The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi, everybody went back live at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center. Dave Ante with David Nicholson. UI. Paths forward five. This is the fourth forward conference that the Cube has done. So we've seen the ascendancy of UI path, the growth customers. UiPath is one of the first companies to actually come back Post Covid. Last year, 2021 at the Bellagio. They took a chance and it actually worked out great at a couple thousand people there. Lots of customers. We're here with Lauren Joyce, who's the global automation lead at Whirlpool. She's joined by Regener Facade rp, who is the global automation lead at Accenture. Good to see you again. Lauren. Welcome to the Cube first timer. Very much, >>Yes, thank >>You. So you're relatively new to automation, but you, as we were talking, you're a process with talk about the center of excellence that you're building out. What's the importance of that to Whirlpool? >>Absolutely. So we are first looking at automation from our finance organization and they were coming to us with, Hey, here are 12 things we wanna automate. And really what we are finding is that not all of these things were suitable for automation. So we've started on the COE journey of, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the most ROI for our business? Starting with discovery, making sure that what we're automating it makes sense, it's the right process versus just an upgrade or, or retooling set. So for us, especially being a global company, making sure that we had that governance in place, that mindset and what should be automated and when really made sense and helped us on our journey pursuing. >>And, and, and I presume that's where Accenture comes in. I mean, rp, you got deep industry expertise, you've got automation expertise. What role do you play in that prioritization exercise? >>So the, the way we approach any automation implementation is similar to what we did here in our pool. First step is, you know, I call it as knowing where you are in the automation journey. Like what always is, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So baselining the current automation maturity and the current journey where they are. And once you do that, you identify you are not star and prioritization and the goals that are required and then you build a plan. And exactly how we approach in establishing a center of excellence that drives the automation with rigor, knowing where you are and where you want to get to, >>What's the team look like in a, in a, who's on the bus, You know, who's who's, who's in in the circle if you will. How do you com you know, build, you've written about this, it's like a sports team. You put it together, you need be a quarterback, you need a lineman, you need, you know, wide receivers who's on the center of excellence team. >>So the way you always build the center of excellence is making sure that your business partners and the senior leadership team is committed to the entire automation journey. That's the key ingredient for success. Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent, the quarterback, you said the talent. In today's world, automation talent is just not about knowing, you know, RPA techniques or you know, process optimization, but it is an end to end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation that combined and coupled with change management and how do you drive an enterprise chain management is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation. >>Absolutely. Lauren, I'm curious, did, did Accenture bring UI path to Whirlpool or did you bring, or did you bring Accenture in and UI path in together? How, how did that interaction? >>Yes. So we brought Accenture in and they really helped us along with that journey and they brought UI path to us. Our European business was actually using Blue Prism and that's when we said no, we wanna standardize specifically on UI path and make sure from a global standpoint we're using the same tooling. And that really helped that as we were building our team, we leaned on their expertise and then even we're retooling people within our corporation of, hey, we took our SAP lead, our GCP lead to be our technical architect and and people that could help speak the language and translate from process and explain that doesn't have to be a large project and explain what automation is to help drive return investment for sure. >>Now you're early in, but have you seen results, you know so far? Can you talk about that, quantify it in any way or? >>Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020. We've automated about 60 or so bots, but really everything that we've done is based on hours saved. So we're at about 60,000 hours automated and with some of our biggest, like our big box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances, we've even had hard dollar savings that we had a bot that went live about in 60 days. We had a $3 million return and take took out 3000 hours of human interaction. That was great for us. >>So the world's kind of a mess right now. You got supply chain issues, you got inflation, you got a recession, you got the United States. Anyway, you got the Fed trying to figure out, oh there's sling shoting, you know, some people are, you know, really hurting stock market is starting to show that there's a lot of confusion out there. The world is changed quite a bit obviously the last few years. How do you guys see it? What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer, what role has automation played in helping like, for instance, Whirlpool with maybe supply chain problems or maybe bigger forecasting and, and what are you seeing across organizations? But Lauren if you could start. >>Absolutely. So for us being able to show improvement in a six to eight week development cycle and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment or a new tooling that you gotta get people resources up to speed on, we can take where we are today, automate save hours where we're getting our employee engagement scores of I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate, how can you help me? And automation is there to support and that's really helped our business one take unnecessary work off their plate and show very quick value add to the business without having to have huge dollar investments in our, I'm you trying to save money. >>Are people, what are you seeing in terms of, so some of the problems that people I see as sign out here said, oh, in inflation at five to 7% go after productivity and make it in 20% gains. I mean, what are you seeing in the field? >>More than ever, More than ever, automation is more relevant now given the current economy environment that we are operating. Because automation always free up or optimizers the capacity that every enterprise has. Optimizing capacity is very important so that you can take your talented employees and the talented resources to do more strategic transformation program, which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business. So I see that automation playing a significant role to impact business imperative. >>What are some of the common misconceptions? I mean we talk a lot about people's fear of automation. You know, I don't think that's necessarily a misconception. I think a lot of times people are fearful about automating though. Maybe they, they shouldn't be. We had Dentsu on today, DS like, you know, this giant global branding firm and they get a lot of young kids, they're like, No, bring it on. I don't want to do all this mundane stuff. But you know, a lot of folks are are are concerned, but, so that maybe is one misconception. Are there others, Lauren, that you found that you can share? >>I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have that fear of being replaced by automation. I think our change management plan really helped drive that. We included some fun things of any time a bot went live you got almost like a birth certificate of here's the process we save for you, here's how it's grown over six, six months, 12 months, 18 months. But I'm not sure if we had any other major gaps like that or or pitfalls >>Or, or p anything that, >>So my philosophy is automation is human plus machine combination. You can't run just, you know, people can't think that, you know, if my task get automated, I lose the, I lose my my jobs. That's not how it works because you, you do need human expertise, competency skills to kind of argument what you do with automation. And most important thing when you do this change is that most of the enterprises do not believe, do not understand that you have to get even process, right? You don't want to, you know, have an inefficient process and put automation on the top of it. Then you just made your inefficiency run more faster. So you need to kind of make sure that you address inefficiency, optimize your process, then infuse automation, then have human plus machine capability to strengthen your automation. >>Is it really that easy? Sounds easy, right? It, >>So from an, from an Accenture perspective, if you're, if you're looking at the market as a whole or looking at industry verticals, what's the difference between an organization that is leveraging automation and an organization that is not leveraging organ leveraging automation? Is there, is there sort of a range of percentage of efficiency that you can put on that? What does it mean for their bottom line? >>Essent, you must have data on this. Yeah, I mean what, >>Yeah, >>Today, today's world in the technology world, every organization understands the importance of automation that's given. That's a table stake. Now, where an organization is in the journey differs some of the enterprises maybe at the beginning of the maturity spectrum. In my book I talk about automation maturity framework wherein there are the initial stages of automation. Some of them are intelligent automation at the end of the spectrum where they're using data cloud and AI to drive the automation journey. But in every enterprise, the key success of automation depends upon whether you do automation and enterprisewide not in a silo in the organization, but if you do enterprise wide apply across, you get a lot more benefits, lot more efficiency to drive. >>Does does automation being more strategic or key? Does it, does it in a way make investments in automation more, more scrutinized or more circumspect? I, I would, I would use the term discretionary. We heard Bobby Patrick today say this is not discretionary, it's strategic to me. If it's strategic it might be a mandate but it's might be something I can kick down the road. What are you seeing there in the field just in terms of overall demand and sentiment? >>Automation today, as I said, is a table stake. When it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise, it is always, you know, whether you want to call one pillar of strategy, key DNA of your strategic roadmap you are in investments have to be directly proportional to what you want to accomplish as your business KPIs to thrive and deliver your business with. Otherwise, if you do it as like a one off thing, you know you won't get the benefit. Yeah. >>Or from your standpoint, where do you want to take the automation initiative inside a whirlpool? How are you thinking about scaling it? What have you learned that you can apply to driving scale? >>So we put some strict governance in place who weren't just automating everything under the sun cuz >>Wild west >>Yeah, I can't support that. Right? So we made sure that everything had at least less than a one year invest return on investment and 500 hours worth of automation for us to even consider it as part of our coe. So because of that, we do have some automations that would make sense, but that's why we're looking at a citizen development program or low code, no code. What other types of options are there to make sure that it does become a part of our culture and dna that you can automate those even small parts of your workflow to, to make your day better. >>When, when you're looking at those workflows, do you, are you, are you literally looking over someone's shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring, Measuring how time >>And motion studies? No >>Question. Yeah. I mean is it time and motion studies? I mean, is that sort of the entry level data that that you use or is it more, or is it more automated than that? >>I would say it's a little more automated than that, but we do sit down and we ask our business process, show me what this process looks like to you. And then from that we can take some task mining and look at, okay, how long did it take you to do this? How often are you doing it? And then based on how long the automation would take, see how many hours are saved and how many people are doing that same task on a monthly, daily, weekly basis. >>Great. All right guys, thanks so much for coming in the cube and sharing your story. A whirlpool and always love to have Accenture on. You guys got such a massive observation space, global depth of industry. So thank you very much both. Thank you. Thank you. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante will be back right to the short break, you watching the cubes coverage of UI path forward. Five live from Las Vegas.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward. Five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five from Las Vegas. We're inside. The formerly was The Sands, now it's the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Nicholson. David, Deb. I've never seen it set up like this before. UI Path's. Very cool company. So of course the setup has to be cool, not like tons of concrete. James Furlong is here, the Vice President of Supply Chain Management and projects at Puma. And Derek Weimer is the CEO of Robo, who's an implementation partner, expert at Intelligent Automation. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Great to have you on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>So what's happening at Puma these days? I love your sneakers, but you guys probably do more than that, but let's tell us about, give us the update on Puma. >>Yeah, absolutely. Puma's one of the world's leading sports, sports brands. So we encompass all things sports. We do footwear, we do apparel, we do accessories. Cobra, Puma golf is underneath our umbrella as well. So we get the added benefit of having that category as well. And yeah, trade, trade all over the world and it's an exciting, exciting brand to be with. >>And di Robo Atlanta based really specialists in intelligent automation. That's pretty much all you do, is that right? >>Yeah, we are a pure play intelligence automation professional services firm. That's all we do. We're the world's largest firm that focuses only on automation headquarter in Germany, but with a large presence here in Americas. >>So we hear from a lot of customers. We've heard from like with the journey it started, you know, mid last decade, Puma James is just getting started. We April you mentioned. So take us through that. What was the catalyst as you're exiting the, the pandemic, the isolation economy we call it? Yeah. What was the catalyst tell, take us through the sort of business case for automation. >>Sure, absolutely. So Puma, our mission is forever faster. It's, it's our mantra and something we live and breathe. So naturally we have an intense focus on innovation and, and automation. So with that mindset, the way this all kicked off is that I had the opportunity to go into some of our distribution facility and I was unbelievably impressed with the automation that I saw there. So how automation augmented the employee workforce. And it was just very impressive to see that some of our state of the art technology and automation at the same time. Then I went back to the office with that excitement and that passion and I saw that we had the opportunity to take that to our employee base as well. We sort of lacked that same intense focus on how do we take automation and technology like I saw at the distribution facilities and bring it to our employees because picture a large workforce of talented, dedicated employees and they just couldn't keep up with the explosive growth who's seen explosive growth over the last couple of years and they just couldn't keep up with it. So I said that that's it. We need to, to take that same passion and innovation and enter in hyper hyper automation. So we went to the leadership team and no surprise they were all in. We went with them with the idea of bringing hyper automation, starting with RPA to, to our office employees. And they were in, they support innovation and they said, Great, what do you need? Really? Go for it. >>The first question wasn't how much, >>Actually the first question I will say that the funny part is, is they said, Well I like this, it sounds too good to be true. And because it, it really does. If you're new to it like we were and I'm pitching all the benefits that RPA could bring, it does sound too good to me. True. So they said, All right, you know, we trust you and, and go for it. What do you need? Resources, just let us know. So sure enough, I had a proof of concept, I had an idea, but now what? I didn't know where to go from there. So that's where we did some intensive research into software suppliers, but also implementation partners because now we knew what we wanted to do. We had excitement, we had leadership buy-in now, now what do I do? So this is when we entered our partnership to figure out, okay, help Puma on this journey. >>How'd you guys find each other? You know, >>Just intensive research and spoke with a lot of people here. Is there a lot of great organizations? But at the end of the day, they really supported everything that Houma stood for, what we're looking to do and had a lot of trust in the beginning and Dirk and his team and how he could help us on this journey. Yeah. >>Now James, your, your job title system for supply chain management. It is, but I understand that you have had a variety of roles within the organization. Now if we're talking about another domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yeah. There's always this concept of domain expertise. Yeah. And how when you're trying to automate things in that realm, domain expertise is critical. Yeah. You have domain expertise outside of your job title. Yeah. So has that helped you with this journey looking at automation, being able to, being able to have insight into those other organizations? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were pitching it to the leadership team in the beginning, that enabled me to look at each one sitting at the table and saying, alright, and on the sales, on a commercial side, I was a head of sales for one of the trade channels. I could speak directly to him in the benefits it could have with not with tribal knowledge and with an expertise. So it wasn't something that, it was just, oh, that's supply chain. I could sit, you know, with the, our CFO and talk to him about the, the benefits for his group merchandising and legal so on. I was really able to kind of speak to each one of them and how it would support, because I had that knowledge from being blessed of 15 years experience at, at Puma. So yeah, I was able to take all of that and figure out how do I make sure not just supply chain benefits from rpa, but how does the whole organization benefit from not only RPA but the hyper automation strategy. >>So what's an engagement look like? You start, I presume you, you gotta do some type of assessment and, and you know, of some upfront planning work. Yeah. What does that look like? How, what's the starting point? Take us through that >>Journey. Yeah, so exactly. So the, the key when you're trying to get value from Intel automation is finding the right opportunities, right? And you can automate a lot of things, but which are the things that are gonna drive the most value and, and the value that actually matters to the company, right? So where are you trying to get to from a strategic level, your objectives and how do you actually use automation to help you get to there? So the first thing is, what are the opportunities gonna help you do that? And then once you identify, what we recommend is start with something that's gonna be, you know, accessible, small, You're gonna get a quick win. Cuz then the important thing is once you get that out there, you build the momentum and excitement in the organization that then leads to more and more. And then you build a proper pipeline and you and you get that the, the engagement. >>So what was that discovery like? Was it you fly up there and do a, a chalk talk? Or did you already know James, like where you wanted to focus? >>Yeah, I knew I had a solid proof of concept with the disruptions in supply chain we couldn't keep up with, with all the changes and supply. So right away I knew that I have a very substantial impact on the organization and it would be a solid proof of concept. It was something that not only would supply chain steal, but our customers would feel that we would be servicing them better. Our sales team, the commercial team, marketing impacted everybody. But at the same time it was tangible. I saw two people that just physically couldn't get their, their work done despite how talented and hardworking they were. So I, I was in on that proof of concept and then I just took that idea with some strong advice from Dirk and and his team on, okay, well how do I take that? But then also use that to evangelize through the organization. What are some pitfalls to avoid? Because as a proof of concept, they just told me it's too good to be true. I believe in it. So it was so important to me that it >>Was successful. >>It get your neck out. Oh, I sure was. Which is a little scary, but I had confidence that we would >>Do it. But your poc you had to have a systems view. Yes. Right? Cuz you were trying to, I think you, I'm inferring that you had two people working really hard, but they couldn't get their job done. Yeah, for sure. They were just sitting on their hands. Right. Waiting. Okay. So you kind of knew where the bottlenecks were. Yes. And that's what you attacked and or you helped James and her the team think through that or, >>Yeah, exactly. So, so a couple points you were asking about her domain model of knowledge earlier, and I think that's really key to the puma's success with it, is that they've come at it from a business point of view, what matters to the business. And at the point, you know, supply chain challenges, how do we use automation to address that? And then, you know, and then it's gonna, it's actually gonna, you know, pick opportunities that are gonna matter to the business. Yeah, >>Yeah. At the same time, we, we knew this could be a scary thing, right? If it's not done right, you know, automation definitely can, can take a, a wrong path. So what we relied on them for is tell us how to make this successful. We wanted structure, we wanted oversight, we wanted to balance that with speed and really, you know, developing our pipeline, but at the same time, tell us how to do this right? How do we set up a center, our first ever center of excellence? They help us set that up. Our steerco, our process definition documents are like, they really helped us add that structure to how to make this successful, sustainable and make sure that we were standing things up the right way versus launching into a strong proof, proof of concept. But then it's not gonna be scalable if we didn't really take their strong advice on how to make this something, you know, that had the right oversight, the right investment. So that was, that was key as >>Well for us. So when you looked at the POC and James was saying there were potential pitfalls, what were those pitfalls? Like what did you tell Puma, Hey, watch out for this, watch out for that. What was sort of the best advice there? >>Yeah, so I think one is understanding complexity, right? So a lot of opportunities sound good, but you want to make sure that it's, it's feasible with the right tool set. And also that you're not bit off too much in the beginning is really important. And so some of that is that bringing that expertise to say, Okay, yeah, look, that does something, a good process. You're gonna get value out. It's not gonna be overly complicated. It's a good place to start. And then also, I guess the thing too to mention is it's more than just a technology project. And that's the thing that we also really focus on is it's actually as much about the change management, it's much about, you know, what is the right story, the business case around it, the technology actually in a way is the easy part and it's all the stuff around it that really makes the POC effective, >>Obviously the process. Yeah. Been the people I presume getting to adopt, >>Right? And I think, again, with our, our brand mantra forever faster, we, we get that support that the buy-in from the top is is there from, from the beginning. So that's a benefit that some companies don't, they don't have, right? They have a little resistance maybe from the top. We're trying to get everyone's buy in it. And we had that. So we had, you know, the buy-in the engagement, we were ready to go. So now we just needed someone to kind of help us. >>One more if I may. Yeah, yeah. Gabe, six months in. Yes. That's the business impact that, can >>You tell you? That was tremendous. Yeah. >>Really already six months. Wow. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. Cfo, CFO's dream. Yeah. >>And again, and, and we had a CFO change mid, mid project. So the new CFO comes in, not new to Puma, the same thing. Super, super smart guy. And I had to sit and again pitch, you know, pitch what it is and the support that I needed by way of investment. And he saw the results and he was all in, you know, what do you need, what's next? And instantly was challenging his departments, Why don't he got competitive, right? We're a competitive bunch, so why don't you know, you should have more in the pipeline. And he was, he was bought in. So there was that fear of a new CFO coming in and how do you show value? Because some of it is, it's very easy to show right away, You know, we were able to refocus those two full-time employees on, on higher value chain activity and you know, they're doing a tremendous job and they're, you know, they have the, the bot and the automation supporting them. So he saw that right away. And we can show him that. But he also understands, as does the whole leadership team, the concept of downstream impacts that you can't necessarily, you know, touch and, and put on paper. So he sees some, but then he also recognizes all the other upstream and downstream impacts that it's had and he's all in and supports whatever, whatever we need. >>Yeah. New CFOs like George Seaford taking over for bill walls. >>Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We >>Have, we have to keep showing results and it has to be sustainable. So that's, again, we'll rely on our partnership to say, okay, this is the beginning, you know, what's next? Keep us, you know, honest on oversight and, and any pitfalls that we should avoid because he's excited. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we sustain those results and, and show what's next. Now they all gotta taste to the apple and they're very eager to see what's next in, in, in this hyper automation journey. >>Well, Dirk, you've partnered on this journey, this specific journey with, with, with Puma. But from your perspective in the broader marketplace, what would be the perfect low hanging fruit opportunity that you would like to have somebody call you and say, Hey, we've got, we've got this perspective engagement with a client. What would be the, what would be the like, Oh yeah, that's easy, that's huge roi really quickly, What does that look like? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a few areas, right? You know, one task automation RPA is a, is a really good entry point, right? Because it's, it's, it's not overly complex. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated technologies. And I'd say the, the usual starting areas, you know, you, you finance back office, you know, shared service, invoice processing, you know, payables is a very good opportunity area. HR is also an area I would look at, you know, in new, new employee onboarding process or you know, payroll, et cetera. And then supply chain is actually becoming more and more, more common, right? So those would be I guess, top three areas I would mention. And >>Then, and then kind of follow onto that, what's the tip of this sphere? What's the sort of emerging market Yeah. >>For >>This kind of technology? >>I think there's two things. One, it's taking a holistic into end view and leveraging multiple, you know, technology, you know, beyond just rpa, right? You know, intelligent document processing, iml, you know, bringing all this to bear to actually do a true digital transformation. That's, that's number one. And then I'd say the second is going from focusing on cost and efficiency to actually getting into the front office and how do you, how do you actually increase revenue? How do you increase margin? How do you actually, you know, help with that, that top line growth. I think that's really, and that's where you're leveraging technologies, you know, like the, the AI as an example to really help you understand how do you optimize. >>So James, that's, that becomes then an enterprise wide initiative. Yeah. That's, that's, is that your vision? Maybe maybe lay that out for >>Us a bit. Yeah, ab absolutely. The, the vision is now that we've seen what, what it can do, how do we take it from being managed by just, you know, supply chain and this proof of concept cuz I manage projects, but now it's bigger than just a supply chain project. And how do we sort of evangelize that through the whole organization And you know, they mentioned on main stage this, the creation of new jobs and, and roles and how a, a company might set out their strategic directive now is, is changing and evolving. So you know that that's our idea now and that what we'll need support next is how should we structure now for success. And so that it's across the whole enterprise. But that's, that's the vision for >>Sure. What worries you do, you worried about it like taking off and getting outta control and not being governed and so you have to be a little bit careful there. >>Yeah, for sure. That was really important to us. And we actually got to leverage a lot of heavy lifting that Puma Global had done at the same time that we were coming up and, and thinking of the idea of rpa. They were having the same thoughts and they did a lot of heavy lifting again, about not only the software providers but also what does the structure look like, the oversight, a center of excellence globally. So we were able to really leverage a lot of best practices and SOPs that they had set out and we were able to kind of leverage those, bring those to Puma North America so that we didn't face that fear cuz that would be a limiting factor for us. So because we were so disciplined and we could leverage the work that they had done, that fear wasn't, wasn't there. Now we have to stay, you know, on top of it. And as people get excited, how do you kind of mirror the excitement and with it at the same time that the oversight and not getting, you know, too, too big, too fast. So that's the balance that we'll, we'll work through now. It's a good problem to have. >>Well, exactly. It is super exciting. Great story. Congratulations on, on the success and good luck. Thank you. Yeah, you very much for coming to the, Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson Andante right back, the cube live from Las Vegas UI path forward. Five.

The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back at forward five UI Paths, Big customer event. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center, Dave Ante and David Nicholson. Javier Castanos is here. He's the Robot Factory director. How's that for a title for Orange ESP Spania. And he's joined by Niva Pillow, who is Senior Director of Telecommunications Industry at UiPath. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Javier. Just off the keynote, it was really amazing to see what you were doing with your dashboard, how much you've operationalized automation, you really far down the journey. But I wanna start with your title. I've never seen this before. Robot Factory director, that's unique. What is that all about? >>Yeah, the Robot Factory is our brand to create the RPA journey to involve all the company in this amazing story regarding automation, because for us, automation is only a piece of the digital transformation and the culture transformation for the employees. >>Your robot factory obviously builds robots. Yeah. For employees and employees build them as well. >>Yeah, both. We have two different ways to, to build robots. We have a citizen developer program with more than 500 and employees certified in UiPath technology, and they build a small robot for the daily task for avoid repetitive task, very board. And in the other hand we have the robot factory team automating the business. The core business processes very complex in the telco industry, you know, and both teams working together, the community of employees, the best ambassadors for to find new opportunities and for discovery for robots and the robot factory are automating real complex processes to impacting our customer satisfaction. >>So if a, if a, if a citizen developer develops a robot, does the factory then have to audit it and make sure it's governed? Or do you add a, maybe I'm not such a good developer. Do you make it better? How does that collaboration work? >>The good thing is with you at Pat, you don't need to be a tech guy. You, you can be a finance guy and every morning you need a report, create an Excel, create a graph, put in a power point and send to your box. And you can create by your own a robot doing that task and going to the bending to take a coffee in, in the meantime that the robot is working. And as soon as you discover in your domain a complex tax, you can call us and say, Hey guys, I need your job because we need to ize this process. You need traceability. And we have a big savings below the desk. It's not only my health, it's the area work. >>Now, Navage, you specialize in the telecommunications industry. Now of course, the telcos are going through a massive transformation. It's almost, I call it revenge. The, the telcos now they're coming back with 5g. It's gonna be a great new future. But what kind of patterns are you seeing in the industry for automation? >>Sure. Look, as you said, telecoms going through quite a transformational era. There's this huge demand for connectivity around the whole world, and that presents opportunities and some challenges. But the key areas of focus right now is really helping the telecom achieve their strategic goals. And they include the customer experience at the most significant point, and thereafter driving a few more efficiencies and improving the employee experience. But organizations like Orange, you know, they start with the customer experience. These are large areas, but they tend to be the patterns where we are really helping telecoms transform and deliver better outcomes. >>Javi, I'm I'm curious about the concept of the citizen developer. Now you said that they don't have to have a deep technical background and they may come from finance or other places, but how do you, how do you recruit these people? What's in it for them? I, I can understand automating a process that is repetitive, mundane, something they don't want to do. But is there ever a concern that they might be automating themselves out of a job? >>Yeah, the, the people use Dex Excel and 30 years ago, Dex Excel does not assist and change our work. Your iPad technology is more or less the same. It's changing the way that you are working with your desktop every morning. You can create for your daily task a robot by yourself and executing your corporate desktop. And then you can save this time or use to improve your satisfaction as employee. Because sometimes in, in, in this kind of companies, we have a telecommunications engineering with a lot of talent making repetitive task. And with this technology, you can use your talent only to improve the processes. So we train these people in Miami, the training is very easy. A robot enter on the web searching, Google make different search regarding prices on, on device creates an Excel and only in a few hours that kind of people that we have in all companies that very easy excel some macros and these kind of things is the people prepared to jump to the next step to the robotization. So in all areas, in all departments, there are people prepared. In our company, 500 people. >>I, I'd like to get into a little mini case study if we could, and understand orange esp Spania is way deep. You should see this dashboard that Javier showed. I mean it's amazing, I think you said 7 million euro business benefit so far to date. But you can slice it and dice it and look at a lot of different angles. But where did you get started? Did you get started? Was it a bottoms up? In other words, an individual started to automate on their desktop. Was it a top down? The, the, the CEO said this is, we're gonna automate. How did it, I mean I'm sure you get this question a lot nivo, but where did it start at Orange? >>Yeah. Our story is very linked with the finance department because the citizen developer are saving internal hours and transforming the employee satisfaction and improving the talent and the reskilling of the people. But in the other hand, from the efficiency point of view, if you look for, for the finance approach, what happened, we, we take one profit and now domain perhaps 80% of the process. And next month the invoice reduce because your external cost disappear because the robot is making the task is improving the satisfaction of the customers. Because sometimes we have a, a human back office or another kind of task. And the compliance, the, the SLAs, the, the, the delay on time with all the people disappear with the robots because the robots are working at night. We can and repeating the job, 1, 1 1. And every tracking of that task are controlled by finance. Because if you save in a transaction three minutes, when you multiply for a thousand, a thousand, thousand tasks, you save on real time, you can see how much money you are saving and making the the things better. Not only a question of money is a question of money, but a attempt below that the customer is, is taking better experience for us. >>Robots don't sleep Nova. >>I never, >>So you started in finance and how much have you gone permeated other parts of the organization? What other parts of the organization are adopting RPA and automation? Where are you on that journey? >>More or less? Our eight, nine hundred and fifty three FTS equivalent robots working okay's like a contact center. It's robots navigating through the user interface applications, making transactions for our customers. So when you put in the middle of your customer relation, you can transform all because if a human agent is making a very complex process for, because telco is a complex market and very fast, perhaps the robot can help the human agent saving time and taking advantage of that part of, of the operations. And at the end, the operation is short and the customer satisfaction is better. And we measure the MPAs, the net, the net promoter score. And when you combine human agents with robots, the satisfaction improve because the transaction is made on real time very fast and doesn't fail. >>Is this a common story nivas that you're seeing in Telco in terms of the, the starting points? Does it tend to be bottoms up? Does it more top down? What are you seeing in >>Look, it actually varies by telecom. You know, Orange started their journey with us four years ago. So companies that have started while they tend to start in finance or IT or, or hr, but the customer experience I think is the ultimate area where many telecoms focus and what Harvey Edge just shared is it doesn't matter if a customer's calling you through a contact center or reaching you through a chatbot. They want their issue resolved at the first point. And what the robots do is they integrate information from multiple sources and provide that data to the agent so you can actually resolve the issue. And that is the beautiful example of humans and robots working together. Because if you know what the data's telling you, if it's a billing issue and a customer's been been billed because they have gone overseas and used international roaming and they weren't aware that the contract had that as a leader or a person in a contact center, you can make the right decision quite often. It takes a long time to find the data, but in this way you can actually address the issue real time, first point of resolution. And we're seeing up to 60% increase in first time resolutions across telecoms, irrespective of whether it's a chat bot or a contact center or a service desk. >>That's key. I mean, that's as a, that's consumer, that's what you just want to get off the phone or you want to get off the chat notice. So I have to ask you, what would you say is your secret to success? >>The secret is to be transparent with the organization, serve the savings and put on the table. We put on the table to the finance guys every month, all the robots that we put in production the month before and it's finance will declare officially the savings for each robot. As soon as you reach this, the credibility appear because it's not the robot factory team telling Aren, saving a lot of money of the company. No, no. It's the finance guys that trust on you. And as soon as you ask more money to buy more license or to improve the processes on whatever finance say, okay, these guys, as soon as we invest money in robots, we obtain twice or three times more by savings and they are improving not only for the quantity point of view, the quality is improving too. Because when you, a brief example, when you have a wifi problem connection and you call to our contact center, there is an ecosystem for more than 25 robots working from the beginning of your call, testing your line and making decisions. If we are going to send you a new router or you have a connectivity problem or, and the robot decide of, we are going to send to you a new install at your home and then the human manage you and take the conversation. But all the decisions are made by robots. So it's very powerful from the point of view of customer satisfaction. >>So what I'm hearing is you started four years ago. Yeah. And it, it, the ROI for your first instantiation was very fast, I presume inside of 12 months or what was the, how fast did you get a return with >>In the first three months we developed 25 robots and we saved more than 1 million to the company in three >>Months. In three months. Okay. So it was self-funding. >>Yeah. >>Right. You took that million dollars and you said, Okay, let's double down on that. Let's do it again. Do it again. Do it >>Again. It's only a question of resources and budget and only companies wants to create robots, but sometimes big companies only put on that one people to people. From the beginning of our story, we put 13 people and a budget. So if you have resources, the things happen be because the process are very accomplished. Sometimes you start one process. Sometimes our block, and we started at the beginning, a lot of process and imagine in telco we developed 900 processes, but every day we have a new opportunity for discovery. So I, I think the scalability is, is, is a challenge, but it's very, is possible if you put people and money >>And we, we focused on, we talk a lot in, in, in the broader IT world about the edge. And so I sort of think of these citizen developers as living at the edge. Part of your robot factory is at the core of the enterprise also. Is that, is that correct? Yes. >>Yes. >>Now what, what is, what has that looked like in terms of ROI cycles and development cycles? What kinds of projects do you work on at the core that are, that are different than what citizen soldiers are doing at the edge? >>Yeah. When, when we need to apply a discount or change your taif or switch on your bonus or your voicemail, that kind of transactions with impacting customers are made by the robot factory with robots made by the robot factory team. With a big traceability. With a big security because okay, with, with human awake the robot, we need to, to make a traceability because we have thousand of agents in the contact center working with robots and we have a lot of security disability and these kind of things. But in the other hand, internally we have a lot of task and a lot of processes for the citizen developers. There are very important tasks for the employee, perhaps not impacting in, in final customers, but we combine both. Because if you only work in one way, the citizen developer are making a lot of savings in terms of internal hours, but it's not real money. But in the other hand, you have the robot factory business processes impacting the money, combining both, you obtain the most powerful tool because the ambassadors, the, the, the employees are discovering you new opportunities. >>Last question, Javier, Why did you choose UiPath? What were the determining factors four years ago? >>Yeah, we, we were researching a lot in the market, but UiPath is pretty easy. You don't need to be an IT guy. People from, from customer care, people from finance in every areas. We have a lot of people learning this, this technology because it's easy, intuitive and very nice from the point of view of look and field. >>This a common story. This is really, we've reported on this a lot. This is how you UiPath really was able to get its foothold in the marketplace because of the simplicity. If you look at the legacy tools and even some of the modern tools, they were a lot more complicated. Now of course, UiPath is expanding its platform. So thank you very much. Don't welcome. Thank, thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, you, you're gonna hear a lot of customer stories cuz that's what UI path brings in the cube. Proof is in the pudding. We right back at forward five from Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to theCube's continuous coverage HPE Discover 2022 and from Las Vegas the formerly Sands Convention Center now Venetian, John Furrier and Dave Vellante here were excited to welcome in Jen Huffstetler. Who's the Chief product Sustainability Officer at Intel Jen, welcome to theCube thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> You're really welcome. So you dial back I don't know, the last decade and nobody really cared about it but some people gave it lip service but corporations generally weren't as in tune, what's changed? Why has it become so top of mind? >> I think in the last year we've noticed as we all were working from home that we had a greater appreciation for the balance in our lives and the impact that climate change was having on the world. So I think across the globe there's regulations industry and even personally, everyone is really starting to think about this a little more and corporations specifically are trying to figure out how are they going to continue to do business in these new regulated environments. >> And IT leaders generally weren't in tune cause they weren't paying the power bill for years it was the facilities people, but then they started to come together. How should leaders in technology, business tech leaders, IT leaders, CIOs, how should they be thinking about their sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think for IT leaders specifically they really want to be looking at the footprint of their overall infrastructure. So whether that is their on-prem data center, their cloud instances, what can they do to maximize the resources and lower the footprint that they contribute to their company's overall footprint. So IT really has a critical role to play I think because as you'll find in IT, the carbon footprint of the data center of those products in use is actually it's fairly significant. So having a focus there will be key. >> You know compute has always been one of those things where, you know Intel's been makes chips so that, you know heat is important in compute. What is Intel's current goals? Give us an update on where you guys are at. What's the ideal goal in the long term? Where are you now? You guys always had a focus on this for a long, long time. Where are we now? Cause I won't say the goalpost of changed, they're changing the definitions of what this means. What's the current state of Intel's carbon footprint and overall goals? >> Yeah, no thanks for asking. As you mentioned, we've been invested in lowering our environmental footprint for decades in fact, without action otherwise, you know we've already lowered our carbon footprint by 75%. So we're really in that last mile. And that is why when we recently announced a very ambitious goal Net-Zero 2040 for our scope one and two for manufacturing operations, this is really an industry leading goal. And partly because the technology doesn't even exist, right? For the chemistries and for making the silicon into the sand into, you know, computer chips yet. And so by taking this bold goal, we're going to be able to lead the industry, partner with academia, partner with consortia, and that drive is going to have ripple effects across the industry and all of the components in semiconductors. >> Is there a changing definition of Net-Zero? What that means, cause some people say they're Net-Zero and maybe in one area they might be but maybe holistically across the company as it becomes more of a broader mandate society, employees, partners, Wall Street are all putting pressure on companies. Is the Net-Zero conversation changed a little bit or what's your view on that? >> I think we definitely see it changing with changing regulations like those coming forth from the SEC here in the US and in Europe. Net-Zero can't just be lip service anymore right? It really has to be real reductions on your footprint. And we say then otherwise and even including in our supply chain goals what we've taken new goals to reduce, but our operations are growing. So I think everybody is going through this realization that you know, with the growth, how do we keep it lower than it would've been otherwise, keep focusing on those reductions and have not just renewable credits that could have been bought in one location and applied to a different geographical location but real credible offsets for where the the products manufactured or the computes deployed. >> Jen, when you talk about you've reduced already by 75% you're on that last mile. We listened to Pat Gelsinger very closely up until recently he was the number one most frequently had on theCube guest. He's been busy I guess. But as you apply that discipline to where you've been, your existing business and now Pat's laid out this plan to increase the Foundry business how does that affect your... Are you able to carry through that reduction to, you know, the new foundries? Do you have to rethink that? How does that play in? >> Certainly, well, the Foundry expansion of our business with IBM 2.0 is going to include the existing factories that already have the benefit of those decades of investment and focus. And then, you know we have clear goals for our new factories in Ohio, in Europe to achieve goals as well. That's part of the overall plan for Net-Zero 2040. It's inclusive of our expansion into Foundry which means that many, many many more customers are going to be able to benefit from the leadership that Intel has here. And then as we onboard acquisitions as any company does we need to look at the footprint of the acquisition and see what we can do to align it with our overall goals. >> Yeah so sustainable IT I don't know for some reason was always an area of interest to me. And when we first started, even before I met you, John we worked with PG&E to help companies get rebates for installing technologies that would reduce their carbon footprint. >> Jen: Very forward thinking. >> And it was a hard thing to get, you know, but compute was the big deal. And there were technologies and I remember virtualization at the time was one and we would go in and explain to the PG&E engineers how that all worked. Cause they had metrics and that they wanted to see, but anyway, so virtualization was clearly one factor. What are the technologies today that people should be paying, flash storage was another one. >> John: AI's going to have a big impact. >> Reduce the spinning disk, but what are the ones today that are going to have an impact? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question. We like to think of the built in acceleration that we have including some of the early acceleration for virtualization technologies as foundational. So built in accelerated compute is green compute and it allows you to maximize the utilization of the transistors that you already have deployed in your data center. This compute is sitting there and it is ready to be used. What matters most is what you were talking about, John that real world workload performance. And it's not just you know, a lot of specsmanship around synthetic benchmarks, but AI performance with the built in acceleration that we have in Xeon processors with the Intel DL Boost, we're able to achieve four X, the AI performance per Watts without you know, doing that otherwise. You think about the consolidation you were talking about that happened with virtualization. You're basically effectively doing the same thing with these built in accelerators that we have continued to add over time and have even more coming in our Sapphire Generation. >> And you call that green compute? Or what does that mean, green compute? >> Well, you are greening your compute. >> John: Okay got it. >> By increasing utilization of your resources. If you're able to deploy AI, utilize the telemetry within the CPU that already exists. We have customers KDDI in Japan has a great Proofpoint that they already announced on their 5G data center, lowered their data center power by 20%. That is real bottom line impact as well as carbon footprint impact by utilizing all of those built in capabilities. So, yeah. >> We've heard some stories earlier in the event here at Discover where there was some cooling innovations that was powering moving the heat to power towns and cities. So you start to see, and you guys have been following this data center and been part of the whole, okay and hot climates, you have cold climates, but there's new ways to recycle energy where's that cause that sounds very Sci-Fi to me that oh yeah, the whole town runs on the data center exhaust. So there's now systems thinking around compute. What's your reaction to that? What's the current view on re-engineering a system to take advantage of that energy or recycling? >> I think when we look at our vision of sustainable compute over this horizon it's going to be required, right? We know that compute helps to solve society's challenges and the demand for it is not going away. So how do we take new innovations looking at a systems level as compute gets further deployed at the edge, how do we make it efficient? How do we ensure that that compute can be deployed where there is air pollution, right? So some of these technologies that you have they not only enable reuse but they also enable some you know, closing in of the solution to make it more robust for edge deployments. It'll allow you to place your data center wherever you need it. It no longer needs to reside in one place. And then that's going to allow you to have those energy reuse benefits either into district heating if you're in, you know Northern Europe or there's examples with folks putting greenhouses right next to a data center to start growing food in what we're previously food deserts. So I don't think it's science fiction. It is how we need to rethink as a society. To utilize everything we have, the tools at our hand. >> There's a commercial on the radio, on the East Coast anyway, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, it's like, "What's your one thing?" And the gentleman comes on, he talks about things that you can do to help the environment. And he says, "What's your one thing?" So what's the one thing or maybe it's not just one that IT managers should be doing to affect carbon footprint? >> The one thing to affect their carbon footprint, there are so many things. >> Dave: Two, three, tell me. >> I think if I was going to pick the one most impactful thing that they could do in their infrastructure is it's back to John's comment. It's imagine if the world deployed AI, all the benefits not only in business outcomes, you know the revenue, lowering the TCO, but also lowering the footprint. So I think that's the one thing they could do. If I could throw in a baby second, it would be really consider how you get renewable energy into your computing ecosystem. And then you know, at Intel, when we're 80% renewable power, our processors are inherently low carbon because of all the work that we've done others have less than 10% renewable energy. So you want to look for products that have low carbon by design, any Intel based system and where you can get renewables from your grid to ask for it, run your workload there. And even the next step to get to sustainable computing it's going to take everyone, including every enterprise to think differently and really you know, consider what would it look like to bring renewables onto my site? If I don't have access through my local utility and many customers are really starting to evaluate that. >> Well Jen its great to have you on theCube. Great insight into the current state of the art of sustainability and carbon footprint. My final question for you is more about the talent out there. The younger generation coming in I'll say the pressure, people want to work for a company that's mission driven we know that, the Wall Street impact is going to be financial business model and then save the planet kind of pressure. So there's a lot of talent coming in. Is there awareness at the university level? Is there a course where can, do people get degrees in sustainability? There's a lot of people who want to come into this field what are some of the talent backgrounds of people learning or who might want to be in this field? What would you recommend? How would you describe how to onboard into the career if they want to contribute? What are some of those factors? Cause it's not new, new, but it's going to be globally aware. >> Yeah well there certainly are degrees with focuses on sustainability maybe to look at holistically at the enterprise, but where I think the globe is really going to benefit, we didn't really talk about the software inefficiency. And as we delivered more and more compute over the last few decades, basically the programming languages got more inefficient. So there's at least 35% inefficiency in the software. So being a software engineer, even if you're not an AI engineer. So AI would probably be the highest impact being a software engineer to focus on building new applications that are going to be efficient applications that they're well utilizing the transistor that they're not leaving zombie you know, services running that aren't being utilized. So I actually think-- >> So we got a program in assembly? (all laughing) >> (indistinct), would get really offended. >> Get machine language. I have to throw that in sorry. >> Maybe not that bad. (all laughing) >> That's funny, just a joke. But the question is what's my career path. What's a hot career in this area? Sustainability, AI totally see that. Anything else, any other career opportunities you see or hot jobs or hot areas to work on? >> Yeah, I mean, just really, I think it takes every architect, every engineer to think differently about their design, whether it's the design of a building or the design of a processor or a motherboard we have a whole low carbon architecture, you know, set of actions that are we're underway that will take to the ecosystem. So it could really span from any engineering discipline I think. But it's a mindset with which you approach that customer problem. >> John: That system thinking, yeah. >> Yeah sustainability designed in. Jen thanks so much for coming back in theCube, coming on theCube. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for John Furrier, we're sustaining theCube. We're winding down day three, HPE Discover 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi buddy. We're back. This is the Cube's coverage of H P's discover a big discover event this year, 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the, what used to be called the sands convention center. Now the Venetian Dave Lotte for John furrier per deep Kumar is here. He is the senior vice president and general manager of HPE E's point next services where the rubber meets the road services is where it's at. That's that's where the value is. <laugh> right. >>It's absolutely >>Great to see you again, man. Thanks for coming on. Okay. >>Welcome John. Hopefully y'all are having a good time. >>Yeah, it's very nice to be. It was always great to be face to face. Right? It's nothing like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we, we slog through two years of virtual and >>It was packed in keynote. Antonio's keynote was jam packed overflow rooms. Yeah. Um, and it was a big room. It wasn't a small room. It was huge. So that's a sign. Yeah. >>People are here good times. Yeah. People love to be here. Yeah. So >>What's the update with, with point next >>It's, uh, lot's happening. Lot's happening, right? Uh, the transformation is underpinned by point next doing the right thing and just, uh, transforming and helping customers to transform themselves as well with the pandemic it just caught on. Right. Everybody wants to do things faster, digitize things faster. And uh, we really bring the technology and the expertise. I think that's this pretty crucial, >>You know, what, what are the, how do you think about success rates with transformations on the one hand? It, it kept the industry going all industries going on the other hand, I feel like a lot of the transformations were rushed. I call it the forced March to digital. Yeah. Yeah. What failures did you see in that? Forced March and, and how are companies course correcting? Yeah, >>Really good question. <laugh> Dave, um, more than half of the transformations fail, right? So there was a BCG study done over 3000 customers over three years around the world. And, um, 57% of the transformations failed. Right. In the sense when somebody start to transform, they, they set it out a set of goals, scope it. This is what it is. They either didn't meet the goal or they spent more money than they should have, or they overshot the timing. Right. Or all of this about, so it's a staggering number, uh, a large piece of them fail. Yeah. Right. So, um, to answer your second question, Dave, so what are we finding out? Why are they failing and what are they, how are they course-correcting I think there's sort of, you know, we speak to customers all the time. So we get an idea of, you know, what's working and what's not working and there's sort of three things that keep on coming up. >>Right. One is, uh, senior management, CEO, CIO, commitment to the north star. Yeah. Right. Hey, are we tied in, are we doing this? The second thing is the, um, the alignment between it and the business and the functions. Right. If you don't agree on the goal set, if you don't agree on the timeline, uh, then it just, you know, don't work. <laugh> the third is expertise. The people underestimate the expertise. You need the discipline, you need to get stuff done. Right. And so these are the three and none of them are technology related. Yeah. I mean, you're heard they're all people related stuff. >>Right. But di I want to get your thoughts on this is a really important point. I love that commentary because what we're seeing as well is that with COVID now we're kind of third year post COVID, if you will. Yeah. I was just getting out of COVID. It caught a lot of people flatfooted. So people who were on a digital transformation either got stuck and fell down or failed, or they had a tailwind going into it and had momentum. They had alignment and they were filling gaps. They kind of crossed over at the right point and could succeed during the pandemic. But many people failed. Yeah. Because they didn't prepare, they didn't have the technology. They had too many gaps. They had antiquated old stuff. What have you learned? Because this is now ignited the services business because no one wants to have that happen again. Yeah. Can you share your experiences with that? With the customers that are going through that learning pain? What are their core issues? Some projects got doubled down on some got killed. Hey, we don't need that anymore. So what, what are the learnings? Well, tell, share us your perspective, cuz this is important. >>Yeah. So people want to do transformation, right? Absolutely. Because it's a must with COVID faster, quickly you want to get, but they also have to run the business because otherwise you don't have the EPS to support the transformation. Right. So it's, it's transform and perform. So we call it within HP perform while you transform and people who got that balance right. Created that flywheel, John >>Don't run outta gas in other words, translation. >><laugh> exactly. So second thing is, so you have a set of people, you have expertise and COVID you started losing people. Great resignation. You heard everything. Then you are trying to balance your people between, do you put them on transformation or do you put them on operating this stuff? This is where companies then now are realizing, Hey, if I put my best guys on transformation, I need to make sure this operations work well. So people are coming to us and saying, Hey, could you operate this one? Well, right. I mean, today we had somebody on stage, in low medical. Right. They, um, they got a ransomware hit and they had been using us, um, to do all the operations. And when hit hit, we were like switched on. They're like, I mean, on stage they're like you guys were golden, took care of the situation. So if you didn't have any extra help of some expertise, then you are really suffering. Right? >>Yeah. We heard this too. From partners we heard during the pandemic, a lot of the partners stepped up the channel and ISV partners. Yeah. Because they could. Yeah. And that was another key point. Yeah. It all comes together. I love to perform and transform Dave, cuz this is about running the business. Cuz you have cyber security as a serious problem right now. Yeah. That's also part of the transformation. Yeah. Where's the overlap. What are the areas that you're seeing, where you gotta operate and transform? Where's the hot zone. So to speak with customers, is it cyber? Is it, is it, uh, data, data? >>I would say clearly data is number one, right? In anything. Now data, data modernization is the key. Otherwise you are not changing your company the way you do things. So we just announced four real big stuff, addressing, uh, data migration. Right. Um, one of the problems so people have is quality of data. Quality of data is not good. They exist in silos. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, it's not in a platform form where you can really take the data, get the insights and use it for your future. Right. I mean that's a key problem, right? Yeah. So you, you hire a few data scientists. They come in, they're doing, they're spending the time on housekeeping data rather than actually doing data science, >>Data engineering, not just wrangling, it's a lot of engineering going on. >>Absolutely. Okay. >>Absolutely. So that's a well known problem. Uh, but as you said before that it's not really a technology problem. I think it's an organizational issue and part of the problem. And I wonder if you're seeing this within your customer base, is this idea that we're gonna try to put everything into some kind of central repository. Yeah. And then we're gonna create a hyper specialized team. That is the goal between the data that you need <laugh> and the insights, right? Yeah. To get the insights. And we're seeing this dispersion of the expertise, which put, putting more responsibility into the line of business, a new data architecture, new organizational thinking. Are you seeing that? Are there particular industries where that's happening more, more quickly where the context which LA is lacking in the centralized team is actually going out to the lines of business where the data quality will be inherently improved. >>Yeah. I think it's like implementing ERP systems. I mean, people who try to create massive data lakes, I don't think it's going to work. Right. Because it's like, nobody has the time to wait for three years until you have structured data in a particular way. The other thing is some of the data companies were take people like that who came in are no more because things are changing at a rapid pace. So anything if you're doing, that's taking too long to get your act together, the market has moved on. You may not be even in that business. So what people are doing Dave is sort of microservices, they're cutting it into pieces and saying, let me get the best, vast, quick, and make it work. And then creating the fly wheel of changing other things that are priority for their. >>So they're getting tactical with their absolutely >>Getting >>Quick wins. Absolutely >>Inviting >>Off smaller. >>Well that's the data. The data thing is, is a cyber problem too. Cuz data is helping cyber, but machine learning feeds off data. Yes. So if you have gaps or blind spots, machine learning isn't as good. So machine learning is only as good in the eye is only as good as the data. Yeah. It can see. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>So that's means it's gotta be fast available, not siloed. So, but you, so this is a balance. What do I silo and protect for compliance. Yeah. And what can I address quickly? Low latency. >>Yeah. If I may add John, the other thing is because there's so many passwords used in the industry. Right. Um, and AIML is one of those, right? So everybody then businesses pick up an area for AI and ML. They do a little pilot, they do a POC and it works well and they're extremely happy <laugh> and then they try to scale it across the whole enterprise. Yeah. And it's a complete failure because most of the time it doesn't work. Right. >>But your data lake comment actually translates over your point there because you can spend, I had a quote on the last event I went to, the quote was we spend all of our time trying to figure out what the latest open source machine learning is. That's a full-time job. So the data lake is heavy lift. Just understand what's going on there. Tracking machine learning yeah. Is a full time job even and changes. >>Absolutely. So >>The change, what does that mean to the customer? That managed services are gonna be part of it? How do the customers tame that moving train that's happening around these really important areas? >>Yeah. So, um, I think, um, customers do need help. So I think they need to be open to ideas of, okay, what is the expertise we need for where we want to get to? And some may be available inside some, they need to go for help outside. I mean, that's a reality, right? So you need to open your eyes and say, I've got, let me put my best people, maybe on transformation. Let me take the people with some expertise, knowledge on different things, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and shortsighted companies. What they do is John, they just automate what's their current. And that's not a transformation in the end, you look back and say, >>That's incremental. >>You didn't achieve anything. Right. Because you haven't transformed your processes. You haven't chained the theme, you just automated what the garbage and garbage out. It's the, the same crap that comes out. So >>How much of the work that point next does is, um, I'll, I'll say, you know, consultative in terms of be being that change agent. Right? Cause again, we back think about data. Yeah. A lot of it is, is thinking about the organization. Yeah. Decentralizing, you know, making that decision, uh, thinking in different terms, around data products, um, having the lines of business, maybe take more responsibility for, and, and those are internal decisions. Yeah. And they have customers have, certainly have a lot of expertise around, but they sometimes need a change agent. Do you play that role? Is that a, a GSI that plays that role? >>Yeah. So, uh, it's a mixed bag. Uh, we play the role in some places and then, uh, some SIS would also play, play that role. Okay. Um, more of the point next is if, if you take a customer engagement advisory, professional services, then actually maintaining their landscape and then manage services, which again, sort of you monitor, but you also provide some info on how to manage it. Right. In those three pieces, Dave, the top piece and the bottom piece are the big pieces. Customers want expertise on the middle piece is getting automated because systems are getting smarter. They are self-healing. And in the middle piece, what people want is knowledge. So say for example, you have an enterprise it's not working well. They want it knowledge up front, tell me where it's broken or what do we need to do? And that's it. Right. Um, and they want to fix it themselves. It's just like consumer. Right. So, um, that's the way it's working. >>So the reason I ask that is we we're having a data discussion here. Yeah. And, and I think that a big role that you can play in the data transformation is to provide self-service infrastructure. Yes. Uh, right where the, the technical pieces or an operational detail. Absolutely. Okay. And then the, the second is that you just touched on it is, is, is automated, automated governance and security. So that when I share data, I know that it's going to the right place. That individual has the proper access to it. So those are two sort of white spaces I think. And a lot of organizations where they need help big >>Wide spaces >>Actually. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And that, that middle please is a complete cloud experience. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. Everything is going to be digitalized. Everything's going to be automated. And um, so you know, people can use it any way they want, >>Do you see hybrid as a steady state? I mean, know, we gotta wrap up. We don't a lot of time left. Yeah. The real quick hybrid we've been saying here in the cube, it's it's gonna be a steady state for a long, long >>Time. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it would be, you know, OnPrem off Preem multi-cloud but it's going to be hybrid world >><laugh> all right. Hybrid world. >>Thank you so much. Hybrid >>Cube cube hybrid cube >>Was great to have you on you're so articulate and, and it's just wonderful to see you. Thanks. Thanks. >>Thank you. Thanks Dave. >>Thank you, John. And thank you for watching John furry, Dave Valante, we'll be back with the cubes coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 in Las Vegas. Right after this short break we're live.

>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Greetings from Las Vegas, everyone. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Vellante. We are live at HPE Discover 2022 with about 8,000 folks here at The Sands Expo Convention Center. First HPE Discover in three years, everyone jammed in that keynote room, it was standing in only. Dave and I have a couple of exciting guests we're proud to introduce you to. Please, welcome back to "theCUBE," John Schultz, the EVP and general counsel of HPE. Great to have you back here. And Kay Firth-Butterfield, the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum. Kay, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Fantastic. >> John, we were saying that. >> Fantastic. >> Last time you were on "theCUBE", it was Cube Virtual. Now, here we are back. A lot of news this morning, a lot's going on. The Edge to Cloud Conferences is the theme this year. In today's Edge to Cloud world, so much data being generated at the edge, it's just going to keep proliferating. AI plays a key role in helping to synthesize that, analyze large volumes of data. Can you start by talking about the differences of the two? The synergies, what you see? >> Yeah. Absolutely. And again, it is great to be back with the two of you, and great to be with Kay, who is a leading light in the world of AI, and particularly, AI responsibility. And so, we're going to talk a little bit about that. But really, this synergistic effect between data and AI, is as tight as they come. Really, data is just the raw materials by which we drive actionable insight. And at the end of the day, it's really about insights, and that speed to insight to make the difference. AI is really what is powering our ability to take vast amounts of data. Amounts of data that we'd never conceived of, being able to process before and bring it together into actionable insights. And it's simplest form, right? AI is simply making computers do what humans used to do, but the power of computing, what you heard about frontier on the main stage today, allows us to use technology to solve problems so complex that it would take humans millions of years to do it. So, this relationship between data and AI, it's incredibly tight. You need the right raw materials. You need the right engine, that is the AI, and then you will generate insights that could really change the world. >> So, Kay, there's a data point from the World Economic Forum which really caught my attention. It says the 15.7 billion of GDP growth is going to be a result of AI by 2030, 15.7 billion added. That includes the dilutive effects where we're replacing humans with machines. What is driving this in this incremental growth? >> Well, I think obviously, it's the access to the huge amounts of data that John pointed out. But one of the things that we have to remember about, AI is that actually, AI is pretty dumb unless you give it nice, clean, organized data. And so, it's not just all data, but it's data that has been through a process that enables the AI to gain insights from it. And so, what is it? It's the compute power, the ever increasing compute power. So, in the past, we would never have thought that we could use some of the new things that we're seeing in machine learning, so even deep learning. It's only been about for a small length of time, but it's really with the compute power, with the amount of data, being able to put AI on steroids, for luck of a better analogy. And I think it's also that we are now in business, and society, being able to see some of the benefits that can be generated from AI. Listening to Oakridge talk about the medical science advances that we can create for human beings, that's extraordinary. But we're also seeing that across business. >> That's why I was going to add. As impressive as those economic figures are in terms of what value it could add from a pure financial perspective? It's really the problems that could be solved. If you think about some of the things that happened in the pandemic, and what virtual experience allowed with a phone or with a tablet to check in with a doctor who was going to curate your COVID test, right? When they invented the iPhone, nobody thought that was going to be the use. AI has that same promise, but really on a macro global scale, some of the biggest problems we're trying to solve. So, huge opportunity, but as we're going to talk about a little later, huge risk for it to be misused if it's not guided and aimed in the right direction. >> Absolutely. >> That's okay. Maybe talk about that? >> Well, I was just going to come back about some of the benefits. California has been over the last 10 years trying to reduce emissions. One wildfire, absolutely wiped out all that good work over 10 years. But with AI, we've been developing an application that allows us to say, "Tomorrow, at this location, you will have a wildfire. So, please send your services to that location." That's the power of artificial intelligence to really help with things like climate change. >> Absolutely. >> Is that a probability model that's running somewhere? >> Yeah. Absolutely >> So, I wanted to ask you, but a lot of AI today, is modeling that's done, and the edge, you mentioned the iPhone, with all this power and new processors. AI inferencing at the edge in real time making real time decisions. So, one example is predicting, the other is there's actually something going on in this place. What do you see there? >> Yeah, so, I mean, yes we are using a predictive tool to ingest the data on weather, and all these other factors in order to say, "Please put your services here tomorrow at this time." But maybe you want to talk about the next edge. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it's not just grabbing the data to do some predictive modeling. It's now creating that end-to-end value chain where the actions are being taken in real time based on the information that's being processed, especially out at the edge. So, you're ending up, not just with predictive modeling, but it's actually transferring into actual action on the ground that's happening... You know, we like to say automagically. So, to the point where you can be making real time changes based on information that continues to make you smarter and smarter. So, it's not just a group of people taking the inputs out of a model and figuring out, okay now what am I going to do with it? The system end-to-end, allows it to happen in a way that drives a time to value that is beyond anything we've seen in the pas- >> In every industry? >> In every industry. >> Absolutely, and that's something we learned during the pandemic, one of the many things. Access to real time data to actually glean those insights that can be acted on, is no longer a nice to have. >> No. >> For companies in any industry they've got to have that now, they've got to use it as their competitive advantage. Where do you see when you're talking with customers, John? Where are they in that capability and leveraging AI on steroids, as I said? >> Yeah. I think it varies. I mean, certainly I think as you look in the medical field, et cetera, I mean, I think they've been very comfortable, and that continues to up. The use cases are so numerous there, that in some ways we've only scratched the surface, I think. But there's a high degree of acceptance, and people see the promise. Manufacturing's another area where automation and relying on some form of what used to be kind of analog intelligence, people are very comfortable with. I would say candidly, I would say the public sector and government is the furthest behind. It may be used for intelligence purposes, and things like that, but in terms of advancing overall, the common good, I think we're trailing behind there. So, that's why things like the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and some of the other things we're seeing. That's why organizations like the World Economic Forum are so important, because we've got to make sure that this isn't just a private sector piece, It's not just about commercialization, and finding that next cost savings. It really should be about, how do you solve the world's biggest problems and do in a way that's smarter than we've ever been able to do it before? >> It's interesting, you say public sectors is behind because in some respects, they're really advanced, but they're not sharing that because it's secretive. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> That's very fair. >> Yeah. So, Kay, the other interesting stat, was that by 2023 this is like next year, 6.8 trillion will be spent on digital transformation. So, there's this intersection of data. I mean, to me, digital is data. But a lot of it was sort of, we always talk about the acceleration 'cause of the pandemic. If you weren't a digital business you were out of business, and people sort of rushed, I call it the force-march to digital. And now, are people stepping back and saying, "Okay, what can we actually do?" And maybe being more planful? Maybe you could talk about the sort of that roadmap? >> Sure. I think that that's true. And whilst I agree with John, we also see a lot of small... A lot of companies that are really only at proof of value for AI at the moment. So, we need to ensure that everybody, we take everybody, not just the governments, but everybody with us. And one of the things I'm often asked, is if you're a small or medium-sized enterprise, how can you begin to use AI at scale? And I think that's one of the exciting things about building a platform. >> That's right. >> And enabling people to use that. I think that there is also, the fact that we need to take everybody with us on this adventure because AI is so important. And it's not just important in the way it's currently being used. But if we think about these new frontier technologies like Metaverse, for example. What's the Metaverse except an application of AI? But if we don't take everybody on the journey now, then when we are using applications in the Metaverse, or building applications in the Metaverse what happens at that point? >> Think about if only certain groups of people or certain companies had access to wifi, or had access to cellular, or had access to a phone, right? The advantage and the inequality would be manifest, right? We have to think of AI and super computing in the same way, because they are going to be these raw ingredients that are going to drive the future. And if they are not, if there isn't some level of AI equality, I think the potential negative consequences of that, are incredibly high, especially in the developing world. >> Talk about it from a responsibility perspective? Getting everybody on board is challenging from a cultural standpoint, but organizations have to do it as you both articulated. But then every time we talk about AI, we've got to talk about it's used responsibly. Kay, what are your thoughts there? What are you seeing out in the field? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I started working in this in about 2014 when there were maybe a handful of us. What's exciting for me, is that now you hear it on people's lips, much more. But we still got a long way to go. We still got that understanding to happen in companies that although you might, for example, be a drug discovery company, you are probably using AI not just in drug discovery but in a number of backroom operations such as human resources, for example. We know the use of AI and human resources is very problematic. And is about to be legislated against, or at least be set up as a high risk problem use of AI by the E.U. So, across the E.U, we know what happened with GDPR that it became something that lots and lots of countries used, and we expect the AI Act to also become used in that way. So, what you need, is you need not only for companies to understand that they are gradually becoming AI companies, but also that as part of that transformation, it's taking your workers with you. It's helping them understand that AI won't actually take their jobs, it will merely help them with reskilling or working better in what they do. And they think it's also in actually helping the board to understand. We know lots of boards that don't have any clue about AI. And then, the whole of the C-suite and the trickle all down, and understanding that at the end, you've got tools, you've got data, and you've got people, and they all need to be working together to create that functional, responsible AI layer. >> When we think about it, really, when we think about responsible AI, really think about at least three pillars, right? The first off, is that privacy aspect. It's really that data ingestion part, which is respecting the privacy of the individuals, and making sure that you're collecting only the data you should be collecting to feed into your AI mechanism, right? The second, is that inclusivity and equality aspect. We've got to make sure that the actions that are coming out, the insights were generate, driving, really are inclusive. And that goes back to the right data sets. It goes back to the integrity in the algorithm. And then, you need to make sure that your AI is both human and humane. We have to make sure we don't take that human factor out and lose that connection to what really creates our shared humanity. Some of that's transparency, et cetera. I think all of those sound great. We've had some really interesting discussions about in practice, how challenging that's going to be, given the sophistication of this technology. >> When you say transparency, you're talking about the machine made a decision. I have to see how, understand how the machine made a decision. >> Algorithmic transparency. Go ahead. >> Algorithmic transparency. And the United States is actually at the moment considering something which is called the Algorithmic Accountability Act. And so, there is a movement to particularly where somebody's livelihood is affected. Say, for example, whether you get a job, and it was the algorithm that did the pre-selection in the human resources area. So, did you get a job? No, you didn't get that job. Why didn't you get that job? Why did the algorithm- >> A mortgage would be another? >> A mortgage would be another thing. And John was talking about the data, and the way that the algorithms are created. And I think, one great example, is lots of algorithms are currently created by young men under 20. They are not necessarily representative of your target audience for that algorithm. And unless you create some diversity around that group of developers, you're going to create a product that's less than optimal. So, responsible AI, isn't just about being responsible and having a social conscience, and doing things, but in a human-centered way, it's also about your bottom line as well. >> It took us a long time to recognize the kind of the shared interest we have in climate change. And the fact that the things that are happening one part of the world, can't be divorced from the impact across the the globe. When you think about AI, and the ability to create algorithms, and engage in insights, that could happen in one part of the world, and then be transferred out, not withstanding the fact, that most other countries have said, "We wouldn't do it this way, or we would require accountability. You can see the risk." It's what we call the race to the bottom. If you think about some of the things that have happened over the time in the industrial world. Often, businesses flock to those places with the least amount of safeguards that allow them to go the fastest, regardless of the collateral damage. I think we feel that same risk exists today with AI. >> So, much more we could talk about, guys, unfortunately, we are out of time. But it's so amazing to hear where we are with AI, where companies need to be. And it's the tip of the iceberg. You're very exciting. >> Yes. >> Kay and John, thank you so much for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching this segment. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante for our guests. We are live at HPE Discover '22. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're here theCUBE on Cloud Startup Showcase brought to you by AWS. And right now we're going to explore the next frontier for privacy, you know, security, privacy, and compliance, they're often lumped together and they're often lumped on as an afterthought bolted on to infrastructure, data and applications. But, you know, while they're certainly related they're different disciplines and they require a specific domain knowledge and expertise to really solve the challenges of today. One thing they all share is successful implementations, must be comprehensive and designed in at the start and with me to discuss going beyond compliance and designing privacy protections into products and services. Justin Antonipillai, who is the founder and CEO of WireWheel, Justin awesome having you on the AWS Startup Showcase. Thanks for being here >> Dave, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor, and I appreciate it. Look forward to the discussion. >> So I always love to ask founders, like, take us back. Why did you start this company? Where did your inspiration come from? >> So Dave, I was very lucky. I had the honor of serving in president Obama's second term as an Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. So I ran the part of the government that includes the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So core economic statistical bureaus. But I helped lead a lot of the Obama administration's, outreach and negotiations on data privacy around the world. Including on something called the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. So at the time the two jobs I had really aligned with what our discussion is here today. The first part of it was, I could see that all around the world in the U.S. and around the world, data privacy and protecting privacy, had become a human rights issue. It was a trade issue. You could see it as a national security issue and companies all around the world were just struggling with how to get legal, how to make sure that I do it right, and how I make sure that I'm treating my customer's data, in the right way. But when I was also leading the agency, a lot of what we were trying to do was to help our U.S. citizens, our folks here around the country solve big public problems by ethically and responsibly using government data to do it. And I can talk about what that meant in a little while. So the inspiration behind why WireWheel was, we need better more technically driven ways to help companies get compliance, to show their customers that they're protecting privacy and to put customers, our customers onto a path where they can start using the customer data better, faster and stronger, but most importantly, ethically. And that's really what we try to tackle at WireWheel. >> Right, excellent. Thank you for that. I mean, yeah you know, in the early days of social media, people kind of fluffed it off and oh there is no privacy in the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then wow, it became a huge social issue and public policy really needed to step in but also technology needs this to help solve this problem. So let's try to paint a picture for people as to really dig into the problem that you solve and why it's so complicated. We actually have a graphic. It's a map of the U S that we want to pull up here. Explain this. >> Yeah, I mean, what you're saying here is that every one of your, our viewers today is going to be looking at privacy laws moving across the country Dave but there's a lot of different ones. You know, if you're a company that's launching and building your product, that you might be helping your customers your consumer facing. The law, and you're even let's assume you want to do the right thing. You want to treat that customer data responsibly and protect it. When you look at a map like this and you can see three States have already passed different privacy laws, but look at the number of different States all across the country that are considering their own privacy laws. It really could be overwhelming. And Virginia, as you can see is just about to pass it's next privacy law but there's something like 23,24 States that are moving them through. The other thing Dave, that's really important about this is, these are not just breach laws. You know, I think years ago we were all looking at these kinds of laws spreading across the country and you would be saying, okay, that's just a breach law. These laws are very comprehensive. They have a lot to them. So what we have been really helping companies with is to enable you to get compliant with a lot of these very quickly. And that's really what we've tried to take on. Because if you're trying to do the right thing there should be a way to do it. >> Got it. Yeah, I can't even imagine what the it had been so many permutations and complexities but imagine this, if this were a globe we were looking at it says it gets out of control. Okay, now you guys well you use a term called phrase beyond compliance? What do we mean by that? >> There are a couple of things. So I'd say almost every company taking a product to market right now, whether you're B2C or B2B you want to make sure you can answer the customer question and say, yes, I'm compliant. And usually that means if you're a B2C company it means that your customers can come to your site. Your site is compliant with all of the laws out there. You can take consents and preferences. You can get their data back to them. All of these are legal requirements. If you're a B2B company, you're also looking at making sure you can create some critical compliance records that's it, right? But when we think beyond compliance, we think of a couple of basic things. Number one, do you tell the story about all the trust and protection you put around your data in a way that your customers want to do business with you? I mean Dave, if you went to CES the last couple of years and you were walking into the center or looking at a virtual version of it, on every billboard, the top five, top 10 global companies advertise that they take care of your data and they're onto something, they're onto something. You can actually build a winning strategy by solving a customer's problem and also showing them that you care, and that they're trustworthy. Because there are too many products out there, that aren't. The second thing, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, please carry on. >> No, I mean the second thing, and then I think I'd say is going beyond compliance also means that you're thinking about how you can use that data for your customer, to solve all of their problems. And Dave, what I'd say here is imagine a world right now, in which, you know you trusted that the data that you gave to companies or to the government, was protected and that if you changed your mind and you wanted it back that they would delete it or give it back to you. Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have solved getting a COVID vaccine? Can you imagine how much data would have been available to pharmaceutical companies to actually develop a vaccine? Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have opened the economy? The thing is companies can't solve every problem that they could for a customer because customers don't trust that the data is going to be used correctly and companies don't know how to use it in that way and ethically. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting beyond compliance which is we want to enable our customers to use the data in the best way and most ethical way to solve all of their customer's problems. >> Okay, so I ask the elephant in the room question. If you asked most businesses about personal information, where it's stored, you know who has access to it, the fact is that most people can't answer it. And so when they're confronted with these uncomfortable questions. The other documents and policies that maybe check some boxes, why is that not a good idea? I mean, there's an expense to going beyond that but so why is that not just a good idea to check it off? >> Well look, a lot of companies do need to just check it off and what I mean, get it right, make sure you label and the way we've thought about this is that when you're building on a backbone like AWS, it does give you the ability to buy a lot of services quickly and scale with your company. But it also gives us an ability to comply faster by leveraging that infrastructure to get compliant faster. So if you think about it, 20 years ago whenever I wanted to buy storage or if I wanted to buy servers and look we're a company that built in the cloud, Dave it would have been very difficult for us to buy the right storage and the processing we needed, given that we were starting. But I was able to buy very small amounts of it until our customer profile grew. But that also means my data moved out of a single hard drive and out of a single set of servers, into other places that are hosted in the cloud. So the entire tech stack that all of our customers are building on means they're distributing personal data into the cloud, into SAS platforms. And there's been a really big move through integration platforms as a service to allow you to spread the personal data quickly. But that same infrastructure can be used to also get you compliant faster, and that's the differentiation. So we built a platform that enables a company to inventory their systems, to track what they're doing in those systems and to both create a compliance record faster by tracking what they're doing inside the cloud and in SAS systems. And that's the different way we've been thinking about it as we've been going to market. >> So, okay. So what actually do you sell, you sell a service? Is it a subscription? >> Yeah. >> And AWS is underneath that, maybe you could put down a picture for us. >> Sure, we're a cloud hosted software as a service. We have two core offerings. One is the WireWheel Trust Access Consent Solution. So if you go to a number of major brands, and you go to their website, when they tell you here's the data we're collecting about you, when they collect your consents and preferences, when they collect a request for data correction or deletion of the data, all the way from the request to delivery back to the consumer, we have an end to end system that our customers use with their customers, a completely cloud hostable in a subscription. So enables even very small startups, to build that experience into their website and into their products, from the very beginning, at a cost efficient point. So if you want to stand up a compliant website or you want to build into your product that Trust Access Consent Solution, we have a SAS platform, and we have developer tools and our developer portal to let you do it quickly. The second thing we do is we have a privacy operations manager. So this is the most security center but for privacy operations. It helps you inventory your systems, actually create data flow maps and most critically create compliance records that you need to comply with, you know the European law, the Brazilian law, and that whole spectrum of U.S. privacy laws that you showed a few minutes ago. And those are the two core offerings we have. >> I love it. I mean, it's the cloud story, right? One is you don't have to spend a millions of dollars on hardware and software. And the second is, when you launch you enable small companies, not just the biggest companies you give them the same, essentially the same services. And that's a great story. Who do you sell to Justin? What does a typical customer engagement look? >> Yeah, we, in many of our customers and in the AWS say startup environment, you often don't have companies that have like a privacy officer. They often don't even have a general counsel. So we sell a package that will often go to whoever is responsible at the company for privacy compliance. And, you know, interestingly Dave in some startups that might be a marketing officer, it might be a CLO, it might be the CTO. So in startups and sort of growing companies, we've put out a lot of guidance, and our core WireWheel developer portal is meant to give even a startup all they need to stand up that experience and get it going, so that when you get that procurement imagine you're about to go sell your product, and they ask you, are you compliant, then you have that document ready to provide. We also do provide this core infrastructure for enormous enterprises. So think telecoms, think top three global technology companies. So Dave, we get excited about is we've built a core software platform privacy infrastructure that is permanently being used by some of the largest companies in the world. And our goal is to get that infrastructure at the right price point into every company in the world, right? We want to enable any company to spend and stand up the right system, that's leveraging that same privacy infrastructure that the big folks have, so that as they scale, they can continue to do the right thing. >> That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned a number of roles of marketing folks. I can even see a sales, let's say sales lead saying, okay we got this deal on the table. How do we get through the procurement because we didn't check the box, all right. So, let me ask you this. We talked a little bit about designing privacy in a and it's clear you help do that. How do you make it, you know fundamental to customer's workloads? Do they have to be like an AWS customer to take advantage of that concept? Or how did they make it part of their workflow? >> Yeah, so there's a couple of critical things. How do you make it part of the workflow? The first thing is, you go to any company's website right now, they have to be compliant with the California law. So a very straightforward thing we do is we can for both B2B and B2C companies stand up an entire customer experience that matches the scale of the company that enables it to be compliant. That means you have a trust center that shows the right information to your customers, it collects the consents, preferences, and it stands up with a portal to request data. These are basics. And for a company that's standing up the internal operations, we can get them app collecting that core record and create a compliance record very fast. With larger companies, Dave you're right. I mean, when you're talking about understanding your entire infrastructure and understanding where you're storing and processing data it could seem overwhelming, but the truth is, the way we onboard our customers is we get you compliance on your product and website first, right? We focus on your product to get that compliance record done. We focus on your website so that you can sell your product. And then we go through the rest of the major systems where you're handling personal information, your sales, your marketing, you know, it's like a natural process. So larger enterprises we have a pretty straightforward way that we get them up and running, but even small startups we can get them to a point of getting them compliant and starting to think about other things very, very quickly. >> And so Justin, you're a government so you understand big, but how I talk about the secret ingredient that allows you to do this at scale and still handle all that diversity, like what we showed in that graphic, the different locations, different local laws, data sovereignty, et cetera. >> Yeah, there's a couple things on the secret source. One is, we have to think about our customers every day. And we had to understand that companies will use whatever their infrastructure is to build. Like you've seen, even on AWS there are so many different services you can use. So number one, we always think with an engineering point of view in mind. Understand the tools, understand the infrastructure in a way that brings that kind of basic visibility to whoever it is that's handling privacy, that basic understanding. The second is, we focused on core user experience for the non-technical user. It's really easy to get started. It's really easy to stand up your privacy page and your privacy policy. It's really easy to collect that and make that first record. The third is, and you know, this is one of those key things. When I was in the government, I met with folks in the intelligence community at one point day, and this always stuck with me. They were telling me that 20 years ago, you know to do the kind of innovation that you have going on now, you would have had to have had a defense contract. You would have had to have invested an enormous amount of money to buy the processing and the services and the team. But the ability for me as a startup founder, to understand the big picture and understand that companies need to be compliant fast, get their website compliant fast, get their product compliant fast, but build on a cloud infrastructure that allowed me to scale was incredible. Because it allows us to do a lot with our customers that a company like ours would have been really challenged to do without that cloud backbone. >> Love this, the agility and the innovation. Last question, give us the company update Justin, you know where are you? What can you share with us, fundraising, head count, are you generating revenue? Where you are? >> Oh yeah, we're excited as I mentioned, we are already the privacy platform of choice of some of the larger brands in the world, which we're very excited about. And we help them solve both the trust, access consent problem for their customers, and we help with the privacy operations management. We recently announced a new $20 million infusion of capital, led by a terrific venture capital fund, ForgePoint Capital. We've been lucky to have been supported by NEA, Sands Capital, Revolution Capital, Pritzker Capital, PSP. And so we have a terrific group of investors behind us. We are scaling, we've grown the company a lot in the last year. Obviously it's been an interesting and challenging year with COVID, but we are really focused on growing our sales team, our marketing team, and we're going to be offering some pretty exciting solutions here for the rest of the year. >> The timing was unbelievable, you had the cloud at your beck and call, you had the experience in government. You've got your background as a lawyer. And it all came in, and the legal come into the forefront of public policy, just a congratulations on all your progress today. We're really looking forward to seeing you guys rocket in the future. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Dave, thanks so much for having me, really enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. >> Great, and thank you for watching everyone is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on cloud startups. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're here theCUBE on Cloud Startup Showcase brought to you by AWS. And right now we're going to explore the next frontier for privacy, you know, security, privacy, and compliance, they're often lumped together and they're often lumped on as an afterthought bolted on to infrastructure, data and applications. But, you know, while they're certainly related they're different disciplines and they require a specific domain knowledge and expertise to really solve the challenges of today. One thing they all share is successful implementations, must be comprehensive and designed in at the start and with me to discuss going beyond compliance and designing privacy protections into products and services. Justin Antonipillai, who is the founder and CEO of WireWheel, Justin awesome having you on the AWS Startup Showcase. Thanks for being here >> Dave, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor, and I appreciate it. Look forward to the discussion. >> So I always love to ask founders, like, take us back. Why did you start this company? Where did your inspiration come from? >> So Dave, I was very lucky. I had the honor of serving in president Obama's second term as an Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. So I ran the part of the government that includes the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So core economic statistical bureaus. But I helped lead a lot of the Obama administration's, outreach and negotiations on data privacy around the world. Including on something called the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. So at the time the two jobs I had really aligned with what our discussion is here today. The first part of it was, I could see that all around the world in the U.S. and around the world, data privacy and protecting privacy, had become a human rights issue. It was a trade issue. You could see it as a national security issue and companies all around the world were just struggling with how to get legal, how to make sure that I do it right, and how I make sure that I'm treating my customer's data, in the right way. But when I was also leading the agency, a lot of what we were trying to do was to help our U.S. citizens, our folks here around the country solve big public problems by ethically and responsibly using government data to do it. And I can talk about what that meant in a little while. So the inspiration behind why WireWheel was, we need better more technically driven ways to help companies get compliance, to show their customers that they're protecting privacy and to put customers, our customers onto a path where they can start using the customer data better, faster and stronger, but most importantly, ethically. And that's really what we try to tackle at WireWheel. >> Right, excellent. Thank you for that. I mean, yeah you know, in the early days of social media, people kind of fluffed it off and oh there is no privacy in the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then wow, it became a huge social issue and public policy really needed to step in but also technology needs this to help solve this problem. So let's try to paint a picture for people as to really dig into the problem that you solve and why it's so complicated. We actually have a graphic. It's a map of the U S that we want to pull up here. Explain this. >> Yeah, I mean, what you're saying here is that every one of your, our viewers today is going to be looking at privacy laws moving across the country Dave but there's a lot of different ones. You know, if you're a company that's launching and building your product, that you might be helping your customers your consumer facing. The law, and you're even let's assume you want to do the right thing. You want to treat that customer data responsibly and protect it. When you look at a map like this and you can see three States have already passed different privacy laws, but look at the number of different States all across the country that are considering their own privacy laws. It really could be overwhelming. And Virginia, as you can see is just about to pass it's next privacy law but there's something like 23,24 States that are moving them through. The other thing Dave, that's really important about this is, these are not just breach laws. You know, I think years ago we were all looking at these kinds of laws spreading across the country and you would be saying, okay, that's just a breach law. These laws are very comprehensive. They have a lot to them. So what we have been really helping companies with is to enable you to get compliant with a lot of these very quickly. And that's really what we've tried to take on. Because if you're trying to do the right thing there should be a way to do it. >> Got it. Yeah, I can't even imagine what the it had been so many permutations and complexities but imagine this, if this were a globe we were looking at it says it gets out of control. Okay, now you guys well you use a term called phrase beyond compliance? What do we mean by that? >> There are a couple of things. So I'd say almost every company taking a product to market right now, whether you're B2C or B2B you want to make sure you can answer the customer question and say, yes, I'm compliant. And usually that means if you're a B2C company it means that your customers can come to your site. Your site is compliant with all of the laws out there. You can take consents and preferences. You can get their data back to them. All of these are legal requirements. If you're a B2B company, you're also looking at making sure you can create some critical compliance records that's it, right? But when we think beyond compliance, we think of a couple of basic things. Number one, do you tell the story about all the trust and protection you put around your data in a way that your customers want to do business with you? I mean Dave, if you went to CES the last couple of years and you were walking into the center or looking at a virtual version of it, on every billboard, the top five, top 10 global companies advertise that they take care of your data and they're onto something, they're onto something. You can actually build a winning strategy by solving a customer's problem and also showing them that you care, and that they're trustworthy. Because there are too many products out there, that aren't. The second thing, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, please carry on. >> No, I mean the second thing, and then I think I'd say is going beyond compliance also means that you're thinking about how you can use that data for your customer, to solve all of their problems. And Dave, what I'd say here is imagine a world right now, in which, you know you trusted that the data that you gave to companies or to the government, was protected and that if you changed your mind and you wanted it back that they would delete it or give it back to you. Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have solved getting a COVID vaccine? Can you imagine how much data would have been available to pharmaceutical companies to actually develop a vaccine? Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have opened the economy? The thing is companies can't solve every problem that they could for a customer because customers don't trust that the data is going to be used correctly and companies don't know how to use it in that way and ethically. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting beyond compliance which is we want to enable our customers to use the data in the best way and most ethical way to solve all of their customer's problems. >> Okay, so I ask the elephant in the room question. If you asked most businesses about personal information, where it's stored, you know who has access to it, the fact is that most people can't answer it. And so when they're confronted with these uncomfortable questions. The other documents and policies that maybe check some boxes, why is that not a good idea? I mean, there's an expense to going beyond that but so why is that not just a good idea to check it off? >> Well look, a lot of companies do need to just check it off and what I mean, get it right, make sure you label and the way we've thought about this is that when you're building on a backbone like AWS, it does give you the ability to buy a lot of services quickly and scale with your company. But it also gives us an ability to comply faster by leveraging that infrastructure to get compliant faster. So if you think about it, 20 years ago whenever I wanted to buy storage or if I wanted to buy servers and look we're a company that built in the cloud, Dave it would have been very difficult for us to buy the right storage and the processing we needed, given that we were starting. But I was able to buy very small amounts of it until our customer profile grew. But that also means my data moved out of a single hard drive and out of a single set of servers, into other places that are hosted in the cloud. So the entire tech stack that all of our customers are building on means they're distributing personal data into the cloud, into SAS platforms. And there's been a really big move through integration platforms as a service to allow you to spread the personal data quickly. But that same infrastructure can be used to also get you compliant faster, and that's the differentiation. So we built a platform that enables a company to inventory their systems, to track what they're doing in those systems and to both create a compliance record faster by tracking what they're doing inside the cloud and in SAS systems. And that's the different way we've been thinking about it as we've been going to market. >> So, okay. So what actually do you sell, you sell a service? Is it a subscription? >> Yeah. >> And AWS is underneath that, maybe you could put down a picture for us. >> Sure, we're a cloud hosted software as a service. We have two core offerings. One is the WireWheel Trust Access Consent Solution. So if you go to a number of major brands, and you go to their website, when they tell you here's the data we're collecting about you, when they collect your consents and preferences, when they collect a request for data correction or deletion of the data, all the way from the request to delivery back to the consumer, we have an end to end system that our customers use with their customers, a completely cloud hostable in a subscription. So enables even very small startups, to build that experience into their website and into their products, from the very beginning, at a cost efficient point. So if you want to stand up a compliant website or you want to build into your product that Trust Access Consent Solution, we have a SAS platform, and we have developer tools and our developer portal to let you do it quickly. The second thing we do is we have a privacy operations manager. So this is the most security center but for privacy operations. It helps you inventory your systems, actually create data flow maps and most critically create compliance records that you need to comply with, you know the European law, the Brazilian law, and that whole spectrum of U.S. privacy laws that you showed a few minutes ago. And those are the two core offerings we have. >> I love it. I mean, it's the cloud story, right? One is you don't have to spend a millions of dollars on hardware and software. And the second is, when you launch you enable small companies, not just the biggest companies you give them the same, essentially the same services. And that's a great story. Who do you sell to Justin? What does a typical customer engagement look? >> Yeah, we, in many of our customers and in the AWS say startup environment, you often don't have companies that have like a privacy officer. They often don't even have a general counsel. So we sell a package that will often go to whoever is responsible at the company for privacy compliance. And, you know, interestingly Dave in some startups that might be a marketing officer, it might be a CLO, it might be the CTO. So in startups and sort of growing companies, we've put out a lot of guidance, and our core WireWheel developer portal is meant to give even a startup all they need to stand up that experience and get it going, so that when you get that procurement imagine you're about to go sell your product, and they ask you, are you compliant, then you have that document ready to provide. We also do provide this core infrastructure for enormous enterprises. So think telecoms, think top three global technology companies. So Dave, we get excited about is we've built a core software platform privacy infrastructure that is permanently being used by some of the largest companies in the world. And our goal is to get that infrastructure at the right price point into every company in the world, right? We want to enable any company to spend and stand up the right system, that's leveraging that same privacy infrastructure that the big folks have, so that as they scale, they can continue to do the right thing. >> That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned a number of roles of marketing folks. I can even see a sales, let's say sales lead saying, okay we got this deal on the table. How do we get through the procurement because we didn't check the box, all right. So, let me ask you this. We talked a little bit about designing privacy in a and it's clear you help do that. How do you make it, you know fundamental to customer's workloads? Do they have to be like an AWS customer to take advantage of that concept? Or how did they make it part of their workflow? >> Yeah, so there's a couple of critical things. How do you make it part of the workflow? The first thing is, you go to any company's website right now, they have to be compliant with the California law. So a very straightforward thing we do is we can for both B2B and B2C companies stand up an entire customer experience that matches the scale of the company that enables it to be compliant. That means you have a trust center that shows the right information to your customers, it collects the consents, preferences, and it stands up with a portal to request data. These are basics. And for a company that's standing up the internal operations, we can get them app collecting that core record and create a compliance record very fast. With larger companies, Dave you're right. I mean, when you're talking about understanding your entire infrastructure and understanding where you're storing and processing data it could seem overwhelming, but the truth is, the way we onboard our customers is we get you compliance on your product and website first, right? We focus on your product to get that compliance record done. We focus on your website so that you can sell your product. And then we go through the rest of the major systems where you're handling personal information, your sales, your marketing, you know, it's like a natural process. So larger enterprises we have a pretty straightforward way that we get them up and running, but even small startups we can get them to a point of getting them compliant and starting to think about other things very, very quickly. >> And so Justin, you're a government so you understand big, but how I talk about the secret ingredient that allows you to do this at scale and still handle all that diversity, like what we showed in that graphic, the different locations, different local laws, data sovereignty, et cetera. >> Yeah, there's a couple things on the secret source. One is, we have to think about our customers every day. And we had to understand that companies will use whatever their infrastructure is to build. Like you've seen, even on AWS there are so many different services you can use. So number one, we always think with an engineering point of view in mind. Understand the tools, understand the infrastructure in a way that brings that kind of basic visibility to whoever it is that's handling privacy, that basic understanding. The second is, we focused on core user experience for the non-technical user. It's really easy to get started. It's really easy to stand up your privacy page and your privacy policy. It's really easy to collect that and make that first record. The third is, and you know, this is one of those key things. When I was in the government, I met with folks in the intelligence community at one point day, and this always stuck with me. They were telling me that 20 years ago, you know to do the kind of innovation that you have going on now, you would have had to have had a defense contract. You would have had to have invested an enormous amount of money to buy the processing and the services and the team. But the ability for me as a startup founder, to understand the big picture and understand that companies need to be compliant fast, get their website compliant fast, get their product compliant fast, but build on a cloud infrastructure that allowed me to scale was incredible. Because it allows us to do a lot with our customers that a company like ours would have been really challenged to do without that cloud backbone. >> Love this, the agility and the innovation. Last question, give us the company update Justin, you know where are you? What can you share with us, fundraising, head count, are you generating revenue? Where you are? >> Oh yeah, we're excited as I mentioned, we are already the privacy platform of choice of some of the larger brands in the world, which we're very excited about. And we help them solve both the trust, access consent problem for their customers, and we help with the privacy operations management. We recently announced a new $20 million infusion of capital, led by a terrific venture capital fund, ForgePoint Capital. We've been lucky to have been supported by NEA, Sands Capital, Revolution Capital, Pritzker Capital, PSP. And so we have a terrific group of investors behind us. We are scaling, we've grown the company a lot in the last year. Obviously it's been an interesting and challenging year with COVID, but we are really focused on growing our sales team, our marketing team, and we're going to be offering some pretty exciting solutions here for the rest of the year. >> The timing was unbelievable, you had the cloud at your beck and call, you had the experience in government. You've got your background as a lawyer. And it all came in, and the legal come into the forefront of public policy, just a congratulations on all your progress today. We're really looking forward to seeing you guys rocket in the future. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Dave, thanks so much for having me, really enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. >> Great, and thank you for watching everyone is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on cloud startups. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the >>Cube with digital >>coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, >>AWS and >>our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes ongoing coverage of this year's AWS reinvent. You know, normally we'd be in the middle of the San Sands Convention Center. We have two sets and 50,000 of our closest friends. We'd be deking out on cloud. Seems like a long time ago, but the show must go on. And it does. Joe Duffy is here. He's the co founder and CEO of Gloomy, and Justin Fits you is the vice president engineering for Cloud Engineering for snowflake. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to see you. >>It's good to be here, >>Joe. I love what you guys are doing. You know, leading your customers to the cloud and really attacking that I t labor problem that we've dealt with for years and years by playing a role in transforming what I would say is I t ops into cloud ups with programmable infra infrastructure practices. So take >>a >>moment to tell us. Why did you and your co founder start the company how you got it off the ground? People are always interested in how you got it funded. You got a couple of Seattle VCs, Madrona and Tola involved. Any a just got involved. So congrats on that. What's the story of your company? >>Yeah. So my background and my co founder Eric's background. You know, we spent multiple decades at Microsoft just really obsessing over developer platforms and productivity and trying to make you know developers lives as as as as productive as possible. You know, help them harness the power of software >>toe create, >>you know, innovative new applications and really spent time on technologies like Visual Studio and Ahmed. And and, you know, it really struck us that the cloud is changing everything about how we develop software. And yet from our perspective, coming from developer landed had almost changed nothing. You know, most of our customers were still, you know, developing software like they did 15 years ago, where it was a typical enter your application, they'd kind of write the code and then go to their I t team and say, Hey, we need to run this somewhere. Can you provisioned a few virtual machines? Can you prevision You know, maybe a database or two and and And so And then we went and talked Thio, you know, infrastructure teams and found out Hey, you know, folks were really toiling away with tools that air a pale in comparison when it comes to the productivity that we we were accustomed Thio on the developer side. And then frequently we heard from leaders that there were silos between the organizations. They couldn't build things quickly enough. They couldn't move quickly enough in cloud Native and the new public cloud capabilities just really were pushed pushing on that, really, you know. But the most innovative companies we kept hearing were the ones who figured this out, who really figured out how to move faster in the cloud. Companies like Snowflake really are leveraging the cloud toe transform entire businesses. You look at uber lyft Airbnb, these companies that really harnessed the cloud toe not just from a technical productivity standpoint, but really transform the business. Eh? So that was the opportunity that we saw Kalemie was Let's take a step back. We call this cloud engineering. Let's imagine a world where every developers, a cloud developer and infrastructure teams are enabling that new way of building. >>Great. So you mentioned cloud engineering. Now, Justin, you've done a bit a bit of cloud engineering yourself in your day. You know, the Cube has been following Snowflake very closely since it launched really mid last decade. And we've we've covered your novel, architectural approach and your cloud only mantra. Talk about that. And have there been any changes in how you're thinking about cloud adoption and how that's as that's increased and you've seen new use cases emerged. >>Yeah, so I think, you know, obviously Snowflake was was built on the foundation of cloud first, and in fact, cloud Onley are only platform and only infrastructure is is based on the cloud. But, you know, for us, it was absolutely key on. How do you develop a platform and a product that's completely elastic? Lee, scalable on drily, really allows for kind of the paper use and paper consumption model. We didn't really it would be very difficult for us to offer this and Thio offer a product in this way. On def, you start to think about kind of from a cloud engineering perspective. Um, we don't have the typical network engineers. A typical data center engineers that you that you might have seen previously. Instead, we're shifting our model in our what we do include engineering away from kind of an operations model or even devotes model towards the software engineering model. E. I think that's the That's the big shift to cloud engineering is that we're looking to hire and we're building a team of software engineers to build systems and platforms and and tooling Thio have the system self managed as much as possible, and it changes to our infrastructure that we look at any changes in our platform are all through, commits and and deployed via pipelines, as opposed to having Operator's log on and make these changes. And so that's the shift that I think we're seeing. And that's to kind of match the overall stuff like Model of Cloud, first and on and where the product is like just going. >>Like you said in cloud only, Justin, you use Pollux me in your own engineering and also in your product externally. Is that correct? And how so? >>Yeah, we actually use it in, specifically and, um, in our platform, in order to kind of deployed to manage and, uh, just operate a kind of our overall cloud infrastructure. We specifically use it more focused on the good days and and continue ization side of things. But that use cases kind of rapidly expanding across the organization. >>So I'm curious of what do you guys we're seeing in the market place? Joe, you know, thinking about cloud broadly, What's the impact that you're seeing on businesses? Who are the big players that you see out there? Maybe you could talk about some of the differentiation that you've noticed. >>Yeah, I think this notion of plot engineering, you know, even 3.5 years ago when we got started was in its infancy. You know, we definitely saw that. Hey, you know, the world is moving and shifting left, you know, it's just was saying and really, people are looking for new ways to empower developers, but that empowerment has to come with guard rails, right? And so what we're seeing is oftentimes, teams are now modernizing their entire platform infrastructure platform, and they're looking to technologies like kubernetes to do that. But increasingly, you know, aws, Azure gp. You know, when we started, um, there weren't any great managed kubernetes clusters. And now today, fast forward. You know Onley 3.5 years and and many of our customers are using flew me to help them get up and running with the chaos in AWS, for example, you look at a lot of folks transforming on Prem as well again many times, adopting kubernetes is sort of a if they intend to stay on Prem. You know, Thio, at least modernize their approach to application infrastructure delivery. That's where Pollux me really can help. It could be a bridge. Thio hate from on Prem to the public cloud. There's certainly a lot of folks doing great work in the space, you know, I think VM Ware has really kind of emerged as sort of vanguard thought leader in this in this space, especially with, you know, hep dio and now kind of pivotal joining the story. We see other, you know, great companies like hash in court, for we're doing good work in this space. Um, certainly we integrate with a lot of their technologies on you. Combine those with the public cloud providers. There's also a lot of just smaller startups in the space which you know, strikes in my heart. I love I love supporting the startup ecosystem. You know, whether that's for cell or net lif I or server list. You know, really trying to help developers harness more of the cloud. I think that's an emerging trend that we're gonna see accelerating in the coming years. >>Yeah. Thank you. You've mentioned a number of interesting emerging tools companies in the ecosystem. I mean, Justin talked about kubernetes. Are there other tooling that you're using that that might be, you know, some of your customers might like toe to know about. >>Yeah, I think so. So one thing I wanted to actually follow up with what Joe said here is is around kind of the multi cloud nature of what we do is is the tools, like gloomy are critical for us to be able to abstract away specific cloud provider AP ice and such and so given Snowflake operates on all three major public clouds and offers a seamless experience amongst all three of them. We have to have something that abstracts some of that complexity and some of those technical details away. Andi, that's why I kind of blew me, made sense in in this case and has helped us kind of achieved that cloud neutrality piece. Um, in terms of other tools that that you're thinking that we're talking about, I think Bellamy is doing a great job kind of on some of these on some of the kind of that interaction and infrastructure and sensation. But we're looking for tooling to kind of look for the overall workflow automation piece on orchestration. So what sits on top of say, you're using intervals using terra form? You may be using Polonia's well, but what kind of orchestrates all these pieces together? Onda, How do you kind of build workflow automation? And I think there's a lot of companies and technology providers that air starting up in this area to kind of stitch all these pieces together so that you kind of have a seamless kind of work flow across across your infrastructure. >>Got it. So, Joe, I'm kind of curious you talked a little bit about your background at Microsoft, and you're even a TMC where you're helping, you know, people manage Luns. It was a sort of skill set that is not in high demand today. Early. Shouldn't be people really need to transform? I've said that a lot in the queue, but But, you know, maybe talk a little bit about the experiences that you've had in the past that informed the direction that Pollux me is taking and where you see it going specifically. I mean, I've been talking a lot about the next decade of cloud is not gonna be the same as the last decade of the cloud. How did you How do you see it? >>Yeah, I think I recognize a clear trend, you know, in with cloud computing. Uh, you know, back I can't remember 13 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, When, when When the Azure project started. You know Dave Cutler, who actually founded the anti project at Microsoft, Actually, was was one of the first engineers that started Azure. And he called it a cloud operating system. And, you know, I think that vision of hey, the cloud is the new operating system is something that we're still just chipping away at. And that was that was a clear trend, you know, having seen these transformations in the past, you know the shift from, you know, dos to windows from windows to mobile Thio, client server thio now the cloud every step of the way. We always transform the way we build applications. And I think where we're at now is horse, really in the midst of a transition that I think we'll look back. You never know when it's happening right? But you can always look back in hindsight and see that it did happen. And I think the trend that we're going through now with service meshes and just, you know, micro services and service list is really we're building distributed applications. These clouds made of applications, they're distributed applications. And that was the trend that I, I recognized, also recognizes another trend, which is, you know, we spent 30 years building great tools. You know, I d s test frameworks sharing and reuse package managers. We figured out static analysis and how to fix security problems in this in in programming languages that we've got today. Let's not go rebuild all that. Let's leverage that, and and so that's what Eric and I said they want, you know, Let's stand on the shoulders of giants. Let's leverage all this good work that has come before us. Let's just apply that to the infrastructure domain and really try toe smooth things out. Give us a new sort of level playing field to build on. From here is we go forward and I'm excited that Parliament gives us that foundation that we can now build on top of >>Great and Justin, of course, were covered. Aws reinvent you guys. It was kind of your your first platform. It's your largest, the largest component of your business. And I have been saying, Ah lot that, you know the early days of cloud was about infrastructure last 32 throw in some database. But really, there's a new workload that's emerging. And you guys are at the heart of that where people are putting governed data giving access to that data, making it secure, uh, sharing that data across an ecosystem so that new workload is really driving new innovation. I wonder how you see that what you see the next half a decade or decades looking like in terms of innovation? >>Yeah, I think I think it za valid point, which is, um, it's less about infrastructure and more about the services that you're providing with that infrastructure. And what what value are you able to add and So I think that's it, Snowflake. The thing that we're really focused on, which is abstract away, all these tunes and all these knobs and such, and the how much remember you have on a specific and a piece of infrastructure or describes or anything like that. So what's the business value? And how can we present that business value in a uniform way, regardless of kind of the underlying service provider on baby to a different class of business users, someone who wants a low data and just two analysts against that they really don't want to understand what's happening underneath. And I think that's that's where this club engineering piece comes in. Um, and what my team is doing is really focused on How do we abstract away that kind of lower level infrastructure and scalability pieces and allow the application developers to develop this application that is providing business value in a transparent and seamless way and in elastic way such that we can scale up and down we can. We have the ability, obviously, to replicate both within regions and clouds, but also across different clouds. So from a business resiliency and and up time point of view. That's that's something that's been really important. Um, and I think also how do we security is? Becoming is obviously a huge, huge importance, given the classifications type of day that people are putting within our platform. So how are we able Thio ensure that there is a pipeline where developers have reviews and commits of any kind of changes going into the system and their arm's length away, and could be fully audited for various clients and regular regulatory needs? And that's something that kind of this suffer engineering cloud engineering concept has really helped develop and allowed us Thio obviously be successful with various different types of industries. >>Joe, we're almost out of time. I wonder if you could bring us home. I mean, some of the things Justin was talking about I mean, I definitely see a lot of potential disruption coming from the world of developers. Uh, he was talking. He was talking about consumption models different than many of the SAS pricing models. And how do you How do you see it? Developers air kind of the really the new source of innovation. Your final thoughts. >>Yeah. I think we're democratizing access to the cloud for everybody. I think you know it's not just about developers, but it's It's really all engineers of all backgrounds, its developers, its infrastructure engineers, its operations engineers, its security engineers. You know, Justin's mentioning compliance and security. These air really critical elements of how we deliver software into the cloud. So I think you know what you're going to see is you're gonna see a lot of new, compelling experiences built thanks to cloud capabilities. You know, the fact that you've got a I and M l and all these infinitely scalable data services like snowflake and, you know, just an arm's length away that you can use as building blocks in your applications. You know, application developers love that. You know, if we can just empower them to run fast, they will run fast, and we'll build great applications. And infrastructure teams and security engineers will be central to enabling that that new future. I think you also see that you know infrastructure and cloud services will become accessible to an entirely new audience. You know, kids graduating from college, they understand Java script. They understand python now they can really just harness the cloud to build amazing new experiences. So I think we're still, you know, still early days on the transition to the cloud. I know where many years on the journey, but we've got many, many years, you know, in our future. And it's very exciting. >>Well, thank you, guys, Joe and Justin. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on your respective success. I know is Joe said you got a lot more work to do, but I really appreciate you coming on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you. You're >>welcome. All right, so we're here covering reinvent 2020. The virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. Were unpacking the cloud and looking to the future. You're watching the cube?

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios today on this kind of ongoing leadership conversation, reaching out to the community during these crazy times, we're two months into the COVID crisis, and we're excited to have two of our favorite guests, one is a frequent guest, Greg Sands, he's the founder and managing partner of Costanoa Ventures, Greg, great to see you. And he brought along Martina Lauchengo, also from Costanoa, Martina, great to see you, is this, I think your first time on theCUBE, right? >> This is my first time, nice to be on, Jeff. >> Great, and Greg, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here. >> So let's get into it, I mean, part of this conversation came from a lot of efforts that you guys are putting into really getting information out to the community, and I think if there's a silver lining and there's a couple here and there, that have come from this, is that everyone is really trying to help each other out. So you've come up with something you call virtual office hours. What is that all about, is that new, or is that just kind of a greater emphasis now that most people are working from home? >> Well, we've also always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times, how to graph, go to market, both sales and marketing onto what are often product-led and founder-led companies, and in a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly, and to set up a venue where we can interact with the broader startup community, and hopefully in the process of doing that, we're useful. >> I just saw a quote I think today or yesterday, from Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford, and it was "I didn't have the playbook for the global pandemic," in terms of preparation and being able to pull something off the shelf to help work through this, so as we've gone through mid-March, just this immediate, full stop, unanticipated light switch moment, now we're two months in, what are the specific actions you've been giving to your portfolio companies, and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days? >> Well I'll take a first stab, and Martina, feel free to jump in if you've got additional thoughts, I think the first piece, going back, six, seven, eight weeks, was we all had that hair on fire moment, where you just have to understand where you are. And so I think that sense of situational awareness, and how does it affect your customers and your market, and figure out if the basics of the business, including revenue rate and what's guaranteed and what's not and expense base and planned growth trajectory are any of those foundational elements what you thought they were going to be, and readjust them, and re-plan, so almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles, trying to understand where we are. And I think also trying to do that with a sense of authenticity and transparency and humanity, 'cause you're dealing with a company, and people's careers and people's jobs. So now I think we're more at the place where we understand the foundation, and you can more reasonably plan for the future. >> Yeah, I'd say I think what I've observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock, and that's also true for all of the customers that they're trying to reach out to, and the big adjustment is, what does our new normal look like? Jeff, before we started we were talking about how everyone has moved digital and virtual, so people did that initially because they had no choice, but now they're looking at the data they've been collecting saying "Gosh, should this mean that we should no longer do "physical events because we're having five or 10x "the amount of registration that we did before." Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising, and so everyone's looking at this moment, and saying "How should be adjust our new normal, "even post-COVID era, and do things differently "as a result of what we're learning from this time "where we have to be constrained in what we--" >> Right, so Greg, you had an interesting quote in an article recently talking about the harder challenge is going to be for people that are on this blitz scaling run, and you've talked about there's kind of two paths, there's growth at all costs, and then there's growth within a reasonable plan, clearly, if you were growth at all costs, and you were Uber or Lyft or one of these types of operations where your revenue just got turned practically off, really significant challenge, so as you look at it from an investor point of view, and what is a good rate of growth, what is the way to build a company versus this hellbent hair on fire, grab global market share at absolutely no, just spend spend spend spend spend? >> Yeah, and so of course this is independent of the pandemic, I think it's the case that there was this orientation towards blitz scaling, towards we're going to grow as fast as we can, and one of the things, if you just think about a biological metaphor, growth is expensive, growth takes a ton of capital, a ton of hiring, a ton of on-ramping, and the like, and you do all of that at very rapid speeds and you tend to cut corners, have people poorly trained, drop balls on the floor and the like, so I think the, generally speaking, our experience is that our portfolio companies, partly due to our guidance, partly 'cause we've selected each other, have been, look, we've got some very fast growers, we've got companies like Alation that have been here a lot, that have created brand new categories, but they've done it with bounce, and they've done it efficiently, and that's always what we preach, it's always what we've believed in, and I think our companies are in much better shape as a result. Martina and I both grew up as young athletes, and one of the things that you learn as an athlete is you got to be balanced, you don't know if your next step is going to have to be forward, back, left or right, and you've got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention, to figure out where you ought to go, and if you're all in one direction, you can only go forward. And when the environment changes, you're toast. >> Yeah, it's really wild to see, 'cause who ever plans for literally a binary turnoff of revenue stream, and we're seeing it in hotels and in obviously conferences and airlines and a whole bunch of industries, so it's pretty challenging. But for a lot of people, business still goes on, and Martina I want to jump into it with you, 'cause you've been a marketer in tech for a long time, but man oh man, the conference itself, the physical events, whether it be a big giant one like AWS re:Invent which had I don't know, 50,000 people, it's going to outgrow Vegas, to smaller events, those are no longer an option, yet people are still delivering products, they still have messaging to get out, they still want to touch their community. How are you kind of looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? >> So I'll start with the broader view, I'd say in general, Dreamforce is canceled, AWS, I mean all these things have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift, and I think one thing that they are all seeing is, they are getting a lot more registration, they're getting a lot more in engagement, this happened at Atlassian where, they rapidly made the shift to virtual, and what they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events, that they had a much bigger social bump, because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously, and it also became this virtuous loop, where more and more people were talking, it was creating this intrigue, where people wanted to participate and see what was happening. So, I think people are looking at that and saying "Well how does that affect our business, "and how does that increased potential "for evangelism actually positively convert towards "a future customer, or more people talking about us "in a positive way?" So this is where they're looking at what they've put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that and I'd say that's the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies is, look at what the data is telling you, and trying to extract what your lessons are about this to what your ongoing normal should be from a marketing perspective. >> Yeah, it's such a good tip, there was so much focus at the beginning of this about what you cannot do in digital, you can't have the hall room chat or you can't have the water cooler chat, but on the other hand there's so many things you can do in digital that you can't do in the physical. And by separating content generation versus content publishing, if you will, and then content consumption, and those no longer have to happen at the same one hour window where there's an available conference room for a breakout session at the Sands on Tuesday at six, that I can't see 'cause I want to see somebody else's conference Tuesday, I mean there's so many things that you can do, and kind of just democratization of the access to the conference, if you don't have the means, the time, or just the ability to get on a plane and fly to Vegas or to New York or San Francisco, so there's a lot of stuff you can do in digital that's different, it's just not the same as the physical space, what are some of the other things that you're finding that are kind of unique and novel and actually really great? >> Well, one thing that you talked about is it relates to events, it's not just the attendees being there, it's also the talent. A lot of times you would want talent, but they're not available because they have a conflict or they can't accommodate that travel, a guy participating in a conference that's based out of London, and they are having people that it doesn't matter what time zone you're in, because they're like "Oh, you can prerecord it, "you can do it live if you choose," and so there's a flexibility that just wasn't there before, certainly as it relates to events. But in terms of novel stuff, people are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past, so one company in our portfolio used to charge for their certifications, and now they've made it free and they've had over 1000 signups in the last couple of weeks, and so that was a small program that they ran and it's now the single largest generator of new leads for them, because they reexamined it and said "Well what assets do we have "and how can we use them differently?" And so I'd say it's not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven't tried before, but they're examining the quiver of assets they have at their disposal and they're saying "Well how can we deploy them differently?" And they see the two things that are really bubbling up are you just have to do things in an excellent way, number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way. >> Right, right. And Greg, I want to go back to you, go ahead. >> Jeff, if I can add two things, I think there are some things that it's worth noting that digital is uniquely good at. So one of which is inferring intent, which you don't necessarily get in the context of conferences, and the second is that as companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets, one of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first party data, their own data about their own customers and their own interactions, with third party data which includes that intent data, and when you combine those together in a business to business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things, and many companies have been under-optimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face to face marketing activities. >> Well, and to me there's so many things, I mean conferences were designed in an age where there was no telephone, and you sent letters, and the speed of communication was weeks, and so that's how you had to get people together, but today, 2020, when information flows, it seems so waterfall to me to kind of squeeze everything in, especially for a big company, into three days in Las Vegas, in terms of all your product announcements, all your partner announcements, all these things, it seems completely against the trend of more of a DevOps world, which is if product group A is ready to roll, why do they have to wait to that date, and wait for product B and everyone else, not to mention that if you're some esoteric cool thing that gets lost in the sea of product announcements and press releases and events, does it really make sense? What we're seeing is there's certainly an opportunity for what's called a rally moment, whether that's a keynote or introducing a new CEO, or we want to have this moment where we have singular focus, but as soon as that's open, let the content be free, let people find what they want, when they want, and to your point Martina, if people want to self-organize, you can actually have almost infinite long tail sessions, if you give people a platform in which to organize, versus being this one way conduit of information which is the old way of working, but not really the new way in which we find, consume, and learn about things in 2020, it just seems so antiquated when we actually take a step back and think of how do we get our information today, and it's not wrapped up in one big giant splash moment. >> Well Jeff, I want to pull on a thread a little bit that you just brought up, which is that the old way of doing things, and I'd say old average, just there's no space for it right now, so I'm going to read through five things that were in my inbox this morning that went into the auto-delete pile, which is what everyone does every morning. "Tomorrow's webinar," "Only three days left, "have you registered yet?" "This week in review." So those were the bad ones that went to the automatic delete pile, that's the average run of the mill stuff that all of us get every day, and I hope everyone that's listening to this stops sending them. And here's the ones that stood out, "Why every startup CEO needs a chief of staff," so something that was specific, it told me more concretely why I should engage with what was being sent to me, it didn't tell me if it was an article or webinar, but it engaged me with content, and if you just look at Netflix as a platform, as an example of how they're very very content-forward, and they're trying to find what specifically is going to get you engaged, all the way down to the thumbnail level, that's what we are needing to do as marketers, where we're taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of our customers, where they are, and trying to create genuine connection with whatever it is we're trying to bring to them. >> With data, right, and you can AB type and all the stuff that Netflix does, it's so funny to me, the answers are all around us, we're just not looking in the right place, but I want to shift gears a little bit for marketing and talk about leadership, we've been doing a lot of these around leadership, 'cause leadership is so important. And really the uncertainty, more even the tough times, I think it's the uncertainty that really challenges people, and you mentioned something Greg, earlier, about really the transparency, and I think there's so much to be learned in terms of being human in your leadership, showing vulnerability, admitting, I'm a little scared too, I don't know what's happening, no one has been through this type of inexperience before, so from just a leadership perspective, again, what are you sharing with your portfolio companies, how are you advising people who are in this position, because they're probably nervous and uncomfortable as well, to lead these teams and to help them through this time of uncertainty. >> Well, it's an amazing and uncertain time, and frankly everybody is challenged by it, nobody's been through it before, even those of us that went through 2008 and 2000 and 2001, the ecommerce blowup in 9/11, this is different, it has a different cause and a different set of effects. I know in my case I spent the weekend rereading Jerry Collona's book, "Reboot," which talks about leading from the heart, and leading with transparency, and leading with authenticity, and what we've been trying to do in working with our founders is one, listen, and be there, and be a support, and recognize that we don't know all the answers either, and so we're in it together. Second is to try to give them the confidence and the room to do that in leading within their teams, and then the third is to focus on a couple of things that I think are particularly important, which is as I said before, situational awareness, you got to understand where you are, and the second is focus. So one of the things that everybody is finding, and we find it true with people's customers, too, hey, we were going to do five things, now we're going to do two. So companies have got to narrow the scope, they got to figure out how to be in the top two for their customers that have to get done. And so you got to do that from a strategic and execution perspective, you got to lead your team to do it, and in order to rally around it, people have to understand the facts, they have to trust you. And they have to know that your heart's in it. >> Yeah, it's almost interesting, the fact that everyone is separated, we have to communicate more, we have to communicate more frequently and we had Darren on from GitLab talking about the variety of types of communications beyond just your standard staff meeting and project updates to things, like social things and happy hours and these things, so it almost feels like because we're forced into scheduled communication, it's almost happening more frequently because you have to make sure it does, then maybe some of the ad hoc stuff that might happen in the hallways are on a more informal basis. You find that happening, are people really stepping up the scale in which they're making sure they're touching base with their team members? >> I'm definitely seeing that throughout our portfolio, so people are doing things like scheduled game nights that would've been more ad hoc in the past, or specifically scheduling water cooler time, or one of our companies has been doing specific meetings and get-togethers of parents, how do you maintain your full time job and actually coparent or figure it out while your kids are doing whatever it is that they need to and being a part of home, and working at home, and so they've definitely scheduled more, but it's really been about acknowledging the whole self that is part of this unique time, and that everybody's in the same boat, I think that is something that is really unique about this is that it is a global phenomenon, and so it's not sort of like oh, this country or this state or this industry is facing this, all of us are facing this, and so to your point, Jeff, about what does it mean to be human and to connect, it is a time in which we are uniquely capable of connecting with one another, and we all have the same way to do it, I meet a bunch of new people every week, and now we all start off actually seeing each other's homes. Saying "Oh, what is that, what book are you reading?" And so it's almost an invitation to have a more personal connection and I've definitely found despite the fact that we're doing all these meetings virtually, I actually feel more connected to a lot of people than I would have normally. >> Law of unintended consequences, you just never know. So last topic to shift gears before I let you go, we're still in the business of investing, and as I'm sure you're seeing or starting to see, now that the shock and awe's kind of over, and people are starting to define new opportunities, basically, to reassemble assets, to reassemble delivery methodologies, to reassemble business plans, and I wonder, as you look forward now to your next wave of investments, assuming everything's medium settled with the current portfolio, how is your investment thesis changing a little bit, what are you seeing in kind of a rejiggering of assets and business models that are going to take advantage of this new normal, 'cause sure enough, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people in garages right now that are building those companies based on this new normal that are going to be leaders down the road. What are you thinking of, how are you thinking about what's going to happen later this year, and in 2021 and beyond? >> So, we absolutely are continuing to invest, and so for quick context, we're seed and A up and down the stack of enterprise technology, so think of it as applied AI and the infrastructure that supports it, much of which is data and machine learning infrastructure, but also cybersecurity and DevOps, and I think for us, one of the things that showed up right away was this idea of, we're all going to work in more distributed fashion. And I think many versions of that were "Oh, we've got a new work from home app," or the like, and we haven't actually found that those are the difference makers, what we think is that these business processes that tie together application logic and data and analytics and a collaboration layer, like in Alation, so that you can collaborate on your data, you can collaborate while you're performing an absolutely critical business function, and what used to be tribal knowledge that was passed around in the halls is embedded in software, and cataloged. And so we're seeing lots of opportunities to do that, both in workflow context and in the context of data scientists and data engineers working on the data stack and developers in and around the DevOps ecosystem, that we think are really interesting and acknowledge the fact that you can't assume that all the people working on this application are sitting in the same building, and get to talk around the water cooler. So they talk about it in the application. >> I just want to add a little something to what Greg said in terms of the things that we're seeing, really the importance of data right now, people are trying to refactor all of our operating plans, they're trying to say "What is this actually doing to our demand," and so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been, and being able to do that wherever it exists, if it's frontline, inside of a dashboard, if it's cleaning up stuff that's coming out of a data lake, people are investing in that infrastructure right now because they have the capacity to, so that's a place where we've seen I'd say probably the least amount of change, and then the other thing that this has revealed are gaps in the technology infrastructure that wasn't available, so for example supply chain, being able to identify all the elements of the mask, or the ventilator supply chain. Those systems were massively disconnected and extremely manual, and so people are looking at that saying there are some gaps that still need to be closed in a big way with infrastructure and technology, and those are some areas that we're seeing very interesting and illuminated as a result of this time. >> Yeah, I mean to certainly, what we've been talking about really is just a light switch moment, in terms of digital transformation and whether that is working from home, which is probably the top focus for a lot of people in the short term, or whether that's in education, suddenly everyone from kindergarten teachers to professors at Stanford had to suddenly learn to teach online with absolutely no preparation, no time to think about it, and then up into the data layer as well, because it's just this ongoing democratization and now with distributed teams, you are forced now to make that data available to them, really as a process as much as an objective to get it into hands to do more things, so certainly a digital transformation accelerant, like nobody expected, there's no more time to prepare and plan, it's ready set go, now. So we see it over and over again. Well thank you so much for coming on, thank you for sharing the information, just kind of last point, one of the things that I think is so interesting about today's time is it used to be the power was held by the people that had the information. And really what we've seen, and what you guys support is now the information is infinite and it's everywhere, and you should be able to find it. Now it's more about who shares the information, who's a trusted source to filter, to find the right information, and who can I go to who I know's going to give me stuff that's relevant for me, and I think you guys have really shown time and time again that in sharing information and helping others to do better, you get this multiplier effect that you wouldn't get if you're just worrying about yourself, and I think it's such a modern way to think about empowering people, and as you said, it even makes you more powerful and more successful, so really a very different way than it used to be in terms of everybody kind of holding the information, and who had the keys, had the information, that's completely turned up on the side of it's head. >> That is absolutely right, and we're thrilled to be here talking about it with you today, thanks for your continued support of the community and trying to help good people get the word out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> Thanks for doing exactly what you're talking about, which is getting the right information out to people so they can be better. >> All right, well Greg, Martina, stay safe, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time we'll see you in person. You're watching theCUBE Conversation, Jeff Frick here in Palo Alto studio, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio today, the COVID thing is continuing to go, and one of the huge impacts, right, is obviously in the conference business, our world. Those things have all been canceled or made virtual, and everyone's still trying to figure out, what does a virtual event look like, what are the characteristics of it, and we're really excited to have one of our favorite CUBE alumni, guest host extraordinaire, Keith Townsend. You know him as the CTO advisor joining us, Keith jumped in with both feet, right when this thing went down, and said "I'm going to have my own CTO Advisor "virtual conference," so first off, Keith, I miss you, great to see you, we haven't run into each other at the Sands in an awfully long time, so great to see you, how are you doing? >> Good to see you, if it's only virtual, good to see you too, Jeff. >> So tell us about your decision to jump in with both feet, and go ahead and test the waters on this virtual conference concept. >> So I talked about this a little bit on a random, just a YouTube update, but roughly 30, 35% of my revenue comes from in-person events. And plus my brand, The CTO Advisor, is tied to people seeing me on theCUBE, seeing me at the shows, creating the content, kind of on the ground, guerrilla style, kind of like how John started out early on. So we needed a practical solution for most things, one, we feed off the energy of the community, so we need to be on the ground as much as possible, so that we can create content and get you guys the stories and the data that you need to make purchasing decisions, and two, we needed the practical problem of solving our own revenue problems, so we jumped in, head in, to say "Let's do a virtual event." I don't know if I would've done it if I wasn't as naive as I was back then, but we jumped in. >> So before we jump into the processes, make sure, give us a full-on plug, when is it, where should people go, registration I assume is still open, want to just get that out there for the folks. >> So even if you see this after registration closes, quote unquote closes, it's April 21st, >> 10: 30 AM central to 3:30 PM central, that's US time. You can register at CTOAdvisorVirtualConference.com. >> Excellent, so let's talk about some of the interesting things about virtual. One of the things as you said in a physical event, you've got people, you've got time and space and geography that we all come together in that space, and there's a lot of advantages to everybody being at the same place at the same time. A virtual event, almost by definition, is now you've broken up the segments of content capture, if you will, and creation, which can or cannot be on that date. The actual display, or the publishing of that content, if you will, and then the consumption of that content, which may or may not happen on the 21st. How have you worked with this expanded palette, if you will, to be able to work in an asynchronous world, and how are you finding it in terms of actually day to day execution? >> So you guys have done plenty of remote content at this point. When you're in theCUBE studio, you have commercial internet, it's fairly reliable when you're on premises, maybe a little bit less reliable from the sense that it's conference-centered, but it's still enterprise class internet access, so you can do real-time video on theCUBE fine. We can go to Cube.tv, Cube.net, and see what you guys are doing real-time, and it's pretty much without blip. In the virtual conference world, what we're dealing with where I'm coming in, remote to you, while my video and audio looks fine now, it may blip. So we embrace two things. We embrace the fact that this is a virtual event, so in a background, you'll see that we're in Keith Townsend's basement, the other thing that you'll see is that we won't produce live content, because there's not much value in it being live, if I can't interact with you. One of the great things about theCUBE, is that it's live, but there's this element that people are on the ground, they're watching it live, they're interacting with it live, we're tweeting about it, so how do you reproduce, if not that exact feeling of it being live and you're being part of it, but the conversation around the content, and that's what we focused on, creating high quality video content, that you can consume, kind of as a watch party, so on Twitter, in the platform that we're using, we're having conversations real-time, so that you can enjoy the community, and the speakers who are presenting, you can interact with them because they're not presenting real-time, they're in the chat room, they're on Twitter, they're running as their session is running, and they're able to interact with you, so we've embraced the medium, and then after the fact of course we can do all kinds of things to run asynchronous content after the fact, 'cause the majority of people will watch it after the video's done. >> All right, and I'm just curious, how many sessions are you going to have, approximately? >> So we have I think 21 sessions, in a five hour period, so we're running three separate tracks, two super techy, geeky tracks, then a sponsored track is kind of by itself, and we're not expecting everyone to consume it all at one time. >> Right, you know it's just so interesting to me, talking about your tracks. If you were to go rent a venue, that had the capacity to run 21 tracks over five hours, it'd be a pretty decent-sized venue, it'd be expensive, and then you would have to pick your sessions and your tracks based on the limitations of the budget that you had and the window that you had of rooms that you could put these people in, and who could do it now, when, there, the other thing, and so it's really interesting that now this opens up the amount of sessions, is really a function of what you can manage, or what the community can kind of self-organize, you're not really limited by how many rooms are in the Sands Convention Center, and the other thing that you brought up, which I think people completely miss is that if the content is recorded in advance and puts in the can, to your point, the presenter can actually participate in the conversation while the session is happening, which they can't do in a physical event, because they're actually presenting, so, we had a guy in the other day, Ben Nelson, he talked about a car is not a mechanical horse, it's not the same, digital's not the same as physical, and there are some things that aren't as cool, but there's a whole lot of things that you can do in the digital space that you can't do in the physical space. >> Yeah, a lot of my presenters were kind of put off by the idea of, "Wait, hold on, I'm not going to present live? "How will I interact with webinars now?" And I think this is the other end of the spectrum, Jeff, I think you guys have probably found this too, it's not a in-person event, and it's also not a webinar, so don't treat it as a webinar. You don't have to have these canned, phony questions that some people have behind the scenes, it is a real, authentic thing. Oddly enough, I discovered this as part of helping my church put on their worship service. I was watching the service, I'll look off the screen a little bit to the left, I was watching the service, and the minister's delivering his sermon, and in the Zoom meeting, there he is, playing with his little two year old daughter, while he's giving the talk, and I just opened chat at him, and next thing I know there's an explosion of conversation around just life and the topic at hand, so it is a really unique experience. >> Yeah, I think that's a really important point, it's not only what is a digital event, but what is it not, and it can't be a webinar, and when we were first going through this kind of shake-up, and we were really trying to identify some of those things, and we specifically did not want a digital event to be a webinar, 'cause what's a webinar, it's generally a one way communication of information for the vast majority of the session that you're sitting there, and they only open it up to Q&A at the very end, and it's only a moderated Q&A that very few people get a chance to get their question in, and you don't know how they're picking, and it only goes to the hosts, so, really having an open, live engagement around an engaged group of people, with a piece of content as kind of the coalescing of those people, really, it's not a webinar, it's a very different kind of experience, and sounds like you're really embracing that. >> Yeah, it'll never replace a live event, live has, again we talked about the energy, the, people are like "Do you really "want to smell the Sands, Keith?" You know what, it's all part of the energy, it's instant reminders to "Oh, I remember when I interviewed Pat Gelsinger here," and you have these instant cues that we as humans love, we don't get that, but I think it is something that's going to be with us to stay and it'll augment, I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about how being able to have this capability will augment theCUBE once we return to physical events. >> Yeah, I mean I think this behavior that we're now been forced to engage in, in terms of increased working from home, and kind of increased use of videoconferencing, and that is a different communication mode, I think those behaviors are going to stick quite a bit, actually, I think if you look at what a conference is, there's a couple different tracks, as you said, there's the expression going around, kind of the rally moment, right, the keynote, we want, we have a strong message, the CEO wants to get something out, and I think that's of tremendous value, but then you look at all the breakout sessions and the information flow and the community engagement, those quite frankly can be done online much more efficiently and with much less cost, so will the new conference be kind of this, the celebration and basically a customer appreciation event, they want to have a party, but really that, I don't think it will be quite the information flow, 'cause why should product group A wait until the conference date, if they're ready to release their information, and wait for product group B or C or D, so this kind of forced aggregation of the communication into this very small window of three days in Vegas, I don't think it makes any sense, you know, it's Waterfall versus DevOps, and if this group's got stuff and they're ready to go, again, why hold the information back, it really doesn't make sense, and decouple the customer celebration, the rally moment, if you will, and the education, they don't necessarily have to be this contiguous big unit for three days in Vegas. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to first quarter 2021, usually January, February, first half of March, really slow news channel product teams release stuff and they really want some big stage to release it, I think this will really make the dissemination of information coming from product teams super interesting as folks like theCUBE, The CTO Advisor, we're able to put on independent events virtually that have a sense of gravitas to it, that our partners will come and embrace. >> Yeah, the other thing, Keith, and I wonder, as you've been collecting your content for your show next week is that, the pressure on the quality of the content has escalated dramatically, right? If you're stuck in a huge conference hall, surrounded by 10,000 people, in the middle of a keynote that's not that exciting, it's kind of hard to get up and walk out. But if you're sitting at your desk with the entire world an alt-tab away, not to mention pesky things like email and Slack and everything else that we have as a distraction, it's really going to come in on the content provider and the engaged community to deliver, or else you're going to lose the audience, and I think it's going to be really interesting, people that overly have relied on the 100 foot video screen and the electronic violin music in the morning, and some of these tips and tricks, aren't going to carry the weight, because if it's just you sitting in front of a screen and you got to deliver the message, it's got to be crisp, it's got to be powerful, and it's got to be engaging, or people are just going to step away. >> And more importantly, how do you bring people back? So, you know how, when I take a break at a conference, I'm kind of captured. Eventually I'm going to walk back to the conference center, I might go back out to take a call, et cetera, but getting people to come back, even if the content has been awesome and engaging and great, how do you get 'em to come back, they don't have to come back that day, or even real time, but they have to come back to the portal, so we're working on kind of the next 30 days after the event, this is the thing that's really funny about putting on a virtual event, there's kind of the exhale after the day of the event, a virtual event, you know what, you've got a third of your audience that first day, a third of the audience the next week, and then the rest of the audience creeps in over the next three or four weeks, and how do you engage them, how do you get them to come back, and ultimately consume your content and your message? It's something that I haven't, I don't know if I've cracked the formula for it yet, but it is going to be a very interesting challenge. >> Yeah, but I think we have, right, in the way, how do you consume video today, how do you find information, right, you go to YouTube or to Google and you search, right, and right now the biggest phenom in pop media is the Tiger King, right, so when do people watch the Tiger King, how do they hear about the Tiger King, when do they actually sit down and watch it, has nothing to do with when you watch it unless we decide to trade messages, I say "Hey, Keith, have you seen the new episode?" So when you look at consumption patterns, to me it's really interesting, it's kind of bifurcated, you either binge watch, and just really get into something that you're into, and you just go go go for hours and hours and hours, or you're getting snippets, you're getting little quick hits, quick hits, quick hits, and I think it's this kind of ugly middle, where you don't have enough content or richness or engagement to have people hang, but you're a little bit longer than a quick hit just to get your message out, and I think it's really going to kind of bifurcate, and the beauty of digital is you can consume it in lots of different ways, and piece parts, and you don't have to necessarily kind of sit through kind of a straight row consumption as a captive audience, I think the opportunity's really really good, if the content is up to snuff, properly tagged, search terms, all those types of things of course as well. >> So yeah, John talks about the value of community a lot, and one of our co-hosts on theCUBE, and also a CUBE alum is Corey Quinn, and he does a really great job of this with curating content after it's been consumed live. He'll to his audience say "You know what, I'm going to live tweet this session "from three months ago," and that refreshes the conversation, it's not about when the content was created, it's about the conversation, as long as it's relevant, and finding mediums to help amplify that message. >> Yeah, I think it's just a great opportunity, you know, we used to do some work with Live Nation in another lifetime, right, and Live Nation around concerts, they had that particular event when you go to the show, and a lot of their efforts on the marketing side were what they call extending the glow, right, extending the glow after, and also kind of building the excitement before, and moving that window of that event to more than just the night that the show played, and I think we've got the same opportunity here, that's why again if you get good quality content, it's not speeds and feeds, but it's evergreen themes that have legs, you can go back to that well and you can stir that thing up, and you can get it back out there again, and then again hopefully people stumble upon it, whether it's via community or whatever. The other thing I think that's really interesting is you talked about community, and you talked about QuinnyPig, @QuinnyPig I think is his Twitter handle, is this whole idea of collaboration, and I think that's another thing that we can take from the internet, I know you do a lot of that, so working with other influencers if you will, or other people in the communities, and introducing each other's community to one another, I think it's a really big part of what makes a lot of the big YouTubers famous is that they do things together and they kind of cross-pollinate their communities, and if there's some overlap there then they both have kind of a win-win, and again I think in digital, where you don't have destruction, you don't have single use, you can use stuff more than once, it really opens up this opportunity for much more win-win, let's work together, and build community together, cross leverage, versus it's either yours or mine, and it's really more of a competitive thing. >> And I've been collaborating a lot with some of my European peers, and you bring up a really interesting concept. Our friends at VMware's going to be putting on VMworld in the next few months, and they usually had a US conference and a European conference, were both pretty sizable conferences. It's basically going to run concurrently as one conference. So if it's going to run as one conference, why do I have to limit the live experience to the US timezone? Why can't I cater this, and why is it just a fixed hour, I don't know if it will be, but it shouldn't just be a fixed hour event, it's going to be a all-out hour event that's going to happen across Asia, Europe, and the US, and tailoring the content to each continent and time zone, and cross-pollinating, so that content that I would not have typically have gotten at the US event, or in the Europe event, I can now get that experience and cross-cultural flavor as a natural part of digital, so there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot to miss about in-person events, but I think there's opportunities that are just massively untapped. >> Yeah, yeah, and I'm just going to get one more concept, which I don't think is getting enough action, get your take on it, but if you think of the value to the company, let's just stick with VMware for a minute, we're great fans of Pat and Sanjay, there is a information transfer when Pat gets up and does his keynote as from one to many tens of thousands, and there's value there, and again we talked about this rallying moment, but think of turning that on its head, which is really what digital provides, now there's an opportunity for Pat and Sanjay and the entire VMware senior team and junior team and product managers to now flip that information flow. So if you think of the user experience from the attendees' point of view, is it better for Sanjay to talk to 10,000 people in an audience, or would Sanjay rather hear from 10,000 people, and have that flow of information going back in? So if you think of it as a community event versus a one way communication of here's our exciting news, I think the value to the sponsor goes up dramatically, 'cause there's so much institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge and experience within all those people that are just sitting passively listening to that keynote. If this is a way to better suck that information back into the company, I don't think they'll ever go back to the other way it was. >> Yeah, two points, two data points on that. One, again, from the worship side of the house, at our Easter service, our church enabled every member who cared to to kind of do a five, eight second "Hey, this is the Townsend family, "happy Easter," and then 15 minutes before the live church service started, they just ran a video of family after family after family that I recognize, saying "Hi, happy Easter," so you have that moment, and how do you capture that online? VMware's social media team already does this well, they amplify end user content, there was a guy that did a video on how to install VMware Cloud Foundation in three hours, went viral. You have these opportunities, again, to hear from sources and have conversations that's really not practical from a typical conference perspective. I think I heard it best the other day, one of my attendees and presenters said "You know what, Keith, the virtual conference "is such a democratizing event because "it enables me, whether I could not afford "to go to a conference before, "or I couldn't travel, or whatever reasons "I could not attend a conference before," the virtual conference gives opportunities for collaborations that could not have taken place otherwise. >> Yeah, it's great, so again, Keith, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your thoughts, and again, for everybody, April 21st 2020, next week, >> 10: 30 AM central time, join the CTO virtual conference. Keith, always great to catch up, man. >> You too, Jeff, thanks a lot. >> All right, take care. He's Keith, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco It's theCUBE. Covering RSA Conference 2020, San Francisco. Brought to you by Silicon Angled Media >> Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at RSA Conference 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE We're on the floor getting all the data, sharing it with you here, Cube coverage. Got the best new generation shift happening as cloud computing goes to the whole other level. Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud changing the game. You're seeing the companies transition from an on-premises to cloud architecture. This is forcing all the companies to change. So a new generation of security is here and we've got a great guest, so a hot start-up. Masha Sedova, co-founder of Elevate Security. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me, John. >> So the next generation in what will be a multi-generational security paradigm, is kind of happening right now with the beginning of, we're seeing the transition, Palo Alto Networks announced earnings yesterday down 13% after hours because of the shift to the cloud. Now I think they're going to do well, they're well positioned, but it highlights this next generation security. You guys are a hot start-up, Elevate Security. What is the sea change? What is going on with security? What is this next generation paradigm about? >> Yeah, so it's interesting that you talk about this as next generation. In some ways, I see this as a two-prong move between, yes, we're moving more into the cloud but we're also going back to our roots. We're figuring out how to do asset management right, we're figuring out how to do patching right, and for the first time, we're figuring how to do the human element right. And that's what where we come in. >> You know, the disruption of these new shifts, it also kind of hits like this, the old expression, 'same wine, new bottle', all this, but it's a data problem. Security has always been a data problem, and we've seen some learnings around data. Visualization, wrangling, there's a lot of best practices around there. You guys are trying to change the security paradigm by incorporating a data-centric view with changing the behavior of the humans and the machines and kind of making it easier to manage. Could you share what you guys are doing? What's the vision for Elevate? >> Yeah, so we believe and we've seen, from our experience being practitioners, you can't change what you can't measure. If you don't have visibility, you don't know where you're going. And that's probably been one of the biggest pain-point in the security awareness space traditionally. We just roll out training and hope it works. And it doesn't, which is why human error is a huge source of our breaches. But we keep rolling out the same one-size fits all approach without wanting to measure or, being able to. So, we've decided to turn the problem on its head and we use existing data sets that most organizations who have a baseline level of maturity already have in place. Your end point protections, your DLP solutions, your proxies, your email security gateways and using that to understand what your employees are doing on the network to see if user generated incidents are getting better over time or getting worse. And using that as the instrumentation and the level of visibility into understanding how you should be orchestrating your program in this space. >> You know, that's a great point. I was just having a conversation last night at one of the cocktail parties here around RSA and we were debating on, we talk about the kind of breaches, you mentioned breaches, well there's the pure breach where I'm going to attack and penetrate the well fortified network. But then there's just human error, an S3 bucket laying open or some configuration problem. I guess it's not really a breach, it's kind of an open door so the kind of notion of a breach is multifold. How do you see that, because again, human error, insider threats or human error, these are enabling the hackers. >> Yeah >> This is not new. >> Yeah. >> How bad is the problem? >> It depends on what report you read. The biggest number I've seen so far is something like 95% of breaches have human error. But I honestly, I couldn't tell you what the 5% that don't include it because if you go far enough back, it's because a patch wasn't applied and there is a human being involved there because there is vulnerability in code, that's probably a secure coding practice when you're a development organization. Maybe it's a process that wasn't followed or even created in the first place. There's a human being at the core of every one of these breaches and, it needs to be addressed as holistically as our technologies and our processes right now in the space. >> The evolution of human intelligence augmented by machines will certainly help. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean, I've got to ask you, obviously you're well-funded. Costanova Ventures well known in the enterprise space, Greg Sands and the team there, really strong, but you guys entered the market, why? I mean you guys, you and your founder both at Salesforce.com. Salesforce gurus doing a lot of work there. Obviously you've seen the large scale, first wave of the cloud. >> Yeah >> Why do the start-up? What was the problem statement you guys were going after? >> So, my co-founder and I both came from the world of being practitioners and we saw how limited the space was and actually changing human behavior, I was given some animated PowerPoints, said use this to keep the Russians out of your network, which is a practical joke unless your job is on the line, so I took a huge step back and I said, there are other fields that have figured this out. Behavioral science being one of them, they use positive reinforcement, gamification, marketing and advertisements have figured out how to engage the human element, just look around the RSA floor, and there's so many learnings of how we make decisions as human beings that can be applied into changing people's behaviors in security. So that's what we did. >> And what was the behavior you're trying to change? >> Yeah, so the top one's always that our attackers are getting into organizations, so, reducing phishing click-throughs an obvious one, increasing reporting rates, reducing malware infection rates, improving sensitive data handling, all of which have ties back to, as I was mentioning earlier, security data sources. So, we get to map those and use that data to then drive behavior change that's rooted in concepts like social proof, how are you doing compared to your peers? We make dinner decisions on that and Amazon buying decisions on that, why not influence security like that? >> So building some intelligence into the system, is there a particular market you're targeting? I mean, here people like to talk in segments, is there a certain market that you guys are targeting? >> Yeah, so the amazing thing about this is, and probably no surprise, the human element is a ubiquitous problem. We are in over a dozen different industries and we've seen this approach work across all of those industries because human beings make the same mistakes, no matter what kind of company they're in. We really work well with larger enterprises. We work well with larger enterprises because they tend to have the data sets that really provides insights into human behavior. >> And what's the business model you guys envision happening with your service product? >> We sell to enterprises and security, the CISO and the package as a whole, gives them the tools to have the voice internally in their organization We sell to Fortune 1000 companies, >> So it's a SAAS service? >> Yeah, SAAS service, yeah. >> And so what's the technology secret sauce? (laughing) >> Um, that's a great question but really, our expertise is understanding what information people need at what time and under what circumstances, that best changes their behavior. So we really are content diagnostic, we are much more about the engine that understands what content needs to be presented to whom and why. So that everyone is getting only the information they need, they understand why they need it and they don't need anything extra-superfluous to their... >> Okay, so I was saying on theCUBE, my last event was at, CIO's can have good days and bad days. They have good days, CISOs really have good days, many will say bad days, >> Masha: Yeah, it's a hard job. >> So how do I know I need the Elevate Solution? What problem do I have, what's in it for me? What do I get out of it? When do I know when to engage with you guys? >> I take a look at how many user generated incidents your (mumbles) responding to, and I would imagine it is a large majority of them. We've seen, while we were working at Salesforce and across our current customers, close to a 40% reduction rate in user generated incidents, which clearly correlates to time spent on much more useful things than cleaning up mistakes. It's also one of the biggest ROI's you can get for the cheapest investment. By investing a little bit in your organization now, the impact you have in your culture and investing in the future decision, the future mistakes that never get made, are actually untold, the benefit of that is untold. >> So you're really kind of coming in as a holistic, kind of a security data plane if you will, aggregating the data points, making a visualization in human component. >> You've got it. >> Now, what's the human touchpoint? Is it a dashboard? Is it notifications? Personalization? How is the benefit rendered for the customer? >> So we give security teams and CSOs a dashboard that maps their organization's strengths and weaknesses. But for every employee, we give personalized, tailored feedback. Right now it shows up in an email that they get on an ongoing basis. We also have one that we tailor for executives, so the executive gets one for their department and we create an executive leaderboard that compares their performance to fellow peers and I'll tell you, execs love to win, so we've seen immense change from that move alone. >> Well, impressive pedigree on your entrepreneurial background, I see Salesforce has really kind of, I consider real first generation cloud before cloud actually happened, and there's a lot of learn, it was always an Apple case, now it's AWS, but it's it's own cloud as we all know, what are the learnings that you saw from Salesforce that you said hey, I'm going to connect those dots to the new opportunity? What's the real key there? >> So, I had two major aha's that I've been sharing with my work since. One, it's not what people know, but it's what they do that matters, and if you can sit with a moment and think about that, you realize it's not more training, because people might actually know the information, but they just choose not to do it. How many people smoke, and they still know it kills them? They think that it doesn't apply to them, same thing with security. I know what I need to do, I'm just not incentivized to do it, so there's a huge motivation factor that needs to be addressed. That's one thing that I don't see a lot of other players on the market doing and one thing we just really wanted to do as well. >> So it sounds like you guys are providing a vision around using sheet learning and AI and data synthesis wrangling and all that good stuff, to be an assistant, a personal assistant to security folks, because it sounds like you're trying to make their life easier, make better decisions. Sounds like you guys are trying to distract away all these signals, >> You're right. >> See what to pay attention to. >> And make it more relevant, yeah. Well think about what Fitbit did for your own personal fitness. It curates a personal relationship based on a whole bunch of data. How you're doing, goals you've set, and all of a sudden, a couple of miles walk leads to an immense lifestyle change. Same thing with security, yeah. >> That's interesting, I love the Fitbit analogy because if you think about the digital ecosystem of an enterprise, it used to be siloed, IT driven, now with digital, everything's connected so technically, you're instrumenting a lot of things for everything. >> Yeah. >> So the question's not so much instrumentation, it's what's happening when and contextually why. >> That's it, why, that's exactly it. Yeah, you totally got it. >> Okay. I got it. >> Yeah, I can see the light bulb. >> Okay, aha, ding ding. All right, so back to the customer pain point. You mentioned some data points around KPI's that they might or things that they might want to call you so it's incidents, what kind of incidents? When do I know I need to get you involved? Will you repeat those again? >> There's two places where it's a great time to involve. Now, because of the human element is, or think about this as an investment. If you do non-investor security culture, one way or another, you have security culture. It's either hurting you or it's helping you and by hurting you, people are choosing to forego investing security processes or secure cultures and you are just increasing your security debt. By stepping in to address that now, you are actually paying it forward. The second best time, is after you realize you should have done that. Post-breaches or post incidents, is a really great time to come in and look at your culture because people are willing to suspend their beliefs of what good behavior looks like, what's acceptable and when you look at an organization and their culture, it is most valuable after a time of crisis, public or otherwise, and that is a really great time to consider it. >> I think that human error is a huge thing, whether it's as trivial as leaving an S3 bucket open or whatever, I think it's going to get more acute with service meshes and cloud-native microservices. It's going to get much more dynamic and sometimes services can be stood up and torn down without any human knowledge, so there's a lot of blind spots potentially. This brings up the question of how does the collaboration piece, because one of the things about the security industry is, it's a community. Sharing data's important, having access to data, how do you think about that as the founder of a start-up that has a 20 mile steer to the future around data access, data diversity, blind spots, how do you look at that and how do you advise your clients to think about that? >> I've always been really pro data sharing. I think it's one of the things that has held us back as an industry, we're very siloed in this space, especially as it relates to human behavior. I have no idea, as a regular CISO of a company, if I am doing enough to protect my employees, is my phishing click (mumbles), are my malware download rates above normal, below or should I invest more, am I doing enough? How do I do compared to my peers and without sharing industry stats, we have no idea if we're investing enough or quite honestly, not enough in this space. And the second thing is, what are approaches that are most effective? So let's say I have a malware infection problem, which approach, is it this training? Is it a communication? Is it positive reinforcement, is it punishment? What is the most effective to leverage this type of output? What's the input output relation? And we're real excited to have shared data with Horizon Data Breach Report for the first time this year, to start giving back to the communities, specifically to help answer some of these questions. >> Well, I think you're onto something with this behavioral science intersection with human behavior and executive around security practices. I think it's going to be an awesome, thanks for sharing the insights, Miss Masha on theCUBE here. A quick plug for your company, (mumbles) you're funded, Series A funding, take us through the stats, you're hiring what kind of positions, give a plug to the company. >> So, Elevate Security, we're three years old. We have raised ten million to date. We're based in both Berkeley and Montreal and we're hiring sales reps on the west coast, a security product manager and any engineering talent really focused on building an awesome data warehouse infrastructure. So, please check out our website, www.elevatesecurity.com/careers for jobs. >> Two hot engineering markets, Berkeley I see poaching out of Cal, and also Montreal, >> Montreal, McGill and Monterey. >> You got that whole top belt of computer science up in Canada. >> Yeah. >> Well, congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story. >> Thank you. >> Security kind of giving the next generation all kinds of new opportunities to make security better. Some CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, at the Moscone Center. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back after this break. (upbeat music)