>>live from Miami, Florida It's the Q covering. IBM is data in a I forum brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to the port of Miami, everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental Hotel. You're watching the Cube? The leader and I live tech covered set. Daubert is here. He's the vice president of data and I and a I and the chief data officer of cloud and cognitive software. And I'd be upset too. Good to see you again. >>Good. See, Dave, thanks for having me >>here. The data in a I form hashtag data. I I It's amazing here. 1700 people. Everybody's gonna hands on appetite for learning. Yeah. What do you see out in the marketplace? You know what's new since we last talked. >>Well, so I think if you look at some of the things that are really need in the marketplace, it's really been around filling the skill shortage. And how do you operationalize and and industrialize? You're a I. And so there's been a real need for things ways to get more productivity out of your data. Scientists not necessarily replace them. But how do you get more productivity? And we just released a few months ago, something called Auto A I, which really is, is probably the only tool out there that automates the end end pipeline automates 80% of the work on the Indian pipeline, but isn't a black box. It actually kicks out code. So your data scientists can then take it, optimize it further and understand it, and really feel more comfortable about it. >>He's got a eye for a eyes. That's >>exactly what is a eye for an eye. >>So how's that work? So you're applying machine intelligence Two data to make? Aye. Aye, more productive pick algorithms. Best fit. >>Yeah, So it does. Basically, you feed it your data and it identifies the features that are important. It does feature engineering for you. It does model selection for you. It does hyper parameter tuning and optimization, and it does deployment and also met monitors for bias. >>So what's the date of scientists do? >>Data scientist takes the code out the back end. And really, there's some tweaks that you know, the model, maybe the auto. Aye, aye. Maybe not. Get it perfect, Um, and really customize it for the business and the needs of the business. that the that the auto A I so they not understand >>the data scientist, then can can he or she can apply it in a way that is unique to their business that essentially becomes their I p. It's not like generic. Aye, aye for everybody. It's it's customized by And that's where data science to complain that I have the time to do this. Wrangling data >>exactly. And it was built in a combination from IBM Research since a great assets at IBM Research plus some cattle masters at work here at IBM that really designed and optimize the algorithm selection and things like that. And then at the keynote today, uh, wonderment Thompson was up there talking, and this is probably one of the most impactful use cases of auto. Aye, aye to date. And it was also, you know, my former team, the data science elite team, was engaged, but wonderment Thompson had this problem where they had, like, 17,000 features in their data sets, and what they wanted to do was they wanted to be able to have a custom solution for their customers. And so every time they get a customer that have to have a data scientist that would sit down and figure out what the right features and how the engineer for this customer. It was an intractable problem for them. You know, the person from wonderment Thompson have prevented presented today said he's been trying to solve this problem for eight years. Auto Way I, plus the data science elite team solve the form in two months, and after that two months, it went right into production. So in this case, oughta way. I isn't doing the whole pipeline. It's helping them identify the features and engineering the features that are important and giving them a head start on the model. >>What's the, uh, what's the acquisition bottle for all the way as a It's a license software product. Is it assassin part >>of Cloudpack for data, and it's available on IBM Cloud. So it's on IBM Cloud. You can use it paper use so you get a license as part of watching studio on IBM Cloud. If you invest in Cloudpack for data, it could be a perpetual license or committed term license, which essentially assassin, >>it's essentially a feature at dawn of Cloudpack for data. >>It's part of Cloudpack per day and you're >>saying it can be usage based. So that's key. >>Consumption based hot pack for data is all consumption based, >>so people want to use a eye for competitive advantage. I said by my open that you know, we're not marching to the cadence of Moore's Law in this industry anymore. It's a combination of data and then cloud for scale. So so people want competitive advantage. You've talked about some things that folks are doing to gain that competitive advantage. But the same time we heard from Rob Thomas that only about 4 to 10% penetration for a I. What? What are the key blockers that you see and how you're knocking them >>down? Well, I think there's. There's a number of key blockers, so one is of access to data, right? Cos have tons of data, but being able to even know what data is, they're being able to pull it all together and being able to do it in a way that is compliant with regulation because you got you can't do a I in a vacuum. You have to do it in the context of ever increasing regulation like GDP R and C, C, P A and all these other regulator privacy regulations that are popping up. So so that's that's really too so access to data and regulation can be blockers. The 2nd 1 or the 3rd 1 is really access to appropriate skills, which we talked a little bit about. Andi, how do you retrain, or how do you up skill, the talent you have? And then how do you actually bring in new talent that can execute what you want on then? Sometimes in some cos it's a lack of strategy with appropriate measurement, right? So what is your A II strategy, and how are you gonna measure success? And you and I have talked about this on Cuban on Cube before, where it's gotta measure your success in dollars and cents right cost savings, net new revenue. That's really all your CFO is care about. That's how you have to be able to measure and monitor your success. >>Yes. Oh, it's so that's that Last one is probably were where most organizations start. Let's prioritize the use cases of the give us the best bang for the buck, and then business guys probably get really excited and say Okay, let's go. But to up to truly operationalize that you gotta worry about these other things. You know, the compliance issues and you gotta have the skill sets. Yeah, it's a scale. >>And sometimes that's actually the first thing you said is sometimes a mistake. So focusing on the one that's got the most bang for the buck is not necessarily the best place to start for a couple of reasons. So one is you may not have the right data. It may not be available. It may not be governed properly. Number one, number two the business that you're building it for, may not be ready to consume it right. They may not be either bought in or the processes need to change so much or something like that, that it's not gonna get used. And you can build the best a I in the world. If it doesn't get used, it creates zero value, right? And so you really want to focus on for the first couple of projects? What are the one that we can deliver the best value, not Sarah, the most value, but the best value in the shortest amount of time and ensure that it gets into production because especially when you're starting off, if you don't show adoption, people are gonna lose interest. >>What are you >>seeing in terms of experimentation now in the customer base? You know, when you talk to buyers and you talk about, you know, you look at the I T. Spending service. People are concerned about tariffs. The trade will hurt the 2020 election. They're being a little bit cautious. But in the last two or three years have been a lot of experimentation going on. And a big part of that is a I and machine learning. What are you seeing in terms of that experimentation turning into actually production project that we can learn from and maybe do some new experiments? >>Yeah, and I think it depends on how you're doing the experiments. There's, I think there's kind of academic experimentation where you have data science, Sistine Data science teams that come work on cool stuff that may or may not have business value and may or may not be implemented right. They just kind of latch on. The business isn't really involved. They latch on, they do projects, and that's I think that's actually bad experimentation if you let it that run your program. The good experimentation is when you start identity having a strategy. You identify the use cases you want to go after and you experiment by leveraging, agile to deliver these methodologies. You deliver value in two weeks prints, and you can start delivering value quickly. You know, in the case of wonderment, Thompson again 88 weeks, four sprints. They got value. That was an experiment, right? That was an experiment because it was done. Agile methodologies using good coding practices using good, you know, kind of design up front practices. They were able to take that and put it right into production. If you're doing experimentation, you have to rewrite your code at the end. And it's a waste of time >>T to your earlier point. The moon shots are oftentimes could be too risky. And if you blow it on a moon shot, it could set you back years. So you got to be careful. Pick your spots, picked ones that maybe representative, but our lower maybe, maybe lower risk. Apply agile methodologies, get a quick return, learn, develop those skills, and then then build up to the moon ship >>or you break that moon shot down its consumable pieces. Right, Because the moon shot may take you two years to get to. But maybe there are sub components of that moon shot that you could deliver in 34 months and you start delivering knows, and you work up to the moon shot. >>I always like to ask the dog food in people. And I said, like that. Call it sipping your own champagne. What do you guys done internally? When we first met, it was and I think, a snowy day in Boston, right at the spark. Some it years ago. And you did a big career switch, and it's obviously working out for you, But But what are some of the things? And you were in part, brought in to help IBM internally as well as Interpol Help IBM really become data driven internally? Yeah. How has that gone? What have you learned? And how are you taking that to customers? >>Yeah, so I was hired three years ago now believe it was that long toe lead. Our internal transformation over the last couple of years, I got I don't want to say distracted there were really important business things I need to focus on, like gpr and helping our customers get up and running with with data science, and I build a data science elite team. So as of a couple months ago, I'm back, you know, almost entirely focused on her internal transformation. And, you know, it's really about making sure that we use data and a I to make appropriate decisions on DSO. Now we have. You know, we have an app on her phone that leverages Cognos analytics, where at any point, Ginny Rometty or Rob Thomas or Arvin Krishna can pull up and look in what we call E P M. Which is enterprise performance management and understand where the business is, right? What what do we do in third quarter, which just wrapped up what was what's the pipeline for fourth quarter? And it's at your fingertips. We're working on revamping our planning cycle. So today planning has been done in Excel. We're leveraging Planning Analytics, which is a great planning and scenario planning tool that with the tip of a button, really let a click of a button really let you understand how your business can perform in the future and what things need to do to get it perform. We're also looking across all of cloud and cognitive software, which data and A I sits in and within each business unit and cloud and cognitive software. The sales teams do a great job of cross sell upsell. But there's a huge opportunity of how do we cross sell up sell across the five different businesses that live inside of cloud and cognitive software. So did an aye aye hybrid cloud integration, IBM Cloud cognitive Applications and IBM Security. There's a lot of potential interplay that our customers do across there and providing a I that helps the sales people understand when they can create more value. Excuse me for our customers. >>It's interesting. This is the 10th year of doing the Cube, and when we first started, it was sort of the beginning of the the big data craze, and a lot of people said, Oh, okay, here's the disruption, crossing the chasm. Innovator's dilemma. All that old stuff going away, all the new stuff coming in. But you mentioned Cognos on mobile, and that's this is the thing we learned is that the key ingredients to data strategies. Comprised the existing systems. Yes. Throw those out. Those of the systems of record that were the single version of the truth, if you will, that people trusted you, go back to trust and all this other stuff built up around it. Which kind of created dissidents. Yeah. And so it sounds like one of the initiatives that you you're an IBM I've been working on is really bringing in the new pieces, modernizing sort of the existing so that you've got sort of consistent data sets that people could work. And one of the >>capabilities that really has enabled this transformation in the last six months for us internally and for our clients inside a cloud pack for data, we have this capability called IBM data virtualization, which we have all these independent sources of truth to stomach, you know? And then we have all these other data sources that may or may not be as trusted, but to be able to bring them together literally. With the click of a button, you drop your data sources in the Aye. Aye, within data. Virtualization actually identifies keys across the different things so you can link your data. You look at it, you check it, and it really enables you to do this at scale. And all you need to do is say, pointed out the data. Here's the I. P. Address of where the data lives, and it will bring that in and help you connect it. >>So you mentioned variances in data quality and consumer of the data has to have trust in that data. Can you use machine intelligence and a I to sort of give you a data confidence meter, if you will. Yeah. So there's two things >>that we use for data confidence. I call it dodging this factor, right. Understanding what the dodging this factor is of the data. So we definitely leverage. Aye. Aye. So a I If you have a date, a dictionary and you have metadata, the I can understand eight equality. And it can also look at what your data stewards do, and it can do some of the remediation of the data quality issues. But we all in Watson Knowledge catalog, which again is an in cloudpack for data. We also have the ability to vote up and vote down data. So as much as the team is using data internally. If there's a data set that had a you know, we had a hive data quality score, but it wasn't really valuable. It'll get voted down, and it will help. When you search for data in the system, it will sort it kind of like you do a search on the Internet and it'll it'll down rank that one, depending on how many down votes they got. >>So it's a wisdom of the crowd type of. >>It's a crowd sourcing combined with the I >>as that, in your experience at all, changed the dynamics of politics within organizations. In other words, I'm sure we've all been a lot of meetings where somebody puts foursome data. And if the most senior person in the room doesn't like the data, it doesn't like the implication he or she will attack the data source, and then the meeting's over and it might not necessarily be the best decision for the organization. So So I think it's maybe >>not the up, voting down voting that does that, but it's things like the E PM tool that I said we have here. You know there is a single source of truth for our finance data. It's on everyone's phone. Who needs access to it? Right? When you have a conversation about how the company or the division or the business unit is performing financially, it comes from E. P M. Whether it's in the Cognos app or whether it's in a dashboard, a separate dashboard and Cognos or is being fed into an aye aye, that we're building. This is the source of truth. Similarly, for product data, our individual products before me it comes from here's so the conversation at the senior senior meetings are no longer your data is different from my data. I don't believe it. You've eliminated that conversation. This is the data. This is the only data. Now you can have a conversation about what's really important >>in adult conversation. Okay, Now what are we going to do? It? It's >>not a bickering about my data versus your data. >>So what's next for you on? You know, you're you've been pulled in a lot of different places again. You started at IBM as an internal transformation change agent. You got pulled into a lot of customer situations because yeah, you know, you're doing so. Sales guys want to drag you along and help facilitate activity with clients. What's new? What's what's next for you. >>So really, you know, I've only been refocused on the internal transformation for a couple months now. So really extending IBM struck our cloud and cognitive software a data and a I strategy and starting to quickly implement some of these products, just like project. So, like, just like I just said, you know, we're starting project without even knowing what the prioritized list is. Intuitively, this one's important. The team's going to start working on it, and one of them is an aye aye project, which is around cross sell upsell that I mentioned across the portfolio and the other one we just got done talking about how in the senior leadership meeting for Claude Incognito software, how do we all work from a Cognos dashboard instead of Excel data data that's been exported put into Excel? The challenge with that is not that people don't trust the data. It's that if there's a question you can't drill down. So if there's a question about an Excel document or a power point that's up there, you will get back next meeting in a month or in two weeks, we'll have an e mail conversation about it. If it's presented in a really live dashboard, you can drill down and you can actually answer questions in real time. The value of that is immense, because now you as a leadership team, you can make a decision at that point and decide what direction you're going to do. Based on data, >>I said last time I have one more questions. You're CDO but you're a polymath on. So my question is, what should people look for in a chief data officer? What sort of the characteristics in the attributes, given your >>experience, that's kind of a loaded question, because there is. There is no good job, single job description for a chief date officer. I think there's a good solid set of skill sets, the fine for a cheap date officer and actually, as part of the chief data officer summits that you you know, you guys attend. We had were having sessions with the chief date officers, kind of defining a curriculum for cheap date officers with our clients so that we can help build the chief. That officer in the future. But if you look a quality so cheap, date officer is also a chief disruption officer. So it needs to be someone who is really good at and really good at driving change and really good at disrupting processes and getting people excited about it changes hard. People don't like change. How do you do? You need someone who can get people excited about change. So that's one thing. On depending on what industry you're in, it's got to be. It could be if you're in financial or heavy regulated industry, you want someone that understands governance. And that's kind of what Gardner and other analysts call a defensive CDO very governance Focus. And then you also have some CDOs, which I I fit into this bucket, which is, um, or offensive CDO, which is how do you create value from data? How do you caught save money? How do you create net new revenue? How do you create new business models, leveraging data and a I? And now there's kind of 1/3 type of CDO emerging, which is CDO not as a cost center but a studio as a p N l. How do you generate revenue for the business directly from your CDO office. >>I like that framework, right? >>I can't take credit for it. That's Gartner. >>Its governance, they call it. We say he called defensive and offensive. And then first time I met Interpol. He said, Look, you start with how does data affect the monetization of my organization? And that means making money or saving money. Seth, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is great to see you >>again. Thanks for having me >>again. All right, Keep it right to everybody. We'll be back at the IBM data in a I form from Miami. You're watching the Cube?

>> From Boston, Massachusets, it's The Cube. Covering Actifio 2019: Data Driven, Brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental Hotel at Actifio's Data Driven conference, day one. You're watching The Cube. The leader in on-the-ground tech coverage. My name is is Dave Valante, Stu Minamin is here, so is John Ferrer, my friend Frank Gens is here, he's the Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC and Head Dot Connector. Frank, welcome to The Cube. >> Well thank you Dave. >> First time. >> First time. >> Newbie. >> Yep. >> You're going to crush it, I know. >> Be gentle. >> You know, you're awesome, I've watched you over the many years, of course, you know, you seem to get competitive, and it's like who gets the best rating? Frank always had the best ratings at the Directions conference. He's blushing but I could- >> I don't know if that's true but I'll accept it. >> I could never beat him, no matter how hard I tried. But you are a phenomenal speaker, you gave a great conversation this morning. I'm sure you drew a lot from your Directions talk, but every year you lay down this, you know, sort of, mini manifesto. You describe it as, you connect the dots, IDC, thousands of analysts. And it's your job to say okay, what does this all mean? Not in the micro, let's up-level a little bit. So, what's happening? You talked today, You know you gave your version of the wave slides. So, where are we in the waves? We are exiting the experimentation phase, and coming in to a new phase that multiplied innovation. I saw AI on there, block-chain, some other technologies. Where are we today? >> Yeah, well I think having mental models of the6 industry or any complex system is pretty important. I mean I've made a career dumbing-down a complex industry into something simple enough that I can understand, so we've done it again now with what we call the third platform. So, ten years ago seeing the whole raft of new technologies at the time were coming in that would become the foundation for the next thirty years of tech, so, that's an old story now. Cloud, mobile, social, big data, obviously IOT technologies coming in, block-chain, and so forth. So we call this general era the third platform, but we noticed a few years ago, well, we're at the threshold of kind of a major scale-up of innovation in this third platform that's very different from the last ten or twelve years, which we called the experimentation stage. Where people were using this stuff, using the cloud, using mobile, big data, to create cool things, but they were doing it in kind of a isolated way. Kind of the traditional, well I'm going to invent something and I may have a few friends help me, whereas, the promise of the cloud has been , well, if you have a lot of developers out on the cloud, that form a community, an ecosystem, think of GitHub, you know, any of the big code repositories, or the ability to have shared service as often Amazon, Cloud, or IBM, or Google, or Microsoft, the promise is there to actually bring to life what Bill Joy said, you know, in the nineties. Which was no matter how smart you are, most of the smart people in the world work for someone else. So the questions always been, well, how do I tap into all those other smart people who don't work for me? So we can feel that where we are in the industry right now is the business model of multiplied innovation or if you prefer, a network of collaborative innovation, being able to build something interesting quickly, using a lot of innovation from other people, and then adding your special sauce. But that's going to take the scale of innovation just up a couple of orders of magnitude. And the pace, of course, that goes with that, is people are innovating much more rapid clip now. So really, the full promise of a cloud-native innovation model, so we kind of feel like we're right here, which means there's lots of big changes around the technologies, around kind of the world of developers and apps, AI is changing, and of course, the industry structure itself. You know the power positions, you know, a lot of vendors have spent a lot of energy trying to protect the power positions of the last thirty years. >> Yeah so we're getting into some of that. So, but you know, everybody talks about digital transformation, and they kind of roll their eyes, like it's a big buzzword, but it's real. It's dataware at a data-driven conference. And data, you know, being at the heart of businesses means that you're seeing businesses transition industries, or traverse industries, you know, Amazon getting into groceries, Apple getting into content, Amazon as well, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, so, my question is, what's a tech company? I mean, you know, Bennyhoff says that, you know, every company's a sass company, and you're certainly seeing that, and it's got to be great for your business. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely >> Quantifying all those markets, but I mean, the market that you quantify is just it's every company now. Banks, insurance companies, grocers, you know? Everybody is a tech company. >> I think, yeah, that's a hundred percent right. It is that this is the biggest revolution in the economy, you know, for many many decades. Or you might say centuries even. Is yeah, whoever put it, was it Mark Andreson or whoever used to talk about software leading the world, we're in the middle of that. Only, software now is being delivered in the form of digital or cloud services so, you know, every company is a tech company. And of course it really raises the question, well what are tech companies? You know, they need to kind of think back about where does our value add? But it is great. It's when we look at the world of clouds, one of the first things we observed in 2007, 2008 was, well, clouds wasn't just about S3 storage clouds, or salesforce.com's softwares and service. It's a model that can be applied to any industry, any company, any offering. And of course we've seen all these startups whether it's Uber or Netflix or whoever it is, basically digital innovation in every single industry, transforming that industry. So, to me that's the exciting part is if that model of transforming industries through the use of software, through digital technology. In that kind of experimentation stage it was mainly a startup story. All those unicorns. To me the multiplied innovation chapter, it's about- (audio cuts out) finally, you know, the cities, the Procter & Gambles, the Walmarts, the John Deere's, they're finally saying hey, this cloud platform and digital innovation, if we can do that in our industry. >> Yeah, so intrapreneurship is actually, you know, starting to- >> Yeah. >> So you and I have seen a lot of psychos, we watched the you know, the mainframe wave get crushed by the micro-processor based revolution, IDC at the time spent a lot of time looking at that. >> Vacuum tubes. >> Water coolant is back. So but the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law forever. Even Thomas Friedman when he talks about, you know, his stuff and he throws in Moore's Law. But no longer Moore's Law the sort of engine of innovation. There's other factors. So what's the innovation cocktail looking forward over the next ten years? You've talked about cloud, you know, we've talked about AI, what's that, you know, sandwich, the innovation sandwich look like? >> Yeah so to me I think it is the harnessing of all this flood of technologies, again, that are mainly coming off the cloud, and that parade is not stopping. Quantum, you know, lots of other technologies are coming down the pipe. But to me, you know, it is the mixture of number one the cloud, public cloud stacks being able to travel anywhere in the world. So take the cloud on the road. So it's even, I would say, not even just scale, I think of, that's almost like a mount of compute power. Which could happen inside multiple hyperscale data centers. I'm also thinking about scale in terms of the horizontal. >> Bringing that model anywhere. >> Take me out to the edge. >> Wherever your data lives. >> Take me to a Carnival cruise ship, you know, take me to, you know, an apple-powered autonomous car, or take me to a hospital or a retail store. So the public cloud stacks where all the innovation is basically happening in the industry. Jail-breaking that out so it can come, you know it's through Amazon, AWS Outpost, or Ajerstack, or Google Anthos, this movement of the cloud guys, to say we'll take public cloud innovation wherever you need it. That to me is a big part of the cocktail because that's you know, basically the public clouds have been the epicenter of most tech innovation the last three or four years, so, that's very important. I think, you know just quickly, the other piece of the puzzle is the revolution that's happening in the modularity of apps. So the micro services revolution. So, the building of new apps and the refactoring of old apps using containers, using servos technologies, you know, API lifecycle management technologies, and of course, agile development methods. Kind of getting to this kind of iterative sped up deployment model, where people might've deployed new code four times a year, they're now deploying it four times a minute. >> Yeah right. >> So to me that's- and kind of aligned with that is what I was mentioning before, that if you can apply that, kind of, rapid scale, massive volume innovation model and bring others into the party, so now you're part of a cloud-connected community of innovators. And again, that could be around a Github, or could be around a Google or Amazon, or it could be around, you know, Walmart. In a retail world. Or an Amazon in retail. Or it could be around a Proctor & Gamble, or around a Disney, digital entertainment, you know, where they're creating ecosystems of innovators, and so to me, bringing people, you know, so it's not just these technologies that enable rapid, high-volume modular innovation, but it's saying okay now plugging lots of people's brains together is just going to, I think that, here's the- >> And all the data that throws off obviously. >> Throws a ton of data, but, to me the number we use it kind of is the punchline for, well where does multiplied innovation lead? A distributed cloud, this revolution in distributing modular massive scale development, that we think the next five years, we'll see as many new apps developed and deploye6d as we saw developed and deployed in the last forty years. So five years, the next five years, versus the last forty years, and so to me that's, that is the revolution. Because, you know, when that happens that means we're going to start seeing that long tail of used cases that people could never get to, you know, all the highly verticalized used cases are going to be filled, you know we're going to finally a lot of white space has been white for decades, is going to start getting a lot of cool colors and a lot of solutions delivered to them. >> Let's talk about some of the macro stuff, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's probably three trillion, maybe it's four trillion now, big market. You talked today about the market's going two x GDP. >> Yeah. >> For the tech market, that is. Why is it that the tech market is able to grow at a rate faster than GDP? And is there a relationship between GDP and tech growth? >> Yeah, well, I think, we are still, while, you know, we've been in tech, talk about those apps developed the last forty years, we've both been there, so- >> And that includes the iPhone apps, too, so that's actually a pretty impressive number when you think about the last ten years being included in that number. >> Absolutely, but if you think about it, we are still kind of teenagers when you think about that Andreson idea of software eating the world. You know, we're just kind of on the early appetizer, you know, the sorbet is coming to clear our palates before we go to the next course. But we're not even close to the main course. And so I think when you look at the kind of, the percentage of companies and industry process that is digital, that has been highly digitized. We're still early days, so to me, I think that's why. That the kind of the steady state of how much of an industry is kind of process and data flow is based on software. I'll just make up a number, you know, we may be a third of the way to whatever the steady state is. We've got two-thirds of the way to go. So to me, that supports growth of IT investment rising at double the rate of overall. Because it's sucking in and absorbing and transforming big pieces of the existing economy, >> So given the size of the market, given that all companies are tech companies. What are your thoughts on the narrative right now? You're hearing a lot of pressure from, you know, public policy to break up big tech. And we saw, you know you and I were there when Microsoft, and I would argue, they were, you know, breaking the law. Okay, the Department of Justice did the right thing, and they put handcuffs on them. >> Yeah. >> But they never really, you know, went after the whole breakup scenario, and you hear a lot of that, a lot of the vitriol. Do you think that makes sense? To break up big tech and what would the result be? >> You don't think I'm going to step on those land mines, do you? >> Okay well I've got an opinion. >> Alright I'll give you mine then. Alright, since- >> I mean, I'll lay it out there, I just think if you break up big tech the little techs are going to get bigger. It's going to be like AT&T all over again. The other thing I would add is if you want to go after China for, you know, IP theft, okay fine, but why would you attack the AI leaders? Now, if they're breaking the law, that should not be allowed. I'm not for you know, monopolistic, you know, illegal behavior. What are your thoughts? >> Alright, you've convinced me to answer this question. >> We're having a conversation- >> Nothing like a little competitive juice going. You're totally wrong. >> Lay it out for me. >> No, I think, but this has been a recurring pattern, as you were saying, it even goes back further to you know, AT&T and people wanting to connect other people to the chiraphone, and it goes IBM mainframes, opening up to peripherals. Right, it goes back to it. Exactly. It goes back to the wheel. But it's yeah, to me it's a valid question to ask. And I think, you know, part of the story I was telling, that multiplied innovation story, and Bill Joy, Joy's Law is really about platform. Right? And so when you get aggregated portfolio of technical capabilities that allow innovation to happen. Right, so the great thing is, you know, you typically see concentration, consolidation around those platforms. But of course they give life to a lot of competition and growth on top of them. So that to me is the, that's the conundrum, because if you attack the platform, you may send us back into this kind of disaggregated, less creative- so that's the art, is to take the scalpel and figure out well, where are the appropriate boundaries for, you know, putting those walls, where if you're in this part of the industry, you can't be in this. So, to me I think one, at least reasonable way to think about it is, so for example, if you are a major cloud platform player, right, you're providing all of the AI services, the cloud services, the compute services, the block-chain services, that a lot of the sass world is using. That, somebody could argue, well, if you get too strong in the sass world, you then could be in a position to give yourself favorable position from the platform. Because everyone in the sass world is depending on the platform. So somebody might say you can't be in. You know, if you're in the sass position you'll have to separate that from the platform business. But I think to me, so that's a logical way to do it, but I think you also have to ask, well, are people actually abusing? Right, so I- >> I think it's a really good question. >> I don't think it's fair to just say well, theoretically it could be abused. If the abuse is not happening, I don't think you, it's appropriate to prophylactically, it's like go after a crime before it's committed. So I think, the other thing that is happening is, often these monopolies or power positions have been about economic power, pricing power, I think there's another dynamic happening because consumer date, people's data, the Facebook phenomenon, the Twitter and the rest, there's a lot of stuff that's not necessarily about pricing, but that's about kind of social norms and privacy that I think are at work and that we haven't really seen as big a factor, I mean obviously we've had privacy regulation is Europe with GDPR and the rest, obviously in check, but part of that's because of the social platforms, so that's another vector that is coming in. >> Well, you would like to see the government actually say okay, this is the framework, or this is what we think the law should be. I mean, part of it is okay, Facebook they have incentive to appropriate our data and they get, okay, and maybe they're not taking enough responsibility for. But I to date have not seen the evidence as we did with, you know, Microsoft wiping out, you know, Lotus, and Novel, and Word Perfect through bundling and what it did to Netscape with bundling the browser and the price practices that- I don't see that, today, maybe I'm just missing it, but- >> Yeah I think that's going to be all around, you know, online advertising, and all that, to me that's kind of the market- >> Yeah, so Google, some of the Google stuff, that's probably legit, and that's fine, they should stop that. >> But to me the bigger issue is more around privacy.6 You know, it's a social norm, it's societal, it's not an economic factor I think around Facebook and the social platforms, and I think, I don't know what the right answer is, but I think certainly government it's legitimate for those questions to be asked. >> Well maybe GDPR becomes that framework, so, they're trying to give us the hook but, I'm having too much fun. So we're going to- I don't know how closely you follow Facebook, I mean they're obviously big tech, so Facebook has this whole crypto-play, seems like they're using it for driving an ecosystem and making money. As opposed to dealing with the privacy issue. I'd like to see more on the latter than the former, perhaps, but, any thoughts on Facebook and what's going on there with their crypto-play? >> Yeah I don't study them all that much so, I am fascinated when Mark Zuckerberg was saying well now our key business now is about privacy, which I find interesting. It doesn't feel that way necessarily, as a consumer and an observer, but- >> Well you're on Facebook, I'm on Facebook, >> Yeah yeah. >> Okay so how about big IPOs, we're in the tenth year now of this huge, you know, tail-wind for tech. Obviously you have guys like Uber, Lyft going IPO,6 losing tons of money. Stocks actually haven't done that well which is kind of interesting. You saw Zoom, you know, go public, doing very well. Slack is about to go public. So there's really a rush to IPO. Your thoughts on that? Is this sustainable? Or are we kind of coming to the end here? >> Yeah so, I think in part, you know, predicting the stock market waves is a very tough thing to do, but I think one kind of secular trend is going to be relevant for these tech IPOs is what I was mentioning earlier, is that we've now had a ten, twelve year run of basically startups coming in and reinventing industries while the incumbents in the industries are basically sitting on their hands, or sleeping. So to me the next ten years, those startups are going to, not that, I mean we've seen that large companies waking up doesn't necessarily always lead to success but it feels to me like it's going to be a more competitive environment for all those startups Because the incumbents, not all of them, and maybe not even most of them, but some decent portion of them are going to wind up becoming digital giants in their own industry. So to me I think that's a different world the next ten years than the last ten. I do think one important thing, and I think around acquisitions MNA, and we saw it just the last few weeks with Google Looker and we saw Tab Low with Salesforce, is if that, the mega-cloud world of Microsoft, Ajer, and Amazon, Google. That world is clearly consolidating. There's room for three or four global players and that game is almost over. But there's another power position on top of that, which is around where did all the app, business app guys, all the suite guys, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, you name it. Where did they go? And so we see, we think- >> Service Now, now kind of getting big. >> Absolutely, so we're entering a intensive period, and I think again, the Tab Low and Looker is just an example where those companies are all stepping on the gas to become better platforms. So apps as platforms, or app portfolio as platforms, so, much more of a data play, analytics play, buying other pieces of the app portfolio, that they may not have. And basically scaling up to become the business process platforms and ecosystems there. So I think we are just at the beginning of that, so look for a lot of sass companies. >> And I wonder if Amazon could become a platform for developers to actually disrupt those traditional sass guys. It's not obvious to me how those guys get disrupted, and I'm thinking, everybody says oh is Amazon going to get into the app space? Maybe some day if they happen to do a cam expans6ion, But it seems to me that they become a platform fo6r new apps you know, your apps explosion.6 At the edge, obviously, you know, local. >> Well there's no question. I think those appcentric apps is what I'd call that competition up there and versus kind of a mega cloud. There's no question the mega cloud guys. They've already started launching like call center, contact center software, they're creeping up into that world of business apps so I don't think they're going to stop and so I think that that is a reasonable place to look is will they just start trying to create and effect suites and platforms around sass of their own. >> Startups, ecosystems like you were saying. Alright, I got to give you some rapid fire questions here, so, when do you think, or do you think, no, I'm going to say when you think, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception, rather than the norm? Buy into the autonomous vehicles hype? Or- >> I think, to me, that's a ten-year type of horizon. >> Okay, ten plus, alright. When will machines be able to make better diagnosis than than doctors? >> Well, you could argue that in some fields we're almost there, or we're there. So it's all about the scope of issue, right? So if it's reading a radiology, you know, film or image, to look for something right there, we're almost there. But for complex cancers or whatever that's going to take- >> One more dot connecting question. >> Yeah yeah. >> So do you think large retail stores will essentially disappear? >> Oh boy that's a- they certainly won't disappear, but I think they can so witness Apple and Amazon even trying to come in, so it feels that the mix is certainly shifting, right? So it feels to me that the model of retail presence, I think that will still be important. Touch, feel, look, socialize. But it feels like the days of, you know, ten thousand or five thousand store chains, it feels like that's declining in a big way. >> How about big banks? You think they'll lose control of the payment systems? >> I think they're already starting to, yeah, so, I would say that is, and they're trying to get in to compete, so I think that is on its way, no question. I think that horse is out of the barn. >> So cloud, AI, new apps, new innovation cocktails, software eating the world, everybody is a tech company. Frank Gens, great to have you. >> Dave, always great to see you. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy. You're watching The Cube, from Actifio: Data Driven nineteen. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> The sun has come out, but we're still talking about a lot of the cloud here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program the 2018 Super User Award winner, George Mihaiescu, who's the senior cloud architect with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research or OICR. First of all, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you so much for joining us. So cancer research, obviously is, one of the things we talk about is how can technology really help us at a global standpoint, help people. So, tell us a little about the organization first, before we get into the tech of it? >> So OICR is the largest cancer research institution in Canada, and is funded by government of Ontario. Located in Toronto, we support about 1,700 researchers, trainees and clinician staff. It's focused entirely on cancer research, it's located in a hub of cancer research in downtown Toronto, with Princess Margaret Hospital, Sick Kids Hospital, Mount Sinai, very, very powerful research centers, and OICR basically interconnects all these research centers and tries to bring together and to advance cancer research in the province, in Canada and globally. >> That's fantastic George. So with that, sketch out for us a little bit your role, kind of the purview that you have, the scope of what you cover. >> So I was hired four years ago by OICR to build and design cloud environment, based on a research grant that was awarded to a number of principal investigators in Canada to build this cloud computing infrastructure that can be used by cancer researchers to do large-scale analysis. What happens with cancer, because the variety of limitations happening in cancer patients, researchers found that they cannot just analyze a few samples and draw a conclusion, because the conclusion wouldn't be actually valid. So they needed to do large-scale research, and the ICGC, which is International Cancer Genome Consortium, an organization that's made of 17 countries that are donating, collecting and analyzing data from cancer patients, okay, they decided to put together all this data and to align it uniformly using the same algorithm and then analyze it using the same workflows, in order to actually draw conclusion that's valid across multiple data sets. They are focusing on the 50 most common types of cancer that affect most people in this world, and for each type of cancer, at least two countries provide and collect data. So for brain cancer, let's say we have data sets from two countries, for melanoma, for skin, and this basically gives you better confidence that the conclusion you draw is valid, and then the more pieces of the puzzle you throw on the table, the easier to see the big picture that's this cancer. >> You know George, I mean, I'm a former academic, and you know, the more data you get right, the more infrastructure you're going to have to have. I'm just reading off the announcement, 2,600 cores, 18 terabytes of RAM, 7.3 petabytes of storage, right, that's a lot of data, and it's a lot of... accessed by a lot of different researchers. When you came in, was the decision to use OpenStack already made, or did you make that decision, and how was the cloud architected in that way? >> The decision was basically made to use open source. We wanted basically to spend the money on capacity, on hardware, on research and not on licensing and support. >> John: Good use of everybody's tax dollars. >> Exactly, so you cannot do that if you have to spend money for paying licensing, then you probably have only half of the capacity that you could. So that means less large analysis, and longer it takes, and more costly. So Ceph for storing the data sets and OpenStack for infrastructure as a service offering was a no-brainer. My specialty was in OpenStack and Ceph, I started OpenStack seven years ago, so I was hired to design and build, and I had a chance to actually do alignment, and invitation calling for some of the data sets, so I was able to monitor the kind of stress that this workflows put on the system, so when I design it, I knew what is important, and what to focus on. So it's a cloud environment, it's customized for cancer research. We have very good ratio of RAM per CPU, we have very large local discs for the VM, for the virtual machines to be able to download very large data sets. We built it so if one compute node fails, you only impact a few workflows running there, you don't impact single small points of failures. Another tuning that we applied to the system too. >> George, can walk us through a little bit of the stack? What do you use, do you build your own OpenStack, or do you get it from someone? >> So basically, we use community hardware, we just high-density chassis, currently from Super Micro, Ubuntu for the operating system, no licensing there, OpenStack from the VM packages. We focus more on stability, scalability and support costs, internal support costs, because it's just myself and I have a colleague Gerard Baker, who's a cloud engineer, and you have to support all this environment, so we try to focus on the features that are most useful to our users, as well as less strain on our time and support resources. >> I mean that's, let's talk about the scalability right? You said the team is you and a colleague. >> George: Yes. >> But mostly, right. And you know, in the olden days, right, you would be taking care of maybe a handful of machines, and maybe some disk arrays in the lab. Now you're basically servicing an entire infrastructure for all of Canada, right? At how many universities? >> Well basically, it's global, so we have 40 research projects from four continents. So we have from Australia, from Israel, from China, from Europe, US, Canada. So approved cancer researchers that can access the data open up an account with us, and they get a quota, and they start their virtual machines, they download the data sets from the extra API of Ceph to their VMS, and they do analysis and we charge them for the time used, and because the use, everything is open source, and we don't pay any licensing fees, we are able to, and we don't run for profit, we charge them just what it costs us to be able to replenish the hardware when it fails. >> Nice, nice. And these are actually the very large machines, right? Because you have to have huge, thick data sets, you've got big data sets you have to compare all at once. >> Yeah, an average bandwidth of a file that has the normal DNA of the patient, and they need also the tumor DNA from the biopsy, an average whole genome sequence is about 150 gigabytes. So they need at least 300 gigabytes, and depending on the analysis, if they find mutations, then the output is usually five, 10 gigabytes, so much smaller. For other workflows, you have to actually align the data, so you input 150 gigabytes and the output is 150 or a bit more with metadata. And so nevertheless, you need very large storage for the virtual machines, and these are virtual machines that run very hard, in terms of you cannot do CPU over subscription, you cannot do memory over subscription, when you have a workflow that runs for four days, hundred percent CPU. So is different than other web scale environments, where you have website was running at 10%, or you can do 10 to one subscription, and then you go much cheaper or different solutions. Here you have to only provide what you have physically. >> John: That's great. >> George, you've said you participated in the OpenStack community for about seven years now. >> George: Yes. >> What kind of, do you actually contribute code, what pieces are you active in the community? >> Yeah, so I'm not a developer. My background is in networking, system administration and security, but I was involved in OpenStack since the beginning, before it was a foundation. I went to the first OpenStack public conference in Boston seven years ago, at the International Intercontinental Hotel and over time I was involved in discussions from the RAC channel, mailing list support, reporting backs. Even recently we had very interesting packet affected as well. The cloud package that is supposed to resize the disk of the VM as it boots, it was not using more than two terabytes because it was a bug, okay. So we reported this, and Scott Moffat, who's the maintainer of the cloud utils package, worked on the bug, and two days later, we had a fix, and they built a package, it's in the latest cloud Ubuntu image, and that happen, everybody else is going to use the same virtual Ubuntu package, so somebody who now has larger than two terabytes VMs, when they boot, they'll be able to resize and use the entire disk. And that's just an example of how with open source we can achieve things that would take much longer in commercial distribution, where even if you pay, doesn't necessarily mean that the response... >> Sure. Also George, any lessons learned? You've been with us a long time, right, and like Ceph. One thing we noticed today in the keynote, is actually a lot of the storage networking and compute wasn't really talked, those projects were maybe down focused a bit, as they talked about all the connectivity to everything else. So, I mean any lessons, so you... My point is, the infrastructure is stable of OpenStack, but any lessons learned along the journey? >> I think the lessons are that you can definitely build very affordable and useful and scalable infrastructure, but you have to get your expectations right. We only use from the open standard project that we consider are stable enough, so we can support them confidently without spending, like if a project adds 5% value to your offering, but eats 80% of your time debugging and trying to get it working, and doesn't have packages and missing documentation and so on, that's maybe not a good fit for your environment if you don't have the manpower to. And if it's not absolutely needed. Another very important lesson is that you have to really stay up to date, like go to the conferences, read the emails from the mailing list, be active in the community, because the OpenStack meetups in Toronto for 2018, we present there, we talk to other members. In these seven years I read tens of thousands of emails, so I learn from other users experiences, I try to help where I can. You have to be involved with the developers, I know the Ceph core developers, Sage and other people. So, you can't do this just by staying on the side and looking, you have to be involved. >> Good, George what are you looking for next from this community? You talked about the stability, are there pieces that you're hoping reach that maturity threshold for yourselves, or new functionalities that you're looking for down the road? >> I think what we want to provide to our researchers, 'cause they don't run web scale applications, so their needs are a little bit different. We want to add Magnum to our environment, to allow them deploy Kubernetes cluster easily. We want to add Octavia to expose the services, even though they don't run many web services, but you have to find a way to expose them when they run them. Maybe, Trove, database as a service, we'll see if we can deploy it safely and if it's stable enough. Anything that OpenStack comes up with, we basically look, is it useful, is it stable, can you do it, and we try it. >> George, last thing. Your group is the Super User of the Year. Can you just walk us through that journey, what led to the nomination, what does it mean to your team to win? >> I think we are a bit surprised, because we are a very small team, and our scale is not as big as T-Mobile or the other members, but I think it shows that again, for a big company to be able to deploy OpenStack at scale and make it work, it's maybe not very surprising 'cause yes, they have the resources, they have a lot of manpower and a lot of... But for a small institution or organization, or small company to be able to do it, without involving a vendor, without involving extra costs, I think that's the thing that was appreciated by the community and by the OpenStack Foundation, and yeah, we are pretty excited to have won it. >> All right, George, let me give you the final word, as somebody that's been involved with the community for a while. What would you say to people if they're, you know, still maybe looking from the outside or played with it a little bit. What tips would you give? >> I think we are living proof that it can be done, and if you wait until things are perfect, then they will never be, okay. Even Google has services in beta, Amazon has services in beta. You have to install OpenStack, it's much more performant and stable than when I started with OpenStack, where there was just a few projects, but definitely they will get help from the community, and the documentation's much better. Just go and do it, you won't regret it. >> George, as we know, software will eventually work, hardware will eventually fail. >> Absolutely. >> So, George Mihaiescu, congratulations to OICR on the Super User of the Year award, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we're getting towards the end of day one of three days of wall to wall coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.