>>Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This is day two, our first full day of coverage. But day two, we have two life sets here with AWS and its ecosystem partners to remote sets over a hundred guests on the program. We're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation, and I'm pleased to welcome back to cube alumni to the program. Justin Borkman is here, the co-founder and CEO of Starburst and Teresa Tung, the cloud first chief technologist at Accenture guys. Welcome back to the queue. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good to have you back. So, so Teresa, I was doing some research on you and I see you are the most prolific prolific inventor at Accenture with over 220 patents and patent applications. That's huge. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And I love your title. I think it's intriguing. I'd like to learn a little bit more about your role cloud-first chief technologist. Tell me about, >>Well, I get to think about the future of cloud and if you think about clouded powers, everything experiences in our everyday lives and our homes and our car in our stores. So pretty much I get to be cute, right? The rest of Accenture's James Bond >>And your queue. I like that. Wow. What a great analogy. Just to talk to me a little bit, I know service has been on the program before, but give me a little bit of an overview of the company, what you guys do. What were some of the gaps in the markets that you saw a few years ago and said, we have an idea to solve this? Sure. >>So Starburst offers a distributed query engine, which essentially means we're able to run SQL queries on data anywhere, uh, could be in traditional relational databases, data lakes in the cloud on-prem. And I think that was the gap that we saw was basically that people had data everywhere and really had a challenge with how they analyze that data. And, uh, my co-founders are the creators of an open source project originally called Presto now called Trino. And it's how Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb and, and a number of the internet companies run their analytics. And so our idea was basically to take that, commercialize that and make it enterprise grade for the thousands of other companies that are struggling with data management, data analytics problems. >>And that's one of the things we've seen explode during the last 22 months, among many other things is data, right? In every company. These days has to be a data company. If they're not, there's a competitor in the rear view rear view mirror, ready to come and take that place. We're going to talk about the data mesh Teresa, we're going to start with you. This is not a new car. This is a new concept. Talk to us about what a data mesh is and why organizations need to embrace this >>Approach. So there's a canonical definition about data mesh with four attributes and any data geek or data architect really resonates with them. So number one, it's really routed decentralized domain ownership. So data is not within a single line of business within a single entity within a single partner has to be across different domains. Second is publishing data as products. And so instead of these really, you know, technology solutions, data sets, data tables, really thinking about the product and who's going to use it. The third one is really around self-service infrastructure. So you want everybody to be able to use those products. And finally, number four, it's really about federated and global governance. So even though their products, you really need to make sure that you're doing the right things, but what's data money. >>We're not talking about a single tool here, right? This is more of a, an approach, a solution. >>It is a data strategy first and foremost, right? So companies, they are multi-cloud, they have many projects going on, they are on premise. So what do you do about it? And so that's the reality of the situation today, and it's first and foremost, a business strategy and framework to think about the data. And then there's a new architecture that underlines and supports that >>Just didn't talk to me about when you're having customer conversations. Obviously organizations need to have a core data strategy that runs the business. They need to be able to, to democratize really truly democratized data access across all business units. What are some of the, what are some of your customer conversations like are customers really embracing the data strategy, vision and approach? >>Yeah, well, I think as you alluded to, you know, every business is data-driven today and the pandemic, if anything has accelerated digital transformation in that move to become data-driven. So it's imperative that every business of every shape and size really put the power of data in the hands of everyone within their organization. And I think part of what's making data mesh resonates so well, is that decentralization concept that Teresa spoke about? Like, I think companies acknowledge that data is inherently decentralized. They have a lot of different database systems, different teams and data mesh is a framework for thinking about that. Then not only acknowledges that reality, but also braces it and basically says there's actually advantages to this decentralized approach. And so I think that's, what's driving the interest level in the data mesh, uh, paradigm. And it's been exciting to work with customers as they think about that strategy. And I think that, you know, essentially every company in the space is, is in transition, whether they're moving from on cloud to the prem, uh, to, uh, sorry, from on-prem to the cloud or from one cloud to another cloud or undergoing that digital transformation, they have left behind data everywhere. And so they're, they're trying to wrestle with how to grasp that. >>And there's, we know that there's so much value in data. The, the need is to be able to get it, to be able to analyze it quickly in real time. I think another thing we learned in the pandemic is it real-time is no longer a nice to have. It is essential for businesses in every organization. So Theresa let's talk about how Accenture and servers are working together to take the data mesh from a concept of framework and put this into production into execution. >>Yeah. I mean, many clients are already doing some aspect of the data mesh as I listed those four attributes. I'm sure everybody thought like I'm already doing some of this. And so a lot of that is reviewing your existing data projects and looking at it from a data product landscape we're at Amazon, right? Amazon famous for being customer obsessed. So in data, we're not always customer obsessed. We put up tables, we put up data sets, feature stores. Who's actually going to use this data. What's the value from it. And I think that's a big change. And so a lot of what we're doing is helping apply that product lens, a literal product lens and thinking about the customer. >>So what are some w you know, we often talk about outcomes, everything being outcomes focused and customers, vendors wanting to help customers deliver big outcomes, you know, cost reduction, et cetera, things like that. How, what are some of the key outcomes Theresa that the data mesh framework unlocks for organizations in any industry to be able to leverage? >>Yeah. I mean, it really depends on the product. Some of it is organizational efficiency and data-driven decisions. So just by the able to see the data, see what's happening now, that's great. But then you have so beyond the, now what the, so what the analytics, right. Both predictive prescriptive analytics. So what, so now I have all this data I can analyze and drive and predict. And then finally, the, what if, if I have this data and my partners have this data in this mesh, and I can use it, I can ask a lot of what if and, and kind of game out scenarios about what if I did things differently, all of this in a very virtualized data-driven fashion, >>Right? Well, we've been talking about being data-driven for years and years and years, but it's one thing to say that it's a whole other thing to actually be able to put that into practice and to use it, to develop new products and services, delight customers, right. And, and really achieve the competitive advantage that businesses want to have. Just so talk to me about how your customer conversations have changed in the last 22 months, as we've seen this massive acceleration of digital transformation companies initially, really trying to survive and figure out how to pivot, not once, but multiple times. How are those customer conversations changing now is as that data strategy becomes core to the survival of every business and its ability to thrive. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's accelerated everything and, and that's been obviously good for companies like us and like Accenture, cause there's a lot of work to be done out there. Um, but I think it's a transition from a storage centric mindset to more of an analytics centric mindset. You know, I think traditionally data warehousing has been all about moving data into one central place. And, and once you get it there, then you can analyze it. But I think companies don't have the time to wait for that anymore. Right there, there's no time to build all the ETL pipelines and maintain them and get all of that data together. We need to shorten that time to insight. And that's really what we, what we've been focusing on with our, with our customers, >>Shorten that time to insight to get that value out of the data faster. Exactly. Like I said, you know, the time is no longer a nice to have. It's an absolute differentiator for folks in every business. And as, as in our consumer lives, we have this expectation that we can get whatever we want on our phone, on any device, 24 by seven. And of course now in our business lives, we're having the same expectation, but you have to be able to unlock that access to that data, to be able to do the analytics, to make the decisions based on what the data say. Are you, are you finding our total? Let's talk about a little bit about the go to market strategy. You guys go in together. Talk to me about how you're working with AWS, Theresa, we'll start with you. And then Justin we'll head over to you. Okay. >>Well, a lot of this is powered by the cloud, right? So being able to imagine a new data business to run the analytics on it and then push it out, all of that is often cloud-based. But then the great thing about data mesh it's it gives you a framework to look at and tap into multi-cloud on-prem edge data, right? Data that can't be moved because it is a private and secure has to be at the edge and on-prem so you need to have that's their data reality. And the cloud really makes this easier to do. And then with data virtualization, especially coming from the digital natives, we know it scales >>Just to talk to me about it from your perspective that the GTL. >>Yeah. So, I mean, I think, uh, data mesh is really about people process and technology. I think Theresa alluded to it as a strategy. It's, it's more than just technology. Obviously we bring some of that technology to bear by allowing customers to query the data where it lives. But the people in process side is just as important training people to kind of think about how they do data management, data analytics differently is essential thinking about how to create data as a product. That's one of the core principles that Theresa mentioned, you know, that's where I think, um, you know, folks like Accenture can be really instrumental in helping people drive that transformational change within their organization. And that's >>Hard. Transformational change is hard with, you know, the last 22 months. I've been hard on everyone for every reason. How are you facilitating? I'm curious, like to get Theresa, we'll start with you, your perspectives on how our together as servers and Accenture, with the power of AWS, helping to drive that cultural change within organizations. Because like we talked about Justin there, nobody has extra time to waste on anything these days. >>The good news is there's that imperative, right? Every business is a digital business. We found that our technology leaders, right, the top 10% investors in digital, they are outperforming are the laggards. So before pandemic, it's times to post pep devek times five, so there's a need to change. And so data is really the heart of the company. That's how you unlock your technical debt into technical wealth. And so really using cloud and technologies like Starburst and data virtualization is how we can actually do that. >>And so how do you, Justin, how does Starburst help organizations transfer that technical debt or reduce it? How does the D how does the data much help facilitate that? Because we talk about technical debt and it can, it can really add up. >>Yeah, well, a lot of people use us, uh, or think about us as an abstraction layer above the different data sources that they have. So they may have legacy data sources today. Um, then maybe they want to move off of over time, um, could be classical data, warehouses, other classical, uh, relational databases, perhaps they're moving to the cloud. And by leveraging Starburst as this abstraction, they can query the data that they have today, while in the background, moving data into the cloud or moving it into the new data stores that they want to utilize. And it sort of hides that complexity. It decouples the end user experience, the business analyst, the data scientists from where the data lives. And I think that gives people a lot of freedom and a lot of optionality. And I think, you know, the only constant is change. Um, and so creating an architecture that can stand the test of time, I think is really, really important. >>Absolutely. Speaking of change, I just saw the announcement about Starburst galaxy fully managed SAS platform now available in all three major clouds. Of course, here we are at AWS. This is a, is this a big directional shift for servers? >>It is, you know, uh, I think there's great precedent within open source enterprise software companies like Mongo DB or confluent who started with a self managed product, much the way that we did, and then moved in the direction of creating a SAS product, a cloud hosted, fully managed product that really I think, expands the market. And that's really essentially what we're doing with galaxy galaxy is designed to be as easy as possible. Um, you know, Starburst was already powerful. This makes it powerful and easy. And, uh, and, and in our view, can, can hopefully expand the market to thousands of potential customers that can now leverage this technology in a, in a faster, easier way, >>Just in sticking with you for a minute. Talk to me about kind of where you're going in, where services heading in terms of support for the data mesh architecture across industries. >>Yeah. So a couple of things that we've, we've done recently, and whether we're doing, uh, as we speak, one is, uh, we introduced a new capability. We call star gate. Now star gate is a connector between Starburst clusters. So you're going to have a Starbucks cluster, and let's say Azure service cluster in AWS, a Starbucks cluster, maybe an AWS west and AWS east. And this basically pushes the processing to where the data lives. So again, living within this construct of, uh, of decentralized data that a data mesh is all about, this allows you to do that at an even greater level of abstraction. So it doesn't even matter what cloud region the data lives in or what cloud entirely it lives in. And there are a lot of important applications for this, not only latency in terms of giving you fast, uh, ability to join across those different clouds, but also, uh, data sovereignty constraints, right? >>Um, increasingly important, especially in Europe, but increasingly everywhere. And, you know, if your data isn't Switzerland, it needs to stay in Switzerland. So starting date as a way of pushing the processing to Switzerland. So you're minimizing the data that you need to pull back to complete your analysis. And, uh, and so we think that's a big deal about, you know, kind of enabling a data mash on a, on a global scale. Um, another thing we're working on back to the point of data products is how do customers curate and create these data products and share them within their organization. And so we're investing heavily in our product to make that easier as well, because I think back to one of the things, uh, Theresa said, it's, it's really all about, uh, making this practical and finding quick wins that customers can deploy, deploy in their data mess journey, right? >>This quick wins are key. So Theresa, last question to you, where should companies go to get started today? Obviously everybody has gotten, we're still in this work from anywhere environment. Companies have tons of data, tons of sources of data, did it, infrastructure's already in place. How did they go and get started with data? >>I think they should start looking at their data projects and thinking about the best data products. I think just that mindset shift about thinking about who's this for what's the business value. And then underneath that architecture and support comes to bear. And then thinking about who are the products that your product could work better with just like any other practice partnerships, like what we have with AWS, right? Like that's a stronger together sort of thing, >>Right? So there's that kind of that cultural component that really strategic shift in thinking and on the architecture. Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining me on the program, coming back on the cube at re-invent talking about data mesh really help. You can help organizations and industry put that together and what's going on at service. We appreciate your time. Thanks again. All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. The cube is the leader in global live tech coverage. We'll be right back.

>>Welcome back to the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin pleased to be here in person. We are actually with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners running. One of the industry's largest and most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've got two life sets over a hundred guests to remote studios. I'm pleased to welcome two guests from Laos here with me. Next, Derek is here, the VP and director of digital modernization and David chow, the director of cloud capabilities, Derek and David. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having us great to be here in person. Isn't it? >>Absolutely. Last year we missed out. So if we've got to get it all in this week. >>Exactly and well, this is day one and the amount of people that are in here, there's a lot of noise in the background. I'm sure the audience can hear it is, is really nice. AWS has done such a great job of getting us all in here. Nice and safely. So let's go ahead and start. Light is coming off a very strong Q3. When we look at the things that have happened, nearly all defense and classified customers are engaged in digital modernization efforts. We've seen so much acceleration of that in the last 20 months, but let's talk about some of the current challenges Derek that customers are facing across operations sustainment with respect to the need to modernize. >>Sure, sure thing. Um, so over the past two years, we spent a better part of all that time, trying to really figure out what are our customers' hardest problems. And, you know, that's across the health vertical, the DOD vertical, uh, the Intel vertical, uh, you name it. We spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. And we kept coming up on three reoccurring themes, one, which is the explosion of data. There's so much data being generated across our customer's environments. Um, there's not enough human brain power to deal with it. All right. So we need to be able to apply technology in a way that reduces the cognitive burden on operators who must do operations and sustainment to get to a business outcome. Uh, the second one and most importantly for us is advanced cyber threats. We've all heard about the colonial pipeline hack. >>We've heard about solar winds. The scary part about that is what about the hacks that we don't know about? Right. And that's something that here at lighthouse, we're really focused on applying technology, cyber AIML in a way that we can detect when someone's in our environments or in our customer environments. And then we can opt out, obviously, um, do some remediation and get them out of our environment. So mission operations are not compromised. And then lastly, customer environments are heterogeneous. You have cloud, you have on-premise infrastructure. Uh, you have edge devices, IOT devices. It's very difficult to be able to do management and orchestration over all these different devices, all the different platforms that are out there. So working in concert with AWS, we build a solution to be able to do just that, which we'll talk about a little later, David, anything else that you want to, >>We talked about the explosion of data, the cybersecurity landscape changing dramatically, and the customers needing to be able to modernize and leverage the power of technology. Yeah, >>So our customers, uh, we have basically three areas that we see our customers having challenges in. And one of them, once they get to the cloud, they don't have the transparency on cost and usage, right. Uh, when you get the engineers are excited, the mission is exploded with extra activities. Um, but our customers don't have a sense on where the cost is going and how that relates to their mission, right? So we help them figure out, okay, your, your cost is going up, which is fine because it's applying to your mission and it's helping you actually be more successful than before. Right? And the other area is, uh, they need, uh, a multi-platform strategy that doesn't impact their existing conditions, right? They don't have the practicality or the funding that's required to just rip and replace everything. And you can't do that. You have to maintain your mission. >>If you have to maintain about a lot of critical capability that they already have, but at the same time, figure out how am I going to add the extensions and the new capabilities, right? And we have certain ways that we can do that to allow them to start getting into the cloud, leveraging a lot of additional capability that they never had before, but maintaining the investment that they've done in the past years to maintain their mission success. Right. Uh, and then the third is skill up-skilling. So we found that a lot of people have a hard time. Once we move them into AWS, specifically their operational duties and things change. And there's a big gap there in terms of training, uh, getting familiar with how that impacts their process and methodology, and that that's where we helped them a lot, uh, modify that revolution and how they do that stuff. >>That's excellent. That upskilling is critical, as things are changing so dramatically, we have, you talked about data and the cybersecurity changes Derek. And you know, every company, every branch of the federal is probably a data company or data organization, or if it's not, it has to become one. But the cyber threats are crazy. The things that have been going on in the last 20 months, the acceleration of ransomware, ransomware as a service, you talked about colonial, like we only hear about the big ones, but how many it's no longer a will we get hit by ransomware? Or will we be hacked? It's when, talk to me about some of those, about those challenges and also the need to be able to deliver real-time data as real-time missions are going on in that real-time is now no longer a nice to have. >>Right? So, um, it's a great question. And one of the things that I'll say is there's some studies out there that said 75% of the computing, uh, that will be happening over the next 10 years will be at the edge, right? So we're not going to be able to go at the edge, collect all this data, ship it back to a centralized way to process it. We're not going to be able to do that. What we have to do is take capability that may have been clouded, able push that capability to the edge. Where did that be? AI ML. It could be your mission applications, and we need to be able to exploit data in near real time, um, to which allows us to make mission critical decisions at the point of need. There's not going to be enough time to collect a big swath of data, move it back across a bandwidth that is temporarily constrained. In many cases, we just can't do it that way. So I think moving as much capability to the edge as possible in order for us to be able to make an impact in near real time, that's what we need to do across all of our verticals, not just DOD, but on the healthcare side to the Intel side, you name it. We gotta be able to move capability as far forward as >>Possible. And where Derek with you for a minute, where are those verticals with respect to embracing that, adopting that being ready to be able to take on those technologies? Because culturally, I can imagine, you know, legacy his story, history organizations to change his heart >>Change is hard. Um, and one of the strategies that we've tried to implement within that context is that the legacy systems, the culture that is already out there, we're not just going to be able to turn all of that off, right. We're going to have to make sure that the new capabilities and the legacy systems co-exist. So that's one of the reasons that we have an approach where we use microservices, very much API driven, such that, uh, you know, a mission critical system that may have been online for the last 20 years. We're not just going to turn it off, but what we can do is start to build sidecar capabilities, microservices, to extend that capability of that system without rebuilding it, we can't build our way out of all the technical debt. What we can do is figure out how do we need to extend this capability to get to a mission need and build a microservices. That's very thin. That's very lightweight. And that's how you start to connect the dots between your mission applications, the data, the data centricity that we talked about and other capabilities that need access to data, to be able to effectuate a decision. >>You make it sound so easy. Derek, >>It's certainly not easy, but in working with AWS, we really have taken this forward and we're really deploying, uh, similar capabilities today. Um, so it's really the way that we have to modernize. We have to be able to do it step by step strangle out the old as we bring in the new right. >>So David, let's talk about the AWS partnership, what you guys are doing as the critical importance of being able to help the verticals modernize at speed at scale in real time. Talk to me about what Leidos and AWS are doing together. >>So we work with Adobe very closely, um, for every engagement we have with our customers, we have AWS as our side, we do the reviews of, of their architecture and their approach. We take, we take into account the data strategy of the organization as long along with their cloud, uh, because we found that you have to combine their cloud and their data strategy because of the volumes of data that Derrick talked about, right. That they needed to integrate. And so we come up with a custom strategy and a roadmap for them to adopt that without like Derek said, um, deprecating any old capabilities that currently have any extending it out into, into the cloud so that those areas are what we strive to get them through. And we talk about a lot about the digital enterprise and how that is for us from light of this point of view, we see that as building an API ecosystem for our customer, right? Because the API is really the key. And if you look at companies like Twilio that have an API first approach, that's, what's allowed them to integrate very old technology like telephones into the new cloud, right? So that approach is really the unique approach that was taken with our customers for to see the success that we've seen. >>Well, can you tell me, David's sticking with you for a minute about upscaling. I know that AWS has a big focus on that. It's got a restart program for helping folks that were unemployed during the pandemic or underemployed, but the upskilling, as we talked about during this interview is incredibly important. As things change are changing so quickly, is there any sort of upskilling kind of partnerships that you're doing with AWS that you, >>Uh, so as a partner, we ourselves get a lot of free upskilling and training, uh, as AWS from your partner. Um, but also with our customers, we're able to customize and build specific training plans and curriculums that is targeted specifically for the operators, right? They don't come from a technology background like we do, but they come from a mission background so we can modify and understand what they need to learn and what they don't really need to worry about so much and just target exactly what they need to do. So they can just do their day-to-day jobs and their duties for the mission. >>That's what it's all about. Derek, can you share an example that you think really speaks volumes to light us and AWS together to help customers modernize? >>One thing I like about AWS is that the partnership is what we describe as a deep technical partnership. It's not just transactional. It's not like, Hey, buy this X services and we'll, we'll do this. I have a great example of this year. We kicked off a pilot with an army customer and we actually leveraged AWS pro. So we were literally building a proof of concept together. So in 90 days, what we, what we did was get the customer to understand we're moving more to native AWS services, EMR, uh, to be more specific that you can save money on tons of licensing costs that you otherwise would have had to pay for it. After the pilot was over, we recognized that we will save the government $1.2 million and they have now said, yes, let's go AWS native, which is, uh, which is, uh, a methodology that we still want to stamp out and use continually because the more and more that you adopt that native services, you're going to be able to move faster. Because as soon as you deploy a system, it's already legacy. When you start to do the native services, as things more services come online, we're sort of their glue where to make sure those things that are coming, the services that are AWS are deploying out, we'd bring, we, we then bring that innovation into our customer environment. So saving a customer, the government $1.2 million at a big deal for us. >>It's huge. And I'm sure you there's, that's one of many examples of significant outcomes that you're helping the verticals achieve. Absolutely. >>Yeah. One of our >>Core focuses. That's excellent. And also to do it so quickly and 90 days to be able to show the army a significant savings is a, is a huge, uh, kudos to, to Linus and to AWS. David, talk to me a little bit about the, from a partnership perspective, how do you guys go into a joint organizations together? I imagine one of the most important things is that transparency from the verticals perspective, whether it's DOD or health or Intel, talk to me about that, that kind of unified partnership. And what is the customer and customer experience? I imagine one team. >>Yes. So we go into, we engage with our AWS counterparts at the very beginning of an engagement. So they have their dedicated teams. We have our dedicated teams and we are fully transparent with each other, what the customers are facing. And we both focus on the customer pain points, right? What was really going to drive the customer. Um, and that's how we sort of approach the customer. So the customer sees us as a single team. Uh, we do things like we'll build out what we call the well-architected framework or wafer for short, right. And that allows us to make sure that we're leveraging all the best practices from AWS, from their clients on the commercial side. And we can leverage that into the government, right. They can get a lot of learnings and lessons learned that they don't have to repeat because some of the commercial cupboard companies who are ahead of us have I've done the hard learning, right. And we can incorporate that into their mission and into their operations. >>That's critical because there isn't the time. Right? I think that's one of the things that Penn has taught us is that there isn't there, like we talked about real-time data, there is, it's no longer a nice to have, right. But even from a training and from a deployment perspective that needs to be done incredibly efficiently with, we're talking about probably large groups of people. I imagine with Leidos folks, AWS folks, and the verticals. So that coordination between, I imagine what are probably two fairly culturally aligned organizations is critical. No. >>Yeah. One of the things that we put in places, this idea of bachelors environment, so that means you could be a Leidos person. You could be an AWS person, there's no badge. We're just sitting there, we're here to do good work, to bring value to a customer. And that's something that's really fantastic about our relationship that we do have. So every week we are literally building things together and that's, that's what the government, that's what the public sector folks expect. No, one's not gonna own it all. You have to be able to work together to be able to bring value to our customers across all the verticals that >>I like. That badge list environment, that's critical for organizations to work together. Harmoniously given there's as the data explosion just continues as does the edge explosion and the IOT device explosion more and more complexity comes into the environment. So that Badger less environment I met David from your perspective is really critical to the success of every mission that you're working on. >>Yeah. I mean, I think the badge approaches is critical without it, the existing teams have a hard time building that trust and being, and feeling like we're part of that team, right? Trust is really important in, in mission success. And so when we enter a new arena, we try to get, build that trust as quickly as we can show them that, you know, we're there to help them with their mission. And we're not really there for anything else. So they feel comfortable to share, you know, the really deep pain points that they're not really sharing all the time. And that's what allows Leidos specifically to, to really be successful with them because they share all their skeletons and we don't judge them. Right. We've say, okay, here's your problems. Here's some solutions. And here are the pros and cons and we figure out a solution together, right. It's a really built together sort of mindset that makes us successful. Okay. >>Togetherness as key, last question, guys, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and feel and see, and smell from Leidos this week at reinvent? >>We want to take that one. >>Um, yeah. So with Leidos, um, we're around, we have, uh, various custom, uh, processes with AWS, uh, because of our peer partnership. We have the MSSP that we just got as a launch partner. So there's a lot of interaction that we have with AWS. Um, anytime that AWS sees that there is opportunity for us to talk to a customer and talk to potential vendor, they'll pull us in. So if you guys come by the booth and you need to talk to an SSI, they'll, they'll pull us in and we'll have those conversations. >>Excellent guys, thank you so much for joining me, talking about Leidos, AWS, what you guys are doing together and how you're helping transform government. You make it sound easy. Like I said, Derek, I know that it's not, but it's great to hear the transparency with which guys are all working. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the leader in global live tech coverage.

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. This year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two life studios, two remote studios, and over 100 guests. So stick around as we talk about the next 10 years of cloud innovation, I'm very excited to be joined by another Lisa from Zscaler. Lisa Lorenzen is here with me, the field CTO for the Americas. She's here to talk about ZScaler's mission to make doing business and navigating change a simpler, faster, and more productive experience. Lisa, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So let's talk about Zscaler in AWS. Talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing together. >>Yeah, definitely. Z scaler is a strategic security ISV partner with AWS. So we provide AWS customers with zero trust, secure remote access to AWS, and this can improve their security posture as well as their user experience with AWS. These scaler recently announced that we are the first and only cloud security service to achieve the FedRAMP PI authorization to operate. And that FedRAMP ZPA service is built on AWS gov cloud. ZScaler's also an AWS marketplace seller where our customers can purchase our zero trust exchange services as well as request or high value security assessments. We're excited about that as we're seeing a rapid increase in customer adoption as these scaler via the AWS marketplace, we vetted our software on AWS edge services that support emerging use cases, including 5g, IOT, and OT. So for example, Zscaler runs on wavelength, outposts, snowball and snowcones, and Zscaler has strategic partnerships with leading AWS service providers and system integration partners, including Verizon NTT, BT, Accenture, Deloitte, and many of the leading national and regional AWS consulting partners. >>Great summary there. So you mentioned something I want to get more understanding on this. It sounds like it's a differentiator for CSO scale. You said that you guys recently announced to the first and only cloud security service to achieve FedRAMP high. Uh, ATO built on AWS gov cloud. Talk to me about and what the significance of that is. >>I L five authorization to operate means that we are able to protect federal assets for the department of defense, as well as for the civilian agencies. It just extends the certification of our cloud by the government to ensure that we meet all of the requirements to protect that military side of the house, as well as the civilian side of the house. >>Got it super important there, let's talk about zero trust. It's a super hot topic. We've seen so many changes to the threat landscape during the pandemic. How are some of the ways that Z scaler and AWS are helping customers tackle this together? >>Well, I'd actually like to answer that by telling a little bit of a story. Um, Growmark is one of our Z scaler and AWS success stories when they had to send everyone home to work from home overnight, the quote that we had from is the users just went home and nothing changed. ZPA made work from anywhere, just work, and they were able to maintain complete business continuity. So even though their employers might have had poor internet service at home, or, you know, 80 challenging infrastructure, if you've got kids on your wifi bunch of kids in the neighborhood doing remote school, everyone's working from home, you don't have the reliability or the, maybe the bandwidth capacity that you would when you're sitting in an office. And Zscaler private access is a cloud delivered zero trust solution that leverages dynamic resilient, TLS encrypted tunnels to connect the user to an application rather than putting an end point on a network. >>And the reason that's important is it makes for a much more reliable and resilient service, even in environments that may not have the best connectivity I live out in the county. I really, some days think that there's a hamster on a wheel somewhere in my cable modem network, and I am a consumer of this, right. I connect to Z scaler over Zscaler private access, I'm protected by Zscaler internet access. And so I access our internal applications that are running in AWS as well this way. And it makes a huge difference. Growmark really started with an SAP migration to AWS, and this was long before the pandemic. So they started out looking for that better user experience and the zero trust capability. They were able to ensure that their SAP environment was dark to the internet, even though it was running in the cloud. And that put them in this position to leverage that zero trust service when the pandemic was upon us, >>That ability or that quote that you mentioned, it just worked was absolutely critical for all of us in every industry. And I'm sure a lot of folks who were trying to manage working from home, the spouses from home kids doing, you know, school online also felt like you with the hamster on the wheel, I'm sure their internet access, but being able to have that business continuity was table-stakes especially early on for most organizations. We saw a lot of digital transformation, a lot of acceleration of it in the last 20 months during the pandemic. Talk to me about how Z scaler helps customers from a digital transformation perspective and maybe what some of the things were that you saw in the last 20 months that have accelerated >>Absolutely. Um, another example, there would be Jefferson health, and really, as we saw during the pandemic, as you say, it accelerated a lot of the existing trends of mobility, but also migration to the cloud. And when you move applications to the cloud, honestly, it's a complex environment and maybe the controls and the risk landscape is not as well. Understood. So Z scaler also has another solution, which is our cloud security posture management. And this is really ensuring that your configuration on your environment, that those workloads run in is controlled, understood correctly, coordinated and configured. So as deference and health migrated to the cloud first model, they were able to leverage the scalers workload posture to measure and control that risk. Again, it's environment where the combination of AWS and Z scaler together gives them a flexible, resilient solution that they can be confident is correctly configured and thoroughly locked down. >>And that's critical for businesses in any organization, especially as quickly as how quickly things changed in the last 20 months or so I do wonder how your customer conversations have has changed as I introduced you as the field CTO of the America's proceeds killer. I'm sure you talk with a lot of customers. How has the security posture, um, zero trust? How has that risen up within the organizational chain? Is that something that the board is concerned about? >>My gosh, yes. And zero trust really has gone through the Gartner hype cycle. You've got the introduction, the peak of interest, the trough of despair, and then really rising back into what's actually feasible. Only zero trust has done that on a timeline of over a decade. When the term was first introduced, I was working with firewall VPN enact technology, and frankly, we didn't necessarily have the flexibility, the scalability, or the resilience to offer true zero trust. You can try to do that with network security controls, but when you're really protecting a user connecting to an application, you've got an abstraction layer mismatch. What we're seeing now is the reemergence of zero trust as a priority. And this was greatly accelerated honestly by the cybersecurity executive order that came out a few months ago from the Biden administration, which made zero trust a priority for the federal government and the public sector, but also raised visibility on zero trust for the private sector as well. >>When we're looking at zero trust as a way to perhaps ward off some of these high profile breaches and outages like the colonial pipeline, whole situation that was based on some legacy technology for remote access that was exploited and led to a breach that they had to take their entire infrastructure offline to mitigate. If we can look at more modern delivery mechanisms and more sophisticated controls for zero trust, that helps the board address a number of challenges ranging from obviously risk management, but also agility and cost reduction in an environment where more than ever belts are being tightened. New ways of delivering applications are being considered. But the ability to innovate is more important than ever. >>It is more important than ever the ability to innovate, but it really changing security landscape. I'm glad to hear that you're seeing, uh, this change as a result of the executive order that president Biden put down in the summer. That's good news. It sounds like there's some progress being made there, but we saw, you mentioned colonial pipeline. We saw a lot in the last 20, 22 months or so with ransomware becoming a household word, also becoming something that is a matter of when companies in any industry get hit and versus if it's no longer kind of that choice anymore. So talk to me about some of the threats and some of the stats that Z scaler has seen particularly in the last 20, 22 months. >>Oh gosh. Well, let's see. I'm just going to focus on the last 12 months, cause that's really where we've got some of the best data. We've seen a 500% increase in ransomware delivered over encrypted channels. And what that means is it's really critical to have scalable SSL inspection that can operate at wire speed without impeding the user experience or delay in critical projects, server communications, activities that need to happen without any introduced in any additional latency. So if you think about what that takes the Z scaler internet access solution is protecting users, outbound access in the same way that Zscaler private access protects access to private resources. So we're really seeing more and more organizations seeing that both of these services are necessary to deliver a comprehensive zero trust. You have to protect and control the outbound traffic to make sure that nothing good leaks out, nothing bad sneaks in. >>And at the same time, you have to protect and control the inbound traffic and inbound is, you know, a much broader definition with apps in the data center in the cloud these days. We're also seeing that 30% of malware is delivered through trusted applications like file shares or collaboration tools. So it's no longer enough to only inspect web traffic. Now you have to be able to really inspect all flavors of traffic when you're doing that outbound protection. So another good example where Z scaler and AWS work together here is in Amazon workspaces. And there's a huge trend towards desktop as a service, for example, and organizations are starting to recognize that they need to protect both the user experience and also the connectivity onward in Amazon workspaces, the same way that they would for a traditional end user device. So we see Z scaler running in the Amazon workspaces instances to protect that outbound traffic and control that inbound traffic as well. >>Another big area is the ransomware infections are not the problem. It's the result. So over half of the ransomware infections include data theft or leakage. And that is a double whammy because you get what's called double extortion where not only do you have to pay to unlock your machines, but you have to pay not to have that stolen data exposed to the rest of the world. So it's more important than ever to be able to break that kill chain as early as possible to ensure that the or the server traffic itself isn't exposed to the initial infection vector. If you do happen to get an infection vector that sneaks through, you need to be able to control the lateral movement so that it doesn't spread in your environment. And then if both of those controls fail, you also need the outbound protection such as CASBY and DLP to ensure that even if they get into the environment, they can't exfiltrate any of the data that they find as a result. We're seeing that the largest security risk today is lateral movement inside the corporate network. And that's one of the things that makes these ransomware double extortion situations, such a problem. >>Last question for you. And we've got about a minute left. I'm curious, you said over 50% of ransomware attacks are now double extortion. How do you guys help customers combat that? So >>We really deliver a solution that eliminates a lot of the attack surface and a lot of the risks. We have no inbound listener, unlike a traditional VPN. So the outbound only connections mean you don't have the external attack surface. You can write these granular policy controls to eliminate lateral movement. And because we integrate with customer's existing identity and access management, we can eliminate the credential exposure that can lead to a larger spread in a compromised environment. We also can eliminate the problem of unpatched gateways, which led to things like colonial pipeline or some of the other major breaches we've seen recently. And we can remove that single point of failure. So you can rely on dynamic optimized traffic distribution for all of these secure services. Basically, what we're trying to do is make it simpler and more secure at the same time, >>Simpler and more secure at the same time is what everyone needs regardless of industry. Lisa, thank you for joining me today, talking about Zscaler in AWS, zero trust the threat landscape that you're seeing, and also how's the scaler and AWS together can help customers mitigate those growing risks. We appreciate your insights and your thoughtfulness. >>Thank you >>For Lisa Lorenzen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent stick around more great content coming up next.

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the eighth year of AWS re:Invent. It's 2019. There's over 60,000 in attendance. Seventh year of theCUBE. Wall-to-wall coverage, covering all the angles of this broad and massively-growing ecosystem. I am Stu Miniman. My co-host is Justin Warren, and one of our Cube alumni are back on the program. Ramin Sayar, who is the president and CEO of Sumo Logic. >> Stu: Booth always at the front of the expo hall. I think anybody that's come to this show has one of the Sumo-- >> Squishies. >> Stu: Squish dolls there. I remember a number of years you actually had live sumos-- >> Again this year. >> At the event, so you know, bring us, the sixth year you've been at the show, give us a little bit of the vibe and your experience so far. >> Yeah, I mean, naturally when you've been here so many times, it's interesting to be back, not only as a practitioner who's attended this many years ago, but now as a partner of AWS, and seeing not only our own community growth in terms of Sumo Logic, but also the community in general that we're here to see. You know, it's a good mix of practitioners and business folks from DevOps to security and much, much more, and as we were talking right before the show, the vendors here are so different now then it was three years go, let alone six years ago. So, it's nice to see. >> All right, a lot of news from Amazon. Anything specific jump out from you from their side, or I know Sumo Logic has had some announcements this week. >> Yeah, I mean, like, true to Amazon, there's always a lot of announcements, and, you know, what we see is customers need time to understand and digest that. There's a lot of confusion, but, you know, selfishly speaking from the Sumo side, you know, we continue to be a strong AWS partner. We announced another set of services along with AWS at this event. We've got some new competencies for container, because that's a big aspect of what customers are doing today with microservices, and obviously we announced some new capabilities around our security intelligence capabilities, specifically for CloudTrail, because that's becoming a really important aspect of a lot of customers maturation of cloud and also operating in the cloud in this new world. >> Justin: So walk us through what customers are using CloudTrail to do, and how the Sumo Logic connection to CloudTrail actually helps them with what they're trying to do. >> Well, first and foremost, it's important to understand what Sumo does and then the context of CloudTrail and other services. You know, we started roughly a decade ago with AWS, and we built and intelligence platform on top of AWS that allows us to deal with the vast amount of unstructured data in specific use cases. So one very common use case, very applicable to the users here, is around the DevOps teams. And so, the DevOps teams are having a much more complicated and difficult time today understanding, ascertaining, where trouble, where problems reside, and how to go troubleshoot those. It's not just about a siloed monitoring tool. That's just not enough. It doesn't the analytics or intelligence. It's about understanding all the data, from CloudTrail, from EC2, and non-AWS services, so you can appropriately understand these new modern apps that are dependent on these microservices and architectures, and what's really causing the performance issue, the availability issue, and, God forbid, a security or breach issue, and that's a unique thing that Sumo provides unlike others here. >> Justin: Yeah, now I believe you've actually extended the Sumo support beyond CloudTrail and into some of the Kubernetes services that Amazon offers like AKS, and you also, I believe it's ESC FireLens support? >> Ramin: Yeah, so, and that's just a continuation of a lot of stuff we've done with respect to our analytics platform, and, you know, we introduced some things earlier this year at re:Inforce with AWS as well so, around VPC Flow Logs and the like, and this is a continuation now for CloudTrail. And really what it helps our customers and end users do is better better and more proactively be able to detect potential issues, respond to those security issues, and more importantly, automate the resolution process, and that's what's really key for our users, because they're inundated with false positives all the time whether it's on the ops side let alone the security side. So Sumo Logic is very unique back to our value prop, but providing a horizontal platform across all these different use cases. One being ops, two being cybersecurity and threat, and three being line-of-business users who are trying to understand what their own users on their digital apps are doing with their services and how to better deliver value. >> Justin: Now, automation is so important when you've got this scope and scale of cloud and the pace of innovation that's happening with all the technology that's around us here at the show, so the automation side of things I think is a little bit underappreciated this year. We're talking about transformation and we're talking about AI and ML. I think, with the automation piece, is one thing that's a little bit underestimated from this year's show. What do you think about that? >> Yeah, I mean, our philosophy all along has been, you can't automate without AI and ML, and it's proven fact that, you know, by next year the machine data growth is going to be 16 zettabytes. By 2025, it's going to be 75 zettabytes of data. Okay, while that's really impressive in terms of volume of data, the challenge is, the tsunami of data that's being generated, how to go decipher what's an important aspect and what's not an important aspect, so you first have to understand from the streaming data services, how to be able to dynamically and schema on read, be able to analyze that data, and then be able to put in context to those use cases I talked about, and then to drive automation remediation, so it's a multifaceted problem that we've been solving for nearly a decade. In a given day, we're analyzing several hundred petabytes of data, right? And we're trying to distill it down to the most important aspects for you, for your particular role and your responsibility. >> Stu: Yeah, um, we've talked a lot about transformation at this show, and one of the big challenges for customers is, they're going through that application modernization journey. I wonder if you could bring us inside some of your customers, you know, where are they having success, where are some of the bottlenecks slowing them down from moving along on this transformation journey? >> Yeah, so, it's interesting because, whether you're a cloud-native company like Sumo Logic or you're aspiring to be a cloud-native company or a cloud-first project going through migration, you have similar problems. It's now become a machine-scale problem, not a human-scale problem, back to the data growth, right? And so, some of our customers, regardless of their maturation, are really trying to understand, you know, as they embark on these digital transformations, how do they solve, what we call, the intelligence gap? And that is, because there's so much silos across the enterprise organizations today, across development, operations, IT, security, lines of business, in its context, in its completeness, it's creating more complexity for our customers. So, what Sumo tries to help solve, do, is, solve that intelligence gap in this new intelligence economy by providing an intelligence platform we call "continuous intelligence". So what do customers do? So, some of our customers use Sumo to monitor and troubleshoot their cloud workloads. So whether it's, you know, the Netflix team themselves, right, because they're born and bred in the cloud or it's Hudl, who's trying to provide, you know, analytics and intelligence for players and coaches, right, to insurance companies that are going through the migration journey to the cloud, Hartford Insurance, New York Life, to sports and media companies, Major League Baseball, with the whole cyber SOC, and what they're trying to do there on the backs of Sumo, to even trucking companies like Packard, who's trying to do driverless, autonomous cars. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, everyone is trying to do through the digital transformation or be disrupted. Everyone's trying to gain that intelligence or not just be left behind but be lapped, and so what Sumo really helps them do is provide one single intelligence platform across dev, sec, and ops, bringing these teams together to be able to collaborate much more efficiently and effectively through the true multi-tenant SaaS platform that we've optimized for 10 years on AWS. >> Justin: So we heard from Andy yesterday that one of the important ways to drive that transformational change is to actually have the top-down support for that. So you mentioned that you're able to provide that one layer across multiple different teams who traditionally haven't worked that well together, so what are you seeing with customers around, when they put in Sumo Logic, where does that transformational change come from? Are we seeing the top-down driven change? Is that were customers come from, or is it a little bit more bottom-up, were you have developers and operations and security all trying to work together, and then that bubbles up to the rest of the organization? >> Ramin: Well, it's interesting, it's both for us because a lot of times, it depends on the size of the organization, where the responsibilities reside, so naturally, in a larger enterprise where there's a lot of forces of mass because of the different siloed organizations, you have to, often times, start with the CISO, and we make sure the CISO is a transformation agent, and if they are the transformation agent, then we partner with them to really help get a handle and control on their cybersecurity and threat, and then he or she typically sponsors us into other parts of the line of business, the DevOps teams, like, for example, we've seen with Hartford Insurance, right, or that we saw with F5 Networks and many more. But then, there's a flip side of that where we actually start in, let's use another example, uh, you know, with, for example, Hearst Media, right. They actually started because they were doing a lift-and-shift to the cloud and their DevOps team, in one line of business, started with Sumo, and expanded the usage and growth. They migrated 32 applications over to AWS, and then suddenly the security teams got wind of it and then we went top-down. Great example of starting, you know, bottom-up in the case of Hearst or top-down in the case of other examples. So, the trick here is, as we look at embarking upon these journeys with our customers, we try to figure out which technology partners are they using. It's not only in the cloud provider, but it's also which traditional on-premise tools versus potentially cloud-native services and SaaS applications they're adopting. Second is, which sort of organizational models are they adopting? So, a lot of people talk about DevOps. They don't practice DevOps, and then you can understand that very quickly by asking them, "What tools are you using?" "Are you using GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory?" "Are you using all these other tools, "and how are you actually getting visibility "into your pipeline, and is that actually speeding "the delivery of services and digital applications, "yes or no?" It's a very binary answer, and if they can't answer that, you know they're aspiring to be. So therefore, it's a consultative sale for us in that mode. If they're already embarking upon that, however, then we use a different approach, where we're trying to understand how they're challenged, what they're challenged with, and show other customers, and then it's really more of a partnership. Does that makes sense? >> Justin: Yeah, makes perfect sense to me. >> So, one of the debates we had coming into this show is, a lot of discussion at multicloud around the industry. Of course, Amazon doesn't talk specifically about multicloud all that well. If you look historically, attempts to manage lots of different environments under a single pane of glass, we always say, "pane is spelled P-I-A-N", when you try to do that. There's been great success. If you look at VMware in the data center, VMware didn't cover the entire environment, but vCenter was the center of your, you know, admin's world, and you would edge cases to manage some of the other environments here. Feels that AWS is extending their footprint with thing like Outposts and the environments, but there are lots of things that won't be on Amazon, whether it be a second cloud provider, my legacy data center pieces, or anything else there. Sounds like you touch many of the pieces, so I'm curious if you, just, weigh in on what you hear from customers, how they get their arms around the heterogeneous mess that IT traditionally is, and what we need to do as an industry to make things better. >> You know, for a long time, many companies have been bi-modal, and now they're tri-modal, right, meaning that, you know, they have their traditional and their new aspects of IT. Now they're tri-modal in the sense of, now they have a third leg of that complexity in stool, which is public cloud, and so, it's a reality regardless of Amazon or GCP or Azure, that customers want flexibility and choice, and if fact, we see that with our own data. Every year, as you guys well know, we put out an intelligence report that actually shows year-over-year, the adoption of not only various technologies, but adoption of technologies used across one cloud provider versus multicloud providers, and earlier this year in September when we put the new release of the report out, we saw that year-over-year, there was more than 2x growth in the user of Kubernetes in production, and it was almost three times growth year-over-year in use of Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers. That tells you something. That tells you that they don't want lock-in. That tells you that they also want choice. That tells you that they're trying to abstract away from the IaaS layer, infrastructure-as-a-service layer, so they have portability, so to speak, across different types of providers for the different types of workload needs as well as the data sovereignty needs they have to constantly manage because of regulatory requirements, compliance requirements and the like. And so, this is actually it benefits someone like Sumo to provide that agnostic platform to customers so they can have the choice, but also most importantly, the value, and this is something that we announced also at this event where we introduced editions to our Cloud Flex licensing model that allows you to not only address multi-tiers of data, but also allows you to have choice of where you run those workloads and have choice for different types of data for different types of use cases at different cost models. So again, delivering on that need for customers to have flexibility and choice, as well as, you know, the promise of options to move workloads from provider to provider without having to worry about the headache of compliance and audit and security requirements, 'cause that's what Sumo uniquely does versus point tools. >> Well, Ramin, I think that's a perfect point to end on. Thank you so much for joining us again. >> Thanks for having me. >> Stu: And looking forward to catching up with Sumo in the future. >> Great to be here. >> All right, we're at the midway point of three days, wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas. AWS re:Invent 2019. He's Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the queue from Las Vegas. We are live at AWS reinvent 19 Lisa Martin with John furrier. We've been having lots of great conversations. John, we're about to have another one cause we always love to talk about customer proof in the putting. Please welcome a couple of guests. We have Rafael, director of analytics and data management from triple a life. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Our pleasure. And from Burkle anchor Jane, the SVP of cloud platforms. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. So here we are in this, I can't see of people around us as, as growing exponential a by the hour here, but awkward. Let's start with you give her audience an understanding of Merkel, who you are and what you do. >>Yeah, absolutely. So Marco is a global performance marketing agency. We are part of a dental agent network and a, it's almost about 9,000 to 10,000 people worldwide. It's a global agency. What differentiates Merkel from rest of the other marketing agencies is our deep roots and data driven approach. We embrace technology. It's embedded in all our, all our solutions that we take to market. Um, and that's what we pride ourselves with. So, um, that's basically a high level pitch about Merkel. What differentiates us, my role, uh, I lead the cloud transformation for Merkel. Um, uh, basically think of my team as the think tanks who bring in the new technology, come up with a new way of rolling out solutions product I solutions, uh, disruptive solutions, which helps our clients and big fortune brands such as triple life insurance, uh, to transform their marketing ecosystem. >>So let's go ahead and dig. A lot of folks probably know AAA life, but, but Raphael, give us a little bit of an overview. This is a 50 year old organization. >>So we celebrate our 50th 50 year anniversary this year. Actually, we're founded in 1969. So everybody life insurance, we endeavor to be the provider of choice for a AAA member. Tell them to protect what matters most to them. And we offer a diverse set of insurance products across just about every channel. Um, and um, we engage with Merkel, uh, earlier, the, um, in 2018 actually to, to, uh, to build a nice solution that allows us to even better serve the needs of the members. Uh, my role, I am the, I lead our analytics and data management work. So helping us collect data and manage better and better leverage it to support the needs of members. >>So a trip, I can't even imagine the volumes of data that you're dealing with, but it's also, this is people's data, right? This is about insurance, life insurance, the volume of it. How have you, what were some of the things that you said? All right guys, we need to change how we're managing the data because we know there's probably a lot more business value, maybe new services that we can get our on it or eyes >>on it. >>So, so that was, that was it. So as an organization, uh, I want to underscore what you said. We make no compromises when it comes to the safety of our, of our members data. And we take every step possible to ensure that it is managed in a responsible and safe way. But we knew that on, on the platform that we had prior to this, we weren't, we weren't as italics. We wanted to be. We would find that threaten processes would take spans of weeks in order to operate or to run. And that just didn't allow us to provide the member experience that we wanted. So we built this new solution and this solution updates every day, right? There's no longer multi-week cycle times and tumbler processes happen in real time, which allows us to go to market with more accurate and more responsive programs to our members. >>Can you guys talk about the Amazon and AWS solution? How you guys using Amazon's at red shift? Can he says, you guys losing multiple databases, give us a peek into the Amazon services that you guys are taking advantage of that anchor. >>Yeah, please. Um, so basically when we were approached by AAA life to kind of come in and you know, present ourselves our credentials, one thing that differentiated there in that solution page was uh, bringing Amazon to the forefront because cloud, you know, one of the issue that Ravel and his team were facing were scalability aspect. You know, the performance was, was not up to the par, I believe you guys were um, on a two week cycle. That data was a definition every two weeks. And how can we turn that around and know can only be possible to, in our disruptive technologies that Amazon brings to the forefront. So what we built was basically it's a complete Amazon based cloud native architecture. Uh, we leveraged AWS with our chip as the data warehouse platform to integrate basically billions and billions of rows from a hundred plus sources that we are bringing in on a daily basis. >>In fact, actually some of the sources are the fresh on a real time basis. We are catching real time interactions of users on the website and then letting Kimberly the life make real time decisions on how we actually personalize their experience. So AWS, Redshift, you know, definitely the center's centerpiece. Then we are also leveraging a cloud native ELT technology extract load and transform technology called. It's a third party tool, but again, a very cloud native technology. So the whole solution leverage is Python to some extent. And then our veil can talk about AI and machine learning that how they are leveraging AWS ecosystem there. >>Yeah. So that was um, so, uh, I anchor said it right. One thing that differentiated Merkel was that cloud first approach, right? Uh, we looked at it what a, all of the analysts were saying. We went to all the key vendors in this space. We saw the, we saw the architecture is, and when Merkel walked in and presented that, um, that AWS architecture, it was great for me because if nausea immediately made sense, there was no wizardry around, I hope this database scales. I was confident that Redshift and Lambda and dynamo would this go to our use cases. So it became a lot more about are we solving the right business problem and less about do we have the right technologies. So in addition to what Ankur mentioned, we're leveraging our sort of living RNR studio, um, in AWS as well as top low frat for our machine learning models and for business intelligence. >>And more recently we've started transition from R to a Python as a practitioner on the keynote today. Slew a new thing, Sage maker studio, an IDE for machine learning framework. I mean this is like a common set. Like finally, I couldn't have been more excited right? That, that was my Superbowl moment. Um, I was, I was as I was, we were actually at dinner yesterday and I was mentioning Tonker, this is my wishlist, right? I want AWS to make a greater investment in that end user data scientists experience in auto ML and they knocked it out of the park. Everything they announced today, I was just, I was texting frat. Wow, this is amazing. I can't wait to go home. There's a lot of nuances to, and a lot of these announcements, auto ML for instance. Yeah. Really big deal the way they did it. >>And again, the ID who would've thought, I mean this is duh, why didn't we think about this sooner? Yeah. With auto ML that that focus on transparency. Right. And then I think about a year ago we went to market and we ended up not choosing any solutions because they hadn't solved for once you've got a model built, how do you effectively migrated from let's say an analyst who might not have the, the ML expertise to a data science team and the fact that AWS understood out of the gate that you need that transparent all for it. I'm really excited for that. What do you think the impacts are going to be more uptake on the data science side? What do you think the impact of this and the, so I think for, I think we're going to see, um, that a lot of our use cases are going to part a lot less effort to spin up. >>So we're going to see much more, much faster pilots. We're going to have a much clearer sense of is this worth it? Is this something we should continue to invest in and to me we should drive and I expect that a lot, much larger percentage of my team, the analysts are going to be involved in data and data science and machine learning. So I'm really excited about that. And also the ability to inquire, to integrate best practices into what we're doing out of the gate. Right? So software engineers figured out profiling, they figured out the bugging and these are things that machine learners are picking up. Now the fact that you're front and center is really excited. Superbowl moment. You can be like the new England Patriots, 17 straight AFC championship games. Boston. Gosh, I could resist. Uh, they're all Seattle. They're all Seattle here and Amazon. I don't even bring Seattle Patriots up here and Amazon, >>we are the ESPN of tech news that we have to get in as far as conversation. But I want to kind of talk a little bit, Raphael about the transformation because presumably in, in every industry, especially in insurance, there are so many born in the cloud companies that are a lot, they're a lot more agile and they are chasing what AAA life and your competitors and your peers are doing. What your S establishing with the help of anchor and Merkel, how does this allow you to actually take the data that you had, expand it, but also extract insights from maybe competitive advantages that you couldn't think about before? >>Yeah, so I think, uh, so as an organization, even though we're 50 years old, one of the things that drew me to the company and it's really exciting is it's unrelated to thrusting on its laurels, right? I think there's tremendous hunger and appetite within our executive group to better serve our members and to serve more members. And what this technology is allowed is the technology is not a limiting factor. It's an enabling factors. We're able to produce more models, more performant models, process more of IO data, build more features. Um, we've managed to do away with a lot of the, you know, if you take it and you look at it this way and squeeze it and maybe it'll work and systematize more aspects of our reporting and our campaign development and our model development and the observability, the visibility of just the ability to be agile and have our data be a partner to what we're trying to accomplish. That's been really great. >>You talked about the significant reduction in cycle times. If we go back up to the executive suite from a business differentiation perspective, is the senior leadership at AAA understanding what this cloud infrastructure is going to enable their business to achieve? >>Absolutely. So, so our successes here I think have been instrumental in encouraging our organization to continue to invest in cloud. And uh, we're an active, we're actively considering and discussing additional cloud initiatives, especially around the areas of machine learning and AI. >>And the auger question for you in terms of, of your expertise, in your experience as we look at how cloud is changing, John, you know, educate us on cloud cloud, Tuto, AI machine learning. What are, as, as these, as businesses, as industries have the opportunity to for next gen cloud, what are some of the next industries that you think are really prime to be completely transformed? >>Um, I'm in that are so many different business models. If you look around, one thing I would like to actually touch upon what we are seeing from Merkel standpoint is the digital transformation and how customers in today's world they are, you know, how brands are engaging with their customers and how customers are engaging with the brands. Especially that expectations customer is at the center stage here they are the ones who are driving the whole customer engagement journey, right? How all I am browsing a catalog of a particular brand on my cell phone and then I actually purchased right then and there and if I have an issue I can call them or I can go to social media and log a complaint. So that's whole multi channel, you know, aspect of this marketing ecosystem these days. I think cloud is the platform which is enabling that, right? >>This cannot happen without cloud. I'm going to look at, Raphael was just describing, you know, real time interaction, real time understanding the behavior of the customer in real time and engaging with them based on their need at that point of time. If you have technologies like Sage maker, if you have technologies like AWS Redship you have technologies like glue, Kinesis, which lets you bring in data from all these disparate sources and give you the ability to derive some insights from that data in that particular moment and then interact with the customer right then and there. That's exactly what we are talking about. And this can only happen through cloud so, so that's my 2 cents are where they are, what we from Merkel standpoint, we are looking into the market. That's what we are helping our brands through to >>client. I completely agree. I think that the change from capital and operation, right to no longer house to know these are all the sources and all the use cases and everything that needs to happen before you start the project and the ability to say, Hey, let's get going. Let's deliver value in the way that we've had and continue to have conversations and deliver new features, new stores, a new functionality, and at the same time, having AWS as a partner who's, who's building an incremental value. I think just last week I was really excited with the changes they've made to integrate Sage maker with their databases so you can score from the directly from the database. So it feels like all these things were coming together to allow us as a company to better off on push our aims and exciting time. >>It is exciting. Well guys, I wish we had more time, but we are out of time. Thank you Raphael and anchor for sharing with Merkel and AAA. Pleasure. All right. Take care. Or John furrier. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from Vegas re-invent 19 we'll be right back.

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas with AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent 2018's CUBE coverage. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage here on the ground floor. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years we've been coming to re:Invent. Every year except for the first year. What a progression. We got great news. Always raising the bar, as they say at Amazon. This year, big announcements. One of them is blockchain. Really kind of laying out early formation of how they're going to roll out, thinking about blockchain. We're here to talk about here, with Rahul Pathak, who's the GM of analytics, and data lakes, and blockchain. Managing that. And Shawn Bice who's the vice president of non-relational databases. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> I wish my voice was a little bit stronger. I love this segment. You know, we've been doing blockchain. We've been following one of the big events in the industry. If you separate out the whole token ICO scam situation, token economics is actually a great business model opportunity. Blockchain is an infrastructure, a decentralized infrastructure, that's great. But it's early. Day one really for you guys in a literal sense. How are you guys doing blockchain? Take a minute to explain the announcement because there are use cases, low-hanging use cases, that look a lot like IoT and supply chain that people are interested in. So take a minute to explain the announcements and what it means. >> Absolutely, so when we began looking at blockchain and blockchain use cases, we really realized there are two things that customers are trying to do. One case is really keep an immutable record of transactions and in a scenario where centralized trust is okay. And for that we have Amazon QLDB, which is an immutable cryptographically verifiable ledger. And then in scenarios where customers really wanted the decentralized trust and the smart contracts, that's where blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum play a role. But they're just super complicated to use and that's why we built Managed Blockchain, to make it easy to stand up, scale, and monitor these networks, so customers can focus on building applications. And in terms of use cases on the decentralized side, it's really quite diverse. I mean, we've got a customer, Guardian Life Insurance, so they're looking at Managed Blockchain 'cause they have this distributed network of partners, providers, patients, and customers, and they want to provide decentralized verifiable records of what's taking place. And it's just a broad set of use cases. >> And then we saw in the video this morning, I think it was Indonesian farmers, right? Wasn't that before the keynote? Did you see that? It was good. >> I missed that one. >> Yeah, so they don't have bank accounts. >> Oh, got it. >> And they got a reward system, so they're using the blockchain to reward farmers to participate. >> So a lot of people ask the question is, why do I need blockchain? Why don't you just put in database? So there are unique, which is true by the way, 'cause latency's an issue. (chuckles) Certainly, you might want to avoid blockchain in the short term, until that gets fixed. Assume that every one will get fixed over time, but what are some of the use cases where blockchain actually is relevant? Can you be specific because that's really people starting to make their selection criteria on. Look, I still use a database. I'm going to have all kinds of token and models around, but in a database. Where is the blockchain specifically resonating right now? >> I'll take a shot at this or we can do it together, but when you think of QLDB, it's not that customers are asking us for a ledger database. What they were really saying is, hey, we'd like to have this complete immutable, cryptographically verifiable trail of data. And it wasn't necessarily a blockchain conversation, wasn't necessarily a database conversation, it was like, I really would like to have this complete cyrptographic verifiable trail of data. And it turns out, as you sort of look at the use cases, in particular, the centralized trust scenario, QLDB does exactly that. It's not about decentralized trust. It's really about simply being able to have a database that when you write to that database, you write a transaction to the database, you can't change it. You know, a typical database people are like, well, hey, wait a second, what does immutable really mean? And once you get people to understand that once that transaction is written to a journal, it cannot be changed at all and attached, then all of a sudden there's that breakthrough moment of it being immutable and having that cryptographic trail. >> And the advantage relative to a distributive blockchain is performance, scale, and all the challenges that people always say. >> Yeah, exactly. Like with QLDB, you can find it's going to be two to three times faster cause you're not doing that distributing consensus. >> How about data lakes? Let's talk about data lakes. What problem were you guys trying to solve with the data lakes? There's a lot of them, but. (chuckles) >> That's a great question. So, essentially it's been hard for customers to set up data lakes 'cause you have to figure out where to get data from, you have to land it in S3, you've got to secure it, you've then got to secure every analytic service that you've got, you might have to clean your data. So with lake formation, what we're trying to do is make it super easy to set up data lakes. So we have blueprints for common databases and data sources. We bring that data into an S3 data lake and we've created a central catalog for that data where customers can define granular access policies with the table, and the column, and the row level. We've also got ML-based data cleansing and data deduplication. And so now customers can just use lake formation, set up data lakes, curate their data, protect it in a single place, and have those policies that enforce across all of the analytic services that they might use. >> So does it help solve the data swamp problem, get more value out of the data lake? And if so, how? >> Absolutely, so the way it does that is by automatically cataloging all datas that comes in. So we can recognize what the data is and then we allow customers to add business metadata to that so they can tag this as customer data, or PII data, or this is my table of sales history. And that then becomes searchable. So we automatically generate a catalog as data comes in and that addresses the, what do I have in my data lake problem. >> Okay, so-- >> Go ahead. >> So, Rahul, you're the general manager. Shawn, what's your job, what do you do? >> So our team builds all the non-relational databases at Amazon. So DynamoDB, Neptune, ElastiCache, Timestream, which you'll hear about today, QLDB, et cetera. So all those things-- >> Beanstalk too, Elastic Beanstalk? >> No we do not build Beanstalk. >> Okay, we're a customer of DynamoDB, by the way. >> Great! >> We're happy customers. >> That's great! >> And we use ElastiCache, right? >> Yup, the elastic >> There you go! >> surge still has it. >> So-- >> Haven't used Neptune yet. >> What's the biggest problem stigmas that you guys are trying to raise the bar on? What's the key focus as you get this new worlds and use cases coming together? These are new use cases. How are you guys evaluating it? How are you guys raising the bar? >> You know, that's a really good question you ask. What I've found in my experience is developers that have been building apps for a long time, most people are familiar with relational databases. For years we've been building apps in that context, but when you kind of look at how people are building apps today, it's very different than how they did in the past. Today developer do what they do best. They take an application, a big application, break it down into smaller parts, and they pick the right tool for the right job. >> I think the game developer mark is going to be a canary in the coal mine for developers, and it's a good spot for data formation in these kind of unstructured, non-relational scenarios. Okay, now all this engagement data, could be first person shooter, whatever it is, just throw it, I need to throw it somewhere, and I'll get to it and let it be ready to be worked on by analytics. >> Well, yeah, if you think about that gamer scenario, think about if you and I are building a game, who knows if there's going to be one user, ten players, or 10 million, or 100 million. And if we had 100 million, it's all about the performance being steady. At 100 million or ten. >> You need a fleet of servers. (John laughing) >> And a fleet of servers! >> Have you guys played Fortnite? Or do you have kids that play? >> I look over my kid's shoulder. I might play it. >> I've played, but-- >> They run all their analytics on us. They've got about 14 petabytes in S3 using S3 as their data lake, with EMR and Athena for analytics. >> We got a season-- >> I mean, think about that F1 example on keynotes today. Great example of insights. We apply that kind of concept to Fortnite, by the way, Fortnite has theCUBE in there. It's always a popular term. We noticed that, the hastag, #wherestheCUBEtoday. (Rahul chuckling) I couldn't resist. But the analytics you could get out of all that data, every interaction, all that gesture data. I mean, what are some of the things they're doing? Can you share how they're using the new tech to scale up and get these insights? >> Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing a bunch of things. I mean, one is just the health of the systems when you've got hundreds of millions of players. You need to know if you're up and it's working. The second is around engagement. What games, what collection of people work well together. And then it's what incentives they create in the game, what power ups people buy that lead to continued engagement, 'cause that defines success over the long term. What gets people coming back? And then they have an offline analytics process where they're looking at reporting, and history, and telemetry, so it's very comprehensive. So you're exactly right about gaming and analytics being a huge consumer of databases. >> Now, Shawn, didn't you guys have hard news today on DynamoDB, or? >> Yeah today we announce DynamoDB On-Demand, so customers that basically have workloads that could spike up and then all of a sudden drop off, a lot of these customers basically don't even want to think about capacity planning. They don't want to guess. They just want to basically pay only for what they're using. So we announced DynamoDB On-Demand. The developer experience is simple. You create a table and you putyour read/write capacity in the on-demand mode, and you literally only pay for the request that your workload puts through system. >> It's a great service actually. Again, making life easier for customers. Lower the bill, manage capacity, make things go better, faster, enables value. >> It's all about improving the customer experience. >> Alright, guys, I really appreciate you coming in. I'm really interested in following what you guys do in the future. I'm sure a lot of people watching will be as well, as analytics and AI become a real part of, as you guys move the stack and create that API model for, what you did for infrastructure, for apps. A total game changer, we believe. We're interested in following you guys, I'm sure others are. Where are you going to be this year? What's your focus? Where can people find out more besides going to Amazon site? Is there certain events you're going to be at? How do people get more information and what's the plans? >> There's actually some sessions on lake formation, blockchain that we're doing here. We'll have a continuous stream of summits, so as the AWS Summit calendar for 2019 gets published that's a great place to go for more information. And then just engage with us either on social media or through the web and we'll be happy to follow up. >> Alright, well, we'll do a good job on amplifying. A lot of people are interested, certainly blockchain, super hot. But people want better, stronger, more stable, but they want the decentralized immutable database model. >> Cryptographically verifiable! >> And see as everyone knows. >> Scalable! >> Anyone who wants to keep those, they talk about CUBE coins but I haven't said CUBE coin once on this episode. Wait for those tokens to be released soon. More coverage after this short break, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. (futuristic buzzing) (futuristic electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Mike Moore, Senior Principal at Accenture Research, and Andrew Wilson, Chief Information Officer at Accenture. Thank you both so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Good to see you as ever, Rebecca, and to be back in Las Vegas as well. >> Exactly, back in Sin City, right, here we are. So our topic is innovation. A buzzword that is so buzzy it's almost boring. Let's start the conversation with just defining innovation. What does innovation mean? >> An objective, a behavior, a way of working. To me, innovation is what we need to do with modern technology to enable the enterprise and the business world and be creative humans and to use disciplines which we didn't typically bring to work before. >> And is it creativity, or is there sort of logic and rationale too? >> I think there's logic and rationale. But there's also entertainment, fun, modern consumer-like experimentation, risk-taking, things of that nature. >> I think that a big key is actually striking a balance between creativity and logic and rationale and that's the really tricky bit, because you need to give your employees the license to be creative but within a certain set of boundaries as well. >> The rules of work have definitely changed, and behaviors that we encourage, even the clothes we wear, how we work, when we work, those are all characteristic of a more innovative, accepting diverse world, and a world that can keep up with the modern technology and the advancements and the announcements like we're hearing about here at re:Invent. >> It's the ultimate right brain, left brain behavior and activity. So Mike, you've done some research recently about the hallmarks of innovative companies, what they do differently from the ones that are not innovative, that are failing here, so tell our viewers a little bit about what you've found in your research. >> We surveyed 840 executives from a variety of different companies, different industries, different geographies, to understand their approach to innovation, and those who were doing it particularly well, and those maybe not so well. And around about 14 percent of our respondents were turning their investments in innovation into accelerated growth, and there were lots of different reasons for their success but three things really stood out. So first of all their outcome lacked in terms of the way they approach innovation, so they put a clear set of processes around their innovation activities, and then linked those to operational and financial performance metrics. They're also disruption minded, so they're not just pursuing incremental tweaks to their products and services, but their investing in disruptive technologies that could actually create entirely new markets. And then finally they're change orientated. They're not just using innovation to change their products and services, but also to fundamentally change the nature of their own organizations as a whole. >> So 14 percent are knocking it out of the park. Does that mean the rest of them are all laggards or are sort of some in the middle? What is the state of innovation in industry today, would you say, Andrew? >> I would say it's hugely variable by industry, geography, type of company, and individual instance of leader and culture, but I am sure that the most successful companies, those that are pivoting to the new, those that are imaginative, those that have recently arrived, all have that DNA that we're describing, all have that way of working, all have that ability to operate cleverly, intelligently, humorously, and at speed. I think innovation is very much characterized by something that can be fast-failed, do, step, move sideways, do again. The way of working has changed in modern enterprises. We as CIO's have to accept that. We have to speed up. We have to create the environment in where that productivity, where that creation can occur, and I think all of that's key. >> You keep mentioning this, the way of working has changed, and I think we all sort of know what you mean but explain a little bit what you're seeing. >> Experimentation, the ability to get more done with the resources that you have. So here we are at AWS re:Invent, cloud-based operations. Cloud gives you, gives me as a CIO the means to do more, more quickly, more rapidly, on a greater scale, in more places that I ever could have imagined in my old old-fashioned data senses. So the services we can consume, the data we can connect together, the artificial intelligence we can bring to it, the consumer-like experience. All of those things, which by the way, are drawing on innovative behaviors in their own right, are absolutely what the game is about now. >> How does AWS figure into your cloud transformation? >> Well for our cloud transformation at Accenture, AWS is one of the core cloud platform providers who power Accenture. We are nearly 95 percent in cloud. So as an organization that's very pronounced, and typically ahead of most organizations. But we sort of have to be, don't we? I mean, we have to be our own North Star. I can't sit here and explain the virtues of what Accenture can bring to a client's cloud transformation if we haven't already done it to ourselves. And by the way, that drew on innovative approaches, risk-taking approaches because over the last three years we've moved Accenture to the cloud. >> So I love how you said it, we are our own North Star, and other people would say we eat our own dog food, I mean that's just kind of more gross, but in terms of having experienced this transformation yourselves, how do you use what you've learned to help your companies transform as well? And make these moves, take these risks, what would you say to that? >> Well I think we keep an eye on the research with our colleagues there, they're our own North Star. I think we look at the ecosystem, we assess readiness for enterprise, security compliance, scale, availability, and then we also look and say, and what's ready for prime time in terms of Accenture scale, half a million people nearly. You bring all of those things together and it's a recipe, and that's why we consult our business, that's why we guide and educate and experiment and innovate together. And that's very much how we adopted cloud, it's very much how we do a number of other things, and the creative services we have. >> In terms of, let's get back to the research. So how do you, I mean as you said, the research is, as Andrew said, it's something that executive leaders are looking at to figure out what's actually happening in the market as well as what's happening within the organization itself. So how do you set your research agenda in terms of figuring out where you want to focus your time and energy and resources. >> Well I think we do it in a very similar way to in which we consult with clients, we speak to them. We talk to them about some of the key issues that they're facing and we always interview a series of executives and also academics to get their perspective at the start of their project. And that's something that we did in this particular instance and what we heard from many executives was that, to the point that Andrew was making before, the speed and scale of innovation today is happening at a completely different pace than in the past. So product cycle times are just diminishing in every single industry and as a consequence, executives now need to build new innovation units to make sure that they can respond to that changing market. So that's we wanted to explore through the research. >> So in this research, with the 14 percent doing it well, the 86 percent sort of either, somewhere on the spectrum of doing terribly or figuring things out, getting better, what are their pain points, and what's your advice to those companies? >> Well I think, and we take the positive spin on it in terms of what the companies are doing well, one of the points that Andrew was making before was how Accenture works with other partners to become more innovative itself. And that's something that we saw many of the high performing companies doing. So many of them were what we call networks powers. Not just innovating using their own resources, their own people, but their drawing on a broader ecosystem of partners to bring the very best products and services to their customers, and their spending not just on R and D internally but also on accelerators, incubators, technology based M and A, and actually their spending as much on inorganic innovation as they are on organic innovation. >> At Accenture we actually help our clients look for trap value, and what we mean by that is if an organization with a history, with a set of business processes, a set of technologies, and a set of disciplines and employees that have been successful and worked possibly for decades in that model, then they're going to be in some pretty tight guide rails. How do you innovate out of that, to deal with all of the destruction that's now available, good healthy disruption, that actually reveals the next level of efficiency, customer satisfaction, product creativity, and innovation in it's own right, so that's innovation in action, if you like. >> I want to ask, here we are at AWS re:Invent, Andy Jassy on the main stage this morning announcing a dizzying number of new products, services, and AWS, this is Amazon, this is a huge company that really seems to know how to innovate, and do it constantly, but is that is that, can every company be Amazon? You know what I'm saying? I mean, is this really possible and attainable? >> Is such a thing as innovation fatigue perhaps? >> Well, exactly, right! >> My view is that you have to find a way to make innovation a constant and a norm. It doesn't mean that you always will have to operate with the same ridiculous pace, but creativity and pace do go hand in hand to a point, but to be ahead, to stay ahead, and to lead an organization of technologists, who can comprehend all of these announcements, so you have to innovate in both how you lead and operate as well. It's not just your product, it's your behaviors, because there's just so much coming all the time. >> Right, and we've seen a number of large companies, not necessarily technology companies, but I'm thinking of Sears and Toys-R-Us, that have really, you've seen what can happen, the cautionary tales. >> Look at the attrition in the Fortune 500, and you can see how companies have a, a half life now, which perhaps is very different to 20 or 30 years ago. >> Right, right, exactly. Well, Mike and Andrew, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was a really fascinating discussion. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, good to see you again. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From Austin, Texas it's the Cube, covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the Cube's coverage of DockerCon 2017 here in Austin, Texas. Getting towards the end of our two days of coverage. Really been geeking out on a lot of the technology here, and I was happy to be able to pull in two guys I know, I've had them on the Cube before, to really go in into how this who container wave is impacting their business, to go into the technology some. So I want to welcome back to the program, first you know John White. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy with Expedient and who I'm happy to see not wearing his football jersey. John, thanks for joining me again. >> (laughs) Good to see you. >> And Joep Piscaer, who is the CTO of OGD. I had the pleasure of interviewing Joep over in Europe last year at a show, so, you know, welcome over to Austin. I think Vienna and Austin, woe meet coma at both of those places. >> Oh yeah. >> So yeah, it seems every time we get together there's a lot of that going around. >> There's always a meet excuse, right? >> Right, so maybe start with you, have you been to DockerCon before? What's your experience been here at the show so far? >> Yeah, so this is my second DockerCon. I've been here last year as well, in Seattle. And I'm kind of liking the vibe this time round. So last year it was really, you know, all about developers. I'm kind of liking it, more about the enterprise right now. You know, as an enterprise guy, work for an MSP, so you know, we deal with a lot of enterprises. And it's good to see that Docker is, you know, giving the enterprise a lot of thought and a lot of attention because, you know, that was one area where they were lacking last year. >> So John, you know, you look at a lot of the ecosystem, you're also a service provider. What's your take so far? >> Yeah, so this is the first time for me at DockerCon. I go to a lot of conferences, so I read the room a little bit differently, I guess, than most. It's been interesting for me. These two days have been jam-packed. I've been soaking up a lot of new knowledge and new vendors, new potential partners for us to look into. But I'll agree, I think a lot of the focus on the enterprise, figuring out maybe how this is relevant to them and the future is actually a really great way to go and I hope to see more of that. Looking for those use cases right now is a little bit hard, especially when you have people like Visa that have been working on this for, you know, a few years now and only six months into production. We're just so very, very early in this technology that I think we're still walking, maybe, probably still crawling even, through it. >> Yeah, before we go into the tech, let's talk about ecosystems. So it's a word that I heard over and over again in the keynotes. You know, John, I was talking with you at VN World at AWS Free Invent, as a service provider sometimes, it feels like body blows and head shots, going to some of these shows because how they're partnering with you, how do you see Docker? What kind of things do they build? How does that, you know, help or hurt your business? >> Yeah, so Docker is a company, we really haven't worked with them quite yet. The ecosystem, though, is interesting here. There's a lot of new faces here, a lot of faces that I've interacted with on the Virtualization Days, now kind of porting over to here, so, you know, I've already started to reach out to some of them to kind of get an understanding, like for instance, of risks on the network side, what they're doing, how they're actually interacting with Docker. And think that's going to be really important because I think that's going to be one of my bigger challenges in the future, is how I actually network all this stuff together. You know, I can see us definitely starting to work closer with Docker, with Docker Data Center. I think customers are going to demand something like that. And they're not going to want to host it inside of their data centers. They're going to want to host it in probably a third party service provider. >> Yeah, I'm sure both of you were looking at, I think it was the Visa case study, we talked about utilization of what they had and I thought of you guys, cause it was like, oh, wait, big surprise, my utilization is really low because wait, why am I doing this in house when I should be going to somebody to handle that. Your thoughts on the ecosystem, you know, we talked at the Nucanic Show, you know, when you look at technology partners, you know, how does Docker and their ecosystem fit in to your thoughts? >> So it's like a whole new ecosystem to get into, right? So it's kind of discovering from ground zero again, what's the ecosystem look like? Who's doing what, who's developing what kind of new trends? So it's good to be there early, just to get a good feel about the ecosystem, get to know the people and be able to kind of develop a strategy around Docker, because it is early days, right? So it's way too early to go in to a customer and say we have a complete package for you. That's just not going to happen between now and like six months. So the issue really is how you get to a point with the customer where you can jointly develop a strategy to get Docker into your service profile. And going to events like DockerCon really helps to actually kind of achieve that goal. >> So you guys are always in an interesting space, you know, you're consuming some of the technologies from the vendor, you've got your customers, you know, putting demands on you, so you know, CTO sets strategy, why not dig in for us a little bit as to what your seeing, what's good, what's bad, you know. There's networking, there's storage, there's security, you know. Maybe John, start with you. I don't know if networking would be the one to start, but I'll let you choose. >> Yeah I think we're going to run, I mean, we're an infrastructure company. We've been running virtual infrastructure since 2007. We know it, we understand it. And you start to understand where the pitfalls are. This is going to change it. I mean, the bin packing problem is going to change significantly over the next few years. Some of the people, I went to their use case session, they're saying they're seeing 70% reduction in resources. Now, they're not saying 70% reduction in resources, you know, just because they made things smaller. They just packed them tighter into a smaller group of boxes. That's going to be interesting. And you know, discovering how we can actually provide that at the true infrastructure layer for our customers is going to be a really big challenge for us. And it's going to revolve around us having pretty strong partner relationships since we don't do the professional services to kind of figure out how to transform your application. We're going to need somebody to help us there. We're going to handle the infrastructure underneath. >> Maybe explain that a little more. Like you know, if I'm saying well, if I'm Amazon and I can just do that, they've got kind of infinite resources there and therefore as a customer I don't need to worry about that, you know. What do you have to worry about? And should your customers care or will you make that transparent to them? >> Let's think about, you know, we went to virtualization. We had P to V converters, right? We all used them, we all tested them. We said okay, this physical server now can run as a virtual server, that works. You really don't have, even though they announce something where you can take a VMDK to an image, Docker image, you really don't have a clean way to do that unless you think that building a big monolithic container is going to save you time and money. Maybe it will. But there's going to be some sort of application transformation that you have to do to be really successful inside of this new platform in the future. And that's something where I think you're going to have to have partners really ingrained to help build the cultural, help build the bridges to the operational teams, help to show the value to the executive team and why you're going to save money, why you're going to do something more secure, you know, how it's going to benefit you in the future. And those are just pretty big challenges that are out there in front of us. >> Joep? >> Yeah so that's the major issue, right? So from our perspective, we use ISVs for the software we deploy for customers, you know, a lot. I'd probably say like 90% of the applications we deploy, we didn't develop or the customer didn't develop in house. It's just all, you know, standardized V stuff. And having a networks of ISVs around you to help you transition from virtual machines into some kind of container format, to address the bin packing problem, that's going to be, that's going to be the biggest challenge to solve, right? It's not just packing up an application and moving it into a container. It's actually transforming it from whatever it is now into something more efficient, more scalable, more resilient. And that's you know really the issue we're trying to tackle, as far as looking at the ecosystem, looking at how to build our practice around it. It's not just infrastructure anymore. It is really all about the application now. So you have to develop a whole new set of skills. You have to develop new people around you. You have to develop new services. And that's interesting because it does have real advantages for the customers, but it's going to take a while to have that mature to a level the customers can actually pull it off the shelf and implement it in their own companies. >> One thing I think on the infrastructure side that I just was in Visa's use case, they were talking about how they're doing it on bare metal. That's different for us. We've been running virtualization for so long, now to say to the engineers, hey look, we're actually just going to run a Linux operating system, or even a Microsoft operating system now on bare metal, and we're going to run containers and get rid of that hypervisor. That's going to be a pretty unique conversation to have. We've already created the monitoring tools and unit performance tools, looking all at the VM. Now we might go back to just running servers again. It'll be a new challenge. >> Yeah really interesting. So there was a lot of focus in the keynote about how they've been maturing security. Want to get your take on that. You know, two years ago it was like oh wait, that's one of the biggest barriers to putting things in production. It feels at a high level like we've made some good progress. Is security still an issue? Are you comfortable with where we are? Maybe anything that still needs to be done? >> You want to go first? >> Sure. (laughing) >> This is a can of worms. >> Yeah so security is always, you know, it's always a can of worms. But you know, my take on it, it doesn't actually matter if it runs in a container or VM. Like 90% of the threads come from outside the compute right? So it's going to come off the network, off the internet, off the users. So really from a security perspective, I'm kind of ambiguous which way to go. But again, the ecosystem story comes back into play, right? Is the ecosystem mature enough to actually deliver security products for containers? The VMware ecosystem was completely mature in that sense. It can just pick off, you know, 20 products and basically do that same thing. And for Docker, that's going to be, you know, a challenge to say the least, to get up to a point where you can pick whatever you actually need. And it's going to be a discovery and it's going to be a little while before we get there. >> Yeah, so I have to read through your tweets to find the answer, John? >> No, no, I'll give you, I think well, security's a mess kind of in general but it's, I think some of the things that they're doing you know, early on, that before there's any critical mass adoption yet, making sure encrypted traffic and handling TLS certificates in an easy fashion, that's great. I was impressed with the notary function, where it can go and look at the image and know if there's any vulnerabilities, and go and identify the problems. It really helps the developers kind of understand the operational asks that people actually have to make sure, okay look, you're going to roll out this new image, this new code? Let's make sure it's secure to get started, at least. We all know it's going to kind of, maybe fall out of the norm once it actually gets up and running operational and production. But let's make sure it's secure at least to boot the thing. >> What do you see containers, when does it have a significant impact on your business? Does it transform the way that you deliver your service? Will it change pricing? >> Yeah, I think it's going to. I mean, a few things that are going to happen. I mean, it's going to increase in scale, so you're going to have more to actually manage, which is going to be a new challenge. That's one side of it. But you're going to probably end up consuming more infrastructure in the long run. And that infrastructure is going to get commoditized even more than it already is right now. And you're going to have to make sure that that's down to the minimum dollars or the minimum cents that you need to provide that very small segment of actual storage or RAM or compute that you need. And that's going to really shift the business. And especially when you look at a lot of containers where you have some that may be run on a monthly basis, a lot of them are only going to be running maybe a few seconds, a few minutes. So you're going to have to have very granular tracking and understanding for that show back charge back to the CFO that you're actually running the services for so they know exactly what they can expect for the bill that month. That's really different than what we're doing today. >> You know will that be a challenge for you to continue to compete against the public clouds, where it seems that that's a more natural fit for some of the pricing and the models that they've built? >> I don't think so. I think this is something where you're even getting more high touch with the application. You know, data sovereignty, that was listed up there I think on Met Life's use case today. That's always going to be important. They're going to want to know where the data's living, why it's living there, how to audit, how to do compliance against it. That's always going to be really important, that'll make us be a little bit different than the public cloud. >> Alright, your business? >> So I agree, right. So the pricing is going to be something to kind of readjust. But I kind of see a lot of advantages in terms of security, the secure software supply chain. So I'm really liking that message. So instead of having a big unknown in terms of whatever is coming into your data center, you now can say with a certain degree of certainty that the application you are running is secure, it's been tested, it's been tested by the compliance team. And I think enterprises in the end are really looking at how to mitigate those security risks and having such a secure software supply chain is absolutely going to help in that respect. >> Alright, so what feedback would you give to the community, what more do you want to see developed, areas where you think we need to make some progress, you know? Joep, I'll start with you. >> So the biggest is monolithic applications. So a lot of enterprises still have legacy applications. >> Well, you've got Oracle in the Docker store now. >> Yeah, exactly. (laughs) But it's still a monolith, right? So addressing that problem one way or the other, but especially in terms of availability, recoverability, I think that's one major area where Docker needs to focus on in the coming months. >> Alright, so John, same question, with a little twist for you is what you'd like to see and anything that if you're talking to VM Ware, what they should be doing more in this space. >> Okay, yeah. I think, I want to see from Docker a lot more use cases. I want to see them start to build their user group and community a little bit more, a lot more sharing needs to occur. The use case session that they had, it was basically two days of use cases running, were great. A lot of those companies, I had a hard time relating to my customers, I mean, Visa, Met Life, they're huge. I really don't, our service, you know, small to medium into the large, but those, they don't have the same use cases. So continue to focus on, you know, how we can actually work on this together with these new customers. On the VMware side of it, VMware's in every data center in the world. And they have a story around VIC, they have a story around Photon. They need to continue to figure out how to build that bridge to, maybe that VM decay to container tool that they have. Work on it together, see what you can do together to take this on to the next level of understanding of really how we can actually transform these applications that were all built in Vms. >> Alright, well, John, Joep, really appreciate you guys coming through. You never hold back sharing your opinions on it. Look forward to reading, I'm sure you'll probably do write ups from the show, too. And we've actually got Visa on as our next guest here. You've probably given me a couple of questions to ask there too, when I go into it. But getting towards the end of Cube's coverage here at DockerCon 2017. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in San Francisco at the Professional Business Women of California Conference, the 28th year, I think Hillary must be in the neighborhood because everyone is streaming up to the keynote rooms. It's getting towards the end of the day. But we're excited to have Adam Smiley on. He's the author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough. Welcome Adam. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So you gave a talk a little bit earlier on, I assume the theme of kind of your general thing. Would you just, Quarter-Life Breakthrough, what is Quarter-Life Breakthrough? >> So this is a book about how to empower the next generation. How young people can find meaning in their careers and their lives. So the subtitle of the book is Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters. So everyone talks about millennials, you hear them in the news, "Oh they're the lazy generation," >> Right, right. >> "The entitled generation." The Me, Me, Me generation. I actually think that couldn't be further from the truth. So the truth is that actually 50% of millennials would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values. 90% want to use their skills for good. So my book is a guide for people to find purpose in their careers and really help them find meaning at the workplace and help companies empower that generation at work. >> So from being the older guy, so then is it really incumbent, you know, because before people didn't work for good, they worked for paycheck, right. They went, they punched in, they got paid, they went home. So is it really incumbent then on the employers now to find purposeful work? And how much of it has to be purposeful? I mean, unfortunately, there's always some of that, that grimy stuff that you just have to do. So what's the balance? >> Yeah and it's not to say that millennials don't want a paycheck, everyone wants money. I obviously want to make more money than less money. But it's also that this generation is really looking for meaning in the workplace. And one of the main things, if you look at all the studies, whether it's the Deloitte Millennial Study or the IBM Study, this is a generation that wants to move the needle forward on social issues at work. Not just after work or on the weekends, but at the workplace. And I think it's incumbent upon companies to really think about how they're providing those opportunities for purpose. Both in the mission of the company, what someone's doing every day, and opportunities outside of work, whether it's service projects, paid sabbaticals for people to do purpose-driven projects, really thinking about how someone is inspired to do mission during work every day. >> Right, it's interesting, Bev Crair at the keynote talked about, the question I think was, do you have to separate, kind of your personal views from your professional views and your social life? And she made a very powerful statement, she's like, "I'm comfortable enough with my employer that I can say what I feel and if there's ever a question they can ask me about it. But I don't gait what I say based on my employer as long as I'm being honest and truthful." So you know it's an interesting twist on an old theme. Where before you kind of had your separate worlds. You know, you had your work life and your home life, but now between email and text and social media, there is no kind of they're there for work and it's really invaded into the personal. So is that why the personal has to kind of invade back into the work? >> And when it comes to millennials, one word that always comes up is authenticity. People do not want to separate who they are at home from who they are at work. They want to be their whole person. Now obviously there's a line you don't cross. I'm not going to tell someone exactly what I think of them or tell the boss to go screw themselves or insult somebody or put on social media something that's secret that we're doing at the company. But I think that people want to feel that they get to show up who they are, have their beliefs echoed at the workplace, be able to be their full self, their full values, their mission, their goals, have that reflected in what they do, and have people at the company actually acknowledge that. You're not just an employee, I actually know what's going on in your life. I know what your dreams are, I know what your family's going through. I care about where you're headed, not just today or while you work here, but when you leave the company. Because that's the other thing, is that we're accepting that most of the people entering the workforce now or starting a new job, they're going to be there on average two to three years, maybe four, five, or six years. They're not going to be there ten, fifteen, twenty years like they used to be. So how do you actually empower someone to make an impact while they're there. And help them find the next lily pad, as they call it. The next opportunity. Because they're going to have a lot of those lily pads as they go throughout their career. >> It's interesting. We interviewed a gal named Marcia Conrad at an IBM event many years ago. She just made a really funny observation, she's like, "You know, people come in and you interview them and they're these really cool people and that's why you hire them, because they've got all these personality traits and habits and hobbies and things that they do, and energy." And then they come into the company, and then the old-school, you drop the employee, you know manual on top of them, basically saying stop being you. Stop being the person that we just hired. So that's completely flipped up on its head. >> Right, one of the things I talked about in the session today was this idea of stay interviews versus exit interviews. Normally when we do performance managements, kind of like, okay, you're leaving, what did you think? Why are you doing that when someone leaves? Do it to be like, what would make you stay? What do you want to accomplish while you're here? And you're not being graded against what everyone else is being graded on, what do you want to be graded on? What are your goals? What are your metrics for success? Performance achievement versus just performance measurement. I think is very important for this generation, because otherwise it's like, well why am I being judged on the standards that were written in 1986? This is what I'm trying to do here. >> It's interesting, even Jeff Immelt at GE, they've thrown out the annual review because it's a silly thing. You kind of collect your data two weeks before and the other fifty weeks everybody is just working. I have another hypothesis I want to run by you though. On this kind of purpose-driven. Today so many more things are as a service, transportation as a service, you know there seems to be less emphasis on things and more emphasis on experiences. It also feels like it's easier to see your impact whether it's writing a line of code, or doing something in social media. And you know there was an interesting campaign, Casey Neistat did, participated a couple weeks ago, right. They raised $2 million and basically got Turkish Airlines to fly in a couple hundred thousand metric tons of food to Somalia. And my question is, is it just because you can do those things so much easier and see an impact? Is that why, kind of this, increased purposefulness, I'm struggling on the word. >> I think the tools are certainly more available for people to take action. I think the connection is there. People are seeing what's going on in the world in a way that they've never been exposed to before with social media, with communication technology. It's up front and center. I think also that as technology takes over our lives, you see this with kind of statistics around depression and anxiety, people are starved for that in-person connection. They're starved for that meaning, that actual conversation. We're always doing this, but really a lot of data shows that people experience true joy, true fulfillment, true connection, true experience is what you're talking about, when they're in a room with someone. So people want that. So it's kind of a return back to that purpose-driven life, that purpose-driven tribe, village experience because the rest of the time we're on our phones. And yeah, it's cool, but something's missing. So people are starting to go back to work and be like, "I want that inspiration" that other generations may have gotten from church or from outside of work, or from their community, or from their village, or from the elders, or from a youth group or something. They're like, "I want that in the workplace. I want that everyday." >> Well so this is more top-down right? I mean I just think again, kind of the classic, back in the day, you were kind of compelled to give x percentage of your pay to United Way or whatever. And that was like this big aggregation mechanism that would roll up the money and distribute it to God-knows-where. Completely different model than, and you can see, because of social media and ubiquitous cell phones all over the place, you can actually see who that kid is, that's getting your thing on the other side. >> And it's empowering someone to say, "Okay this is what's important to me. These are the causes that I'd like to support. This is where I want my money to go and here's why." >> So what do you think's the biggest misunderstanding of millennials from old people like me or even older hopefully? >> Well one thing that I do think that millennials don't get right is the importance of patience. I think a lot of times people say, you know, "oh millennials, they want things to happen too quickly." I think that that's true. I think that my generation, I'm going to be the first to admit and say that we need to do a better job of being patient, being persistent. You can't expect things to happen overnight. You can't expect to start a job and in two months get promoted or to feel like you're with the Board of Directors. Things take time. At the same time, it's incumbent upon older generations to listen to these young people, to make them feel like they have a voice, to make them feel like they're heard and that their ideas matter, even if they don't have the final say, to make them feel like they actually matter. Because I think sometimes people assume that they don't know anything. They don't know everything, but they have some really brilliant ideas and if you listen to those ideas they might actually be really good for the company both in terms of profit and purpose. So that's one thing I would say. >> Okay, just, so first time with this show, just get your impressions of the show. >> Oh it's great. This is a great show. You all are doing a great job, a great interview. >> No not our show. The PBWC, I mean of course we're doing a good job, we have you on. I mean the PBWC. >> It's a great, you know for me, it's real exciting to be at the end of an event where I'm one of the only male speakers. Because usually, I've been doing the speaking circuit thing now for a year or two. And I go to these events, I go to panels, I go to conferences, keynotes, and it's mostly male speakers, which is a huge problem. There's far far far fewer women and people of color speaking at these events than men. And one of the things I'm really trying to change is that but also pay equity around speaking, because I talked to some of my female colleagues about what they were paid for a specific event, and they'll say, "Well they covered my transportation, they covered my lift and a salad, or my hotel maybe." I'm like, well I got paid $5000. That's messed up. We did the same amount of work. We did the same panel or doing the same keynote, similar experience levels. That's messed up. And so I'm trying to change that by doing this thing called the Women Speaker Initiative. Which is a mentorship program to empower more women and people of color to be speakers and then to make sure that they're paid fairly when compared to men. >> So how do people get involved with that? >> They should just got to my website, smileyposwolsky.com and check out Women Speaker Initiative. >> Alright, well Adam, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Great great topic and I'm sure, look forward to catching up again later. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Alright. He's Adam, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're at the Professional Business Women of California conference, twenty eighth year. Thanks for watching.