>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Okay. We're back to wrap up HPE discover 2022. The Cube's continuous coverage is day three. John furrier, Dave ante. We had a business friend that we met during the pandemic. A really interesting gentleman, norm Ette. He's the director of global technical marketing at Hewlett Packard enterprise, a real innovator norm. Great to see you. Thanks for making time for coming on >>The cube, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. You're giving me the opportunity to bring it home. Yeah. You know, if I'm only gonna get one shot at it, it might as well be >>The last we always, we always like to bring the energy in the last segment because you know, the cube, we grind it out for three days. I mean, it's just such a great content injection. And so we love to wrap it up, especially with someone like yourself who can really help us convey the themes, but even more so when we look around here this entire ecosystem, you and your team built this. And so take us through that. >>Well, we did, you know, and it takes a village. You know, we have the core team, HPE global technical marketing, uh, which is my team. And then of course we're partnered with other parts of the, our marketing organizations on different pieces, different aspects. And then we have a tremendous team of vendors that we work with on a regular basis. Companies such as, you know, F two B and ivory and others that, you know, really kind of pitch in. And they're, they're kind of my, I call 'em my flex force. You know, we also have another group called promote live and we bring all these people together. And, and in addition, all the vendors, we have something like 380 employees that come from all different parts of the organization to, to land in Las Vegas, to man, these booths and staff, these, uh, staff, these exhibits. >>And so for one week, we get to really work as a, as a, a team, as a family, you know, there's no organizational borders, so to speak, you know, you know, we're a big company, everybody has, you know, different objectives and different things that they're focused on, but we get a chance to all get together and work as one, one team. And so that, that the people aspect is what's so exciting, I think this week. And I think I even saw some of your broadcast earlier. So I think it kind of, it kind of came through as well. Just the joy of, of being together, you know? Sure. Human beings <laugh> >>And, and H HP's got a new spring and its step, which so much focus brought to the table from Antonio and, you know, the team is the lining. >>Yeah, we do. And that's, you know, when you go, when we start talking about the design and you know, one of the things that, you know, we work on this months ahead of time. Yeah. Right. And so it's kinda like a spinning top, you know, we, we, we keep, we, we keep spinning that thing tightening up and then this week you put it on the table and just let it go. Yeah. Right. But it's that whole multi-month process of, of, of twisting that top around and getting it going and right at the middle and right at the centerpiece. And, uh, the core design principle and an ask from, uh, Antonio is that we make sure that we major on HPE, uh, GreenLake edge to cloud platform that, you know, it, it's a, obviously you've been talking about it all week. Yeah. Uh, we've been talking about it all week. It's a big focus of our company. And so right at the very center, we have our HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform demonstration, and then everything in the showcase then radiates from that centerpiece, uh, you know, right, right. At, right at the nexus of all the activities. So the experience starts there and propagates its >>Way. Well, I wanna get into some of the themes and the set pieces you have here. Um, you are in technical marketing and this platform is a tech play. So it's not so much just solutions that you're enabling the theme this year is very much technical marketing. So there's edge, especially cloud data and edge is the big themes security's baked in throughout the whole set, right as well. And that messaging, but it's technical marketing right now. We had, you know, platform play uett packer is a platform. Google packer enterprise is a >>Platform. It is, and it's a, it is a, it's a software platform. Um, you, it, it really completes a cloud strategy. And when you really think about it, I, again, I know some of these numbers have been floating around. Um, but, uh, you know, 70% of all data is still staying OnPrem for good reasons, you know, and then 30% of it can be out there in the public cloud. Uh, so what you kind of have is an incomplete cloud strategy, if you will. And what's happened is that organizations have gotten spoiled a little bit by the cloud experience. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. That, you know, I, you know, your, your dev teams say go, Hey, I just, I wanna work in a Azure. I wanna work in AWS. I love how I go through this process. Why can't I do that with my on-prem stuff? Why, you know, why, you know, I want that kind of experience. So it organizations are really being challenged about how to create that, that kind of service and that experience to their customers because expectations are not because >>Data ha it has to be inclusive. It can't be exclusive to just one part of the organization. >>Yeah. And so how did you, how did that impact obviously, cause GreenLake was coming together, you know, you got the multiple months in advance planning for this big event, right. A lot of lot work goes into it. What was some of the impact to the execution of this event, um, that you can share in terms of the set pieces? Some of the displays was there was there, I won't say radical cause it's not radical. It looks, it turned out great. But what are some of the popular things happening here? What worked, what resonated with customers and what was different from, from, uh, that GreenLake enabled you to do differently? >>Well, I mean, first the first thing is that we, we kind of had a high touch experience at that center point, right. That nexus, the hub of the activity, the GreenLake edge to club platform, uh, demonstration. And it started with us just kind of, you know, having the strategy about first of all, if you sh, if you guys show this and I know, I think maybe you have, when you enter in, we've got like this big aha moment, right. And that aha moment is that platform right in the center, surrounded with wonderful visuals above, below, you know, behind, uh, all around it. But we, we, we had to think about, okay, now I'm staring at this thing. What am I, how am I gonna experience it? So, uh, when I say a high touch experience, we start with a, what I call a platform generalist that would greet you up front, engage in the conversation, you know, so realize that, you know, Dave is a network operations director, he's got some keen interests. >>He has some sort of peripheral idea about what the, uh, HPE GreenLake edge cloud platform is about, but what can it really do for him? You know, what can do, what can he use? How can he use it? So we start at that level of conversation, you know, socialize the core services, the attributes, you know, the, the technology that is actually enabling it. And then as we've identified in our conversation that you're a network geek, you know, and you want to understand, you've heard about Aruba, you know, how's Aruba central play into that. How do the networking services play into that? And so for then we take that, that, that big leap and go up two steps up onto the platform. And we go over to the network specialist, what I, what I'm calling a platform specialist, uh, who understands all the things about the platform, but then is peaked in networking. And we have that conversation and you see how the Aruba customer can benefit by this evolution, uh, and how the different platform services combine to give a holistic experience across a company. And so when I'm an it ops director, and I'm trying to service my network, guys, my storage guys, my compute guys, my external cloud services guys, that this is an environment that I can, so you >>Have an experience where they come in, they can easily move to a point quickly in the display, on the platform >>And it's tailored for them. Exactly. Right. Exactly. That's the exactly. Right. And so if I transition over to you, you know, and you're my, you know, you're my specialist, you know, you're not saying, Hey, Dave, what brings you here today? What are you today? <laugh>, you know, I, I mean, you're prequalified, it's a prequalified conversation. We jump into it. And then that specialist is armed with knowledge as to where, okay, this guy is really interested in switching technology and switches as well. Well, that's demo five 12. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, let me have one of my colleagues take you over there. So then you're, you're escorted over to demo five 12 to go to the next level or perhaps, and this has happened throughout the week that people want to take a test drive of the environment. And so we have the HPE GreenLake living lab, and we have a, a test drive environment right there. >>And so we bring you right to that test drive, where you can, you know, kick the tires yourself, you fire up a live environment. We have a series of exercises that you're taken through. And, uh, I think I've just checked with one of my colleagues where like, well over, you know, well, over 1100 experiences of people doing that here. And that lab has 25 seats, but also externally. Yeah. So right off of hpe.com, that same test drive experience that we're doing here. People can launch at home. And so we got in this morning, there were like four guys logged in from New Zealand, you know, doing exercises, which is pretty neat. So, so when you ask me the question, what are the design considerations, uh, that HPE GreenLake that we baked in and thought through it's again, that, Hey, it's a, it's a big thing. Yeah. It's a big, it's an experience. Let's start with you just digesting the, you know, the comp basic concepts. Then let's talk about your persona and how it directly maps to what you can do. And then if you want to get deeper, you know, we have the solutions that we design behind it, solution demos, and, and if you wanna drive it, let you know, buckle up. Let's >>Go. Yeah, you get right to a spot, multiple monitors, great experience, high touch. Um, that's awesome. I gotta ask you another question. Cause you've been, you know, pre pandemic, you've been doing a lot of this technical marketing and events and then virtual hit right now. We're back face to face, right? It's clear, Dave and I were just talking about our, on our opening day, year on day. One, people love to see each other back. Every event we've been to face to face. People are energized to a level. We didn't even see. What are you seeing here in terms of performance? Obviously, you got sales people here, you got executives here, you got customers right. Face to face, right. >>Doing belly to belly, >>Belly to belly, as Dave says, that's a positive, what's it like, explain what it's like. >>Well, I mean, you don't, you never know what you got until it's gone, right? >>Yeah. >>You, and so people didn't really realize that, Hey, we really needed to have this kind of touch and this, this kind of activity. And it was funny because people be before the pandemic, there was also a push to do a lot of virtual stuff, you know, economies of scale. Yeah. You know, some of that stuff works. Teams are making decisions, but then it all goes away and people realize how valuable, you know, just the conversations were, you know, meeting >>Somebody, relationships, meeting >>Somebody for a coffee, you know, talking through different bumping into colleagues than that. You haven't seen for years, or you worked with somebody and now they're doing this. And then you realize you have some sort of synergy with each other and you know, you can still help each other. And just the, just, you know, just the discovery <laugh> of being at discover, you know, and running into these different types of things. So, uh, well >>You think about it norm, you know, we, we've done plenty of stuff virtually we have, but I think we've talked maybe four times this week. Yeah. You've seen you here walking around the hallways. We saw you last night, right? Yeah. You just, that just wouldn't happen in your little virtual >>World. Yeah. I mean, not at all. And during that virtual era, and I think we'll look back on that and we're still gonna do virtual stuff >>Course, and we're learning, >>It's got value, but I just want to thank you guys for just being the cube and the whole team, you know, Frank, everybody just tremendous partners through that because you can still look at that content that we produced together last year and it's still relevant. We're still sharing it. It still has impact. We, we point, you know, we tell people, Hey, here's call to action. You're leaving. Discover by the way, there's these three or four pieces out on the cube that really go with, go at this topic. >>Right. That GreenLake event we did last year was phenomenal. >>It was, it was, and it was a partnership with you guys. And I, I, you know, I, I speak on, on behalf of many of my colleagues here at HPE, we just wanna thank the cube for all the support, creativity, uh, and how we got through that >>All together. We we'll back at you because norm you were a real innovator when John and I first met you, we were like, Hey, this guy, actually, he's gonna, he's gonna push us to some new levels. Technical >>Marketing know >>That's our, our team marketing. Like our team was a little nervous, a lot nervous actually, because you know, you do, you are not only demanding, but you're super creative. Well, thank you. And so you, you helped us, you know, up, up our game. >>Yeah. Thanks a lot. Yeah. You know, Frank was getting, Hey, Frank, Dave, can you guys do this? You >>Know, so yeah, we were on the background. >>I mean, but we were, we were growing and surviving and thriving together and getting through it, but what's coming out. The other side now is a new format. You mentioned virtual. That's not going away. Hybrid is a steady state for all of us. Even the cube. Yeah. So the new protocols and the new standards are emerging. And I think the newness of it scares people also like how do you do it? Um, who, whose role is it to take the virtual and digital? So this whole new set of experiences still coming out. Yeah. What's your vision? How do you see this? Cause we're face to face clearly is what everyone wants from school kids to adults. Right. We want face to face. Right. How does digital fit in? >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a, that's a really tricky question. I'll give you a, a, I'll kind of back into the answer a little bit. Um, you guys can see this, right, right behind us. We had this whole backdrop here, greetings from the edge of virtual reality experience. Well, we built that. We built that during the COVID era, so we could have experiences with people remotely. Right. Uh, and we used it for our executive summit, you know, last year for the virtual discovery, we shipped those Oculus headsets to everybody. They, everybody jumped into it. And so I was sitting there being a host, you know, with four CTOs that were scattered all over the world. So we were in cyberspace together. Right. And so of course being good, uh, you know, good business people we realized, Hey, this is pretty fun. So let's dust it off and bring it out here for the more general public. >>So again, it was like a 200 person, you know, uh, executive level experience and all of that, but it had tremendous value, different types of experiences. I recommend you try it if you ever have the opportunity. Um, so that's a way that we start emerging virtual reality and digital experiences to try to keep that human connection, but now we're using it again. And everybody's in these little pod rooms, six of them together. So they're having this experience in cyberspace and they're having it physically. Yeah. And so I think some, and everyone's enjoying being together and still in cyber space together. So I think when we start to build assets and we start to look at different types of things and experiences, we gotta think, we, we gotta think through that now. Right. You know, how is this, how is this investment or this, this experience, how's it gonna translate, you know, outside of these four walls, right. And how can we use it outside of these four walls, uh, and create, you know, a more engaging experience. So that's a little bit of a backing into that answer, but I think I'm, I'm, >>It's emerging. It's >>Important. Well, I'm saying it more as an example of us thinking through and trying to leverage. Yeah. >>I love it though. I mean, you always, you've always been struck me as a visionary and I, I loved that answer and I can just see, it's just gonna progress by the end of the decade. This is gonna become right. Uh, a a, you know, a normal sort of practice, and we're gonna bring people in from the outside and interacting. I love what you were saying about, yeah. Even though we're here physically, we're actually creating a virtual world within this physical pod. We are. Where can people discover more about that? About, about, about the shows, the content that >>Was here? Well on hpe.com, you can just launch into discover. We have a tremendous amount of content that's been recorded, keynote sponsor sessions, the cube they're dialed in all kinds of different pieces of assets that we've done. Um, I'll plug just another couple of things just to, again, to talk about the connectivity of things that we're doing. So one of the projects that I lead, uh, I am very proud to lead is HPE space born and our space born computer space, born computer two, flying a most powerful machine, uh, computer to ever fly in space. Uh, we've been up there for a year. We've done 24 different experiments over the year to, for the benefit of the entire scientific community. Um, also, you know, doing things for the ISS national lab in NASA, our partners up there, but what we've got is we've built a scale replica of the Columbus module, right? So this is, you know, this is a 28 by 12 foot module. Hey, we're bringing her home seriously. >>They're gonna pull the plugs. They're gonna pull the >>Plug on me soon. Right. So anyway, so we have that module built, right? And this is, uh, we work with a Hollywood production company. We've had it before, but you know, we we've customized it. We have a live link to the ISS station in there. And, and so we're talking about everything that we're doing there, but also in this virtual reality experience, we have you going on a space walk, right. And so we've, we've captured that as well. So we've, we're tying this physical and virtual experience together. Uh, and, uh, so it's a fun project. So you can check that >>Out. We did exit scale together during the pandemic, and that's when I first really got into to space point. It was awesome to see frontier announced actually breaking through the exo scale barrier. We, we were on the cusp, but we, we now see it breaking through. So, yeah. Congratulations on that. Thank you >>Very much. And, you know, a couple, you know, just couple other things that we're doing, that's pretty exciting. I don't, I don't wanna give away all my tricks, uh, but you know, we've organized our demonstrations through the customer lenses. So we have these customer journeys that we see people that are using our technology, you know, so I'm, I'm not talking about the storage business unit or, you know, the networking business unit, but how are our customers really trying to, you know, advance AI and machine learning, for example, how are they actually trying to, you know, protect their data? You know, the different things, the business issues, the business issues. Yeah. And so we've organized our demos through that, and we have these, these pods and then satellites, and you, you, you give you walk through that whole thing and it's addressing different aspects of that. >>Um, and then another thing that we've done is we have tours here, uh, as well, where, cuz there's so much content that people can take tours and you know, 1400 people have taken those tours. Uh, you know, and these are guided tours, headsets, curated, big numbers, designated places to go. And we see big traffic the first day or so and by design. And so we hit the highlights and then they decide how to use their valuable time later in the showcase about what they want to deep dive on. And so that's been a tremendous success for >>Us. Well norm thanks for bringing us on the tour of discover. Yeah. Well and really, you know, sharing that with our audience and you've been an awesome partner. And as you say, a great innovator, hope I can't wait to see what's next. All right. >>You so much. Hey, thanks for letting me on here guys. Welcome to our pleasure. I'm somebody I made. You're a Cub >>Alumni alumni. You're alumni. Welcome to alumni. So >>Guys great. Our week. That's a wrap on on day three, uh, Dave Valant day, John furrier for Lisa Martin. Don't forget to go to Silicon angle.com where we've got all the news, all the interviews that we've done this week, get written up and posted on Silicon angle.com. The cube.net I publish every week. Uh, my breaking analysis on, on, on wikibon.com. It's on a podcast. So check that out. Thanks to everybody. Thanks for the crew. Everybody back at the office. Really appreciate it. Great job. And we'll see you next time. All right.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to this cube conversation, on cube on cloud startups. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're wrapping up the closing keynote fireside chat of the AWS showcase, the hottest startups in data and cloud. We've got some great guests here to eluminate what's happened and why it's important. And Michael Skok who's the founding partner, Michael Skok founding partner of Underscore VC, Mike Feinstein, principal business development manager, and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this closing keynote for the AWS showcase. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, first of all-- >> Happy to be here >> Guys, do you guys have a unique background from startup funding, growing companies, managing these partners at AWS and being a practitioner with Ben here. The first question I have is, what is the real market opportunity? We've heard from McKinsey that there's a trillion dollars of unlocked value in cloud and that really is going to come from all enterprises big and small. So the question is that that's what every wants to know. What's the secret answer key to the to the test if you are a business. 'Cause you don't want to be on the wrong side of cloud history here. There is a playbook, there's some formation of patterns and there's some playbook things happening out there. How do you guys see this? >> Well, I can try to take a crack at that. First of all I think, there's not only one playbook, you know, only one recipe. If it's a trillion dollar opportunity, that's in the aggregate. There's many different types of opportunities. I think you could have existing companies that are maybe older line companies that need to change the way they're doing things. You can have the younger companies that are trying to take advantage of all the data they've already collected and try to get more value out of it. There could be some radically different types of opportunities with newer technology. I think, you know, for each company just like each of the companies here at the showcase today, they are targeting some, you know, segment of this. Each of those segments is already large. And I think you're going to see a wide range of solutions taking hold here. >> Yeah, cloud drives a lot of value. Michael, I want to get your thoughts. You know, you've seen the software revolution you know, over the years. This time it seems to be accelerated, the time to value, if you're a startup. I mean, you couldn't ask for the perfect storm for our innovation if you're coming out of MIT, Stanford, any college. If you're not even going to school you can get in cloud, do anything. Starting software now is not as hard as it was or its different. What's your perspective because you know, these companies are adding treated value and they're going into an enterprise market that wants scale, they want the reliability. How do you see this evolving? >> You know, the very first time I saw Bezos get on stage and pitch AWS he said one thing which is, "We take away all the hard stuff about starting a software business and let you focus on the innovation." And I think that's still applies. So you're dead right John. And honestly, most founders don't want to spend any time on anything other than unique piece of innovation that they're going to deliver for their customers. So, I think that is fabulous news. I'm going to joke for a second, so I think we're all under shooting on this number. I mean, the reality is that every part of compute infrastructure that we talk about today was built from an infrastructure that's you know, decades old. By which I mean 30 to 50 decades in some 30 to 50 years in some cases. And we look forward in 30 to 50 years, we won't be talking about cloud or everything else. We'll be just talking about computing or whatever it is that we want to talk about at the edge. Or the application of data that you know, in a car and an ARVR heads up display that's helping surgeons work across the world. The fact is the only way this is really going to work is on the cloud. So I think it's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, we're just taking a snapshot of it right now. And we're in an interesting point because of course digital transformation has been rapidly accelerated. I mean, there's all these jokes about you know, we've had five years of transformation in five months. I don't really care what the number is but what is obvious is that we couldn't have gone off to work and to play and to teach and all these other things without the cloud. And we just took it for granted but a year ago, that's what we all did and look, they're thriving. This whole thing is that, you know, a live broadcast that we're doing on the cloud. So yeah, I think it's a very big opportunity and whatever sector I think to Mike's point, that you look at and all the companies that you've seen this morning prove that, if you want to innovate today, you start on the cloud. Your cloud native as I would say. And as you grow, you will be a cloud assumed. It will be the basis on which everybody wants to access your products and services. So I'm excited about the future if you can't tell. >> I totally subscribe to that. Ben, I want to get your take as the CIO, now advisor to companies. If you're going to look at what Michael's laying out, which is born in the cloud native, they have an advantage, an inherent advantage right out of the gate. They have speed agility and scale. If you're an existing business you say, "Wait a minute I'm going to be competed against these hot startups." There's some serious fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed, right? I mean, you might go out of business. So this is the real threat. This is not just talked about, there's real examples now playing out. So as a practitioner, thinking about re-architecting or rejuvenating or pivoting or just being competitive. It's really the pressure's there. How do you see this? >> Yeah I know it really is. And every enterprise company and through every decade is it's a buyer versus build conversation. And with the cloud opportunities, you can actually build a lot quicker or you can leverage companies that can even go quicker than you that have a focus on innovation. 'Cause sometimes enterprise companies, it's hard to focus on the really cool stuff and that's going to bring value but maybe it won't. So if you can partner with someone and some of these companies that you just showcase, start doing some amazing things. That can actually help accelerate your own internal innovation a lot quicker than trying to spool up your own team. >> We heard some companies talking about day two operations lift and shift, not a layup either. I mean, lift and shift if not done properly as it's well discussed. And McKinsey actually puts that in their report as there's other point outs. It's not a no brainer. I mean, it's a no brainer to go to the cloud but if you lift and shift without really thinking it through or remediating anything, it could be, it could cost more. And you got the CAPEX and OPEX dynamics. So, certainly cloud is happening and this kind of gives a great segue into our next topic that I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on. And that is the business model, the business structure, business organization. Michael you brought up some interesting topics around, some of the new ideas that could be, you know, decentralized or just different consumption capabilities on both sides of the equation. So, the market's there, trillions and trillions of dollars are shifting and the spoils will go to the ones who are smart and agile and fast. But the business model, you could have it, you could be in the right market, but the wrong business model. Who wants to take the first cut at that? >> Mike do you want to go? >> Sure, I'd be happy to. I think that, you know, I mean again, there's not there only going to be one answer but I think one of the things that really make sense is that the business models can be much more consumption-based. You're certainly not going to see annual software licenses that you saw in the old world. Things are going to be much more consumption-based obviously software is a service type of models. And you're going to see, I think lots of different innovations. I've also seen a lot of companies that are starting up kind of based on open source as like a first foray. So there's an open source project that really catches hold. And then a company comes up behind it to both enhance it and to also provide support and to make it a real enterprise offering. But they get there early quick adoption of the frontline engineers by starting off with an open source project. And that's a model that I've seen work quite well. And I think it's a very interesting one. So, you know, the most important thing is that the business model has to be one that's as flexible as what the solutions are that you're trying to get the customers to adopt. The old way of everything being kind of locked in and rigid isn't going to work in this world 'cause you have to just really be agile. >> I want to come back to you Mike in a second on this 'cause I know Amazon's got some innovative go to market stuff. Michael you've written about this, I've read many blog posts on your side about SaaS piece. What's your take on business structure. I mean, obviously with remote, it's clear people are recognizing virtual companies are available. You mentioned you know, edge and compute, and these new app, these emerging technologies. Does the business structure and models shift? Do you have to be on certain side of this business model innovation? How do you view? 'Cause you're seeing the startups who are usually crazy at first, but then they become correct at the end of the day. What's your take? >> Well first of all, I love this debate because it's over. We used to have things that were not successful that would become shelfware. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. There is no shelfware. You're either live and being used or you're dead. So the great news about this is, it's very visible. You know, you can measure every person's connection to you for how long and what they're doing. And so the people that are smart, don't start with this question, the business model. They start with what am I actually doing for my user that's in value them? So I'll give you some examples like build on Mike's team. So, you know, I backed a company called Acquia. But it was based on an open source project called Drupal. Which was initially used for content management. Great, but people started building on it and over time, it became used for everything from the Olympics and hosting, you know, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, pick your favorite consumer brand that was using it to host all of their different brands and being very particular about giving people the experiences. So, it's now a digital experience platform. But the reason that it grew successfully as a company is because on top of the open source project, we could see what people were doing. And so we built what in effect was the basis for them to get comfortable. By the way, Amazon is very fundamental partner in this was, became an investor extremely helpful. And again, took away all the heavy lifting so we could focus on the innovation. And so that's an example of what's going on. And the model there is very simple. People are paying for what they use to put that digital experience of that, to create a great customer journey. And for people to have the experience that obviously you know, makes the brand look good or makes the audience feel great if it's the Grammy's or whatever it is. So I think that's one example, but I'll give you two others because they are totally different. And one of the most recent investments we made is in a company called Coder. Which is a doc spelled backwards. and it's a new kind of doc that enables people to collaborate and to bring data and graphics and workflow and everything else, all into the simplicity of what's like opening up a doc. And they don't actually charge anybody who uses their docs. They just charge for people who make their docs. So its a make a best pricing, which is very interesting. They've got phenomenal metrics. I mean they're like over 140% net dollar retention, which is astoundingly good. And they grew over three and a half times last year. So that's another model, but it's consumer and it's, you know, as I said, make a price. And then, you know, another company we've been involved with if I look at it way back was Demand Web. It was the first e-commerce on demand company. We didn't charge for the software at all. We didn't charge for anything in fact. what we did was to take a percentage of the sales that went through the platform. And of course everybody loved that because, you know, if we were selling more or getting better uplift then everybody started to do very well. So, you know, the world's biggest brands moved online and started using our platform because they didn't want to create all that infrastructure. Another totally different model. And I could go on but the point is, if you start from the customer viewpoint like what are you doing for the customer? Are you helping them sell more? Or are you helping them build more effective business processes or better experiences? I think you've got a fantastic opportunity to build a great model in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I think that's a great highlight also call out for expectations become the experience, as the old saying goes. If a customer sees value in something, you don't have to be tied to old ways of selling or pricing. And this brings up, Ben, I want to tie in you in here and maybe bring Mike back in. As an enterprise, it used to be the old adage of, well startups are unreliable, blah, blah, blah, you know, they got to get certified and enterprise usually do things more complicated than say consumer businesses. But now Amazon has all kinds of go to market. They have the marketplace, they have all kinds of the partner networks. This certification integration is a huge part of this. So back to, you know, Michael's point of, if you're dead you're dead or knows it, but if you're alive you usually have some momentum it's usually well understood, but then you have to integrate. So it has to be consumable for the enterprise. So Ben, how do you see that? Because at the end of the day, there's this desire for the better product and the better use case. That can, how do I procure it? Integration? These used to be really hard problems. Seems to be getting easier or are they? What's your take? >> Not 100%. I mean, even five years ago you would have to ask a lot of startups for a single sign on and as table stakes now. So the smart ones are understanding the enterprise principles that we need and a lot of it is around security. And then, they're building that from the start, from the start of their products. And so if you get out of that security hurdle, the stability so far is a lot more improved because they are, you know, a lot more focused and moving in a really, really quick way which can help companies, you know, move quickly. So definitely seen an improvement and there's still, the major entry point is credit card, small user base, small pricing, so you're not dealing with procurement. And building your way up into the big purchase model, right? And that model hasn't changed except the start is a lot lot quicker and a lot easier to get going. >> You know, I remember the story of the Amazon web stores, how they won the CIA contract is someone put a test on a credit card and IBM had the deal in their back pocket. They had the Ivory Tower sales call, Michael, you know the playbook on enterprise sales, you know, you got the oracles and you guys call it the top golf tournament smoothing and then you got the middle and then you got the bottoms up you got the, you know, the data dogs of the world who can just come in with freemium. So there's different approaches. How do you guys see that? Michael and Mike, I'd love for you to weigh in on this because this is really where there's no one answer, but depending upon the use case, there's certain motions that work better. Can you elaborate on which companies should pay attention to what and how customers should understand how they're buying? >> Yeah, I can go first on that. I think that first of all, with every customer it's going to be a little different situation, depends on the scale of the solution. But I find that, these very large kind of, you know, make a huge decision and buy some really big thing all at once. That's not happening very much anymore. As you said John, people are kind of building up it's either a grassroots adoption that then becomes an enterprise sale, or there is some trials or smaller deployments that then build up at enterprise sales. Companies can't make those huge mistake. So if they're going to make a big commitment it's based on confidence, that's come from earlier success. And one of the things that we do at AWS in addition to kind of helping enterprises choose the right technology partners, such as many of the companies here today. We also have solutions partners that can help them analyze the market and make the choice and help them implement it. So depending on the level of help that they need, there's lots of different resources that are going to be available to help them make the right choice the first time. >> Michael, your thoughts on this, because ecosystems are a part of the entire thing and partnering with Amazon or any cloud player, you need to be secure. You need to have all the certifications. But the end of the day, if it works, it works. And you can consume it whatever way you can. I mean, you can buy download through the marketplace. You can go direct, it's free. What do you see as the best mix of go to market from a cloud standpoint? Given that there's a variety of different use cases. >> Well, I'm going to play off Ben and Mike on this one and say, you know, there's a perfect example of what Ben brought up, which is single sign on. For some companies, if you don't have that you just can't get in the door. And at the other extreme to what Mike is saying, you know, there are reasons why people want to try stuff before they buy it. And so, you've got to find some way in between these two things to either partner with the right people that have the whole product solution to work with you. So, you know, if you don't have single sign on, you know, go work with Okta. And if you don't have all the certification that's needed well, work with AWS and you know, take it on that side of cash and have better security than anybody. So there's all sorts of ways to do this. But the bottom line is I think you got to be able to share value before you charge. And I'll give you two examples that are extreme in our portfolio, because I think it will show the sort of the edge with these two things. You know, the first one is a company called Popcart. It's been featured a lot in the press because when COVID hit, nobody could find whatever it was, that TP or you know, the latest supplies that they wanted. And so Popcart basically made it possible for people to say, "Okay, go track all the favorite suppliers." Whether it's your Walmarts or your Targets or your Amazons, et cetera. And they would come back and show you the best price and (indistinct) it cost you nothing. Once you started buying of course they were getting (indistinct) fees and they're transferring obviously values so everybody's doing well. It's a win-win, doesn't cost the consumer anything. So we love those strategies because, you know, whenever you can make value for people without costing them anything, that is great. The second one is the complete opposite. And again, it's an interesting example, you know, to Ben's point about how you have to work with existing solutions in some cases, or in some cases across more things to the cloud. So it's a company called Cloud Serum. It's also one we've partnered with AWS on. They basically help you save money as you use AWS. And it turns out that's important on the way in because you need to know how much it's going to cost to run what you're already doing off premises, sorry off the cloud, into the cloud. And secondly, when you move it there to optimize that spend so you don't suddenly find yourself in a situation where you can't afford to run the product or service. So simply put, you know, this is the future. We have to find ways to specifically make it easy again from the customer standpoint. The get value as quickly as possible and not to push them into anything that feels like, Oh my God, that's a big elephant of a risk that I don't obviously want to take on. >> Well, I'd like to ask the next question to Michael and Ben. This is about risk management from an enterprise perspective. And the reason Michael we just want to get you in here 'cause you do risk for living. You take risks, you venture out and put bets on horses if you will. You bet on the startups and the growing companies. So if I'm a customer and this is a thing that I'm seeing both in the public and private sector where partnerships are super critical. Especially in public right now. Public private partnerships, cybersecurity and data, huge initiatives. I saw General Keith Alexander talking about this, about his company and a variety of reliance on the private problem. No one winning formula anymore. Now as an enterprise, how do they up level their skill? How do you speak to enterprises who are watching and learning as they're taking the steps to be cloud native. They're training their people, they're trying to get their IT staff to be superpowers. They got to do all these. They got to rejuvenate, they got to innovate. So one of the things that they got to take in is new partnerships. How can an enterprise look at these 10 companies and others as partners? And how should the startups that are growing, become partners for the enterprise? Because if they can crack that code, some say that's the magical formula. Can you guys weigh in on that? (overlapping chatter) >> Look, the unfortunate starting point is that they need to have a serious commitment to wanting to change. And you're seeing a lot of that 'cause it is popping up now and they're all nodding their heads. But this needs people, it needs investment, and it needs to be super important, not just to prior, right? And some urgency. And with that behind you, you can find the right companies and start partnering to move things forward. A lot of companies don't understand their risk profile and we're still stuck in this you know, the old days of global network yet infiltrated, right? And that's sort of that its like, "Oh my God, we're done." And it's a lot more complicated now. And there needs to be a lot of education about the value of privacy and trust to our consumers. And once the executive team understands that then the investments follow. The challenge there is everyone's waiting, hoping that nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong, oh, we better address that, right? And so how do we get ahead of that? And you need a very proactive CSO and CIO and CTO and all three if you have them really pushing this agenda and explaining what these risks are. >> Michael, your thoughts. Startups can be a great enabler for companies to change. They have their, you know, they're faster. They bring in new tech to the scenario scene. What's your analysis? >> Again, I'll use an example to speak to some of the things that Ben's talking about. Which is, let's say you decide you want to have all of your data analysis in the cloud. It turns out Amazon's got a phenomenal set of services that you can use. Do everything from ingest and then wrangle your data and get it cleaned up, and then build one of the apps to gain insight on it and use AI and ML to make that whole thing work. But even Amazon will be the first to tell you that if you have all their services, you need a team understand the development, the operations and the security, DevSecOps, it's typically what it's referred to. And most people don't have that. If you're sure and then say you're fortune 1000, you'll build that team. You'll have, you know, a hundred people doing that. But once you get below that, even in the mid tier, even in a few billion dollar companies, it's actually very hard to have those skills and keep them up to date. So companies are actually getting built that do all of that for you, that effectively, you know, make your services into a product that can be run end to end. And we've invested in one and again we partnered with Amazon on gold Kazina. They effectively make the data lake as a service. And they're effectively building on top of all the Amazon services in orchestrating and managing all that DevSecOps for you. So you don't need that team. And they do it in, you know, days or weeks, not months or years. And so I think that the point that Ben made is a really good one. Which is, you know, you've got to make it a priority and invest in it. And it doesn't just happen. It's a new set of skills, they're different. They require obviously everything from the very earliest stage of development in the cloud, all the way through to the sort of managing and running a bit. And of course maintaining it all securely and unscalable, et cetera. (overlapping chatter) >> It's interesting you bring up that Amazon's got great security. You mentioned that earlier. Mike, I wanted to bring you in because you guys it's graduating a lot of startups, graduating, it's not like they're in school or anything, but they're really, you're building on top of AWS which is already, you know, all the SOC report, all the infrastructure's there. You guys have a high bar on security. So coming out of the AWS ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. I mean, you got to kind of go through and I've heard from many startups that you know, that's a grueling process. And this is, should be good news for the enterprise. How are you guys seeing that partnership? What's the pattern recognition that we can share with enterprises adopting startups coming on the cloud? What can they expect? What are some best practices? What are the things to look for in adopting startup technologies? >> Yeah, so as you know we have a shared security model where we do the security for the physical infrastructure that we're operating, and then we try to share best practices to our partners who really own the security for their applications. Well, one of the benefits we have particularly with the AWS partner network is that, we will help vet these companies, we will review their security architecture, we'll make recommendations. We have a lot of great building blocks of services they can use to build their applications, so that they have a much better chance of really delivering a more secure total application to the enterprise customer. Now of course the enterprise customers still should be checking this and making sure that all of these products meet their needs because that is their ultimate responsibility. But by leveraging the ecosystem we have, the infrastructure we have and the strength of our partners, they can start off with a much more secure application or use case than they would if they were trying to build it from scratch. >> All right. Also, I want to get these guys out of the way in on this last question, before we jump into the wrap up. products and technologies, what is the most important thing enterprises should be focused on? It could be a list of three or four or five that they should be focused on from emerging technologies or a technology secret sauce perspective. Meaning, I'm going to leverage some new things we're going to build and do or buy from cloud scale. What are the most important product technology issues they need to be paying attention to? >> I think I'll run with that first. There's a major, major opportunity with data. We've gone through this whole cycle of creating data lakes that tended to data's forms and big data was going to solve everything. Enterprises are sitting on an amazing amount of information. And anything that can be done to, I actually get insights out of that, and I don't mean dashboards, PI tools, they're like a dime a dozen. How can we leverage AI and ML to really start getting some insights a lot quicker and a lot more value to the company from the data they owns. Anything around that, to me is a major opportunity. >> Now I'm going to go just a little bit deeper on that 'cause I would agree with all those points that Ben made. I think one of the real key points is to make sure that they're really leveraging the data that they have in kind of in place. Pulling in data from all their disparate apps, not trying to generate some new set of data, but really trying to leverage what they have so they can get live information from the disparate apps. Whether it's Salesforce or other systems they might have. I also think it's important to give users the tools to do a lot of their own analytics. So I think definitely, you know, kind of dashboards are a dime a dozen as Ben said, but the more you can do to make it really easy for users to do their own thing, so they're not relying on some central department to create some kind of report for them, but they can innovate on their own and do their own analytics of the data. I think its really critical to help companies move faster. >> Michael? >> I'll just build on that with an example because I think Ben and Mike gave two very good things, you know, data and making it self service to the users et cetera So, an example is one of our companies called Salsify, which is B2B commerce. So they're enabling brands to get their products out into the various different channels the day that people buy them on. Which by the way, an incredible number of channels have been created, whether it's, you know, Instagram at one extreme or of course you know, traditional commerce sites is another. And it's actually impossible to get all of the different capabilities of your product fully explained in the right format in each of those channels humanly. You actually have to use a computer. So that highlights the first thing I was thinking is very important is, what could you not do before that you can now do in the cloud? And you know, do in a distributed fashion. So that's a good example. The second thing is, and Mike said it very well, you know, if you can give people the data that Ben was referring to in a way that they line a business user, in this case, a brand manager, or for example the merchandiser can actually use, they'll quickly tell you, "Oh, these three channels are really not worth us spending a lot of money on. We need waste promotion on them. But look at this one, this one's really taking up. This TikTok thing is actually worth paying attention to. Why don't we enable people to buy, you know, products there?" And then focus in on it. And Salsify, by the way, is you know, I can give you stats with every different customer they've got, but they've got huge brands. The sort of Nestlés, the L'Oreals et cetera. Where they're measuring in terms of hundreds of percent of sales increase, because of using the data of Ben's point and making itself service to Mike's point. >> Awesome. Thought exercise for this little toss up question, for anyone who wants to grab it. If you had unlimited budget for R&D, and you wanted to play the long game and you wanted to take some territory down in the future. What technology and what area would you start carving out and protecting and owning or thinking about or digging into. There's a variety of great stuff out there and you know, being prepared for potentially any wildcards, what would it be? >> Well, I don't mind jumping in. That's a tough question. Whatever I did, I would start with machine learning. I think we're still just starting to see the benefits of what this can do across all of different applications. You know, if you look at what AWS has been doing, we, you know, we recently, many of our new service offerings are integrating machine learning in order to optimize automatically, to find the right solution automatically, to find errors in code automatically. And I think you're going to see more and more machine learning built into all types of line of business applications. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service. You know, you already see some of it but I think it's going to happen more and more. So if I was going to bet on one core thing, it would be that. >> I'll jump on that just because I-- >> You're VC, do you think about this as an easy one for you. >> Well, yes or no (indistinct) that I've been a VC now for too long. I was you know (indistinct) for 21 years. I could have answered that question pretty well but in the last 19 of becoming a VC, I've become ruined by just capital being put behind things. But in all seriousness, I think Mike is right. I think every single application is going to get not just reinvented completely reimagined by ML. Because there's so much of what we do that there is indeed managing the data to try to understand how to improve the business process. And when you can do that in an automated fashion and with a continuous close loop that improves it, it takes away all the drudgery and things like humans or the other extreme, you know, manufacturing. And in-between anything that goes from border to cash faster is going to be good for business. And that's going to require ML. So it's an exciting time ahead. That's where we're putting our money. >> Ben, are you going to go off the board here or you're going to stay with machine learning and dating, go wild card here. Blockchain? AR? VR? (overlapping chatter) >> Well I'd have to say ML and AI applying to privacy and trust. Privacy and trust is going to be a currency that a lot of companies need to deal with for a long time coming. And anything you can do to speed that up and honestly remove the human element, and like Michael said, there's a lot of, before there's a lot of services on AWS that are very creative. There's a lot of security built-in But it's that one S3 bucket that someone left open on the internet, that causes the breach. So how are we automating that? Like how do we take the humans out of this process? So we don't make human errors to really get some security happening. >> I think trust is an interesting one. Trust is kind of data as well. I mean, communities are, misinformation, we saw that with elections, huge. Again, that's back to data. We're back to data again. >> You know, John if I may, I'd like to add to that though. It's a good example of something that none of us can predict. Which is, what will be a fundamentally new way of doing this that we haven't really thought of? And, you know, the blockchain is effectively created a means for people to do distributed computing and also, you know, sharing of data, et cetera. Without the human being in the middle and getting rid of many of the intermediaries that we thought were necessary. So, I don't know whether it's the next blockchain or there's blockchain itself, but I have a feeling that this whole issue of trust will become very different when we have new infrastructure. >> I think I agree with everyone here. The data's key. I come back down to data whether you're telling the sovereignty misinformation, the data is there. Okay. Final, final question before we wrap up. This has been amazing on a more serious note for the enterprise folks out there and people in general and around the world. If you guys could give a color commentary answer to, what the post COVID world will look like. With respect to technology adoption, societal impact and technology for potentially good and aura for business. Now that we're coming closer to vaccines and real life again, what is the post COVID world going to look like? What do we learn from it? And how does that translate into everyday in real life benefits? >> Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is that people have realized you can do a lot of work without being in the office. You could be anywhere as long as you can access the data and make the insights from it that you need to. And so I think there's going to be an expectation on the part of users, that there'll be able to do that all the time. They'll be able to do analytics on their phone. They'll be able to do it from wherever they are. They'll be able to do it quickly and they'll be able to get access to the information that they need. And that's going to force companies to continue to be responsive to the expectations and the needs of their users, so that they can keep people productive and have happy employees. Otherwise they're going to go work somewhere else. >> Michael, any thoughts? Post COVID, what do we learn? What happens next? >> You said one key thing Mike, expectations. And I think we're going to live in a very difficult world because expectations are completely unclear. And you might think it's based on age, or you might think it's based on industry or geography, etc. The reality is people have such wildly different expectations and you know, we've tried to do surveys and to try and understand, you know, whether there are some patterns here. I think it's going to be one word, hybrid. And how we deal with hybrid is going to be a major leadership challenge. Because it's impossible to predict what people will do and how they will behave and how they want to for example, go to school or to you know, go to work or play, et cetera. And so I think the third word that I would use is flexibility. You know, we just have to be agile and flexible until we figure out, you know, how this is going to settle out, to get the best of both worlds, because there's so much that we've learned that has been to your point, really beneficial. The more productivity taking out the community. But there's also a lot of things that people really want to get back to such as social interaction, you know, connecting with their friends and living their lives. >> Ben, final word. >> So I'll just drill in on that a little bit deeper. The war on talent, if we talk about tech, if we talk a lot about data, AI, ML. That it's going to be a big differentiator for the companies that are willing to maintain a work from home and your top level resources are going to be dictating where they're working from. And they've seen our work now. And you know, if you're not flexible with how you're running your organization, you will start to lose talent. And companies are going to have to get their head around that as we move forward. >> Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. That's a great wrap up to this cube on cloud, the AWS startup showcase. Thank you very much on behalf of Dave Vellante, myself, the entire cube team and Amazon web services. Thank you very much for closing out the keynote. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you John and thanks Amazon for a great day. >> Yeah, thank you John. >> Okay, that's a wrap for today. Amazing event. Great keynote, great commentary, 10 amazing companies out there growing, great traction. Cloud startup, cloud scale, cloud value for the enterprise. I'm John Furrier on behalf of theCUBE and Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS "re:Invent" 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS "re:Invent" virtual 2020. It's not an in-person event this year. It's remote, it's virtual, "theCUBE" is virtual and our guests and our interviewers will be remote as well. And so we're here covering the event for the next three weeks, throughout the next three cause we're weaving in commentary from "theCUBE", check out the cube.net and all of our coverage. And here at AWS we have special feature programming, we got a great segment here talking about big data in the cloud, governance, data lakes, all that good stuff. Rik Tamm-Daniels, vice-president strategic ecosystems and technology for Informatica, and Rick Turnock, head of enterprise data services, Invesco, customer of Informatica. Welcome to the cube. >> Hey John, thanks for having us. >> So Rik, with a K from Informatica, I want to ask you first, we've been covering the company journey for many, many years. Always been impressed with the focus on data and specifically cloud and all the things that you guys have been announcing over the years, have been spot on the mark. You know, AI with CLAIRE, you know, making things, cloud native, all that's kind of playing out now with the pandemic, "re:Invent", that's the story here. Building blocks with high level services, cloud native, but data is the critical piece again. More machine learning, more AI, more data management. What's your take on this year's "re:Invent". >> Absolutely John and again, we're always excited to be here at "re:Invent", we've been here since the very first one. You know, it's a deep talk to a couple of key trends there, especially the era of the global pandemic here. There's so many challenges that so many enterprises are experiencing. I think the big surprise has been, that has actually translated into a tremendous amount of demand for digital transformation, and cloud modernization in particular. So we've seen a huge uptake in our cloud relationships with AWS when it comes to transformational architecture solutions around data and analytics, and using data as a fundamental asset for digital transformation. And so some of those solution areas are things like data warehouse, modernization of the cloud, or end-to-end data governance. That's a huge topic as well for many enterprises today. >> Before coming into "re:Invent", I had a chance to sit down an exclusive interview with Andy Jassy. I just spoke with Matt Garman who's now heading up sales and marketing, who ran EC too. Rick, you're a customer of Informatica. Their big talking point to me and validation to the trends is, there's no excuse to go slow anymore because there's a reason to go fast cause there's consequences and the pandemic has highlighted that you got to move faster otherwise, you know, you're going to be on the wrong side of history and necessity is the mother of all invention. Okay, great. I buy that by the way. So I have no complaints on talking point there from Amazon Web Services. The problem is, you got to manage the data. (John chuckles) To go fast. The gas in the tank is data, and if it's screwed up, it's not going to go well, all right? So it's like putting gas in a car. So, this is where I see the data lake coming into the cloud and all the benefits and look at the successes of companies. The cloud is a real enabler. What's your take on this? The importance of data governance, because cloud scale is here, people want to go faster, data is like the key thing. >> Yeah. The data governance was a critical component when we started our enterprise data platform and looking at, you know, how can we build a modern-day architecture with scale, bringing our enterprise data, but doing it in a governed fashion. So, when we did it, we kind of looked at, you know, what are critical partners? How can we apply data governance and the full catalog capabilities of knowing what data's coming in, identifying it, and then really controlling the quality of it to meet the needs of the organization. It was a critical component for us because typically it's been difficult to get access to that right data. And as we look in the future and even current needs, we really need to understand our data and bring the right data in and make it easily accessible and governance, and quality of that is a critical component of it. >> I want to just follow up with that if you don't mind cause you know, I've done so many of these interviews, I've been on the block now 30 years in the industry, I've seen the waves come and go, and you see a lot of these mandates, you know, "Data governance, we're adding data governance." From the Ivory tower, or you hear, "Everything got to be a service." But when you peel back and look under the hood to make that happen, it's complicated. You've got to have put things in place and it's got to be set up properly, you got to do your work. How important it is to have... And well what's under the covers to this? Cause governance, yeah, it's a talking point, I get that. But to make it actually happen well, it's hard. >> We started really with the operating models from the start. So I kind of took over data governance seven years ago and had a governing global architecture that's been around for 40 years, and it was hard. So this was really our shot and time to get it right. So we did an operating model, a governance model, and it really ingrained it through the whole build and execution process. And so it was part with technology and it was foundational to the process to really deliver it. So it wasn't governance from a governance saying, it was really part of our operating model and process to build this out and really succeed at it. >> Rik, on the Informatica side, I got to get your take on the new solution you guys announced, "The Governed Data Lake", I think it was solution. Does this tie into that? Take a minute to explain the announcement, and how does this tie in? >> Yeah, absolutely John. So I think you take a step back, look at... We talked about some of the drivers of why companies are investing in cloud data lakes. And I think what comes down to is, when you think about that core foundation of data analytics, you know, they're really looking at, you know, how do we go ahead and create a tremendous leap forward in terms of their ability to leverage data as an asset. And again, as we talked about, one of the biggest challenges is trust around the data. And what the solution does though, is it really looks to say, "Okay, first and foremost, "let's create that foundation of trust "not just for the cloud data lake, "but for the entire enterprise. "To ensure that when we start to build this "new architecture, one, we understand the data assets "that are coming in at the very get-go." Right? It's much harder to add data governance after the fact, but you put it in upfront, you understand your existing data landscape. And once that data is there, you make sure you understand the quality of the information, you cleanse the data, you also make sure you put it under the right data management policies. So many policies that enterprises are subject to now like CCPA and GDPR. They have to be concerned about consumer privacy and being able as part of your governance foundational layer, to make sure that you're in compliance as data moves through your new architectures. It's fundamental having that end trust and confidence to be able to use that data downstream. So our solution looks to do that end-to-end across a cloud environment, and again, not just the cloud environment, but the full enterprise as well. One thing I do want to touch on if you don't mind is on the AI side of things and the tooling side of things. Because I think data governance has been around a while, as you said, it's not that it's a new concept. But how do you do it efficiently in today's world? >> John: Yeah. >> And this is where Informatica is focused on a concept of data 4.0. Which is the use of metadata and AI and machine learning and intelligence, to make this process much, much more efficient. >> Yeah that's a good point, Rik, from these two Rickes, I got to go, one's with a K, one with a C, and CK. So Rick, CK and from Invesco customer, I want to just check that with you because I was your customer of Informatica, by they brought up a good point about governance. And I saw this movie before, we've all seen this before, people just slap on solutions or tooling to a pre-existing architecture. You see that with security, you know, now it's, you can't have a conversation without saying, "Oh security's got to be baked in from the beginning." Okay cool, I get that. There's no debate there. Governance, same kind of thing, you know, you're hearing this over and over again, if you don't bake governance into the beginning of everything, you're going to be screwed. Okay? So how important is that foundation of trust for this peace. (Rick mumbling) >> It's critical and to do it at beginning, right? So you're profiling the data, you're defining entitlements and who has access to it, you're defining data quality rules that you can validate that, you define the policies, is there a PII data, all of that, as you do that from the start, then you have a well-governed and documented data catalog and taxonomy that has the policies and the controls in place to allow that to use. If you do it after the fact, then you're always going to be catching up. So a part of our process and policies and where the really Informatica tools delivered for us is to make it part of that process. And to use that as we continue to build out our data platform with the quality controls and all the governance processes built in. >> I got to ask on your journey, that's seven years ago, you took over the practice. You were probably right in the middle of the sea change when everyone kind of woke up and said, "Hey, you know, Amazon, you go back seven years, "look at Amazon where they were to where they are today." Okay? Significantly strong then, total bellwether now in terms of value opportunity. So, how did you look at the cloud migration? How do you think about the cloud architecture? Because I'm sure, and I'd love to get your story here about how you thought about cloud, in the midst of architecting the data foundational platform there. >> Yeah, we're a global company that had architecture, we grew it by acquisition. So a lot of our data architecture was on-prem, difficult really to pull that enterprise data together to meet the business needs. So when we started this, we really wanted to leverage cloud technology. We wanted a modern stack. We wanted scale, flexibility, agility, security, all the things that the cloud brought us too. So we did a search, and looking at that, and looked at competitors, but really landed on to Amazon just bought by core capabilities and scale they have innovation and just the services to bring a lot what we're looking at and really deliver on what we wanted from a platform. >> Why Informatica and AWS, why the combination? Can you share some of the reasons why you went with Informatica with AWS? >> Yeah, again, when we started this off, we looked at the competitors, right? And we were using IVQ. So we had an Informatica product on-prem, but we looked at a lot of the different governance competitors, and really the integrated platform that Informatica brings to us, what was the key deliverer, right? So we can really have the technical metadata with EDC and enterprise data client, catalog, scan our sources, our file, understanding the data and lineage of what it is. And we can tie that into axon and the governance tools to really define business costs returns. We were very critical of defining all our key data elements business glossary, and then we can see where that is by linking that to the technical metadata. So we know where our PII data, where are all our data and how it flows, both tactically and from a business process. And then the IDQ. So when we've defined and understand the data, we want to bring in the delight and how we want to conform it, to make it easily accessible, we can define data quality rules within the governance tool, and then execute that with IDQ, and really have a well-defined data quality process that really takes it from governance in theory to governance in really execution. >> That's awesome. Hey, you are using the data, you're using the cloud, you're getting everything you need out of it. That's the whole idea, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> That's good stuff, Rik at Informatica, tell us about what's going on, you mentioned data 4.0, I think people should pay attention to some of the interviews I've done with your team. They're online also, it's part of that next-gen, next level thinking. Here at "re:Invent", what should customers pay attention to, that you guys are doing? Great customer example here of cloud scale. What's the story for "re:Invent" this year for Informatica. >> But what John, it comes down to when customers think about their cloud journey, right? And the difference, especially with their data centric workloads and priorities and initiatives, all the different hurdles that they need to overcome. I think Informatica we're uniquely positioned to help customers address all those different challenges and you heard Rick speak about a whole bunch of those along the way. And I think particularly at "re:Invent", first of all, I just welcome folks to... They want to learn more about our data governance solution. Please come by our virtual booth. We also have a great interactive experience that encouraged folks to check out. One of the key components of our solution is our enterprise data catalog. And attendees at "re:Invent" can actually get hands on with our data catalog through the demo jam, the AWS demo jam as part of "re:invent". So I'd encourage folks to check that out as well, just to see what we're talking about yet actually. >> Awesome. Final question for you guys, as "re:Invent" is going on, a lot app stores are popping up, you seeing obviously the same trends, machine learning and you know, outpost is booming, so a cloud operations is clearly here, Rick from Invesco, what do you think the most important story is for your peers as they're here? It's a learning conference and you guys have seven years in the cloud working together with Informatica, in your opinion, what should people be paying attention to as they looked at this pandemic and what they got to get through? And then coming out of it with the growth strategy, it's all got to be more about the data, there's more data coming in, more sources, IoT data, certainly the work at home is causing these workloads, workplace, workflows, everything's changed, the future of work. What's your advice to peers out there on what to pay attention to and what to think about? >> We really started with a top-down strategy, right? To really the vision and the future. What do we want to get out of our data? Data is just data, right? But it's the information, it's the analytics, it's really delivering value for our clients, shareholders, and employees to really do their job, simplify our architecture. So really defining that vision of what you want and approach, and then executing on it, right? So how do you build it in a way to make it flexible and scalable, and how do you build an operating and governance model really to deliver on it because, you know, garbage in is garbage out, and you really got to have those processes, I think to really get the full value of what you're building. >> Get the data out there at the right place, at the right time and the right quality data. That's a lot more involved now and you need to be agile. And I think agile data is a way to go. Rick Turnock... >> And then with channels and capabilities that makes it easier, right? It makes it doable. And I think that's what cloud and the Informatica tools, right? Where in the past, you know, it was people hard coding and doing it right? The capability of that cloud and these tools give us makes it really achievable. >> You know, we have an old saying here in our CUBE team, you know, "If there's a problem, "you got to see if it's important, "and then look at the consequences "of not solving that problem, quantify the value of "solving or not solving that problem, "and then look and deploy solutions to do it." I think now with the data, you can actually do that and say, "This ain't quite the consequences of not doing this "or doing this, have a quantifiable value." I just loved that because it brings the whole ROI back to the table. And, you know, it's a dark art, it used to be, you mentioned the old days, you know, you got to do all this custom work, it was like a dark art. Oh yeah, the ROI calculation, payback. I mean, it was a moving train. That's the way it used to be. Not anymore. >> You got to do it to survive, really, if you're not doing it, you know, I don't know. >> Necessity is the mother of all inventions I think, now more than ever, data's going to be the key. Rik final word from Informatica. What should people pay attention to? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as you mentioned there, data is obviously a critical asset, right? And, and to your point with cloud, you can not only realize ROI quickly, but, you can actually iterate so much more quickly, where you can get that ROI immediately or you can validate that ROI, you can adjust your approach. But again, from an Informatica standpoint, we are seeing such a huge uptake in demand for customers who want to go to the cloud, who are modernizing. Every day we're investing heavily and how do we make sure that customers can get there quickly? They can maximize the ROI from their data assets, and we're doing it with all things, data management, from traditional data integration, all the way to the data governance, all the capabilities we talked about today. >> Yeah. Congratulations. That's the benefit of investing in a platform and having a set of out of the box tooling with SaaS, platform as a service, really it can enable success. And I think the pandemic is pretty obvious who's taking advantage of it, so congratulations and continued success. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Rick Turnock, head of data service, enterprise data services at Invesco, customer of Informatica sharing his insight. Great insight there. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, baking it in from the beginning data governance foundational, it's not a bolt on, that's the message. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the you covering your red hat. Some twenty nineteen >> rots. >> You buy bread >> hat, >> and we'LL go back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage here. Red Hat Summit day. One of three days of Walter Wall coverage coming to you exclusively here on the Q. I'm John Walls was too Millman. Thank you for joining us. And we're now joined by a couple of gentlemen. Guess the dynamic duo of the container World it at Red Hat. Scott McCarty is the principal product manager of Containers. That open shift and Forell. Scott. Good to see you, sir. >> You could see it >> and been. Bree are Who's the principal product? Manager of Containers and Koro s, Of course. Also it Red hat Been. Thank you for joining us. First off, just your thought about show. Obviously, there's a lot of educational programming going on up down, big crowds, a lot of buzz. Good activity day one, at least from our perspective. How are you guys seeing this so far? >> I love it. I mean, it's been great so far. We just had us. I just had a session, just got out of it. was completely full of people trying to get in that were lined up against a wall. So it's been very exciting so far. >> Yeah. Ben. So it's one of >> my favorite times of the year, right? It's so much energy. Everybody comes with the exchange of ideas, just feedback and everything is one of my favorites. >> Oh, good. Right now s o l e made available publicly today for the first time. We talked about that a lot so far on the program, I'd like to hear from >> your side of the fence. Then what does that mean to you in terms of the container world and the impact that you, you know, from here going forward, you've got a whole new world of concern, I would think Scott. >> Yeah. I mean, with the relic, it's it's >> exciting because we're releasing, uh, you know, a lot of new tools around containers, >> a ton of new operational, you know, management capabilities. I mean, it's just it's an exciting release, Ben. It's a It's a big step forward, right? Every single release is a big deal, and we look at the container space. It's evolved a lot in the past for five years right when we came out. Seven. So technology's matured, Really, it's Ah, it's a smooth, easy experience to get to the release. And if lots going into it a lot, >> Yeah, so, Scott, It's funny. I think back. Turn back. Five years ago, we had a lot of jokes about doctors. You mean the pants? Because container ization and, you know, limits, containers and everything. That was something most people hadn't heard about here. Twenty nineteen, You said, There's, you know, crowds trying to get in the door. And it's not what but there really digging in and understand the tools we give a little bit of. You know what? What's what's with the excitement these days? Where are the customers? And you know what? What do you digging into >> with them? Yeah, well ah, >> funny example. So I asked I asked this last session, You know, raise your hand if you've used containers. If you just even fired up a container before and everyone raise your hand. And now, five years ago, that was, like one person >> and then even last you worked for Google. Yeah. Even last >> year that it was still maybe forty percent of the people, and now it's one hundred percent when they come to a session. So I mean, it's it is it is definitely changed, a tremendous amount. And now it's about So I joked, You know, five years ago is about using a chef knife, you know, just like you cut everything with it, right? You cut it. Vegetables, meat, whatever. And there was like one thing, and you just figured out Doctor and Cooper names was even on the radar Yet now it's about refining all the tools and getting to a place where, like, it's really getting excited, cause now we have special paring knives and chef knife and, you know, hibachi, knife and all these different, more specialized >> tools. So it's getting saying >> You think it's easy to >> adopt now to write, because years ago everyone was hedging their bets on you know what orchestration am I going to use? What piece? Um, I'm gonna build my stack. We have >> now. It's much, much clear, well defined. You know, Cooper Netease is dominant factor, right? Mean, open shift is huge, huge growth for us in that space. So I mean, it's it's it's a lot easier for customers to get in that game now than it was, you know? Yeah, just a couple years ago. Yeah, just a couple years ago. All right, so let's let's sticking out security a little bit because that was one of the big question marks in the early days. And you know something? We talk about it all the shows. It's it's definitely a focus of the real late launch. So where were the container world today and anything new or nuance that the audience should understand? I think on the security side you've got I have three or four big points there. One is the container tools of worshipping. Today they basically inherit the full Lennox security model. Right? So no longer do you have ah, privilege socket. That is, I kind of that weak factor, if you will, that's gone on. Really? So that's a big That's a big win right there. Beyond that, we've got a new crystal policies. You can set a central policy for the O. S. And that works in the containers well, so of you and enforce a particular kind of floor, if you will, of crypto. You could do that with relate for the host way and images as well. That's a that's a big part of it. And then we also have new tools that you can build smaller containers because how did the security is what is in my container? So if you're putting less less packages and content in that image, that's a much smaller Becker as well. Soon. >> Yeah. So, um, from from a security perspective, too, you know, you know the fact that now we have, um, kind of we've got a set of tools now that we can do experiments with things like ruthless, for example. You know, we're tech preview release of ruthless contract, so historically have always ran them, you know, as route. That's just how it works. I mean, we kind of figured it out one way and did it, and it was cool. And then at a certain point, we went all right, we need these other use cases where want developers to build to do it. For example, I just talked to a customer that it has four two hundred. I'm sorry, developers that are all running instances on their laptops PM's with pod man and build a running and, you know, using these tools to actually build containers, and they want to do ruthless bad. They want to do it in all their essentially all their environment, so that people are really hungry for a lot of these security features that we're working on now and relate. And it's something that we're releasing even as a vato. >> How did the capabilities changed in terms of relate now and what you have to provide the support? So what's transformed? And then what will be the need in order to build on that toe work on that and to make it more secure stables on so >> far? Well, I think I think you kind of have to dig into, like, a selection of what tools we decided to go in. Relate you'LL see that it's pod man. Build a scope. Here are the three main lower level tools that we have, and those tools are built serving a Unix mindset where it's like you can pipe things together and do things and use them collaboratively together to go remotely inspect images, pull them, build them from scratch, you know, run them locally, not as roots run them as a non route, contains things like that way or not at, you know, we're not releasing doctrine. Relate. And so so the transition. There is probably the biggest transition for users. Kind of realizing. Okay, we're going kind of broken this apart into three little or tools that we can then use Todd Man being the main one you go to. And then and then it's got a command line that's very similar. And so it's very easy, tio kind of transition over. But then you start to again kind of my my chef knife reference. You realize once you transition from, say, Dr Pod man, you kind of that's your chef knife. You kind of know what? How to start doing things that way. But then you start to get more refined and start to dig deeper into, you know, like, you know, into building scope. You essentially teacher. Yeah. >> You're good there. Yeah. I don't know. All right. Whatever he says. Scott >> Universal base image. Something we've talked a little bit about to tell us how that this is going to impact, you know, talk about everybody building things on their laptop. Seems like that's an extension of where this fits. Help help us understand? >> Yeah, I can't hide my enthusiasm. One how excited I am by Eva, and I will admit Ivory had a couple people come to me and say, This is the most exciting thing for me at Summit period And I think that's interesting because it's not actually something new and that, you would say from a technology perspective, how exciting is that? I don't know, but like it allows a set of collaboration that we've never been able to like, really, really do with a well base image historically, and I think the real base image is the highest quality basement temperament out there. But the problem is, even if you had something really simple, like so you had one university and that created some kind of science experiment in a container, and then they want to push that out to a public registry, then pull it down a different university and share it. They couldn't do that under the terms of the rail base image. So that was that. Was that create a little bit of friction with the FBI? Now that's completely gone. You can now run it anywhere you want, distribute anywhere you want, just the distribution alone is exciting. It and the fact that when you >> run it on rail, you >> build on rail, run on relics completely supported Israel. But you can now push it out to a public registry and let it sit out there and other people can >> use it in an experiment. So is the, you know, coming together of container ization in that distribution is that would kind of is really new with this, as opposed to the ways that I used to be able to share lennox images in the past. >> Well, all I think I think the challenge was you'd have some people that would want to do something. They want to build a distributed anywhere they want have that freedom. But they still wanted the quality of the rail basement. Now that created friction, right? So then they'd have to make an unnatural choice between, like, a fedora or I use, you know, well, maybe how you sent to less and your lying and none of those have all the things that I want, right? It was like a card game trying to get all the components that you want. You want sport, ability of Raoul. You want the security of the performance center center. But you couldn't. You couldn't distribute anywhere, so that created friction where you make on natural choices on basement. Now you be. I just The name implies that universal use it for anything you want. >> Same for communities to write because they don't want to make one that could freely distribute and then another like supported variant. They have more to maintain its more cycles and everything so simple. Find that it is a big deal. Yeah, >> and migration between base images is a linen migration, so it's frustrating to do. You don't want to do it. You want to build on one thing. And then I thought I distribute that thing anywhere. Well, then it's >> interesting, you know, go back a few years. There was this big movement to do, like just enough OS. How do I slim down the core? Os was I don't need everything that you know Realm necessarily does. So have we gotten over that? And we now gotten with you know, the things like you be I down to like a nice unit that's easily terrible and distributed. It's a good question. It's a topic that we'LL never go away. I don't think we're still. It's just changing its form, right? It still exists on the host. It's still exists in images. It's still exist with unit colonels and everything. I >> think where we >> are today. That was a really good spot, right? We've got several footprints of FBI. If there's several footprints of Rehl, including well, Core OS, which is like bedded version of rail into open shift right for a small form factor container host. So where we are today is very strong, but it's going to continue to evolve and get better. So, yeah, >> and we I mean, we look at the future and we're we're looking at ways toe. Make it even smaller, you know, you're always looking at, but yeah, Ben, mention there's three footprints of you B i today. There's a minimal image. There's a standard image, and then there's even a little bit bigger images allows you run multiple services, but you know that's the selection today. But in the future, we're looking at making the minimal one more minimal. Were even looking at, you know, making the standard one more minimal. >> Yeah, we're not done. Yeah, we're not done. You're never done. I guess the last thing I have on this, you know, multi cloud is such you know where customers are today. You know, you're gonna have the CEO Microsoft up on stage today. Two years ago, when I was here, it was the partnership between Red had an eight of us was all the discussion. I spoke to the Red Hat team, the Cloud show recently. So how does the tooling that you have fit in tow all the clouds discussion that I have when I talked to users? You know, one of the biggest lock ins they have is the skill set and the understanding of different tools and knowledge. And so you know, where we standardize and where do we still have work to do in this space? That's a big question. So yeah, I guess way addressing a multiple levels right at the core. The center Israel. Right. So well ate right now today on all those cloud platforms that you just name, right. So same say maybe I level guarantee that ten years hard work everything. It's it's everywhere. It's pervasive today. Level up, right. You've got the container images and stuff same story. They're Goa level. You've got open shift that is pervasive everywhere. And now we're doing really cool things. And Cooper Net. He's like a machine, a p I and all these other things toe actually control those individual cloud infrastructures which abstracts all of the customers ations per for food for him, which is >> powerful. So I think, for me was the most exciting things is the open shift for paradigm shift that shift from managing individual nodes to ship to managing the cluster as a computer, which we've said for what, twenty years? The sun? I think you know the cluster is the computer, you know? But we're really there today. Like we have a single E p I. Ben mention the machine, the machine, a PR machine configure operator. There's there's essentially automation built into the chip platform now that allows you to appoint the same on any cloud. So eight of us azure, you know, open stack, even on VM, where even on, you know, even in liver gonna look a laptop. There's a way to deploy it in the identical, you know, in an identical configuration. To me, that's exciting, because now I have one set of things I could learn. And then again in the standard red hat way. If you feel locked in, you can go use a Okay, Daddy, you can use the upstream. So you're never locked into our product, Which that's something. Get a lot with Kat drives, right? Like if you're locked in there, you're you're locked in there. There's no there's no, you know, open source version of that to get out of that. >> So you've talked about growth opportunities? You said, No, we're not done yet. Making the joke about your own work. You've talked about a twenty year evolution, you know, Just refer to that. And if you could look, you know, whether it's three, four, five, whatever years down the road, where's the big leap? Where's that have to come? Where do you think it's going to come in terms of the capabilities that you want to work on and what you want to be able to deliver from where you are right? Now >> get my crystal ball. Yeah. >> Yeah, Well, I think you've got one. Yeah. Then I have a lot of confidence in you, but if you had to say okay, this is this is atleast where we're gonna be. We're gonna have to spend a lot of our time because this this is the area that we think I think needs most attention. A >> couple of things, right? People only scale so much. So automation is an area that's bulletproof going forward, and it's going to evolve and take many forms. Right now, our big push has been on the operator space and obviously technologies like answerable that's going to continue to evolve and make make people scale better. That's probably one of the biggest ones. And I >> think that's one of the biggest ones. I think I think for me, probably where my mind wanders, is around partners and building that ecosystem in the open ship space similar to what you see in the realm. Because system today I think three, four years from now you're going to see it really exploded at ABC that I already see it exploding. But by then you'LL see it maturing and you'LL really see. I think if you look at the operator paradigm, I'm very excited by that because it's kind of like the Emma science dollar that Microsoft invented. You know that kind of made that that ubiquitous that install experience. Except that operators make it you because they install and managed a too. So I think, like, kind of to his point of, like making that the install really simple and then the operation of it. Over time, I think you're going to see a lot of I think. I think you couldn't fill a room and ask him, Like what I in fact, I did. I asked what an operator was, you know, and they they weren't super aware of it yet. But I think in the next five years, that will become the big with this way of just installing software. >> All right, well, we're going to check back in five. We'LL see how it turns out and been by then. Bring that crystal ball back with wood. Ok, I'll do a good deal. Thanks, gentlemen. Thanks for the time you haven't put on the Cuba as we continue our coverage here. Red Hat Summit. We're in Boston back with more right after this

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment