(gentle music) >> Okay. We're back at AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day four. Think it's the first time, at re:Invent, we've done four days. This is our ninth year covering re:Invent. Tom Miller is here. He's the senior vice president of alliances. And he's joined by Ankur Jain, who's the global cloud practice lead at Merkle. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Tom, tell us about Merkel, for those who might not be familiar with you. >> Yeah. So, Merkle is a customer experience management company that is under the dentsu umbrella. Dentsu is a global media agency. We represent one of the pillars, which is customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkle does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. >> So you're a tech company? >> Yes. >> Right? Okay. So there's some big tailwinds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously, the pandemic, the forced march to digital, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing, that you're trying to ride? >> So what we're seeing is, as a start, we've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on-prem, that we manage today, within a SQL environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment. To be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data, be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realizing they need, to be in a digital environment. And so, that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environment. >> And you're relatively you new to the AWS world, right? Maybe you can talk about that, Ankur. >> Well, actually, as a partner, we may be new. But Merkle has been working with AWS for over five years. >> Dave Vellante: As a customer? >> As a customer. >> Yeah. >> So what we did was, last year, we formalized the relationship with AWS to be an advanced partner now. So we are part of the re:Stack program, basically, which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialization of marketing. So, as Tom said, you know, we are part of a dentsu umbrella. Our core focus is on customer experience transformation. And how we do that customer experience transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us, to modernize the solutions that Merkle can take to the market. >> So, I mean, your on-prem databases, there's probably a lot of diversity on-prem. (laughs) A lot of tech... When the cloud, you know, more agility, infinite resources. Do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe your technical philosophy. >> Yeah, I could take that. What Tom just described... So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are, essentially, Merkle helping big brands, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 brands to modernize their marketing ecosystem. Especially, MarTech ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints, customer data from disparate sources. And they, basically, integrate that data in one central place. And then bolt-on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, on top of it. Helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about. And these databases, currently, sit on-prem, on Merkle's own data center. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernize them. Give all these AI, ML type of capabilities, advanced analytic capabilities, to our customers by using AWS as the platform to kind of migrate that. >> Dave Vellante: And you do that as a service? >> We do that as a service. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Strategically, >> Yes. >> you're sort of transforming your business- >> Yes. >> to help your customers transform their business. >> Right. >> Right? Take away, it's classic. I mean, it's happening. This theme of, you know, AWS started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, you guys in the media world, essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Superclouds, we call 'em. >> Superclouds, yeah. (Dave laughs) It's about helping our clients understand what is it they're trying to accomplish. And, for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey, where that customer is, how they're driving that experience with them, and understanding that experience through the journey. And doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical for 'em. >> Yeah, I was listening to the Snowflake earnings call from last night. And they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media. And all they keep talking about was direct-to-consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> Media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily, I mean, you don't want to go through a third-party anymore, if you don't have to. Technology's enabling that, right? Is that, kind of, the play here? >> Yes. Direct-to-consumer is a huge play. Companies which were traditionally brick-and-mortar-based, or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors, are now, basically, transforming themselves to be direct-to-consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalization becomes a big theme, especially in D2C type of environment. Because, now, those customers are expecting brands to know what's their like, what's their dislike, which products, which services are they interested in. So that's all kind of advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems, that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkle is partnering with AWS, to bring all those technologies, and build those next generation solutions for our customers. >> So what kind of initiatives are you working on with AWS? >> So, there are, like, three, four areas that we are working very closely with AWS. Number one, I would say, think about our marketer's friend. You know, and they have a transformation like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, these type of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools, what technologies will be part of that ecosystem. So that's where Merkle provides consulting services. To give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one, we are doing in partnership with AWS. To reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two, as Tom mentioned, migrations. You know, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernize their environment, by migrating them to cloud. Number three, Merkle has a solution called Merkury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are modernizing all that solution, making that available on AWS Marketplace for customers to, actually, easily use that solution. And number four, I would say is, helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing data lake. You know, leveraging AWS technologies like Glue, Redshift, and actually modernize their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms. Which is, bring on your first-party data, join it with Amazon data, to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com. Which gives insight to these brands, to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are, like, four, five focus areas. >> No, it's good. So, I was going to ask you about the data and the data strategy. Like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists, that... Your clients have first-party data. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> And then you might recommend bringing in other data sources. >> Yes. >> And then you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >> Well, ultimately, client owns the data, because that's their customer's data. To your point on, we help them enrich that data by bringing in third-party data, which is what we call as... So Merkle has a service called DataSource, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests. So we monetize all that data. And the idea is, to take those data assets and make them available on AWS Data Exchange. So that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first-party data, take this third-party data from Merkle, and then, segment their customers much more intelligently. >> And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile? >> Yeah. CMO is our main customer profile. And we'll work with the chief data officer, or we'll work with the chief technology officer. We bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing, and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get what they want. >> And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too? >> Tom Miller: Yeah, he fits in there too. >> CGO, chief dig. officer, CMO. Sometimes, they're one in the same. Other times, they're mixed. >> Yep. Yep. >> I've seen CIOs and CDOs together. >> Yes. >> Sure. >> It's all data. >> It's all data. (Dave laughs) >> Yeah. Some of the roles that come into play, as Tom mentioned, and you mentioned, CIO, CTO, chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the IT side. And then we have the CMOs, chief digital officers, from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkle brings to the table is that we know the language, what IT speaks and what business speaks. So when we talked about the business initiatives, like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, those are more business-driven initiatives. That's where Merkle comes in, to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years, on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then, at the same time, how do we translate those strategic initiatives into IT transformation? Because it does require a lot of IT transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >> So you've got data, you've got tools, you've got software, you've got expertise, that now, you're making that available as a service. Is that right? >> That's right. Yes. >> Yes. >> How far are you into that journey, of saasfying your business? >> Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, five to seven years ago at Merkle. >> Yeah. Where you began leveraging the cloud? >> That's right. >> Dave Vellante: And then the light bulb went off and- >> So cloud, again, we use cloud in multiple aspects. From general computing perspective, leveraging, you know, fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyze it, and derive intelligence. The second piece, on the cloud side, is SaaS offering, Software as a Service offerings, like Adobe, Salesforce, and other CDP platforms. So Merkle covers a huge spectrum, when it comes to cloud. >> And you got a combination, you have a consulting business, and also- >> So Merkle has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them. Where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives, and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have a data business, the data assets that I was talking about, that we monetize. We have promotions and loyalty, we have media. So we cover multiple services. >> Dave Vellante: Quite a portfolio. >> Yes. >> You mentioned analytics a couple of times, how do you tie that back to the sales function? I would imagine your clients are increasingly asking for analytics, so they can manage their dashboards and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? >> Yeah. So that's a very important line. Because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it, because that's the actionable part. So, few areas. I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to a set of customers. Now, who those set of customers are, you know, where they should target this, who their target customers are, what their demographics are, that's all done through analytics. And what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence, machine learning, those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell, and personalize the offerings that they want to offer to the customers. >> Used to be, really, pure art, right? It's really becoming- >> Not any more, it's all data driven companies. (Tom laughs) >> It's "Moneyball." >> Yes. Exactly. (Dave laughs) >> Tom Miller: Exactly. >> There's, maybe, still a little bit of art in there, right? It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair, still. >> Yes. >> But you got to go with the data. >> And that's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in. And how you take that science and combine it with the art, to present it to a end customer, that's exactly, you know, it's a combination. >> And we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves. Where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkle. >> You got to teach 'em how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in two to three years? Where do you want to take? >> I think future is cloud, AWS being the market leader. I think AWS has a huge role to play. We are very excited to be partners with AWS, I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS sales in, majority of the sales happen in IT. Our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that will be a very powerful story for us to tell. >> Yeah, that's good news for AWS. If a little of your DNA could rub off on them, it'd be good. >> Tom Miller: Yeah. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> It was great to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE. Day four, AWS re:Invent. We're theCUBE, the global leader in high-tech coverage. Be right back. (gentle music)

>>Okay, We're back at AWS Re. Invent. You're watching the >>cubes. Continuous coverage >>coverage. This is Day four. I think it's the first time it reinvent. We've done four days. This is our ninth year covering Reinvent. Tom Miller is here is the senior vice president of Alliances. And he's joined by Anchor Jane. Who's the global cloud? Practically practise lead at Merkel. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Tom. Tell us about Merkel. For those who might not be familiar with you. >>So Merkel is a customer experience management company. That is, um, under the Dentsu umbrella. Dense. Who is a global media agency? We represent one of the pillars which is global, our customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkel does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. They're a tech company. Yes. >>Okay, so there's some big big tail winds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously the pandemic. You know, the force marched to digital. Uh, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing that you're trying to ride? >>So what we're seeing is, uh we've got, uh, as a start. We've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on Prem that we manage today within a sequel environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment to be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data to be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realising they need to be in a digital environment. And so that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environments. >>And you're relatively new to the ws world, right? Maybe you can talk >>about that anchor actually, as a partner. We may be new, but Merkel works with AWS has been working with AWS for over five years as a customer as a customer. So what we did was last year we formalise the relationship with us to be, uh, an advanced partner now. So we were part of the restock programme, basically which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialisation of marketing. So as Tom said, you know, we're part of, uh Dentsu umbrella are our core focuses on customer experience, transformation and how we do that Customer experience. Transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us to modernise the solutions that Martin can take to the market. >>So your on Prem databases is probably a lot of diversity on a lot of technical that when the cloud more agility, infinite resources do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe >>your I can take that what time just described. So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are essentially Markle, helping big brands 1400 Fortune 500 brands to organise their marketing ecosystem, especially Martek ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints customer customer data from disparate sources, and they basically integrate that data in one central place and then bolt on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning on top of it, helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about, and and these databases currently set on Prem on Merkel's own data centre. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernise them. Give all these ai ml type of capabilities advanced analytic capabilities to our customers by using AWS is the platform to kind of migrate. And you do that as a service. We do that as a service. >>Strategically, you're sort of transforming your business to help your customers transform their business right? Take away. It's it's classic. I mean, you really it's happening. This theme of, you know a W started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing NASDAQ. Goldman Sachs. You guys in the media world essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. Yes, super clouds. We call >>them Super Cloud. Yeah, it's about helping our clients understand What is it they're trying to accomplish? And for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey where the customer is, how they're driving that experience with them and understanding that experience through the journey and doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical form. >>I was listening to the, uh, snowflake earnings call from last night and they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media and all. I keep talking about direct direct to consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot of media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily. I mean, you don't want to go through a third party anymore if you don't have to, Technology is enabling that is that kind of the play here? >>Yes, Director Consumer is a huge player. Companies which were traditionally brick and mortar based or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors are now basically transforming themselves to be direct to consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalisation comes becomes a big theme, especially indeed to see type of environment, because now those customers are expecting brands to know what's there like. What's their dislike? Which products which services are they interested in? So that's that's all kind of advanced analytics machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkel is partnering with AWS to bring all those technologies and and build those next generation solutions for access. So what kind >>of initiatives are you working >>on? So there are, like, 34 areas that we are working very closely with AWS number one. I would say Think about our marketers friend, you know, and they have a transformation like direct to consumer on the channel e commerce, these types of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools? What technologies will be part of that ecosystem. That's where Merkel provides consulting services to to give them a road map, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one we are doing in partnership with AWS to reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two as Tom mentioned migrations, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernise their environment by migrating them to cloud number three. Merkel has a solution called mercury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are Modernising all that solution of making that available on AWS marketplace for customers to actually easily use that solution. And number four, I would say, is helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing Data Lake leveraging AWS technologies like blue, red shift and and actually modernise their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms, which is bring on your first party data. Join it with Amazon data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on amazon dot com, which gives insights to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are like four or five focus areas. So I was >>gonna ask you about the data and the data strategy like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists that your clients have first party data and you might recommend bringing in other data sources. And you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >>Well, ultimately, client also data because that that's their customers' data. Uh, to your point on, we helped them enrich that data by bringing in third party data, which is what we call is. So Merkel has a service called data source, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests so we monetise all that data. And the idea is to take those data assets and make them available on AWS data exchange so that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first party data. Take this third party data from Merkel and then, uh, segment their customers much more intelligently. >>And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile. >>Yeah, CMO is our main customer profile and we'll work with the chief data officer Will work with the chief technology officer. We kind of we bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get both get what they want. >>And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too. Yeah, he fits in their CDOs. Chief Digital officer CMO. Sometimes they're all they're one and the same. Other times they're mixed. I've seen see IOS and and CDOs together. Sure, you sort of. It's all data. It's all >>day. >>Yeah, some of the roles that come into play, as as Tom mentioned. And you mentioned C I o c T. O s chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the side. And then we have the CMOS chief digital officers from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkel brings to the table is that we know the language, what I t speaks and what business speaks. So when we talk about the business initiatives like direct to consumer Omni Channel E commerce, those are more business driven initiatives. That's where Merkel comes in to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years on on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then at the same time, how do we translate translate those strategic initiatives into it transformation because it does require a lot of idea transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >>So you got data. You've got tools, you've got software. You've got expertise that now you're making that available as a as a service. That's right. How far are you into that? journey of satisfying your business. >>Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, 5 to 7 years ago at Merkel, >>where you started, where you began leveraging the cloud. That's right. And then the light bulb went off >>the cloud again. We use clouds in multiple aspects, from general computing perspective, leveraging fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyse it and and derive intelligence. The second piece on the cloud side is, uh, SAS, offering software as a service offerings like Adobe Salesforce and other CDP platforms. So Merkel covers a huge spectrum. When it comes to cloud and you got >>a combination, you have a consulting business and also >>so Merkel has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have data business that data assets that I was talking about, that we monetise. We have promotions and loyalty. We have media, so we recover multiple services portfolio. >>How do you mentioned analytics a couple times? How do you tie that? Back to the to the to the sales function. I would imagine your your clients are increasingly asking for analytics so they can manage their dashboards and and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? Yes, >>So that's a very important line because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you know, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it? Because that's the actionable part. So a few areas I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to the to a set of customers Now who those set of customers are, You know where they should target this, who their target customers are, what the demographics are that's all done through and analytics and what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence machine learning those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell and personalised the offerings that they're going to offer to. The customers >>used to be really pure art, right? It's really >>not anymore. It's all data driven. Moneyball. Moneyball? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe still a little bit of hard in there, right? It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair still, but you've got to go with the data. >>That's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in and how you take that science and combine it with the art to present it to the end customer. That's exactly you know. It's a combination, >>and we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkel, >>teach them how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in 2 to 3 years. Where do you want to take it? >>I think future is Cloud AWS being the market leader. I think aws has a huge role to play. Um, we are very excited to be partners with AWS. I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS cells in, uh, majority of the sales happen in our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that would be a very powerful story for us to be >>good news for AWS. They little your DNA can rub off on them would be good, guys. Thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube Day four aws re invent. Were the Cube the global leader in high tech coverage? Right back. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

(soothing music) >> Commentator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman, and welcome to this Pensando event. We're talking about how Pensando is helping the future proof for enterprise. Really happy to welcome back to the program. Prem Jain he is the CEO of Pensando. Prem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, So we had the opportunity, Jeff Frick was at the launch when Pensando came out of stealth. Of course, we were all together there, New York City, beautiful views at the Goldman Sachs office in New York City. We had John Chambers there, Antonio Neary and really explaining to the world what your team is doing. And giving that out to the world. We're a little bit more than six months later. So, first just give us the update is how's your team doing? Obviously, when people come out of stealth or have any major things going on. You can't necessarily predict when things like a pandemic or global financial situations are happening, but how's the team doing and give us the updates since last year? >> Yeah sure, thank you. It was a great launch actually we had and that was in October. Since then, the company had made tremendous progress in all different areas of the company. So let me start with a number of people. We have grown to 250 plus people in the company, we filled up all our key positions in the company, and we are really making very good progress with the whole overall team. Product-wise, we continuously delivering since October last year. We have made multiple releases for the enterprise customers, we have made multiple releases for the cloud customers. And we also have done work with some other service provider customers. And the product is really doing very well in these environments. We have partners like you mentioned in the Discover show, HP is going to launch our cards into their server. This is the official launch, we are already shipping to some customers. And this particular thing is with all their servers as well as the GreenLake product. We continue to work with our cloud partners and they are also, we have done multiple releases to them and they will all go in production in next six months time frame. We also have a lot of interest, we are seeing it from the service product customers and we are working with a few of them. I cannot mention the name at this particular point but we will share with you, once that information becomes available. And they are very excited about the technologies which we have. And they think this innovation which we bringing into the market is really great for the edge market, in the cloud as well as edge of the service provider. >> Congratulations Prem on the progress there, of course, HPE was an investor and you know and expected to be an OEM. So, getting that, you know less than a year from when you've come out of stealth, to being generally available this month, great milestone there. And as you said, you've already got some early customers using it. >> Yes. >> Help us understand, when the company first launched, your team has a very storied pedigree. Everyone in the network knows what you've done before. when I was waiting to watch, when you were in stealth, it's like, okay, well, I know there's going to be a chip and, we'll see how all the software that happening in the world is going to change that. So very Much edge is one of the, key use cases that you talk about, that you're enabling but, help our audience understand a little bit. If I'm an HPE customer, and I'm looking at GreenLake, I'm looking at ProLiant. What are those things that I'm doing that says, Oh, hey, HPE is now going to offer this to me. >> Yeah, so I think what the customer is going to get in the very beginning is HPE is going to ship our DSC card into the server. And that makes the server a future proof. And the reason for that is because, initially they are just using the networking capabilities. But then going forward, they can enable security capabilities. We can do like distributed firewall. We can do distributed load balancing, we can provide the encryptions, we can provide the capability of making sure the system is highly secure. We have created a air gap between the host and the network itself. They can also making it sure that they can get the visibility on the networking side, as well, as the application is very close to the application edge. Security is the right place to be close to where the application is running on the server. And then we provide the capability with the policy and service manager, so that they can manage lifecycle of this particular products into all the servers which is installed, as well as making sure they can enable all the features and capabilities based upon the object model. >> Yeah, excellent. Absolutely security needs to be everywhere. So when we think about edge models, how do I get into those devices? So therefore, form factor of a card, that fits in seems to be well. We talked about it at the launch. Goldman Sachs was, a customer of yours. They're very well known in the enterprise space, Financial Services, needs to make sure securities there needs to understand that, maybe speak to that enterprise customer. And if there's anything specifically with how Goldman sees this rolling, that can help illustrate a little bit more what you're doing. >> Sure, so we start shipping to Goldman right after the launch, as we talked about in the launch itself. They have since then, they are now expanding it and rolling it out more servers and capabilities into their environment, particularly using distributed firewall, and other capabilities, which is, they wanted to make sure that it get deployed into their environment. And one of the things which is we are looking at it also, is that we want it to be for every future servers they buy, we want to be part of it and then they can enable all the services related to like I talked about before. Firewall, load balancing, micro-segmentation other capabilities, containers down the road. To make sure that we can provide storage also as a part of it. So we can enable them to deploy those services and that makes it also in their case of future proof once they deployed, roll out this particular capabilities. At the same time, we have more than 10 to 12 customers, which is we are doing a POC and these are all very large enterprise customers. And the POC so far has done... is going very well. And these customers again will deploy different capabilities of the product. Starting in Q3, Q4 this year. The POC is going very well and we are very excited about working with these customers and these are named brand customers. Once you will see it, once we will announce it, you will see it, this is really making a difference in their environment. >> You talk about the capabilities that customers are using today and then, the roadmap of services that they will be able to add on top of that. >> Obviously, you're talking about future proof, I shouldn't change the hardware. But, how do I think about it from a customer standpoint? Is it similar to kind of a SaaS model as to how things updated? Do do I purchase it? More as a subscription than as a feature card? How should I be thinking that from a consumption model or, the finance team, when you say, oh, there's all these wonderful things? What will that do to my cost over time? >> No absolutely, I think it's a very good point, the way the customer should think about it is that they're getting, one is a piece of the hardware which provides this capabilities. And then on top of it, the subscription model, which allows them to pay in three years, or if they want to buy it all in once, they can also do that. It's a very cost effective way of deploying these services. This is a new paradigm. This is a world of distributed services paradigm, and I think this will allow them to scale up, scale down whatever is needed because by the time you are discarding to a server, you're basically adding these capabilities in every server. And more servers you're going to add, you don't need to worry about, do I need to add this particular capabilities on the servers, you can enable whatever is necessary to enable in that server. And it's a very cost effective model. Once you enable these services, encryptions, compressions, firewall, load balancing, all the networking services and storage services, once you enable all those, it's very cost justifiable in terms of deploying these services. >> So Prem, when I think about HPE and their history, in the compute market very much they offer flexibility, they want things to be really simple when they go out the door. You've both partnered with them as well as created competing products with HP in the past so, give us a little bit more as to what Pensando plus HPE will deliver to the market place. >> Yeah, exciting, is a very good partnership so far, I think can we assume that this is going to continuously get better and better. The reason I think is very important, because instead of just selling a classic server, HPEs now have the ability to provide the security solutions, networking solutions, as well as storage solutions to their customers. And this one is really providing all the services, simplifying the design of the network, and also making sure that the customers can enable all these capabilities wherever they want. It's a model which is unprecedented in the sense of it's a totally distributed and the customers should be able to enable whatever the service they need there, even if they didn't plan it in the past. >> Yeah, excellent, we very much these days talk about, how important data is, and I need to be able to deliver services where the data is. So, very much a discussion of the cloud as well as the edge. So, it sounds like this is extending, the importance of that data and being able to bring those services, very much where the data is being created and service in real time. >> Correct. >> Okay, so, from the HPE relationship obviously gives you, a good chunk of the enterprise business, but down the road, should we be thinking about other partnerships and potentially even other OEM relationships? >> Yes, I think, like I said, we are working with the two or three major cloud vendors. And they will be rolling it out by the end of this year. And they see themselves like we said, we are going to democratize the Cloud based upon the fact that the only solution which is Amazon has based upon the Nitro, we are now providing the capabilities, to all the cloud vendors. And they can take this particular technologies and integrate in their environment, which is what we are providing the software stack. And they are integrating, and they will be going into the production and providing more capabilities, more features, and stuff like that. Then what the competition will provide. So this is a really excellent opportunity, both for us as well as for our cloud vendor partners. >> Yeah, one of the key things when you hear talk of what AWS is doing with Nitro, and the Outpost solution is they talk about, from a hardware standpoint and a software standpoint, they pull certain things off of the software layer to be able to have them be more performing, but also it's both in the cloud and in your location, whether that be an edge data center with Outpost, it's the same on both ends. So, it should I be thinking of this in a similar model that you need to... I guess, where is it that it would be an enterprise only play? And what considerations is it between enterprise and cloud when you'd be buying it from multiple vendors, if they're enabled by your solution? >> Absolutely, and I think for the enterprise, the people who wants to build their own cloud, I think this is provide a really excellent solution. Because all the capabilities which we have will provide all the features which you can get from the cloud vendors, in that particular sense. And if you are in the cloud, you can provide scale and capabilities to the cloud vendors. Now the combination is a very powerful solutions between, you can get the same services, whether you're in premise, or providing or leveraging the cloud. And that can give also hybrid opportunities. You can run, same capabilities, same features in the hybrid cloud model where you're running some on your premises and some running in the cloud itself. >> Excellent, all right. So, Prem you've got the solution coming out with HPE, you talked a little bit about some of the other, partnerships in the cloud. Partners there, give us a little bit of priorities for the second half of 2020. >> Yeah, so I think the first half we have done very well financially also, we are running almost close to 50% ahead of our forecast where we were at this particular point. Going forward, I think we need to make sure that we execute based upon, the current roadmap which we have, and making sure that we meet the customers expectations and our partners expectations. And also, I want to also give you another thing is that which is our plan is basically our second generation innovation. Also is going to come in very soon, and we will be able to take that into the production also on the first half of next year. So I think all for the second half, we have a pretty good opportunity to really capture with our solutions, as well as looking forward to win some more design wins, both with our current solutions as well as the new solutions, which we're going to take it today. >> All right, well Prem Jain let me just give you the final word as to how customers should be thinking about Pensando as they look the future proof their enterprise. >> Absolutely, I think based on the history, we are known as a innovation machine in the industry, and we continuously do better and better. So I think the people should think about us is providing really looking at this transition, which is happening in the enterprise cloud as well as in the service provider space. And we will provide the solution, which is really will meet their expectations, and the solution is consistent whether it's for VMs whether resources containers, whether it's for bare-metal services, and providing all these services in a very consistent manner. >> And well thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the continued steps along with HPE and definitely look forward to catching up with you and the team in the future. >> Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. And definitely we will talk six months from now and and again see how much progress we have made and what I told you and I will compare the notes and say, this is what we have done better. >> Alright, stay tuned. We have a lot of interviews with some of the Pensando teams as well as that partnership with HPE. I'm Stuart Miniman and check out theCUBE.net for all of the background on this. And thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we're gonna be talking about the networking giant. So, uh, joining me is the first time on the program some of the members been on and the cover launch of Pensando so vivid Jane, his CTO and co founder of Pensando Bipin thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. It was very nice talking to you. >>All right, so in a big theme we've been talking about for a number of years now is multi cloud. And, you know, I go back and think about you know, that the concept of cloud and even, you know, I've been around long enough You think about the and one of the challenges you look at is well, security is always a challenge. The other things network bandwidth is not infinite. The speed of light has not been solved, though you know, help us understand is you know the first I guess give our audience a little bit of your background. As I said, anybody in the networking world knows less team, though. Tell us, you know, have you been on the journey with them for all of that? Or And you know what brought you and Sandy? >>Yes. Yes. Um, I mean, I've been in the journey with the team since 2000 and six, so it's pretty long, I would say 14 years now, and it's been tremendous. Um uh, at heart, I'm an engineer who takes, you know, Brian brilliant things and taking upon challenges. And I've got multiple startups before this been in a new era, The more startups before that. And of course, you know, they were not experience more independent startups. And, you know, all through the course, I have gained appreciation for, like, you know, starting all the way from silicon to build a distributed systems and a u io all the way up to the fully consumable, you know, system. So I I totally understand the the angle I need to look at this time in a holistic manner. Having contributed to Cisco, UCS of and Nexus products on. Before joining pensando, I was, um I was contributing with my own open source container networking project, which is quite exciting to see How do you evangelize, You know, my own my own core, and that was fun. And that's where I come from, But, uh, but I I'm I'm a software engineer. To start off it started contributing to a six, then started going into the application world with containers trying to pull a container networking with, Ah, we did a server product with Cisco UCS and on and pretty much all over the stack with respect, participation. So that's my background. Um, but it's being exciting to consider what's next for me. And I was largely trying to see >>so, so definitive, actually, if I If I could jump in there, right, you know, I think back the UCS it was, You know, some of those ways I gather virtualization had been around for quite a number of years at that point. But, you know, how do you optimize it you're in. How do you transform infrastructure toe live for those environments, though? You know, UCS, You know, remember, people get back saying, you know, Cisco getting into services like Well, they are. They are because they're changing that compute model really caught that. You know, Cisco led that way. If the urge instructor, so many things you talked about that we'll get to later in the interview open for station. When I look out today, you know infrastructure's paint a lot and cloud obviously, is a huge impact, but also the application. So help us understand kind of the the waves that were writing together And, you know, what was it that you know in Santo decided to build in order to meet what you know, the customers of a require >>Um So I think, you know, going back to the UCS common that you had We started off thinking, for example, what are what were the challenges with respect is scaling out the deployment of servers and we quickly realized that manageability is number one challenge on. And of course, you know when we speak about manageability, it comes down to the underpinnings of what you're building. Are you Are you able to see the entire infrastructure together, or are you still seeing those big pieces? And that's when I think UCS was born to say that Look, we need to bring everything together that could be consumed in a holistic manner. And for that you have to have all those components there are There are somewhat independent to be consumed as a unified thing. And which is why I think it was a unified computing system. UCS. Um and then I think, you know, and Sanders a journey that takes it to probably not just that concept, but in general, the the challenges and the disruptions that we're seeing to the next level. So, I mean, just to summarize, I would say we started off looking at all the disruptions that are happening in the industry. And there are many of those I'm happy to talk about, which means we looked at, uh and then we looked at What are the consumption models that people are largely, you know, finding it very appealing these days because the days in which you're going to write a spirit to do something is still pretty old you want to be able to consume and most this after consumable way, How can we build, you know, how can you build systems that are programmable in the field? Those kind of things? The consumption model reliability software is the friendly factor there, and highly appealing to you guys and all their last one. You know, at least we also we also wanted to be really heard in the game, competitiveness wise. So those were like the the overarching set of things there that we started to think about, like, what descriptions are we going to solve, um, and how the consumption model needs to be for or ah, for the future of infrastructure. And how can we get that key, which is which is far ahead and better than anything that exists out there? So that's where we started to look at. Let's bring something which is bigger B sphere and and something. Even if we have the possibility of feeling it. Let's go ahead and they're doing their anything. >>Yeah, and absolutely. There's been so much discussion over the last decade or so about about software's eating the world and what's going on there yet you know, your your team mates. It's a lot of times it's been the chip set. There have been some huge ripples in the industry, you know, major acquisitions by some of the big, disruptive companies out there. Apple made a silicon acquisition, you know, everybody paid and that will have. You can't talk about disruption today without talking about Amazon. And, of course, when Amazon bought Annapurna Labs, you know, those of us looking at the Enterprise and the clouds base was like, Keep an eye on this. And absolutely, it's been something over the last year or so now, where we've seen Amazon roll things out and, of course, a critical component of what Amazon's doing from outposts. So with that as the stage there, you talked about wanting to be interesting leading, you know Amazon, you know, is really sick, and it's setting the bar that everyone is measured against. And when I look at the solution pensando, the kind of best comparable analogy that we've seen is, you know, look at what Nitro chip can do. This is an alternative for all of the other 1000 for customers that might not want to get them from Amazon. Is that a fair comparison? And how would you line up what founder is doing compared to what Amazon has done there? >>Um, so you know, what you've seen in the Amazon announcement really is possible. Amazon is a great benchmark to beat eso No make mistakes. We are very happy to say that, you know, we are We are doing by comfortably so But then, you know, Amazon is more than more than just the just the chips that are that they are building. I mean, what you consume is what they're building and underneath the engines are really part up by by the nicety off all these things that they're very, um, having said that, you know, And Sandra was consisting off both the you know, it's recognized us as a team which has been in traditionally building chips. But yet I think you know, the the Iot or the the previous venture from Mpls Team was somewhat of an eye opening as to how bringing things together is much more value in op, ex and and simplifying things is a huge, huge value compared to just putting performance and those things. So why this is important? That is another aspect which is important in trying to simplify things and make it consumable like software. And Sandra itself has probably, you know, I would say, Ah, good chunk, like about 60% of people in software team and not the, you know, basic harbor t This is not to say that, you know, we, you know, we are under emphasizing one versus the other. Software is a bigger beast when you start trying to build all those programs on a programmable and doing that here and start to roll out those applications on. So that's why I think the emphasis on software is there. Having said that, you know, it's the software that runs the data path pipeline. There's also a layer of software that we're building that can help manage all you know, all the product in a more cohesive manner and unified. >>Okay, that's Ah, thank you for laying that out. You mentioned you've got some background and open for definitely an area where, for a number of years, you know, Amazon has not exactly, uh, open source. Not exactly been a strength for AWS. They have put a lot of effort. They've done some president IRS over the last couple of years. >>And >>how do you see open source fitting into the space? What is I kind of the philosophy of pensando when it comes to open source. And where do you see it playing in the You know, this network piece of the multi cloud. >>Yeah, no, I think it's It's ah, it's a squared, relevant in a way that you know of the cloud native movement on how applications with very Onda normalization of AP eyes across multiple clouds. Israel, We are all seeing the benefits offered. And I think that that trend will continue and which is all driven through open source Ah, you know, community that exist in, you know, in the heart of the word. So personally for me, I think I learned a whole lot of things in the open source community. You know, the importance off evangelizing whatever you're working on, the reason to have convinced other people about contributing into what you're working on on. Frankly, I also learned how difficult it is to make revenues in an open source based part of that strategy. So I think you know that those were the things that I got away from it when I was doing my own open source project of container networking. Um, but at the same time, pensando, uh, you know, we have to make sure that we are 100% aligned with anything that's happening in open source. Never replicated, Um, anything that might be that might be happening in open source instead tried to make people use those things in the best possible way and in the most efficient way and the easiest possible way to use those. So our strategy largely is that, you know, embrace open source which exists are there from an infrastructure point of view, we are collaborating and communicating with less of the users are Hello. I think we're going to standardize most of things we're looking in before community. So our stands largely is that, you know, if we are building a programmable platform than the community is what is gonna driver and we are very much working towards a step by step, of course, trying to get through, you know, a stable state where we could we could not just empower people who are who are taking up the open source efforts which are going on. But at the same time, we can also contribute our program are programs into the open source community and defining the right abstractions into into the community. Um, because we came out of stealth pretty recently, you'll start seeing that and helping those activity as Well, >>excellent. Well, you know the launch of Pensando you had a phenomenal lineup. Not only you know, John Chambers obviously has the relationship with your theme, but you know, oh, am partners of Hewlett Packard, Enterprise and IBM, as well as the Marquis of Goldman Sachs. Things look a little bit different in the first half of 2020 and then they didn't end of 29 teams. So, you know, curious, You know that the global pandemic, the rippling financial implications, you know, what does that mean? The pensando. How has that impacted conversations that you're having with your >>Well, one thing I know at a broader level, let me cover, um, where things are heading. And in that sense, you know, I see that network and the infrastructure in general cloud infrastructure networking it's going to become. And we have realized it's this during during during recent early 20 twenties that that is going to be very important to have the have a new underpinning infrastructure that is not just working efficiently, securely, but is, you know, highly cost effective and very high performance, you know, ranging from people who are trying to connect from home to people who are trying to use videoconferencing and people who are going to be more and more use cloud based services even to order simple of the data being, you know, going to source for so network will become essential, you know, essential element for four things as we go forward. And we do see that being embraced by our customers and and things where we were trying to communicate that, you know, look, you will need performance and cost benefits are becoming more and more real Now. It's like, oh, things that we were having things in the pipeline for us. We need to work on that now. And the reason is because the things that we anticipated the demand increase, which is gonna happen over the fear of years, is happening literally in a few months. And so that is what we see. We are definitely, you know, very well poised to take advantage of their of their demand for sure. But also the fact that you know it needs to be done super efficiently. And so I think we are. You know, we are right. Well, I would say, you know, situated to be able to take advantage of start. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing you can't control as a company is you know what the global situation is when you come out of stealth and, you know, move through some of those early phases, you know, you've been part of You said a number of startups you've been part of been in give us a little bit of the inside baseball of, you know, being part of Rondo. You know, any stories on a little some of the ups and downs on the multi year journey to get where you are today? >>Definitely. I think. You know, um, minutes aren't good. They are largely an execution play. Relatively independent startup is is going to be about you know, how we cracked the overall market market fit and, ah, on execution, Of course, on deal with maybe in a competition in a different way, of course, like maybe big companies are our great partners. At the same time, you have to navigate that. So the overall the overall landscape in Spain and forces forces not is it's quite different. We can be much more border than we are independent company In trying to disrupt almost anything because we don't have any point of view to define per se. We do exactly, You know, what could be the most disruptive way, too, to potentially benefit the users on day? That's a big, you know, big change. I would say, um, we are being but paranoid as well at the same time, impractical to look at. You know how how we could navigate this situation in a very practical may. And the journey off, often independent startup is, you know, personally, for me, this is this is my fourth in different and start and best off. Off off, all independent. Once, I would stay largely because the kind of tradition that we're getting being an independent company is so huge. I'm just concerned about those things. But what We're really trying to trying to ensure that, you know, we can't get our stuff, but I want you and we started. >>Excellent. Guess what? One of the other things about being a startup is You know what you know adjustments You need to make along the way. So I'm curious. As you know, you've gone to some of your early customers. Any feedback or adjustments in some of the use cases or, you know, things that you've learned along the way that you can share. >>Um, fundamentally, at a base level, we haven't shifted from what we started off. We look at disruptions on on how consumption models are going to be changing, how speeds and feeds are gonna become important because, you know, because most law is going to be almost operating, how we how we deliver things into and containers are going to be a primary, you know, vehicle to deliver and build applications. So we recognize those disruptions, and we haven't changed, But normally from those disruptions that we wanted people after her. Uh, but at the same time, I think, you know, as we went and socialize our ideas and on architecture and designs with customers, we realized that that they are giving us lots more feedback on work all we could do and ah, and starting to become like we could take on different segments of market and not just one. So why stick ourselves to the data center power? Why not work on something on edge, blur wine or wine are real solutions for five G where latency and and performance is super crucial. Why don't take up on, you know, branch that use cases. So there are many things that are opening up. Um, and largely the you know, the shift. Or I would say the the inclination of what we should change versus not is happening with respect to where our customers are driving us. And and it is very important to make sure that you know the users of our lives Articulating all of the shift happens as opposed to, uh, you know, as opposed to anything else. We listen to them like super, super carefully, uh, and at the same time trying to make sure that we not only meet their means for you there their demands. So, um, definitely, you know, from the from the overall landscape of things, we are starting to get a lot more than what we are capture, which is good news For the same time, we're trying to also, uh, take on one part. I'm you know, >>all right, Vivienne, I can't let you off the hook as the cto without talking a little bit about that. You know, I think earlier in my career there was the old discussion and said you know, we should have started it, you know, a year or two ago. But, you know, we didn't. So we should start it today with changing pace of technology. You know, I've always said, you know, if I could I'd rather wait a year because I could take the next generation. I can take advantage of all these other things, but I can't wait, because then I'd never ship any things that I need to start now, Give us a little bit, you know, Look out in the future. How is your architecture designed to be able to take advantage of all the wonders coming with five G and everything there, Um, and anything that we should be looking at, You know, through the next kind of 12 18 months on the roadmap that you could share >>your Ah, yes. So, um, I would first of all say that we didn't build a part of, actually, what we build was a platform on which we can build multiple products. And we started we started off going there because we thought that, you know, the the platform that we're building is capable of capable of doing a lot more things than than one use case that we start off with. And so, to that point, I would say that yes. I mean, he started focusing on one product initially on the possibilities off. Trying to take it to multiple segments is is normally very much there. But we are already, you know, having those conversations to see what is the core set of use cases that we could we could get into for different segments. Besides the data center, you know, public Private Data center, you're looking at edge. We're looking by the looking at, Yeah, you mentioned this is as well as the, you know, storage and conversion infrastructure. So I would say that the food of all those things that we're starting to engage is going to start showing up in next 18 months. I could actually I think we are very well boys to take advantage of what we have. The hardware that we're shipping is going to be 100% compatible with four programs, but I don't those. So that is that is lot more possibilities are interesting. More use cases as people. The software's architecture that we have built is very extensible as well. Eh so we believe that. You know, uh, we believe that we can normally satisfy those use cases, but we're starting to you get into those things now, which will start to show up in and actually useful products of unusable for us with customer testimonials and then maybe 12 to 18 months from now. All >>right, well, thank you so much. It's great to catch up with. You really appreciate you coming on. >>Thank you to Because they're talking to you. And, you know, I appreciate your time. >>All right, I'm stew minimum. And be sure to check out the cube dot net for all the coverage. Go see the launch that we did. So in the second half of 2019. Thank you for watching you. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something >>brought to you by Accenture. >>Welcome back, everyone. We are kicking off day two of the cubes. Live coverage of the ex center Executive Summit here at AWS. Reinvent, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this panel. We have some bad meta. He is the chief information officer at Putnam based in Boston. Where? Boston People together. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Nitin Gupta. He's the partner and solutions lead. Financial service is at AWS Welcomed and Shale Jane back again for more. Who leads the data business group in North America. Thanks >>so much the last time. >>Yes. We can't get enough of each other. So thank you so much for coming on the show. We're talking about the data data journey and financial service is so I'm gonna start with you, Sam. It tell us. Tell our viewers a little bit about Putnam. That your assets under management. Your employees? >>Sure. So you know, problem is a global firm. We are a leader in mutual funds in the mutual fund business. We're in 84 year old organization. We based in Boston on, and we are known for innovation. We've done a lot of firsts in our industry on our focus has always bean looking after the needs of our shareholders. So even as we launch digital transformation, we launch it with the lens off, making sure we're covering the needs of our shareholders. >>So what was the impetus? What was the driving force to it? To embark on this cloud journey? >>Sure, So you look recovered. The financial markets recover industries. We look at our own industry as well. Things are changing rather rapidly, right, if I may just turn it around a little bit. Last year's letter from our CEO Bob Reynolds, said That problem now has Maur increasingly Maur four and five star funds, according to Morningstar, then we've had it as a percent of total funds ever. Before we had inflows, when the rest of the industry were having outflows, we built a digital platform and we said digital technology at problem is how we gonna view the internal technology department who will help enable our company to go and provide the investment insights directly to our advisors and to our shareholders so that they can benefit from the performance that we're we're delivering, right? We can only do that through a change. What's really going on in our industry is that there's more choice that's now available to shareholders than ever before. So while we talk about where there's outflows in in in our world, there's actually a lot of flow happening, right, So So it's for us to figure out how. How are the tastes changing right? What are people buying would do advisors need? When do they need them and can reposition ourselves to service them at scale, and so that those are the things that are driving our business? For us to continue to serve the shareholders needs. We really need to be in tune with where the market is. So we're helping do that at Putnam through technology, >>so shale in it. And I mean, what he's just described is thin. This enormously changing landscape and financial service is disrupted by a lot of new entrance. A lot of financial text in tak, a lot of different kinds of technologies. A lot of industries are experiencing this rapid pace of change. How do u ex ensure in AWS work with Putnam amidst this tremendous change, and how do you sit down with the client and sort of work out? Where do we go from here? >>So you know, I want to touch upon a couple of things that made you said And Rebecca You said, So no one is the cloud of their journey. It's It's not a destination that you're trying to get to, And then the other thing that you talked about, it's change. So we had in the cycle right now. But there's a lot of change happening at an industry we had in the cycle Where you nothing, that $38 trillion or something, which is a generator, you know, they're just getting transferred from one generation to the other. I'm not getting any off it. Unfortunately, you know >>all of >>this change that is happening in the industry. What is really required is you need something up in terms of technology, a platform that allows you to move quickly on adapt really quickly to this change. And I think that's where cloud comes in when we talk about all the new generation technologies like data machine learning, artificial intelligence, how >>do you >>leverage all of those. How do you fail quickly? How do you test experiment? Run thousands of not millions of experiments and see what will work in what will not work and do that in a very cost effective way and cloud of a very easy. It's an effective way to do it. And the weight of Louis is helping our customers. Obviously. You know, we we announced a bunch of service is yes, today way have the widest and the deepest tack that is dead in the industry today. You know the strength of our partners. Accenture. So you know, Accenture has Bean one of our longest standing partners altar and financial firm on, you know, working with them, working with our partners to enable our customers. But then we're also investing very heavily in building our industry capabilities. Are accounting solution architects? Professional service is security professionals helping our customers answer all the questions that they would need to answer as they go in this journey with us. So it's, you know, we are in this with them for for the long haul on dhe, you know, super excited about parking trip. >>So from our perspective, I think where we view the world as at a point where we're post digital, where digital was to put a front end that made your engagement with the customers much better. But now we're talking about intelligent enterprise, which is to really digitize the company from the inside out. So not only you need cloud for agility and all the other benefits that cloud offers, but you also need to look at data is the vehicle that would actually not only transform the culture of the company but also be able to integrate with your partners. For example, Cement talked about, you know, getting mind share from the advisers. But if you can exchange data, integrate data much better, faster with them and serve data to them in shapes and speeds that they need, they'll be more amenable to put you on their roster as well. So I think we're seeing a change that's mostly driven by the fintech industry disruption. That's that's happening as well. And it is no better time than now with the cloud and data to really help transform companies like >>the's tons of innovation, right, it's We heard Andy Jassy talk about the Let's roll Sweet the Sweets that are available to us. Our job is to learn what they are and how does it apply to our business because at the end of the game you said it's about our shareholders. It's about the value that we can bring. But we want to harness the power off all of the innovation, and we can't even though we've Bean an innovator, we're not going to innovate alone, all right, so it's really helpful to have to surround yourself with partners who have done this before, to be learning from others and bringing in the right tools at the right time, so so we can turn things around quickly, right? This is way are obviously very conservative and risk averse when it comes to managing other people's money. So we have to be very, very careful. Having said that, you know, we want to learn about all the guardrails we can put in place so we can go faster. >>I want to actually do something about what Shayla brought up, and that is the cultural change within the organization, because change is hard and so many people are resistant, particularly when things are going relatively well and they say Why mess that up with the new technology? So how is hard? Maybe >>is the understatement of the week very hard, and as you guys know, you know where it's not. It's not hard because people don't just want changes. They are experts in things that they've been doing for the last 15 years. 20 years. They've bean at our firm for a really long time. They really know how everything works from front to back. What happens, though? Now, when we get a changing need from the market and people want to buy things differently and we want to sell different products and maybe wanna introduce new products to the market, we can create bottlenecks that slow things down if we're not careful. So this is where we want to learn about the two pizza teams and how you can do things faster. How can we apply that to our world? Which means business partners working with technology, co located in small teams, being completely empowered to deliver solutions, right, working with our risk and compliance people, making sure that everyone's doing things that there were supposed to be doing right? How do we put that to work in the financial service is industry. So where we're learning as we go, we're learning to break down the sidles in the organization, and it's hot all the way around because we're experts in our areas. We know what we've done really well. But fortunately we have a leader in our CEO who's basically said that Let's transform problem so that we become leaders in the digital era for financial service is so with his support waken. Get the executive team align, and as the executive team aligns, then you find that people in the organization they want to work in this model, right but way don't know yet what we don't know, right? It's so we know how to do things from yesterday. Now we're learning and working together. So you guys have come in and this is where we've said, Bring in the people who have done this before and let's hold a session with 40 50 people that Putnam and let's just learn about what that transformation looked like at other places, so we don't make the same mistakes. >>Well, that's what Andy Jassy said in his fireside chat this morning. He was talking about how he had surgery recently in the question you need to ask your surgeon is how many times have you done this surgery? Because that is the critical thing. And so having a trusted partner is so important. So how how does it work that we're working together, collaborating on this relationship? How are you ensuring that Putnam doesn't make mistakes and does do the right tool for the right job shell? >>So, um, earlier this year, we actually launched an offering. A devious lighthouse with eight of us and what it is is a is a collection off. All of our assets are thought, leadership and architectures that we have garnered over the years, having worked with plants like Putnam and have them through the journey. So we put them all together and we bring Bring that Fourth Putnam is one of the first clients actually take advantage of it Abuse Data Lighthouse and, for example, we have a methodology that is specially customized for doing data on on eight of us. So things like that is what we bring to the table to help eliminate the risk that they may encounter. >>And data is critical to us, right? It's we manage a set of data assets, and that's the engine off the organization. So when we look at cloud migration way, look at what's our data strategy? How are rebuilding the so called you guys introduce the terminology for confirmed data sets? And then can we gallon eyes the rest of the organization around it, from investment professionals to operational professionals who used that data every day. Manager governent Make sure that it is what it's supposed to be. And to do that in a cloud environment where their user experience becomes a lot simpler, a lot easier almost takes I t a little away from the day to day. We don't have to be in the report writing business because we can make them more self service right that will create efficiencies in our organization. Our clients are asking us to do things at a lower cost than ever before and introduce more products and more tools and more service is right, so >>I would just tie with Samantha, just said with your question about culture. So if you can make it easy for people, for example, making things self service and data that's discovered through a catalog, so you have a place where you can go and find all the data sets it available. What is the quality? What is the veracity of data and then be able to take a piece of that and try some experiments with it? I think that would enable the cultural change much faster >>because they are able to basically do their jobs better. >>Yes, yes, >>it is. A is a more productive implement. Will highly >>engaged employees, right? We don't want to be in a situation where we find a lot of those disengagement moving employees and the mission for company. We want high engagement. We own people committed to what they're doing. We want to remove hurdles, and technology is they can produce great efficiencies, but it's not done right. It can also be a big hurdle. So we want to learn how to deliver the right tools, the right products to make it easier for way like to say, bring delightful experiences for our clients and our employees. >>Delightful. Another were another Jeff Bezos favorite word of his Obviously Putnam is, is a real innovator and really on the vanguard of this new technology. What are you seeing in the greater financial service is landscape. I mean, how how what are the what is the corporate mind set when it comes to this kind of change? >>So you know, when we look across our financial service is customer base across banking, capital markets, insurance pretty much every customer today. The question is not, you know if we should move to the cloud or when should we move to the cloud? But I think every every CEO and see io is asking the question, How do I move too loud? And what applications do I move over? How do I start on this journey of transformation? Whether it's a digital or it's reducing costs are improving my risk. Posher whatever that end goal is on dhe, you know, when we look at use cases across the industry, risk and data is with one of the easiest use cases to get started with, say, on Ben Field. They were looking at Solvent E to calculations for 25 million other policy holders, and they reduce that time from 10 days to 10 minutes. That is a, you know, really good use case off getting moving to the cloud. You know, if Indra is a great example. They're very public customer analyzing 38 building over market records in the stock market and looking in on alive in all of the data. On it up with data and risk is one of the core use cases that companies start with but then >>has to >>get more as they learn more about the cloud. As they get more get a deeper understanding, they start looking at other things, like Transforming Corp core applications. Today we have core creating applications, scored insurance application score, banking applications that are running running on the cloud. And then they start looking and innovation. You know, how do we look at artificial intelligence? How do we look at machine learning? How do we look at the new technologies to really transform our business and one of the great use case? And we thought so. You know, a lot off insurance companies Liberty Mutual using Lexx as part of their there was a conversational agent for their customers. But one of the interesting examples I have is it's ah, it's a reinsurer in Denmark, Italy insurer in Denmark, and what they're doing is they're using image recognition from from Amazon to look at on accident in the field and then analyzing that, using the using our recognition service to see what that that actual damages and what the cost is and feeding that information to the underwriter really compressing the time that it takes two from a clean filing to processing and payment to a matter of a few few few hours on getting that payment to the to the customer. So really creating a very positive customer experience. >>So it speaking of customer experiences, what have you know? You said you thought you were in service to your shareholders. What have been some of the results that you've seen? >>So you have to look across the organization, right? So our advisers served the need on the retail side, so we were like a bee to be business, right? So we have to be cognizant of what's going on in their world. They're sitting down with clients and talking through the choices, and they have certain needs what they need to fulfill their obligations. They need to explain why they're doing what they're doing. If Putnam knows where each of the advisers are at in their journey with their clients, we can be more helpful to them in explaining why our funds are behaving the way they are right, that information can be had at the right time at the right moment when they need it. Need it, And that brings advisers closer to our our teams are retail distribution teams are marketing teams are investment teams are investment professionals, are using data and analytics to get information to. We're using technology to get information to them faster, so companies are doing releases. There's a ton of information out there these days. We're using technology to dig deeper into the press releases as well as the SEC filings, looking at the footnotes, really trying to understand what they're trying to say, what they said before and what are analysts should be focused on. And we can take a 70 page document, condense it to seven pages and pinpoint what the technology tools say's are really insights. And the analysts will take the time and read the whole thing. But they'll also look at the insides and they'll add it into their process. So technology's additive to the investment process and really making a change help and then that's helping Dr performance. So at the end of the day, we're living good performance on our funds through data analytics technology, you know, give you another example. Some off the were were very strong in the in the mortgage analytics business and on the fixed income side. Our team's very well known. They've been together for many, many years now. They're starting to use data at scale, and we found that being able to go to the cloud to do these analytics right in hours instead of days has really made a material difference in the number of iterations we can run. So now the questions are, when we do risk management, can we do that a little differently and run more reiterations and get more accuracy? So we're seeing all of that benefit. That's direct user experience, that people are seeing people seeing how technology is helping them do a better job with their thesis. >>Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on. The Cube seem ed knitting and shale. A pleasure having you on. >>Thank you for being here. >>I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Ex Center Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit

>>Locke from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering KWS executive sub brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit here at AWS reinvent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Dan Sheeran, the director of global accounts at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We have Ken Schwartz, vice president, enterprise analytics at health first. Welcome Ken and shale Jane lead data business group in North America. Accenture. Thank you so much. I am glad to have you all here. Good to be here. Yes. So we're talking today about driving digital transformation via data and analytics. I'm going to start with, you can tell us our viewers a little bit about health first as a business. >>Sure. Health first is the largest not-for-profit health plan in New York city. It's a 26 year old company. It's owned by 15 sponsor hospitals. So the business model is a little different than most health plans. The sponsor hospitals who own us, we actually share risk with the sponsor hospitals. So if our members obtain their medical services at sponsor hospitals, we have the same goal of keeping them out of the hospital essentially. And we, the revenue stays within the health healthcare delivery system. So it's a little bit different business model. We've been very successful. We're very local plan, so we have a big footprint in the communities, the very diverse communities in New York city. We're kind of part of the fabric of New York city and that's really very much part of our brand. >>So your patient population is mostly, I mean who, who, who are cuckoo prizes? >>1.4 million members, 1.4 million people mostly in New York city. So we like to say if you ride the subway in New York city, it's very likely that one in eight people are health first members, a one in three if you're in the Bronx, mostly underserved populations in a lot of cases. And people that really, like I said, sort of the, the real fabric of communities in the city. >>So what were the reasons that health works? Health first embarked on this data transformation. >>Really just again, a 26 year old company kind of outgrowing its infrastructure and really wanting to make sure that we can keep up with growth. We've been lucky to grow steadily over our entire history and at a certain point in time the legacy systems and legacy data systems don't support the new ways to do things. Prescriptive, predictive analytics, some of the great new capabilities that you can do in the cloud. So it became really important to get off the legacy hardware, get off the legacy approaches and big people change management to make that happen. I mean that's kind of what we've been living for about the last three years. >>So what were some of the goals? >>The goals are just to be able to do things at scale for in the legacy systems. I think we really didn't support analytics across our entire membership and our entire 30 million claims a year. 1.4 million members, 37,000 providers. So just being able initially just being able to query and do sort of business intelligence at scale across that, that much data, the old infrastructure just didn't support it from there. We've gone into launching our data science platform and things like that. So like I said, just, just being able to keep up with the times and provide more information, get to know everything we can possibly know about our members so that we can reach out to them in better and more effective ways. >>So shale, I want to bring you in here a little bit. How was, how did Accenture partner with health first and helping it achieve this goal? >>Yeah, so, um, we work with companies like health verse all the time and you almost have to embark on a journey that starts with a concept, almost the imagination, if you will. And then you take it into a test mode, the pilot mode in the scale up mode. And we were fortunate enough to actually to be involved in, in the journey that health first has had all throughout that, those stages, if you will. Um, and it's been, it's been a very rewarding experience because health first is one of those companies that actually took a very early lead on moving to the cloud, moving to the new data architectures and actually trying new technologies such as we recently finished a, uh, a knowledge graph project with them as well, which is relatively new in this space. So it's been a rewarding experience for us as well. >>So what are kind of, what are some of the challenges that you faced along this journey? Organization of lead technically and how did you overcome them? >>I think early on it's, it's whole new roles and new new technical paths that just didn't exist at the company. So Accenture being partner, good support from AWS really helped us. So we didn't have machine learning engineers and data engineers and cloud practitioners. So you don't grow that overnight. So having professionals come on graph as well. We oftentimes you start off with the use case and you have somebody just download things and get going. Right. And that's great, but that doesn't really land it. So getting professionals who have done things in the new environments on board to help us out was, was really key in the challenges side. I really think the people change management can be really hard. Again, if you're a sort of a brand new company or startup and you're just, you have to do your business on the cloud and it's dependent on that from day one. >>It's a lot different than we have a lot of people. Our company has been successful for 26 years. We have to look to the future to make these changes, but we've been doing pretty well sort of on our legacy platforms and things like that. So it's not always easy to just get people to change streams and say like, Hey, you really should be be doing this differently. So I think the people change management realizing you have to kind of sometimes lead with use cases, lead with pilots, lead people by the hands to get from point a to point B was kind of surprising. But we've, we've learned that that's true. >>So Dan, he you had a nice shout out from Ken here by giving you some prompts buddy in the U S and what you bring to the value you bring to the table. What do you, what do you make of what he said about the people change and how that is in a lot of ways the hardest >>couldn't agree more. In fact, that was the first point that Andy Jesse led off with this morning in his keynote that it's any of these projects, if you don't start with leadership that is both committed to the change and coordinated among themselves, then you've got no chance of success. Now that's, that's a necessary condition. It's not sufficient. You do need to drive that change through the organization and this, the scenario that Ken described is very common in what we see in that you start with enthusiasts typically that will, we often call builders who are going to be at a department who are playing around with tools because one of the advantages of course of AWS is it's all self-serve. You can get started very easily create your own account. But it is tricky to make sure that before that gets too far along that an enterprise wide architecture and strategy is agreed upon or else you can get sort of half pregnant with an approach that really is not going to serve the longterm objectives. And that's the reason why working with Accenture, getting the reference architecture for a data Lake really agreed on early on in this project was essential and that's what allowed once that foundation was in place. All these other benefits to accrue pretty quickly. >>So on a project like this, how closely are you all working together in teams to get the job done? I mean, and what is the collaboration, what is the process and what does it look like? >>Well, you know, I'm sure that each of us is going to have an answer to that, but our perspective on that at AWS is to always be customer led. We have some customers who themselves want to use a journey like this to become a builder organization. And one of their strategic objectives is that their developers are the ones who are really at the controls longterm building out a lot of new features. We have other customers who really want to be principally buyers. They'll have some enthusiasts here and there in their organization, but they really want to principally define the objectives, participate in the architecture, but then really lean on somebody like an Accenture to implement it >>and to also stand behind it afterwards. So in this case, Accenture played a central role, but we really think that the very first meeting needs to be sit down and listen to what the customer wants. Yeah. I'd say we're builders but with guidance that against them we want people who have, who have hit their heads on things and kind of learn from that and that's, that can be a force multiplier instead of having, and we definitely jumped into use cases that we wanted to just build. Like I said in a year later, we're a little bit spinning our wheels. It's not really hurting anything cause it's not necessarily anything anybody else's for anyway is standing up a graph database. It's just something we wanted to do. Right. So having these guys come in as force multiplier has been really useful. So we reach out to AWS, have really good support from AWS when we need it. AWS also has great online training, the loft in lower Manhattan or in Soho we go to things as well so we can help ourselves. And the next venture is just really been embedded with us too. We have seven or eight data engineers that have really walked pretty much every mile with us so far on this journey. So >>yeah, the only thing I would, I would add to it is that, you know, we have a very strong relationship with AWS and as such we become privy to a lot of the things that are coming down the pike, if you will. So that can add value. At the same time, we have very good access to some of the top technologists within AWS as well, so we can bring that to bear so that that all kind of works really well together. Having a partnership with AWS and then with our, we have different parts of the organization. They can also bring not just the technology skills but also domain skills as well. So we can add to some of the thinking behind the use cases as well. So that's another part of the collaboration that happens including in the security model. Right. And if we don't have that right from the beginning, then very true. Nothing else becomes possible. And there's a lot of domain expertise within Accenture. It helps us scale. >>One of the things that we, that I've heard a lot today at the Accenture executive summit is this idea of thinking differently about failure. And this is an idea that's in Silicon Valley, failed, fail better, fail happier, fail up all these things. Fail fast. Exactly. But all of them do. How do you, how but how does a co does a nonprofit in New York city, how does it embrace that? I mean, as we've talked about a lot here just now is the people are, are the hardest part that then that's a really different mindset in a really big change for an organization like health first. >>But the, the, the business model of working with AWS to is pay as you go and everything. It's like failing cheapest, very possible. You know, we're not putting out huge upfront costs to turn something on. We can turn it on for pennies sometimes and do a use case. So it really does support experimentation. We've been, one of our successes I think is we really just try a lot of things. So we've, we've had to learn how to do that and learn how to sort of either pull in more experienced people to help us or just just cut it off kind of in some cases. So yeah, the cloud patterns and AWS is business model just makes it really easy. >>And it's also key of course, to have some quick wins that are highly visible. So to my understanding that in the case of health first there was, you know, whether it's reimbursement claims or there's potential fraud that can be detected, that is a lot easier to start doing once you got your data into a common data Lake and you've got world-class analytics tools that are available directly to the business analysts. Instead of requiring lots of hand holding and passing datasets around, when you get those initial quick wins that builds the kind of enthusiasm that allows you to then take this from being a project that people are skeptical about to people really seeing the value >>and people get excited about it too. So talk about some of the benefits that your members have seen from this. >>Sure. So again, we have 1.4 million members. So just something pretty simple. Every health plan wants to prevent readmissions. So someone's been in the hospital and then they have to go right back with the same condition. That's bad for the member or bad for the plan. Bad for everybody, right? So just just being able to take a data science model on our own data, train it up for predicting readmissions. Again, we have large care management community. Many nurses go out in the field every day and meet members, but now that we can give them a list of the 500 most important members and it's also self-service, it's, it's in a dashboard that's running in red shift and people can go and just get their lists. I mean that's really profoundly satisfying and important to change our members health outcomes. You know, that's only one example. That was kind of the first model we've built, but we have models for people being adherent to their medication. Just a lot of things that we can do. Targeted interventions instead of kind of having a bunch of business rules. Kind of in your head of who you think you should reach out to. This is the data's telling us who's most at risk and sometimes empowering the call center personnel >>when you can give them access to data that allows them to really personalize that, that phone call experience with somebody. It's a, it's a relatively low cost way to surprise and delight the patient or the health plan member. And that then drives customer satisfaction scores, which are very important in the healthcare industry for all sorts of reasons related to accreditation are related to reimbursement. And also frankly just related to enrollment and retention. >>I speak from experience when I say the best, the companies are the ones with the good call centers that you just are happy and you get off the phone, you don't want to slam it down, you're, you're happy to talk to them. So final pieces of advice for companies that are, that are trying to drive change through data analytics. What, what is a best practice? Best piece of advice? Well, because you looked at me, I'll let you go first. >>Um, we always, it sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly often not the case. Once you get past the initial five minutes of a conversation, really stress are we actually focused on a real problem as opposed to something that sounds cool or fun to go experiment with. Because these tools, as Ken said, these are, it's fun to play with these self-service AI tools. You can predict all sorts of things. Isn't an actual pain point for either an internal customer or an external customer. >>Yeah, I think you hit it on the head as well. That's advice to starting this as get, get some wins, get some early wins and then don't be afraid to experiment and don't be afraid to think outside the box. I think I would say there are two pieces of advice. One is focused on strategy like Dan was talking about before, because with tools like AWS where you can literally use your credit card to get started, you can lose sight of the big picture. So have a data strategy that is directly tied to your business strategy is very important. And the second is instead of thinking about building a data pipeline for a specific use case, think about building a platform, a data platform that can serve the need of today and tomorrow as well in a, in an architecture that is, that is fit for purpose architecture like Andy Jesse talked about today. So don't go for a Swiss army knife approach. Go for fit for purpose platforms, products, models, if you will, that can allow you to build that platform that can serve the need of the future as well. >>Excellent. Thank you so much shale. Ken and Dan, thanks for coming on the cube. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit.

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

>>From New York city. It's the cube covering. Welcome to the new edge brought to you by systems. >>Okay, we'll come back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in downtown Manhattan at the top of Goldman Sachs, like 43 stories above the Hudson. It was a really beautiful view a couple hours ago, but the cloud has moved in and that's only appropriate cause it's cloud is a big theme of why we're here today. We're here for the Penn Zando event. It's called welcome to the new edge. They just come out of stealth mode after two and a half years, almost three years, raised a ton of money, got a really rockstar team and we're excited to have the CEO with us today to tell us a little bit about more what's going on. And that's prem Jane and again, the CEO of Penn Sandow prem. Great to see you. Nice to see you too. So everything we did running up to this event before we could get any of the news, we, we, we tried to figure out what was going on and all it kept coming up was NPLS, NPLS, NPLS, which I thought was a technology, which it is, but it's really about the team. Tell us a little bit about the team in which you guys have built prior and, and why you're such a, a well functioning and kind of forward thinking group of people. >>So I think the team is working together. Mario Luca, myself and Sony were working together since 1983 except for Sony. Sony joined us after the first company, which has crescendo, got acquired by Cisco in 1993 and since then four of us are working together. Uh, we have done many, uh, spinnings inside the Cisco and demo was the first one. Then we did, uh, uh, Nova systems, which was the second, then we did recently in CMA. Uh, and then after we left we thought we are going to retire, but we talked about it and we says, you know, there is still transitions happening in the industry and maybe we have few more years to go back to the, you know, industry and, and do something which is very challenging and, and uh, impacting. I think everything which we have done in the past is to create a impact in the industry and make that transition which is occurring very successful, >>which is really hard to do. And, and John Chambers who, who's on the board and spoke earlier today, you know, kind of talked about these 10 year cycles of significant change in our industry and you know, Clayton Christianson innovator's dilemma, it's really easy when you are successful at one of those to kind of sit on your laurels. In fact, it's really, really hard to kill yourself and go on to the next thing you guys have done this time and time and time again. Is there a unique chemistry in the way you guys look forward or you just, you just get bored with what you built and you want to build something new. I mean, what is some of the magic, because even John said, as soon as he heard that you were the team behind it, he was like, sign me up. I don't know what they're building but I don't really care cause I know these people can deliver. >>I think it's very good the, whenever you look at any startup, the most important thing which comes up as the team and you're seeing a lot of startup fails because the team didn't work together or they got their egos into this one. Since we are working for so long, they compliment each other. That's the one thing which is very important. Mario, Luca, myself, they come from engineering backgrounds. Sony comes from marketing, sales, uh, type of background and we all lady in terms of the brain, if you think about is the Mario behind the scene, Luca is really the execution machine and I'm, you can think like as a heart, okay. Putting this thing together. Uh, as a team, we work very complimentary with each other. It does not mean that we agree on everything, right? We disagree. We argue. We basically challenge each other. But one thing good about this particular team is that once we come to a conclusion, we just focus and execute. And team is also known to work with customers all the time. I mean, even when we started Penn Sando, we talked to many customers in the very beginning. They shape up our ideas, they shape up the directions, which is we are going and what transitions are occurring in the industries and all that. That's another thing which is we take customer very seriously in our thought process of building a product. >>So when you were thinking around sitting around the table, deciding whether you guys wanted to do it again, what were the challenges that you saw? What was the kind of the feedback loop that came in that, that started this? The, uh, the gym of the idea >>thing is also is that, uh, we had, we had developed so many different products as you saw today in the launch, eight or nine, uh, billion dollar product line and stuff like that. So we all have a very good system experience what is really needed, what transitions are occurring and stuff like that. When we started this one, we were not really sure what we wanted to do it, but in the last one when we did the, uh, NCMA, we realize that the enterprise thing, which we deliver the ACI solution for the enterprise, the realize that these services was the most complex way of incorporating into that particular architectures. So right from the beginning of interview realized that the, this particular thing is nobody has touched it, nobody thought about it out of the box thinking that how can you make it into a distributed fashion, which has also realized that cloud is going, everything distributed. >>They got away from the centralized appliances. So as the enterprise is now thinking of doing it cloud-like architectures and stuff like that. And the third thing which was really triggered us also, there was a company which is a new Poona which got acquired by Amazon in 2016 and we were looking at it what kinds of things they are doing and we said we can do much better architecturally and next generation, uh, architecture, which can really enable all the other cloud vendors. Some of them are our partners to make sure they can leverage that particular technologies and build the next generation cloud. And that's where this idea of new edge came in because we also saw that the new applications like IOT is five G's and artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics or drones, you just name it intelligent devices, which is going to get connected. What is the best place to process them is at the edge or also at the backend with the application where the server is running these and that is another edge compute edge, right? >>In that particular sense. So our idea was to develop a product so that it can cover wide segment of the market, enterprise cloud providers, service borders, but focus very narrowly delivering these services into existing architectures. Also people who are building, building the next generation architectures. Right, so it's the distributed services platform or the distributed services architecture. So at its core for people that didn't make it today, what is it? It's basically is a distributed service platforms. The foundation of that is really our custom processor, which is we have designed is highly programmable. It's software defined so that all the protocols, which is typically people hardwired in our case is programmable. It's all programs which is we are writing the language which you selected as before and before extensions. The software stack is the major differentiated thing which is running on the top of this particular processor, which is we have designed in such a way that is hardware agnostics. >>The the, the capabilities which we have built is easily integrated into the existing environment. So if people already have cloud and they want to leverage our technologies, they can really deploy it in the enterprise. We are basically replacing lot of appliances, simplifying the architectures, making sure they can enable the service as they grow model, which is really amazing because right now they had to say firewall goes here, load balancer goes here, these a VPN devices goes there. In our case it's very simple. You put in every server of our technologies and our software stack and our Venice, which is our policy manager, which is sitting outside and it's based upon Kubernete X a architectures is basically a microservices, which is we are running and managing the life cycle of this particular product family and also providing the visibility and uh, uh, accountability in terms of exactly what is going on in that particular network. >>And it's all driven by intent-based architecture, which is policy driven, right? So software defined sitting on software defined Silicon. So you get the benefits of the Silicon, but it's also programmable Silicon, but it's still, you're sitting, you've got a software stack on top of that that manages that cloud and then the form factors as small as a Nick. Yes. So he can stick it in the HP HP server. Yeah. It specifically goes into any PCI slot in any server, uh, in the industry. Yes. It's amazing. Well, first incarnation, but, but, but, but, but that's a really simple implementation, right? Just to get radiation and easy to deploy. Right. And you guys are, you're yourself where involved in security that's involved in managing the storage. It's simple low power, which I thought was a pretty interesting attribute that you defined early on. Clearly thinking about edge and these distributed, uh, things all over the place. >>They're metal programmable. And then the other thing that was talked about a lot today was the observability. Yes. Um, why observability why was that so important? What were you hearing from customers that were really leading you down that path? Yeah, it's important. Uh, you know, surprisingly enough, uh, the visibility is one of the biggest challenge. Most of the data center faces today. A lot of people tried to do multiple different things, but they're never able to do it, uh, in, in the way we are doing it. One is that we don't run anything on the host. Some people have done it right on the train running the agent on the host. Some people have tried to run virtual machines on the those particular environment. In our case there's nothing which is running on the host site. It runs on our card and having end to end that visibility we can provide latency, very accurate latency to the, to the applications which is very important for these customers. >>Also, what is really going on there is the problem in the network. Isolation is another big thing. When something get lost they don't know where it got lost. We can provide that thing. Another important thing that you're doing, which is not being done in the industries. Everything which is we are doing is flow based means if I'm talking to you, there is a flow being set up between you and me and we are monitoring every flow and one of the advantages of our processor is we have four to eight gigabytes of memory, so we can keep these States, have these flows inside, and that gives a tremendous advantage for us to do lots of things, which as you can imagine going forward, we will be delivering it such as, for example, behavior of these flows and things from this point of view, once you understand the behavior of the flow, you can also provide lot of security features because if I'm not talking to you and suddenly I start talking to you and I know that there's something went wrong, right, right. >>And they should be able to look at the behavior analysis and should be able to tell exactly what's going on. You mean we want a real time snapshot of what's really happening instead of a instead of a sample of something that happened a little. No, absolutely. You're absolutely connected. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's terrific. So you put together to accompany and you immediately went out and talked to a whole bunch of customers. I was amazed at the number of customers and partners that you had here at the launch. Um, was that for validation? Were you testing hypotheses or, or were there some things that the customers were telling you about that maybe you weren't aware of or maybe didn't get the right priority? I think it's all of the above. What you mentioned our, it's in our DNA by the way. You know, we don't design products, we don't design things without talking to customers. >>Validation is very important that we are on the right track because you may try to solve the customer problem, which is not today's problem. Maybe future's problem. Our idea was that then you can develop the product it was set on the shelf. We don't want to do that. We wanted to make sure that, that this is the hard problem customer is facing today. At the same time looking at it, what futuristic in their architecture is understanding the customers, how, what are they doing today, how they're deploying it. The use cases are understanding those very well and making sure that we are designing. Because when we design a seeker, when your designer processor, you know, you cannot design for one year, it has to be a longterm, right? And you need to make sure that we understand the current problems, we understand the future problems and design that in pretty much your spark and you've been in this space forever. >>You're at Cisco before. And so just love to get your take on exponential growth. You know, such an interesting concept that people have a really hard time grasping exponential growth and we're seeing it clearly with data and data flows and ultimately everything's got to go through the network. I mean, when you, when you think back with a little bit of perspective at the incredible increase in the data flow and the amount of data is being stored and the distribution of these, um, applications now out to the edge and store and compute and take action at the edge, you know, what do you think about, how do you, how do you kind of stay on top of that as somebody who kind of sees the feature relatively effectively, how do you try to stay on top of exponential curves? As you know, very valuable data is very important for anybody in any business. >>Whether it's financial, whether it's healthcare, whether it's, and it's becoming even more and more important because of machine learning, artificial intelligence, which is coming in to really process this particular data and predict certain things which is going to happen, right? We wanted to be close to the data and the closest place to be data is where the application is running. That's one place clears closest to the data at the edge is where data is coming in from the IOT devices, from the 5g devices, from the, you know, you know all kinds of appliances which is being classified under IOT devices. We wanted to be, make sure that we are close to the data, doesn't matter where you deploy and we want to be agnostic. Actually our technologies and architectures designed that this boundary is between North, South, East, West is going to go away in future cloud. >>A lot of things which is being done in the backend will be become at the edge like we talked about before. So we are really a journey which is just starting in this particular detectors and you're going to see a lot more innovations coming from us continuously in this particular directions. And again, based upon the feedback which you're going to get from cloud customers with enterprise customers, but they were partners and other system ecosystem partners, which is going to give us a lot of feedback. Great. Well again, thanks for uh, for having us out and congratulations to uh, to you and the team. It must be really fun to pull the covers off. absolutely. It is very historical day for us. This is something we were waiting for two years and nine months to see this particular date, to have our customers come on the stage and talk about our technologies and why they think it's very important. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk to you. Thank you. Alright, thanks prem. Thanks. He's prem. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube where it depends. Sandow launch at the top of Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube, covering AWS reInforce, 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Boston with theCube's coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, reInforce their inaugural conference, getting into the security event business because the customers are here and it's growing like crazy. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We are two guests of a hot startup called Valtix, Vishal Jain CEO, and Brian Lazear, Chief Product Officer. Valtix, you guys just launched out of stealth, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You guys got some good pedigree I here, in the company. >> Yeah. >> Welcome to the cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, so first of all, before we get to the conference, which I think is very relevant, you guys are are getting out there. What do you guys do? What is Valtix all about? What is the core problem you solve? Why start this company? What's the value proposition? >> Yeah, so Valtix is building the first cloud native network security platform. So before you start a company, you talk to lot of customers, and you talk to customers, and we saw the cloud is real. You can see here, cloud is real. And we saw that network security, have challenges in how to scale in the cloud, that mainly because of three things to look at that main thing is that the cloud is crawling. The data center used to be like three and four. Now the customer says is hard in the morning in the keynote, they have suddenly one than 10, hundred and 30 PCs. So the new logical perimeter you're seeing. Second thing we saw was that the apps are agile. And the third thing is security is always falling behind DevOps. So if you want to make security to be scaled with apps. >> So, you're saying level up the security apps piece to the DevOps pace. So DevOps is kind of pushing things really fast. You mentioned cloud come the new way. I mean, I remember the conversations around Software Defined data center, Brian, that was the holy grail for the on premises activity, was going to put some software on the storage and you got virtualization, we're done. In comes the cloud, changed the game on the Hadoop ecosystem, change the game on the on premises ecosystem. So what has it actually done differently? Where's it going? Where's the game happening now for security with kind of, because software is key to it? Where do you see it? >> Yeah, we definitely see that, I mean, DevOps is doing such a great job in the public cloud. I mean, DevOps is just, they're really doing a great job with the tooling, the teamwork, you know, automation aspects, and traditionally, security is always had a little bit of a lag to that. And in the cloud, that distance is much greater than ever has before so the security teams, particularly we do, which is network security, they are struggling. And so we focus on providing them a really good platform for that. And that platform includes the firewall. So we are building a cloud based firewall, that goes to the customer's premise, it's all structured around a controller, we have a cloud based controller that manages the firewall is in their central place to configure things. And also that controller is very aware of the applications. So we're keen on giving them that cloud-like experience with a vendor like us that comes over the top, and it can provide that capability as they grow. >> And the status of the product is what, shipping? It's a service? >> Yep. >> Explain the product. >> So last week, we did launch. We announced our funding, and we launched the the availability of the product, and it is built as a SAS. So the controller is a SAS model. The customer does own the firewall, we're a software company, so the software goes into their cloud premise, and it has all the services that they need for protecting their network edge. >> So what are the finer aspects, what are the real differences of network security in the cloud relative to traditional network security? >> Yeah, so what we saw was that the enterprises try to bring the our on prem vendor to the cloud, based as boxes, and as you said, a software defined environment, you need to bring up something more. So what we do is, we bring the whole lifecycle and three core elements of that is the visibility that we do the inventory of the apps, across your accounts, across your regions, across the cloud even. And second thing is how to plumb yours in the path and how to build an unified enforcement solution, which is what we call a firewall. So and built on three principles, cloud native, unification, and performance. >> And the the purpose of the company, when was the origination? When would you get the idea? Was it like, you decided to start a company? What was the motivation? >> Yeah, the big motivation was that, again, we talked to our customers, and we saw the cloud is real. But security is a big impediment to the public adoption and that's why we have this conference here, as well. And then we noticed the network security is not scaling the cloud. We like the problem, we found a team. Our team has the networking background, security background, and the cloud background. And we like the problem. We like a team and he said, okay, let's attack this problem and go after the market. >> So the blocker is scale, right? >> Scale and agility. Okay, so it's a company like Cisco is not solving this problem? Yeah, so what they did was they tried to bring the appliances to the cloud, in a virtual form factor. But in this new world of the cloud, getting sprawl. Agile's... You need kind of centralized control model to secure this new logical perimeter. You can't be appliance by appliance to secure the perimeter. You need to have a more data. >> You can't throw boxes at them. >> Yeah. >> Right, whether whether it's physical or virtual Yeah, exactly. I mean, what Vishal's pointing out too is that we want one aspect of what we do is that there's this super elegance to that day zero. You can just click a button and we deploy the gateway through the controller. That gateway is your firewall. Its right there. I mean, its almost instantaneous. So, even that level reflects the cloud native capabilities. That really gets people excited because the alternative is they grudgingly have to go and get the license and build it and build their functions to scale it and we handle all that. >> And I get why the hardware box model doesn't scale. Why doesn't the software defined virtual appliance scale? >> Yeah. Well, the background is that we see a couple competitors. We see the classic NG firewall players and we see the cloud native capabilities. On the cloud native side, they've made efforts to get into a virtual form factor, but its still basically a box. Its a VM form factor. The instrumentation for it, in a cloud environment, its sub-par and there's still a lot of manual effort to get these things up and running. The plumbing, its not... The user experience is very poor. >> So, its really bring your own box as opposed to here's a... >> Yeah and it has to be a solid form factor. >> So, network security, we heard yesterday at the partner event I attended, and I heard the folks from Amazon up there and they're getting serious about this cause they see the big enterprise opportunity. They want channel marketing, all kinds of new things. But, network security kind of has that same vibe that DevOps had. Which was, you have different consumption mechanisms, the customers are buying services, the pricing's different, the scale is different, you have policy, APIs too, its very cloud native. Are customers ready for that or is your controller, Valtix controller the gateway drug to the cloud so to speak cause, certainly if all those things are changing, that means the old just can be retrofitted for the new. You got to have something from scratch. And not a lot of people are lifting and shifting beyond infrastructure as a service. That's easy to replicate with the cloud, but when you get into some of the nuances with the apps that you're mentioning, these new dynamics have to be pure play features. >> Correct. >> Are you a solution to that? Or are you a gateway to that? Its the controller right? >> Yeah, we are a solution. For example, as I said, we do the full lifecycle. We have a controller will discover all your apps, so, an enterprise can have apps that cross your accounts and cross your cloud even and we discover all the apps. Second thing is once we discover the apps, put yourself in the path of security and we do that automatically. Third thing is enforcement. For that, we have two core engines, as I said. Provide re-development, which we call a cloud firewall from Valtix and secondly the cloud controller, which sees everything. So, its a global view of the entire enterprise infrastructure. >> In your marketing documentation, you talk about the trade-offs that people have to make between security and agility. That's always been a trade-off. Do you solve that problems and if so, how? >> So, again when we saw the customer we talked to and they bring their workshop appliances, or appliances to the cloud, then there are two choices they have. One is that are apps agile, but then you cannot secure using the client's model, so you kind of insecure, or naked we call it. The other option is that you must have heard, security slows me down. So you kind of become a secure and rigid. So every time you have a new app, a new EPC, you open a ticket and you install the new firewall. So, what we are giving a third option because both options I gave are bad choices, so we give a third option, which is agile and secure. That's what a centralized controller and a Valtix file will give you that option. >> Vishal and Brian, I want to get your thoughts on why you guys, so be the devil's advocate. You guys are just a startup, although your startups actually doing well in the cloud environment, I'm being a skeptic, I'm trying to shoot my own narrative here. But the reality is you guys are young company, you want to get the attention of the enterprise or customers, what's the pitch? Why you guys? What's your backgrounds, pedigrees, the backgrounds you guys bring to the table with software, talk about why you guys? What's the differentiator? >> In terms of the team, I would say, there are three core pillars, networking, security, and cloud, right? So, this team has built up billions of parkline and deployed in thousands of enterprises and there were two core expertise initially the team was, building fast performance by plans. Second thing is decoupling the control development. I mentioned some of that. So, those are some of the aspects and then you build your team around network expertise, security expertise, and a cloud expertise. >> Have they done it before? >> Yes, multiple times. >> How big's the team? >> The team is right now twenty people. >> Twenty people? And you just raised 14 million or over 14 million? >> Yeah, over 14 million we raised and we announced it last week. >> Yeah, great. Congratulations. >> What are some of the backgrounds of the team members? >> I mean they're Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Google Cloud... >> Fortinet. >> Yeah, Fortinet. Its kind of that bench strength of security in a networking cloud and then I think the other component to that is that we all come from a common denominator of building, hands on building, shipping and marketing products that are transformative. That's also exciting. So, we see this and say, this is clearly transformative or this big market opportunity to help customers and we're like, ecstatic. >> Yeah, the cloud really... It sounds like to me you guys have a real holistic systems view of the world. Because the cloud is essentially an operating system or large, distributed computer and decentralized with crypto and blockchain. Its the system thinking that's interesting. Right, you guys have that... To know the network, you got to know the system. And you get into the apps, you got to understand that middle layer that's developing with Kubernetes and containers. With cloud native, that's developing really fast. So, to see that end to end is more of a systems kind of mindset. A lot of companies are lacking that because they've outsourced everything to global SI's and now they got to rebuild. Capital One's Sie So said, we're investing everything building. We're building more. So, they're builders, they're systems guys. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, so basically we also know this, that all of the enterprise we talk to were told that a lot of wine products, what we're building the platform. So, we'll be starting off with the food services, but its a platform, so a wholistic platform could do the full network security in the public cloud. That's what we are working towards. >> What's the differentiator? Why you guys? What's the main value proposition that you guys bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? >> Correct, the main value proposition is the team can build it and second thing is taking a cloud related approach to this problem. We are building for the cloud and we are building using the cloud are the principles. >> So you just went through your raise, so all these answers to the questions are fresh in your mind. But, Brian you talked about a large market. Help us understand that because the market is enormous, its like a hundred billion dollars or whatever it is, but its so fragmented, there's so many different segments. How do you guys look at the TAM and then the served market for you guys, that you go after? >> Our goal is to protect their data center, this new data center, basically everything that's going in or out of the data center on the network side, that's our focus. We didn't mention some of these services, but in the product we're shipping right now, it does decryption of TLS traffic, it does firewall, it does intrusion prevention, it does WAF, so it has this, and more, so there's this set of things that when we talk to the customers, they'll say, my blueprint for the cloud is like the prep, I have to stack all these things together, risk in security says you have to emulate that environment, its worked well here, make it happen out there. And so that's where you see people getting a little bit amped up. Its hard to do that. We have a platform that can consolidates that really well and knows the system level things that John was mentioning, but it is covering a lot of space, but we are very optimistic. We're making good grounds with that. >> So its a platform approach versus five, six products? >> Exactly, so the consolidation story connects really well. >> What's the most important story that needs to be told in the security industry today in your opinion? What do you think that customers should know about, that the media and or the industry should be discussing? >> The main thing is that we talk about DevOps. DevOps is very agile. So one thing is the current security is slowing me down. Security has to be agile, especially network security, we have heard in the past, slows you down. So that's, in the cloud world, the main reason people are going to cloud is because of the agility and network security should not stop that. >> So, security's slowing down... >> Yeah and we don't want that. >> Its a deep bottleneck for mass adoption, we're seeing that more and more and that problem statement, there's a lot of Ops angles to this. Its understanding, like multi-AZ deploys and the Transit Gateway, the new Transit Gateway from Amazon and how does this all work together and we're on top of that in the network security perspective. >> What do you think about the show here? Amazon's inaugural re:Inforce. Its not a summit, summits are regional re-invents. This is its own name, just like re-invent's different for the customer. Re-invent isn't re:Inforce. Pretty important, pretty strategic for Amazon Web Services. What do you guys think? >> I think its great. I mean, we have been using all alternatives like Transit, their mutilated support, the ST bucket. We use all the infrastructure they provide. Its always good to know what they are doing because in the reinvent around Transit Gateway and we incorporate that into our product. So, we want to be ahead of what they announcing, incorporate that and giving our customer what they need as a whole solution. >> So, Brian you're running the product, Chief Product Officer. What's on the roadmap? (laughter) >> Lots of good stuff. >> C'mon! >> We're very busy. >> Feed your request coming in. Give you their services, you could just bang them out, no big deal. (talking over each other) >> Just so easy, 2,000 a year. Amazon does it, you could do a couple hundred a year, no problem. >> There's probably a couple things. One is that we will continue to expand to other clouds because our customers want that. But its also just about more capabilities. So, they're seeing what we could do today. There's a lot that it could do and they're with us, they're on the journey with us and saying we want more help and this show is an example of that. The cloud is becoming more than a thing and security's getting emphasized, literally, its emphasized here. So, we're happy to help our customers along. >> Well you guys are launched, what's the priority? You're obviously hiring, what kind of culture do you have? What are some of your needs here? Put a plug for the company real quick. >> In terms of hiring, initially I'm also hiring more engineering, building the product. They're the core of the engine. But, now we are expanding the go to market team, we have sales, marketing and we are going to expand on both the sides, like sell and build more and sell more. >> Yeah, get the revenue in. Congratulations, hot startup. Good job, well done. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks John. >> Valtix launching with new product out of stealth with funding, getting off the runway, here at Amazon Websters Re:Invent theCube coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat London twenty nineteen, Brought to you by Amazon Web services. >> We're at the A. W s summits here in London, at the XL Center there are thousands and thousands of delegates here looking to see the future for their own technologies on what Kyle will hold for them, as well as lots of the other established players here. There are plenty of startups. I'm just down the street and this is my co host, Dame Ellen. We're gonna be talking to a few of the startup founders who are with us here on the Cuban. It's great to have you here. So first up, Hu Pei jin, Who is that? The co founder of the three d mapping based service. And this is called Escape Technologies, but also chanting Jane. And you are the co founder. A swell founder, I believe is it found it found in co founder ofyour organization called Kwan. Now let me festival starts talking to Jan Di and about what you do because you're offering a service to financial services. Are you on helping them with machine learning? Teo, try and offer the best portfolio managers for wealth investment. How does it work? What you're offering? >> Yes, our platform basically allows traders, portfolio managers, asset managers who want to make smarter investment decisions to build machine learning models. To do this Theo idea is that data driven investing should help funds make more profits for themselves and their clients. But there's not enough data, scientists, King data scientist who can actually do more good for them. And we address this lack of talent by using a community of data scientist people who come from outside of finance to help them crowd to help fund managers crowdsource model, using their intelligence, their talent. So the process is really simple. Clients come to us with what we like to call an investment problem or a finance problem. We take that problem and convert it into a pure matter. And she learning problem. That's someone who is not from finance, can understand and soil >> so really interesting. You say that because I've spoken to other founders of other data companies who say, for example, be looking at the stars for their main bread and butter. But then Khun transfer those skills and astronomy to the financial sector and those types of people that you're trying to harness their skills. >> Yeah, exactly. So our community is made up of people who work at tech. Companies at Google and Amazon have sport off people who are putting graduate program and computer science and math machine learning, but don't necessarily know finance. And the idea is, can you make this problem than two problems? Can you make finance problem into problems that this community of data scientists really smart data scientists understand without needing to know finance? >> It's interesting that it lord, because ofthe a lack of of data scientists, Really? But do you think if you eliminate all the kind of heavy lifting out of what you do in the future, though, will be a need for fewer data? Scientists? >> I don't think we need to fut the scientist, but they wouldn't be a need for reform Toe have in house teams. They will basically be able to. A data scientist working in an unequal miss company should be able to solve problems of a finance company. The scientists working in uber should be able to solve problems for a hedge fund because we're building this translator that can allow knowledge from anywhere to be used to solve any kind of problems. >> Okay, let me talk to you because you do three d mapping services. Why do you think these are essential for technologies large and small? Going forward, >> Esso and every future industry in the future is going to have some autonomous aspect to it. So if you think about Atanas vehicles, ever think about delivery Jones. These are going to be machines. They're going to be acting autonomously in human like environments, and they're going to make decisions based on purely what they're observing with hardly human in between. So the only way that this can happen intelligently and safely is if those machines also have a human like understanding ofthe human like environment, just like you humans. So while we are providing these things, machines with Is that human like understanding and the first service that we're building towards that is a visual positioning system to provide the machines with the ability to answer the question. Where am I now? The only way that you can provide official positioning system is this. If you also have a visual map off of the world on this math needs to be updated in real time. So for every future industry, having a real time update version off the real world is fundamental. That's the pinnacle around. Every single every single decision that autonomous agent is going to make is going to be based upon this map. >> So this map was really value Peace Corps piece, um, that we're building. So I've often wondered if people talk about autonomous cars, but we don't have things like autonomous cart's right now. People will say, Well, an Amazon warehouse would have that. But there, following beacons or stripes, Yeah, what you're talking about is potentially taking >> us to the point where you can break that barrier. Is that fair? Exactly. And for warehouses, I would forever advice to use those beacons. Because warehouses are pre pre massaged environments, you define what the environment looks like. Whereas humans we walk around in cities, in nature and all these places that are not pre processed, we have to take our cues from the visuals that we observe. So if you go back to your hometown, for example, you observe a Starbucks logo Starbucks logo and observe our street sign, you might be able to very opposition based on those visual visual cues. Even though the environment itself was not pre processed to provide those cues, the cues are already in the nature. So >> we've heard that there have bean in these trials that have bean accident. There's a limit that is >> Oh, yeah, totally. So at the moment, they're sure are accidents, But you are a human. You can navigate properly with any human environment, using your visual sense it your eyes. Therefore, any machine will, in the future only need that visual sensor as well. So only a camera to navigate around the world were seeing great great progress on the neural networks, deep learning as well as on the geometry and visual image processing, like the type of computer vision that we do that are making so much progress that guaranteed a couple of years from now, the devices will have the understanding off the world like humans do. And we'LL be able to make decisions even better than humans do because they don't got there. They don't get tired. They don't need coffee. S o. B. Guaranteed. More safe than any human knowledge. It's Sunday, and you probably hate the term robo investing, right? But but it sounds like you're doing that form of machine investing for and with hedge funds is that isn't fair. And is your background finance data science or both? >> Both. Actually, I studied engineering, but I started working as a trader of infidelities trading company in Chicago. On that I started with them. We were very old school discretionary, you know, a couple of very senior guys who were making everything based on their past experience and that contusion about the market. On my time with them, he started shifting from this manual human process driven trading to something that was more systematic, inconsistent again. That's where the whole idea >> for all >> Kwan came from. I saw firsthand the benefits that making your trading more data driven more model and algorithms driven could have >> unique. You probably hate this trump to your unicorn, but I'm guessing you guys have no it shop is You're right. It is in the cloud. Is that writer OK, >> it is, you know, straight onto the cloud todo in that started. You didn't exist before. >> Yeah, yeah, Waylon Street in the club. >> And you got a team of developers. They program infrastructure. Totally. >> Yeah. We have a team off for developers and the city of totally tech team of five based out of India. We have a developed sky who basically runs everything for us. Our website, Our platform where the data scientist party prision where our clients see the mortals where client fronts for data to us and where our machine learning computations run >> right three t mapping used to buy a box the Unix box, maybe get a database mother software. Yeah, so we're in scale were thought of as well, right? So when we what you need is the process. If you want to create a three d map off even a city but we have to do is run eight hundred GPS in parallel, blasting through imagery data. Now, this is impossible. If we as a starter had to buy a GPU wreck right from the bat, we would have been bankrupt even before we started. So, like being able to spin up GPU servers in the cloud and also killing them after we're done with them say there's a lot of money but also provides so much flexibility for us to do prototyping and two on DH to make everything affordable and east implement with very, very small team of very talented system. >> It's a real kind of pick and mix approach. Just what kind of services do I need to get off the shelf? And then it happened to you? >> I think one of the great things that a US has been able to do infrastructure used to be a very dusty and tangled industry on one of the beauties that Davy was able to do is actually product eyes, product, eyes, infrastructure. So you can now actually pick and choose different products from the idea of a library and put them together, connect them, tied him up very, very cleanly. With a very small team, I create something that is just accedes. Any expectations from a start of twenty years ago. So why, why eight of us? A lot of other clouds out there who has got a good cloud. Microsoft has a big cloud. Why did you guys migrate or moved to eight of us not moved to start with a W s. How was that decision made? >> I mean, we started with eight of us because we were gonna start a program a date afterwards. But then we just really liked the support that we got a way. We had access to someone twenty four seven. We had a dedicated person who was helping us on DH. We were just starting out. So the first time interacting with a cloud infrastructure, uh, the support was greater than the pricing will go great. For a start, it would have to say that's just a start of ur cost sensitive and the ability to turn on on and off services as and when we need them. I think that was fantastic. >> Does it concern you that we've heard a lot about how the cost of services has come down quite a lot? There's a lot of Costco going, but in the future, if you're overly reliant on your provider, can that put you into a corner? >> I mean, you get into troubles if your spotify skill, but as a start of the environment that ate us created for startups to flourish, is incredible. The amount of I think you have the same, like we receive a huge amount of credits just for starting. So if you raise a seed round of money which is, let's say, one million U. S. Dollars. US puts one hundred thousand worth of credit. On top of that, that's ten percent extra funding for free provided. Wait. Oh, yes. Furthermore, they have this great architects. The help you out with all the questions that you might have if this is the first time that you are actually designing a whole our detector around a data processing apartment or an FBI or a Web platform? Very, very supportive. What was that? What's the one thing a ws would could do to make your life easier? If you're sitting here with Andy Jassy, what would you tell him? >> I mean, it's already fantastic. It's made our life so much easier. I really don't think of anything that could have gone better. >> Really? Nothing. I mean, you had reduced the cost even way prices. >> Okay. Well, thank you so much for talking to us about your experiences here on the Cube. Who? Heiner. Thank you. Co founder of Escape. And also it'LL really, Jane, it's really be fascinating to hear how you've grown your businesses. So I really appreciate you joining us here with me. Damayanti here at eight Ws summits in London

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to You by Cisco >> Welcome back to the Cube. Elisa Martin with Set Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen at the Computer History Museum, but here all day, talking with some really great innovative folks excited to welcome to the Cube. Marty Jane, senior director of this Cisco Global Partnership and Video. Marty, It's great to have you here. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> So I always love talking about partnerships Where what Day One of Dev. Net. Tomorrow's day to. There's been a lot of a lot of community spirit is here, so I just kind of in the spirit of partnerships, lot of collaboration that community is is really strong. Uh, before we get into kind of the details of this Cisco in video partnership first kind of thing, I wonder is all right. This is the developer community. Why the developer community within video? >> That's a great question. So if you think about way, make GP use, which is a piece of silicon graphics processing unit, and it is really only a piece of silicon until a developer comes along and develops a cool app on it. So if you think about how we go to market our large conferences called GTC, it's really developer. Focus. We have a little over a million developers in our ecosystem, and I find it very synergistic with Cisco. If you think about Suzy, we's vision. I think it's the same idea. You look at over half a million developers in their ecosystem and they want to develop collapse, and that's how your platform becomes relevant. So if you think of all the modern innovation that's coming from developers, so these are the folks that we should be talking to on a daily basis. I see a lot of commonality, a lot of synergies. In fact, we had Sisko definite come over to our conference GTC, and they they appeal to our developers. And now we're here talking to their developers and also developing some joint platforms which the the folks can use for. Like I said, the more modern *** with all the new data that's coming, whether the coyote with a machine learning automotive, smart cities, you name it, we need to be able to provide the platform to the developers >> and a number of those topics came up today, even during the keynote, Smart cities being able to utilize and accelerate work leads with a I and machine learning. They gave some great examples during the keynote of how developers can build networks. They give this cool example of I think it right off the hills of Coachella of designing a secure network for an indoor concert, designing it for an outdoor festival, Coachella and then designing it for a massive stadium like a big football game like the Super Bowl, for example. And they showed it that higher end. They showed how they're using machine, learning to zoom in on. For example, they had this little red box and you see people and what's actually in there than the machines detected was a fight and in real time, analysing this data and thence, dispatching the appropriate security to come and obviously probably take the drinks out of their hands first. But it was a really interesting, great real world example. So you guys have been partners a long time. Our you've been actually working at various companies with Cisco for a long time, but I think of Cisco and video coming together. How are you great? Something to accelerate these? Aye. Aye. And machine weren't were machine learning workloads that we're starting to see in every industry. >> You bet. Great question. So let me first comment on what you said about smart cities. I like to think of it as smart and safe cities. So actually, the first set of application will be around public safety. What the example you were giving his spot on? If you have large crowds gathering, it makes sense for us to be able to look at those clouds. Crowds? We call it intelligent video analytics or idea. In fact, we have a platform here. The Sisko i R eleven o one with a GPU added to it. So now I can wash the crowds. And if there's a fight breaking out or somebody's carrying in a weapon, you want to know somebody walks in carrying a backpack and drops it and moves on. You want to know one? Inform somebody. So what is happening is way of these millions and millions of bites of video data, >> and >> that data is not being really used today. So what we're doing is saying you know what? Let's find those pieces of intelligence and the video data and do something with it. And public safety is absolutely the highest priority. So smartest, safe city makes a lot of sense. So what we're doing is we're going to market with partners at Cisco. So what we're doing is we're saying Okay, let's design these GPS into the servers, which are connected to cameras and think about how many cameras are deployed today, probably a billion. And a lot of the video data can now be used for public safety purposes, and we basically go out and talk to large companies. We talked to governments. We talked to cities along with Sisko to go even open their eyes to what is possible today. >> Right? Because of that data is dark for so long, they don't know what they don't know. >> While most cases, what happens is you record four days of video and until something happens, nobody goes back and takes a look at it. But now we have the ability to look at the real time and cities and government's desire that very much so, >> sir example, that's such a relevant topic. I mean, they know. There's also the issue of privacy. But to your point about not just a smart city but a smart, safe city. I like that. I think it's absolutely imperative. How do you have this conversations with cities with governments about All right, this is what we want. Do we want to actually apply machine learning? So the machines are taught What that line is with privacy with those boundaries are so that a person, I'd say a lay person not in technology. Maybe is a city government official who doesn't understand the technology or need Teo will go. I get it. >> Yes. So our conversations are really about what we call you cases. So think of enterprise. A good use case would be. In fact, we work with Cisco on developing use case. You know, you always badge in into an enterprise. You have your badge, you walk in. But you also have some cases. People follow you, following you in what stops you from following me into a building. And usually people are too polite to say no, you can walk in, but we've >> all had the video training or read the manual. We know we're not >> we're not supposed to bite, but >> then you're like, I >> don't just cultural, exactly. We just can't you know that. So now we have the ability. So we trained a in a network to say, Look, if Marty's badging in, only he's allowed to walk in. And if there's a second person walks in, I want to take put Little Red Square on that face and inform security that we have had more than one person walking. So these are some of the ways. So we talk about use cases. This is one use case crowd behavior. Analytics is another use case. You know, people were walking in the backpack, dropping it. Other use case would be something like Bar to Bart loses millions of dollars year because people jumped the turnstiles and Bart didn't really have a good way of of monitoring, measuring the losses until we put a camera and captured the number of people that were jumping. The turnstiles are going in through the handicap access, okay? They were losing ten times the dollar value of what we had thought. Wow. So this is how we start the conversation with use cases, you know? And what would you like to do? Being able to count the number of cars in intersection begin with counter number of pedestrians, so you could do traffic management better. That's the language we would use with cities and governments. And then we go deeper as you go through the implementation process. >> Well, that makes perfect sense going in the use case route, because you can clearly see in that example that you mentioned with Bart a massive business outcome and an opportunity to regain a tremendous amount of resource is that they could redeploy for whether it it's new trains, new trucks, etcetera than them, not realizing we're losing how much money. I think anybody when you could put the useless in that context of this is what you can expect as an outcome. They get it >> Absolutely. That's the really the only way to start the conversation than starting from bits and bytes. And this is the This is usually the case across industries. If you think about retail, for example, you know you go to a safe way to start talking about GPS and servers. That's not the great way to start, but they do have issues with shoplifting, for example. So how do you know a person is walking in, you know, through the checkout. And they have one item. Then there's a small item right here and they walk out with this. How do you monitor that? So now you can do that with the right kind of cameras that can capture. Look there Two items, not one. How do you know where shop are stopping Which aisle is the most popular? I'Ll How do you know that? Well, now you can have cameras would say, Look, we have red zones and Green Zone so you could do those kinds of things with modern ways of doing. I >> so interesting because it's so. I mean, the examples that you gave are so disparate, but yet they make so much sense was how how you're describing it rather than going into, you know, a grocery store in talking about GPS, which they might fall over with their eyes. Doing this >> right. >> You're actually putting in the context of a real world problem they've been experiencing since the beginning of time. Don't you understand? Only goodness and this is how we can use technology. It's the safe way becomes a technology company. They don't know it. What actually started packing their bottom line. >> That's right, And so even now, you know. So I have to take that and you extend that into How do you go to market? And it's something you wanted Teo Touch on. How do you go to market with Cisco's? How does ingredients is? Could do it together, right? So think of Cisco's sales teams who are talking to all these customers every day where their retailers, financial services, federal government, health care, you name it. So what we've done is we basically sort of taking all these industries and created the top three or four use cases we know are relevant to that industry, either for safety or for saving money's. For variety of their operational reason, we have narrowed it down to three or four five use cases and each of those target industries. So what we do now with Cisco teams that we would bring them into our facility or go to them and really talkto all those use cases and train them on Hey, look, this is what we do jointly, and that makes the conversation much easier. Then they will go and present to the customer and what's the customer gets an idea far this all possible. Now that starts a deeper level technology and server and GPU engagement. So this is one way we go up and talk to different customers. What's the school's >> second? About a bit. Marcus. Cisco is so enormous, they have a billion different. I'm slightly exaggerating products with but a lot of different technologies that form many different solutions. So I imagine your Cisco expertise over many years of working with Cisco's a partner for other companies. How do you once you get to that deeper level conversation, how do you bring this different groups within Cisco together? So that that solution conversation is one that really aligns to that use case and the customer doesn't get it? >> Yeah, that's a difficult question to answer. That's like, you know your work. It's just cause a large company. But I think I also think they're also very cells driven, and that's what drives the different groups to come together. In fact, some people called me the Connector because I've been working. Cisco's so long. I know people and definite I know people in sales. I know people in the server. BU, in fact, if you think about the The platform was talking about the i r eleven o one with the jets and GPU that came as a result. I was talking to the i o t bu result talking to Dev net our situation the definite he said. You know what? This is cool are gonna do this. Then we take that to the IOC Guys is Oh, this is cool. We can take that. Put it in this platform, and then I'm next. Actually, next week I'm talking to a sale. Seaman Cisco. They cover utilities. And this platform was profit for utilities. Even think about fire monitoring in a forest. How do you do, boy thousand? The people to just watch what happens. We can take a platform like that now and really deploy it in hundreds of places which could monitor fires or the starting off a fire. But yes, bringing them together. It is no easy task. It's fun >> where you are smiling. I like that. Marty the connector. Jane, thank you >> so much for >> joining me on the kid this afternoon. Fun conversation. I enjoyed it. >> Ofcourse. Thank you. Likewise. Thank >> you, Lisa Martin for the Cube. you're watching us live, Francisco Definite. Create twenty nineteen. This is the end of day one. Stick around, John. Failure on I will be back tomorrow to cover day too. Thanks for watching.

>> From Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. This is a huge event. Not just 20,000 people here but there's about a million people SAP SAS are going to engage with their life and on-demand video experiences for Sapphire, amazing. We are excited to welcome for the first time to theCUBE Jinesh Jain the VP of Global Delivery at CenturyLink. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you guys for having me here. >> The theme in this event is really around what SAP is doing to enable the intelligent enterprise. This is really beyond digital transformation where customers have to have a customer centric view. It's about infusing and embedding emerging and advanced technologies, AI machine learning into business processes. How is CenturyLink helping customers on that transformation journey? >> I think that's a great question. Let me give you a little bit of background behind what CenturyLink is all about because this is all SAP here in this event right? CenturyLink is all about connecting customers in the in the digital world. And we recently acquired Level 3, and with that Level 3 acquisition we became now, we provide trusted connections to all the connected world, you know all the network world. So you can imagine in a digital transformation you need a very strong foundation when it comes to connectivity, network, infrastructure and security behind that and that's what CenturyLink does. That's our core business and with that journey as we started the journey, we have 60 plus datacenters as part of CenturyLink core strategic assets. We have around 500K miles of fiber optics, which is one of the, we are the second largest in the United States when it comes to network connectivity and redundancy across. And in 60 plus countries, I think all this strategic assets mix provides us very strong foundation for any customers who is embarking this digital journey. It reminds me of one of those recent survey done by McKinsey Global Institute, where they said that they figured out that digitization index for Europe was 12% and for North America was little better around 18%. But look at the gap, how much of gap is there in terms of exploring the full potential of digitization. So I think our journey in terms of giving the digital transformation starts from our strong foundation of our strategic assets of data centers network and security, along with that as you mentioned about the intelligent enterprise, we have a very strong practice in terms of not just descriptive analytics, but we do prescriptive analytics. We do machine learning. We have IOT and we do big data analysis as well. So all these things combined together provides a complete end-to-end solution. And of course SAP plays a big play here and we can talk about that in terms of what we do on the SAP side as well. >> So let's add some more color to that. When I think of CenturyLink, I think about the 60 data centers. Even when I think about SAP what I normally consider CenturyLink's role traditionally in a SAP relationship is that you know what CenturyLink to get me better either closer to my customers so that data injection can happen faster with lower latency. When I think of CenturyLink, I think of lower latency to hyper scale cloud providers so that if I have hold on applications I can get closer to my core SAP data, but what I'm hearing is that CenturyLink has greater SAP capability outside of that. Tell us about the SAP practice at CenturyLink. >> I'm glad you asked that because everybody is wondering about CenturyLink and SAP relationship. In fact let me go back in time here. Six years, few years back I would say six, five years back, CenturyLink acquired Cognilytics. Cognilytics was all about deep HANA expertise, deep analytics and all about BI strategy. And then recently a couple of years back, they acquired SEAL Consulting. So these two organizations which CenturyLink acquired, that gave us deep roots into SAP ecosystem in terms of what CenturyLink and SAP can work together. So now let's look at Cognilytics. They were all about HANA, core HANA expertise. They co-innovated with SAP in terms of that HANA analytics. They came out with number of used cases symptoms of predictive science and then when they acquired SEAL Consulting, it was all about yes for HANA transformation, which is absolutely the theme across this Sapphire and for all the SAP customers globally. From SEAL perspective, which is now of course part of CenturyLink, but now we can provide infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, OSDB as a service, which is already part of CenturyLink. Now with SEAL and Cognilytics coming into play, we are end-to-end sharp in terms of SAP strategy, digital transformation strategy, using SAP tools and products, implementation upgrades, application management services, and continual improvement as part of the digital transformation every customer is looking for. I think that's how we are using the strategic assets of CenturyLink as part of with the SAP expertise coming into play. >> So every customer, digital transformation to any business is just, it's you got to do it right or you will lose relevance and go out of business and we've seen a lot of incumbent retailers for example go away because they haven't been able to transform digitally. I read a stat recently that said 70% of siloed digital transformation projects fail. So how does CenturyLink and your expertise with SAP as for with HANA, how do you help customers be successful? Do you come in and see these siloed projects that you know maybe shadow IT had evolved and helped them to break down those silos, so that they can actually facilitate what it is that they need which is that that 360-degree view of their customers. What they want, when they want it, to be able to predict what they're gonna want next. How do you help break down those silos? >> Right, now I think is a known problem, known challenge across all of the customers who are embarking this journey. I'll tell you what. I'll give you a simple, the way we work, our digital strategy is very much aligned with our customer's business and IT goals. So what we do first and foremost is we want to align ourselves with what the business and IT goals are. Let's double click on that right. So if I look at the business goals, so most of the customers today, A, they want to make sure they want to protect the revenue stream right? B, they want to make sure they have real-time position, no latency in terms of their business decision making. And C, they want to make sure that they go into the new markets. They just can't stay silent to same market there. Plus know the unfamiliar competition, which comes up many times. So that's the business aspect of the goals. We want to look at that and make sure that we align our implementation, our strategy to those business goals. If you look at IT side of that, and I tell you what, these are the things which are being missed out with most of the partners in this ecosystem. If I look at the IT side of it, first and foremost we want to make sure that IT think goals are, it's all about innovation. They want to be innovative. They want to have minimal shelf wear so that they can innovate all the time. They want to evolve the resources so they are aligned with the lines of business all the way and that way everybody has a career path, and they are evolving to the market needs. And then lastly it's all about making sure that all the mundane tasks you know if I look at they need to focus on core competency and offload all the routine tasks. And we very much aligned as part of the journey to those business and IT goals. So if you look at our mission, we won't just look at our mission in terms of overall CenturyLink for SAP customers. We want to provide them a private managed secured cloud, which is scalable, which can be commissioned in a week's time with full automation, completely secure, data protected and an uptime of 99.99% and take care of all the lights on kind of routine tasks, so they can focus on their main core competency about business decision, new business, business process design and things like that which are being lagging behind. So that's our key theme in terms of how we drive all the SAP information. >> There's a lot of complexity behind getting this much value out of any platform, whether it's complexity at the data analytics layer, whether it's the networking that needs to be done, the design and deployment of NetApp stack. We're in a conference where all the hyper scalers are here. >> Yes. >> The company smaller than CenturyLink provides larger than CenturyLink. How is CenturyLink uniquely positioned to basically go to whether it's a Fortune 100 customer or someone down level to basically add value where these other providers potentially will trouble at. >> Alright, no I think it's very true, we need to be nimble. I mean you know we can be a big ship, but should not take time to turn. And I completely agree with that. I think what we do is I'll tell you, one of the unique position we have in this market space is you know we can proudly say that we are, we don't need to go to any third party when it comes to data center locations. We have our own 500k lines of fiberoptics. So network is where we provide, we can provide minimal latency from network perspective. We are all over the, we are 60 plus countries. We are into 350 metros. We can do a metro tier. I think if you look at our network, our hosting capabilities our infrastructure capabilities, we are uniquely positioned compared what the customers need today as a one-stop shop or a one hand to shake to make things happen for them. At the same time, we are very nimble for many customers because that's how CenturyLink has grown up. They acquired us, and we were 800 people company. So was other acquisition as well. We can very easily adapt, innovate, comprehend and adapt to the needs of the customers based on our core competency, our solutions which are available, and strategy which is very much fitting most of our customers in the retail space, in CPG space, in manufacturing space, in healthcare, and in life sciences. We have some designated industry solutions as well, which can help us drive those values quicker. At the same time measurable. >> Being nimble I think of you know being adaptive and being flexible but adaptive struck a big, actually Hasso Plattner this morning in his keynote talked about SAP being adaptive in the context, I think he was talking about intelligence. And everybody wants to paint intelligence all over everything and they talked about SAP being adaptive. That kind of aligns with something I read recently that Bill McDermott said, which is where SAP was the last to accept the status quo. I think he was talking about in relation to CRM specifically but the first to change it. So with that spirit of being nimble, being adaptive how are you helping customers adapt to needing to bring on you know edge core millions of devices or customers that go you know what I want to be able to use advanced technologies like AI to make you know my manufacturing smarter or to be able start connecting my supply chain with demand chain? How are you harnessing that, your adaptability to meet their needs on some of those emerging trends? >> Absolutely, this can be very overwhelming and if you really look at what everybody's talking about, where do you start with and I think we have been doing this for last six years, even before the keynote announcement to be honest to you guys. We have documented 60 to 70 used cases in this case. So what we do is when we approach a customer or a prospect, we come out with some specific used case for their line of business. It can be in a marketing campaign. It can be in a supply chain. It can be in financials. It can be in insurance. So depending on what the needs are, we have those documented used cases, so what we do is for each of these used cases, we break it down in terms of what problem are we gonna to solve, what is the problem definition. And for that problem definition, what's my used case, how do I solve this, what are the alternatives, and how do I reach to my measurable value of that solution. And then we have built-in data models ready to go for each of these used cases behind the scene. So that helps us build something which is nimble, because the data is available. We just need to customize to 20% of what the customer needs are, and then provide that value right away. And once that pilot goes live for a small segment of user community, then we expand that to the larger audience to see the value of whether this is a predictive science machine learning or just pure KPI driven analytics. So we do that and then we expand that. This is what we have done with number of Fortune 500 companies and we're really proud of what we do in terms of being big, but being nimble. >> So speaking of being big, talk about customer engagement, not necessarily the actual customer conversations, but how do customers engage with CenturyLink. One of the simple things that you look at the hyperscalers, I can go to the website, and when I have a question, I can type it in and I'll get a script that answers me in an hour or so. What is the engagement model for interacting with CenturyLink for new customers? >> I think, actually let me go back on this one. I was reading a survey in a CIO magazine. Actually this is a recent survey last year it was, that around thousand-plus CIO's who were interviewed and most of the CIO's, all the CIO's had SAP systems in their companies. And 40% of them said they want to move from on-premise to cloud. Right there that's our engagement strategy there. That we come as a one-stop shop for all these customers who are planning to move from on-premise to cloud. Why? Because number one, they want to reduce their CAPEX, upfront reduction in your cost. They want to make sure that their steady-state cost for keeping the lights on is bare minimal. So whatever budget is left out they can focus more on innovation. We take the sliver line of keeping the lights on and moving them from on-premise to cloud as part of our engagement strategy to start with number one. As we do that, they realize, customer realize that we are not just hosting partners. We just don't provide scalable private managed security cloud for our customers, but we can also do SAP implementation end-to-end, which is whether this is ECC upgrade to S/4HANA or this is a digital strategy for S/4HANA going forward, or just HANA as a pure analytics tool. Or the different SAP suite of products, whether this is Hybris, whether this is Ariba or other suite of products which are very much in a SAS model aspect of SAP, we support that end to end. Our support model is based out of the United States. We have offshore centers in India. So globally follow the same kind of approach. We do this between our number of you know units here in US and in India. That's our engagement strategy across. >> So last question is we're now in our booth here at SAPPHIRE NOW. Tell us about what CenturyLink, NetApp, SAP are doing within the context of automation. >> Wonderful yeah great. That's important actually because I think if you really look at the pace of what customer needs today, the pace is changing so fast. In a typical SAP landscape, you want to commission a system, a development system or a production system within weeks or within days. Gone are other days where you need two months and three months. I mean you miss the business goals for doing all these things. So what we have done is we want to get into the automation mode, and we are heavily investing in that part with help of Cisco, UCSKS. NetApp plays a very big role here in terms of providing their data-driven strategy, their hyper-converged infrastructure as part of the storage system and working with another partner Vnomic to make sure that entire, all these gears behind the scene have a very good orchestration layer to automate the whole process of building the infrastructure, building the application, building all the services and handing it over to our, to the customer team for them to start the journey. So that whole cycle can be reduced by the automation. So I would say NetApp plays a big role there, no doubt about that because most of the IT organizations are data driven today. The SAP workloads are changing and you can't wait for those change manually to be operated. So these are all application driven workloads which changes you know, which can adapt to all these changing workloads and this is where we are going right now in terms of automation. >> Well thanks so much Jinesh for stopping by. I wish we had more time but talking to us about what CenturyLink is doing with SAP, with NetApp for example to help customers on this arduous digital transformation journey. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much I mean this is great, thank you, enjoy rest of the day. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(click) >> I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at Google for the sixth annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Award Event and we're very excited to be joined by one of the award winners, Neha Jain, Engineering Manager at LinkedIn. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi, thank you, Lisa. >> And, second of all, congratulations on the award. We'll talk about that in a second, but one of the things that I found very inspiring when I was doing some research about you is how you describe yourself on LinkedIn. A lot of us use LinkedIn, of course. I love that you said that you love to work on technology that empowers users and uplifts the society. What a beautiful statement. >> Thank you so much. >> Tell me a little bit more about what you mean about that. >> Growing up, I always wanted to be in a space where I was doing something for the community. A little bit about myself is I'm an only child and my father passed away when I was barely a year old. So my mom, who's also disabled, raised me literally single-handedly and we had a lot of help on the way. So the thing that always kept me going and inspired is if I could do it, then anyone can. And I have to make that happen, and that is an obligation or a responsibility that I have toward the world. That's basically what I did. Initially I wanted to become a doctor and help the patients get the best of their health but I couldn't deal with blood. >> That's kind of a key. That was a good decision. >> I was really interested in math as a child, so I was like, "Yeah, let's try this engineering thing. "It also sounds pretty fun." And then that's how I started in the engineering field. Initially I joined a company directly from college, but the work didn't inspire me as much. And then I found out about SlideShare. It was a company in the user-generated space, user-generated content space, and they had a female CEO and I was like, "Oh my God, this is just perfect, "and I have to get there." So I joined SlideShare, and six months later it got acquired by LinkedIn. Interesting turn of events. And then now at LinkedIn, we are in the process of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And that's a mission I can live for. That's something that inspires me every single day and gets me up in the morning, gets me to work, where we are trying to get the right talent matched with the right job, get the companies the right hire. That's very inspiring work to do. >> As an, and I would say, inspiring female in technology, what are some of the things that once you finished your education, you said your first job, you realized, "This isn't quite what I want." But you have the drive, it sounds like probably innately for you that, "I want something else." You kind of knew what you were looking for. Or maybe you knew, "I know when I get there." >> Yeah, you could say that. It's something that, ah, what I was doing was interesting work, but in terms of impact, it wasn't very clear. So I'm sort of a person who's driven more by results, by metrics or something like that. There should be something tangible that's coming out of it, that I can measure. >> Right, yes, validating, right? >> So then I was like, at that time, internet was taking off, and it was all very -- People were all over the place and there were so many things getting shared. And then Facebook came around and then there was Arab Spring and so many other things that were happening. People were taking ownership of their own lives and their own values. I thought that something in the internet space would be an interesting place to be where you could make the change and empower people, empower your users. And I wasn't willing to move out of India at that point, so it was like, "Let's just join SlideShare." I'd been using SlideShare when I was in college doing researches and working for Google Summer of Code. So then I saw that they had a banner that they were hiring, and I'm like, "Okay, yeah, let's just interview for them." >> And here you are. Within the last couple of minutes here, I want to talk about the Top Women in Cloud Award that you're being honored with tonight. And also something that I thought was really, really honest that you wrote on LinkedIn was your experience with imposter syndrome, which I've had for many years and didn't even know what it was until I read about it. And I think that's so, it's such a strong message, knowing that you've had that, but also seeing how accomplished you are, what does this CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Award mean to you? >> That's a very good question. That's something that I'd been asking myself as well when I first got nominated for it. So my friend, who is the co-founder of Haliburton School, Silmar, he nominated me for the award. I got the email and I was very excited that okay, this is really interesting. How could I become this person? And then I read the application form. There were five questions and I'm like, "I'm not good enough. "I'll not be selected. "I'll just spend a lot of time filling out "this application form, and it will all be futile." So I thought, "Let's just not do it." But then Silmar, he just didn't nominate me for the award, he pushed me to apply, to fill out the application. >> Because he knew how accomplished you were. >> And I am so grateful to him for that. He started a Google Doc where he copied all the questions, and he started listing all the things that I'd done. >> That's fantastic, Neha. >> He is the kind of mentor or the kind of friend, the kind of force that I guess if all the females and all the people had, the world would be a different place. So that's the kind of inspiration, the kind of support that you want from people. >> Absolutely. >> Then I was talking to my husband and my husband was like, he's a very logical person, he wouldn't give you direct prescriptions that, "Okay, no, you should do it, "you should do that," or this or that. He would ask you questions and then make you decide what you want to do, but in those questions will steer you in the direction. >> Right. >> Which is very clever of him. Very few people have the kind of smartness to do that where you don't even realize that you are being pushed into some of the things. >> It sounds like he helps you think through, and you realize, "I have accomplished a lot. "I am deserving of this award." And here you are, being honored tonight. >> Yeah, so it's like, maybe that's not what I thought. What I thought is that there are things, and I should probably apply for it and not wait, not give up because of the result. So that's something that I've also learned in my life. My mom always tells me, "Don't bind yourself to the result. "Just give your best shot. "That's all which is in your control, "so just do that." And that's basically also what my husband also ended up pointing out to me. So then I was like, "Okay, fine, I'll apply." And it was basically like just three days before the application deadline. So I filled out the application form, sent it out to the LinkedIn's comps team for review, my manager reviewed the entire work-related stuff, and I'm so grateful that they were able to do the review process in time so that I could apply right before the deadline. I don't know what the CloudNOW award will mean for me, and I hope that we are able to drive real change in the tech field and bring more women and more diversity and inclusion and belonging in the community. So today, Vint Cerf was the keynote speaker. And he was saying that when he joined the tech industry there were 50 percent women, and there were women who were programming. And if you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, >> Oh, yes. >> There were women who figured out how to program. >> A very long time ago. >> Yeah, a long time ago. And we've had people like Grace Hopper and all these other women leaders. And now just 20 years later, you would think the situation would get better, but it has actually gotten worse. >> Right. >> So why is it? The thing that falls on us as a responsibility is to figure out why would we change direction for the worse. And, people have gotten smarter, not lesser intelligent, right? So why would women not opt into computer science and give up? There is something that we aren't doing right. And I think a lot of companies have started asking the right question. Like in LinkedIn, we have the diversity, inclusion and belonging initiative. And we try to make these differences in real time. When I joined LinkedIn, when I moved to the United States, I couldn't recognize people because of the variety of facial structures. And I had a lot of difficulty. I had always grown up seeing Indian faces. And I could easy tell that you were Calcutta or you're from Bangalore. And I could tell it from their faces. But that wasn't something here. And I would always confuse people, and that bothered me a lot. But at LinkedIn, all the things that we had, all the initiatives that we had, the culture and the values, they help me feel belonged. And not a single day has passed where I don't feel that I am not the right person for this job. >> You're making a contribution. >> Yeah. >> Well, congratulations Neha on the award. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for stopping by, and I think you're quite inspirational. >> Thank you so much. >> And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at Google. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a Cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. And we're going to be digging into P4, which is, the programming protocol independent packet processors. And to help me with that, first time guest on the program, Mario Baldi, he is a distinguished technologist with Pensando. Mario, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting. >> Alright, so Mario, you have you have a very, you know, robust technical career, lot of patents, you've worked on, you know, many technologies, you know, deep in the networking and developer world, but give our audience a little bit of your background and what brought you to Pensando. >> Yeah, yes, absolutely. So I started my my professional life in academia, actually, I worked for many years in academia, about 15 years exclusively in academia, and I was focusing both my teaching in research on computer networking. And then I also worked in a number of startups and established companies, in the last about eight years almost exclusively in the industry. And before joining Pensando, I worked for a couple of years at Cisco on a P4 programmable switch and that's where I got in touch with P4 actually. For the occasion I wore a T shirt of one of the P4 workshops. Which reminds me a bit of those people when you ask them, whether they do any sports, they tell you they have a membership at the gym. So I don't just have membership, I didn't just show up at the workshop. I've really been involved in the community and so when I learned what pensando was doing, I immediately got very excited that the ASIC that Pensando has developed these is really extremely powerful and flexible because it's fully programmable, partly programmable, with P4 partly programmable differently. And Pensando is starting to deploy these ASIC at the edge and Haas. And I think such a powerful and flexible device, at the edge of the network really opens incredible opportunities to, on the one hand implement what we have been doing in a different way, on the other hand, implement completely different solution. So, you know, I've been working most of my career in innovation, and when when I saw these, I immediately got very excited and I realized that Pensando was really the right place for me to be. >> Excellent. Yeah, interesting, you know, many people in the industry, they talk about innovation coming out of the universities, you know, Stanford often gets mentioned, but the university that you, you know, attended and also were associate professor at in Italy, a lot of the networking team, your MPLS, you know, team at Pensando, many of them came from them. Silvano guy, you know, written many books, they're, you know, very storied career in that environment. P4, maybe step back for a second, you know, you're you're deep in this group, help us understand what that is, how long it's been around, you know, and who participates in it with P4? >> Yeah, yeah. So as you were saying before, one of the few P4 from whom I've heard saying it, because everyone calls it P4 and nobody says what it really means. So programming protocol, independent packet processor. So it's a programming language for packet processors. And it's protocol independent. So it doesn't start from assuming that we want to use certain protocols. So P4 first of all allows you to specify what packets look like. So what the headers look like, and how they can be parsed. And secondly, because P4 is specifically designed for packet processing, and it's based on the idea that you want to look up values in tables. So it allows you to define tables, in keys that are being used to look up those tables and find an entry in the table. And when you find an entry, that entry contains an action and parameters to be used for that action. So the idea is that the package descriptions that you have in the program, define how the package should be processed. Header fields should be parsed, values extracted from them, and those values are being used as keys to look up into tables. And when the appropriate entry in the table is found, an action is executed and that action is going to modify those header fields, and these happens a number of times, the program specifies a sequence of tables that are being looked up, header fields being modified. In the end, those modified header fields are used to construct new packets that are being sent out of the device. So this is the basic idea of a P4 program. You specify a bunch of tables that are being looked up using values extracted from packets. So this is very powerful for a number of reasons. So first of all, its input, which is always good as we know, especially in networking, and then it maps very well on what we need to do, when we do packet processing. So writing a packet processing program, is relatively easy and fast. Could be difficult to write a generic programming in P4, you could not, but the packet processing program, it's easy to write. And last but not least, P4 really maps well on hardware that was designed specifically to process packet. What we call domain specific processes, right. And those processes are, in fact designed to quickly look up tables that might have decamping side, they might have processes that are specialized in performing, in building keys and performing table lookup, and modifying those header fields. So when you have those processors that are usually organized in pipelines to achieve a good throughput, then you can very efficiently take a P4 program and compile it to execute it very high speed on those processors. And this way, you get the same performance of a fixed function ASIC, but it's fully programmable, nothing is fixed. Which means that you can develop your features much faster, you can add features and fix bugs, you know, with a very short cycle, not with a four or five year cycle of baking a new ASIC. And this is extremely powerful. This is the strong value proposition of P4. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that that resonates Mario, you know, I used to do presentations about the networking industry and you would draw timelines out there in decades. Because from the standard to get deployed for, you know, the the hardware to get baked, the customers to do the adoption, things take a really long time. You brought up, you know, edge computing, obviously, you know, we are, you know, it is really exciting, but it is changing really fast, and there's a lot of different, you know, capabilities out there. So if you could help us, you know, connect the dots between what P4 does and what the customers need. You know, we talked about multi-cloud and edge. What is it that you know, P4 in general, and what Pensando is doing with P4 specifically, enables this next generation architecture? >> Yeah, sure. So, Pensando has developed these card, which we call DSC distribute services card, that is built around an ASIC, that has a very very versatile architecture. It's a fully programmable. And it's fully programmable it's various levers, and one of them is in fact P4. Now this card and has a PCIE interface. So it can be installed in horse. And by the way, this is not the only way this powerful as you can be deployed. It's the first way Pensando has decided to use it. And so we have this card, it can be plugged into a host, it has two network interfaces. So it can be used as a network adapter. But in reality, because the card is fully programmable and it has several processors inside, it can be used to implement very sophisticated services. Things that you wouldn't even dream of doing with the typical network adapter, with a typical NIC. So in particular, this card, this ASIC contains a sizable amount of memory. Right now we have two sizes four, an eight gig but we are going to have versions of the card with even larger memory. Then it has some specialized hardware for specific functions like cryptographic functions, compression, computation of CRCs and if sophisticated queueing system with packet buffer with the queuing system to end the packets that have to go out to the interfaces or coming from the interfaces. Then it is several types of processors. It has generic processors, specifically arms, arm processors that can be programmed with general purpose languages. And then a set of processors that are specific for packet processing that are organized in a pipeline. In those, idea to be programmed with P4. We can very easily map a P4 program, on those pipeline of processor. So that's where Pensando is leveraging P4, is the language for programming those processes that allow us to process packets at the line rate of our 200 gigabit interfaces that we have in the card. >> Great. So Mario, what about from a customer viewpoint? Do they need to understand you know, how to program in P4, is this transparent to them? What's the customer interaction with it? >> Oh yeah, not at all. The Pensando platform, Pensando is offering a platform that is a completely turnkey solution. Basically the platform, first of all, the platform has a controller with which the user interacts, the user can configure policies on this controller. So using an intent based paradigm, the user defines policies that the controller is going to push those policies to the cards. So in your data center in your horse, in your data center, you can deploy thousands of those cards. Those cards implement distributed services. Let's say, just to give a very simple example, a distributed stateful firewall implemented on the all of those cards. The user writes a security policy, says this particular application can talk to these other particular application, and then translate it into configuration for those cards. It's transparently deployed on the cards that start in force the policies. So the user can use this system at this very high level. However, if the user has more specific needs, then the system, the platform offers several interfaces and several API's to program the platform through those interfaces. So the one at the highest level, is a REST API to the controller. So if the customer has an orchestrator, they can use that orchestrator to automatically send policies to the controller. Or if a customer already have their own controller, they can interact directly with the DSCs with the cards on the horse, with another API's that's fully open, is based on GRPC. And in this way, they can control the cards directly. If they need something even more specific, if they need a functionality that Pensando doesn't offer on those card, hasn't already ever written software for the cards, then customers can program the card, and the first level at which they can program it is the ARM processors. We have ARM processors, those are running in version of Linux, so customers can program it by writing C-code or Python. But if they have very specific needs, like when they write a software for the ARM processor, they can leverage the P4 code that we have already written for the card for those specialized packet processors. So they can leverage all of the protocols that our P4 program is already supported. And by the way because that's software, they can pick and choose in a Manga library of many different protocols and features we support, and decide to deploy them and then integrate them in their software running on the ARM processor. However, if they want to add their own proprietary protocols, if they want, if they need to execute some functionalities at very high performance, then they that's when they can write P4 code. And even in that case, we are going to make it very simple for them. Because they don't have to write everything from scratch. They don't have to worry about how to process AP packets, how to terminate TCP, we have to solve the P4 code for them. They can focus just on their own feature. And we are going to give them a development environment that allows them to focus on their own little feature and integrate it with the rest of our P4 program. Which by the way, is something that P4 is not designed for. P4 is not designed for having different programmers, write different pieces of the program and put them together. But we have the means to enable this. >> Okay, interesting. So, you know, maybe bring us inside a little bit, you know the P4 community, you're very active in it, when I look online, there's a large language consortium, many of, you know, all the hardware and software companies that I would expect in the networking space are on that list. So what's Pensando's participation in the community? And you were just teasing through, you know, what does P4 do and then what does Pensando, maybe enable, you know, above and beyond what, you know, P4 just does on its own? >> Yeah, so yes Pensando is very much involved in the community. There has been recently an event, online event that substituted the yearly P4 workshop. It was called the P4 expert round-table series. And Pensando had very strong participation. our CTO, Vipin Jain, had the keynote speech. Talking about how P4 can be extended beyond packet processing. P4, we said, has been designed for packet processing, but today, there are many applications that require message processing, which is more sophisticated then. And he gave a speech on how we can go towards that direction. Then we had a talk that was resulting from a submission that was reviewed and accepted on in fact, the architecture of our ASIC, and how it can be used to implement many interesting use cases. And finally, we participated into a panel in which we discussed how to use P4 in mix-ins Martin at the edge of the network. And there we argued with some use cases and example and code, how before it needs to be extended a little bit because NICs have different needs and open up different opportunities rather than switches. Now P4 was never really meant only for switches. But if we looked at what happened, the community has worked mostly on switches. For example it is defined that what is called the PSA, portable switch architecture. And we see that the NICs have an edge devices, have a little bit different requirements. So, one of the things we are doing within the communities working within one of the working groups, is called the architecture work group. And they are working in there to create the definition of a PNA, Portable NIC Architecture. Now, we didn't start this activity, this activity has started already in 2018. But it did slow down significantly, mostly because there wasn't so much of a push. So now Pensando coming on the market with this new architecture really gave new life to this activity. And we are contributing, actively we have proposed a candidate for a new architecture which has been discussed within the community. And, you know, just to give you an example, why do we need a new architecture? Because if you think of the switch, there are several reasons but one, it's very intuitive. If you think of a switch, you have packets coming in, they've been processed and packets go out. As we said before, there's the PMA then sorry, PSA architecture is meant for these kinds of operation. If you think of a NIC, it's a little bit different because yes, you have packets coming in, and yes, if you have multiple interfaces like our card, you might take those packets and send them out. But most likely what you want to do, you want to process those packets, and then not give the packets to the host. Otherwise the host CPU will have to process them again, to pass them again. You want to give some artifacts to the host, some pre-processed information. So you want to, I don't know take those packets for example, assemble many TCP messages and provide a stream of bytes coming out of this TCP connection. Now, these requires a completely different architecture, packets come in, something else goes out. And goes out, for example, through a PCI bus. So, you need the some different architecture and then you will need in the P4 language, different constructs to deal with the fact that you are modifying memory, you are moving data from the card to the host and vice versa. So again, back to your question, how are we involved in the workgroups? We are involved in the architecture workgroup right now to define the PNA, the Portable NIC Architecture. And also, I believe in the future we will be involved in the language group to propose some extensions to the language. >> Excellent. Well, Mario, thank you so much for giving us a deep dive into P4, where it is and you know some of the potential futures for where it will go in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching the Cube. (gentle music)

>> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Technovation's World Pitch 2018. Now here's Sonia Tagare. >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Sonia Tagare, here with theCUBE in Santa Clara, California, covering Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2018, a pitch competition for girls who develop mobile apps in order to create positive change in the world. This week, 12 finalists are competing for their chance to win the gold or silver scholarships. With us right now, we have, from Delhi, India Team Cantavits. So we have Sneha Agarwal, Aditi Jain, Shriya Shukla. Then we have Kritika Sharma, and then we have Shraddha Chugh. With them is their coach, Archana Jain. So congratulations, and welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So your app, Eedo, tell us more about that. >> So Eedo is a late Latin word for electronic waste. our app is all about electronic waste. Electronic waste is electronic equipment which are not in a working condition right now. So what we do is connect people who generate e-waste to people who recycle it in an eco-friendly manner without harming the environment, and health problems. Because, generally people, what they do is, they dispose their e-waste as regular trash, or they just throw it in the dustbins, or maybe sell it to the local scrap dealers which harm the environment illegally, and harms all the human health. So our app is just about connecting e-waste generators and e-waste recyclers, to not harm environment and human health from e-waste dispos&al. >> It sounds like it could have quite the social impact. What inspired you all to create this app? >> Actually, it was one of the potential ideas when we had a brainstorming session to choose an idea for an app for Technovation challenge, but then we read a grave article about e-waste in a national daily, and that motivated us further, and we decided to make an app to solve this issue. >> What inspired you to join Technovation? >> Actually, Technovation always gave us inspiration, and that spirit to just go into the field of information and technology and create cool apps to solve community issues. I think we were, in 2016, we came to know about Technovation, and just reading about an overview of Technovation, it just gave us that spirit and that enthusiasm to participate in this competition. >> And how did you all create your team? How did you meet? >> She's our teacher at school, and she's the one who introduced us all. I, Aditi, and Shraddha, we have been participating for three years in this competition. This is the third year, and Shriya has been participating for two years. This is her second year, and Sneha is the new one, and she introduced us all. She came up, and we went to her once or twice, then she introduced us to this competition. >> Actually, she appointed all the students, that we should come as a team, >> Yeah >> and go into this competition. >> That's wonderful. So how do you think, being a part of this competition, how has it helped you? Has it made you more interested in technology? >> Yeah, definitely. >> Actually, Technovation gave us the opportunity to go in a world of endless opportunities. Actually, Technovation helped us to actually identify ourselves, identify inner talent so that we solve community issues, and create coding, actually go into coding, and that high tech opportunities. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> Just take the microphone. >> You want to add anything? >> I want to add. We also got to learn many things that we'll not learn if we didn't get to know about Technovation. We learned coding, and marketing strategies, which we'll not be able to learn if we not create an app for Technovation. >> Well that's wonderful. >> For me, earlier, coding was a very difficult task. I'm talking three years back, but now, after participating in this event in three years, it has been very easy and it it is very helpful to develop a new career in our life so we can go in the field of software engineering, or many other fields that will be very wonderful for our life. >> That's very inspiring. What are you most excited about this week at the Technovation competition? >> For this week, we're most excited about pitching our app in front of the people so that we can generate awareness about the e-waste problem and our solution to it. >> That's great. Can you tell us a little bit more about how a user can use this app? >> Actually, if I'm a common user, and I have to use my app to dispose of the e-waste, so what will I do? I download the app from the Google Play Store, just post an ad of the e-waste, like, I have a Mumbai phone that's broken now. I just enter the device name, the quantity, and the date and time for collection, and I'll just post the ad. Only that's much work from the generator of e-waste, and then comes in all of recyclers of the e-waste. He'll just see the list of ads which have been posted by the generators of e-waste. He'll click the ad, view it's details, and accept that for pick up. After picking that e-waste from user's doorstep, he'll be given a reasonable amount for the same to the user. Wow, so what advice would you give to other girls who want to join Technovation? >> I want to say that Technovation gave us wings, as I mentioned earlier to fly in a world of endless opportunities, and I would say that if you have that will to do something good for society, technology is the best option you can go for, and you can implement to solve community issues. So, go girls, I would say, go girls in the field of information technology, and do whatever you want. >> Well, that's a great note to end on. Thank you all so much for being here, and congratulations, and good luck on your pitch tomorrow. >> Thank you. >> We are here at Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2018 in Santa Clara, California, stay tuned for more. (electronic music)