(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Um, Jamie Sharath with Liga data, I'm primarily on the delivery side of the house, but I also support our new business teams. I'd like to spend a minute really just kind of telling you about, uh, uh, legal data where basically a Silicon valley startup, uh, started in 2014 and, uh, our lead iron, our executive team, basically where the data officers at Yahoo before this, uh, we provide managed data services and we provide products that are focused on telcos. So we have some experience in non telco industry, but our focus for the last seven years or so is specifically on telco. So again, something over 200 employees, we have a global presence in north America, middle east Africa, Asia, and Europe. And we have folks in all of those places. Uh, I'd like to call your attention to the, uh, the middle really of the screen there. >>So here is where we have done some partnership with Cloudera. So if you look at that, you can see we're in Holland and, uh, Jamaica, and then a lot to throughout Africa as well. Now the data fabric is the product that we're talking about. And the data fabric is basically a big data type of data warehouse with a lot of additional functionality involved. The data fabric is comprised of, uh, some something called flare, which we'll talk about admitted below there, and then the Cloudera data platform underneath. So this is how we're partnering together. We, uh, we, we have this tool and it's, uh, it's functioning and delivering in something over and up. Oops. So flare now, flare is a piece of that. It's legal data IP. The rest is Cloudera. And what flare does is that basically pulls in data and integrates it to an event streaming, uh, platform. >>It, uh, it is the engine behind the data fabric. Uh, it's also a decisioning platform. So in real time, we're able to pull in data. We're able to run analytics on it and we're able to alert our, do whatever is needed in a real-time basis. Of course, a lot of clients at this point are still sending data in batch. So it handles that as well, but we call that a cut off picture Sanchez. Now Sacho is a very interesting app. It's an AI analytics app for executives. What it is is it runs on your mobile phone. It ties into your data. Now this could be the data fabric, but it couldn't be a standalone product. And basically it allows you to ask, you know, human type questions to say, how are my gross ads last week? How are they comparing against same time last week before that? >>And even the same time 60 days ago. So as an executive or as an analyst, I can pull it up and I can look at it instantly in a meeting or anywhere else without having to think about queries or anything like that. So that's pretty much for us legal data. Now, it really does set the context of where we are. So this is a traditional telco environment. So you see the systems of record and you see the cloud, you see OSS and BSS day. So one of the things that the next step above which calls we call the system of intelligence of the data fabric does, is it mergers that BSS and OSS data. So the longer we have any silos or anything that's separated, it's all coming into one area to allow business, to go in or allow data scientists go in and do that. >>So if you look at the bottom line, excuse me, of the, uh, of the system of intelligence, you can see that flare is the tool that pulls in the data. So it provides even screening capabilities, it preserves entity states, so that you can go back and look at it to the state at any time. It does stream analytics that is as the data is coming in, it can perform analytics on it. And it also allows real-time decisioning. So that's something that, uh, that's something that business users can go in and create a system of, uh, if them's, it looks very much like a graph database where you can create a product that will allow the user to be notified if a certain condition happens. So for instance, a bundle, so a real-time offer or user is fixing to run out of is ongoing and an offer can be sent to him right on the fly. >>And that's set up by the business user as opposed to programmers a data infrastructure. So the fabric has really three areas. That data is persistent, obviously there's the data lake. So the data lake stores that level of granularity that is very deep years and years of history, data scientists love that. And, uh, you know, for a historical record keeping and requirements from the government, that data would be stored there. Then there's also something we call the business semantics layer and the business semantics layer contains something over 650 specific telco KPIs. These are initially from PM forum, but they also are included in, uh, various, uh, uh, mobile operators that we've delivered at. And we've, we've grown that. So that's there for business. The data lake is there for data scientists, analytical stores, uh, they can be used for many different reasons. There are a lot of times RDBMS is, are still there. >>So these, this, this basically platform, this cloud they're a platform can tie into analytical data stores as well via flair access and reporting. So graphic visualizations, API APIs are a very key part of it. A third-party query tools, any kind of grid jewels can be used. And those are the, of course, the, uh, the ones that are highly optimized and allow, you know, search of billions of records. And then if you look at the top, it's the systems of engagement, then you might vote this use cases. So telco reporting, hundreds of KPIs that are, that are generated for users, segmentation, basically micro to macro segmentation, segmentation will play a key role in a use case. We talk about in a minute monetizations. So this helps telco providers monetize their specific data, but monetize it in, okay, how to do they make money off of it, but also how might you leverage this data to, in, in dates with another client? >>So for instance, in some cases where it's allowed a DPI is used and the, uh, fabric tracks exactly where each person goes each, uh, we call it a subscriber, goes within his, uh, um, uh, internet browsing for 5g and, uh, all that data is stored. Uh, whereas you can tell a lot of things where the segment, the profile that's being used and, you know, what are they propensity to buy? Did they spend a lot of time on the Coca-Cola page? There are buyers out there that find that information very valuable, and then there's sideshow. And we spoke briefly about Sacha before that sits on top of the fabric or it's it's alone. >>So, so the story really that we want to tell is, is one, this is, this is one case out of it. This is a CVM type of case. So there was a mobile operator out there that was really offering, you know, packages, whether it's a bundle or whether it's a particular tool to subscribers, they, they were offering kind of an abroad approach that it was not very focused. It was not depending on the segments that were created around the profiling earlier, uh, the subscriber usage was somewhat dated and this was causing a lot of those. Uh, a lot of those offers to be just basically not taken and not, not, uh, uh, there was limited segmentation capabilities really before the, uh, before the, uh, fabric came in. Now, one of the key things about the fabric is when you start building segments, you can build that history. >>So all of that data stored in the data lake can be used in terms of segmentation. So what did we do about that? The, the, the MDNO, the challenge, uh, we basically put the data fabric in and the data fabric was running Cloudera data platform and that, uh, and that's how we team up. Uh, we facilitated the ability to personalize campaign. So what that means is, uh, the segments that were built and that user fell within that segment, we knew exactly what his behavior most likely was. So those recommendations, those offers could be created then, and we enable this in real time. So real-time ability to even go out to the CRM system, again, their further information about that, all of these tools, again, we're running on top of the cloud data platform, uh, what was the outcome? Willie, uh, outcome was that there was a much more precise offer given to the client that is, that was accepted, you know, increase in cross sell and upsell subscriber retention. >>Uh, our clients came back to us and pointed out that, uh, it was 183% year on year revenue increase. Uh, so this is a, this is probably one of the key use cases. Now, one thing to really mention is there are hundreds and hundreds of use cases running on the fabric. And, uh, I would even say thousands. A lot of those have been migrated. So when the fabric is deployed, when they bring the, uh, Cloudera and the legal data solution in there's generally a legacy system that has many use cases. So many of those were, were migrated virtually all of them in pen, on put on the cloud. Uh, another issue is that new use cases are enabled again. So when you get this level of granularity and when you have campaigns that can now base their offers on years of history, as opposed to 30 days of history, the campaigns campaign management response systems, uh, are, are, uh, are enabled quite a bit to do all, uh, to be precise in their offers. Yeah. >>Okay. So this is a technical slide. Uh, one of the things that we normally do when we're, when we're out there talking to folks, is we talk and give an overview and that last little while, and then we give a deep technical dive on all aspects of it. So sometimes that deep dive can go a couple of hours. I'm going to do this slide and a couple of minutes. So if you look at it, you can see over on the left, this is the, uh, the sources of the data. And they go through this tool called flare that runs on the cloud. They're a data platform, uh, that can either be via cues or real-time cues, or it can be via a landing zone, or it can be a data extraction. You can take a look at the data quality that's there. So those are built in one of the things that flare does is it has out of the box ability to ingest data sources and to apply the data quality and validation for telco type sources. >>But one of the reasons this is fast to market is because throughout those 10 or 12 opcos that we've done with Cloudera, where we have already built models, so models for CCN, for air for, for most mediation systems. So there's not going to be a type of, uh, input that we haven't already seen are very rarely. So that actually speeds up deployment very quickly. Then a player does the transformation, the, uh, the metrics, continuous learning, we call it continuous decisioning, uh, API access. Uh, we, uh, you know, for, for faster response, we use distributed cash. I'm not going to go too deeply in there, but the layer and the business semantics layer again, are, are sitting top of the Cloudera data platform. You see the cough, but flu, uh, Q1 on the right as well. >>And all of that, we're calling the fabric. So the fabric is Cloudera data platform and the cloud and flair and all of this runs together. And by the way, there've been many, many, many, many hundreds of hours testing flare with Cloudera and, uh, and the whole process, the results, what are the results? Well, uh, there are, there are four I'm going to talk about, uh, we saw the one for the, it was called my pocket pocket, but it's a CDM type, uh, use case. Uh, the subscribers of that mobile operator were 14 million plus there was a use case for a 24 million plus a year on year revenue was 130%, uh, 32 million plus for 38%. These are, um, these are different CVM pipe, uh, use cases, as well as network use cases. And then there were 44%, uh, telco with 76 million subscribers. So I think that there are a lot more use cases that we could talk about, but, but in this case, this is the ones we're looking at again, 183%. This is something that we find consistently, and these figures come from our, uh, our actual end client. So how do we unlock the full potential of this? Well, I think to start is to arrange a meeting and, uh, it would be great to, to, uh, for you to reach out to me or to Anthony. Uh, we're working in conjunction on this and we can set up a, uh, we can set up a meeting and we can go through this initial meeting. And, uh, I think that's the very beginning. Uh, again, you can get additional information from Cloudera website and from the league of data website, Anthony, that's the story. Thank you. >>Oh, that's great. Jeremy, thank you so much. It's a, it's, it's wonderful to go deep. And I know that there are hundreds of use cases being deployed in MTN, um, but great to go deep on one. And like you said, it can, once you get that sort of architecture in place, you can do so many different things. The power of data is tremendous, but it's great to be able to see how you can, how you can track it end to end from collecting the data, processing it, understanding it, and then applying it in a commercial context and bringing actual revenue back into the business. So there is your ROI straightaway. Now you've got a platform that you can transform your business on. That's, that's, it's a tremendous story, Jimmy, and thank you for your partnership. So, um, that's, uh, that's, that's our story for today, like Jamie says, um, please do fleet, uh, feel free to reach out to us. Um, the, the website addresses are there and our contact details, and we'd be delighted to talk to you a little bit more about some of the other use cases, perhaps, um, and maybe about your own business and, uh, and how we might be able to make it, make it perform a little better.

>>Hi today, I'm going to talk about network analytics and what that means for, for telecommunications as we go forward. Um, thinking about, uh, 5g, what the impact that's likely to have on, on network analytics and the data requirement, not just to run the network and to understand the network a little bit better. Um, but also to, to inform the rest of the operation of the telecommunications business. Um, so as we think about where we are in terms of network analytics and what that is over the last 20 years, the telecommunications industry has evolved its management infrastructure, uh, to abstract away from some of the specific technologies in the network. So what do we mean by that? Well, uh, in the, in the initial, uh, telecommunications networks were designed, there were management systems that were built in, um, eventually fault management systems, uh, assurance systems, provisioning systems, and so on were abstracted away. >>So it didn't matter what network technology had, whether it was a Nokia technology or Erickson technology or Huawei technology or whatever it happened to be. You could just look at your fault management system, understand where false, what happened as we got into the last sort of 10, 15 years or so. Telecommunication service providers become became more sophisticated in terms of their approach to data analytics and specifically network analytics, and started asking questions about why and what if in relation to their network performance and network behavior. And so network analytics as a, as a bit of an independent function was born and over time, more and more data began to get loaded into the network analytics function. So today just about every carrier in the world has a network analytics function that deals with vast quantities of data in big data environments that are now being migrated to the cloud. >>As all telecommunications carriers are migrating as many it workloads as possible, um, to the cloud. So what are the things that are happening as we migrate to the cloud that drive, uh, uh, enhancements in use cases and enhancements and scale, uh, in telecommunications network analytics? Well, 5g is the big thing, right? So 5g, uh, it's not just another G in that sense. I mean, in some cases, in some senses, it is 5g means greater bandwidth, lower latency and all those good things. So, you know, we can watch YouTube videos with less interference and, and less sluggish bandwidth and so on and so forth. But 5g is really about the enterprise and enterprise services. Transformation, 5g is more secure, kind of a network, but 5g is also a more pervasive network 5g, a fundamentally different network topology than previous generations. So there's going to be more masts and that means that you can have more pervasive connectivity. >>Uh, so things like IOT and edge applications, autonomous cars, smart cities, these kinds of things, um, are all much better served because you've got more masks that of course means that you're going to have a lot more data as well. And we'll get to that. The second piece is immersive digital services. So with more masks, with more connectivity, with lower latency with higher man, the potential, uh, is, is, is, is immense for services innovation. And we don't know what those services are going to be. We know that technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, things like this have great potential. Um, but we, we have yet to see where those commercial applications are going to be, but the innovation and the innovation potential for 5g is phenomenal. Um, it certainly means that we're going to have a lot more, uh, edge devices, um, uh, and that again is going to lead to an increase in the amount of data that we have available. >>And then the idea of pervasive connectivity when it comes to smart, smart cities, uh, autonomous, autonomous currents, um, uh, integrated traffic management systems, um, all of this kind of stuff, those of those kind of smart environments thrive where you've got this kind of pervasive connectivity, this persistent, uh, connection to the network. Um, again, that's going to drive, um, um, uh, more innovation. And again, because you've got these new connected devices, you're going to get even more data. So this rise, this exponential rise in data is really what's driving the change in, in network analytics. And there are four major vectors that are driving this increase in data in terms of both volume and in terms of speed. So the first is more physical elements. So we said already that 5g networks are going to have a different apology. 5g networks will have more devices, more and more masks. >>Um, and so with more physical elements in the network, you're going to get more physical data coming off those physical networks. And so that needs to be aggregated and collected and managed and stored and analyzed and understood when, so that we can, um, have a better understanding as to why things happened the way they do, why the network behaves in which they do in, in, in, in ways that it does and why devices that are connected to the network. And ultimately of course, consumers, whether they be enterprises or retail customers, um, behave in the way they do in relation to their interaction within our edge nodes and devices, we're going to have a, uh, an explosion in terms of the number of devices. We've already seen IOT devices with your different kinds of trackers and, uh, and, and sensors that are hanging off the edge of the network, whether it's to make buildings smarter car smarter, or people smarter, um, in, in terms of having the, the, the measurements and the connectivity and all that sort of stuff. >>So the numbers of devices on the agent beyond the age, um, are going to be phenomenal. One of the things that we've been trying to with as an industry over the last few years is where does the telco network end, and where does the enterprise, or even the consumer network begin. You used to be very clear that, you know, the telco network ended at the router. Um, but now it's not, it's not that clear anymore because in the enterprise space, particularly with virtualized networking, which we're going to talk about in a second, um, you start to see end to end network services being deployed. Um, uh, and so are they being those services in some instances are being managed by the service provider themselves, and in some cases by the enterprise client, um, again, the line between where the telco network ends and where the enterprise or the consumer network begins, uh, is not clear. >>Uh, so, so those edge, the, the, the proliferation of devices at the age, um, uh, in terms of, um, you know, what those devices are, what the data yield is and what the policies are, their need to govern those devices, um, in terms of security and privacy, things like that, um, that's all going to be really, really important virtualized services. We just touched on that briefly. One of the big, big trends that's happening right now is not just the shift of it operations onto the cloud, but the shift of the network onto the cloud, the virtualization of network infrastructure, and that has two major impacts. First of all, it means that you've got the agility and all of the scale, um, uh, benefits that you get from migrating workloads to the cloud, the elasticity and the growth and all that sort of stuff. But arguably more importantly for the telco, it means that with a virtualized network infrastructure, you can offer entire networks to enterprise clients. >>So if you're selling to a government department, for example, is looking to stand up a system for certification of, of, you know, export certification, something like that. Um, you can not just sell them the connectivity, but you can sell them the networking and the infrastructure in order to serve that entire end to end application. You could sentence, you could offer them in theory, an entire end-to-end communications network, um, and with 5g network slicing, they can even have their own little piece of the 5g bandwidth that's been allocated against the carrier, um, uh, and, and have a complete end to end environment. So the kinds of services that can be offered by telcos, um, given virtualize network infrastructure, uh, are, are many and varied. And it's a, it's a, it's a, um, uh, an outstanding opportunity. But what it also means is that the number of network elements virtualized in this case is also exploding. >>That means the amount of data that we're getting on, uh, informing us as to how those network elements are behaving, how they're performing, um, uh, is, is, is going to go up as well. And then finally, AI complexity. So on the demand side, um, while historically, uh, um, network analytics, big data, uh, has been, has been driven by, um, returns in terms of data monetization, uh, whether that's through cost avoidance, um, or service assurance, uh, or even revenue generation through data monetization and things like that. AI is transforming telecommunications and every other industry, the potential for autonomous operations, uh, is extremely attractive. And so understanding how the end-to-end telecommunication service delivering delivery infrastructure works, uh, is essential, uh, as a training ground for AI models that can help to automate a huge amount of telecommunications operating, um, processes. So the AI demand for data is just going through the roof. >>And so all of these things combined to mean big data is getting explosive. It is absolutely going through the roof. So that's a huge thing that's happening. So as telecommunications companies around the world are looking at their network analytics infrastructure, which was initially designed for service insurance primarily, um, and how they migrate that to the cloud. These things are impacting on those decisions because you're not just looking at migrating a workload to operate in the cloud that used to work in the, in the data center. Now you're looking at, um, uh, migrating a workload, but also expanding the use cases in that work and bear in mind, many of those, those are going to need to remain on prem. So they'll need to be within a private cloud or at best a hybrid cloud environment in order to satisfy a regulatory jurisdictional requirements. So let's talk about an example. >>So LGU plus is a Finastra fantastic service provider in Korea. Um, huge growth in that business over the last, uh, over the last 10, 15 years or so. Um, and obviously most people will be familiar with LG, the electronics brand, maybe less so with, uh, with LG plus, but they've been doing phenomenal work. And we're the first, uh, business in the world who launch commercial 5g in 2019. And so a huge milestone that they achieved. And at the same time they deploy the network real-time analytics platform or in rep, uh, from a combination of Cloudera and our partner calmer. Now, um, there were a number of things that were driving, uh, the requirement for it, for the, for the analytics platform at the time. Um, clearly the 5g launch was that was the big thing that they had in mind, but there were other things that re so within the 5g launch, um, uh, they were looking for, for visibility of services, um, and service assurance and service quality. >>So, you know, what services have been launched? How are they being taken up? What are the issues that are arising, where are the faults happening? Um, where are the problems? Because clearly when you launch a new service, but then you want to understand and be on top of the issues as they arise. Um, so that was really, really important. The second piece was, and, you know, this is not a new story to any telco in the world, right. But there are silos in operation. Uh, and so, um, taking advantage of, um, or eliminating redundancies through the process, um, of, of digital transformation, it was really important. And so particular, the two silos between wired and the wireless sides of the business come together so that there would be an integrated network management system, um, for, uh, for LGU plus, as they rolled out 5g. So eliminating redundancy and driving cost savings through the, the integration of the silos is really, really important. >>And that's a process and the people thing every bit, as much as it is a systems and a data thing. So, um, another big driver and the fourth one, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of these things, right? 5g brings huge opportunity for enterprise services, innovation. So industry 4.0 digital experience, these kinds of use cases, um, are very important in the south Korean marketing and in the, um, in the business of LGU plus. And so, uh, um, looking at AI and how can you apply AI to network management? Uh, again, there's a number of use cases, really, really exciting use cases that have gone live now, um, in LG plus since, uh, since we did this initial deployment and they're making fantastic strides there, um, big data analytics for users across LGU plus, right? So it's not just for, um, uh, it's not just for the immediate application of 5g or the support or the 5g network. >>Um, but also for other data analysts and data scientists across the LGU plus business network analytics, while primarily it's primary it's primary use case is around network management, um, LGU plus, or, or network analytics, um, has applications across the entire business, right? So, um, you know, for customer churn or next best offer for understanding customer experience and customer behavior really important there for digital advertising, for product innovation, all sorts of different use cases and departments within the business needed access to this information. So collaboration sharing across the network, the real-time network analytics platform, um, it was very important. And then finally, as I mentioned, LG group is much bigger than just LG plus it's because the electronics and other pieces, and they had launched a major group wide digital transformation program in 2019, and still being a part of that was, well, some of them, the problems that they were looking to address. >>Um, so first of all, the integration of wired and wireless data service data sources, and so getting your assurance data sources, your network, data sources, uh, and so on integrated with is really, really important scale was massive for them. Um, you know, they're talking about billions of transactions in under a minute, uh, being processed, um, and hundreds of terabytes per day. So, uh, you know, phenomenal scale, uh, that needed to be available out of the box as it were, um, real time indicators and alarms. And there was lots of KPIs and thresholds set that, you know, w to make, make it to meet certain criteria, certain standards, um, customer specific, real time analysis of 5g, particularly for the launch root cause analysis, an AI based prediction on service, uh, anomalies and service service issues was, was, was a core use case. Um, as I talked about already the provision of service of data services across the organization, and then support for 5g, uh, served the business service, uh, impact, uh, was extremely important. >>So it's not just understand well, you know, that you have an outage in a particular network element, but what is the impact on the business of LGU plus, but also what is the impact on the business of the customer, uh, from an outage or an anomaly or a problem on, on, on the network. So being able to answer those kinds of questions really, really important, too. And as I said, between Cloudera and Kamarck, uh, uh, and LGU plus, uh, really themselves an intrinsic part of the solution, um, uh, this is, this is what we, we ended up building. So a big complicated architecture space. I really don't want to go into too much detail here. Um, uh, you can see these things for yourself, but let me skip through it really quickly. So, first of all, the key data sources, um, you have all of your wireless network information, other data sources. >>This is really important because sometimes you kind of skip over this. There are other systems that are in place like the enterprise data warehouse that needed to be integrated as well, southbound and northbound interfaces. So we get our data from the network and so on, um, and network management applications through file interfaces. CAFCA no fire important technologies. And also the RDBMS systems that, uh, you know, like the enterprise data warehouse that we're able to feed that into the system. And then northbound, um, you know, we spoke already about me making network analytics services available across the enterprise. Um, so, uh, you know, uh, having both the file and the API interface available, um, for other systems and other consumers across the enterprise is very important. Um, lots of stuff going on then in the platform itself to petabytes and persistent storage, um, Cloudera HDFS, 300 nodes for the, the raw data storage, um, uh, and then, uh, could do for real time storage for real-time indicator analysis, alarm generation, um, uh, and other real time, um, processes. >>Uh, so there, that was the, the core of the solution, uh, spark processes for ETL key quality indicators and alarming, um, and also a bunch of work done around, um, data preparation, data generation for transferal to, to third party systems, um, through the northbound interfaces, um, uh, Impala, API queries, um, for real-time systems, uh, there on the right hand side, and then, um, a whole bunch of clustering classification, prediction jobs, um, through the, uh, the, the, the, the ML processes, the machine learning processes, uh, again, another key use case, and we've done a bunch of work on that. And, um, I encourage you to have a look at the Cloudera website for more detail on some of the work that we did here. Um, so this is some pretty cool stuff. Um, and then finally, just the upstream services, some of these there's lots more than, than, than simply these ones, but service assurance is really, really important. So SQM cm and SED grade. So the service quality management customer experience, autonomous controllers, uh, really, really important consumers of, of the, of the real-time analytics platform, uh, and your conventional service assurance, um, functions like faulted performance management. Uh, these things are as much consumers of the information and the network analytics platform as they are providers of data to the network, uh, analytics >>Platform. >>Um, so some of the specific use cases, uh, that, uh, have been, have been stood up and that are delivering value to this day and lots of more episodes, but these are just three that we pulled out. Um, so first of all, um, uh, sort of specific monitoring and customer quality analysis, Karen response. So again, growing from the initial 5g launch and then broadening into broader services, um, understanding where there are the, where there are issues so that when people complaining, when people have an issue, um, that, um, uh, that we can answer the, the concerns of the client, um, in a substantive way, um, uh, AI functions around root cause analysis or understanding why things went wrong when they went wrong. Um, uh, and also making recommendations as to how to avoid those occurrences in the future. Uh, so we know what preventative measures can be taken. Um, and then finally the, uh, the collaboration function across LGU plus extremely important and continues to be important to this day where data is shared throughout the enterprise, through the API Lira through file interfaces and other things, and through interface integrations with, uh, with upstream systems. >>So, um, that's kind of the, the, uh, real quick run through of LGU plus the numbers are just stave staggering. Um, you know, we've seen, uh, upwards of a billion transactions in under 40 seconds being, um, uh, being tested. Um, and, and we've gone beyond those thresholds now, already, um, and we're started and, and, and, and this isn't just a theoretical sort of a benchmarking test or something like that. We're seeing these kinds of volumes of data and not too far down the track. So, um, with those things that I mentioned earlier with the proliferation of, of, um, of network infrastructure, uh, in the 5g context with virtualized elements, with all of these other bits and pieces are driving massive volumes of data towards the, uh, the, the, the network analytics platform. So phenomenal scale. Um, this is just one example we work with, with service providers all over the world is over 80% of the top 100 telecommunication service providers run on Cloudera. >>They use Cloudera in the network, and we're seeing those customers, all migrating legacy cloud platforms now onto CDP onto the Cloudera data platform. Um, they're increasing the, the, the jobs that they do. So it's not just warehousing, not just ingestion ETL, and moving into things like machine learning. Um, and also looking at new data sources from places like NWTF the network data analytics function in 5g, or the management and orchestration layer in, in software defined networks, network, function, virtualization. So, you know, new use cases coming in all the time, new data sources coming in all the time growth in, in, in, in the application scope from, as we say, from edge to AI. Um, and so it's, it's really exciting to see how the, the, the, the footprint is growing and how, uh, the applications in telecommunications are really making a difference in, in facilitating, um, network transformation. And that's covering that. That's me covered for today. I hope you found that helpful, um, by all means, please reach out, uh, there's a couple of links here. You can follow me on Twitter. You can connect to the telecommunications page, reach out to me directly at Cloudera. I'd love to answer your questions, um, uh, and, uh, and talk to you about how big data is transforming networks, uh, and how network transformation is, is accelerating telcos, uh, throughout >>Jamie Sharath with Liga data, I'm primarily on the delivery side of the house, but I also support our new business teams. I'd like to spend a minute really just kind of telling you about the legal data, where basically a Silicon valley startup, uh, started in 2014, and, uh, our lead iron, our executive team, basically where the data officers at Yahoo before this, uh, we provide managed data services, and we provide products that are focused on telcos. So we have some experience in non telco industry, but our focus for the last seven years or so is specifically on telco. So again, something over 200 employees, we have a global presence in north America, middle east Africa, Asia, and Europe. And we have folks in all of those places, uh, I'd like to call your attention to the, uh, the middle really of the screen there. So here is where we have done some partnership with Cloudera. >>So if you look at that and you can see we're in Holland and Jamaica, and then a lot to throughout Africa as well. Now, the data fabric is the product that we're talking about. And the data fabric is basically a big data type of data warehouse with a lot of additional functionality involved. The data fabric is comprised of, uh, some something called a flare, which we'll talk about in a minute below there, and then the Cloudera data platform underneath. So this is how we're partnering together. We, uh, we, we have this tool and it's, uh, it's functioning and delivering in something over 10 up. So flare now, flare is a piece of that legal data IP. The rest is there. And what flare does is that basically pulls in data, integrates it to an event streaming platform. It's, uh, it is the engine behind the data fabric. >>Uh, it's also a decisioning platform. So in real time, we're able to pull in data. We're able to run analytics on it, and we're able to alert are, do whatever is needed in a real-time basis. Of course, a lot of clients at this point are still sending data in batch. So it handles that as well, but we call that a CA picture Sanchez. Now Sacho is a very interesting app. It's an AI analytics app for executives. What it is is it runs on your mobile phone. It ties into your data. Now this could be the data fabric, but it couldn't be a standalone product. And basically it allows you to ask, you know, human type questions to say, how are my gross ads last week? How are they comparing against same time last week before that? And even the same time 60 days ago. So as an executive or as an analyst, I can pull it up and I can look at it instantly in a meeting or anywhere else without having to think about queries or anything like that. >>So that's pretty much for us at legal data, not really to set the context of where we are. So this is a traditional telco environments. So you see the systems of record, you see the cloud, you see OSS and BSS data. So one of the things that the next step above which calls we call the system of intelligence of the data fabric does, is it mergers that BSS and OSS data. So the longer we have any silos or anything that's separated, it's all coming into one area to allow business, to go in or allow data scientists go in and do that. So if you look at the bottom line, excuse me, of the, uh, of the system of intelligence, you can see that flare is the tools that pulls in the data. So it provides even streaming capabilities. It preserves entity states, so that you can go back and look at it state at any time. >>It does stream analytics that is as the data is coming in, it can perform analytics on it. And it also allows real-time decisioning. So that's something that, uh, that's something that business users can go in and create a system of, uh, if them's, it looks very much like the graph database, where you can create a product that will allow the user to be notified if a certain condition happens. So for instance, a bundle, so a real-time offer or user is succinct to run out of is ongoing, and an offer can be sent to him right on the fly. And that's set up by the business user as opposed to programmers, uh, data infrastructure. So the fabric has really three areas. That data is persistent, obviously there's the data lake. So the data lake stores that level of granularity that is very deep years and years of history, data, scientists like that, uh, and, uh, you know, for a historical record keeping and requirements from the government, that data would be stored there. >>Then there's also something we call the business semantics layer and the business semantics layer contains something over 650 specific telco KPIs. These are initially from PM forum, but they also are included in, uh, various, uh, uh, mobile operators that we've delivered at. And we've, we've grown that. So that's there for business data lake is there for data scientists, analytical stores, uh, they can be used for many different reasons. There are a lot of times RDBMS is, are still there. So these, this, this basically platform, this cloud they're a platform can tie into analytical data stores as well via flair access and reporting. So graphic visualizations, API APIs are a very key part of it. A third-party query tools, any kind of grid tools can be used. And those are the, of course, the, uh, the ones that are highly optimized and allow, you know, search of billions of records. >>And then if you look at the top, it's the systems of engagement, then you might vote this use cases. So teleco reporting, hundreds of KPIs that are, that are generated for users, segmentation, basically micro to macro segmentation, segmentation will play a key role in a use case. We talked about in a minute monetization. So this helps teleco providers monetize their specific data, but monetize it in. Okay, how to, how do they make money off of it, but also how might you leverage this data to engage with another client? So for instance, in some where it's allowed a DPI is used, and the fabric tracks exactly where each person goes each, uh, we call it a subscriber, goes within his, uh, um, uh, internet browsing on the, on the four or 5g. And, uh, the, all that data is stored. Uh, whereas you can tell a lot of things where the segment, the profile that's being used and, you know, what are they propensity to buy? Do they spend a lot of time on the Coca-Cola page? There are buyers out there that find that information very valuable, and then there's signs of, and we spoke briefly about Sanchez before that sits on top of the fabric or it's it's alone. >>So, so the story really that we want to tell is, is one, this is, this is one case out of it. This is a CVM type of case. So there was a mobile operator out there that was really offering, you know, packages, whether it's a bundle or whether it's a particular tool to subscribers, they, they were offering kind of an abroad approach that it was not very focused. It was not depending on the segments that were created around the profiling earlier, uh, the subscriber usage was somewhat dated and this was causing a lot of those. A lot of those offers to be just basically not taken and, and not, not, uh, audited. Uh, there was limited segmentation capabilities really before the, uh, before the, uh, fabric came in. Now, one of the key things about the fabric is when you start building segments, you can build that history. >>So all of that data stored in the data lake can be used in terms of segmentation. So what did we do about that? The, the, the envy and, oh, the challenge this, uh, we basically put the data fabric in and the data fabric was running Cloudera data platform and that, uh, and that's how we team up. Uh, we facilitated the ability to personalize campaign. So what that means is, uh, the segments that were built and that user fell within that segment, we knew exactly what his behavior most likely was. So those recommendations, those offers could be created then, and we enable this in real time. So real-time ability to even go out to the CRM system and gather further information about that. All of these tools, again, we're running on top of the Cloudera data platform, uh, what was the outcome? Willie, uh, outcome was that there was a much more precise offer given to the client that is, that was accepted, no increase in cross sell and upsell subscriber retention. >>Uh, our clients came back to us and pointed out that, uh, it was 183% year on year revenue increase. Uh, so this is a, this is probably one of the key use cases. Now, one thing to really mention is there are hundreds and hundreds of use cases running on the fabric. And I would even say thousands. A lot of those have been migrated. So when the fabric is deployed, when they bring the Cloudera and the legal data solution in there's generally a legacy system that has many use cases. So many of those were, were migrated virtually all of them in pen, on put on the cloud. Uh, another issue is that new use cases are enabled again. So when you get this level of granularity and when you have campaigns that can now base their offers on years of history, as opposed to 30 days of history, the campaigns campaign management response systems, uh, are, are, uh, are enabled quite a bit to do all, uh, to be precise in their offers. Okay. >>Okay. So this is a technical slide. Uh, one of the things that we normally do when we're, when we're out there talking to folks, is we talk and give an overview and that last little while, and then we give a deep technical dive on all aspects of it. So sometimes that deep dive can go a couple of hours. I'm going to do this slide and a couple of minutes. So if you look at it, you can see over on the left, this is the, uh, the sources of the data. And they go through this tool called flare that runs on the cloud. They're a data platform, uh, that can either be via cues or real-time cues, or it can be via a landing zone, or it can be a data extraction. You can take a look at the data quality that's there. So those are built in one of the things that flare does is it has out of the box ability to ingest data sources and to apply the data quality and validation for telco type sources. >>But one of the reasons this is fast to market is because throughout those 10 or 12, uh, opcos that we've done with Cloudera, where we have already built models, so models for CCN, for air for, for most mediation systems. So there's not going to be a type of, uh, input that we haven't already seen are very rarely. So that actually speeds up deployment very quickly. Then a player does the transformations, the, uh, the metrics, continuous learning, we call it continuous decisioning, uh, API access. Uh, we, uh, you know, for, for faster response, we use distributed cash. I'm not going to go too deeply in there, but the layer in the business semantics layer again, are, are sitting on top of the Cloudera data platform. You see the Kafka CLU, uh, Q1, the right as well. >>And all of that, we're calling the fabric. So the fabric is Cloudera data platform and the cloud and flair and all of this runs together. And, and by the way, there've been many, many, many, many hundreds of hours testing flare with Cloudera and, uh, and the whole process, the results, what are the results? Well, uh, there are, there are four I'm going to talk about, uh, we saw the one for the, it was called my pocket pocket, but it's a CDM type, a use case. Uh, the subscribers of that mobile operator were 14 million plus there was a use case for 24 million plus that a year on year revenue was 130%, uh, 32 million plus for 38%. These are, um, these are different CVM pipe, uh, use cases, as well as network use cases. And then there were 44%, uh, telco with 76 million subscribers. So I think that there are a lot more use cases that we could talk about, but, but in this case, this is the ones we're looking at, uh, again, 183%. This is something that we find consistently. And these figures come from our, uh, our actual end client. How do we unlock the full potential of this? Well, I think to start is to arrange a meeting and, uh, it would be great to, to, uh, for you to reach out to me or to Anthony. Uh, we're working at the junction on this, and we can set up a, uh, we can set up a meeting and we can go through this initial meeting. And, uh, I think that's the very beginning. Uh, again, you can get additional information from Cloudera website and from the league of data website, Anthony, that's the story. Thank you. >>No, that's great. Jeremy, thank you so much. It's a, it's, it's wonderful to go deep. And I know that there are hundreds of use cases being deployed in MTN, um, but great to go deep on one. And like you said, it can, once you get that sort of architecture in place, you can do so many different things. The power of data is tremendous, but it's great to be able to see how you can, how you can track it end to end from collecting the data, processing it, understanding it, and then applying it in a commercial context and bringing actual revenue back into the business. So there is your ROI straight away. Now you've got a platform that you can transform your business on. That's, that's, it's a tremendous story, Jamie, and thank you for your part. Sure. Um, that's a, that's, that's our story for today. Like Jamie says, um, please do flee, uh, feel free to reach out to us. Um, the, the website addresses are there and our contact details, and we'd be delighted to talk to you a little bit more about some of the other use cases, perhaps, um, and maybe about your own business and, uh, and how we might be able to make it, make it perform a little better. So thank you.

(gentle music) >> Okay, thank you Adam. Thank you everyone for joining us on the main stage here, folks watching, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante co-hosts of theCube. We're here in the main stage to talk to the two main players of Totogi, Danielle Royston, CEO as of today, the big news. Congratulations. >> Danielle: Yeah. Thank you. >> And Robin Langdon the CTO, Totogi. >> Robin: Thanks. So big news, CEO news today and $100 million investment. Every wants to know where's all the action? Why is this so popular right now? (Danielle chuckles) What's going on? Give us the quick update. >> Yeah, I met the Totogi guys and they have this great product I was really excited about. They're focused purely on telco software and bringing, coupling that with the Public Cloud, which is everything that I talk about, what I've been about for so long. And I really wanted to give them enough funding so they could focus on building great products. A lot of times, telcos, startups, you know they try to get a quick win. They kind of chase the big guys and I really wanted to make sure they were focused on building a great product. #2, I really wanted to show the industry, they had the funding they needed to be a real player. This wasn't like $5 million or a couple million dollars, so that was really important. And then #3, I want to make sure that we could hire great talent and you need money for compensation. And so $100 million it is. >> $100 million is a lot of fresh fat financing as they say. I got to ask you, what's different? Because I've been researching on the refactoring aspect of with the Cloud, obviously public cloud with AWS, a big deal. What's different about the charging aspect of this? >> Yeah I mean, charging hasn't been exciting, maybe ever. I mean, it's kind of like this really sort of sleepy area, but I think what the Totogi guys are doing is they're really coupling the idea of charging and network data to bring hyper-personalization to subscribers. And I think that's where it changes from being a charging engine to become an engagement engine. Telcos know more about us than Google, which is kind of crazy to think about it. They know when we wake up, they know what apps we use. If we call or text, if we game or stream and it's time to start using that data to drive a better experience to us. And I think to Totogi is enabling that. I'm super excited to do that. >> So Robin, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. I mean, maybe we get into the plumbing and I don't want to go too deep in it, but I think it's important because we've seen this movie before where people take their on-prem stacks, they wrap it in containers and they shove it into the Public Cloud and they say, "Hey, we're cloud too." If reading a press release, you guys are taking advantage of things like Amazon Nitro of course, but also Graviton and Graviton2 and eventually 3, which is the underlying capabilities, give you a cloud native advantage. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we wanted to build this in the Cloud using all of those great cloud innovations. So Graviton2, DynamoDB and using their infrastructure, just allowing us to be able to scale out. These all available to us to use and essentially free for us to use. And it's great, so as you say, we're not shoehorning something in that's decade's old technology, wrapping it in some kind of container and pushing it in. Which is just then, you just can't use any of those great innovations. >> And you've selected DynamoDB as the database. Okay, that's fine. We don't have to get so much into why, but maybe you could explain the advantage because I saw some benchmark numbers which were, like an order of magnitude greater than the competition, like share with us, why? How you were able to get there? And maybe share those numbers. >> Yeah, no, we do. So we just launched our benchmark. So, a million transactions per second. So we just blew away everyone else out there. And that's really because we could take advantage of all that great AWS technology in there and the database side we're using DynamoDB, where we had a huge debate about using what kind of database to go and use? There's a lot of people out there probably get very religious about the kind of database technology that you should be using. And whether it should it be SQL in-memory object database type technology, but really a single table design, gives you that true scalability. You can just horizontally scale that easily, across the whole planet. >> You know, Danielle. Again, I said that we've seen this movie before. There are a lot of parallels in telco with the enterprise. And if you look at enterprise SAS pricing, a lot of it is very static, kind of lock you in, per seat pricing, kind of an old model. And you're seeing a lot of the modern SAS companies who are emerging with a consumption pricing models. How are you guys thinking about pricing? >> Yeah, I don't know of any other company in telco that's starting to price by usage. And that is a very standard offering with the cloud providers, right? Google we know, Amazon, all those guys have a price by the API, price by the transaction. So we're really excited to offer that to telcos. They've been asking for it for awhile, right? Pay for what you need, when you need it, by the use. And so we're really excited to offer that, but I think what's really cool is the idea of a free tier, right? And so I think it's smaller telcos have a trade-off to make, whether, am I going to buy the best technology and pay through the nose and maybe at an unaffordable level, or do I compromise and buy something more affordable, but not as great. And what's so great about Totogi, it's the same product just priced for what you need. And so I think a CSP it'll, below 250,000 subscribers should be able to use the Totogi absolutely for free. And that is, and it's the same product that the big guy would get. So it's not a junior version or scaled back. And so I think that's really exciting. I think we're the only ones that do it. So here we go. >> Love the freemium model. So Robin, maybe you could explain why that's so much, so important in the charging space, because you've got a lot of different options that you want to configure for the consumer. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about sort of how the old world does that, the old guard and how long it takes and how you're approaching this. >> Yeah so it's, I mean traditionally, charging design, there's as you say, there's lots of different pricing leavers you want to be able to move and change to charge different people. And these systems, even if they say they're configurable, if they normally turn into an IT project where it takes weeks, months, even years to build out the system, you know, marketing can't just go in there and configure the dials and push out your new plans and tariffs. They have to go and create a requirement specification. They hand it down to IT. Those guys go and create a big change project. And by the time they're finished, the market's moved on. They're on to their next plan, their next tariff to go and build. So we wanted to create something that was truly configurable from a marketing standpoint. You know, user-friendly, they can go in there, configure it and be live in minutes, not even days or weeks. >> No, IT necessary. >> Robin: No IT necessary. >> So you know, I've been thinking about, John and I talk about this all the time, It's that there's a data play here. And what I think you're doing is actually building a data product. I think there's a new metric emerging in the industry, which is how long does it take me to go from idea to monetization with a data product. And that's what this is. This is a data product >> Yeah. >> for your customers. >> Absolutely, what Robin was talking about is totally the way the industry works. It's weeks before you have an idea and get it out to the market. And like Robin was mentioning, the market's changed by the time you get it out there, the data's stale. And so we researched every single plan in the world from every single CSP. There is about 30,000 plans in the world, right? The bigger you are, the more plans you have. On average, a tier one telco has 40 to 50 plans. And so how many offers, I mean think about, that's how many phones to buy, plans to buy. And so we're like, let's get some insight on the plans. Let's drive it into a standardization, right? Let's make them, which ones work, which ones don't. And that's, I think you're right. I think it's a data play and putting the power back into the marketer's hands and not with IT. >> So there's a lot of data on-prem. Explain why I can't do this with my on-prem data. >> Oh, well today that, I mean, sorry if you want to jump in. Feel free to jump in, right. But today, the products are designed in a way where they're, perpetually licensed, by the subscriber, rigid systems, not API based. I mean, there might be an API, but you got to pay through the nose to use it or you got to use the provider's people to code against it. They're inflexible. They were written when voice was the primary revenue driver, not data, right? And so they've been shoehorned, right? Like Robin was saying, shoehorned to be able to move into the world that we are now. I mean, when the iPhone came about that introduced apps and data went through the roof and the systems were written for voice, not written for data. >> And that's a good point, if you think about the telco industry, it seems like it could be a glacier that just needs to just break and just like, just get modern because we all have phones. We have apps. We can delete them. And the billing plans, like either nonexistent or it has to be all free. >> Well I mean, I'll ask you. Do you know what your billing plan is? Do you know how much data you use on a monthly basis? No one knows. >> I have no clue. >> A lot. >> No one. And so what you do is you buy unlimited. >> Dave: Right. >> You overpay. And so what we're seeing in the plans is that if you actually knew how much you used, you would be able to maybe pay less, which I remember the telcos are not excited to hear that message, but it's a win for the subscriber. And if you could >> I mean it's only >> accurately predict that. >> get lower and lower. I having a conversation last night at dinner with industry analysts, we're talking about a vehicle e-commerce, commerce in your car as you're driving. You can get that kind of with a 5G. The trend is transactions everywhere, ad-hoc, ephemeral... >> Yeah. >> The new apps are going to demand this kind of subscriber billing. >> Yeah >> Do people get this? Are you guys the only ones kind of like on this? >> No I think people have been talking about it for years. I think there's vendors out there that have been trying to offer this idea of like, build your own plan and all that other stuff but I think it's more than just minutes, text and data. It's starting to really understand what subscribers are using, right? Are you a football fan? Are you a golf fan? Are you a shopper? Are you a concert goer? And couple that with how you use your phone and putting out offers that are really exciting to subscribers so that we love our telco. Like we should be loving our telco. And I don't... I don't know that people talk >> They saved us >> about loving their telco. >> from the pandemic >> They saved us during the pandemic. The internet didn't crash, we got our zoom meetings. We got everything going on. What's the technical issue on solving these problems? Is it just legacy? Is it just mindset? Robin, what's your take on that? >> I'll keep talking as long as Robin will let me. (Daniel laughing) >> So the big technical issues, you're trying to build in this flexibility so that you can have, we don't know what people are going to configure in the future. It's minutes and text messages are given away for free. They're unlimited. Data is where it's at, about charging for apps and about using all that data in the network the telcos have, which is extremely valuable and there's a wealth of information in there that can be used to be monetized and push that out. And they need a charging system on top that can manage that and we have the flexibility that you don't have to go off and then start creating programs and IT projects that are going to do that. >> Well it's funny Danielle, you say that the telcos might not like that, right? 'Cause you might pay less. But in fact, that is the kind of on-prem mindset because when you have a fixed resource, you say, okay, don't use too much because we have to buy more. Or you overbuy to your point. The cloud mindset is, I'll try it. I'll try some more, I'll try some more. I'm aligning it with business value. Oh, I'm making money. Oh, great. I'm going to keep buying more. And it's very clear. It's transparent where the business value is. So my question is when you think about your charging engine and all this data conversation, is there more than just a charging engine in this platform? >> Well, I think just going back to what Robin was talking about. I think what Totogi is doing differently is by building it on the Public Cloud gives you virtually unlimited resources, right? In a couple of different directions, certainly hardware and capacity and scalability and all those other things, right? But also as Amazon is putting out more and more product, when you build it in this new way, you can take advantage of these new services very, very easily. And that is a different mindset. It's a different way to deploy applications. And I think that's what makes Totogi really different. You couldn't build Totogi on-premise because you need the infinite scalability. You need the machine learning, you need the AI of Amazon, which they have been investing in for decades, if they now charge you by the API call. And you get to use it like you were saying. Just give it a try, don't like it, stop. And it's just a completely different way of thinking, yeah. >> If I have to ask you a question about the Public Cloud, because the theme here in Cloud City is the Public Cloud is driving innovation, which is also includes disruption. And the new brands are coming in, old brands are either reinventing themselves or falling away. What is the Public Cloud truly enabling? Is it the scale? Is it the data? Is it the refactoring capability? What is the real driver of the Public Cloud innovation? >> I think the insight that CSPs are going to have is what Jamie Dimon had in banking. Like I think he was pretty famously saying, "I'm never going to use the Public Cloud. Our data is too precious, you know, regulations and all that stuff." But I think the insight they're going to have, and I hopefully, I do a keynote and I mentioned this, which is feature velocity. The ability to put out features in a day or two. Our feature velocity in telco is months. Months, months. >> Seriously? >> Yeah, sometimes years. It's just so slow between big iterations of new capability and to be able to put out new features in minutes or days and be able to outmaneuver your competition is unheard of. So the CSPs that starts to get this, it's going to be a real big get, and then they're going to start to.. (Danielle makes swishing sound) >> We just interviewed (Dave speaking indistinctly) a venture capitalist, Dave and I last month. And he's a big investor in Snowflake, on the big deals. He said that the new strategy that's working is you go to be agile with feature acceleration. We just talked about this at lunch and you get data. And you can dismantle the bad features quickly and double down >> Yup. >> on the winners. >> Ones that are working. So what used to be feature creep now is a benefit if you play it right? >> Danielle: It's feature experimentation. >> That's essentially what you- >> It's experimentation, right? And you're like, that one worked, this one didn't, kill that one, double down on this one, go faster and faster and so feature experimentation, which you can't do in telco, because every time we ask for a feature from your current vendor, it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So you don't experiment. And so yeah- >> You can make features disposable. >> Correct. And I think that we just discovered that on this stage just now. (group chuckling) >> Hey look at this. Digital revolution, DR. Telco DR. >> Yeah. >> Great to have you guys. >> This is super awesome. Thanks so much. >> You guys are amazing. Congratulations. And we're looking forward to the more innovation stories again, get out there, get the momentum. Great stuff. >> Danielle: It's going to be great. >> And awesome. >> Feature experimentation. >> Yeah. >> Hashtag. >> And Dave and I are going to head back over to our Cube set here, here on the main stage. We'll toss it back to the Adam in the studio. Adam, back to you and take it from here.

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. This is the CUBEs, continuous, deep dive coverage of the people, processes and technologies that are really changing our world. Right now, we're going to talk about modernization and what's beyond with Jamie Thomas, general manager, strategy and development, IBM Enterprise Security. Jamie, always a pleasure. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you, Dave. And thanks for having me on the CUBE is always a pleasure. >> Yeah, it is our pleasure. And listen, we've been hearing a lot about IBM is focused on hybrid cloud, Arvind Krishna says we must win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I love that. We've been hearing a lot about AI. And I wonder if you could talk about IBM Systems and how it plays into that strategy? >> Sure, well, it's a great time to have this discussion Dave. As you all know, IBM Systems Technology is used widely around the world, by many, many 1000s of clients in the context of our IBM System Z, our power systems and storage. And what we have seen is really an uptake of monetization around those workloads, if you will, driven by hybrid cloud, the hybrid cloud agenda, as well as an uptake of Red Hat OpenShift, as a vehicle for this modernization. So it's pretty exciting stuff, what we see as many clients taking advantage of OpenShift on Linux, to really modernize these environments, and then stay close, if you will, to that systems of record database and the transactions associated with it. So they're seeing a definite performance advantage to taking advantage of OpenShift. And it's really fascinating to see the things that they're doing. So if you look at financial services, for instance, there's a lot of focus on risk analytics. So things like fraud, anti money laundering, mortgage risk, types of applications being done in this context, when you look at our retail industry clients, you see also a lot of customer centricity solutions, if you will, being deployed on OpenShift. And once again, having Linux close to those traditional LPARs of AIX, I-Series, or in the context of z/OS. So those are some of the things we see happening. And it's quite real. >> Now, you didn't mention power, but I want to come back and ask you about power. Because a few weeks ago, we were prompted to dig in a little bit with the when Arvind was on with Pat Kessinger at Intel and talking about the relationship you guys have. And so we dug in a little bit, we thought originally, we said, oh, it's about quantum. But we dug in. And we realized that the POWER10 is actually the best out there and the highest performance in terms of disaggregating memory. And we see that as a future architecture for systems and actually really quite excited about it about the potential that brings not only to build beyond system on a chip and system on a package, but to start doing interesting things at the Edge. You know, what do you what's going on with power? >> Well, of course, when I talked about OpenShift, we're doing OpenShift on power Linux, as well as Z Linux, but you're exactly right in the context for a POWER10 processor. We couldn't be more we're so excited about this processor. First of all, it's our first delivery with our partner Samsung with a seven nanometer form factor. The processor itself has only 18 billion transistors. So it's got a few transistors there. But one of the cool inventions, if you will, that we have created is this expansive memory region as part of this design point, which we call memory inception, it gives us the ability to reach memory across servers, up to two petabytes of memory. Aside from that, this processor has generational improvements and core and thread performance, improved energy efficiency. And all of this, Dave is going to give us a lot of opportunity with new workloads, particularly around artificial intelligence and inferencing around artificial intelligence. I mean, that's going to be that's another critical innovation that we see here in this POWER10 processor. >> Yeah, processor performance is just exploding. We're blowing away the historical norms. I think many people don't realize that. Let's talk about some of the key announcements that you've made in quantum last time we spoke on the qubit for last year, I think we did a deeper dive on quantum. You've made some announcements around hardware and software roadmaps. Give us the update on quantum please. >> Well, there is so much that has happened since we last spoke on the quantum landscape. And the key thing that we focused on in the last six months is really an articulation of our roadmaps, so the roadmap around hardware, the roadmap around software, and we've also done quite a bit of ecosystem development. So in terms of the roadmap around hardware, we put ourselves out there we've said we were going to get to over 1000 qubit machine and in 2023, so that's our milestone. And we've got a number of steps we've outlined along that way, of course, we have to make progress, frankly, every six months in terms of innovating around the processor, the electronics and the fridge associated with these machines. So lots of exciting innovation across the board. We've also published a software roadmap, where we're articulating how we improve a circuit execution speeds. So we hope, our plan to show shortly a 100 times improvement in circuit execution speeds. And as we go forward in the future, we're modifying our Qiskit programming model to not only allow a easily easy use by all types of developers, but to improve the fidelity of the entire machine, if you will. So all of our innovations go hand in hand, our hardware roadmap, our software roadmap, are all very critical in driving the technical outcomes that we think are so important for quantum to become a reality. We've deployed, I would say, in our quantum cloud over, you know, over 20 machines over time, we never quite identify the precise number because frankly, as we put up a new generation machine, we often retire when it's older. So we're constantly updating them out there, and every machine that comes on online, and that cloud, in fact, represents a sea change and hardware and a sea change in software. So they're all the latest and greatest that our clients can have access to. >> That's key, the developer angle you got redshift running on quantum yet? >> Okay, I mean, that's a really good question, you know, as part of that software roadmap in terms of the evolution and the speed of that circuit execution is really this interesting marriage between classical processing and quantum processing and bring those closer together. And in the context of our classical operations that are interfacing with that quantum processor, we're taking advantage of OpenShift, running on that classical machine to achieve that. And once again, if, as you can imagine, that'll give us a lot of flexibility in terms of where that classical machine resides and how we continue the evolution the great marriage, I think that's going to that will exist that does exist and will exist between classical computing and quantum computing. >> I'm glad I asked it was kind of tongue in cheek. But that's a key thread to the ecosystem, which is critical to obviously, you know, such a new technology. How are you thinking about the ecosystem evolution? >> Well, the ecosystem here for quantum is infinitely important. We started day one, on this journey with free access to our systems for that reason, because we wanted to create easy entry for anyone that really wanted to participate in this quantum journey. And I can tell you, it really fascinates everyone, from high school students, to college students, to those that are PhDs. But during this journey, we have reached over 300,000 unique users, we have now over 500,000 unique downloads of our Qiskit programming model. But to really achieve that is his back plane by this ongoing educational thrust that we have. So we've created an open source textbook, around Qiskit that allows organizations around the world to take advantage of it from a curriculum perspective. We have over 200 organizations that are using our open source textbook. Last year, when we realized we couldn't do our in person programming camps, which were so exciting around the world, you can imagine doing an in person programming camp and South Africa and Asia and all those things we did in 2019. Well, we had just like you all, we had to go completely virtual, right. And we thought that we would have a few 100 people sign up for our summer school, we had over 4000 people sign up for our summer school. And so one of the things we had to do is really pedal fast to be able to support that many students in this summer school that kind of grew out of our proportions. The neat thing was once again, seeing all the kids and students around the world taking advantage of this and learning about quantum computing. And then I guess that the end of last year, Dave, to really top this off, we did something really fundamentally important. And we set up a quantum center for historically black colleges and universities, with Howard University being the anchor of this quantum center. And we're serving 23 HBCUs now, to be able to reach a new set of students, if you will, with STEM technologies, and most importantly, with quantum. And I find, you know, the neat thing about quantum is is very interdisciplinary. So we have quantum physicist, we have electrical engineers, we have engineers on the team, we have computer scientists, we have people with biology and chemistry and financial services backgrounds. So I'm pretty excited about the reach that we have with quantum into HBCUs and even beyond right I think we can do some we can have some phenomenal results and help a lot of people on this journey to quantum and you know, obviously help ourselves but help these students as well. >> What do you see in people do with quantum and maybe some of the use cases. I mean you mentioned there's sort of a connection to traditional workloads, but obviously some new territory what's exciting out there? >> Well, there's been a really a number of use cases that I think are top of mind right now. So one of the most interesting to me has been one that showed us a few months ago that we talked about in the press actually a few months ago, which is with Exxon Mobil. And they really started looking at logistics in the context of Maritime shipping, using quantum. And if you think of logistics, logistics are really, really complicated. Logistics in the face of a pandemic are even more complicated and logistics when things like the Suez Canal shuts down, are even more complicated. So think about, you know, when the Suez Canal shut down, it's kind of like the equivalent of several major airports around the world shutting down and then you have to reroute all the traffic, and that traffic and maritime shipping is has to be very precise, has to be planned the stops are plan, the routes are plan. And the interest that ExxonMobil has had in this journey is not just more effective logistics, but how do they get natural gas shipped around the world more effectively, because their goal is to bring energy to organizations into countries while reducing CO2 emissions. So they have a very grand vision that they're trying to accomplish. And this logistics operation is just one of many, then we can think of logistics, though being a being applicable to anyone that has a supply chain. So to other shipping organizations, not just Maritime shipping. And a lot of the optimization logic that we're learning from that set of work also applies to financial services. So if we look at optimization, around portfolio pricing, and everything, a lot of the similar characteristics will also go be applicable to the financial services industry. So that's one big example. And I guess our latest partnership that we announced with some fanfare, about two weeks ago, was with the Cleveland Clinic, and we're doing a special discovery acceleration activity with the Cleveland Clinic, which starts prominently with artificial intelligence, looking at chemistry and genomics, and improve speed around machine learning for all of the the critical healthcare operations that the Cleveland Clinic has embarked on but as part of that journey, they like many clients are evolving from artificial intelligence, and then learning how they can apply quantum as an accelerator in the future. And so they also indicated that they will buy the first commercial on premise quantum computer for their operations and place that in Ohio, in the the the years to come. So it's a pretty exciting relationship. These relationships show the power of the combination, once again, of classical computing, using that intelligently to solve very difficult problems. And then taking advantage of quantum for what it can uniquely do in a lot of these use cases. >> That's great description, because it is a strong connection to things that we do today. It's just going to do them better, but then it's going to open up a whole new set of opportunities. Everybody wants to know, when, you know, it's all over the place. Because some people say, oh, not for decades, other people say I think it's going to be sooner than you think. What are you guys saying about timeframe? >> We're certainly determined to make it sooner than later. Our roadmaps if you note go through 2023. And we think the 2023 is going to will be a pivotal year for us in terms of delivery around those roadmaps. But it's these kind of use cases and this intense working with these clients, 'cause when they work with us, they're giving us feedback on everything that we've done, how does this programming model really help me solve these problems? What do we need to do differently? In the case of Exxon Mobil, they've given us a lot of really great feedback on how we can better fine tune all elements of the system to improve that system. It's really allowed us to chart a course for how we think about the programming model in particular in the context of users. Just last week, in fact, we announced some new machine learning applications, which these applications are really to allow artificial intelligence users and programmers to get take advantage of quantum without being a quantum physicist or expert, right. So it's really an encapsulation of a composable elements so that they can start to use, using an interface allows them to access through PyTorch into the quantum computer, take advantage of some of the things we're doing around neural networks and things like that, once again, without having to be experts in quantum. So I think those are the kind of things we're learning how to do better, fundamentally through this co-creation and development with our quantum network. And our quantum network now is over 140 unique organizations and those are commercial, academic, national laboratories and startups that we're working with. >> The picture started become more clear, we're seeing emerging AI applications, a lot of work today in AI is in modeling. Over time, it's going to shift toward inference and real time and practical applications. Everybody talks about Moore's law being dead. Well, in fact, the yes, I guess, technically speaking, but the premise or the outcome of Moore's law is actually accelerating, we're seeing processor performance, quadrupling every two years now, when you include the GPU along with the CPU, the DSPs, the accelerators. And so that's going to take us through this decade, and then then quantum is going to power us, you know, well beyond who can even predict that. It's a very, very exciting time. Jamie, I always love talking to you. Thank you so much for coming back on the CUBE. >> Well, I appreciate the time. And I think you're exactly right, Dave, you know, we talked about POWER10, just for a few minutes there. But one of the things we've done in POWER10, as well as we've embedded AI into every core that processor, so you reduce that latency, we've got a 10 to 20 times improvement over the last generation in terms of artificial intelligence, you think about the evolution of a classical machine like that state of the art, and then combine that with quantum and what we can do in the future, I think is a really exciting time to be in computing. And I really appreciate your time today to have this dialogue with you. >> Yeah, it's always fun and it's of national importance as well. Jamie Thomas, thanks so much. This is Dave Vellante with the CUBE keep it right there our continuous coverage of IBM Think 2021 will be right back. (gentle music) (bright music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Welcome back to IBM. Think at 2021, the virtual edition, my name is Dave Volante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of think 21. And right now we're going to talk about banking and the post isolation economy. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. Look at Wigley's the general manager global banking financial markets at IBM and John diagonal is the global CTO and vice president and distinguished engineer for banking and financial services. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. That's my pleasure. Look at this current economic upheaval, it's quite a bit different from the last one. Isn't it? I mean, liquidity doesn't seem to be a problem for most banks these days. I mean, if anything, they're releasing loan loss reserves that they didn't need. What's from your perspective, what's the state of banking today and hopefully as we exit this pandemic soon. Okay. >>So, so Dave, I think, like you say, it's a, it's a, it's a state in a picture that, uh, in a significantly different from what people were expecting. And I, and I think some way, in some ways you're seeing the benefits of a number of the regulations that were put into, into place after the, you know, the financial crisis last time round, right? And therefore this time, you know, a health crisis did not become a financial crisis because I think the banks were in better shape. And also, you know, governments clearly have put worldwide a lot of liquidity into the, into the system. Um, I think if you look at it though, um, maybe two or three things ready to call out, firstly, there's a, there's a massive regional variation. So if you look at the U S banking industry, uh, it's extremely buoyant and I'll come back to that in a managing the way in which it's performing. >>Uh, you know, the banks that are starting to report that first quarter results are going to show a profitability that's significantly ahead of where they were last year. And probably some of those, some of that best performance for quite a long time, if you go into Europe, it's a completely different picture. I think the banks are extremely challenged at that. And I think you're going to see a much Bleaker outlook in terms of what those banks report, as far as Asia Pacific is concerned again, you know, because they did, they have come out of the pandemic much faster that consumer businesses back into growth. Again, I think they're showing some pretty buoyant up performance as far as, as far as banking performance is concerned. I think the beast that's particularly interesting. And I think Kim is a bit of a surprise to most, uh, is, is what we've seen in the U S right? >>And in the U S what's actually happened is, uh, the investment banking side of banking businesses has been doing better than they've ever done before. There's been the most unbelievable amount of acquisition activity. You've seen a lot of what's going on with the specs that's driving the res you know, deal based fee income for the banks, the volatility in the marketplace, meaning that trading income is much, much higher than it's ever been. And therefore the banks are very much seeing a profitability on that investment banking side. That was way ahead of what I think they were, they were expecting. Consumer business is definitely down. If you look at the credit card business, it's down, if you look at, uh, you know, lending activity, that's going down, going out, it's substantially less than where it was before. There's hardly any lending growth because the economy is flat at this moment in time. >>But again, the good news that, and I think this is a worldwide, but you're not just in the us. The good news here is that because of the liquidity and some of them are special mentions that government put out that there has not been, uh, the, the level of bankruptcies that people were expecting. Right. And that for most of the provisioning that the banks did, um, in expectation of non-performing loans has been, I think, a much more, much greater than what they're going to need, which is why you're starting to supervision is being released as well, which I kind of flattering, flattering the income flattering. I think going forward though, you're going to see a different picture. >>It's the, thank you for the clarification on the regional divergence is that you're right on, I mean, European central banks are, are not the same, the same position, uh, to, to affect liquidity, but is that nuance, is that variation across the globe? Is that, uh, is that a blind spot? Is that a, is that a, a concern, uh, or the other, other greater concerns, you know, inflation and, and, and the, the, the pace of the, the return to the economy. What are your thoughts on that? >>So I think, I think the, um, the, the, the concern, um, you know, as far as the European marketplace is concerned is, um, you know, whether the, the performance that in particularly, I don't think the level of Verition in there was quite as generous as we saw in other parts of the world. And therefore, um, you know, ease the issue around non-performing loans in, in Europe going to hold the European, uh, European banks back. And are they going to, you know, therefore constrained them under lending that they put into the economy. And that then, um, you know, reduces the level of economic growth that we see in Europe. Right. I think, I think that is certainly that is certainly a concern. Um, I would be surprised and I've been looking at, you know, forecasts that have been brought forward by various people around the world around infection. >>I would be surprised if inflation starts to become a genuine problem in the, in the kind of short to medium term. I think in the industry that are going to be two or three other things that are probably going to be more, you know, going to be more issues. Right. I think the first one, which is becoming top of mind for chief executives is this whole area around operational resiliency. So, you know, regulators universally are making very, very sure that banks do not have a technical debt or a complexity of legacy systems issue. They are. And, you know, the UK has taken the lead on this and they are going so far as even requiring non-executive directors to be liable. If banks are found to not have the right policies in place, this is not being followed by other regulators around the world. Right. So, so that is very much top of mind at this moment in time. >>So I think discretionary investment is going to be, uh, you know, to watch, um, uh, solving that particular problem. I think that that's one issue. I think the other issue is what the pandemic has shown is that, and, and, and this was very evident to me. I mean, I spent the last three years out in Singapore where, you know, banks have become very digital businesses. Right. When I came into the U S in my current role, it was somewhat surprising to me as to where the U S marketplace was in terms of digitization of banking. But if you look in the last 12 months, uh, you know, I think more has been achieved in terms of banks becoming digital businesses. And they've probably done in the last two or three years. Right. And then the real acceleration of that, uh, digitalization, which is going to continue to happen. But the downside of that has been that the threat to the banking industry from essentially fintechs and big decks has exactly, you know, it's really accelerated. Right, right. I mean, just to give you an example, pay Pat is the second largest financial services institution in the us, right. So that's become a real problem of my English. The banking industry is going to have to deal with, >>I want to come back to that, but now let's bring John into the conversation. Let's talk about the tech stack. Look, it was talking about whether it was resiliency going digital. We certainly saw with the pandemic remote work, huge, huge volumes of things like PPP and, and, and, and, and mortgages and with dropping rates, et cetera. So, John, how has the tech stack been altered in the past 14 months? >>Great question, Dave and it's top of mind for almost every single financial services firm, regardless of the sector within the overall industry, every single business has been taking stock of how they handled the pandemic and the economic conditions thereafter, and all of the business needs that were driven by the pandemic. In so many situations, firms were unable to service their clients or were not competitive in serving their clients. And as a result, they've had to do very deep, uh, uh, architectural, uh, transformation and digital transformation around their core platforms, their systems of analytics and their systems, their front end systems of engagement in terms of, uh, the core processing systems that many of these institutions, some in many cases, they're 50 years old. And with any 50 year old application platform, there are inherent limitations as an inflexibility and flexibility as an inability to innovate for the future as a speed of delivery issue. In, in other words, it can be very hard to accelerate delivery of new capabilities onto an aging platform. And so in every single case, um, institutions are looking to hybrid cloud and public cloud technology, and pre-packaged AI and pre-packaged solutions from an ISV ecosystem of software vendor ecosystem to say, as long as we can crack open many of these old monolithic cores and surround them with new digitization, new user experience that spans every channel and automation from the front to back of every interaction, that's where most institutions are prioritizing. Yep. >>Banks, aren't gonna migrate. Uh, they're gonna, they're going to build a abstraction layer. I want to come back to the disruption is so interesting. You had the Coinbase IPO last month, see Tesla and micro strategy. They're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Jamie diamond says traditional banks are playing a smaller role in the financial system because of the new fintechs. Look at, you mentioned PayPal, the Stripe does Robin hood. You get the Silicon Valley giants have this dual disruptive disruption agenda, Apple, Amazon, even Walmart, Facebook. The question is, are traditional banks going to lose control of the payment systems? >>Yeah, I mean, I think to a large extent that is, that is already happened, right? Because I think if you look at, if you look at the experience in Asia, right, and you look at particularly organizations like iron financial, uh, you know, in India, you look at organizations like ATM the, you know, very substantial trends, particularly on the consumer payment side has actually moved, uh, away from the banks. And I think you're starting to see that in the West as well, right. With organizations like, you know, cloud. Now that's coming out with this, um, you know, pay, you know, buying out the later type of schemes. You've got and then, so you've got PayPal. And as you said, Stripe, uh, and, and others as well, but it's not just, um, you know, in the payment side. Right. I think, I think what's starting to happen is that, that are very core part of the banking business, you know, especially things like lending, for instance, where again, you are getting a number of these, um, fintechs and big, big tech companies entering the marketplace. >>And I, and I think the threat for the banks is, and this is not going to be small chunks of market share that you're going to actually lose. Right. It's, it's, it's actually, uh, it could actually be a Kodak moment. Let me give you an example. Uh, you know, you will have just seen that grab is going to be acquired by one of these facts for about $40 billion. I mean, this organization started like the Uber in Singapore. It very rapidly got into both the payment side, right? So it actually went to all of these mom and pop shops and it offered QR based, um, go out code based payment capabilities to these very small retailers. They were charging about half or a third of what MasterCard or visa were charging to run those payment routes. They took market share overnight. You look at the remittance business, right? >>They, they went into the remittance business, they set up these wallets in 28 countries around the ICR and region. They took huge chunks of business completely away from DBS, which is the local bank out there from Western union and all of these, all of these others. So, so I, I think it's a real threat. I think Jamie Dimon is saying what the banking industry has said always, right? Which is the reason we are losing is because the playing field is not even, this is not about playing fields and even right. All of these businesses have been subject to exactly the same regulation that the bank shop subject to regulations in Singapore and India, more onerous than maybe in other parts of the world. This is around the banking business, recognizing that this is a threat. And exactly, as John was saying, you got to get to delivering the customer experience. >>That juniors are wanting at the level of pasta they're prepared to pay. And you're not going to do that by purely shorting out the channels and having a cool app on somebody's smartphone. Right? If that smartphone is 48 by arcade processes and legacy systems, where can I apply? You know, like, like today, you know, you make a payment, your payment does not clear for five days, right? Whereas in Singapore I make a payment, the payment is instantaneously cleared, right? That's where the banking system is going to have to get to in order to get to that. You need to order the whole stack. And the really good news is there are many examples where this has been done very successfully by incumbent banks. You don't have to set up a digital bank on the side to do it. An incumbent bank could do it, and it can do it in a sense of a period of time, or does sense for level of investment. A lot of IBM's business across our consulting, as well as our, our technology stack is very much trying to do that with our clients. So I am personally very bullish about what the industry >>Yeah. I mean, taking friction out of the system sometimes with the case of crypto taking the middle person out of the system. But I think you guys are savvy. You understand that, you know, like, yeah, Jamie diamonds a couple of years ago said, he'd fire anybody doing crypto Janet Yellen and says, ah, I don't really get it. You know, Warren buffet. But I think as technology people, we look at it and say, okay, wait a minute. This is an interesting Petri dish. There's, there's fundamental technology here that has massive funding that is going to inform, you know, the future. I think, you know, big bags are gonna lean in some of them and others, others. Won't, uh, John, give you the last word here, >>But for sure they're leaning in. Uh, so to just, to, to, to think about, uh, uh, something that Likud said a moment ago, the reason these startups were able to innovate fast was because they didn't have the legacy. They didn't have the spaghetti lying around. They were able to be relentlessly laser focused on building new, using the API ecosystem, going straight to public and hybrid cloud and not worrying about everything that had been built for the last 50 years or so. The benefit for existing institutions, the incumbents is that they can use all of the same techniques and tools and hybrid cloud accelerators in terms. And we're not just thinking about, um, uh, retail banking here, your question around the industry, that disruption from Bitcoin, blockchain technologies, new ways of processing securities. It is playing out in every single securities processing and capital markets organization. Right now I'm working with several organizations right now, exactly on how to build custody systems, to take advantage of these non fungible digital assets. It's a hot, hot topic around which there's, uh, incredible, uh, appetite to invest an incredible appetite to innovate. And we know that the center of all these technologies are going to be cloud forward cloud ready, AI infused data infuse technologies. >>So I want to have you back. I wish you had more time. I want to talk about specs. I want to talk about NFTs. I want to talk about technology behind all this really great conversation and really appreciate your time. I'm sorry. We got to go. >>Thank you. Thanks so much indeed, for having us. >>Oh, really? Pleasure. Was mine. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for IBM. Think 2021. You're watching the cube.

(bright music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. This is the CUBEs, continuous, deep dive coverage of the people, processes and technologies that are really changing our world. Right now, we're going to talk about modernization and what's beyond with Jamie Thomas, general manager, strategy and development, IBM Enterprise Security. Jamie, always a pleasure. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you, Dave. And thanks for having me on the CUBE is always a pleasure. >> Yeah, it is our pleasure. And listen, we've been hearing a lot about IBM is focused on hybrid cloud, Arvind Krishna says we must win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I love that. We've been hearing a lot about AI. And I wonder if you could talk about IBM Systems and how it plays into that strategy? >> Sure, well, it's a great time to have this discussion Dave. As you all know, IBM Systems Technology is used widely around the world, by many, many 1000s of clients in the context of our IBM System Z, our power systems and storage. And what we have seen is really an uptake of monetization around those workloads, if you will, driven by hybrid cloud, the hybrid cloud agenda, as well as an uptake of Red Hat OpenShift, as a vehicle for this modernization. So it's pretty exciting stuff, what we see as many clients taking advantage of OpenShift on Linux, to really modernize these environments, and then stay close, if you will, to that systems of record database and the transactions associated with it. So they're seeing a definite performance advantage to taking advantage of OpenShift. And it's really fascinating to see the things that they're doing. So if you look at financial services, for instance, there's a lot of focus on risk analytics. So things like fraud, anti money laundering, mortgage risk, types of applications being done in this context, when you look at our retail industry clients, you see also a lot of customer centricity solutions, if you will, being deployed on OpenShift. And once again, having Linux close to those traditional LPARs of AIX, I-Series, or in the context of z/OS. So those are some of the things we see happening. And it's quite real. >> Now, you didn't mention power, but I want to come back and ask you about power. Because a few weeks ago, we were prompted to dig in a little bit with the when Arvind was on with Pat Kessinger at Intel and talking about the relationship you guys have. And so we dug in a little bit, we thought originally, we said, oh, it's about quantum. But we dug in. And we realized that the POWER10 is actually the best out there and the highest performance in terms of disaggregating memory. And we see that as a future architecture for systems and actually really quite excited about it about the potential that brings not only to build beyond system on a chip and system on a package, but to start doing interesting things at the Edge. You know, what do you what's going on with power? >> Well, of course, when I talked about OpenShift, we're doing OpenShift on power Linux, as well as Z Linux, but you're exactly right in the context for a POWER10 processor. We couldn't be more we're so excited about this processor. First of all, it's our first delivery with our partner Samsung with a seven nanometer form factor. The processor itself has only 18 billion transistors. So it's got a few transistors there. But one of the cool inventions, if you will, that we have created is this expansive memory region as part of this design point, which we call memory inception, it gives us the ability to reach memory across servers, up to two petabytes of memory. Aside from that, this processor has generational improvements and core and thread performance, improved energy efficiency. And all of this, Dave is going to give us a lot of opportunity with new workloads, particularly around artificial intelligence and inferencing around artificial intelligence. I mean, that's going to be that's another critical innovation that we see here in this POWER10 processor. >> Yeah, processor performance is just exploding. We're blowing away the historical norms. I think many people don't realize that. Let's talk about some of the key announcements that you've made in quantum last time we spoke on the qubit for last year, I think we did a deeper dive on quantum. You've made some announcements around hardware and software roadmaps. Give us the update on quantum please. >> Well, there is so much that has happened since we last spoke on the quantum landscape. And the key thing that we focused on in the last six months is really an articulation of our roadmaps, so the roadmap around hardware, the roadmap around software, and we've also done quite a bit of ecosystem development. So in terms of the roadmap around hardware, we put ourselves out there we've said we were going to get to over 1000 qubit machine and in 2023, so that's our milestone. And we've got a number of steps we've outlined along that way, of course, we have to make progress, frankly, every six months in terms of innovating around the processor, the electronics and the fridge associated with these machines. So lots of exciting innovation across the board. We've also published a software roadmap, where we're articulating how we improve a circuit execution speeds. So we hope, our plan to show shortly a 100 times improvement in circuit execution speeds. And as we go forward in the future, we're modifying our Qiskit programming model to not only allow a easily easy use by all types of developers, but to improve the fidelity of the entire machine, if you will. So all of our innovations go hand in hand, our hardware roadmap, our software roadmap, are all very critical in driving the technical outcomes that we think are so important for quantum to become a reality. We've deployed, I would say, in our quantum cloud over, you know, over 20 machines over time, we never quite identify the precise number because frankly, as we put up a new generation machine, we often retire when it's older. So we're constantly updating them out there, and every machine that comes on online, and that cloud, in fact, represents a sea change and hardware and a sea change in software. So they're all the latest and greatest that our clients can have access to. >> That's key, the developer angle you got redshift running on quantum yet? >> Okay, I mean, that's a really good question, you know, as part of that software roadmap in terms of the evolution and the speed of that circuit execution is really this interesting marriage between classical processing and quantum processing and bring those closer together. And in the context of our classical operations that are interfacing with that quantum processor, we're taking advantage of OpenShift, running on that classical machine to achieve that. And once again, if, as you can imagine, that'll give us a lot of flexibility in terms of where that classical machine resides and how we continue the evolution the great marriage, I think that's going to that will exist that does exist and will exist between classical computing and quantum computing. >> I'm glad I asked it was kind of tongue in cheek. But that's a key thread to the ecosystem, which is critical to obviously, you know, such a new technology. How are you thinking about the ecosystem evolution? >> Well, the ecosystem here for quantum is infinitely important. We started day one, on this journey with free access to our systems for that reason, because we wanted to create easy entry for anyone that really wanted to participate in this quantum journey. And I can tell you, it really fascinates everyone, from high school students, to college students, to those that are PhDs. But during this journey, we have reached over 300,000 unique users, we have now over 500,000 unique downloads of our Qiskit programming model. But to really achieve that is his back plane by this ongoing educational thrust that we have. So we've created an open source textbook, around Qiskit that allows organizations around the world to take advantage of it from a curriculum perspective. We have over 200 organizations that are using our open source textbook. Last year, when we realized we couldn't do our in person programming camps, which were so exciting around the world, you can imagine doing an in person programming camp and South Africa and Asia and all those things we did in 2019. Well, we had just like you all, we had to go completely virtual, right. And we thought that we would have a few 100 people sign up for our summer school, we had over 4000 people sign up for our summer school. And so one of the things we had to do is really pedal fast to be able to support that many students in this summer school that kind of grew out of our proportions. The neat thing was once again, seeing all the kids and students around the world taking advantage of this and learning about quantum computing. And then I guess that the end of last year, Dave, to really top this off, we did something really fundamentally important. And we set up a quantum center for historically black colleges and universities, with Howard University being the anchor of this quantum center. And we're serving 23 HBCUs now, to be able to reach a new set of students, if you will, with STEM technologies, and most importantly, with quantum. And I find, you know, the neat thing about quantum is is very interdisciplinary. So we have quantum physicist, we have electrical engineers, we have engineers on the team, we have computer scientists, we have people with biology and chemistry and financial services backgrounds. So I'm pretty excited about the reach that we have with quantum into HBCUs and even beyond right I think we can do some we can have some phenomenal results and help a lot of people on this journey to quantum and you know, obviously help ourselves but help these students as well. >> What do you see in people do with quantum and maybe some of the use cases. I mean you mentioned there's sort of a connection to traditional workloads, but obviously some new territory what's exciting out there? >> Well, there's been a really a number of use cases that I think are top of mind right now. So one of the most interesting to me has been one that showed us a few months ago that we talked about in the press actually a few months ago, which is with Exxon Mobil. And they really started looking at logistics in the context of Maritime shipping, using quantum. And if you think of logistics, logistics are really, really complicated. Logistics in the face of a pandemic are even more complicated and logistics when things like the Suez Canal shuts down, are even more complicated. So think about, you know, when the Suez Canal shut down, it's kind of like the equivalent of several major airports around the world shutting down and then you have to reroute all the traffic, and that traffic and maritime shipping is has to be very precise, has to be planned the stops are plan, the routes are plan. And the interest that ExxonMobil has had in this journey is not just more effective logistics, but how do they get natural gas shipped around the world more effectively, because their goal is to bring energy to organizations into countries while reducing CO2 emissions. So they have a very grand vision that they're trying to accomplish. And this logistics operation is just one of many, then we can think of logistics, though being a being applicable to anyone that has a supply chain. So to other shipping organizations, not just Maritime shipping. And a lot of the optimization logic that we're learning from that set of work also applies to financial services. So if we look at optimization, around portfolio pricing, and everything, a lot of the similar characteristics will also go be applicable to the financial services industry. So that's one big example. And I guess our latest partnership that we announced with some fanfare, about two weeks ago, was with the Cleveland Clinic, and we're doing a special discovery acceleration activity with the Cleveland Clinic, which starts prominently with artificial intelligence, looking at chemistry and genomics, and improve speed around machine learning for all of the the critical healthcare operations that the Cleveland Clinic has embarked on but as part of that journey, they like many clients are evolving from artificial intelligence, and then learning how they can apply quantum as an accelerator in the future. And so they also indicated that they will buy the first commercial on premise quantum computer for their operations and place that in Ohio, in the the the years to come. So it's a pretty exciting relationship. These relationships show the power of the combination, once again, of classical computing, using that intelligently to solve very difficult problems. And then taking advantage of quantum for what it can uniquely do in a lot of these use cases. >> That's great description, because it is a strong connection to things that we do today. It's just going to do them better, but then it's going to open up a whole new set of opportunities. Everybody wants to know, when, you know, it's all over the place. Because some people say, oh, not for decades, other people say I think it's going to be sooner than you think. What are you guys saying about timeframe? >> We're certainly determined to make it sooner than later. Our roadmaps if you note go through 2023. And we think the 2023 is going to will be a pivotal year for us in terms of delivery around those roadmaps. But it's these kind of use cases and this intense working with these clients, 'cause when they work with us, they're giving us feedback on everything that we've done, how does this programming model really help me solve these problems? What do we need to do differently? In the case of Exxon Mobil, they've given us a lot of really great feedback on how we can better fine tune all elements of the system to improve that system. It's really allowed us to chart a course for how we think about the programming model in particular in the context of users. Just last week, in fact, we announced some new machine learning applications, which these applications are really to allow artificial intelligence users and programmers to get take advantage of quantum without being a quantum physicist or expert, right. So it's really an encapsulation of a composable elements so that they can start to use, using an interface allows them to access through PyTorch into the quantum computer, take advantage of some of the things we're doing around neural networks and things like that, once again, without having to be experts in quantum. So I think those are the kind of things we're learning how to do better, fundamentally through this co-creation and development with our quantum network. And our quantum network now is over 140 unique organizations and those are commercial, academic, national laboratories and startups that we're working with. >> The picture started become more clear, we're seeing emerging AI applications, a lot of work today in AI is in modeling. Over time, it's going to shift toward inference and real time and practical applications. Everybody talks about Moore's law being dead. Well, in fact, the yes, I guess, technically speaking, but the premise or the outcome of Moore's law is actually accelerating, we're seeing processor performance, quadrupling every two years now, when you include the GPU along with the CPU, the DSPs, the accelerators. And so that's going to take us through this decade, and then then quantum is going to power us, you know, well beyond who can even predict that. It's a very, very exciting time. Jamie, I always love talking to you. Thank you so much for coming back on the CUBE. >> Well, I appreciate the time. And I think you're exactly right, Dave, you know, we talked about POWER10, just for a few minutes there. But one of the things we've done in POWER10, as well as we've embedded AI into every core that processor, so you reduce that latency, we've got a 10 to 20 times improvement over the last generation in terms of artificial intelligence, you think about the evolution of a classical machine like that state of the art, and then combine that with quantum and what we can do in the future, I think is a really exciting time to be in computing. And I really appreciate your time today to have this dialogue with you. >> Yeah, it's always fun and it's of national importance as well. Jamie Thomas, thanks so much. This is Dave Vellante with the CUBE keep it right there our continuous coverage of IBM Think 2021 will be right back. (gentle music) (bright music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the cube with digital >>Coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to IBM Think 2021 The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of think 21. And right now we're gonna talk about banking in the post isolation economy. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guest. Look at wag lee is the general manager, Global banking financial markets at IBM and john Degnan is the global ceo and vice president and distinguished engineer for banking and financial services. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Yeah >>that's my pleasure. Look at this current economic upheaval. It's quite a bit different from the last one, isn't it? I mean liquidity doesn't seem to be a problem for most pecs these days. I mean if anything they're releasing loan loss reserves that they didn't need. What's from your perspective, what's the state of banking today and hopefully as we exit this pandemic soon. >>So so dave, I think, like you say, it's, you know, it's a it's a state and a picture that in a significantly different from what people were expecting. And I think some way, in some ways you're seeing the benefits of a number of the regulations that were put into into place after the, you know, the financial crisis last time around, right? And therefore this time, you know, a health crisis did not become a financial crisis, because I think the banks were in better shape. And also, you know, governments clearly have put worldwide a lot of liquidity into the, into the system. I think if you look at it though, maybe two or three things ready to call out firstly, there's a there's a massive regional variation. So if you look at the U. S. Banking industry, it's extremely buoyant and I'll come back to that in a minute in the way in which is performing, you know, the banks that are starting to report their first quarter results are going to show profitability. That's you know significantly ahead of where they were last year and probably some of the some of their best performance for quite a long time. If you go into europe, it's a completely different picture. I think the banks are extremely challenged out there and I think you're going to see a much bleaker outlook in terms of what those banks report and as far as Asia pacific is concerned again, you know because they they have come out of the pandemic much faster than consumer businesses back into growth. Again, I think they're showing some pretty buoyant performance as far as as far as banking performance is concerned. I think the piece that's particularly interesting and I think him as a bit of a surprise to most is what we've seen in the U. S. Right. And in the US what's actually happened is uh the investment banking side of banking businesses has been doing better than they've ever done before. There's been the most unbelievable amount of acquisition activity. You've seen a lot of what's going on with this facts that's driving deal raised, you know, deal based fee income for the banks. The volatility in the marketplace is meaning that trading income is much much higher than it's ever been. And therefore the banks are very much seeing a profitability on that investment banking side. That was way ahead of what I think they were. They were expecting consumer businesses definitely down. If you look at the credit card business, it's down. If you look at, you know, lending activity that's going down going out is substantially less than where it was before. There's hardly any lending growth because the economy clearly is flat at this moment in time. But again, the good news that, and I think this is a worldwide which are not just in us, the good news here is that because of the liquidity and and some of the special measures the government put out there, there has not been the level of bankruptcies that people were expecting, right. And therefore most of the provisioning that the banks did um in expectation of non performing loans has been, I think, a much more, much greater than what they're going to need, which is why you're starting to see provisions being released as well, which are kind of flattering, flattering the income, flattering the engine. I think going forward that you're going to see a different picture >>is the re thank you for the clarification on the regional divergence, is that and you're right on, I mean, european central banks are not the same, the same position uh to to affect liquidity. But is that nuances that variation across the globe? Is that a is that a blind spot? Is that a is that a concern or the other other greater concerns? You know, inflation and and and the the pace of the return to the economy? What are your thoughts on that? >>So, I think, I think the concern, um, you know, as far as the european marketplace is concerned is um you know, whether whether the performance that and particularly, I don't think the level of provisions in there was quite a generous, as we saw in other parts of the world, and therefore, you know, is the issue around non performing loans in in europe, going to hold the european uh european banks back? And are they going to, you know, therefore, constrain the amount of lending that they put into the economy and that then, um, you know, reduces the level of economic growth that we see in europe. Right? I think, I think that is certainly that is certainly a concern. Um I would be surprised and I've been looking at, you know, forecasts that have been put forward by various people around the world around inflation. I would be surprised if inflation starts to become a genuine problem in the, in the kind of short to medium term, I think in the industry that are going to be two or three other things that are probably going to be more, you know, going to be more issues. Right. I think the first one which is becoming top of mind for chief executives, is this whole area around operational resiliency. So, you know, regulators universally are making very very sure that banks do not have a technical debt or a complexity of legacy systems issue. They are and you know, the U. K. Has taken the lead on this and they are going so far as even requiring non executive directors to be liable if banks are found to not have the right policies in place. This is now being followed by other regulators around the world. Right. So so that is very much drop in mind at this moment in time. So I think discretionary investment is going to be put you know, towards solving that particular problem. I think that's that's one issue. I think the other issue is what the pandemic has shown is that and and and this was very evident to me and I mean I spent the last three years out in Singapore where you know, banks have become very digital businesses. Right? When I came into the U. S. In my current role, it was somewhat surprising to me as to where the U. S. Market place was in terms of digitization of banking. But if you look in the last 12 months, you know, I think more has been achieved in terms of banks becoming digital businesses and they've probably done in the last two or three years. Right. And that the real acceleration of that digitization which is going to continue to happen. But the downside of that has been that the threat to the banking industry from essentially fintech and big tex has exactly, it's really accelerated. Right, Right. Just to give you an example, Babel is the second largest financial services institutions in the US. Right. So that's become a real problem I think with the banking industry is going to have to deal with >>and I want to come back to that. But now let's bring john into the conversation. Let's talk about the tech stack. Look, it was talking about whether it was resiliency going digital, We certainly saw over the pandemic, remote work, huge, huge volumes of things like TPP and and and and and mortgages and with dropping rates, etcetera. So john, how is the tech stack Been altered in the past 14 months? >>Great question. Dave. And it's top of mind for almost every single financial services firm, regardless of the sector within the overall industry, every single business has been taking stock of how they handled the pandemic and the economic conditions thereafter and all of the business needs that were driven by the pandemic. In so many situations, firms were unable to service their clients or we're not competitive in serving their clients. And as a result they've had to do very deep uh architectural transformation and digital transformation around their core platforms. Their systems of analytics and their systems different end systems of engagement In terms of the core processing systems that many of these institutions, some in many cases there are 50 years old And with any 50 year old application platform there are inherent limitations. There's an in flex itty inflexibility. There's an inability to innovate for the future. There's a speed of delivery issue. In other words, it can be very hard to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities onto an aging platform. And so in every single case um institutions are looking to hybrid cloud and public cloud technology and pre packaged a ai and prepackaged solutions from an I. S. V. Ecosystem of software vendor ecosystem to say. As long as we can crack open many of these old monolithic cause and surround them with new digitalization, new user experience that spans every channel and automation from the front to back of every interaction. That's where most institutions are prioritizing. >>Banks aren't going to migrate, they're gonna they're gonna build an abstraction layer. I want to come back to the disruption is so interesting. The coin base I. P. O. Last month see Tesla and microstrategy. They're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Jamie diamonds. Traditional banks are playing a smaller role in the financial system because of the new fin text. Look at, you mentioned Paypal, the striped as Robin Hood, you get the Silicon Valley giants have this dual disrupt disruption agenda. Apple amazon even walmart facebook. The question is, are traditional banks going to lose control of the payment systems? >>Yeah. I mean I think to a large extent that is that has already happened, right? Because I think if you look at, you know, if you look at the experience in ASia, right? And you look at particularly organizations like and financial, you know, in India, you look at organizations like A T. M. You know, very substantial chance, particularly on the consumer payments side has actually moved away from the banks. And I think you're starting to see that in the west as well, right? With organizations like, you know, cloud, No, that's coming out with this, you know, you know, buying out a later type of schemes. You've got great. Um, and then so you've got paper and as you said, strike, uh and and others as well, but it's not just, you know, in the payment side. Right. I think, I think what's starting to happen is that there are very core part of the banking business. You know, especially things like lending for instance, where again, you are getting a number of these Frontex and big, big tech companies entering the marketplace. And and I think the threat for the banks is this is not going to be small chunks of market share that you're going to actually lose. Right? It's it's actually, it could actually be a Kodak moment. Let me give you an example. Uh, you know, you will have just seen that grab is going to be acquired by one of these facts for about $40 billion. I mean, this organization started like the Uber in Singapore. It very rapidly got into both the payment site. Right? So it actually went to all of these moment pop shops and then offered q are based um, 12 code based payment capabilities to these very small retailers, they were charging about half or a third or world Mastercard or Visa were charging to run those payment rails. They took market share overnight. You look at the Remittance business, right? They went into the Remittance business. They set up these wallets in 28 countries around the Asean region. They took huge chunks of business completely away from DBS, which is the local bank out there from Western Union and all of these, all of these others. So, so I think it's a real threat. I think Jamie Dimon is saying what the banking industry has said always right, which is the reason we're losing is because the playing field is not even, this is not about playing fields. Been even write, all of these businesses have been subject to exactly the same regulation that the banks are subject to. Regulations in Singapore and India are more onerous than maybe in other parts of the world. This is about the banking business, recognizing that this is a threat and exactly as john was saying, you've got to get to delivering the customer experience that consumers are wanting at the level of cost that they're prepared to pay. And you're not going to do that by purely sorting out the channels and having a cool app on somebody's smartphone, Right? If that's not funny reported by arcade processes and legacy systems when I, you know, like, like today, you know, you make a payment, your payment does not clear for five days, right? Whereas in Singapore, I make a payment. The payment is instantaneously clear, right? That's where the banking system is going to have to get to. In order to get to that. You need to water the whole stack. And the really good news is that many examples where this has been done very successfully by incumbent banks. You don't have to set up a digital bank on the site to do it. And incumbent bank can do it and it can do it in a sensible period of time at a sensible level of investment. A lot of IBM s business across our consulting as well as our technology stack is very much trying to do that with our clients. So I am personally very bullish about what the industry >>yeah, taking friction out of the system, sometimes with a case of crypto taking the middle person out of the system. But I think you guys are savvy, you understand that, you know, you yeah, Jamie Diamond a couple years ago said he'd fire anybody doing crypto Janet Yellen and says, I don't really get a Warren Buffett, but I think it's technology people we look at and say, okay, wait a minute. This is an interesting Petri dish. There's, there's a fundamental technology here that has massive funding that is going to inform, you know, the future. And I think, you know, big bags are gonna lean in some of them and others, others won't john give you the last word here >>for sure, they're leaning in. Uh so to just to to think about uh something that lick it said a moment ago, the reason these startups were able to innovate fast was because they didn't have the legacy, They didn't have the spaghetti lying around. They were able to be relentlessly laser focused on building new, using the app ecosystem going straight to public and hybrid cloud and not worrying about everything that had been built for the last 50 years or so. The benefit for existing institutions, the incumbents is that they can use all of the same techniques and tools and hybrid cloud accelerators in terms And we're not just thinking about uh retail banking here. Your question around the industry that disruption from Bitcoin Blockchain technologies, new ways of processing securities. It is playing out in every single securities processing and capital markets organization right now. I'm working with several organizations right now exactly on how to build custody systems to take advantage of these non fungible digital assets. It's a hard, hard topic around which there's an incredible appetite to invest. An incredible appetite to innovate. And we know that the center of all these technologies are going to be cloud forward cloud ready. Ai infused data infused technologies >>Guys, I want to have you back. I wish I had more time. I want to talk about SPAC. So I want to talk about N. F. T. S. I want to talk about technology behind all this. You really great conversation. I really appreciate your time. I'm sorry. We got to go. >>Thank you. Thanks very much indeed for having us. It was a real pleasure. >>Really. Pleasure was mine. Thank you for watching everybody's day. Volonte for IBM think 2021. You're watching the Cube. Mhm.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3 million, more than has ever been paid for works, by Gauguin or Salvador Dali, making it created the third most expensive living artists in the world. One can't help but take notice and ask, what is going on? The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit bubblicious, but it's yet another sign, that the digital age is now fully upon us. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon's CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to take a look at some of the trends, that may be difficult for observers and investors to understand, but we think offer significant insights to the future and possibly some opportunities for young investors many of whom are fans of this program. And how the trends may relate to enterprise tech. Okay, so this guy Beeple is now the hottest artist on the planet. That's his Twitter profile. That picture on the inset. His name is Mike Winkelmann. He is actually a normal looking dude, but that's the picture he chose for his Twitter. This collage reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. You may already know the story, but many of you may not. Back in 2005 a college kid from England named Alex Tew, T-E-W created The Million Dollar Homepage to fund his education. And his idea was to create a website with a million pixels, and sell ads at a dollar for each pixel. Guess how much money he raised. A million bucks, right? No, wrong. He raised $1,037,100. How so you ask? Well, he auctioned off the last 1000 pixels on eBay, which fetched an additional $38,000. Crazy, right? Well, maybe not. Pretty creative in a way, way early sign of things to come. Now, I'm not going to go deep into NFTs, and explain the justification behind them. There's a lot of material that's been published that can do justice to the topic better than I can. But here are the basics, NFTs stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. They are digital representations of assets that exist in a blockchain. Now, each token as a unique and immutable identifier, and it uses cryptography to ensure its authenticity. NFTs by the name, they're not fungible. So, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, which can be traded on a like-for-like basis, in other words, if you and I each own one bitcoin we know exactly how much each of our bitcoins is worth at any point of time. Non-Fungible Tokens each have their own unique values. So, they're not comparable on a like-to-like basis. But what's the point of this? Well, NFTs can be applied to any property, identities tweets, videos, we're seeing collectables, digital art, pretty much anything. And it's really. The use cases are unlimited. And NFTs can streamline transactions, and they can be bought and sold very efficiently without the need for a trusted third party involved. Now, the other benefit is the probability of fraud, is greatly reduced. So where do NFTs fit as an asset class? Well, they're definitely a new type of asset. And again, I'm not going to try to justify their existence, but I want to talk about the choices, that investors have in the market today. The other day, I was on a call with Jay Po. He is a VC and a Principal at a company called Stage 2 Capital. He's a former Bessemer VC and one of the sharper investors around. And he was talking about the choices that investors have and he gave a nice example that I want to share with you and try to apply here. Now, as an investor, you have alternatives, of course we're showing here a few with their year to date charts. Now, as an example, you can buy Amazon stock. Now, if you bought just about exactly a year ago you did really well, you probably saw around an 80% return or more. But if you want to jump in today, your mindset might be, hmm, well, okay. Amazon, they're going to be around for a long time, so it's kind of low risk and I like the stock, but you're probably going to get, well let's say, maybe a 10% annual return over the longterm, 15% or maybe less maybe single digits, but, maybe more than that but it's unlikely that any kind of reasonable timeframe within any reasonable timeframe you're going to get a 10X return. In order to get that type of return on invested capital, Amazon would have to become a $16 trillion valued company. So, you sit there, you asked yourself, what's the probability that Amazon goes out of business? Well, that's pretty low, right? And what are the chances it becomes a $16 trillion company over the next several years? Well, it's probably more likely that it continues to grow at that more stable rate that I talked about. Okay, now let's talk about Snowflake. Now, as you know, we've covered the company quite extensively. We watched this company grow from an early stage startup and then saw its valuation increase steadily as a private company, but you know, even early last year it was valued around $12 billion, I think in February, and as late as mid September right before the IPO news hit that Marc Benioff and Warren Buffett were going to put in $250 million each at the IPO or just after the IPO and it was projected that Snowflake's valuation could go over $20 billion at that point. And on day one after the IPO Snowflake, closed worth more than $50 billion, the stock opened at 120, but unless you knew a guy, you had to hold your nose and buy on day one. And you know, maybe got it at 240, maybe you got it at 250, you might have got it at higher and at the time you might recall, I said, You're likely going to get a better price than on day one, which is usually the case with most IPOs, stock today's around 230. But you look at Snowflake today and if you want to buy in, you look at it and say, Okay, well I like the company, it's probably still overvalued, but I can see the company's value growing substantially over the next several years, maybe doubling in the near to midterm [mumbles] hit more than a hundred billion dollar valuation back as recently as December, so that's certainly feasible. The company is not likely to flame out because it's highly valued, I have to probably be patient for a couple of years. But you know, let's say I liked the management, I liked the company, maybe the company gets into the $200 billion range over time and I can make a decent return, but to get a 10X return on Snowflake you have to get to a valuation of over a half a trillion. Now, to get there, if it gets there it's going to become one of the next great software companies of our time. And you know, frankly if it gets there I think it's going to go to a trillion. So, if that's what your bet is then you know, you would be happy with that of course. But what's the likelihood? As an investor you have to evaluate that, what's the probability? So, it's a lower risk investment in Snowflake but maybe more likely that Snowflake, you know, they run into competition or the market shifts, maybe they get into the $200 billion range, but it really has to transform the industry execute for you to get in to that 10 bagger territory. Okay, now let's look at a different asset that is cryptocurrency called Compound, way more risky. But Compound is a decentralized protocol that allows you to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies. Now, I'm not saying go out and buy compound but just as a thought exercise is it's got an asset here with a lower valuation, probably much higher upside, but much higher risk. But so for Compound to get to 10X return it's got to get to $20 billion valuation. Now, maybe compound isn't the right asset for your cup of tea, but there are many cryptos that have made it that far and if you do your research and your homework you could find a project that's much, much earlier stage that yes, is higher risk but has a much higher upside that you can participate in. So, this is how investors, all investors really look at their choices and make decisions. And the more sophisticated investors, they're going to use detailed metrics and analyze things like MOIC, Multiple on Invested Capital and IRR, which is Internal Rate of Return, do TAM analysis, Total Available Market. They're going to look at competition. They're going to look at detailed company models in ARR and Churn rates and so forth. But one of the things we really want to talk about today and we brought this up at the snowflake IPO is if you were Buffet or Benioff and you had to, you know, quarter of a dollars to put in you could get an almost guaranteed return with your late in the game, but pre IPO money or a look if you were Mike Speiser or one of the earlier VCs or even someone like Jeremy Burton who was part of the inside network you could get stock or options, much cheaper. You get a 5X, 10X, 50X or even North of a hundred X return like the early VCs who took a big risk. But chances are, you're not one of these in one of these categories. So how can you as a little guy participate in something big and you might remember at the time of the snowflake IPO we showed you this picture, who are these people, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Chris Dixon, this girl Sono. And of course Tim Berners-Lee, you know, that these are some of the folks that inspired me personally to pay attention to crypto. And I want to share the premise that caught my attention. It was this. Think about the early days of the internet. If you saw what Berners-Lee was working on or Linus Torvalds, in one to invest in the internet, you really couldn't. I mean, you couldn't invest in Linux or TCP/IP or HTTP. Suppose you could have invested in Cisco after its IPO that would have paid off pretty big time, for sure. You know, he could have waited for the Netscape IPO but the core infrastructure of the internet was fundamentally not directly a candidate for investment by you or really, you know, by anybody. And Satya Nadella said the other day we have reached maximum centralization. The main protocols of the internet were largely funded by the government and they've been co-opted by the giants. But with crypto, you actually can invest in core infrastructure technologies that are building out a decentralized internet, a new internet, you know call it web three Datto. It's a big part of the investment thesis behind what Carlson-wee is doing. And Andreessen Horowitz they have two crypto funds. They've raised more than $800 million to invest and you should read the firm's crypto investment thesis and maybe even take their crypto startup classes and some great content there. Now, one of the people that I haven't mentioned in this picture is Camila Russo. She's a journalist she's turned into hardcore crypto author is doing great job explaining the white hot defining space or decentralized finance. If you're just at read her work and educate yourself and learn more about the future and be happy perhaps you'll find some 10X or even hundred X opportunities. So look, there's so much innovation going around going on around blockchain and crypto. I mean, you could listen to Warren Buffet and Janet Yellen who implied this is all going to end badly. But while look, these individuals they're smart people. I don't think they would be my go-to source on understanding the potential of the technology and the future of what it could bring. Now, we've talked earlier at the, at the start here about NFTs. DeFi is one of the most interesting and disruptive trends to FinTech, names like Celsius, Nexo, BlockFi. BlockFi let's actually the average person participate in liquidity pools is actually quite interesting. Crypto is going mainstream Tesla, micro strategy putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. We have a 2017 Jamie diamond. He called Bitcoin a tulip bulb like fraud, yet just the other day JPM announced a structured investment vehicle to give its clients a basket of stocks that have exposure to crypto, PayPal allowing customers to buy, sell, and Hodl crypto. You can trade crypto on Robin Hood. Central banks are talking about launching digital currencies. I talked about the Fedcoin for a number of years and why not? Coinbase is doing an IPO will give it a value of over a hundred billion. Wow, that sounds frothy, but still big names like Mark Cuban and Jamaat palliate Patiala have been active in crypto for a while. Gronk is getting into NFTs. So it goes to have a little bit of that bubble feel to it. But look often when tech bubbles burst they shake out the pretenders but if there's real tech involved, some contenders emerge. So, and they often do so as dominant players. And I really believe that the innovation around crypto is going to be sustained. Now, there is a new web being built out. So if you want to participate, you got to do some research figure out things like how PolkaWorks, make a call on whether you think avalanche is an Ethereum killer dig in and find out about new projects and form a thesis. And you may, as a small player be able to find some big winners, but look you do have to be careful. There was a lot of fraud during the ICO. Craze is your risk. So understand the Tokenomics and maybe as importantly the Pump-a-nomics, because they certainly loom as dangers. This is not for the faint of heart but because I believe it involves real tech. I like it way better than Reddit stocks like GameStop for example, now not to diss Reddit. There's some good information on Reddit. If you're patient, you can find it. And there's lots of good information flowing on Discord. There's people flocking to Telegram as a hedge against big tech. Maybe there's all sounds crazy. And you know what, if you've grown up in a privileged household and you have a US Education you know, maybe it is nuts and a bit too risky for you. But if you're one of the many people who haven't been able to participate in these elite circles there are things going on, especially outside of the US that are democratizing investment opportunities. And I think that's pretty cool. You just got to be careful. So, this is a bit off topic from our typical focus and ETR survey analysis. So let's bring this back to the enterprise because there's a lot going on there as well with blockchain. Now let me first share some quotes on blockchain from a few ETR Venn Roundtables. First comment is from a CIO to diversified holdings company who says correctly, blockchain will hit the finance industry first but there are use cases in healthcare given the privacy and security concerns and logistics to ensure provenance and reduce fraud. And to that individual's point about finance. This is from the CTO of a major financial platform. We're really taking a look at payments. Yeah. Do you think traditional banks are going to lose control of the payment systems? Well, not without a fight, I guess, but look there's some real disruption possibilities here. And just last comment from a government CIO says, we're going to wait until the big platform players they get into their software. And so that is happening Oracle, IBM, VMware, Microsoft, AWS Cisco, they all have blockchain initiatives going on, now by the way, none of these tech companies wants to talk about crypto. They try to distance themselves from that topic which is understandable, I guess, but I'll tell you there's far more innovation going on in crypto than there is in enterprise tech companies at this point. But I predict that the crypto innovations will absolutely be seeping into enterprise tech players over time. But for now the cloud players, they want to support developers who are building out this new internet. The database is certainly a logical place to support a mutable transactions which allow people to do business one-on-one and have total confidence that the source hasn't been hacked or changed and infrastructure to support smart contracts. We've seen that. The use cases in the enterprise are endless asset tracking data access, food, tracking, maintenance, KYC or know your customer, there's applications in different industries, telecoms, oil and gas on and on and on. So look, think of NFTs as a signal crypto craziness is a signal. It's a signal as to how IT in other parts of companies and their data might be organized, managed and tracked and protected, and very importantly, valued. Look today. There's a lot of memes. Crypto kitties, art, of course money as well. Money is the killer app for blockchain, but in the future the underlying technology of blockchain and the many percolating innovations around it could become I think will become a fundamental component of a new digital economy. So get on board, do some research and learn for yourself. Okay, that's it for today. Remember all of these episodes they're available as podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Please feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or tweet me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action and data science. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, be careful out there in crypto land. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>From around the globe with digital coverage of 2020 brought to you by beam. Welcome back. I'm assuming a man, and this is the cubes coverage of Veem on 2020 online. I'm really happy to welcome to the program. We had done the Milan many years, first time doing it online and we have two first time guests. the center square. We have Daniel freed. He is the GM and senior vice president of AMEA and the head of worldwide sitting on the other side of the screen. Is it David Harvey? He's the vice president of Dietrich alliances. Both of them, of course, with beam. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. >>All right, Daniel, maybe start with you, uh, you know, the online event, obviously, uh, you know, it gives us, you know, there's some allergens, but there's also some opportunities rather than, you know, thousands of us gathering in Las Vegas where right. There's a diversity of locations because if you look up and down the street, the strip, um, and instead we really have a global event in an operation, unity, I'm speaking to you where you are in Asia right now. What, what is, you know, the online event mean? And you know, how you can relate to, you know, how many countries do you have a attending the event. Okay. Yeah. >>Okay. So, so the good, the good thing about, about being online is, as you mentioned, as you said, is, is we can have all, all people from all countries, all around the world present. Of course we are surely, uh, now with my responsibility, my worldwide responsibility for the channels, uh, all countries in the world, we have partners of all in all countries in the world, which means that all our teams, as well as all our butlers are virtual things or the kid limits, uh, of, of joining that, that event today. But that's, that's why I'm very, very happy to have these virtual events, which is much easier. And they're heading all people try flying in from all the different parts of the world, do they guess? Right. And, and, and David, you know, also with alliances standpoint, I assume since, you know, they don't actually have to fly to Vegas. We've got the special guest appearances by Satya Nadella, uh, you know, Arvin, Krishna, you know, all of the, you know, Andy Jassy, you know, everyone's coming in, but no, and also seriousness from an Alliance standpoint, uh, you know, we'd love to hear how you're, you're working with them., uh, for, for the global event. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And security is having a tough time keeping them at Bay right now. I mean, the online thing is handy because we can just cut them off, but, uh, yeah. Uh, but you're exactly right. It, the support of the alliances has been fantastic. Uh, everyone was trying to adjust to this new world we're in, but what you're seeing this week, um, he's a fantastic mom's body alliances. So once in Mike, all items should really work and we're doing the same for their events. And it's just a really nice >>If >>Camaraderie is coming together. And so, um, they've been great in supporting us as you've as seen through the week. Um, and we're excited about know whole vibe that getting in a commitment >>That, that we're getting from the customers I'm from the alliances, which is really, really good. Excellent. Well, we know that, you know, Veeam is a hundred percent partner focus, Daniel, maybe let's start with you, uh, you know, what, what's new kind of in the last year. So since we were together, last year, so on the new, on the new things that we have been doing for the last year, it's actually continuing first to move with our hundred percent, uh, since the beginning of, of, of Veem and all the way to the fully do squatters, that's more important even that is definitely the move that we see, uh, with working with your answers, uh, and their partners, as well as working much more with the Saudis providers, meaning the cloud service providers, where are there is a big, big trend now in the market with customers requesting more and more rather than, than I would say, technologies and products on premise. >>Uh, so we see that everywhere around the world. It is actually writing now again with the nutrition that we see, well, why, because of these, Nope, this is about situation, uh, where virtual is a big move that we, uh, we, we can see from customers and the partners that we have, the ecosystem that we've built, um, all around the world, he's helping very much in this move. Excellent. And David would love to hear the, the, the progress that, uh, your group with some of the parts. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's been a, it's been a really exciting ride, uh, year over year growth rates with the alliances, continue to shoot out, which we're really excited about. Um, the VTN launch was fantastic for us for most of our major strategic alliances. So we're really pleased about that. And a lot of our technical alliances as well, they really benefited from some of the new capability coming out there. >>So what we're seeing is not only are we seeing our go to market, be enriched more and have a lot of success with the strategic alliances, the technology Alliance is a really starting to benefit from some of that new innovation that just came out and funny as well. So that global systems integrators, we've seen a massive uptick in that interest in the last, in the last couple of quarters. And that's really helping too Alison tonight. Oh, I spy. So yeah, it's been a really exciting year. And certainly when you do these types of events virtually yeah. LinkedIn, your, I am, and text messages go through the roof, which is a nice way to, to keep communication with the alliances. Yeah, I did. David, I'd like to just drill in a little bit on some of the pieces that you're talking about there, uh, you know, I really feel in the last year, yeah. We saw a real maturation in what we do talk about. Yeah. Hybrid cloud and multicloud. Um, I, I know one of the, you know, key strategic Alliance is actually from day one for Veem. Yeah. And you know, every time I saw an announcement of some of the VMware Bob pieces, I usually felt like there was soon after a Veem piece of it. Uh, could you bring us inside a little bit, especially some of the cloud pieces and maybe how beam differentiate, uh, from, from some of the competition out there, you know, both VMware, >>You know, Amazon, Microsoft and that whole ecosystem. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you touched on, uh, VMware and ops have been very close, Brown is process, and we're really excited about, uh, some of the recent work has been going on with them as well. Um, we're also have tremendous steps fools with Amazon that continues to be a strong area. And the Microsoft is a cloud in the way that we continue during the harms, the way we work with their solution. Um, it's really providing right strides forwards, especially for the enterprise customers. Uh, we also were excited about the recent announcement related to Google cloud as well. So that's another big area for us. Um, and so that was another thing that continues to differentiate us. And what I would say overall though, is it's about having that philosophy as customers continue to have there philosophical view related to on premise cloud on off premise cloud. >>What we're showing is whether it's through the hardware partners, whether it's through the application partners well through the cloud is we're enabling you to decide your workflows. And I think that's the bit it's a little bit different than, and some of the others that are out there taking that heritage, should we put into the virtual world and that mentality, there's certain it departments have. It enables us to really synergize with those different partners as they go through their evolution and a certain customers move more towards the public cloud. And then you might be look towards some workplace back to the private that synergy between all of those areas is hugely important. And even for the hardware partners that we have, do you have cloud plays, mentioning some of their value solutions as well. So it's a really sort of, um, heterogeneous world that it we're really pleased on the way that the market is accepting it. Yeah. And Daniel that this, this move and a maturation of what's happened in the cloud is a significant impact on the channel. I'd love to hear, you know, anything specifically, you know, with your, uh, your viewpoint on the channel as to, you know, how your partners are now adjusting to that, you know, VMware, Microsoft, uh, some of the other pieces is that how they are now ready, uh, to help customers, uh, through these transitions. >>Yeah. And, and let me, let me make one run back, which is very important. First of all, VIM is not Mmm. The cloud provider and will not be accepted, right. Or in other words, the idea is that we will never compete with our brothers, never. Uh, so we provide technology, which is used by our partners and a number of them. I just think that technology to provide services, a number of them are using this technology to resell, uh, or to implement some additional services for the customers. And this is a key, key element. We're not there to do anything and competition. We are here to compliment and to use it, to leverage as much as possible, all our partners, as much as we can, uh, they know very good the market, they know very good at how things are moving. They know very good where they can do they know very good where they cannot do and what their customers want or, or, Oh,. >>Um, so the big, big move that we see in the market is how everyone is moving more and more to, again, there's said initially, uh, to the cloud, um, I mean, providing cloud services, whether it's multicloud hybrid cloud, as you mentioned it, as you listed them, we have all different types of scenarios. And this is a very interesting thing, is us helping them, educating them on how to use our technology, to be able to verify we be provide services and capabilities to their end customers. So we have a big, big investments in this enablement in what we call sales acceleration software, because it's all about businesses, uh, and helping our partners to get there and to move them as fast as placebo. Again, there is a big, a big need, a big request from the end customers and the role of the partners. I understand that and have to move very quickly to this new world of services. >>And we are there to help and support because we strategically no, that this is a way not only for him, but for the entire market. Yeah. And Danielle, you know, an important point. I think anybody that thinks that, okay, editor, uh, you know, to the channel or things, you know, probably doesn't matter. Okay. Or value proposition, a Veeam. What I'm curious from your standpoint is what was the impact of know wire now? You know, obviously some management changes there. Uh, I'm, I'm curious what feedback you've gotten and how that impact, uh, you know, the channel first. Yeah. I mean, let's be open as you know, it's one of, I hope one of our qualities, that theme is the transparency and the way we communicate again with the world, with our, especially with our partners. So initially the feedback that I had and with a number of partners and partners, well, a little bit of, okay, Nope, no worries. >>Uh, no, no. What is going to happen? What is next? Are we going to, to lose the DVM culture? Are we going to, are we going to go through a number of changes eventually in the strategy of him? And actually I have to say, and I'm extremely comfortable, uh, in my, let's say regular communications and connections with, with the insight partners, we have quiet team software because they think that the strategy that we had and the strategy that we have now is the strategy they want just to keep on doing, because it is a successful strategy. And by the way, when we do get the data, uh, that we got from the market from, uh, from, from some, from IDC that that was out lately, we see that Veeam is the number one in both, all around the world, compared to all the other vendors, doing the same kind of technology. >>That means that each is a successful strategy going with the partners and through the partners, he's a very successful strategy. And there is no reason that that yeah, and insight partners understands that extremely good. And I feel very comfortable with it. Yeah. With our future. That would mean more to us, but that's okay. We'll see. In the coming quarters. Well, I, I think, uh, you know, we, we, we do need to have, make sure that VMs has a little bit more focused on getting some green in your home environments there. Um, cause normally if I'm doing an interview with green, I'm expecting with BMI Mexican and a little bit more of the, of the breaker in there, David, you know, obviously, you know, the strategic alliances, uh, you know, some of those executive relationships, good morning, bring us in a little bit, as you know, Daniel was saying there's a little bit yeah. >>Of trepidation at the bit. And they've worked ruin, uh, from the Alliance standpoint, uh, you know, what is this, uh, what what's, what's transpired. Yes, true. It's, it's one of those things. It's a really unexciting answer because they aren't similar, simple answers calmness. Um, I often 24 hours, once we announced it, my call sheet was pretty, pretty empty for the simple reason being that, uh, we've spoken to everybody very quickly and the resonant feedback was that's great news. We know insight. We trust insight. We're glad it is say a growth play. Uh, also it clears up the future. And obviously, yeah, when you have strategic alliances is always in the back of their mind, wondering when is one of our competitors going to come in and Acqua you guys Mmm. Your article feedback was, this is fantastic. This is exactly what we wanted to see. >>Um, you provide clarity to our partnership. You can continue to invest in grow, which you've demonstrated for years, and you can move that forward for the next few years. Um, but also more importantly, this enables us to feel even better doubling down on veins. And so frankly, while we haven't had any issues and I'm sure a lot of the viewers out there have been through events seeing sometimes that can be crazy. It's a Daniel was pointing the strategy. Hasn't changed, we're executing, we've got the support. And the strategic Alliance is probably for the executive level and also the day to day level on leaning in more and more of them please that we're executing on our strategy, focusing in the U S with a big push. Okay. Bringing the investment, moving forward, stabilizing the leadership team. It's just been overall. It's been fantastic. So yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a really unexciting new soundbite answer, but that's a, how long has inclarity clarity has been a real takeaway? Excellent. Well, one of the, the key messages in the keynote, of course talking about a digital transformation, we'd love to hear, uh, for, from both of you, uh, you know, what you're seeing and hearing how beam's message is a, you know, engaging with both partners and ultimately the, the end user itself, uh, Daniel, maybe we'll start with you on that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for asking. It's usually always comes from the end customers and their needs, and we all know that the need for data uh he's he's getting exponential. Uh, so that is why we can't do things manually anymore. So it has to be digitalized everywhere. Yeah. The very interesting thing is that not only something that express with the end customers, but we see more and more because it's an absolute need. Uh, when partners are providing, uh, services or providing all night, chubby she's out services or providing even, even products, they have digitalize also themselves. They are doing it at very, very high speed. But I know I'm mentioning that because I'm extremely pleased with the ecosystems of partners that we have >>Because they understand it's very good, how the market is, is evolving. I'm still only about the customers, but it's also about themselves. Yeah. That they are evolving 21st. And did you digitalization of all the processors? Well, the way they work with their customers, it's definitely one of the key elements, uh, which is going to be extremely good for the future. That's why, because of all this moves in a very positive dynamic way, there is no reasons why we should change our strategies and no remaining said our rights, uh, lions first, whatever it is, uh, continue driving the ecosystem, building the ecosystems, organizing the acquisition. And he's absolutely key for the success of everyone, including people, Brittany and David, please from the Alliance side. Yeah, it's do, I'm sure you'll notice, but in anybody and, uh, we're in a fortunate situation that we probably both get to sit through, uh, all of the strategies that a lot of the Titans of industry are all focused on right now and, and, and having ecosystem we do in your line side, that rich tapestry from the very large to very small is focused on that digital transformation. >>And I think that the good news from my point of view, and I'm going to touch on one of the points Daniel mentioned before was we don't eat with them. And so, yeah, he volunteers, we've got his work hogging, a piece of that, the strategy that they're looking for, the criticality of data three is transformation is huge as everybody knows. Um, and what we're finding right now is that the approach that we take yep. Approach to focus on doing what we do extremely well is synergizing with the evolution of the customer is seeing as they go through that transformation and transformation, sometimes a scary transformation sometimes brings nervousness and they want to do it with a lot of their thought leaders. They working with the VM-ware has the Microsoft, the HBS, and then apps, et cetera. And so from that point of view, the fact that we can providing them with that peace of mind for the complete solution, it's been fantastic. >>So, you know, when you look at a 75 plus partners, there's always going to be one way you need to thread the needle. Shall we say on exactly where intellectual property provides that value to them? But the good news is we don't have to spend a lot of time on that because we're clear, we're concise. Uh, and a lot of times they've been involved in a lot of our strategy sessions. So they're on board with us. And I think the Daniels area as well with the channel, the channel sees that as well. And that's why, whether it's through the alliances channel or with us directly to the resellers, uh, we're finding that, uh, that harmony is bringing a lot of peace of mind. So you can focus on the pains of the customer. I'm not worried about your technology partners fighting with themselves. And that's really where we are, right. Uh, the overall ethic of the company. All right. Well, the final item I have for, for both of you is, you know, normally, you know, but we have a certain understanding of where we are and what the roadmap is. Look, of course, we're dealing with a global pandemic, right? So >>As we look forward to the outlook, uh, I'd love to be able to hear a little bit about, you know, what you're hearing from your partners, how that is coloring, you know, decisions that are made really for the rest of kind of the next 12 months or so. Um, and you know, okay. Any other data points that you have, uh, from your broad perspectives as to how people think the recovery is going to be know, obviously we understand there's a lot of inserts. Nope. Daniel, you've got a, uh, great global viewpoint. We understand, uh, you know, what, what is happening impacts differently locally quite a bit, but, um, what are you seeing going forward and do you know the impact? Bye bye. Yeah. So I couldn't say the contrary. Yeah. So they correct. And we see it in our numbers that the countries, which are the most impacted, I would buy the QVC. >>I would have been more difficulties than the others, uh, to move, to move forward for a business standpoint, uh, which everybody understands, but we've received in the numbers. No, the thing. And this is what I liked very much about, but our ecosystem and where is we had a plan, uh, that we said that we said in 2019 before we knew anything about curvy a con for 2020, and you know what, uh, we are now in no, in, in, in our, the second part of the month of the year, you too, and are going to make our numbers. We are going to make our plans and why are we going to make it? That's the only because, you know, it's just been because perfect, but he's very, very much because of all our partners who, despite all the issues that are, they are in country because of coverage are just getting there, biking, helping themselves, helping us, and altogether as, as a big business machine, as big business system, we all just making success. >>And this will only show extremely good at the end of the year. When we look at the market share, Jamie's going to gain again, uh, with all our butters, it will be the, the results of the success. So good results. Very good results. No. And, and do you mean just continuing to move with these, he's a network of fathers and David, obviously we've seen, you know, you know, many of the big partners, you know, uh, you know, very circumstance and their response, you know, nobody wants, are you seen as, uh, you know, doing something that is untoward towards customers taking care of business. Okay. So, you know, how how's this impacting, you know, what you're doing with your partners? And it gives a little bit of the outlook going forward. Yeah. I mean, why not use for this as energy? Mmm. Some of these headlines that you see, of course, they're not going to get picked up with the impact related to it on a day to day basis, through the discussions with the executives are in the field level, we're seeing the energy with same people want to make sure on what is a tricky situation was a very impactful situation. >>Um, but what, we're not seeing people Mmm. He was onto it. We're seeing people really want to, um, make sure that they are also relating to the needs of their customers today, whether it's more and point whether it's moving towards the user experience, but also taking this time to keep building the foundation for a lot of that infrastructure related to data protection, data availability, um, that we've enjoyed for a long period of time. So yeah, you know, you, you have a degree of disruption, but the objective that I'm seeing from all the major guys that are out there is let's make sure we drive hard. Let's not take the pedal off the metal. Let's not use this as an excuse. Let's keep moving. What, uh, I mean, I sh I would say our engagement with them has increased in sort of happened. Um, and so I don't think we ever expected to be running into tempo. >>We're running bean does it as standard, but we don't normally I have that same temperature. Okay. From some of the, uh, some of the alliances we're really pushing hard with him. So, yeah, we're excited. And we continue to evolve rudeness how, in a situation, everyone's going to be employees with a lot of aggression, a lot of desire to keep capitalizing on the work we've done together. The key solving the customer demands that are going to come over the next 18 to 24 months, um, and reading, make sure that, uh, this is really okay. Yeah. It's impactful just to be clear, but, but not one that we're going to let define our future. I'm looking into that together. So I think from us, um, we're excited about not only as Daniel said, beam success. Well, what, we're starting to see us really good attitudes, uh, from all of our lines bombs, which we love. Yeah. All right. Well, Daniel and David, thank you so much for the update. Great. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. All right. Lots more covered from Veeam on 2020 online. I'm assuming a minute. Thank you. Oh, wow. The cube.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM. We're back and this is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cube and we're covering wall-to-wall the IBM 2020 I think digital experience. Rob Thomas is here. He's the senior vice president of clouds and data. Right. Warm rub. Always a pleasure to see you. I wish you were face to face, but Hey, we're doing the best we can. As you say, doing the best we can. Great to see you Dave. Hope family safe, healthy, happy as best you can be. Yeah. Ditto. You back out your Robin. Congratulations on on the new role, you and the cube. We've been riding this data wave for quite some time now. It's really been incredible. It really is. And last year I talked to you about how clients, we're slowly making progress on data strategy, starting to experiment with AI. >>We've gotten to the point now where I'd say it's game on for AI, which is exciting to see and that's a lot of what the theme of this year's think is about. Yeah, and I definitely want to dig into that, but I want to start by asking you sort of moves that you saw you're in there seeing your clients make with regard to the cobot night covert 19 crisis. Maybe how you guys are helping them in very interested in what you see as sort of longterm and even, you know, quasi permanent as a result of this. I would first say it this way. I don't, I'm not sure the crisis is going to change businesses as much as it's going to be accelerating. What would have happened anyway, regardless of the industry that you're in. We see clients aggressively looking at how do we get the digital faster? >>How do we automate more than we ever have before? There's the obvious things like business resiliency and business continuity, managing the distributed workforce. So to me, what we've seen is really about, and acceleration, not necessarily in a different direction, but an acceleration on. The thing is that that we're already kind of in the back of their minds or in the back of their plans now that as we'll come to the forefront and I'm encouraged because we see clients moving at a rate and pace that we'd never seen before that's ultimately going to be great for them, great for their businesses. And so I'm really happy to see that you guys have used Watson to really try to get, you know, some good high fidelity answers to the citizens. I wonder if you could explain that initiative. Well, we've had this application called Watson assistant for the last few years and we've been supporting banks, airlines, retailers, companies across all industries and helping them better interact with our customers and in some cases, employees. >>We took that same technology and as we saw the whole covert 19 situation coming, we said, Hey, we can evolve Watson assistant to serve citizens. And so it started by, we started training the models, which are intent based models in Watson assistant on all the publicly available data from the CDC as an example. And we've been able to build a really powerful virtual agent to serve really any citizen that has questions about and what they should be doing. And the response has been amazing. I mean, in the last two weeks we've gone live with 20 organizations, many of which are state and local governments. Okay. Also businesses, the city of Austin children's healthcare of Atlanta. Mmm. They local governments in Spain and Greece all over the world. And in some instances these clients have gotten live in less than 24 hours. Meaning they have a virtual agent that can answer any question. >>They can do that in less than 24 hours. It's actually been amazing to see. So proud of the team that built this over time. And it was kind of proof of the power of technology when we're dealing with any type of a challenge. You know, I had a conversation earlier with Jamie Thomas about quantum and was asking her sort of how your clients are using it. The examples that came up were financial institutions, pharmaceutical know battery manufacturers, um, airlines. And so it strikes me when you think about uh, machine intelligence and AI, the type of AI that you're yeah, at IBM is not consumer oriented AI. It's really designed for businesses. And I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. Yeah, let's distinguish the difference there. Cause I think you've said it well consumer AI is smart speakers things in our home, you know, music recommendations, photo analysis and that's great and it enriches all of our personal lives. >>AI for business is very different. This is about how do you make better predictions, how do you optimize business processes, how do you automate things that maybe your employees don't want to do in the first time? Our focus in IBM as part of, we've been doing with Watson is really anchoring on three aspects of AI language. So understanding language because the whole business world is about communication of language, trust meaning trusted AI. You understand the models, you understand the data. And then third automation and the whole focus of what we're doing here in the virtual think experience. It's focused on AI for automation. Whether that's automating business processes or the new announcement this week, which is around automating AI opera it operations for a CIO. You, you've talked the years about this notion of an AI ladder. You actually, I actually wrote a book on it and uh, but, but it's been hard for customers to operationalize AI. >>Mmm. We talked about this last year. Thanks. What kind of progress, uh, have we made in the last 12 months? There's been a real recognition of this notion that your AI is only as good as your data. And we use the phrase, there's no AI without IAA, meaning information architecture, it's all the same concept, which is that your data, it has to be ready for AI if you want to too get successful outcomes with AI and the steps of those ladders around how you collect data, how you organize data, how you analyze data, how you infuse that into your business processes. seeing major leaps forward in the last nine months where organizations are understanding that connection and then they're using that to really drive initiatives around AI. So let's talk about that a little bit more. This notion of AI ops, I mean it's essentially the take the concept of dev ops and apply it to the data pipeline if you will. >>Everybody, you know, complains, you know, data scientists complained that all, they spent all their time wrangling data, improving data quality, they don't have line of sight across their organization with regard to other data specialists, whether it's data engineers or even developers. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that announcement and sort of what you're doing in that area. Sure. So right. Let me put a number on it because the numbers are amazing. Every year organizations lose 2016 point $5 billion of revenue because of outages in it system. That is a staggering number when you think about it. And so then you say, okay, so how do you break down and attack that problem? Well, do you have to get better at fixing problems or you have to get better at avoiding problems altogether. And as you may expect, a little bit of both. You, you want to avoid problems obviously, but in an uncertain world, you're always going to deal with unforeseen challenges. >>So the also the question becomes how fast can you respond and there's no better use of AI. And then to do, I hope you like those tasks, which is understanding your environment, understanding what the systems are saying through their data and identifying issues become before they become outages. And once there is an outage, how do you quickly triage data across all your systems to figure out where is the problem and how you can quickly address it. So we are announcing Watson AI ops, which is the nervous system for a CIO, the manager, all of their systems. What we do is we just collect data, log data from every source system and we build a semantic layer on top that. So Watson understands the systems, understands the normal behavior, understands the acceptable ranges, and then anytime something's not going like it should, Watson raises his hand and says, Hey, you should probably look at this before it becomes a problem. >>We've partnered with companies like Slack, so the UI for Watson AI ops, it's actually in Slack so that companies can use and employees can use a common collaboration tool too. Troubleshoot or look at either systems. It's, it's really powerful. So that we're really proud of. Well I just kind of leads me to my next question, which I mean, IBM got the religion 20 years ago on openness. I mean I can trace it back to the investment you made and Lennox way back when. Um, and of course it's a huge investment last year in red hat, but you know, open source company. So you just mentioned Slack. Talk about open ecosystems and how that it fits into your AI and data strategy. Well, if you think about it, if we're going to take on a challenge this grand, which is AI for all of your it by definition you're going to be dealing with full ecosystem of different providers because every organization has a broad set of capabilities we identified early on. >>That means that our ability to provide open ecosystem interoperability was going to be critical. So we're launching this product with Slack. I mentioned with box, we've got integrations into things like PagerDuty service now really all of the tools of modern it architecture where we can understand the data and help clients better manage those environments. So this is all about an open ecosystem and that's how we've been approaching it. Let's start, it's really about data, applying machine intelligence or AI to that data and about cloud for scale. So I wonder what you're seeing just in terms of that sort of innovation engine. I mean obviously it's gotta be secure. It's, it seems like those are the pillars of innovation for the next 10 plus years. I think you're right. And I would say this whole situation that we're dealing with has emphasized the importance of hybrid deployment because companies have it capabilities on public clouds, on private clouds, really everywhere. >>And so being able to operate that as a single architecture, it's becoming very important. You can use AI to automate tasks across that whole infrastructure that makes a big difference. And to your point, I think we're going to see a massive acceleration hybrid cloud deployments using AI. And this will be a catalyst for that. And so that's something we're trying to help clients with all around the world. You know, you wrote in your book that O'Reilly published that AI is the new electricity and you talked about problems. Okay. Not enough data. If your data is you know, on prem and you're only in the cloud, well that's a problem or too much data. How you deal with all that data, data quality. So maybe we could close on some of the things that you know, you, you talked about in that book, you know, maybe how people can get ahold of it or any other, you know, so the actions you think people should take to get smart on this topic. >>Yeah, so look, really, really excited about this. Paul's the capitalists, a friend of mine and a colleague, we've published this book working with a Riley called the a ladder and it's all the concepts we talked about in terms of how companies can climb this ladder to AI. And we go through a lot of different use cases, scenarios, I think. Yeah. Anybody reading this is going to see their company in one of these examples, our whole ambition was to hopefully plant some seeds of ideas for how you can start to accelerate your journey to AI in any industry right now. Well, Rob, it's always great having you on the cube, uh, your insights over the years and you've been a good friend of ours, so really appreciate you coming on and, uh, and best of luck to you, your family or wider community. I really appreciate it. Thanks Dave. Great to be here and again, wish you and the whole cube team the best and to all of our clients out there around the world. We wish you the best as well. All right. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 20, 20 digital, the vent. We'll be right back right after this short break. This is Dave Volante.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hello everybody welcome to the cubes exclusive coverage of IBM thanks 2020 digital event experience the cube covering wall-to-wall we've got a number of interviews planned for you going deep my name is Dave Volante I'm here with stoom in ament's - how you doing doing great Dave so we're socially distant as you can see in the studio and mohab row everybody's you know six feet apart got our masks on took them off for this for this segment so Stu let's get into it so a very interesting time obviously for IBM Arvind Krishna doing the big keynote Jim Whitehurst new president so you got a new leadership a lot of talk about resilience agility and flexibility you know which is kind of interesting obviously a lot of their clients are thinking about kovat 19 in that context iBM is trying to provide solutions and capabilities we're going to get into it but really the linchpin of all this is open shift and RedHat and we're gonna talk about what that means for the vision that Arvind Krishna laid out and let's get into it your your thoughts on think 2020 yeah so Dave of course you know last week we had Red Hat summit so Red Hat is still Red Hat you and I had a nice discussion going into Red Hat summit yes thirty four billion dollar acquisition there now under IBM Jim white her slides over in that new role as president but you know one of the questions we've had fundamentally Dave is does an acquisition like this will it change IBM will it change the cloud landscape openshift and Red Hat are doing quite well we definitely have seen some some of the financials and every audience that hasn't seen your analysis segment of IBM should really go in and see that because the Red Hat of course is one of the bright spots in the financials they're you know good growth rate on the number of customers and what they're doing in cloud and underneath a lot of those announcements you dig down and oh yeah there's openshift and there's Red Hat Enterprise Linux rel so you know I long partner for decades between IBM and Red Hat but is you know how will the IBM scale really help the Red Hat pieces there's a number of announcements underneath you know not just you know how does the entire world work on you know Z and power and all of the IBM platforms but you know I believe it's arvind says one of the enduring platforms needs to be the hybrid cloud and you heard a Red Hat summit the entire week it was the open hybrid cloud was the discussion well yes so that actually is interesting you brought up Arvin's sort of pillars there were three enduring platforms that he cited then the fourth of course is I guess open hybrid cloud but the first was mainframes the second was and I'm not sure this is the right order the second was services and then the third was middleware so basically saying excuse me we have to win the day for the architecture of hybrid cloud what's that mean to you then I'd like to chime in yeah so so Dave first of all you know when when we did our analysis when IBM bought red Hatton says you know my TL DR was does this change the cloud landscape my answer is no if I'm a Amazon I'm not sitting there saying oh geez you know the combination of IBM and Red Hat well they're partners and they're they're gonna be involved in it does IBM have huge opportunities in hybrid cloud multi cloud and edge computing absolutely one of the questions is you know how will I be M services really be transformed you know Dave we've watched over the last decade some of the big service organizations have really shrunk down cloud changed the marginal economics you've done so much discussion of this over the last handful of years that you need to measure yourself against the hyper scalars you need to you know see where you can add value and the question is Dave you know when and where do we think of IBM in the new era well so coming back to sort of your point about RedHat and services is it about cloud is a developer's near-term I've said it's it's more about services than it is about cloud longer-term I think it is about cloud but but IBM's definition of cloud is maybe a little different than 10 hours but when Jeannie when on the roadshow - after the redhead acquisitions you said this is gonna be a creative - free cash flow within one year and the reason why I always believe that is because they were gonna plug Red Hat and we've talked about this an open shift right into their services business and start modernizing applications right away they've actually achieved that so I think they had pretty good visibility and that was kind of a mandate so IBM's huge services organization is in a good position to do that they've got deep industry expertise we heard Arvind Krishna on his keynote talking about that Jim Whitehurst talking more about services you really didn't hear Jim you know previously in his previous roles talk a lot about services other than as part of the ecosystem so it's an interesting balancing act that that iBM has to do the real thing I want to dig into Stu is winning the day with the with with the architecture of hybrid cloud so let's start with with cloud talk about how IBM defines cloud IBM on its earning earnings call we talked about this on our Red Hat Summit analysis the cloud was you know 23 billion you know growing it whatever 20 20 plus percent when my eyes have been bleeding reading IBM financial statements in ten case for the last couple of weeks but when you go in there and you look at what's in that cloud and I shared this on my braking analysis this week a very small portion of that cloud revenue that what last year 21 billion very small portion is actually what they call cloud cloud and cognitive software it's only about 20 percent of the pie it's really services it's about 2/3 services so that is a bit of a concern but at the same time it's their greatest opportunity because they have such depth and services if IBM can increase the percentage of its business that's coming from higher margin software a business which was really the strategy go back 20 years ago it's just as services became this so big it's so pervasive that that software percentage you know maybe it grew maybe it didn't but but that's IBM's opportunities to really drive that that that software based revenues so let's talk about what that looks like how does OpenShift play in that IBM definition of cloud which includes on Prem the IBM public law everybody else's public cloud multi-cloud and the edge yeah well first of all Dave right the question is where does IBM technologies where do they live so you know look even before the Red Hat piece if we looked at IBM systems there's a number of times that you're seeing IBM software living on various public clouds and that it's goodness you know one of the things we've talked about for a number of years is you know how can you become more of a software company how can you move to more of the you know cloud consumption models you go in more op X and capex so IBM had done some of that and Red Hat should be able to help supercharge that when we look at some of the announcements the one that of course caught my other most Dave is the you know IBM cloud satellite would would say the shorthand of it it's IBM's version of outposts and underneath that what is it oh it's open shift underneath there and you know how can I take those pieces and we know open ship can live across you know almost any of the clouds and you know cannot live on the IB cloud IBM cloud absolutely can it be open ship be in the data center and on virtualization whether it be open source or VMware absolutely so satellite being a fundamental component underneath of open ship makes a lot of sense and of course Linux yeah Linux underneath if you look at the the one that we've heard IBM talking about for a while now is cloud packs is really how are they helping customers simplify and build that cloud native stack you start with Red Hat Enterprise Linux you put openshift on top of that and then cloud packs are that simple toolset for whether you're doing data or AI or integration that middleware that you talked about in the past iBM has way the ways that they've done middleware for decades and now they have the wonderful open source to help enable that yeah I mean WebSphere bluemix IBM cloud now but but OpenShift is really that pass layer that that IBM had coveted right and I was talking to some of IBM's partners getting ready for this event and they say if you dig through the 10k cloud packs is one of those that you know there are thousands of customers that are using this so it's good traction not just hey we have this cloud stuff and it's wonderful and we took all of these acquisitions everything from SoftLayer to software pieces but you know cloud packs is you know a nice starter for companies to help really move forward on some of their cloud native application journey yes so what whatever we talked about this past week in the braking analysis and certainly David floor has been on this as well as this notion of being able to run a Red Hat based let's call it a stack everywhere and Jim White has talked about that essentially really whether it's on Prem at the edge in the clouds but the key there stew is being able to do so natively so every layer of you know it began call it the stack IT services the data plane the control plane the management plane all the planes being able to the networking the transport etc being natively able to run wherever it is so that you can take fine-grain advantage and leverage the primitives on respective clouds the advantage that IBM has in my view would love your thoughts on this is that Red Hat based platforms it's open source and so I mean it's somebody gonna trust Amazon to be the the cloud native anybody's cloud yeah you know solution well if you're part of the Amazon stack I mean I Amazon frankly an Oracle have similar kind of mindset you know redstack Amazon stack make it all homogeneous and it'll run just fine IBM's coming at it from an open source perspective so they they in some ways will have more credibility but it's gonna take a lot of investment to really Shepherd those standards they're gonna have to put a lot of commitments in committers and they're gonna have to incent people to actually adhere to those standards yeah I mean David's the idea of pass the platform as a service that we've been chasing as an industry for more than a decade what's interesting if you listen to IBM what's underneath this well it's you know taking advantage of the container based architecture with kubernetes underneath so can I run kubernetes anywhere yeah pretty much every cloud has their own service OpenShift can live everywhere the question is what David floors rightly putting out okay if I bake to a single type of solution can i really take advantage of the native offerings so the discussion we've always had for a long time as dua virtualize something in which case I'm really abstract away I get to you know I can't take advantage of the all various pieces do I do multi cloud in which case I have some least common denominator way of looking at cloud because I what I want to be able to do is get the value in differentiation out of each cloud I use but not be stuck on any cloud and yes Dave Red Hat with openshift and based with kubernetes and the open source community is definitely a leading way to do that what you worry about is saying okay how much is this stuck on containerization will it be able to take advantage of things like serverless you talk to IBM and say okay underneath it's going to have all this wonderful components Dave when I talked to Andy Jesse and he says if I was rebuilding AWS today it would all be service underneath so what is that underlying construct you know is it flexible and can it be updated Red Hat and IBM are going to bridge between the container world and the serverless world with things like a native but absolutely we are not yet at the Nirvana that developers can just build their apps and know that it can run anywhere and take advantage of anything so you know some things we know we need to keep working so a couple other things there so Jim Weider has talked about ingesting innovation that the nature of innovation is such that it comes from a lot of different places open source obviously is a you know fundamental you know component of that he talked about the telco edge he gave an example of Vodafone Arvind Krishna talked about anthem kind of redefining healthcare post kovat so you're seeing some examples of course that's good that IBM puts forth some really you know proof points it's not just you know slide where which is good I think the the interesting thing you know you can't just put you know containers out there and expect the innovation to find its way into those containers it's gonna take a lot of work to make sure that as those different layers of the stack that we were talking about before are actually going to come to fruition so there's there's the there's some other announcements in this regard to these Edgecumbe edge computing application manager let's say the telco edge a lot of automation focused you mentioned IBM satellite there's the financial services cloud so we're seeing IBM actually you know sprinkle around some investments there as I said in my breaking in houses I'd like to see them dial up those investments a little bit more maybe dial down the return of cash at least for the next several years to shareholders yeah I mean Dave the concern you would talk to most customers and you say well if you try to even optimize your own data center and turn it into a cloud how can you take advantage of the innovation that the Amazon Microsoft Google's and IBM's are Tait are putting out there in the world you want to be able to plug into that you want to be able to leverage those those new services so that is where it's definitely a shift Dave you think about IBM over a hundred years usually they're talking about their patent portfolio I I think they've actually opened up a lot of their patent portfolio to help attack you know the kovat 19 so it is definitely a very different message and tenor that I hear under Arvind Krishna you know in very early days than what I was used to for the last decade or two from IBM yeah well at the risk of being a little bit repetitive one of the things that I talked about in my breaking the analysis I highlighted that arvind said he wants to lead with a technical story which I really like Arvin's a technical visionary his predecessors his three predecessors were not considered technical visionaries and so I think that's one of the things that's been lacking inside of IBM I think it's one of the reason why why Services has been such a dominant component so look Lou Gerstner too hard to argue with the performance of the company but when he made the decision and IBM made the decision to go all-in on services something's got to give and what gave and I've said this many many times in the cube was was product leadership so I'd like to see IBM get back to that product leadership and I think Red Hat gives them an opportunity to do that obviously Red Hat Linux you know open source is a leader the leader and this is jump all as we've talked about many times in this multi hybrid cloud edge you know throwing all the buzzwords but there's some interesting horses on the track you got you got VMware we throw in AWS just because they're there you can talk about cloud without talking about AWS certainly Microsoft has designs there Cisco Google everybody wants a piece of that pie and I would say that you know Red Hat with with with OpenShift is in a good position if in fact they can make the investments necessary to build out those stacks yeah it's funny Dave because IBM for the history the size that they are often can get overlooked you talk about you know we've probably spent more air time talking about the VMware Amazon relationship than almost any in the last few years well we forget we were sitting at vmworld and two months before VMware announced the Amazon partnership who was it that was up on the main stage with Pat Gelson der it was IBM because IBM was the first partner I I believe that I saw numbers that IBM was saying that they have more hosted VMware environments than anyone out there I'd love to see the data on it to understand there because you know IBM plays in so many different places they just often are not you know aggregated and counted together you know when you get outside of some of the you know middleware mainframe some of the pieces that you talked about earlier Dave so IBM does have a strong position they just haven't been the front center leader too often but they have a broad portfolio and very much services led so they they kind of get forgotten you know off on the sides so IBM stated strategy is to bring those mission critical workloads into the cloud they've said that 80% of the workloads remain on Prem only 20% have been been clarified you know when you when you peel the onions on that there's just is so much growth and cloud native workloads so you know there's there is a somewhat of a so what in that but I will say this so where are the mission critical workloads where do they live today they live on Prem we can but but but whose stacks are running those it's IBM and it's Oracle and and David floor has done some research that suggests that if you're gonna put stuff into the cloud that's mission-critical you're probably better off staying with those those stacks that are going to allow you to a lower risk move not have to necessarily rip and replace and so you know migrating mission-critical Oracle database into AWS or db2 you know infrastructure into AWS is is gonna be much more challenging than than going same-same into the IBM cloud or the respective Oracle cloud so I guess my question to you Stu is why do people want to move those mission critical workloads into the cloud do they well first of all it's unlocking innovation that you talked about Dave so you know we've looked at from a VMware standpoint versus a red hat standpoint if you talk about building new apps doing containerization having that cloud native mindset do I have a bimodal configuration not so not a word that we talk about as much anymore because I want to be able to modernize it modernizing those applications doing any of those migrations we know or super challenging you know heck David Flair has talked about it for a long long time so you bring up some great points here that you know Microsoft might be the best at meeting customers where they are and giving people a lot of options IBM lines up in many ways in a similar ways my biggest critique about VMware is they don't have tight ties to the application it's mostly you know virtual eyes it or now we have some cloud native pieces but other than the pivotal group they didn't do a lot with modernization on applications IBM with their middleware history Red Hat with everything that they do with the developer communities are well positioned to help customers along those digital journeys and going through those transformations so it's you know applications need to be updated you know if anybody that's used applications that are long in the tooth know that they don't have the features that I want they don't react the way they want heck today Dave everybody needs to be able to access things where they are on the go you know it's not a discussion anymore about you know virtual desktop it's about you know work anywhere have access to the data where I need it and be much more flexible and agile and those are some of the configurations that you know iBM has history and their services arm can help customers move along those journeys yeah so you know I think one of the big challenges iBM has it's got a it's got a its fingers in a lot of pies AI you know they talk a lot about blockchain they're about quantum quantum is not gonna be here for a while it's very cool we have an interview coming up with with Jamie Thomas and you know she's all over the quantum we've talked to her in the past about it but I think you know if you think about IBM's business in terms of services and product you know it's whatever it is a 75 you know billion dollar organization 2/3 or and maybe not quite 2/3 maybe 60 Plus percent is services services are not an R&D intensive business you look at a company like Accenture Stu I think Accenture spent last year 800 million on R&D they're a forty five billion dollar forty six billion dollar company so if you really isolate the IBM you know company to two products whatever its call it 25 30 billion they spend a large portion of that that revenue on R&D to get to the six billion but my argument is it's it's not enough to really drive the type of innovation that they need just another again Accenture data point because they're kind of a gold standard along with IBM you.why and others and and a couple of others in services they return seventy six percent of their cash to shareholders iBM has returned consistently 50 to 60 percent to its shareholders so arvind stated he wants to return IBM to growth you know every every IBM CEO says that Ginni I used to talk about has to shrink to grow as I said unfortunately so you should run out of time and now it's up to Arvind to show that but to me growth has got to come from fueling Rd whether it's organic or inorganic I'd like to see you know organic as the real driver for obvious reasons and I don't think just open source in and of itself obviously is going to attract that it'll attract innovation but whether or not IBM will be able to harness it to his advantage is the real challenge unless they're making huge huge commitments to that open source and in a microcosm you know it's a kind of a proxy we saw what happened to Hortonworks and cloud era because they had to had to fund that open source commitment you know IBM we're talking about much much with the hybrid multi-cloud edge much much bigger opportunity but but requirement and we haven't even talked about AI you know bringing you know I think I think you have a quote on you know data is the fuel what was that quote yes it was Jim Whitehurst he said data is the fuel cloud is the platform AI is accelerant and then security my paraphrase is the mission control there so sounds a lot like your innovation cocktail that you've been talking about for the last year or so Dave but iCloud but so okay but AI is the accelerant and I agree by the way applying AI to all this data that we have you know over the years automating it and scaling it in the cloud it's critical and if IBM wants to define cloud as you know the cloud experience anywhere I'm fine with that I'm not a fan of the way they break down their cloud business I think it's bogus and I've called them on that but okay fine so maybe we'll get by that I'll get over it but but but really that is the opportunity it's just it's got to be funded yeah no Dave absolutely iBM has a lot of really good assets there they've got strong leadership as you said can Arvind do another Satya Nadella transformation there's the culture there's the people and there's the product so you know IBM you know absolutely has a lot of great resources and you know smart people and some really good products out there as well as really good ecosystem partnerships it's you know Amazon is not the enemy to IBM Microsoft is a partner for what they're doing and even Google is somebody that they can work with so you know I always say back in the ten years I've been working for you Dave I think the first time I heard the word coopertition I thought it was like an IBM trademark name because they were the ones that really you know lead as to have a broad portfolio and work with everybody in the ecosystem even though you don't necessarily agree or partner on every piece of what you're doing so in a multi cloud AI you know open ecosystem IBM's got a real shot yeah I mean a Satya Nadella like move would be awesome of course Satya had a much much larger you know of cash hoard to play with but but I guess the similarity stew are you you're notwithstanding that now we have three prominent companies run by Indian native born leaders which is pretty astounding when you think about it but notwithstanding that there are some similarities just in terms of culture and emphasis and getting back to sort of the the technical roots the technical visionaries so I'm encouraged but I'm watching very closely stew as I'm sure you are kind of where those investments go how how it plays in the marketplace but but I think you're right I think people underestimate IBM and and but the combination of IBM Red Hat could be very dangerous yeah Dave how many times do we write the article you know has the sleeping giant of IBM been awoken so I think it's a different era now and absolutely there's IBM has the right cards to be able to play at some of these new tables and it's a different IBM for a different era somebody said to me the other day that and probably you've probably heard this you have to but it was first I heard of it is that within five years IBM had better be a division of Red Hat versus the other way around so all right Stu thanks for for helping to set up the IBM think 2020 digital event experience what coming at you wall-to-wall coverage I think we've got over 40 interviews lined up Stu you you have been doing a great job both last week with the Red Hat summit and helping out with IBM thanks so thanks for that Dave no no rainy week at the new Moscone like we had last year a really good content from the comfort of our remote settings yeah so keep it right there buddy this is Dave a lot a force to Minutemen go to Silicon angle calm you'll check out all the news the the cube net we'll have all of our videos will be running wall-to-wall wiki bong calm has some some of the research action this day Volante force too many we'll be right back right after this short break [Music]