>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Oven Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of Amazon Web services. Eight. Of his public sector summit online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Curry. Your host of the Cube got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California about social impact, transforming, teaching and learning with cloud technology. Got three great guests. You go. Richard is the CEO and co founder of Guys Tech and Jean Te'o, CEO and founder of Solve Education Founders and CEOs of startups is great. This is squad was the AIPAC regional head. Education, health care, not for profit and research. Ray Ws, he head start big program Vincent. Thanks for coming on, Janine. And you go Thank you for joining. >>Thanks for having us, John. >>We're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever, social change is happening. Um, this next generation eyes building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems there. Today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually digitally and also in person. So the world's changing. So, um, I gotta ask you, Vincent, we'll start with you and Amazon. Honestly, big started builder culture. You got two great founders here. CEO is doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on. A pack, >>A lot of >>activity. I mean, reinvent and some it's out. There are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >>Thank you. Thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they are always looking for help and support in many off the innovation that they're trying to develop the second area off observation that we had waas, that they are always alone with very limited resources, and they usually do not know where to look for in terms, off support and in terms off who they can reach out to. From a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called A W s. At START. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they join the program. Aws ed start. Yeah, three specific areas. First one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges off A W S services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community off like minded education technology founders and linking them also to investors and VCs and lastly, off course, in supporting innovation. We support them with a bit off AWS cop credits promotional credits for them so that they can go on experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >>That's great stuff. And I want to get into that program a little further because I think that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides actually free credits or no one is gonna turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Um, Jean, I want to get your thoughts. How would solve education? Born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story? >>Thank you so much for the question. So, actually, my co founder was invited to speak at an African innovation forum a couple of years back on the topic that he was sharing with. How can Africa skip over the industrialization face and go direct to the knowledge economy? Onda, the discussion went towards in orderto have access to the knowledge economy, unique knowledge. And how do you get knowledge Well through education. So that's when everybody in the conference was a bit stuck right on the advice waas. In order to scale first, we need to figure out a way to not well, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the successful education initiated. So and that's was what pain walk away from the conference. And when we met in in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries on the problem that we're trying to solve this. It might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million Children and you are not learning on. That is a big number globally right on out of all the SDG per se from U N. Education. And perhaps I'm biased because I'm a computer engineer. But I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming bites. But since the other stg is like, you know, poverty or hunger, right, actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very, um, interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smartphones, becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very, uh, interesting. Fortunately for us to disseminate education through about technology. So we in self education elevate people out of poverty, true, providing education and employment opportunities live urging on tech. And we our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we do an open platform that provides everyone effected education. >>You could How about your company? What problem you're you saw And how did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >>Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started. We have a joke. One of the co founder, Matthew, had a has a child with severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having another one of them that would support those those kids on Duh. I took the joke seriously, So we're starting sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we could make this happen. Um, so it turns out that the dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world, with an estimated 10 to 20% off the worldwide population with the disorder between context between 750 million, up to 1.5 billion individual. With that learning disorder on DSO, where we where we sort of try and tackle. The problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for Children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dislikes. Yeah, many being assessed. And the second is so what? What do we do about it? And so given or expertise in data science and and I, we clearly saw, unfortunately off, sort of building something that could assess individual Children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U. S. Specifically who paid up to 6000 U. S. Dollars for for diagnosis within educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. Eso What we so clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading and everyone has a smartphone and you're smart. Smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. Eso We started collecting order recording from Children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia, and we then trying a model to recognize the likelihood of this lecture by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed, dyslexic being being diagnosed. So we have now an algorithm that can take about 10 minutes, which require no priors. Training cost $20. Andi, anyone can use it. Thio assess someone's likelihood off dyslexia. >>You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning progressions that air nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube. You got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Johnny and you mentioned, you know making the bits driver and changing technology. So Jeannine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, Okay? You got the idea. You're kicking the tires. You're putting it together. Now you gotta actually start writing code >>for us. We know education technology is not you. Right? Um, education games about you. But before we even started, we look at what's available, and we quickly realize that the digital divide is very real. Most technology out there first are not designed for really low and devices and also not designed for people who do not have Internet at hope so way. So with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need toe do something about on board, but something that that that problem is one eyes just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices, And then the second thing is motivation it again. It's also really obvious, but and people might think that, you know, uh, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral changes really hard right. I would love to work out every day, but, you know, I don't really get identity do that. So how do we, um, use technology to and, um, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that date, so that we can help support the motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we >>welcome? >>Yeah. And then the motivated community even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going and it's powerful, Hugo, your reaction to you know, you got the idea you got, You got the vision you're starting to put. Take one step in front of the other. You got a W s. Take us through the progression, understand the startup. >>Yeah, sure. I mean, what Jane said is very likely Thio what we're trying to do. But for us, there's there's free key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, that is free things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility, and the other one is affordability. Eso the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how we're going to make this work. And so we have. We have a couple of scientific publications on Do we have to collect data and, you know, sort of published this into I conferences and things like that. So make sure that we have scientific evidence behind us that that support us. And so what that means that we had Thio have a large amount of data >>on and >>put this to work right on the other side. The accessibility and affordability means that, Julian said. You know it needs to be on the cloud because if it's on the cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device with an Internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe, it's it's a good start on DSO the clock. The cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience in the same value to clients and and parent and teacher and allied health professionals around the world. Andi. That's why you know, it's it's been amazing to to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well. Obviously there is ah lot of benefit off being able to leverage the computational power off off the cloud to to make better, argue with them and better training. >>We're gonna come back to both of you on the I question. I think that's super important. Benson. I want to come back to you, though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, um, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning. But there is great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunity with Head Start. What trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with co vid, you know the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before covert and after co vid. There's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation. There's, um, or channels more data, the more engagement. How >>are you >>looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >>So there are three things that I want to quickly touch on number one. I think government are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't You can find a better time, uh, to now develop and not just developed a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right? We will talk about speed, three agility off the cloud. That's why the cloud is so powerful for government to adult. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools closed down across the world. UNESCO reported what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open? And that's where education, technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's Company and others there's so many of them around our ableto come forward and offer their services and help schools go online run classrooms online continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online and and this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even catch off education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they got to have a clear digital strategy. And the education technology companies like, what? Who we have here today, just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get toe addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >>Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just say it. There's some old technology out there and Jenny and you go, You're young enough not to know what I t means because you're born in the cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I t is like. In fact, there's a There's a joke here in the United States that with everyone at home, the teachers have turned into the I T department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go on mute and how toe configure a network adds just translation. If they're routers, don't work real problems. I mean, this was technology. Schools were operating with low tech zooms out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things. But now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So, Vincent, I'll start with you. Um, this is a big problem. So cloud solves that one. You guys have pretty much helped. I t do things that they don't want to do any more by automation. This >>is an >>opportunity not necessary. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. You just quickly talk about how you see the cloud helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >>We are all now living in a cloud empowered economy. Whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services. There are powered by the cloud, and a lot of them are powered by the AWS cloud. But we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right Whether you are watching Netflix, um Well, in the old days you're buying tickets and and booking hotels on Expedia or now you're actually playing games on epic entertainment, you know, playing fortnight and all those kind of games you're already using and a consumer off the cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness off club computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society, that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to happen. So the first big idea is want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on club literacy? The second thing is, for those who have not embarked on a clear cloud strategy, this is the time. Don't wait for for another pandemic toe happen because you wanna be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with, and you want to get ahead of the curve and so education training yourself, getting some learning done, and that's really very, very important as the next step to prepare yourself toe face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EC start actually helps toe empower and catalyzed innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you Join. >>Congratulations on the head. Start. We'll get into that real quickly. Uh, head start. But let's first get the born in the cloud generation, Janine. And you go, You guys were competing. You gotta get your APS out there. You gotta get your solutions. You're born in the cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How >>do you >>view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset? Janine will start with you. >>So for us, way are very aware that we're solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So So? So this is a very big problem. And being able to liberate on cloud technology means that we're able to just focus on what we do best. Right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is, um, effective? And how do we keep people motivated and all those sorts of great things, um, leveraging on game mechanics, social network and incentives. And then while we do that on the outside way, can just put almost out solved everything to AWS cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and hands organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments on brother, even big NGOs on, you know, because before cove it, we had to really do our best to convince them until our troops are dry and way, appreciate this opportunity and and also we want to help people realized that in order to buy, adopting either blended approach are a adopting technology means that you can do mass customization off learning as well. And that's what could what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So and there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government off East Java on top of just using the education platform as it is andare education platform, which is education game Donald Civilization. Um, they have added in a module that teaches Cove it because, you know, there's health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right and adding this component in and the most popular um mitigate in that component is this This'll game called hopes or not? And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region off 25 million people. So tech became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the federal government off Indonesia to talk about anti something and even a very difficult topic, like sex education as well. >>Yeah, and the learning is nonlinear, horizontally scalable, its network graft so you can learn share about news. And this is contextual data is not just learning. It's everything is not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo. Um, your competitive strategy. You're out there now. You got the covert world. How are you competing? How is Amazon helping you? >>Absolutely. John, look, this is an interesting one, because the current competitors that we have, uh, educational psychologist, they're not a tech, So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitive per se. I would say that we're competing against the old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to, um, empower people to be comfortable. We've having a machine, you know, analyzing your kids or your recording and telling you if it's likely to be dislikes. Yeah, and in this concept, obviously, is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with, you know, you have the app that stand Ford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. It's being done in different industry. Eso The biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that, you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big part in school, but when you're an adult, you learn on Did you know we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty, and so we've been doing some very interesting working in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do their job and and and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against attack. And often when we talk to other ethnic company, we come before you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide a assessment solution on e assessment solution. So, really, John, what we're competing against is an old way of doing things. >>And that's exactly why clouds so successful. You change the economics, you're actually a net new benefit. And I think the cloud gives you speed and you're only challenges getting the word out because the economics air just game changing. Right, So that's how Amazon does so well, um, by the way, you could take all our recordings from the Cube, interviews all my interviews and let me know how ideo Okay, so, um, got all the got all the voice recordings from my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that e. I wanna come back to you. But I wanna ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching. Okay on Dhere about Amazon. They know the history. They know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the cloud You get big pay when you're successful. Love that business model. But for the folks watching that were in the virtual garages, air in their houses, innovating and building out new ideas. What does Ed start mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it on what are some of the learnings that you have from work with Head Start? >>But our relationship X s start is almost not like client supplier relationship. It's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with protect their providing the technology, but on top of that, they have their system architect to work with my tech team. And they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things, like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet and also other opportunities, like getting out the word out there. Right. As you know, all of their, uh, startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting out without there is another big benefit as well. So, um definitely very much recommend that start. And I think another big thing is this, right? Uh, what we know now that we have covert and we have demand coming from all over the place, including, like, even a lot of interest, Ally from the government off Gambia, you know? So how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria? Right. With technology that is almost frameless. >>Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. And they got the region's too. So the region's do help. I love we call them Cube Region because we're on Amazon. We have our cloud, Hugo, um, and start your observations, experience and learnings from working with aws. >>Absolutely. Look, this is a lot to say, so I'll try and making sure for anyone, but but also for us on me personally, also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Johnny mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur you can connect with expert in different industry. You can ask technical expert and and have ah, you know office our every week. Like you said Jenny, with your tech team talking to cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have on day and you know, on the business side I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we when we've approached government being able to say that we have the support off AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms off, moving forward with discussion with potential plant and and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things where when people see you, there's a perceived value that you know, your your entourage is smart people and and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really >>helpful, you know, that's a great point. The APP SEC review process, as you do deals is a lot easier. When here on AWS. Vincent were a little bit over time with a great, great great panel here. Close us out. Share with us. What's next for you guys? You got a great startup ecosystem. You're doing some great work out there and education as well. Healthcare. Um, how's your world going on? Take a minute, Thio. Explain what's going on in your world, >>John, I'm part of the public sector Team Worldwide in AWS. We have very clear mission statements on by the first is you know, we want to bring about destructive innovation and the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many off our techs, whether it's a text, healthtech golf text, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions or health care institutions to really be better at what they do, we want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market as fast as possible. It's just an honor on a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver. Heck, the kind of work that Hugo and Janina doing. You know, we cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part off their work And in delivering this impact to society, >>the expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson, Andy Jassy in the folks that aws for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together. You're starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here, uh, making a social impact, transforming, teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on the Cube. Thanks for joining. >>Thank you. Thank >>you, John. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube. Virtual were remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic. You're watching a divest Public sector online summit. Thank you for watching

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California, about social impact, transforming teaching and learning with Cloud technology we've got three great guests. Hugo Richard is the CEO and co-founder of Dystech and Janine Teo CEO and founder of Solve Education founders and CEOs of startups is great Vincent Quah is the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. (indistinct) big program. Vincent, thanks for coming on Janine and Hugo thank you for joining. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Thanks John So, we're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever social change is happening. This next generation is building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems, they're today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually, digitally, and also in person. So the world's changing. So I got to ask you, Vincent we'll start with you Amazon, obviously big (indistinct) culture. You got two great founders here and CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC, a lot of activity. I mean re-invent and the summits out there are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >> Thank you, thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they're always looking for help and support in many of the innovation that they're trying to develop. The second area of observation that we had was that they are always alone with very limited resources and they usually do not know where to look for in terms of support and in terms of not who they can reach out to from a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS EdStart. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting, delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they joined the program, AWS EdStart. Yeah, three specific areas, one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges of AWS services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community of like-minded education technology founders, and linking them also to investors and VCs. And lastly, of course, in supporting innovation, we support them with a bit of AWS Cloud credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >> That's great stuff I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think, you know, that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides (indistinct) free credits or, no one is going to turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time, all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Janine I want to get your thoughts. How was Solve Education born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story. >> Thank you so much for the question. So actually my co-founder was invited to speak at an African Innovation Forum couple of years back, and the topic that he was sharing with, how can Africa skip over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy and that discussion went towards, in order to have access to the knowledge commonly you need knowledge and how do you get knowledge well through education. So that's when everybody in the Congress was a bit stuck, right? And the advice was in order to scale fast, we need to figure out a way to not while, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the success of the education initiative. So, and that's was what (indistinct) walk away from the conference. And when we met in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries. And the problem that we're trying to solve is it might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million children and youth are not learning. And that is a big number globally, right? And out of all the SDGs per se, from UN, education, and perhaps I'm biased, because I'm a computer engineer, but I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming (indistinct) versus the other SDGs like, you know, poverty or hunger, right? Actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smart phones becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very interesting opportunity for us to disseminate education through mobile technology. So we in self-education elevate people on a public through providing education and employment opportunities, (indistinct) on tech. And we.. our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone active education. >> Hugo How about your company? What problem are you solving? How did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >> Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke, one of the co-founder, Matthew, had a, he has a child who has severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having (indistinct) that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we started sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we can make this happen. So it turns out that dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world. We have an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder, due to in context, that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individuals with that learning disorder. And so where we sort of try and tackle the problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dyslexia, meaning being assessed. And the second one is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given all expertise in data science and AI, we clearly saw an opportunity of sort of building something that could assess individual children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U.S. specifically who paid up to 6,000 U.S. Dollars for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. So what we saw clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading, and everyone has a smartphone and (indistinct) from smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recordings from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then try to model and to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now (indistinct) them. That can take about 10 minutes, which requires no prior training costs, 20 U.S. Dollar, and anyone can use it to assess someone's likelihood of dyslexia. >> You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning for questions that are nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube, you've got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Janine, you mentioned, you know, making the bits of driver and changing technology. This is the kind of thing that seems obvious now as look at it, but now you've got to put it into action. So, you know, one of the benefits of Cloud on AWS, we'll give a plug for Vincent's company here is that you can move faster. And that's something that Andy Jassy always talks about and Teresa Carlson, being builders and moving fast, but you got to build it. So Janine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, okay, you got the idea, you're kicking the tires, you're putting it together. Now you've got to actually start writing code. What happens next? Janine, we'll start with you. >> Well, what happens next? Okay. So for us, we know education technology is not new, right. And education games are not new, but before we even started, we look at what's available and we quickly realized that the digital divide is very real, most technology out there first are not designed for (indistinct) devices, and also not designed for people who do not have internet at home. so with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need to do something about, and that's something that problem is. One is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. And again, it's also really obvious, but, and people might think that, you know, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral change is really hard, right? I would love to workout everyday, but you know, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that we can help support their motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we work on, certainly with it. >> Yeah, and then a motivated community, is even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going, then it's powerful. Hugo your reaction to, you know, you got the idea, you got the vision, you're starting to put, take one step in front of the other. You got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, what Janine said is, very likely to, to what we're trying to do, but for us, there's three key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, it is three things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility and the other one is affordability. So the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how are we going to make this work And so we've.. We have a couple of scientific publications and we had to collect data and, you know, sort of publish this into AI conferences and things like that. So it makes sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we have to have a large amount of data and then put this to work, right on the other side of the accessibility and affordability means that Janine said, you know, it needs to be on the Cloud because if it's on the Cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device, with an internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe. So it's a good start. And so, the Cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and (indistinct) professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing, to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well obviously there is a lot of benefit of being able to leverage the computational power of the Cloud, to make better algorithm and better training. >> (indistinct) to come back to both of you on the AI question. I think that's super important. Vincent I want to come back to you though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning, but there's great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities EdStart, what trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with COVID, you know, the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before COVID and after COVID, there's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation is more channels, more data, the more engagement, how are you looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >> So there're three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think governments are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't find a better time to now develop and not just develop a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the Cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right, We will talk about speed, the agility of the Cloud, and that's why the Cloud is so powerful for government to adopt. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools close down across the world, UNESCO reported, what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open and that's where education technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's company and others, there are so many of them around are able to come forward and offer their services and help schools go online, run classrooms online, continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online. And this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even (indistinct) education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they've got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what, who we have here today. Just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >> Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just be, say it. There's some old technology out there and Janine and Hugo, you're young enough not to know what IT means because you're born in the Cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I teach. Like in fact, there's a, there's a joke here in the United States so with everyone at home the teachers have turned into the IT department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go unmute and how to configure a network address translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech Zoom's out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things, but now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So Vincent, I'll start with you. This is a big problem. So Cloud solves that one, you guys have pretty much helped IT do things that they don't want to do anymore by automation. This is an opportunity, not necessarily.. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Could you just quickly talk about how you see the Cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >> Absolutely. So I want to say and put forth a hypothesis and that hypothesis is simply this. We are all now living in a Cloud empowered economy, whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services that are powered by the Cloud. And a lot of them are powered by the AWS Cloud, but we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right? Whether you are watching Netflix, well in the old days, you're buying tickets and booking hotels on Expedia, or now you're actually playing games on Epic Entertainment, you know, playing Fortnite and all those kinds of games you're already using and a consumer of the Cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness of top computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to have. And so the first big idea is, want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on Cloud literacy. The second thing is for those who have not embarked on a clear Cloud strategy, this is the time don't wait for another pandemic to happen because you want to be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with. And you want to get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as a next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EdStart actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. >> Congratulation on the EdStart, we'll get into that and real quickly, EdStart but let's first get the born in the Cloud generation Janine and Hugo you guys are competing, you got to get your apps out there. You've got to get your solutions. You're born in the Cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How do you view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset, Janine, we'll start with you. >> So for us, we are very aware that we are solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So this is a very big problem. And being able to leverage on Cloud technology means that we are able to just focus on what we do best, right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is effective. And how do we get people motivated and all those sort of great things leveraging on game mechanics, social network, and incentives. And then while we do that on the Cloud side, we can just put that almost ourselves, everything to AWS Cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and has organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments and other, even big NGOs on, you know, because before COVID we had to really do our best to convince them until (indistinct) are dry >> (indistinct) knock on doors and convince people. >> Yes. And now we don't have to do that. It's the other way around. So we are really, you know, we appreciate this opportunity and also we want to help people realize that in order to.. By adopting either a blended approach or adopting technology means that you can do mass customization of learning as well. And that's, what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So, and, there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government of East Java on top of just using the education platform, as it is an educational platform, which is education (indistinct) on our civilization, they have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, their health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right? And adding this component in and the most popular mini game in that component is this game called Hoax Or Not. And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region of 25 million people. So that became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the Federal Government of Indonesia to talk about (indistinct) and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. >> Yeah. And the learning is nonlinear, it's horizontally scalable, it's network graph. So you can learn, share about news. And this is contextual data. It's not just learning, it's everything. It's not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo, your competitive strategy. You're out there now, you got the COVID world. How are you competing? How's Amazon helping you? >> Absolutely John, look, this is an interesting one because the common competitor that we have are educational psychologist, they're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we are competing against some old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people, to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kid's audio recording and telling you if it's likely to be dyslexia. And this concept obviously is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with AI, you know, you have the app that Stanford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. So it's being done in different industry. So the biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big pot in school, but when you're an adult you learn and, you know, we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and, and, you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty. And so we've been doing some very interesting work in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do the job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against Ed Tech. And often when we talk to other Ed Tech company, we come before, you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide an assessment solution, an E assessment solution. So really John, what we competing against is an old way of doing things. >> And that's exactly why the Cloud's so successful. You change the economics. You're actually a net new benefit. And I think the Cloud gives you speed. And your only challenge is getting the word out because the economics are just game changing, right? So that's how Amazon does so well, by the way, you can take all our recordings from theCUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay. So got all the, got all the voice recordings for my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. >> Absolutely. >> Vincent I want to come back to you, but I want to ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching okay and hear about Amazon. They know the history, they know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the Cloud. You get big pay when you're successful, love that business model. But for the folks watching that are in the virtual garages or in their houses innovating and building out new ideas, what does EdStart mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from working with EdStart? Janine We'll start with you. >> For me. So I would, for me, I would definitely highly recommend EdStart. And the reason is because EdStart, our relationship with EdStart, is almost not like a client-supplier relationship it's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with providing the technology. But on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet. And also other opportunities like getting out there, right? As you know, all of the startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting all that out there is another big benefit as well. So I'll definitely very much recommend EdStart. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demands coming from all other places including like, even (indistinct) from the Government of Gambia, you know, so how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria, right? With technology it is almost brainless. >> Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. I think, at the regions too. So the regions do help. I love we call them cube regions because we're on Amazon, we have our Cloud Hugo, EdStart your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS. >> Absolutely. Look, there's a lot to say, so I'll try and make it short for anyone, but, so for us and me personally, and also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have a, you know, office hour every week. Like you said, Janine with, your tech team talking to a Cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have. And, you know, on the business side, I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we've approached government, being able to say that we have the support of AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential client and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things, where when people see you, there's a perceived value that, you know, your entourage is smart people and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really helpful. >> You know, that's a great point. The AppSec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent we're a little bit over time. What a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You've got a great startup ecosystem and doing some great work out there and education as well, healthcare, how's your world going on? Take a minute to explain what's going on in your world. >> John I'm part of the public sector team worldwide in AWS, we have very clear mission statements. And the first is, you know, we want to bring about disruptive innovation. And the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many of our Ed Techs, whether it's (indistinct) Health Tech, Gulf Tech, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions, our healthcare institutions to really be better at what they do. We want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market, as fast as possible. It's just an honor and a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver.. The kind of work that Hugo and Janine are doing. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part of their work. And in delivering this impact to society. >> The expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson and Andy Jassy and the folks at AWS for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together, you starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here making a social impact, transforming teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you for having us >> thanks John >> Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual we're remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic you're watching AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier. We're on the ground with theCUBE. In theCUBE studio today we have a live audience on break but I had a chance to meet with the Chief Digital Officer of Hybrid Cloud, Janine Snead, who's just appointed. She's here in set on theCUBE. Great to see you at IBM Think. >> Hi, great to see you. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on. I'm super excited. When I interviewed Bob Lord last year, Chief Digital Officer, you know we love digital on theCUBE so we get really excited. We're like great, that's awesome. Now IBM's got more Chief Digital Officers being appointed >> Janine: That's right. >> You're the first Chief Digital Officer in a business unit. That's awesome, congratulations. >> Thank you. Yeah we're excited about it. We know and we believe that the future is really in the hands of the web. And we know that customers are engaging with us differently. They want much more of a self service. They want to experience the products without always I'll say a person interacting with them. And we know that from a product perspective there's things that we need to do to make our offerings much more digitally consumable. So we're taking this very seriously. And we put an organization in place Digital within Hybrid Cloud, that truly focuses on the time from a customer goes out and actually does a search, all the way through the buyer journey to the time they get to the product. >> John: You know I've been a student of IBM I actually worked at IBM as a co-op back in my early days. IBM has always been on the leading edge of marketing. And you guys are looking at socially you looked at social in an early way, digital in an early way, but now with the cloud you can actually engage customers digitally. So I've got to ask you, you know, how are you going to do that? >> Janine: Yeah >> John: Because you've got to remember websites are now the fabric of all this that's 30 year old tech stack. You've got cloud now, you've got APIs with the synchronous software packages. You've got blockchain. All these new things. So what's the vision as you guys go out and start putting stakes in the ground for a digital strategy. How are you guys doing it, can you share the vision? >> Yeah, I think it starts with using our own technology. So within the Hybrid Cloud organization, we have a lot of software and we're putting that software out on the cloud. We want customers to engage with us digitally through a technical experience. So we're taking our products, putting product demos, we're putting POTs, we're putting even proof of concept secure in the cloud, guided demos where they can come and experience these offerings without ever engaging with us. Now of course once they're ready they can engage with us but this is truly about a low touch, self service way for customers to engage with our products. >> Now a lot of people, and we talk about this all the time, but the general sentiment online now is you have the kind of crazies out there you've seen that on Reddit, fake news, weaponizing content. Then you have the other side of the spectrum where people are like, I don't want to be sold to. I'm discovering, I want to learn. >> Janine: Yes. >> John: I'm in communities. I know you guys address that. I want you to just clarify, because there's a model now where people just want to be ingratiated in. You know, kick the tires. Which by the way, kicking tires right now is much different than it was years ago because you have APIs. You have SARS source code. You have credits for cloud. >> Janine: That's right. >> What is the digital motion there? I mean obviously it's a light touch. >> Yeah >> But is it still an IBM.com? >> It is. So we're still on IBM.com properties. And we're nurturing with the ecosystem and the communities to also go where they are, but bring them back to the IBM.com properties and engage with them when they're ready. You know, we've done the research. We know that 70% of b2b buyers learn about your products and your services without ever talking to you. So we want to be where those users are and eventually that will be back on our property but we also want to find them where they are. >> You know, one of the things we were talking about before you came on camera here, We've been doing theCUBE for seven years or so plus six shows now to one show. But the thought leadership on theCUBE has always been powerful. And that's seemed to be a great way to get into communities. And IBM's got a lot of thought leaders. So I'm sure you have a plan for thought leaders. You have IBM Fellows. You've got R&D. You've got a lot of content opportunities. >> We do. We've got a lot of partners. So here at this conference we've been talking to a lot of our partners who want to be a part of this experience. We've got great solutions and all of our solutions a lot of them are delivered with partners. And so it's working the community. It's working the ecosystem. And it's doing this together with partners to allow them to contribute and allow customers to come and consume solutions. In much of a use case way, of course you can have product by product by products, but how do you essentially deliver solutions based on use cases. >> So I'll ask you a personal question. How did you get here? Was it like hey, I want to do the digital job, was it an itch that you were scratching, did Bob Lord lure you into the job? (Janine laughs) Did he recruit you? I mean -- >> No, it's -- >> How did you get it? >> It's a great question >> Because this is a great opportunity. >> It is. I'm a product person by training. And I spent the last 18 months in sales. And I enjoyed every minute of that and listening and understanding how our sellers want to consume. Short, snackable type of learning and training and watching what was going on with the digital ecosystem I thought it was a great way to really mix my skills that I have within product with what I just learned from my sales role. And I did nine months in marketing. So I felt like it was kind of a mixture. And we have a huge opportunity here. So the opportunity presented itself. >> Sales always has a my favorite sales expression is people love to buy from people that they like. How are you going to make IBM likable digitally? Is there a strategy there? >> Oh, it's simple. (John laughs) It is so dead simple. It's about the user experience. When users come, you have to give them the best experience possible because you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. So I want to basically set the bar. And we're an MVP right now with a lot of the stuff that we're doing out. >> You mean software and tools and stuff? >> Yeah, no, well, our experience right now so when you come and you experience our tools I'm sorry, our demos and our proof of technologies and our tutorials out on our site it's MVP. We're 45 days old. But it's about the user experience. And so we've been serving users here that are coming to try our stuff. >> So the Digital Technical Engagement, that's the DTE? >> Janine: DTE, yep. >> That's the one that's 45 days? >> That's the one that's 45 days old. >> The IBM site's not 45 days old. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But this new program. So take a minute to explain what the DTE, the Digital Technical Engagement program is. What was the guiding principles behind it >> Yeah >> What's some of the deign objectives is there any new cool tech under the covers? Share a little bit of color on that. >> Sure, sure. Happy to. So back in the fourth quarter of last year we took a look and we said, how are customers consuming? How are we engaging? How are we showing up? And what do we need to do to shift to become more agile and lighten the way that we showed up. And so we really gathered a few smart creatives from the CIO's office, from IBM design, from product and from marketing and we said guys, we're going to run an experiment. We want to set up a site off of IBM.com a page off of IBM.com and it's very simple. Keep it so clean. Keep the user experience clean. Take something like IBM Cloud Private. Give me three product demos. Give me one guided demo where in 10 minutes a client can get through IBM Cloud Private without getting stuck and then give them a way to try it for two weeks. Just experiment. Well, in 90 days we've had 10,500 users try that guided demo and our NPS is 56. >> What does NPS mean? - Net Promoter Score >> That's what I figured, okay. >> So it's about experimentation. And so in this world that we're going into we want to experiment. And so from there, what happened, that proved to be successful. We now have an organization of about 60 people within digital technical engagement deep product experts, but we also have a platform team to drive that experience. >> So there's some real value there. I mean, a lot of people look at website and digital technologies as ad tech, you know, and there's a lot of bad press out there now with Facebook where a lot of people are looking at Facebook as content that got weaponized for fake news and the ad tech has a bad track record of fill out a form, they're going to sell me something. How are you going to change that perception? >> That's a great question. So a lot of the folks that we're working with right now say you have to capture user information capture user information. And for me, I don't want to be bothered. So I'm kind of looking at this maybe a little bit too selfishly saying I want to demo without giving you my information. We have our product demos and our guided demos, we don't collect any information from the user. When you are going to reserve our software for two weeks, up to a month, we do collect some information about you. >> John: You got to. >> We have to. >> At some point. >> So we're keeping it very low touch because we know that's how users want to engage. >> You don't want to gate the hell out of it. >> No, we don't want to gate the hell out of it. We want to keep it just, let them explore without being all over them. Right? >> Talk about the new IBM. You know, one of the things that's transforming right now that I'm impressed with is IBM's constantly reinventing themself. I was impressed with Ginni's keynote. The way she talks about data in the middle, blockchain on one side and AI on the other. I call it the innovation sandwich. >> Janine: Yeah >> How are you applying that vision to digital? I mean not yet obviously, you're only at the beginning. >> Right But that vision is pretty solid. And she brought up Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law. >> That's right. >> Moore's Law is making things faster, smaller, cheaper. >> Right >> Component wise and speed. >> Yes >> Metcalfe's Law is about network effect and the future of digital is either going to be token economics or blockchain with programatic tooling that gives users great experiences. So how do you tie that together? Maybe it's too early to ask, but-- >> No, no. It's simple. I'm a consumer of this stuff. I'm using the cloud. I'm using the IBM Design Thinking because I brought in three designers from Phil Gilbert's group. Right? I'm embedded in the digital organization basically, regardless of where I sit. So we are adopting best practices that come from IBM's big chief digital office. >> So you get to use your own tools, that's one of the things she said. >> Yeah and we'll embed, we'll get there. Right? >> Yeah >> Well actually, we already are doing, we embedded chat. So we've got Watson Chat running on our SPSS statistics page So it's about the cloud, it's about user experience. It's about applying digital practices from Bob Lord's organization and then it's about Watson. >> I was having a great Twitter thread with a bunch of people that were on Twitter just ranting on the weekend a couple weekends ago about digital transformation. Tom Peters actually jumped in, the famous Tom Peters who wrote the books there, a management consultant, about digital transformation. I love digital transformation, it's overused, but it's legit. People are transforming. So the question was, how do you do it successfully? And all the canned answers came out. Well, you need commitment from the top. You've got to have this and that. And I said look, bottom line, if people don't have the expertise, and if they don't know what they're doing, they can't transform. So it begs the question for skills gap. A lot of people are learning, so there's a learning environment. It's not just sales. Proficiency, getting the product buying. There's a community thirst for learning. How is that incorporated in, if any? >> I think I have a little bit of a different hurdle. The people that we're working with are learning. They're out in the communities they're engaging. I think one of the things that we have to continue to do is continue to show the value of digital transformation. Remember, IBM is a big company. I'm not a ten person startup. Right? We're a bigger organization so what we have to do is show why digital is important back in with our product teams. I think for the most part our marketing teams get it. Because you have to make trade offs. Am I going to invest in this feature in the product or am I going to put in something like eCommerce so you can subscribe and buy. >> Priorities. But you're a product person, so it's all about the trade offs. >> Yeah, it's all about the trade offs, right? So the skills are part of it but some of it is just education on why this is so critical. And then the last thing is passion. You have to bring the skills, the education and then that passionate team that really believes that they can get this done. >> Okay so given that, let's go back to some of the comments I made about the people who we were talking about on Twitter >> Janine: Sure >> Commitment from the top. IBM commitment at the top is there? What are they saying, what's the marching orders? >> The marching orders is we got to go and we're not moving fast enough. Speed, speed, speed, right? So we got to move fast. >> So in an interview with Bob Lord, one of the things we talked about was interesting. He's like I like to just get stuff done. I think he might have used another word. Maybe it was off camera he said that. IBM's got a lot of process. How do you take the old IBM process and make it work for you rather than having digital work for the process? >> Yeah >> It's a lot of internal things but no need to give away too much but it's a management challenge. How do you cut through it? >> I think from a process perspective, these are conversations and you have to explain why. If you could go in and explain why you need to do something differently, then people will listen. I'd like to give an example, okay? I had 26 days to get five products out the door. I formed a team January 2nd. By January 26th, I had to be live. Now I worked with my marketing team and I said I will get into your buyer journey, but I have to launch my Digital Technical Engagement site and my products. They understood. So I went live. Now, will I back back into the process? Sure I will. >> John: But you had good alignment. >> But yeah, we have to move fast, right? So it's explaining why and having mature conversations and then people that really believe in digital they'll support you. >> Great conversation. I'm looking forward to chatting more with you. We're at theCUBE. But I want to ask you one final question before we break. What's your objective? What's the roadmap for you, what's your top priorities? Are you hiring? Who're you looking for? What kind of product priorities, what's the sales priorities? What's your to-do list? >> I think let's start with the customer. So the customer priority is to deliver the best experience possible as they engage with IBM digitally. And that's all about the user experience. From a talent perspective, it's all about diversity, inclusion, and people that come with different skills from technology, to growth hacking, to marketing, and to engineering. And some people that think differently. We want people that, no idea is a bad idea, just come and bring great ideas. >> Well, diversity and inclusion, first of all, half of the users are women. And you also have to have an understanding of the use cases. >> Yeah >> It's not just men using software. >> Yeah, that's right. >> It's a huge deal. >> That's right, that's right. >> Alright well, Janine, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on the new role. Janine Sneed, Chief Digital Officer from IBM Hybrid Cloud. First IBM Chief Digital Officer in a business unit. I also today have Bob Lord and a lot of other folks doing digital but great to see the digital momentum. >> Thank you. >> It's not just a selling apparatus. It's all about value for users. It's theCUBE bringing you the value here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

okay we're back here live in las vegas for ibm's information on demand exclusive coverage by SiliconANGLE this is a cube our flagship program we go out to the events extract to see with knows i'm john for either found or so looking angle we have two guests here today tom morris row and janine grosso classes across the cube acquisition IBM you guys closed the your company the now factory just recently big deal social service providers mobile need to talk much about mobile we talk about big data analytics yesterday all the insights today it's kind of social business but we've been commenting about what's under the hood cloud and mobiles obviously one of them tom how did how did you guys get to the point where you guys were acquired by my IBM because you you're in the mobile area mainly specialized and that's a hot area yeah consumers asia society yeah just a little bit about what what it is we do first so i guess we're we're experts in understanding users experience on when they use their mobile devices on the services so we're able to understand the ones and zeros flown up and down the wire and translate that into a customer's experience and and we get insights and those customers and that information then we can use across the business the mobile business in the marketing side of the house and the technical side of the house and the care side of the house so you're you're an entrepreneur you've been found you found the company in 2007 shared the folks what was the breakout moment for you guys I mean what product what market trend really catapulted you're offering well we started I guess you know you don't have to go back very far in telecoms when you know mobile dear sir wasn't very sophisticated back in 2006 2007 you had if you remember GPRS and all you could get if you were lucky with the weather and it came in text form you know you know it was before any of these smartphones stay there it seems a long long time ago so back then we started working with mobile operations had no ability at all even if it was working or not working so was the very idea came out and blackberries out there but the iphone really kind of it was really going to say wow yeah that's when everything changed smarter than the other person in sport mode at that time people were still wondering you know was you know was there enough value in this in this mobile data so we started in the early days helping operators understand whether the disservice was working on us din with the introductions of the smartphone and the explosion of new applications and services we we got into the whole area of of looking deeper into that understanding what the experience of the customers were what their what their what are the services work on enough from a technology perspective and and also working with a customer with our customers which is the mobile operators to understand you know what better services that can provide so talk about the big data angle here because obviously you know each other side of house in large enterprises big data is in in the data center people are using data to measure all kinds of activity within the data center the physical plant if you will of a company you know service providers if their customers they have to be aggressive with big data they have all kinds of revenue driving concerns hey what's preference of my customer to operational efficiencies can you go a little bit into detail and some of the things that they do you guys can you talk about face well well maybe I'll start with why right so obviously big data and analytics is you know one of our four strategic focus items at the at the corporate level right so again who more than a telco has a big data problem right with just an explosion of data how do they capitalize on it how do they monetize it how do they find ways to get savings within the organization so we took a we took a deep look into telco to say where would it make sense to invest that would really complement what we already offer with big data and our analytics portfolio and it kind of came to us the now factory came to us through a client who got exposed to their technology and it you know we just had our vision was so aligned that it just made sense to obviously kind of take that next step and take them off the market taken off the market marry them and you know choir so what does the driver obviously talk about some of the dynamic cuz you do you've been involved in M&A in business development the service provider market obviously relevant the old days was subscribers subscriber growth that's it now welcome to the internet with iphones and the smart phones you have revenue threats from sources of the competitive nature at the edge to growth just physical growth on the operations side what was what do you guys look at an IBM what's your what's your solution what do you guys sell to the providers these case and what are their top concerns well i think all of the concerns that you named basically right it's how can they differentiate themselves from their competitors right and how can they keep subscribers how can they keep their clients happy because if they keep their clients happy and limit the number of calls that they're going to let's say put in because of quality issues then obviously they'll be able to retain them so the subscriber experience i think is key you know definitely one of the you know kind of big angles that the csps are trying to do because of the competitive nature of this business so i think i've seen that there so that there is their normal business and that's in terms of their current business which is the money they're making from their subscribers and the services they are providing currently and they need to optimize those businesses and then most in most the world and especially in the developed world that there's a lot of focus in that area so how do you deliver those services at more and more efficiently but then at the same time they need to look to the future and they say well you know you know how do we fit into the new ecosystem and we would work with service providers and given them better insights as to how that has changed in over the use cases did you see both of you pumped into with these guys well this is the i guess there's a number of different ways they're trying to generate new revenue so I'm and to be to be honest and some of these are very early stages and there's some other stuff that they're they would try to do in terms of provide Dean alternatives to say if I look and say what's app for example which is a free text message I mean they would look at the kind of usage of that within their subscriber base look at which kind of tariff groups would be taken that open which wouldn't be and may be competing against that by offering more free text to those type of tariff groups so they you know so they can with the in with the right information optimize their their business models so that they can compete more effectively with some of these new social medias and new changes in things there they're also at the same time as there's cannibalization to their revenue right there that's some cannibalization but there's also new opportunities for them in new revenue streams which many of them are looking at as well she talked about the the service providers that you talked to in the acquisition you did the due diligence you did the purchase then you got to do the integration just take us through what was that like I mean and the strategy and do people get brought in is it full integration do they get to work autonomously to get brought into the fold immediately what's the strategy how do you guys do your integrations well there's there's no one acquisition alike so they're all very different in this case it's not a playbook like EMC has a specific playbook they're like okay we'll bring them in will let them run it for a while see how thank you can some rope and see if they hang themselves and some do it on case by case you're saying yeah I mean we do we do have some area like back office is very structured right so we obviously fold accounting finance legal you know contracts all of that does get folded into kind of that the the broader IBM in the case of how we go to market the offerings that we create in some cases to your Europe earlier point you know it could be a tuck and fold where maybe you're just acquiring the technology I'm in this case we yes we have an industry team that focuses on telco and selling to the csps in an overall platform view but what really drew us to the now factory was you know their industry expertise the fact that the products that they are actually offering to their clients are software versus of Lee customized set of services right and therefore software was a synergy aspect absolutely i mean with software you can scale right so obviously software was a big drive the fact that they had a fully integrated stack that's what clients want they don't want to buy capabilities they want to they want to buy value and by use case and so that too i think was a big differentiator from the now factory and other and other vendors in this space tom how was the how was the process for you was it painful hey what can I see the back office integration that I've got some serious machinery back this you have I mean bridge is great great foundation I think they have a great machine it's big the monster and keep it small yeah but I mean the outcome you asked what the outcome was I mean the outcome is I mean we still as the nail Factory an IBM company I mean we still have revenue targets to make in margin targets to make so things haven't changed that much now we have a much bigger support obviously in reach into customers than we had before and then we also have the added benefit now have been able to use technology which has been developed by IBM over many years which is very scalable which gives us which means we can instead of build on that we can focus on the differentiating stuff which makes a real difference to their clients yes even more resources we can give them the depth and the breadth that big that it's hard to do first in alone it was a great big plantation called the world I am which is still an image reach and custom and it can be overkill by the way it works both way cuts both ways yeah well that's the balance of the M&A and you brought up that the interesting I always kind of joke about the back office but the IBM does some good acquisitions but the key is the leverage right so like the interesting people worry about acquisitions is you know the founders come in they get integrated into culture that's not there as they feel handcuffed and and so that's always a concern or four founders mean how do you feel what the hell you guys giving them enough room to be creative but yet all that leverage as at the philosophy so far that's how I say yeah that's what I've seen so far I mean one of the things that I feel lose culturally I think it wasn't as different as what I'm i may stop drinking it yeah yeah it seemed to be okay I'm enjoying workers so way it hasn't hasn't been a huge hasn't been a huge change absolutely i mean that was one of the things that for a small company they had such a defined culture and a set of practices that they followed and it's just so rare that you actually see that in a in a small company janeshia what's next for you the integration is done now what do you do with my next deal you stay with them I'm actually staying with them so the integration is not done so we closed last week closed a deal yes so we'll have 48 months and we'll obviously incorporate what we believe we should write and integrate again back office and then obviously continue to help them build out their offerings and you know even see it through your like project managing the kind of the keeping the ball moving yeah yeah so I will stay on it for at least a year if not to and you know ensure that again the now factory preserve what we what we obviously bought from a technology perspective but also integrate it with other big data products and that was the other great thing about them some companies you know there has there's a lot of kind of rewrite that has to be done but the technology was so compatible with our big data platform already so there's me a lot of natural synergies with that he's that big data platform was it most synergistic within your mind and it's pretty big yes well actually I mean if you think about the core you have netezza right or pure data for analytics and so there's there's a lot of great things that we think we're going to do there and then streams which is a InfoSphere streams which is a product that actually was built within IBM over the last 5 10 years there's great opportunity there to take that technology which really does mediation for telcos and incorporate it into their offering yes dreams is really relevant mean the tease is a track record speaks for itself but you look at real time you bring in streaming this kind of it's pretty interesting yeah I think that's a this great opportunities there I mean a lot of the value-add in this area's is been able to close the loop so were you where you see in where you see enough where you can make to somebody are to be able to do that in real time to give to I guess is the the now part of the now factory and to be able to to make it real so if you're walking past a shop which is enough for which you're interested in to be able to get a trigger straight away so there's a lot of great stuff I think that would be able to do with streams gone forward so I gotta ask you as an entrepreneur two questions one how's it feel to get bull you nervous to sell I mean was it like match made my IBM is a big machine battleship or eric i have to say i have to see from my purse i wasn't looking to sell it wasn't something that I was doing we set it up and you know we're gonna write so it wasn't I guess there is a lot of consolidation in the space were in at the moment and so it wasn't something we were looking to do if it was a different company that approaches I don't think we would have went down the same I think there's when I look at IBM and how it fits with where we wanted to go it was an obvious fish and I mean they're their strategy in in big days and insights and stuff like that it's very soon as i said the opportunity yeah so the next quote that's that good segue there my next question so startups are hungry you know Steve Jobs and stay hungry and you're always bootstrapping even hundred seventy people you're still you know fearful of oh my god I could run on money even though you probably loaded it's like okay always always bootstrapping you get to IBM it's like oh my god they have all these resources do you feel like if you know I'm just learning how are you eating more you go to the cafeteria for appetizer you guys hungry what ya mean what's your mindset now that you're in IBM I mean because you now have so much more at your disposal and so against it's an oasis III think it's AI think this great opportunities in terms of what we can we can invest in things now which we know would make a difference in the Americas that before we couldn't do resource watch ya resource why so we were always constrained by we would see opportunity and in the area work in this odds of opportunities no shortage of opportunities but often you just don't we didn't have the resources to go after those opportunities now I think with the resources we have it's very exciting the one thing actually that they had did differently that we observed is they really built their company around their technology so they built you they built use cases out and then build a sales team around that it doesn't always work that way so it's really kind of the perfect formula for us to come in give them the scale give them the sales resources the channel to to really drive that value to the client jeje how about the growth mobile growth I was leaving Smith's massive you got the entrepreneurs now other eyes get bigger because they have bigger opportunities I mean part of your job is kind of keep them reined in a little bit not overdrive red line there engine right so you gotta say we could meet if we can clone these guys mobile is growing so fast what are some of the numbers or can you share any anecdotal data around the mobile growth I mean the market you know if you look at kind of the segments and they cross a few different segments but the market is growing at at least fifteen percent within the you know customer care you know / analyst Mason so I think there's tremendous growth clearly we're going to take more than fifteen percent you know if all of the opportunities that we're seeing today you know come to fruition so I think I think it'll grow thin churn two more I Android devices are coming on board give hace iPhones crushing it you know that was it's it's funny because you know having just got into the space over the last you know six to nine months it's very dynamic that the telco industries it's um it's almost antiquated but also very advanced it's it's it's kind of it's all over the place and so that I think is is going to hopefully just you know take us places because of the value that we're going to be able to drive what's your forecast for the for the future in terms of not IBM but from your perspective getting in this deal getting in with the entrepreneurs who have been laying down great foundation knowing what you know at IBM what's the outlook for telcos in your mind what's the big sweeping change that most folks don't see out there that you might be able to share with them so I mean from a from an underlying perspective what you know the vision I think that even they have for themselves is to kind of get out of the siloed business right where they have kind of all of the different network assets and that they have to kind of pull together to actually get some sort of overarching view of the organization so I think you know being able to really sell them a platform across the entire enterprise to give them the insights that they're going to need to better manage their business Tom will give you the final word we've got run a break right here coming up for the folks of it to share them you know what to expect from you guys maybe talk to your your customers your future customers share with them kind of what's going to go on for you guys on your team inside IBM what's your what's your objective what are you going to do well first how many farty customers are all around the world in Europe US and asia and first thing is i mean there isn't going to be huge amount to change in terms of the value we deliver them and the one thing I can say is that in IBM now we're able to wake I mean one of the reasons our customers work with us is because we're innovative and we move very very fast with the industry I think now given the capability act we have with that in IBM we're able to even move faster with new propositions to our customers and to our new customers so I think within it's a very exciting time both for our customers annals at the moment I want the feedback we got from our customers who have been very very positive so far well congratulations on the acquisition it the ink is signed it's closed money's transferred all that stuff's happened now them now the hard work yeah absolutely right the entire dash against and for the folks that know what goes on it's really a lot of work and you got to get it right it's like a secret it's like a recipe to a you know it's nice sauce you want to make sure all the ingredients are in place for scale I'll see a hot mark congratulations so we're here live inside the cube exclusive coverage at IBM's information I've been this to cube right back

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen. Brought to you by X Ensure Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit. Twenty nineteen. I'm John. For whichever Frick. My Coast. This week. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Our next guest is Janine Falcone. Is the marketing agency lead in North America for a center in Iraq? Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having >> me love having the conversation just talking on before we came on camera around the role of the agencies. You guys are doing a lot of big work for big brands. B to C B to B. There's a big shift going on with Cloud computing. We've seen that movie is happening right now. Amazon, as you are all going on, but that what? The marketing world. It's not just about marketing. Cloud is a lot more going on there. The impact to the marketing world and the agency relationships are impacted. That's what's going on. Give us >> the state of >> the market, >> happy to sew an extension. Interactive. You know, a lot of clients come to us and they're living in this world. I talk with my hands. Sorry, living in this world of, like chaos, as I like to call it, because there's so many things going on the technology landscape that you described. It's crazy out there. Remember, the landscape used to be this big announces big. So there's all that sort of market buzz and chaos around. I should buy this technology in that technology, and marketers and CEOs they've all been out there doing, that's that's one piece. The second piece is the customer affectation, right? All that is evolving and changes a customer's always expect. I don't really carry our retailer bank whatever. They kind of have that uber experience that they all expect regardless of product or service or anything like that. So marketers have always tried to deal with that in the way they knew how. But then the third component is business climate and what's happening in their worlds with either shrinking budgets or aging workforce. I don't even mean age necessarily as much a skill set. Aging skill sets things that used to matter. Don't they've got that they've got organizational silos, they've got all these things. So those three things, plus I'm a marketer. I still have to deliver that old brand promise that they're told to dio, It's a crazy crazy time. >> All theaters air on massive change over chips happening. Marketers and CMOS also relied on agencies for help. Tell them they have domain expertise in certain areas, A and agencies and the other thing. But now that the value equations shifting in the economics underlying economics behind it are getting some visibility around its digital different new ballgame, you got a I and Machine Learning has caused that shift. So the question is, How should your customer how are your customers dealing with agency relation? Because in today's value exchange, >> totally and that's all >> don't often come ask us that so not only they have all those silos and all those things. They could have seventeen different agencies across multiple product lines that may have been doing a great job in their own silo. But who's bringing all that together? And then it's not even and my just not spending my money right with these agencies, like What are they delivering for that? So when they come to us, tow holistically, look across all of that and help them. We start with the customer in the center of all those siloed crazy areas. You've got to start with the customer, and what do they expect and how do you deliver to them? So, yes, we're seeing this crazy world in the agency space two of brandade disease desolate all the different kinds of agency >> toss another piece of fruit in the blender makes it all. So I was talking with the sea so that the chief information security officer at some chief security officer at Microsoft reports to the board in cybersecurity, going through the same transformation that it's happening, marking where now you have technology and AP eyes and and tools technical tools. So he's shrinking his supplier base down because he doesn't want his skills gas to get widened by having to learn new tools. So there's now a new forcing function on the tech side, and now we see that kind of creeping into the adobe conversation where it's like this techno involved. Yes, we now have toes, shrink suppliers even more so how do you get from seventeen to three years at the train? So there seems to be a discussion around the impact attack your thoughts. >> Yeah, well, absolutely. That was one of the areas I talked about. So what happens? There is they'LL need marketers to understand technology which today many do. Let's be honest, right? Like, ten, fifteen years ago. They didn't. Today they do. But it also requires you both internally and externally, tohave multiple skill sets. And sometimes they'LL say, Should I be bringing this in house shivering that in house? What do I do with this technology? And there's never one answer. There's never like you should enforce this or that. And so technology has had that massive impact on Oh, I could do this myself and then they realise that can and then back to the But do I have the right skill sets internally externally to be able to do that. And it's often seventeen different still skill sets to do one thing where it used to be. A lot >> of Jeff and I talked on the cue before about you know, the classic business school conversation around core competency should be in house Horak outsource your non core competencies. How did you see that evolved? Because at some point there has to be a core concert on data and things of that nature. So what's your thoughts? How do you advise clients on Okay, if you're going to go in house and start putting a toe in the water and building it out, it's an investment. And all I think about, what's the core competency? >> I mean core competence to me or anything related specifically to your industry that people have to continue to get skilled in an expert in. And they want to do just that. One thing. Sometimes people that are broader generalists in marketing and data, they might get bored doing that. But if someone is like, I want to be really good at this and I'm going to continue to hone my skills in that one thing Data Analytics, whatever, then that may be. And you live in the right market. You don't live in kind of a part of the country where it be hard to find those skills. Be honest. I mean some parts of the country, it's easier than others, so that is one way to look at it. But anything that requires generalist knowledge across industry knowledge or or things that are constantly evolving and you want someone else to pay for the training. >> What's the CMO conversation like for you in clients these days is actually lets a lot of stuff going on. We just illustrated the game is still the same. They gotta pride that brand promise. Now they got the text taxing always new things. Hopefully, Ball will move down the field faster. But what is the CMO conversation that you have? How they stay ahead of the curve? What's their edge? >> Yeah, >> how they posturing right now? >> I mean, I think it's an amazing time to be in marketing. So CM owes to me that are the pioneering. CMO is the ones that are really focusing back is in on the customer and developed, you know, delivering those relevant experiences. They're the ones that are being ex successful because they try toe, not certainly not. Ignore all of us chaos that's surrounding, but stay focused and then they don't worry about Oh, this isn't in my silo. I have to kind of reach across, and I have to make sure I get this first. They have to be the leaders. They have to lead the industry like knowledge and business would be the leader in the organization, whether or not they are and just be the pioneer to get that done, that makes them successful. The ones that are excited about that they're the future, writes >> funny. We interviewed a guy from Clorox while ago, and you think of CPG has been data driven forever right there coming out of there coming out of Cincinnati. They all got trained Teo G. But this is a whole different level of kind of, of data, of data driven execution's been than what they've been doing for years and years and years. That's >> right, because potentially they were product centric. So they dealt with their product in CPD, and I'm going to sell toilet paper. That's I'm going to be the best market or there is. But the customer expectations surrounding that have changed, and they expect you to know them in a relevant, non creepy way. And product marketing to customer marketing is a big shift, and potentially I know a lot. I know a little about a lot of industries. CPG has been very product focused, which is difficult when you now have to be customer centric, regardless of product right that your company is trying to >> send the >> changing rule of distribution, especially in cpt. Anywhere before they would. They would ship the the toilet paper, whatever they were doing, and it goes out the door and they don't know anything else about it to the next. Word comes in correct. Now they know how the products are being used. They got a direct connection to the to the customer, and they need to establish a relationship beyond just the actual execution of the purchase of a very different >> kind of a chance. Crazy. I love it. I think it's a crazy time >> to be able to do that. And again, the blurring between marketing and commerce and sales and service. There's all sorts of debates on where marketing ends commerce sales service begins because it's all clustered together now. Then there's creativity and technology and data and analytics all converging. So to me, people that understand all of those things at a high enough level and are good collaborators and orchestrators that know how to get things done, they will be successful. >> Do you take a lot of people tried to buy their way out of the problem because you know Martek technology has been around for a long time. Arguably, you know, kind of leading edge in a lot of the the things in terms of a web experience. But this, you know, so many of them. >> You can't buy your way out of the problem. Yeah, Yeah, except that. And >> buy it quickly, right? I'm going to buy it, and I'm gonna plug the sand. I mean, I feel like that might have happened years ago, and now you're right there seeing that. Oh, my God. Now, that, too, is like its own silo. Now they have a technology silo to, in addition to potentially some organizational silos that they have to break down. So But, you know, the good news is that everybody sort of sees this now and kind of gets it. And if people are just sort of focused on to do the right thing for the customer because if you don't, someone else will. And sometimes going back to what used to work works like Now, if I call a company, I have no expectation they're going to answer the phone. And when they do, you're like, Wow, that was a great experience. I scheduled a vacation. It was It ended up being non refundable. And I'm like, I'm just going to try to call. It was one of the online. It wasn't Airbnb was one of those like services I caught. They answer the phone. If seven o'Clock on a Thursday night, >> no problem. You can count. Like this is the greatest experience I've had. I'm going to use them again because I didn't expect >> that. So it's not like what used to work doesn't work anymore, but has to work on the right. >> Pleasant surprises. Exactly. Relevancy. That's healthy. And you got it. Yeah. And then they >> said I said, Okay, well, I mean, they're like, we don't need your information, you know, I have your cell phone, so I don't >> know. And I wasn't creeped out by that. I don't >> thank God. Now I don't have to fill out a form >> I need to do mother's maiden name, like, six different times. >> And then, you know what? I saw how you guys make >> money. Like I was so fascinated by this that I just had to sort of figure out the business model because I'm a marker there. And my point is that was. I don't know how much it costs them to do that, but that was a positive experience, >> President. People call in >> there, Bryan. Nobody call it. And I don't know how they got around the company for all I know. So I gotta ask you, I gotta ask >> you with all these new changes you mentioned in one of the great example of how the world's changing KP eyes also change around what's really what's relevant. Because these new things air going on where may or may not have KP I. So how does the CMO get out in front of that? How did they evolve their skill set to either either grok that understand all this new k p I potential? Yeah, and have that front and center and working through the marketing mix. >> Yeah, you can have KP I overload to write. So remember, old school still works. Brand matters. Brandt. No one worried about measuring that stuff years ago, and part of that is still relevant. I had a session earlier today and people talked about CP eyes like customer related influence and things like that, because that matters and some things you absolutely I know This is a Dobie a mike in trouble. You maybe can't necessarily measure. But, you know, it matters to your brand, and some of that matters to know how much you spend on that, how you sort of track that and maybe track I'm all about, like, mixing gray and mixing, you know, qualitative and quantitative stuff. That's part of the trick >> on these signals. Their market, their data signals totally put on the agency front. Go back to the agency for second because with sass, APS and these new things, people answer the phone, which has blended kind of channels. Is there a new agency model emerging around cloud and sass applications that that this doesn't feel like an agency but acts like an agency? Because if you're an agency you're providing a service, you have software service models out there. Self service is there in the evolution of change over and how ages new agencies looked like. And how does the CMO know if someone's a new agency is going to be relevant or not? >> I mean, it totally depends on the kind of agents, and I would tell C Motor not necessarily worry about that. I wouldn't worry about. Do I need a new kind of agency at all? It's like, What am I getting? What are they delivering for me? I would go back to the first question and what do I need to keep as a core competency? And inside versus outside I wouldn't worry about it. Might be the technology question. Right now, I'm gonna have even the others other crazy agencies in What I would worry about is what do I know? I need toe outsource and have people help me with that are going to come up with the best ideas. And I mean, agencies still do that because to come up with a creative idea, you need that expertise that is outside of your industry. So I don't see that ever changing >> don't ask in terms of because, he said, cause brand matters. And I always like a Harley Davidson is kind of the extreme brand loyalty where people tattoo it on their bodies and there's a whole ecosystem outside of the motorcycle. That's a really, you know, passionate group of people. Should everybody strive for that kid everybody. I mean they can't get quite where every tattoo and brands on their arm. But you know where we're kind of the limits And is it, you know, kind of appropriate based on what the product is, how people think about that. Specter. >> Yeah, I might be a little biased on that. I always think brand matters. I always think that when you think of something, if you don't in your head, know what that stands for, whether or not it's a positive or negative is not really relevant. It's yes, I think it does now. Should they strive to be that? No. But they have to be differentiated, and they have to have people know what they do quickly, because if you have to figure it out like mean, people struggle with that today in terms of knowing where to go for what, So without a clear value proposition, differentiation and a brand that matches that and a brand you can live up to with every experience, it's going to be rough. You might have some early success, but it won't. I don't know that it lasts their time and strong brands kind of carry through some tough times, too, You know, if sales are down on the market changes, >> we'LL keep doing our and our interviews on events and get smart people really smart people. And all the answers come out community. Thanks >> so much for coming on, sharing these awesome insights. Final question. What's going on? The show for you? What? Some of the hallway conversations here. You're speaking. What's the top story line for you here at this show? >> It's two things. It's what's going on. The market with our clients is as we just talked about. It's what's going on in our own industry. I mean, there's craziness in our own industry, which is kind of fun. You know what players do, what and who's going to do what and you know, where's this all going? And it's fun. I mean, it's it's really, really fun and exciting to be part of this industry. >> Well, thanks for coming on, Mr. Q. Where we're extracting the signal from the noise at this event. Adobe Summit twenty nineteen Talking the smartest people bringing it to you. Bring that data to you. We right back with more coverage after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE . Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, and welcome to The CUBE . Here we are at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, your host. We are here for a feature one-on-one CUBE interview with Nancy Hensley, the Chief Digital Officer of the Analytics group. IBM has a new position rolling out across the company called the Chief Digital Offices. So there's a chief-Chief Digital Officer, and that's Bob Lord. But each business unit's taking digital seriously as a way to engage and provide services and value to customers and anyone who's interested. Nancy, great to see you. CUBE alumni. >> Thank you, thank you. Glad to be here. Always happy to be back. >> Thanks for stopping by. So, I'm really interested in this Chief Digital Officer role that you're in. >> Yeah. >> You know we love digital, you know we're progressive, we love to try new things. >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> IBM, big infrastructure on digital. What's your new role? Take a minute to explain what you're working on in this analytics group. So you're in this analytics division. >> Nancy: Yes. >> So you're in the business unit? Take a minute. >> I haven't left all of my love for data and analytics. I'm still here, but now what I'm doing is making these products much more consumable and accessible. The challenge we had, and I think a big change that's happening in the industry, is that best of breed isn't good enough anymore. You have to make these products much more accessible because the power shifting to that one digital consumer, who's going to search for some sort of capability >> John: Yeah. >> And wherever they find it is where they're going to start to engage, right? And that's where we have to be. >> Yeah. I mean, to me, remember the old days? CRM. Customer Relationship Management software. >> Yeah. >> I mean, right now, software is in a relationship, still. >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> So, talk about the relationship because digitally it's different. >> Nancy: It is. >> It's not a catalog for learning. >> Right. >> It's not waterfall, it's more agile, it's more personal. >> Right. >> But it can't be intrusive, because people don't want to be sold to, they're worried about their data. >> Nancy: Right. >> Re-targeting. >> Nancy: Yep. >> How are you guys changing the game? >> So, we used to develop products. Now we develop experiences. The product is the experience, and the experience is the product, and that starts from, how easy is it to find? When I search for a capability like text analytics or content analytics, do I find what I'm looking for? How easy is it to get my hands on it and try it? How easy is it to have that aha moment of 'oh, I get how this product can help me,' right? How easy is it to engage with my peers in a community? How easy it is to get support, right? All of that is part of the experience. And what we're doing now, is wrapping that all together around the product. >> Talk about specifically, some of the things you're working on, I'd like to get.. >> Sure. >> I know you were talking before we came on camera about some of the programs, but at the end of the day, people want to get the job done, right? >> Nancy: Right. >> They need, they have a job to do, a mission, and they want to feel like they got instant value. >> Nancy: M-hmm. >> Maybe kick the tires, do a little deep dive. >> Nancy: Yup. >> Jump around, not feel like they're, you know, getting in a headlock on the IBM dot com site. >> (laughing) Well, let's talk about one of the products that we started with, which was SPSS Statistics. So, do you know Statistics actually turns 50 this year? 50! That's amazing, right? So, Statistics is primarily students in academia. So the average profile of a Statistics buyer is normally under 25. How do you think those buyers want to buy? It's probably not through a face-to-face IBM sales relationship, right? So we started off with that product because it was the most B to C product that we had, and we knew that the buyer gave us some very clear signals about, I want to buy digitally, I want to be able to easily try it, download it, and subscription-based pricing, which is including support and a good community go-to. So, when we started off the digital transformation a year ago on Statistics, it was very difficult to find, it was very difficult to try. We didn't have a very good NPS score for support. And so we transformed the whole experience, and you literally can get on, it's easy to find, it comes up top of the search. You download it, you swipe your credit card. It's a very sleek experience and you are up and running in like, 15 minutes. >> You know, one of the thing's that's interesting, people just want a relationship with that experience. And as you guys rethink this, if you think about it, analytics, the younger buyers.. >> Nancy: Yeah! >> They don't actually even use email. They have mobile email accounts. >> Nancy: Right. >> They're on Snapchat, they're on Instagram, and they have multiple channels open, and so you have to be smarter about how to engage in the preferred method that the users want. How is that translated within IBM? Share some inside baseball about some of the conversations inside IBM as you guys try to make that happen. Because I know, certainly, that you're talking about it, you guys are doing stuff. What's the conversations like inside IBM? >> (laughing) I think we want to be able to do more to engage with the client in-product. Everything from making it easier for them to find support to even booking time with an expert. And the more we can push that into the product so they never have to leave that original experience, I think it's better for them, right? I mean, in the past IBM would have one site for developer works, right? One site that had support information, one site that had product information, one site that had, like, learn and discover assets and another site that you would try and buy. And that was just too much work for the consumer to try and get to that point where they were very comfortable and confident, they could find their peers, right? So consolidating that all, that is the big challenge now. Because we're, you know, we're not a young company So we have a lot of information that's digitized out there. >> And you have some older buyers, I mean, but that's the trade-off. I have this conversation all the time with folks, that new solutions aren't mutually exclusive to the old way. >> Nancy: Right. >> There are a lot of people that still use email >> Nancy: Yeah. >> As a preferred method. It's been the killer app for 30 years. >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> Okay, but now the new users, you've got to bolt on new programs, so how's that ... How are you guys thinking about that? Is there any technology decisions that you guys made? Jeannie mentioned you guys are using your own tools and technology, love her story. A.I. ... >> So, one of the cool things- >> Blockchain, data. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, one of the cool things we're doing is using chat bots to optimize the time of our digital sales reps. So if you go on SPSS Statistics right now, you can have a conversation with a chat bot, and what it's done is, it's actually helped us optimize. So, when you actually talk to a really good rep that you want to get deeper in conversation on, you've already gotten a lot of your questions answered. We've improved their time, they optimized their time by 76%. Overall, what digital's done for us in a product like Statistics, is it's reduced the amount of time it's taken us to acquire new clients. So, for every 100 new clients that we acquire new, brand new to IBM, it's been reduced by 70%. So we can truly accelerate how many more clients we can onboard in digital than we ever could before. >> So here's a trick question for you. It's kind of a hard question, but it's kind of a trick question because it's hard to answer. At least I think it's hard, maybe you'll think it's easier. Inefficiencies always come in new technologies, but whenever you have new technologies, you can create new efficiencies. >> Nancy: M-hmm. >> What if, because you mentioned some great stats, you guys are shortening the cycle down to acquire new customers. >> Provide value, faster time to value. Have you seen any new blockers come in front of you or have you seen any new things that you guys have disrupted a way in terms of making it more efficient? Because there's always an opportunity to reduce the steps it takes to do something. >> Nancy: Right. >> Or make it easier to use and more simpler. >> Well, it is a huge mindset shift for us, because this is not how we've engaged with the client. So first, it's important for clients to understand that there are two routes to market with us now. One is through a face-to-face, traditional sales method, and some clients will continue to engage on that through many of our products. There's our partners. Actually, it's more than two. And now there's digital, and that's brand new, right? Truly digital self-service commerce, and with that we're doing more focus around how do we grow adoption around those products faster than we ever can before? So we're using new growth hacking techniques and that is, again, it is very disruptive to the mindset that we came from, but, you know, I always say, IBM, we continue to reinvent ourselves so we're reinventing a new experience. >> Well, I've got to just say growth hacking techniques has been a big debate in Silicon Valley. Gamification, growth hacks is kind of passé in terms of wording. There's nuance, but I want to share that with you. There were companies that did growth hacking at the expense of the users. >> Nancy: Right. >> But there's actually growth hacking that creates a good user experience >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> That's kind of being replaced with gamification and this is becoming a very critical part of digital. >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> 'Gamifiying' on behalf of user experience, >> Nancy: Yep. >> which Jeannie was saying that's the focus, is really the short cut. >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> So to me, the shortcut is, how do I get to what I want to find ... ? That's gamification. It's an algorithm, it's software. >> Right, right. And how do you amplify on what's working and what's not working? So we're literally running weekly experiments. We get the teams together, we have squads that get together it's everybody from design to development, and we just do a big drain dump of here's the things we should try. And then we just try and we start to double down where it's working, and we learn a lot from the things that aren't working, and not everything works in digital is what we're finding. >> The best thing about it is that you can always re-start and re-try because it's easy to work with. >> Right. >> So I want to talk about the role of community. IBM has always had a strong community mindset. >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> The ethos going back to Open Source days, it's been a leader in Linux, and continued to have an open source presence. We've been following the Hyper ledger project in the Linux foundation, I've been covering some of the IBM work there with Blockchain. But more and more open source and community. How do you guys take digital to communities? >> So, in the past, the digital experience wasn't really all-inclusive around the product, so you would have to go to a different place to connect with community. And now what we're doing is bringing that all into, we call it a hub-like experience in the marketplace so it's all there. Because part of your decision process is, I want to go connect with people like me, right? I want to connect with my peers. So we're making it easier to do that. So now that it's all interconnected in the marketplace, making it easier for people to find, because ... You know, what do you do when you buy something, right? You read reviews, you see how other people have used it. >> Check the ratings. >> Community's critical to that, right? Exactly. So we've connected all that too, including a support experience as well. All of that revolves around the product digitally. >> All right. I've got to ask the final question. I asked Janine Sneed who's the CDO for Hybrid Cloud the same question, what's on your to-do list? New job, congratulations. >> (laughing) Thank you! >> An important one, we think it's super critical. What's your priorities, what are you going to work on? What's the to-do list look like? What are some of the things you want to accomplish over the next year, be it putting stakes in the ground, new programs ... What's the priorities? Share some insight into what you're thinking. >> I would like get as much self-service capability across the products that we are determining to be digital, is probably my number one priority. But the number two is, to create a great onboarding experience, right? And that's different than selling. When you're selling, you're convincing somebody. When you're onboarding a client, you're kind of showing them the way, and so I want to create that great onboarding experience in every single product so that our products are easy to adapt, they're easy to use, and they, you know, that's how we grow. >> You've got to earn their trust in that onboarding process. >> Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, in the digital space it's everything. >> Yeah. >> It's everything. >> Digital trust. Nancy Hensley, Chief data ... Data ... >> (laughing) >> Chief Digital Officer. See, CDO means multiple things. Chief Data Officer, but you're Chief Digital Officer for the Analytics team, and CUBE alumni. sharing her thoughts on her new opportunity within IBM and also an important one, as digital is the fabric, digital's transformation is changing experiences and outcomes, of course creating value. I'm John Furrier here in the CUBE studios at IBM Think. We'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)