(gentle music) >> Welcome back to our coverage here on theCUBE of AWS re:Invent 22. We are on day three, starting to wind down, but still a lot of exciting topics to cover here on the AWS Global Showcase, part of the startup program there at AWS. Joining us now, two representatives from LTI Mindtree. You say LTI Mindtree? I thought they were two different companies. Well, they're actually one and the same. Been together just a mere two weeks now. We'll hear more about that from Sid Bohra, who is the Chief Business Officer at LTI Mindtree and Ashish Varerkar, who is the Vice President of Cloud Success at LTI Mindtree. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Pleasures all ours. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations. So two weeks in the making in its infancy, still in the honeymoon period, but how's the two weeks been? Everything all right? >> Well, two weeks have been very exciting. >> I'll bet. >> Well, I would say the period prior to that was just as exciting as you can imagine. >> John: Oh, sure. And we are super excited about what the future holds for this company because we truly believe that we have a remarkable opportunity to create value for our clients as one company. >> Well let's talk about LTI Mind tree then a little bit. Ashish, I'll let you carry the ball on this. Tell us about your services, about your core focus, and about those opportunities that Siddharth was just telling us about. >> So I think with the two companies coming together, we have a larger opportunity to like go to market with our end to end business transformation services and leveraging cloud platforms, right? So, and that's what we do. My responsibility particularly is to see to it that what customers are deploying on cloud is aligned to their business outcomes and then take it forward from there. >> Yeah, Vice President of Cloud Success, that gives you a lot of runway, right? Does it not? I mean, how do you define success in the cloud? Because there are a lot of different areas of complexity with which companies are dealing. >> So I think you would agree that in today's scenario, customers are not looking for a platform, right? But they're looking for a platform which can deliver business value. They're looking at business value and resiliency and then at the end, the cost, right? So if you're able to deliver these three things to the customer through the cloud implementation, I think that's success for us. >> Right. We've talked about transformation a lot this week and modernization, right, which is those are two pretty key buzzwords right now we're hearing a lot of. So when you see said, you know, companies come to you and they say, okay, it's time for us to make this commitment. Do they make it generally wholeheartedly? Is there still some trepidation of the unknown? Because there's a lot of, as we've said, complexity to this, it's multidimensional. We can go public, we can go hybrid, we can go multicloud. I mean, we got a lot of flavors. >> Yeah >> Absolutely. >> No, we see a spectrum. There are customers who are very early in the journey of getting onto cloud and are a little uncertain about what value they can get out of it. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are companies who are well into the journey who have understood what are the benefits of truly leveraging cloud who also understand what are the challenges they will face in getting onto the journey. So we get to meet a spectrum of customers, I would say. If you ask me where do bulk of them lie, I would say early in their journey. I would say there are only a handful who have that maturity where they can predict what's exactly going to happen on the cloud journey, what value they will accumulate through the process. So there's a lot of hand holding to be done, a lot of, you know, solving together to be done with our clients. >> You know, it is such a dynamic environment too, right? You have new opportunities that seem to be developed and released on a daily basis, almost, right? There's a large amount of flexibility, I would think, that has to be in place because where you think you're going to go today might not be where you wind up in six months. >> That's true. >> Is that fair? >> Absolutely fair. And I think from that perspective, if you look at the number of services that AWS provides, right? And what customers are looking for is how can they compose their business processes using this multiple services in a very seamless manner. And most of the announcements that we have seen during the re:Invent as well, they're talking about seamless connectivity between their services. They're talking about security, they're talking about creating a data fabric, the data zone that they announced. I think all these things put together, if you're able to kind of connect the dots and drive the business processes, I think that's what we want to do for our customers. >> And the value to AWS, it just can't be underscored enough I would assume, because there's comfort there, there's confidence there. When you bring that to the table as well along with your services, what kind of magnitude are we talking about here? What kind of force do you think? How would you characterize that? >> Well I think, you know, firstly, I would say that most of our engagements are not just services. Ashish and team and the company have invested heavily in building IP that we pair with our services so that we bring non-linearity and more, I would say, certainty to the outcomes that our customers get. And I can share some examples in the course of the conversation, but to answer your question in terms of magnitude, what we are collaborating with AWS on for our clients ranges from helping customers build more resiliency. And I'm talking about life sciences companies build more resiliency in the manufacturing R and D processes. That's so critical. It was even more critical during the pandemic times because we were working with some of the pharma companies who were contributing to the efforts in the pandemic. That's one end of the spectrum. On the other side, we are helping streaming companies and media companies digitize their supply chain, and their supply chains, the media supply chain, so that it is more effective, it's more efficient, it's more real time, again, using the power of the cloud. We are helping pharmaceutical companies drive far greater speed in the R and D processes. We are helping banking companies drive far more compliance in their anti-money laundering efforts and all of those things. So if you look at the magnitude, we judge the magnitude by the business impact that it's creating and we are very excited about what AWS, LTI Mindtree, and the customer are able to create in terms of those business impacts. >> And these are such major decisions. >> That's right. >> For a company, right, to make, and there are a number of factors that come into play here. What are you hearing from the C-Suite with regard to what weighs the most in their mind and is there, is it a matter of, you know, fear missing out? Or is it about trying to stay ahead of your competition, catching up the competition? I mean, generally speaking, you know, where are the, where's the C-Suite weighing in on this? >> I think in the current times, I think there is a certain level of adoption of cloud that's already happened in most enterprises. So most CIOs in the C-suite- >> They already get it. They already get it. >> They kind of get it, but I would say that they're very cagey about a bunch of things. They're very cagey about, am I going to end up spending too much for too little? Am I going to be able to deliver this transformation at the speed that I'm hoping to achieve? What about security? Compliance? What about the cost of running in the cloud? So those are some really important factors that sometimes end up slowing the cloud transformation journeys down because customers end up solving for them or not knowing for them. So while there is a decent amount of awareness about what cloud can do, there are some, a whole bunch of important factors that they continue to solve for as they go down that journey. >> And so what kind of tools do you provide them then? >> Primarily, what we do is, to Siddharth's point, right? So on one end, we want to see to it that we are doing the business transformation and all our cloud journeys start with a business North Star. So we align, we have doubled down on, say, five to six business domains. And for each of these business domains industries, we have created business North Star. For these business North Star, we define the use cases. And these use cases then get lit up through our platform. So what we have done is we have codified everything onto our platform. We call it Infinity. So primarily business processes from level one, level two, level three, level, and then the KPIs which are associated with these business processes, the technical KPIs and the business KPIs, and then tying it back to what you have deployed on cloud. So we have end to end cloud transformation journeys enabled for customers through the business North Star. >> And Infinity is your product. >> Can I add something? >> Please do. Yeah, please. >> Yeah so, you know, Ashish covered the part about demystifying if I were to do this particular cloud initiative, it's not just modernizing the application. This is about demystifying what business benefit will accrue to you. Very rare to find unless you do a very deep dive assessment. But what the platform we built also accelerates, you talked about modernization early in the conversation, accelerates the modernization process by automating a whole bunch of activities that are often manual. It bakes insecurity and compliance into everything it does. It automates a whole bunch of cloud operations including things like finops. So this is a life cycle platform that essentially codifies best practices so that you are not getting success by coincidence, you're getting success by design. So that's really what, that's really how we've approached the topic of realizing the true power of cloud by making sure that it's repeatedly delivered. >> Right. You know, I want to hit on security too because you brought that up just a few moments ago. Obviously, you know, we all, and I'd say we, we can do a better job, right? I mean, there's still problems, there's still challenges, there are a lot of bad actors out there that are staying ahead of the game. So as people come to you, clients come to you, and they raise these security concerns, what's your advice to them in terms of, you know, what kind of environment they're going into and what precautions or protections they can put in place to try to give themselves a little bit of peace of mind about how they're going to operate? >> You want to take it? >> So I think primarily, if you are going to cloud, you are going with an assumption that you are moving out of your firewalls, right? You're putting something out of your network area. So and from that perspective, the parameter security from the cloud perspective is very, very important. And then each and every service or the interactions between the services and what you integrate out of your organization, everything needs to be secured through the right guard rates. And we integrate all those things into our platform so that whatever new apps that get deployed or build or any cost product that gets deployed on cloud, everything is secure from a 360 degree perspective. So primarily, maintaining a good security posture, which on a hybrid cloud, I would not say only cloud, but extending your on-prem security posture to cloud is very, very important to when you go to implementing anything on could. >> If you had a crystal ball and we were sitting down here a year from now, you know, what do you think we'd be talking about with regard to, you know, developing these end-to-end opportunities that you are, what's the, I wouldn't say missing piece, but a piece that you would like to have refined to the point where you come back next year and say, John, guess what we did? Look what we were able to accomplish. Anything that you're looking at that you want to tackle here in 2023? Or is there some fine tuning somewhere that you think could even tighten your game even more than it is already? >> We have a long, long way to go, I would say. I think my core takeaway in terms of where the world of technology is headed because cloud is, you know, is essentially a component of what customers want to achieve. It's a medium through which they want to achieve. I think we live in a highly change oriented economy. Every industry is what I call getting re-platformed, right? New processes, new experiences, new products, new efficiency. So a year from now, and I can tell you even for few years from now, we would be constantly looking at our success in terms of how did cloud move the needle on releasing products faster? How did cloud move the needle on driving better experience and better consumer loyalty, for example. How did cloud move the needle on a more efficient supply chain? So increasingly, the technology metrics like, you know, keeping the lights on, or solving tickets, or releasing code on time, would move towards business metrics because that's really the ultimate goal of technology or cloud. So I would say that my crystal ball says we will increasingly be talking business language and business outcomes. Jeff Bezos is an incredible example, right? One of his annual letters, he connected everything back into how much time did consumers save by using Amazon. And I think that's really where in the world, that's the world we are headed towards. >> Ashish, any thoughts on that? >> I think Siddharth put it quite well. I would say if you are able to make a real business impact for our customers in next one year, helping them in driving some of their newer services on cloud through cloud, that would be a success factor for us. >> Well gentlemen, congratulations on the merger. I said two weeks. Still very much in the honeymoon phase and I'm sure it's going to go very well and I look forward to seeing you back here in a year. We'll sit down, same spot, let's remember, fifth floor, and we'll give it a shot and see how accurate you were on that. >> Absolutely. >> Wonderful. It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Very good. Ashish, good to see you, sir. >> Thank you. >> A pleasure. We'll continue here. We're at the Venetian at AWS re:Invent 22, continue at the AWS Global Showcase startup. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>Welcome back to the Cube, as a continued coverage here from AWS Reinvent 22. It's day three of our coverage here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, and we're part of the AWS Global Startup Showcase. With me to talk about what Kong's to in that regard is Marco Palladino, who's the, the CTO and the co-founder of Con Marco. Good >>To see you. Well, thanks for having me >>Here. Yeah, I was gonna say, by the way, I, I, you've got a beautiful exhibit down on the show floor. How's the week been for you so far as an exhibitor here? >>It's been very busy. You know, to this year we made a big investment at the WS reinvent. You know, I think this is one of the best conferences in the industry. There is technology developers, but it's also business oriented. So you can learn about all the business outcomes that our, you know, customers or, you know, people are trying to make when, when adopting these new technologies. So it's very good so far. >>Good, good, good to hear. Alright, so in your world, the API world, you know, it used to be we had this, you know, giant elephant. Now we're cutting down the little pieces, right? That's right. We're all going micro now these days. That's right. Talk about that trend a little bit, what you're seeing, and we'll jump in a little deeper as to how you're addressing that. >>Well, I think the industry learned a long time ago that running large code bases is actually quite problematic when it comes to scaling the organization and capturing new opportunities. And so, you know, we're transitioning to microservices because we want to get more opportunities in our business. We want to be able to create new products, fasters, we want to be able to leverage existing services or data that we have built, like an assembly line of software, you know, picking up APIs that other developers are building, and then assemble them together to create new experiences or new products, enter new markets. And so microservices are fantastic for that, except microservices. They also introduce significant concerns on the networking layer, on the API layer. And so this is where Kong specializes by providing API infrastructure to our customers. >>Right. So more about the problems, more about the challenges there, because you're right, it, opportunities always create, you know, big upside and, and I, I don't wanna say downside, but they do introduce new complexities. >>That's right. And introducing new complexity. It's a little bit the biggest enemy of any large organization, right? We want to reduce complexity, we want to move faster, we want to be more agile, and, and we need an API vision to be able to do that. Our teams, you know, I'm speaking with customers here at Reinvent, they're telling me that in the next five years, the organization is going to be creating more APIs than all the APIs they've created up until now. Right? So how do you >>Support, that's a mind boggling number, right? >>It's mind boggling. Yeah, exactly. How do you support that type of growth? And things have been moving so fast. I feel like there is a big dilemma in, you know, with certain organizations where, you know, we have not taught a long term strategy for APIs, whereas we do have a long term strategy for our business, but APIs are running the business. We must have a long term strategy for our APIs, otherwise we're not gonna be able to execute. And that's a big dilemma right now. Yeah. >>So, so how do we get the horse back in front of the cart then? Because it's like you said, it's almost as if we've, we're, we're reprioritizing, you know, incorrectly or inaccurately, right? You're, you're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. >>Well, so, you know, whenever we have a long-term strategy for pretty much anything in the organization, right? We know what we want to do. We know the outcome that we want to achieve. We work backwards to, you know, determine what are the steps that are gonna bring us there. And, and the responsibility for thinking long term in, in every organization, including for APIs at the end of the day, always falls on the leaders and the should on the shoulders of the leadership and, and to see executives of the organization, right? And so we're seeing, you know, look at aws by the way. Look at Amazon. This conference would not have been possible without a very strong API vision from Amazon. And the CEO himself, Jeff Bezos, everybody talks about wanting to become an API first organization. And Amazon did that with the famous Jeff Bezos mandate today, aws, it's a hundred billion revenue for Amazon. You see, Amazon was not the first organization with, with an e-commerce, but if it was the first one that married a very strong e-commerce business execution with a very strong API vision, and here we are. >>So yeah, here we are putting you squarely in, in, in a pretty good position, right? In terms of what you're offering to the marketplace who has this high demand, you see this trend starting to explode. The hockey sticks headed up a little bit, right? You know, how are you answering that call specifically at how, how are you looking at your client's needs and, and trying to address what they need and when they need it, and how they need it. Because everybody's in a kind of a different place right now. >>Right? That's exactly right. And so you have multiple teams at different stages of their journey, right? With technology, some of them are still working on legacy, some of them are moving to the cloud. Yep. Some of them are working in containers and in microservices and Kubernetes. And so how do you, how do we provide an API vision that can fulfill the needs of the entire organization in such a way that we reduce that type of fragmentation and we don't introduce too much complexity? Well, so at con, we do it by essentially splitting the API platform in three different components. Okay. One is API management. When, whenever we want to expose APIs internally or to an ecosystem of partners, right? Or to mobile, DRA is a service mesh. You know, as we're splitting these microservices into smaller parts, we have a lot of connectivity, all, you know, across all the services that the teams are building that we need to, to manage. >>You know, the network is unreliable. It's by default, not secure, not observable. There is nothing that that works in there. And so how do we make that network reliable without asking our teams to go and build these cross-cut concerns whenever they create a new service. And so we need a service match for that, right? And then finally, we could have the best AP infrastructure in the world, millions of APIs and millions of microservices. Everything is working great. And with no API consumption, all of that would be useless. The value of our APIs and the value of our infrastructure is being driven by the consumption that we're able to drive to all of these APIs. And so there is a whole area of API productivity and discovery and design and testing and mocking that enables the application teams to be successful with APIs, even when they do have a, the proper API infrastructure in place that's made of meshes and management products and so on and so forth. Right. >>Can you gimme some examples? I mean, at least with people that you've been working with in terms of addressing maybe unique needs. Cuz again, as you've addressed, journeys are in different stages now. Some people are on level one, some people are on level five. So maybe just a couple of examples Yeah. Of clients with whom you've been working. Yeah, >>So listen, I I was talking with many organizations here at AWS Reinvent that are of course trying to migrate to the cloud. That's a very common common transformation that pretty much everybody's doing in the world. And, and how do you transition to the cloud by de-risking the migration while at the same time being able to get all the benefits of, of running in the cloud? Well, we think that, you know, we can do that in two, two ways. One, by containerizing our workloads so that we can make them portable. But then we also need to lift and shift the API connectivity in such a way that we can determine how much traffic goes to the legacy and how much traffic goes to the new cloud infrastructure. And by doing that, we're able to deal with some of these transformations that can be quite complex. And then finally, API infrastructure must support every team in the organization. >>And so being able to run on a single cloud, multi-cloud, single cluster, multi cluster VMs containers, that's important and essential because we want the entire organization to be on board. Because whenever we do not do that, then the developers will make short term decisions that are not going to be fitting into the organizational outcomes that we want to achieve. And we look at any outcome that your organization wants to achieve the cloud transformation, improving customer retention, creating new products, being more agile. At the end of the day, there is an API that's powering that outcome. >>Right? Right. Well, and, and there's always a security component, right? That you have to be concerned about. So how are you raising that specter with your clients to make them aware? Because sometimes it, I wouldn't say it's an afterthought, but sometimes it's not the first thought. And, and obviously with APIs and with their integral place, you know, in, in the system now security's gotta be included in that, right? >>API security is perhaps the biggest, biggest request that we're hearing from customers. You know, 83% of the world's internet traffic at the end of the day runs on APIs, right? That's a lot of traffic. As a matter of fact, APIs are the first attack vector for any, you know, malicious store party. Whenever there is a breach, APIs must be secured. And we can secure APIs on different layers of our infrastructure. We can secure APIs at the L four mesh layer by implementing zero trust security, for example, encrypting all the traffic, assigning an identity to every service, removing the concept of trust from our systems because trust is exploitable, right? And so we need to remove the cut zero trust, remove the concept of trust, and then once we have that underlying networking that's being secure and encrypted, we want to secure access to our APIs. >>And so this is the typical authentication, authorization concerns. You know, we can use patterns like op, op or opa open policy agent to create a security layer that does not rely on the team's writing code every time they're creating a new service. But the infrastructure is enforcing the type of layer. So for example, last week I was in Sweden, as a matter of fact speaking with the largest bank in Sweden while our customers, and they were telling us that they are implementing GDPR validation in the service mesh on the OPPA layer across every service that anybody's building. Why? Well, because you can embed the GDPR settings of the consumer into a claim in a gel token, and then you can use OPPA to validate in a blanket way that Jo Token across every service in the mesh, developers don't have to do that. It just comes out of the box like that. And then finally, so networking, security, API security for access and, and management of those APIs. And then finally we have deep inspection of our API traffic. And here you will see more exotic solutions for API security, where we essentially take a subset of our API traffic and we try to inspect it to see if there is anybody doing anything that they shouldn't be doing and, and perhaps block them or, you know, raise, raise, raise the flag, so to speak. >>Well, the answer is probably yes, they are. Somebody's trying to, somebody's trying to, yeah, you're trying to block 'em out. Before I let you go, you've had some announcements leading up here to the show that's just to hit a few of those highlights, if you would. >>Well, you know, Kong is an organization that you know, is very proud of the technology that we create. Of course, we started with a, with the API gateway Con Gateway, which was our first product, the most adopted gateway in the world. But then we've expanded our platform with service mesh. We just announced D B P F support in the service mesh. For example, we made our con gateway, which was already one of the fastest gateway, if not the fastest gateway out there, 30% faster with Con Gateway 3.0. We have shipped an official con operator for Kubernetes, both community and enterprise. And then finally we're doubling down on insomnia, insomnia's, our API productivity application that essentially connects the developers with the APIs that are creating and allows them to create a discovery mechanism for testing, mocking the bagging, those APIs, all of this, we of course ship it OnPrem, but then also on the cloud. And you know, in a cloud conference right now, of course, cloud, right? Right. Is a very important part of our corporate strategy. And our customers are asking us that. Why? Because they don't wanna manage the software, they want the API platform, they don't, don't wanna manage it. >>Well, no, nobody does. And there are a few stragglers, >>A few, a few. And for them there is the on-prem >>Platform. Fine, let 'em go. Right? Exactly. But if you wanna make it a little quick and dirty, hand it off, right? Oh, >>That's exactly right. Yes. >>Let Con do the heavy lifting for you. Hey Marco, thanks for the time. Yeah, thank you so much. We appreciate, and again, congratulations on what appears to be a pretty good show for you guys. Yeah, thank you. Well done. All right, we continue our discussions here at aws. Reinvent 22. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. >>Okay.

(lively music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, where we're here live from the show floor, all four days of AWS re:Invent. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> Good. Beautiful and chilly Las Vegas. Can't wait to get back to New England where it's warm. >> Balmy, New England this time of year in December. Wow, Dave, that's a bold statement. I am super excited about the conversation that we're going to be having next. And, you know, I'm not even going to tee it up. I just want to bring Dilip on. Dilip, thank you so much for being here. How you doing? >> Savannah, Dave, thank you so much. >> Hey, Dilip. >> Excited to be here. >> It's joy to have you. So, you have been working at Amazon for about 20 years. >> Almost. Almost. >> Yes. >> Feels like 20, 19 1/2. >> Which is very exciting. You've had a lot of roles. I'm going to touch on some of them, but you just came over to AWS from the physical retail side. Talk to me about that. >> Yup, so I've been to Amazon for 19 1/2 years. Done pricing, supply chain. I was Jeff Bezos technical advisor for a couple years. >> Casual name drop. >> Casual name drop. >> Savannah: But a couple people here for that name before. >> Humble brag, hashtag. And then I, for the last several years, I was leading our physical retail initiatives. We just walk out Amazon One, bringing convenience to physical spaces. And then in August, with like as those things were getting a lot of traction and we were selling to third parties, we felt that it would be better suited in AWS. And, but along with that, there was also another trend that's been brewing, which is, you know, companies have loved building on AWS. They love the infrastructure services, but increasingly, they're also asking us to build applications that are higher up in the stack. Solving key, turnkey business problems. Just walk out Amazon One or examples of that, Amazon Connect. We just recently announced supply chain, so now there's a bevy interesting services all coming together, higher up in the stack for customers. So it's an exciting time. >> It was interesting that you're able to, you know, transfer from that retail. I mean, normally, in historically, if you're within an industry, retail, manufacturing, automotive whatever. You were kind as locked in a little bit. >> Dilip: Siloed a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Because they had their own, your own value chain. And I guess, data has changed that maybe, that you can traverse now. >> Yeah, if you think about the things that we did, even when we were in retail, the tenants was less about the industries and more about how can we bring convenience to physical spaces? The fact that you don't like to wait in line is no more like likely, you know, five years from now than it is today. So, it's a very durable tenant, but it's equally applicable whether you're in a grocery store, a convenience store, a stadium, an airport. So it actually transcends any, and like supply chain, think of supply chain. Supply chain isn't, you know, targeted to any one particular industry. It has broad applicability. So these things are very, you know, horizontally applicable. >> Anything that makes my life easier, I'm down. >> Savannah: We're all here for the easy button. We've been talking about it a bit this week. I'm in. And the retail store, I mean, I'm in San Francisco. I've had the experience of going through. Very interesting and seamless journey, honestly. It's very exciting. So tell us a little bit more about the applications group at AWS. >> Yup. So as I said, you know, we are, the applications group is a combination of several services. You know, we have communication developer services, which is the ability to add simple email service or video and embed video, voice chat using a chime SDK. In a higher up in the stack, we are taking care of things that IT administrators have to deal with where you can provision an entire desktop with the workspaces or provide a femoral access to it. And then as you go up even higher up in the stack, you have productivity applications like AWS Wicker, which we just did GA, you know, last week in AWS Clean Rooms which we announced as a service in preview. And then you have, you know, Connect, which is our cloud contact center, AWS supply chain. Just walk out Amazon One, it just feels like we're getting started. >> Just a couple things going on. >> So, clean rooms. Part of the governance play, part of data sharing. Can you explain, you know, we were talking offline, but I remember back in the disk drive days. We were in a clean room, they'd show you the clean room, you couldn't go near it unless you had a hazmat suit on. So now you're applying that to data. Explain that concept. >> Yeah, so the companies across, you know, financial services or healthcare, advertising, they all want to be able to combine and pull together data`sets with their partners in order to get these collaborative insights. The problem is either the data's fragmented, it's siloed or you have, you know, data governance issues that's preventing them from sharing. And the key requirement is that they want to be able to share this data without exposing any of the underlying data. Clean rooms are always emerged as a solution to that, but the problem with that is that they're hard to maintain. They're expensive. You have to write complex privacy queries. And if you make a mistake, you risk exposing the same data that you've been, you know, studiously trying to protect. >> Trying to protect. >> You know, take advertising as an industry, as an example. You know, advertisers care about, is my ad effective? But it turns out that if you're an advertiser and let's say you're a Nike or some other advertiser and your pop, you know, you place an ad on the website. Well, you want to stop showing the ad to people who have already purchased the product. However, people who purchased the product,- >> Savannah: It happens all the time. >> that purchasing data is not accessible to them easily. But if you could combine those insights, you know, the publishers benefit, advertisers benefits. So AWS Clean Rooms is that service that allows you very easily to be able to collaborate with a group of folks and then be able to gain these collaborative insights. >> And the consumers benefit. I mean, how many times you bought, you search it. >> It happens all the time. >> They know. And like, I just bought that guys, you know? >> Yeah, no, exactly. >> Four weeks. >> And I'm like, you don't need to serve me that, you know? And we understand the marketing backend. And it's just a waste of money and energy and resources. I mean, we're talking about sustainability as well. I don't think supply chain has ever had a hotter moment than it's had the last two and a half years. Tell me more about the announcement. >> Yup, so super excited about this. As you know, as you said, supply chains have always been very critical and very core for companies. The pandemic exacerbated it. So, ours way of sort of thinking about supply chains is to say that, you know, companies have taken, over the years many, like dozens, like millions and millions of dollars of investment in building their own supply chains. But the problem with supply chains is that the reason that they're not as functional as they could be is because of the lack of visibility. Because they're strung together very many disparate systems, that lack of visibility affects agility. And so, our approach in it was to say that, well, if we could have folks use their existing supply chain what can we do to improve the investment on the ROI of what they're getting? By creating a layer on top of it, that provides them that insights, connects all of these disparate data and then provides them insights to say, well, you know, here's where you overstock, here's where you under stock. You know, this is the, you know, the carbon emission impact of being able to transfer something. So like rather without requiring people to re-platform, what's the way that we can add value in it? And then also build upon Amazon's, you know, years of supply chain experience, to be able to build these predictive analytics for customers. >> So, that's a good, I like that you started with the why. >> Yes. >> Right now, what is it? It's an abstraction layer and then you're connecting into different data points. >> Yes, that's correct. >> Injecting ML. >> Feel like you can pick in, like if you think about supply chain, you can have warehouse management systems, order management systems. It could be in disparate things. We use ML to be able to bring all of this disparate data in and create our unified data lake. Once you have that unified data lake, you can then run an insights layer on top of it to be able to say, so that as the data changes, supply chain is not a static thing. Data's constantly changing. As the data's changing, the data lake now reflects the most up-to-date information. You can have alerts and insights set up on it to say that, what are the kinds of things that you're interested in? And then more importantly, supply chain and agility is about communication. In order to be able to make certain things happen, you need to be able to communicate, you need to make sure that everyone's on the same page. And we allow for a lot of the communication and collaboration tools to be built within this platform so that you're not necessarily leaving to go and toggle from one place to the other to solve your problems. >> And in the pie chart of how people spend their time, they're spending a lot less time communicating and being proactive. >> That's correct. >> And getting ahead of the curve. They're spending more time trying to figure out actually what's going on. >> Yes. >> And that's the problem that you're going to solve. >> Well, and it ensures that the customer at the other end of that supply chain experience is going to have their expectations managed in terms of when their good might get there or whatever's going to happen. >> Exactly. >> I feel like that expectation management has been such a big part of it. Okay, I just have to ask because I'm very curious. What was it like advising Jeff? >> Quite possibly the best job that I've ever had. You know, he's a fascinating individual. >> Did he pay you to say that? >> Nope. But I would've, like, I would've done it for like, it's remarkable seeing how he thinks and his approach to problem solving. It is, you know, you could be really tactical and go very deep. You could be extremely strategic. And to be able to sort of move effortlessly between those two is a unique skill. I learned a lot. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what made you want to evolve your career at Amazon after that? 'Cause I see on your LinkedIn, you say, it was the best job you ever had. With curiosity? >> Yeah, so one of the things, so the role is designed for you to be able to transition to something new. >> Savannah: Oh, cool. >> So after I finished that role, we were just getting into our foray with physical stores. And the idea between physical stores is that, you and I as consumers, we all have a lot of choices for physical stores. You know, there's a lot of options, there's a lot of formats. And so the last thing we wanted to do is come up with another me too offering. So, our approach was that what can we do to improve convenience in physical stores? That's what resulted in just walk out to Amazon Go. That's what resulted in Amazon One, which is another in a fast, convenient, contactless way to pay using the power of your palm. And now, what started in Amazon retail is now expanded to several third parties in, you know, stadiums, convention centers, airports. >> Airport, I just had, was in the Houston airport and got to do a humanless checkout. >> Dilip: Exactly. >> And actually in Honolulu a couple weeks ago as well too. Yeah, so we're going to see more and more of this. >> Yes. >> So what Amazon, I think has over a million employees. A lot of those are warehouse employees. But what advice would you give to somebody who's somewhere inside of Amazon, maybe they're on AWS, maybe they're Amazon. What advice would you give somebody inside that's maybe, you know, hey, I've been at this job for five, six years, three, four years, whatever it is. I want to do something else. And there's so much opportunity inside Amazon, right? What would you advise them? >> My single advice, which is actually transferable and I use it for myself is choose something that makes you a little uncomfortable. >> Dave: Get out of your comfort zone. >> It's like, you got to do that. It's like, it's not the easiest thing to hear, but it's also the most satisfying. Because almost every single time that I've done it for myself, it's resulted in like, you don't really know what the answer is. You don't really know exactly where you're going to end up, but the process and the journey through it, if you experience a little bit of discomfort constantly, it makes you non complacent. It makes you sort of not take the job, sort of in a stride. You have to be on it to do it. So that's the advice that I would give anyone. >> Yeah, that's good. So something that's maybe adjacent and maybe not completely foreign to you, but also something that, you know, you got to go dig a little bit and learn. >> You're planning a career change over here, Dave? >> No, I know a lot of people in Amazon are like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next. I mean, I love it here. I live by the LPS, you know, but, and there's so much to choose from. >> It is, you know, when I joined in 2003, there were so many things that we were sort of doing today. None of those existed. It's a fascinating company. And the evolution, you could be in 20 different places and the breadth of the kinds of things that, you know, the Amazon experience provides is timeless. It's fascinating. >> And, you know, you look at a company like Amazon, and, you know, it's so amazing. You look at this ecosystem. I've been around- >> Even a show floor. >> I've been around a lot of time. And the show floor says it all. But I've seen a lot of, you know, waves. And each subsequent wave, you know, we always talk about how many companies were in the Fortune 1000 and aren't anymore. And, but the leaders, you know, survive and they thrive. And I think it's fascinating to try to better understand the culture that enables that. You know, you look at a company like Microsoft that was irrelevant and then came back. You know, even IBM was on death store for a while and they come back and so they. And so, but Amazon just feels, you know, at the moment you feel like, "Oh wow, nothing can stop this machine." 'Cause everybody's trying to disrupt Amazon and then, you know, only the paranoid survive, all that stuff. But it's not like, past is not prologue, all right? So that's why I asked these questions. And you just said that a lot of the services today that although the ideas didn't even exist, I mean, walkout. I mean, that's just amazing. >> I think one of the things that Amazon does really well culturally is that they create the single threaded leadership. They give people focus. If you have to get something done, you have to give people focus. You can't distract them with like seven different things and then say that, oh, by the way, your eighth job is to innovate. It just doesn't work that way. It's like it's hard. Like it can be- >> And where were the energy come from that? >> Exactly. And so giving people that single threaded focus is super important. >> Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, has a great quote. He wrote on his book. He said, "If you got 14 priorities, you got none." And he asks,- >> Well said. >> he challenges people. If you had to give up everything and do only one thing for the next 365 days, what would that be? It's a really hard question to answer. >> I feel like as we're around New Year's resolution times. I mean when we thinking about that, maybe we can all share our one thing. So, Dilip, you've been with the the applications team for five months. What's coming up next? >> Well, as I said, you know, it feels like it's still day one for applications. If you think about the things, the news that we introduced and the several services that we introduced, it has applicability across a variety of horizontal industries. But then we're also feeling that there's considerable vertical applications that can be built for specific things. Like, it could be in advertising, it could be in financial services, it could be in manufacturing. The opportunities are endless. I think the notion of people wanting applications higher up in the stack and a little more turnkey solutions is also, it's not new for us, but it's also new and creative too. You know, AWS has traditionally been doing. >> So again, this relates to what we were sort of talking about before. And maybe, this came from Jazzy or maybe it came from Bezos. But you hear a lot, it's okay to be misunderstood or if we were misunderstood for a long time. So when people hear up the stack, they think, when you think about apps, you know, in the last 10 years it was taking on-prem and bringing it into the cloud. Okay, you saw that with CREM, email, CRM, service management, you know, data warehouses, et cetera. Amazon is thinking about this in a different way. It's like you're looking at the world saying, okay, how can we improve whatever? Workflows, people's lives, doing something that's not been done before? And that seems to be the kind of applications that you guys are thinking about building. >> Yeah. >> And that's unique. It's not just, okay, we're going to take something on-prem put it in the cloud. Been there, done that. That S-curve is sort of flattening now. But there's a new S-curve which is completely new workflows and innovations and processes that we really haven't thought about yet. Or you're thinking about, I presume. >> Yeah. Having said that, I'd also like to sort of remind folks that when you consider the, you know, the entire spend, the portion of workloads that are running in the cloud is a teeny tiny fraction. It's like less than 5%, like 4% or something like that. So it's a very, there's still plenty of things that can sort of move to the cloud. But you're right that there is another trend of where in the stack and the types of applications that you can provide as well. >> Yeah, new innovation that haven't well thought of yet. >> So, Dilip, we have a new tradition here on theCUBE at re:Invent. Where we're looking for your 30 minute Instagram reel, your hot take, biggest key theme, either for you, your team, or just general vibe from the show. >> General vibe from the show. Well, 19 1/2 years at Amazon, this is actually my first re:Invent, believe it or not. This is my, as a AWS employee now, as re:Invent with like launching services. So that's the first. I've been to re:Invent before, but as an attendee rather than as a person who's, you know, a contributing number of the workforce. >> Working actually? >> If you will. >> Actually doing your job. >> And so I'm just amazed at the energy and the breadth. And the, you know, from the partners to the customers to the diversity of people who are coming here from everywhere. I had meetings from people in New Zealand. Like, you know, the UK, like customers are coming at us from like very many different places. And it's fascinating for me to see. It's new for me as well given, you know, some of my past experience. But this is a, it's been a blast. >> People are pumped. >> People are pumped. >> They can't believe the booth traffic. Not only that quality. >> Right. All of our guests have talked about that. >> Like, yeah, you know, we're going to throw half of these leads away, but they're saying no, I'm having like really substantive conversations with business people. This is, I think, my 10th re:Invent. And the first one was mostly developers. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And, you know, so. Now it's a lot more business people, a lot of developers too. >> Yeah. >> It's just. >> The community really makes it. Dilip, thank you so much for joining us today on theCube. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're fantastic. I could ask you a million questions. Be sure and tell Jeff that we said hi. >> Will do. >> Savannah: Next time you guys are hanging out. And thank all of you. >> You want to go into space? >> Yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely. I'm perhaps the most space obsessed on the show. And with that, we will continue our out of this world coverage shortly from fabulous Las Vegas where we are at AWS re:Invent. It is day four with Dave Vellante. I'm Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (lively music)

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John fur, host of the cube here at our headquarters on the west coast in Palo Alto, California. Got a great news guest here. Matt McGill, Wayne managing director of Madrona venture group is here with me on the big news and drone raising their record 690 million fund and partnering with their innovative founders. Matt, thanks for coming on and, and talking about the news and congratulations on the dry powder. >>Well, Hey, thanks so much, John. Appreciate you having me on the show. >>Well, great news here. Oley validation. We're in a new market. Everyone's talking about the new normal, we're talking about a recession inflation, but yet we've been reporting that this is kind of the first generation that cloud hyperscale economic scale and technical benefits have kind of hit any kind of economic downturn. If you go back to to 2008, our last downturn, the cloud really hasn't hit that tipping point. Now the innovation, as we've been reporting with our startup showcases and looking at the results from the hyperscalers, this funding news is kind of validation that the tech society intersection is working. You guys just get to the news 430 million in the Madrona fund nine and 200. And I think 60 million acceleration fund three, which means you're gonna go stay with your roots with seed early stage and then have some rocket fuel for kind of the accelerated expansion growth side of it. Not like late stage growth, but like scaling growth. This is kind of the news. Is that right? >>That's right. You know, we, we've had a long time strategy over 25 years here in Seattle of being early, early stage. You know, it's like our friends at Amazon like to say is, well, we're there at day one and we wanna help build companies for the long run for over 25 years. We've been doing that in Seattle. And I think one of the things we've realized, I mean, this is, these funds are the largest funds ever raised by a Seattle based venture capital firm and that's notable in and of itself. But we think that's the reason is because Seattle has continued to innovate in areas like consumer internet software cloud, of course, where the cloud capital of the world and increasingly the applications of machine learning. And so with all that combination, we believe there's a ton more companies to be built here in the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle in particular. And then through our acceleration fund where we're investing in companies anywhere in the country, in fact, anywhere in the world, those are the kinds of companies that want to have the Seattle point of view. They don't understand how to work with Amazon and AWS. They don't understand how to work with Microsoft and we have some unique relationships in those places and we think we can help them succeed in doing that. >>You know, it's notable that you guys in particular have been very close with Jeff Bayo Andy Jesse, and the success of ABUS as well as Microsoft. So, you know, Seattle has become cloud city. Everyone kind of knows that from a cloud perspective, obviously Microsoft's roots have been there for a long, long time. You go back, I mean, August capital, early days, funding Microsoft. You remember those days not to date myself, but you know, Microsoft kind of went up there and kind of established it a Amazon there as well. Now you got Google here, you got Facebook in the valley. You guys are now also coming down. This funding comes on the heels of you appointing a new managing director here in Palo Alto. This is now the migration of Madrona coming into the valley. Is that right? Is that what we're seeing? >>Well, I think what we're trying to do is bring the things that we know uniquely from Seattle and the companies here down to Silicon valley. We've got a terrific partner in Karama Hend, Andrew he's somebody that we have worked together with over the years, co-investing in companies. So we knew him really well. It was a bit opportunistic for us, but what we're hearing over and over again is a lot of these companies based in the valley, based in other parts of the country, they don't know really how to best work with the Microsoft and Amazons are understand the services that they offer. And, you know, we have that capability. We have those relationships. We wanna bring that to bear and helping build great companies. >>What is your expectation on the Silicon valley presence here? You can kind of give a hint here kind of a gateway to Seattle, but you got a lot of developers here. We just reported this morning that MEA just open source pie, torch to the Linux foundation again, and Mary material kind of trend we are seeing open source now has become there's no debate anymore has become the software industry. There's no more issue around that. This is real. I >>Think that's right. I mean, you know, once, you know, Satya became CEO, Microsoft, and they started embracing open source, you know, that was gonna be the last big tech holdout. We think open source is very interesting in terms of what it can produce and create in terms of next generation, innovative innovation. It's great to see companies like Facebook like Uber and others that have had a long track record of open source capabilities. But what we're also seeing is you need to build businesses around that, that a lot of enterprises don't wanna buy just the open source and stitch it together themselves. They want somebody to do it with them. And whether that's the way that, you know, companies like MongoDB have built that out over time or that's, you know, or elastic or, you know, companies like opt ML and our portfolio, or even the big cloud, you know, hyperscalers, you know, they are increasingly embracing open source and building finished services, managed services on top of it. So that's a big wave that we've been investing in for a number of years now and are highly confident gonna >>Continue. You know, I've been a big fan of Pacific Northwest for a while. You know, love going up there and talking to the folks at Microsoft and Amazon and AWS, but there's been a big trend in venture capital where a lot of the, the later stage folks, including private equity have come in, you seen tiger global even tiger global alumni, that the Cubs they call them, you know, they're coming down and playing in the early state and the results haven't been that good. You guys have had a track record in your success. Again, a hundred percent of your institutional investors have honed up with you on this two fund strategy of close to 700 million. What's this formula says, why aren't they winning what's is it, they don't have the ecosystem? Is it they're spraying and praying without a lot of discipline? What's the dynamic between the folks like Madrona, the Neas of the world who kind of come in and Sequoia who kind of do it right, right. Come in. And they get it done in the right way. The early stage. I just say the private equity folks, >>You know, I think that early stage venture is a local business. It is a geographically proximate business when you're helping incredible founders, try to really dial in that early founder market fit. This is before you even get to product market fit. And, and so the, the team building that goes on the talking to potential customers, the ITER iterating on business strategy, this is a roll up your sleeves kind of thing. It's not a financial transaction. And so what you're trying to do is have a presence and an understanding, a prepared mind of one of the big themes and the kinds of founders that with, you know, our encouragement and our help can go build lasting companies. Now, when you get to a, a, a later stage, you know, you get to that growth stage. It is generally more of a financial, you know, kind of engineering sort of proposition. And there's some folks that are great at that. What we do is we support these companies all the way through. We reserve enough capital to be with them at the seed stage, the series B stage the, you know, the crossover round before you go public, all of those sorts of things. And we love partnering with some of these other people, but there's a lot of heavy lifting at the early, early stages of a business. And it's, it's not, I think a model that everybody's architected to do >>Well, you know, trust becomes a big factor in all this. You kind of, when you talk about like that, I hear you speaking. It makes me think of like trusted advisor meets money, not so much telling people what to do. You guys have had a good track record and, and being added value, not values from track. And sometimes that values from track is getting in the way of the entrepreneur by, you know, running the certain meetings, driving board meetings and driving the agenda that you see to see that trend where people try too hard and that a force function, the entrepreneur we're living in a world now where everyone's talking to each other, you got, you know, there's no more glass door it's everyone's on Twitter, right? So you can see some move, someone trying to control the supply chain of talent by term sheet, overvaluing them. >>You guys are, have a different strategy. You guys have a network I've noticed that Madrona has attracted them high end talent coming outta Microsoft outta AWS season, season, senior talent. I won't say, you know, senior citizens, but you know, people have done things scaled up businesses, as well as attract young talent. Can you share with our audience that dynamic of the, the seasoned veterans, the systems thinkers, the ones who have been there done that built software, built teams to the new young entrepreneurs coming in, what's the dynamic, like, how do you guys look at at those networks? How do you nurture them? Could you share your, your strategy on how you're gonna pull all this together, going forward? >>You know, we, we think a lot about building the innovation ecosystem, like a phrase around here that you hear a lot is the bigger pie theory. How do we build the bigger pie? If we're focusing on building the bigger pie, there'll be plenty of that pie for Madrona Madrona companies. And in that mindset says, okay, how are we gonna invest in the innovation ecosystem? And then actually to use a term, you know, one of our founders who unfortunately passed away this year, Tom Aber, he had just written a book called flywheel. And I think it embodies this mindset that we have of how do you create that flywheel within a community? And of course, interestingly enough, I think Tom both learned and contributed to that. He was on the board of Amazon for almost 20 years in helping build some of the flywheels at Amazon. >>So that's what we carry forward. And we know that there's a lot of value in experiential learning. And so we've been fortunate to have some folks, you know, that have worked at some of those, you know, kind iconic companies, join us and find that they really love this company building journey. We've also got some terrific younger folks that have, you know, some very fresh perspectives and a lot of, a lot of creativity. And they're bringing that together with our team overall. And you know, what we really are trying to do at the end of the day is find incredible founders who wanna build something lasting, insignificant, and provide our kind of our time, our best ideas, our, our perspective. And of course our capital to help them be >>Successful. I love the ecosystem play. I think that's a human capital game too. I like the way you guys are thinking about that. I do wanna get your reaction, cause I know you're close to Amazon and Microsoft, but mainly Jeff Bezos as well. You mentioned your, your partner who passed away was on the board. A lot of great props on and tributes online. I saw that, I know I didn't know him at all. So I really can't comment, but I did notice that Bezos and, and jazz in particular were complimentary. And recently I just saw Bezos comment on Twitter about the, you know, the Lord of the rings movie. They're putting out the series and he says, you gotta have a team. That's kinda like rebels. I'm paraphrasing, cuz these folks never done a movie like this before. So they're, they're getting good props and reviews in this new world order where entrepreneurs gotta do things different. >>What's the one thing that you think entrepreneurs need to do different to make this next startup journey different and successful because the world is different. There's not a lot of press to relate to Andy Jassey even on stage last week in, in, in LA was kind of, he's not really revealing. He's on his talking points, message, the press aren't out there and big numbers anymore. And you got a lot of different go-to market strategies, omnichannel, social different ways to communicate to customers. Yeah. So product market fit is becomes big. So how do you see this new flywheel emerging for those entrepreneurs have to go out there, roll up their sleeves and make it happen. And what kind of resources do you think they need to be successful? What are you guys advocating? >>Well, you know, what's really interesting about that question is I've heard Jeff say many times that when people ask him, what's gotta be different. He, he reminds them to think about what's not gonna change. And he usually starts to then talk about things like price, convenience, and selection. Customer's never gonna want a higher price, less convenience, smaller selection. And so when you build on some of those principles of, what's not gonna change, it's easier for you to understand what could be changing as it relates to the differences. One of the biggest differences, I don't think any of us have fully figured out yet is what does it mean to be productive in a hybrid work mode? We happen to believe that it's still gonna have a kernel of people that are geographically close, that are part of the founding and building in the early stages of a company. >>And, and it's an and equation that they're going to also have people that are distributed around the country, perhaps around the world that are some of the best talent that they attract to their team. The other thing that I think coming back to what remains the same is being hyper focused on a certain customer and a certain problem that you're passionate about solving. And that's really what we look for when we look for this founder market fit. And it can be a lot of different things from the next generation water bottle to a better way to handle deep learning models and get 'em deployed in the cloud. If you've got that passion and you've got some inkling of the skill of how to build a better solution, that's never gonna go away. That's gonna be enduring, but exactly how you do that as a team in a hybrid world, I think that's gonna be different. >>Yeah. One thing that's not changing is that your investor, makeup's not changing a hundred percent of your existing institutional investors have signed back on with you guys and your oversubscribed, lot of demand. What is your flywheel success formula? Why is Tron is so successful? Can you share some feedback from your investors? What are they saying? Why are they re-upping share some inside baseball or anecdotal praise? >>Well, I think it's very kind to you to frame it that way. I mean, you know, it does for investors come back to performance. You know, these are university endowments and foundations that have a responsibility to, to generate great returns. And we understand that and we're very aligned with that. I think to be specific in the last couple years, they appreciated that we were also not holding onto our, our stocks forever, that we actually made some thoughtful decisions to sell some shares of companies like Smartsheet and snowflake and accolade in others, and actually distribute capital back to them when things were looking really, really good. But I think the thing, other thing that's very important here is that we've created a flywheel with our core strategy being Seattle based and then going out from there to try to find the best founders, build great companies with them, roll up our sleeves in a productive way and help them for the long term, which now leads to multiple generations of people, you know, at those companies. And beyond that we wanna be, you know, partner with and back again. And so you create this flywheel by having success with people in doing it in a respectful. And as you said earlier, a trusted way, >>What's the message for the Silicon valley crowd, obviously bay area, Silicon valley, Palo Alto office, and the center of it. Obviously you got them hybrid workforce hybrid venture model developing what's the goals. What's the message for Silicon valley? >>Well, our message for folks in Silicon valley is the same. It's always been, we we're excited to partner with them largely up here again, cause this is still our home base, but there'll be a, you know, select number of opportunities where we'll get a chance to partner together down in Silicon valley. And we think we bring something different with that deep understanding of cloud computing, that deep understanding of applied machine learning. And of course, some of our unique relationships up here that can be additive to what the they've already done. And some of them are just great partners and have built, you know, help build some really incredible companies over >>The years. Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview, given them big news. I guess the question on everyone's mind, certainly the entrepreneur's mind is how do I get some of that cash you have and put it into work for my opportunity. One what's the investment thesis can take a minute to put the plug in for the firm. What are you looking to invest in? What's the thesis? What kind of entrepreneurs you're looking for? I know fund one is seed fund nine is seed to, to a and B and the second one is beyond B and beyond for growth. What's the pitch. What's the pitch. >>Yeah. Well you can, you can think of us as you know, any stage from pre-seed to series seed. You know, we'll make a new investment in companies in all of those stages. You know, I think that, you know, the, the core pitch, you know, to us is, you know, your passion for the, for the problem that you're trying to, trying to get solved. And we're of course, very excited about that. And you know, at, at, at the end of the day, you know, if you want somebody that has a distinct point of view on the market that is based up here and can roll up their sleeves and work alongside you. We're, we're, we're the ones that are more than happy to do that. Proven track record of doing that for 25 plus years. And there's so much innovation ahead. There's so many opportunities to disrupt to pioneer, and we're excited to be a part of working with great founders to do that. >>Well, great stuff. We'll see you ATS reinvent coming up shortly and your annual get together. You always have your crew down there and, and team engaging with some of the cloud players as well. And looking forward to seeing how the Palo Alto team expands out. And Matt, thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks very much, John. Appreciate you having me look forward to seeing you at reinvent. >>Okay. Matt, Matt here with Madrona venture group, he's the partner managing partner Madrona group raises 690 million to fund nine and, and, and again, and big funds for accelerated growth fund. Three lot of dry powder. Again, entrepreneurship in technology is scaling. It's not going down. It's continuing to accelerate into this next generation super cloud multi-cloud hybrid cloud world steady state. This is the cubes coverage. I'm John for Silicon angle and host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe. (gentle music)

>>Hello. Welcome back to our super cloud 22 event. I'm John F host the cue with my co-host Dave ante. Extracting the signal from noise. We're proud to have two amazing cube alumnis here. We got Sanja Putin. Who's now the CEO of cohesive the emo Aaron who's the CTO. Co-founder also former CEO Cub alumni. The father of hyper-converged welcome back to the cube I endorsed the >>Cloud. Absolutely. Is the father. Great >>To see you guys. Thank thanks for coming on and perfect timing. The new job taking over that. The helm Mo it at cohesive big news, but part of super cloud, we wanna dig into it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having >>Us here. So first of all, we'll get into super before we get into the Supercloud. I want to just get the thoughts on the move Sanjay. We've been following your career since 2010. You've been a cube alumni from that point, we followed that your career. Why cohesive? Why now? >>Yeah, John David, thank you first and all for having us here, and it's great to be at your event. You know, when I left VMware last year, I took some time off just really primarily. I hadn't had a sabbatical in probably 18 years. I joined two boards, Phillips and sneak, and then, you know, started just invest and help entrepreneurs. Most of them were, you know, Indian Americans like me who were had great tech, were looking for the kind of go to market connections. And it was just a wonderful year to just de to unwind a bit. And along the, the way came CEO calls. And I'd asked myself, the question is the tech the best in the industry? Could you see value creation that was signi significant and you know, three, four months ago, Mohit and Carl Eschenbach and a few of the board members of cohesive called me and walk me through Mo's decision, which he'll talk about in a second. And we spent the last few months getting to know him, and he's everything you describe. He's not just the father of hyperconverge. And he wrote the Google file system, wicked smart, built a tech platform better than that second time. But we had to really kind of walk through the chemistry between us, which we did in long walks in, in, you know, discrete places so that people wouldn't find us in a Starbucks and start gossiping. So >>Why Sanjay? There you go. >>Actually, I should say it's a combination of two different decisions. The first one was to, for me to take a different role and I run the company as a CEO for, for nine years. And, you know, as a, as a technologist, I always like, you know, going deep into technology at the same time, the CEO duties require a lot of breadth, right? You're talking to customers, you're talking to partners, you're doing so much. And with the way we've been growing the with, you know, we've been fortunate, it was becoming hard to balance both. It's really also not fair to the company. Yeah. So I opted to do the depth job, you know, be the visionary, be the technologist. And that was the first decision to bring a CEO, a great CEO from outside. >>And I saw your video on the site. You said it was your decision. Yes. Go ahead. I have to ask you, cuz this is a real big transition for founders and you know, I have founder artists cuz everyone, you know, calls me that. But being the founder of a company, it's always hard to let go. I mean nine years as CEO, it's not like you had a, you had a great run. So this was it timing for you? Was it, was it a structural shift, like at super cloud, we're talking about a major shift that's happening right now in the industry. Was it a balance issue? Was it more if you wanted to get back in and in the tech >>Look, I, I also wanna answer, you know, why Sanja, but, but I'll address your question first. I always put the company first what's right for the company. Is it for me to start get stuck the co seat and try to juggle this depth and Brad simultaneously. I mean, I can stroke my ego a little bit there, but it's not good for the company. What's best for the company. You know, I'm a technologist. How about I oversee the technology part in partnership with so many great people I have in the company and I bring someone kick ass to be the CEO. And so then that was the second decision. Why Sanja when Sanjay, you know, is a very well known figure. He's managed billions of dollars of business in VMware. You know, been there, done that has, you know, some of the biggest, you know, people in the industry on his speed dial, you know, we were really fortunate to have someone like that, come in and accept the role of the CEO of cohesive. I think we can take the company to new Heights and I'm looking forward to my partnership with, with Sanja on this. >>It it's we, we called it the splash brothers and >>The, >>In the vernacular. It doesn't matter who gets the ball, whether it's step clay, we shoot. And I think if you look at some of the great partnerships, whether it was gates bomber, there, plenty of history of this, where a founder and a someone who was, it has to be complimentary skills. If I was a technologist myself and wanted to code we'd clash. Yeah. But I think this was really a match me in heaven because he, he can, I want him to keep innovating and building the best platform for today in the future. And our customers tell one customer told me, this is the best tech they've seen since VMware, 20 years ago, AWS, 10 years ago. And most recently this was a global 100 big customers. So I feel like this combination, now we have to show that it works. It's, you know, it's been three, four months. My getting to know him, you know, I'm day eight on the job, but I'm loving it. >>Well, it's a sluman model too. It's more modern example. You saw, he did it with Fred Ludy at service now. Yes. And, and of course at, at snowflake, yeah. And his book, you read his book. I dunno if you've read his book, amp it up, but app it up. And he says, I always you'll love this. Give great deference to the founder. Always show great respect. Right. And for good reason. So >>In fact, I mean you could talk to him, you actually met to >>Frank. I actually, you know, a month or so back, I actually had dinner with him in his ranch in Moana. And I posed the question. There was a number of CEOs that went there and I posed him the question. So Frank, you know, many of us, we grow being deaf guys, you know? And eventually when we take on the home of our CEO, we have to do breadth. How do you do it? And he's like, well, let me tell you, I was never a death guy. I'm a breath guy. >>I'm like, >>That's my answer. Yeah. >>So, so I >>Want the short story. So the day I got the job, I, I got a text from Frank and I said, what's your advice the first time CEO, three words, amp it up, >>Amp it up. Right? Yeah. >>And so you're always on brand, man. >>So you're an amazing operator. You've proven that time and time again at SAP, VMware, et cetera, you feel like now you, you, you wanna do both of those skills. You got the board and you got the operations cuz you look, you know, look at sloop when he's got Scarelli wherever he goes, he brings Scarelli with him as sort of the operator. How, how do you, how are you thinking >>About that? I mean it's early days, but yeah. Yeah. Small. I mean I've, you know, when I was, you know, it was 35,000 people at VMware, 80, 90,000 people at SAP, a really good run. The SAP run was 10 to 20 billion innovative products, especially in analytics and VMware six to 12 end user computing cloud. So I learned a lot. I think the company, you know, being about 2000 employees plus not to mayor tomorrow, but over the course next year I can meet everybody. Right? So first off the executive team, 10 of us, we're, we're building more and more cohesiveness if I could use that word between us, which is great, the next, you know, layers of VPs and every manager, I think that's possible. So I I'm a people person and a customer person. So I think when you take that sort of extroverted mindset, we'll bring energy to the workforce to, to retain the best and then recruit the best. >>And you know, even just the week we, we were announced that this announcement happened. Our website traffic went through the roof, the highest it's ever been, lots of resumes coming in. So, and then lots of customer engagement. So I think we'll take this, but I, I feel very good about the possibilities, because see, for me, I didn't wanna walk into the company to a company where the technology risk was high. Okay. I feel like that I can go to bed at night and the technology risk is low. This guy's gonna run a machine at the current and the future. And I'm hearing that from customers. Now, what I gotta do is get the, the amp it up part on the go to market. I know a little thing or too about >>That. You've got that down. I think the partnership is really key here. And again, nine use the CEO and then Sanja points to our super cloud trend that we've been looking at, which is there's another wave happening. There's a structural change in real time happening now, cloud one was done. We saw that transition, AWS cloud native now cloud native with an kind of operating system kind of vibe going on with on-premise hybrid edge. People say multi-cloud, but we're looking at this as an opportunity for companies like cohesive to go to the next level. So I gotta ask you guys, what do you see as structural change right now in the industry? That's disruptive. People are using cloud and scale and data to refactor their business models, change modern cases with cloud native. How are you guys looking at this next structural change that's happening right now? Yeah, >>I'll take that. So, so I'll start by saying that. Number one, data is the new oil and number two data is exploding, right? Every year data just grows like crazy managing data is becoming harder and harder. You mentioned some of those, right? There's so many cloud options available. Cloud one different vendors have different clouds. There is still on-prem there's edge infrastructure. And the number one problem that happens is our data is getting fragmented all over the place and managing so many fragments of data is getting harder and harder even within a cloud or within on-prem or within edge data is fragmented. Right? Number two, I think the hackers out there have realized that, you know, to make money, it's no longer necessary to Rob banks. They can actually see steal the data. So ransomware attacks on the rise it's become a boardroom level discussion. They say there's a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds or so. Right? So protecting your data has become very important security data. Security has become very important. Compliance is important, right? So people are looking for data management solutions, the next gen data management platform that can really provide all this stuff. And that's what cohesive is about. >>What's the difference between data management and backup. Explain that >>Backup is just an entry point. That's one use case. I wanna draw an analogy. Let's draw an analogy to my former company, Google right? Google started by doing Google search, but is Google really just a search engine. They've built a platform that can do multiple things. You know, they might have started with search, but then they went down to roll out Google maps and Gmail and YouTube and so many other things on that platform. So similarly backups might be just the first use case, but it's really about that platform on which you can do more with the data that's next gen data management. >>But, but you am, I correct. You don't consider yourself a security company. One of your competitors is actually pivoting and in positioning themselves as a security company, I've always felt like data management, backup and recovery data protection is an adjacency to security, but those two worlds are coming together. How do you see >>It? Yeah. The way I see it is that security is part of data management. You start maybe by backing with data, but then you secure it and then you do more with that data. If you're only doing security, then you're just securing the data. You, you gotta do more with the data. So data management is much bigger. So >>It's a security is a subset of data. I mean, there you go. Big TA Sanjay. >>Well, I mean I've, and I, I, I I'd agree. And I actually, we don't get into that debate. You know, I've told the company, listen, we'll figure that out. Cuz who cares about the positioning at the bottom? My email, I say we are data management and data security company. Okay. Now what's the best word that describes three nouns, which I think we're gonna do management security and analytics. Okay. He showed me a beautiful diagram, went to his home in the course of one of these, you know, discrete conversations. And this was, I mean, he's done this before. Many, if you watch on YouTube, he showed me a picture of an ice big iceberg. And he said, listen, you know, if you look at companies like snowflake and data bricks, they're doing the management security and mostly analytics of data. That's the top of the iceberg, the stuff you see. >>But a lot of the stuff that's get backed archive is the bottom of the iceberg that you don't see. And you try to, if you try to ask a question on age data, the it guy will say, get a ticket. I'll come back with three days. I'll UNIV the data rehydrate and then you'll put it into a database. And you can think now imagine that you could do live searches analytics on, on age data that's analytics. So I think the management, the security, the analytics of, you know, if you wanna call it secondary data or backed up data or data, that's not hot and live warm, colder is a huge opportunity. Now, what do you wanna call one phrase that describes all of it. Do you call that superpower management security? Okay, whatever you wanna call it. I view it as saying, listen, let's build a platform. >>Some people call Google, a search company. People, some people call Google and information company and we just have to go and pursue every CIO and every CSO that has a management and a security and do course analytics problem. And that's what we're doing. And when I talk to the, you know, I didn't talk to all the 3000 customers, but the biggest customers and I was doing diligence. They're like this thing has got enormous potential. Okay. And we just have to now go focus, get every fortune 1000 company to pick us because this problem, even the first use case you talk back up is a little bit like, you know, razor blades and soap you've needed. You needed it 30 years ago and you'll need it for 30 years. It's just that the tools that were built in the last generation that were companies formed in 1990s, one of them I worked for years ago are aids are not built for the cloud. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity where many of those, those, those nos management security analytics will become part of what we do. And we'll come up with the right phrase for what the companies and do course >>Sanjay. So ma and Sanja. So given that given that's this Google transition, I like that example search was a data problem. They got sequenced to a broader market opportunity. What super cloud we trying to tease out is what does that change over from a data standpoint, cuz now the operating environments change has become more complex and the enterprises are savvy. Developers are savvy. Now they want, they want SAS solutions. They want freemium and expanding. They're gonna drive the operations agenda with DevOps. So what is the complexity that needs to be abstracted away? How do you see that moment? Because this is what people are talking about. They're saying security's built in, driven by developers. Developers are driving operations behavior. So what is the shift? Where do you guys see this new? Yeah. Expansive for cohesive. How do you fit into super cloud? >>So let me build up from that entry point. Maybe back up to what you're saying is the super cloud, right? Let me draw that journey. So let's say the legacy players are just doing backups. How, how sad is it that you have one silo sitting there just for peace of mind as an insurance policy and you do nothing with the data. If you have to do something with the data, you have to build another silo, you have to build another copy. You have to manage it separately. Right. So clearly that's a little bit brain damaged. Right. So, okay. So now you take a little bit of, you know, newer vendors who may take that backup platform and do a little bit more with that. Maybe they provide security, but your problem still remains. How do you do more with the data? How do you do some analytics? >>Like he's saying, right. How do you test development on that? How do you migrate the data to the cloud? How do you manage it? The data at scale? How do you do you provide a unified experience across, across multiple cloud, which you're calling the super cloud. That's where cohesive goes. So what we do, we provide a platform, right? We have tentacles in on-prem in each of the clouds. And on top of that, it looks like one platform that you manage. We have a single control plane, a UI. If you may, a single pin of glass, if, if you may, that our customers can use to manage all of it. And now it looks, starts looking like one platform. You mentioned Google, do you, when you go to, you know, kind Google search or a URL, do you really care? What happens behind the scenes mean behind the scenes? Google's built a platform that spans the whole world. No, >>But it's interesting. What's behind the scenes. It's a beautiful now. And I would say, listen, one other thing to pull on Dave, on the security part, I saw a lot of vendors this day in this space, white washing a security message on top of backup. Okay. And CSO, see through that, they'll offer warranties and guarantees or whatever, have you of X million dollars with a lot of caveats, which will never paid because it's like escape clause here. We won't pay it. Yeah. And, and what people really want is a scalable solution that works. And you know, we can match every warranty that's easy. And what I heard was this was the most scalable solution at scale. And that's why you have to approach this with a Google type mindset. I love the fact that every time you listen to sun pitch, I would, what, what I like about him, the most common word to use is scale. >>We do things at scale. So I found that him and AUR and some of the early Google people who come into the company had thought about scale. And, and even me it's like day eight. I found even the non-tech pieces of it. The processes that, you know, these guys are built for simple things in some cases were better than some of the things I saw are bigger companies I'd been used to. So we just have to continue, you know, building a scale platform with the enterprise. And then our cloud product is gonna be the simple solution for the masses. And my view of the world is there's 5,000 big companies and 5 million small companies we'll push the 5 million small companies as the cloud. Okay. Amazon's an investor in the company. AWS is a big partner. We'll talk about I'm sure knowing John's interest in that area, but that's a cloud play and that's gonna go to the cloud really fast. You not build you're in the marketplace, you're in the marketplace. I mean, maybe talk about the history of the Amazon relationship investing and all that. >>Yeah, absolutely. So in two years back late 2020, we, you know, in collaboration with AWS who also by the way is an investor now. And in cohesive, we rolled out what we call data management as a service. It's our SaaS service where we run our software in the cloud. And literally all customers have to do is just go there and sign on, right? They don't have to manage any infrastructure and stuff. What's nice is they can then combine that with, you know, software that they might have bought from cohesive. And it still looks like one platform. So what I'm trying to say is that they get a choice of the, of the way they wanna consume our software. They can consume it as a SAS service in the cloud. They can buy our software, manage it themselves, offload it to a partner on premises or what have you. But it still looks like that one platform, what you're calling a Supercloud >>Yeah. And developers are saying, they want the bag of Legos to compose their solutions. That's the Nirvana they want to get there. So that's, it has to look the same. >>Well, what is it? What we're calling a Superlo can we, can we test that for a second? So data management and service could span AWS and on-prem with the identical experience. So I guess I would call that a Supercloud I presume it's not gonna through AWS span multiple clouds, but, but >>Why not? >>Well, well interesting cuz we had this, I mean, so, okay. So we could in the future, it doesn't today. Well, >>David enough kind of pause for a second. Everything that we do there, if we do it will be customer driven. So there might be some customers I'll give you one Walmart that may want to store the data in a non AWS cloud risk cuz they're competitors. Right. So, but the control plane could still be in, in, in the way we built it, but the data might be stored somewhere else. >>What about, what about a on-prem customer? Who says, Hey, I, I like cohesive. I've now got multiple clouds. I want the identical experience across clouds. Yeah. Okay. So, so can you do that today? How do you do that today? Can we talk >>About that? Yeah. So basically think roughly about the split between the data plane and the control plane, the data plane is, you know, our cohesive clusters that could be sitting on premises that could be sitting in multiple data centers or you can run an instance of that cluster in the cloud, whichever cloud you choose. Right. That's what he was referring to as the data plane. So collectively all these clusters from the data plane, right? They stored the data, but it can all be managed using the control plane. So you still get that single image, the single experience across all clouds. And by the way, the, the, the, the cloud vendor does actually benefit because here's a customer. He mentioned a customer that may not wanna go to AWS, but when they get the data plane on a different cloud, whether it's Azure, whether it's the Google cloud, they then get data management services. Maybe they're able to replicate the data over to AWS. So AWS also gains. >>And your deployment model is you instantiate the cohesive stack on each of the regions and clouds, is that correct? And you building essentially, >>It all happens behind the scenes. That's right. You know, just like Google probably has their tentacles all over the world. We will instantiate and then make it all look like one platform. >>I mean, you should really think it's like a human body, right? The control planes, the head. Okay. And that controls everything. The data plane is large because it's a lot of the data, right? It's the rest of the body, that data plane could be wherever you want it to be. Traditionally, the part the old days was tape. Then you got disk. Now you got multiple clouds. So that's the way we think about it. And there on that piece of it will be neutral, right? We should be multi-cloud to the data plane being every single place. Cause it's customer demand. Where do you want your store data? Air gapped. On-prem no problem. We'll work with Dell. Okay. You wanna be in a particular cloud, AWS we'll work then optimized with S3 and glacier. So this is where I think the, the path to a multi-cloud or Supercloud is to be customer driven, but the control plane sits in Amazon. So >>We're blessed to have a number of, you know, technical geniuses in here. So earlier we were speaking to Ben wa deja VI, and what they do is different. They don't instantiate an individual, you know, regions. What they do is of a single global. Is there a, is there an advantage of doing it the way the cohesive does it in terms of simplicity or how do you see that? Is that a future direction for you from a technology standpoint? What are the trade offs there? >>So you want to be where the data is when you said single global, I take it that they run somewhere and the data has to go there. And in this day age, correct >>Said that. He said, you gotta move that in this >>Day and >>Age query that's, you know, across regions, look >>In this day and age with the way the data is growing, the way it is, it's hard to move around the data. It's much easier to move around the competition. And in these instances, what have you, so let the data be where it is and you manage it right there. >>So that's the advantage of instantiating in multiple regions. As you don't have to move the >>Data cost, we have the philosophy we call it. Let's bring the, the computation to the data rather than the data to >>The competition and the same security model, same governance model, same. How do you, how do you federate that? >>So it's all based on policies. You know, this overarching platform controlled by, by the control plane, you just, our customers just put in the policies and then the underlying nuts and bolts just take care >>Of, you know, it's when I first heard and start, I started watching some of his old videos, ACE really like hyperconverged brought to secondary storage. In fact, he said, oh yeah, that's great. You got it. Because I first called this idea, hyperconverged secondary storage, because the idea of him inventing hyperconverge was bringing compute to storage. It had never been done. I mean, you had the kind of big VC stuff, but these guys were the first to bring that hyperconverge at, at Nutanix. So I think this is that same idea of bringing computer storage, but now applied not to the warm data, but to the rest of the data, including a >>Lot of, what about developers? What's, what's your relationship with developers? >>Maybe you talk about the marketplace and everything >>He's yeah. And I'm, I'm curious as to do you have a PAs layer, what we call super PAs layer to create an identical developer experience across your Supercloud. I'm gonna my >>Term. So we want our customers not just to benefit from the software that we write. We also want them to benefit from, you know, software that's written by developers by third party people and so on and so forth. So we also support a marketplace on the platform where you can download apps from third party developers and run them on this platform. There's a, a number of successful apps. There's one, you know, look like I said, our entry point might be backups, but even when backups, we don't do everything. Look, for instance, we don't backup mainframes. There is a, a company we partner with, you know, and their software can run in our marketplace. And it's actually used by many, many of our financial customers. So our customers don't get, just get the benefit of what we build, but they also get the benefit of what third parties build. Another analogy I like to draw. You can tell. And front of analogy is I drew an analogy to hyperscale is like Google. Yeah. The second analogy I like to draw is that to a simple smartphone, right? A smartphone starts off by being a great phone. But beyond that, it's also a GPS player. It's a, it's a, it's a music player. It's a camera, it's a flashlight. And it also has a marketplace from where you can download apps and extend the power of that platform. >>Is that a, can we think of that as a PAs layer or no? Is it really not? You can, okay. You can say, is it purpose built for what you're the problem that you're trying to solve? >>So we, we just built APIs. Yeah. Right. We have an SDK that developers can use. And through those APIs, they get to leverage the underlying services that exist on the platform. And now developers can use that to take advantage of all that stuff. >>And it was, that was a key factor for me too. Cause I, what I, you know, I've studied all the six, seven players that sort of so-called leaders. Nobody had a developer ecosystem, nobody. Right? The old folks were built for the hardware era, but anyones were built for the cloud to it didn't have any partners were building on their platform. So I felt for me listen, and that the example of, you know, model nine rights, the name of the company that does back up. So there's, there's companies that are built on and there's a number of others. So our goal is to have a big tent, David, to everybody in the ecosystem to partner with us, to build on this platform. And, and that may take over time, but that's the way we're build >>It. And you have a metadata layer too, that has the intelligence >>To correct. It's all abstract. That that's right. So it's a combination of data and metadata. We have lots of metadata that keeps track of where the data is. You know, it allows you to index the data you can do quick searches. You can actually, you, we talking about the control plan from that >>Tracing, >>You can inject a search that'll through search throughout your multi-cloud environment, right? The super cloud that you call it. We have all that, all that goodness sounds >>Like a Supercloud John. >>Yeah. I mean, data tracing involved can trace the data lineage. >>You, you can trace the data lineage. So we, you know, provide, you know, compliance and stuff. So you can, >>All right. So my final question to wrap up, we guys, first of all, thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy, San Jose. We, we know what you're gonna do. You're gonna amp it up and, you know, knock all your numbers out. Think you always do. But what I'm interested in, what you're gonna jump into, cuz now you're gonna have the creative license to jump in to the product, the platform there has to be the next level in your mind. Can you share your thoughts on where this goes next? Love the control plane, separate out from the data plane. I think that plays well for super. How >>Much time do you have John? This guy's got, he's got a wealth. Ditis keep >>Going. Mark. Give us the most important thing you're gonna focus on. That kind of brings the super cloud and vision together. >>Yeah. Right away. I'm gonna, perhaps I, I can ion into two things. The first one is I like to call it building the, the machine, the system, right. Just to draw an analogy. Look, I draw an analogy to the us traffic system. People from all walks of life, rich, poor Democrats, Republicans, you know, different states. They all work in the, the traffic system and we drive well, right. It's a system that just works. Whereas in some other countries, you know, the system doesn't work. >>We know, >>We know a few of those. >>It's not about works. It's not about the people. It's the same people who would go from here to those countries and, and not dry. Well, so it's all about the system. So the first thing I, I have my sights on is to really strengthen the system that we have in our research development to make it a machine. I mean, it functions quite well even today, but wanna take it to the next level. Right. So that I wanna get to a point where innovation just happens in the grassroots. And it just, just like >>We automations scale optic brings all, >>Just happens without anyone overseeing it. Anyone there's no single point of bottleneck. I don't have to go take any diving catches or have you, there are people just working, you know, in a decentralized fashion and innovation just happens. Yeah. The second thing I work on of course is, you know, my heart and soul is in, you know, driving the vision, you know, the next level. And that of course is part of it. So those are the two things >>We heard from all day in our super cloud event that there's a need for an, an operating system. Yeah. Whether that's defacto standard or open. Correct. Do you see a consortium around the corner potentially to bring people together so that things could work together? Cuz there really isn't no stand there. Isn't a standards bodies. Now we have great hyperscale growth. We have on-prem we got the super cloud thing happening >>And it's a, it's kind of like what is an operating system? Operating system exposes some APIs that the applications can then use. And if you think about what we've been trying to do with the marketplace, right, we've built a huge platform and that platform is exposed through APIs. That third party developers can use. Right? And even we, when we, you know, built more and more services on top, you know, we rolled our D as we rolled out, backup as a service and a ready for thing security as a service governance, as a service, they're using those APIs. So we are building a distributor, putting systems of sorts. >>Well, congratulations on a great journey. Sanja. Congratulations on taking the hem. Thank you've got ball control. Now you're gonna be calling the ball cohesive as they say, it's, >>It's a team. It's, you know, I think I like that African phrase. If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you wanna go far, you go together. So I've always operated with the best deal. I'm so fortunate. This is to me like a dream come true because I always thought I wanted to work with a technologist that frees me up to do what I like. I mean, I started as an engineer, but that's not what I am today. Right? Yeah. So I do understand the product and this category I think is right for disruption. So I feel excited, you know, it's changing growing. Yeah. No. And it's a, it requires innovation with a cloud scale mindset and you guys have been great friends through the years. >>We'll be, we'll be watching you. >>I think it's not only disruption. It's creation. Yeah. There's a lot of white space that just hasn't been created yet. >>You're gonna have to, and you know, the proof, isn't the pudding. Yeah. You already have five of the biggest 10 financial institutions in the us and our customers. 25% of the fortune 500 users, us two of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies in the world use us. Probably, you know, some of the biggest companies, you know, the cars you have, you know, out there probably are customers. So it's already happening. >>I know you got an IPO filed confidentially. I know you can't talk numbers, but I can tell by your confidence, you're feeling good right now we are >>Feeling >>Good. Yeah. One day, one week, one month at a time. I mean, you just, you know, I like the, you know, Jeff Bezos, Andy jazzy expression, which is, it's always day one, you know, just because you've had success, even, you know, if, if a and when an IPO O makes sense, you just have to stay humble and hungry because you realize, okay, we've had a lot of success in the fortune 1000, but there's a lot of white space that hasn't picked USS yet. So let's go, yeah, there's lots of midmarket account >>Product opportunities are still, >>You know, I just stay humble and hungry and if you've got the team and then, you know, I'm really gonna be working also in the ecosystem. I think there's a lot of very good partners. So lots of ideas brew through >>The head. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on our super cloud event and, and, and also doubling up on the news of the new appointment and congratulations on the success guys. Coverage super cloud 22, I'm sure. Dave ante, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more segments after this break.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the cube coverage here at Remar. Amazon Remar stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And we're here for a robotics. Cool segments. We have Monia on the desk. We'll get Caitlin Caitlin clay bar head. Ofri welcome to the cube and follow Virginian, founder and CEO of Moxi. Thanks for coming on and thanks for bringing this special third guest. Thank you for helping >>Us. >>This is exciting. Okay. So first of all, we'll get into the company a second, but what do we, what is this? What what's going on? This is amazing. >>Go. This is Moxi. This is our first product out of embodied and it is a social, emotional learning AI friend for children, ages five to 10 currently. >>That's what he, he or she likes me. Yes. Staring at me right now. I'm a child. Thank he. Nice to see you. >>And it has all sorts of content and in multi back and forth interaction. Yeah. And it's, it's our first pass at doing socially. >>Okay. So this product is shipping. >>It is shipping. Yeah. Available. It is available. We've been out for over a year now shipping for over a year now. >>Okay. Oh man. It just makes me feel good. It must be a big seller across all use cases. So what's the number one thing you guys getting attention on right now from Moxi besides the cool factor, the tech what's going on? >>Well, I think we have received a lot of interest from many people because Mo Mox is captured the imagination of people in terms of what is possible in the future. And really the Genesis of it is that I've been doing robotics for 20 years and sort of a little bit disappointed with what we have accomplished in robotics, because there's so much where we can do we have dreamt about robots for centuries. But what we were dreaming about was not robotic vacuum cleaners, which guilty as charged. I was part, I was a CTO at iRobot and we wanna see robots that can actually can really care for us from childhood to retirement. And Moxi represents the AI technology we have developed. That's gonna make that next wave of robotics to flourish. >>You must be really excited because I think right now, one of the main, my main walkaway themes so far from this show is technology's not the blocker anymore. It's the people human side of it, where it used to be technology slow. And robotics has been that area where we've seen great innovation, but where's that needle moving moment coming. I think now with cloud and all the things happening seems to be the moment. >>I think we are seeing exponential growth in technology. That's gonna enable robots to become unreal. As an example, Moxi uses very advanced, conversational engine where you literally can talk to Moxi about anything you want. So it can be a real companion. It will understand, you understand your needs and emotions and start working on social, emotional development for children. This technology, which are as transformer models, deep neural networks that are trained on millions of conversation. We are seeing every year, 10 X improvement to this. So I predict in the next two to three years, you will be able to have a conversation with Moxi. That's like having a subject expert matter expert in every single subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's like getting a cube interview like instantly, Hey, Moxie, what's the information. So I could see the tie in and it's just my mind's blown, I guess in the sense of the use cases are wide. You get wide ranging use cases, elderly care, child development, loneliness, all kinds of social, emotional factors. >>Yeah. We've built a really incredible platform that we're hoping to expand out beyond kids. I mean, kids is kind of our, this is our first product, but Moxi the fact that we have what we call our social X platform and the tools where you can create content and Moxi can have conversations about any number of things it's >>So share. What's what technology is under the covers here with the human robotic interface kind of dynamic, you got software, you got hardware, you're gonna have code. You got the neural networks. It's kind of the confluence of a lot of different vectors coming together. What's the secret sauce. >>So that's what we call our social X platform. And really it you're right. Everything has to work in concert and at a price point that's affordable for people. So Moxie's able to actually track people in the real world and we are able to fuse people's speech. And you know, we do facial recognition for the specific child. So Moxie knows its mentor and personalize the interaction over time. >>Well, she's talking to me or he is a, she is a gender neutral robot, I guess, like whatever I want it to be, I guess >>We've left it intentionally gender neutral, but kids kind of yeah. Prescribe whatever gender they feel connected. >>Yes. Good, good. You enables the user. Yes. Really? The key what's what's been the biggest use case that you didn't think would be coming to the table with Moxi anything surprise you, you must get a lot of reactions. >>Yeah. So you covered some of the ones we are focused on. We are particularly focused on mental health from childhood to retirement and aging gracefully. After we launched Moxi we had a TikTok video that went crazy viral. We got 40 million views on this. And that led to a lot of interest from celebrities. Yeah. >>From some of the most luxury hotel chains that have reached out to us and they want to use the technology in Moxi to develop a personal Butler for every guest room, as an example, that's one example, right? So we have one of the largest violence intervention program in the us that caters to children that have unfortunately been through very traumatic experiences in their life and want to use Moxi as a way to provide therapy to these children. Yeah. Yeah. So the use cases are very broad. We even have people from different countries that were very interested in using Moxi for, for instance, teaching a Chinese child, how to speak English, immersively by interacting with Moxi, which is the best way to learn a different language. So I think the implications of this are paramount. Yeah. We will even see in contact centers, centers, customer support centers, and so on will use technology like this for having them empathetic AI that's actually taking care of your customer service complaints rather than a robotic way of >>Interacting with. I was just on, on earlier with an interview here with Deloitte and AWS on conversational AI and trust was a big conversation. Yes. Trust and, and ethics. So you got ethics, trust bias, all these things are of factors. You got human interaction from a physical and then software standpoint. What, what other hard problems are in here that you guys are solving? Come on. This is incredible because these are hard problems. >>Yes they are. And one of them is the famous cocktail party problem. And Palo being our fearless CEO really drove the team to get Moxi to this state where Moxie's able to interact with people, even in this environment, which is pretty incredible and like lock in and have a back and forth conversation. It's very exciting. >>So Moxi how do you feel you feeling good? What's the biggest challenge you've had here? Audio. Congratulations. That's really impressive. I'm so impressed. And again, it it's again, not to oversimplify it. There's a lot of hard problems going on here that are, that are being solved. >>Absolutely. There's >>Human interaction. You get a physical device. >>Exactly. It's a physical device. And like how we have designed Moxi down to the color of Moxie's eyes, the color of the shell, all of that has taken a lot of iteration to get to a point where we really have a robot that people feel like they can trust, feel like they can connect with. And, >>And even something to add to this is that we have many robots that cost tens of thousands of dollars, because it's very easy to keep adding more sensors and more compute power. And so on. You end up with robots that cost 10, 20, $30,000. One of the goals we set at the outset was we want to make Moxi as, as affordable as an iPhone. So, and Moxi is right. The price point of Moxi is same as owning an iPhone. You pay about a thousand dollars up front plus a monthly subscription fee. And that not >>The Ram cap upgrade the Ram on that too. >>We have very limited brand. >>We have please. Very, >>If you can convince it >>IPhone, I can always get the 2 56 or the one terabyte, >>Right? No, it, it really actually makes it much harder to develop technology that's affordable >>For yeah. Yeah, totally. >>And we wanted to do that because we wanted to have impact. >>So are you shipping now or are you on allocation? I can imagine that demand is off the >>Charts. Definitely. We sold out last year when we launched the product. Now we are resolving supply chain issues that everyone is suffering from due to COVID and this year we'll have better ability to meet demand. >>So this is people want it. There's a lot of demand. >>Right? >>You guys a smile having fun. Yes. Right. All right. So now talking about the product, take me through the product. What's the challenges here. Obviously the animation in the camera. I see the camera. I see some lights there at heart speaker. What would Moxi be doing if wasn't, if we weren't here, if we were at home. >>So as in interacting with a child at home, we've seen a lot of people actually put Moxy on the floor and kids will like lay down and interact with Moxy. And there are a lot of different activities right now it's doing a little jukebox dance, but there are more kind of therapy or mental health and, and social, emotional learning, driven content. Like children can read a book with Moxi and we use the screen, not just to show that great, cute facial expression and the eye contact, but we also can show icons and some additional information. And so in this way, we've created a very new type of interface for a machine, with a child, >>Not to get all product visionary and roadmap oriented here. But I can imagine interfacing out to a third party screens in the future where this is gonna stay compact and affordable. And if I'm interacting and I want to display a visual, is that something you guys are guys going beyond that you're still focused on the product here? So what's some of the vision you have >>There definitely. There will be versions of our social X platform, finding their way into what we may call the metaverse, where you could have hyper realistic models of humans driven by our AI to interact with you the way you and I are interacting, but embodiment where the name of the companies derive from is actually super important in the kind of things we are doing with mental health and social emotional development. Because the physical co-presence of an entity like this interacts with our brains in a different way than when we do on extreme. So there is gonna be both versions for some applications will be virtual. Other applications will be >>Physical. Well, that's a wait and see, see what happens, sell out the next batch inventory where the product yeah. >>And the embodiment. It does. It just, it hits a little different, you know, kids yeah. Will actually physically tuck Moxi in at night. There's there's something there >>That's, there's something there tangible, I think it's great. Home run. I mean, just having the response, the visual response, the facial makes an impact instantly. >>Absolutely. >>So you can extend that out, probably make it more immersive, whether it's metaverse or within your home. >>Yeah. And now with AR VR goggles, where you get this 3d immersive experience, it may get closer to the impact we can have with an embodied agency. So the lines are blurring obviously between the physical and the digital. >>Well, great to have you guys on. Thanks for bringing the, the, the Moxi on Moxi to come on. This event kind of symbolizes this revolution. We're seeing the robotics industrial shift space is a good example of one. This is another machine learning, the software business cloud, all great, you know, force multipliers to enable value creation. Where do you guys see this going Remar as this whole intersection, you got a lot of different disciplines coming together. We're seeing here in the cube and we're talking to folks that we think it's gonna be a needle moving moment for the, for the industrial era. What do you guys take on this? >>Absolutely. I mean, >>Robotics has always been right around the corner, but with the advances of technology in the last 10 years or so, this is now really possible and it's growing at exponential rates. So the future is exciting. Obviously we have to guide it. You talked about ethics. So being ethical about it, being mindful about how we want to deploy this technologies to actually have positive impact on us. For instance, we do not believe in replacing a human labor or the need for humans, but we believe in augmenting humans, right. And technology today can actually do that. Yeah. >>Know that whole argument's been debunked for decade, the whole bank teller. Oh, they're gonna put tellers outta business. No, there's more tellers now than ever before. So I think technology is gonna create much greater aperture of, of opportunities. And I think the question I'd love to get, get you guys to share is this is gonna wake up a lot of generational, young talent to come into the workforce, cuz the problems are there. It's not a technology. It's a human mind, creative problem. Now it's more of, you know, you're gonna see robotics probably being accelerated even more now than it is. It's still growing. Yeah. Young kids love robotics. >>I mean, it's incredible to see the breadth of applications of robotics at, at this event specifically and just, I don't know, getting into it. I mean, I haven't been in it as long as you pow, but five, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have seen, I mean, this just wouldn't be possible. >>The robotics clubs are more popular now in high, most high schools in the United States than some sports there's a and a B team and people get cut from the B team. There's so much demand. There's so much excitement cuz it's building. If you get your hands on and it's got software, it's got coding. Absolutely. It's got building. >>Absolutely. And you are, you are creating, there are figures like Steve jobs, Jeff Bezos, LAN Musk that are inspiring children to go into stem education and really build a career in that area, which is much more exciting than the, the opposite. >>Great. What do you guys think about re Mars this year? What's your walk away? What's the big story here besides Moxi cuz we recovered that right now. What's what's the, what's the trend. What's the high level. What's the most important story people should pay attention to? >>I think we're just gonna see robotics or machine learning and we're just gonna see it in almost every application and it's going to be, the word was ambient was being used during the keynote. And I think that's really true. Ambient intelligence, like having robots in your everyday life as well as just AI in your everyday life. And it's gonna feel seamless. >>It's pretty impressive. Paul, what's your take on the, the >>Big story? I would say one of the trends we are seeing at even here at AWS, Amazon re remarks is making machines more human. Yeah. Even Astro the product that was launched last September, I believe by Amazon is adding a lot of facial affect emotions and understanding of humans for decades. We have been bound to using keyboards and touch screens and yeah. Clicks here and there. And it's gonna change it's time for machines to learn, to understand us. Yeah. And that is gonna be a trend that we will see even in the self self-driving cars, which are not gonna have a steering wheel, but the machine will understand our mood and drive accordingly. >>Yeah. And you know, Apollo, you guys are doing Caitlin your work here. I think highlights what I'm seeing as it's a future theme. That's positive. It has a vibe of like, we need a good to come. You know, it's like, when's the good gonna happen? And I think, >>I think we're ready for that. >>The theme's here though. They're very positive forward thinking practical engineered, you know, and solving problems, right? Real problems. The climate change and the keynote. We talking about healthcare and, and having things be solved this way. This is the new, the new normal, it's a human problem now to solve >>It is. And I think we are all, all of us are a bit more aware of that after the pandemic, because pan the pandemic was hard on everyone in different ways and we are more mindful of the positive. Right? We are looking for something positive and hopefully yeah. Coming out of the pandemic, now we have a global crisis, but these, these technologies will transform life and the world in a positive way. Yeah. >>You guys doing a great job. Congratulations on the success of >>Moxi. Thank >>You. Great work. Thanks for sharing that. Thank you. I wanna let more platform maybe next time. We'll have a conversation. We'll talk about the platform in tric season, then detail. So, but thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate the problem. >>Thank you. Our pleasure. Okay. >>It's the Cube's coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re Mars. I'm John furrier. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> We're back at the ARIA in Las Vegas you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022 live in person, but there's a big hybrid event going on. Close to 40,000 people watching online. This is the CEO segment. The newly minted CEO Anand Eswaran is here. And it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on. First time on theCUBE. >> Yeah, first time on theCUBE, excited to be here. Newly minted, those words, I haven't heard those for a long time. But thank you for the warm introduction, Dave. >> So why Veeam? What did you see that attracted you to Veeam? You have a great career, awesome resume. Why Veeam? >> A lot of different things. You know, it started with when I spent a good bit of time... I spent months with, you know, Insight, with Bill Largent who is now the chair of the board. And for me a few things, one, it started with the company culture. I absolutely loved... I spent time with our engineering team that it's an innovation-focused culture. It's an engineering-focused culture, which is so critical to any software company. And so that was the first place. And I spent a good bit of time with customers, reading, research, you know, brilliant products, always innovating. You know, even though it's a category you would think is fairly mature. I mean, when Veeam for example, did instant recovery. I mean, that was extreme innovation. And so that was the first thing which was appealing. The second thing was, you know, yes, we've reached a billion, but it still has that, you know, feel of a start up. It still has that feel of a... Jeff Bezos says this best, "A day one culture." Which is super critical, you know, we scale but you don't want to lose your soul and what made you special in the first place. And then you come down to the rest of the stuff, it's an execution machine. You know, it's an absolutely interesting category, especially in the day and the world we live in right now. You know, the proliferation of bad actors, security, backup, recovery, you know, everything you... Ransomware is starting to become you know, a meaningful threat to every company. So many different things coming together. This category is an interesting place. But that's not all, I feel that we are going to see this category evolve and shape very differently. You're going to see adjacencies coming and you're going to see in a couple of years or three years you're not going to just look at this and say, "Hey, it's backup and recovery." And so it's an opportunity to shape what is going to be a very important inflection point in this whole space. So a whole bunch of things. Excited about it. >> So flip question, why Anand? What did Insight see and the board see? What do you see as your key skills that they wanted here? Go after that opportunity- >> You should also get insight on this man. And you should ask them this question. I know Peter and Sokolov (laughs) >> So, you know, I don't know... I'll tell you where I think there's relevant experience is if I look at the future of Veeam. I think the first thing is we've got to think through what the next evolution of Veeam is. You know, there's a ton of work to do even in the path we are on, on data protection. And the team is absolutely brilliant at that. But how do you start to think ahead? How do you think about data management? How do you think about, you know, where are the adjacencies and how does it... How do you shape and reshape the category? You know, and I have some experiences in that. As I look at growth, Veeam has done a phenomenal job you know, 35,000 partners, an execution machine. I mean, just last year we grew ARR, you know, 27% we are sustaining that growth. But as I look ahead, you know there's huge opportunities to further accelerate our share in the enterprise to actually go work with creating multiple layers of partnerships beyond the very successful partnerships we already have. You know, how do you start to get GSIs in the mix? How do you start to get MSPs in the mix? How do you start to actually get to being a core part of the portfolio and platform of our primary storage partners, HPE, Pure Storage and so on. So reinvigorating and creating a multidimensional partnership strategy is key as well. And then just my experience in, you know I ran the enterprise for Microsoft and so those sort of experiences sort of are very relevant to our next step of the journey as well. And finally, you know I think the one thing which matters most for me and yeah, you realize... Again, I think we've forgotten what it means to have a microphone on. But culture, you know, I spent a lot of time in every company I've worked in, in contributing to the culture of what shapes and you know how do you create a purpose-led company and how do you get on that path? Which is a very, very important conversation inside Veeam. you know, and we already do that... You know, there's a huge focus on purpose. There's a huge focus on diversity. There's a huge focus on inclusion, but you know, the cultural aspect of Veeam attracted me to it. And I think my work and my passion for it attracted me to Veeam as well. So just a few of those things. >> Yeah, you speak from the heart, you can sense that. Dave and I were talking with Zias about platform versus product. Now you've got some experience with platforms, obviously, Microsoft, you know the amazing platform. RingCentral Zias brought up. And then I brought up HP, which actually never could figure out its software platform. So you've seen some successes. You've seen some, you know, couldn't ever get there. Do you see Veeam as a platform company? >> You know, the way I look at it is this. I mean, I may actually not answer your question directly but I'll answer the question. >> Dave: Okay. >> Which is, if you look at the biggest successes in the industry, call it Microsoft, Adobe now- >> Dave: Sure. >> Salesforce, eventually the path from a high growth startup to scale is platform and partners. That is the key. >> Dave: Ecosystem- >> So yeah. Platform and the ecosystem. So it all comes together. And so, yes, I mean, I think we already do that. I mean, we have a singular platform today for the multiple workloads we protect from, you know physical to cloud, to Kubernetes to the hybrid architectures the ability to actually, you know restore your data into any cloud, you know, back up from AWS restore into Azure or a physical data center. So we already have a robust platform in place but the scale or the growth from where we are a billion to the next set of milestones 2, 3, 5, 10 is going to be an absolute maturity and amp of platform partnerships ecosystem. >> That's a high wire act. When you talk about platform and scaling, you know, think about moving forward, when you have pressure to grow, often the easiest thing to grow is to acquire and add adjacencies that might not be as core to your core value proposition as they could be. How do you navigate that as you move forward in a world where... Look, Veeam was founded in an age when it was all about meantime between failure, recovery point, recovery time objectives. Now the big concern is malicious actors. So Veeam has been able to navigate that transition very well so far, but how do you do that? How do you balance that moving forward? This idea of platform is a desirous state to be in but you don't want to be a fake platform where you just glue a bunch of things on. >> It all comes down to thinking through where we see the world going from this point in time. How do you see technology evolving? How do you see the outside's, you know influences evolving. And when I say influences, it's, you know, just a euphemism for all the bad actors we expect to see getting even more active. So, you know, the way I think about it is either platform or acquisitions are not things you do piecemeal or point in time. It all needs to accrue to a larger strategy of how you create the ability for all of your customers to own protect, secure, you know their data and eventually create intelligence from it so that they can actually be proactive about it. So that, you know, if that's the thing, you know, our ambition is starting to become how do we sort of secure the world's data and help companies create intelligence from it so they can be proactive about it? You know, everything else sort of accrues from there the platform we evolve from the platform we already have, you know, stems from it. The acquisitions we may do, will do evolves from it. It all are... You know, its pieces coming together to the overall puzzle framework we've already created. >> Yeah. I have so many questions for you. And I want to get into a little bit of your philosophy, but before we do it, I want touch on the TAM a little bit more. You mentioned in the analyst discussion this morning that the market's fragmented. A lot of people think, "Oh, backup, storage, we'll just put it together. You know, Dell now or EMC brought it all together." But they're just dramatically different markets. You're seeing some of your competitors. One in particular is now kind of pivoting to security. It's an adjacency, but it's, yeah, I'm not sure you want to walk into that mess but it's clearly part of a data protection strategy. And you said you want your... My words, legacy to be a significant increase in market share, dominant position in the market. Even if it's number two, whatever, number one's nice, great. But much larger share than what is your 10, 12% today. How do you think about the TAM? It's so undercounted, I think. You know, we used to look at purpose built backup appliances, "Oh, it's a couple billion dollar market and it's a ceiling there." It reminds me of service management with ServiceNow. It's virtually unlimited TAM because it's data. How do you look at the TAM? >> How much time do you have? >> I know, I got so many questions- >> But I'll tell you this, right? You got to piece this question very carefully because I'll look at it in a variety of different ways. Number one, if you do nothing, if you just do nothing. I mean, today, as I shared in IDCs latest report last week we were joined number one, you know, for the first time we actually got- >> Dave: Yeah. Congratulations. That's a big milestone. >> That's huge, that's exciting. >> Dave: And that's revenue by the way. That's not licenses- >> Yeah. That's in share. But the thing is this, right? If, if you look at share, we are at 12%, you know as is the... You know, so 12% is not representative of how I think about number one. When you look at a market with a clear winner you expect to see 40 to 60% market share. So doing nothing is an opportunity to actually continue the path we are on which is taking share from every one of the top five significantly and growing as fast as we are. I mean, we are going to be on a path to, you know doubling our market share in the next two to three years. So there's share to gain doing nothing. And this is... You know what? This is the first and the most simplest aspect of TAM. Now layer in other aspects of TAM but just still stay in data protection. You know, talk about every single SaaS workload coming on. I mean, I shared 270 million Teams' users right now monthly actives. The TAM, if you were able to secure every one of those Teams' users and protect the data, I mean that's close to 6 or $7 billion. It's not factored in into any of the TAM numbers you see right now. Gartner talked about 13. You know, others talked about TAM being 40. I mean, but SaaS workloads, you know each of them are not factored in as much as it could be right now. So, you know, we are bringing in Salesforce, Microsoft 365. We secure 11 million paid users with Microsoft 365 backup. And so add all of them on, execute. We see a path to taking share and getting from here 12 to 25 to 40 and being an outsize number one. And then you'd come down to what you said, which is how do you think about adjacencies? Now, at Veeam, yeah, messaging is important, but unlike some of the competitors, we don't use words frivolously. If we say something, data protection, modern data protection, ransomware attacks, we mean it. And there's product truth behind it. We do not use frivolous security words to create a message and get attention and have no product truth behind it. That's where we are. We expect to see adjacencies come up. We expect Veeam to beyond execution and bringing in more SaaS workloads to look at the next layer of data management. We expect us to create partnerships which allow us to go do that meaningfully. And as time goes, you should expect us to be the prime influencer in reshaping this category with other adjacencies coming in. But we talk about it and there's product truth behind it. >> I wanted to get into your philosophy of management a little bit. I went to your LinkedIn recently and I loved the little graphic that you had. But I know a lot of people put up a picture of a pretty lake or mountains. I got theCUBE up there. You had a number of items. I wonder if I could read. You had a rocket ship, which was very cool. You had teamwork, you had innovation. I wrote down ABC, always be closing, Alec Baldwin. But everybody sells, I think is what it was and then keep it simple. >> Anand: Yep. >> I really like that. I mean, people going to... If they're going to evaluate Veeam they're going to go to your LinkedIn page. So tell us where that came from what your philosophy is as a manager. >> Yeah, no. So there's a few things and this is the philosophies which I put on is a meld of what I believe in and what Veeam believes in and has believed in for a long time which is life starts with a customer. For us, everything starts with a customer. You know, even the product creation philosophy 15 years back was, "Hey let's not just create some check marks and create a feature because someone, you know thought it's an important check mark to have." What is the value it creates for the customer? And is it different enough, unique enough, where, you know, it actually creates a moment where the customer sees the value impact their core business. That's where it all starts for us at Veeam. And then everything we do relates back to, "Is this moving the ball enough for our customers and for our partners and for our developers and users?" Everything comes back to there. Are we easy enough to do business with? You know, are we keeping it simple? Simple to use. A product should be really simple. It should be brain dead simple, you know are our processes such that, you know it's easy for us to connect with our partners, connect with our customers, connect with our users, you know it all comes back to keeping it really simple. And then, you know, I come down to a set of personal philosophies, which matters as well, which is, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, we used to say everyone is in sales, but we got to evolve it. Everyone is in customer success because we all know that it's not just the first sale which matters which was true 15 years back, what matters today is, yeah, the sale matters, everybody is there to sell. But what matters even more is the whole company rallies behind the customer's success at every step along the way. Because when you do that, you don't need to sell. You know, you get in through BBR and then we have a world of workloads to actually create value for the customer with, from, you know Microsoft 365 backup or, you know soon to come Salesforce backup cost. And we see that on net retention or, you know... And it's manifested in numbers, right? It's manifested in growth. It's manifested in net retention and it's manifested in NPS. I mean, Dave, I'm hugely excited about that, man. NPS of 80 where we are. I mean, you guys have been around for quite a bit. I mean, that's huge numbers. I mean, that's- >> Apple's- >> Apple was 76 or 77. And so eventually that is what matters more for me because it's... Share is important. And I'm excited about, you know, IDC saying, "You're joint number one." Hugely important, but that is a consequence. Growth is important. 25% ARR growth in Q1, super important but that is a consequence. What really matters is value for your customers. And the number one metric I look at is NPS, you know and NPS at 80, all the other things start to happen pair it with the engineering culture the innovation culture we have, long roadmap ahead. >> Veeam has made some... What appear to be, from the outside anyway, pretty successful acquisitions. Kasten is an obvious one. I remember it wasn't the first time I met Ratmir. It was maybe the third or fourth time we were at like a late night, Peter Bell party this Highland Capital at VMware. And we were walking down Howard Street. I see Ratmir and some of his colleagues, we start chatting. We, you know, got into a good conversation. I'm like, "What about an IPO?" He goes, "We're not doing an IPO. We don't need to do an IPO." And then several years later on theCUBE, he's like, "No, I'd be open to an IPO." And then of course the big acquisition happened. So you've got an opportunity here M and A obviously is a possibility. But what about the IPO in your future? Presumably, that's something Insight wants to do. What can you tell us about that? >> No, it's a great question. I was waiting when you were going to ask me that question. But this is what I would say which is, by the way, Veeam, at today's numbers, I mean, we shared numbers at the end of last year. 1.1 billion in ARR, 1.2 in revenues, 99.99% organic, right? You know, Kasten was the only acquisition we shared how Kasten is a blip at this point in time. And so the philosophy has always been organic. And as I look ahead, this is how I think about it. I think the pace of market change is going to be extreme. And so we will be a lot more open-minded, thinking about acquisitions for complimentary technologies which allow us to expand TAM and think about adjacencies, more to come there. IPO, see the good thing is this, a lot of companies want to enter the public markets to raise money, create liquidity. That's not the primary lens for us. And so the good news is that, you know we are incredibly profitable. We shared, you know, 30% EBITDA, you know, for 2021. So money is not the issue, but we do think that we entering the public markets is a good thing for a variety of other reasons, because when you are public and it comes with the, you know, transparency, which we believe we're already transparent. But it puts the focus on you. And that creates even better growth impetus. Especially as you go work with large enterprise customers they are a lot more amenable and you know and so we feel that it's a strategy of growth not a strategy of liquidity for us, but stay tuned. You know, I fully expect for something like that to happen sometime towards the middle of next year, to the end of next year. >> Yeah, we had a similar conversation with Frank Slootman they obviously were able to raise money. But wow, what a change since the snowflake IPO in terms of just the brand value. And again, so many questions. I thought your keynote was great, by the way. >> Anand: Thank you. I love the focus on, you know, ransomware, of course. I thought the bot jokes were great. Keep 'em coming. I mean, I really did enjoy- >> (laughs) Absolutely. >> It lightens things up. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. >> Absolutely appreciate it, Dave and Dave. By the way, I mean, it's funny, I mean about, you know, Dave and Dave, Dave and David reminded me of Thompson and Thompson, guess which comic book they're from? >> Thompson and Thompson- >> Thompson and Thompson. I don't know. >> Don't know. >> Tin Tin. >> Oh (laughs). >> (laughs) So you got to go read up. You guys don't look anything like that, but Dave and Dave, was an absolute pleasure. My first theCUBE and look forward to many more to come. >> Love to have you back- >> Absolutely. >> All right. Thank you for watching. >> Thank you. >> Keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022, 2 days of wall to wall coverage here at the ARIA in Las Vegas, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Lisa Martin: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Cube's coverage of women in tech International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Nicole Parafita joins me next: head of communications, people and culture at AWS Latin America. Nicole, it's great to have you on the program. >> Nicole: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> Tell me a little bit about your role as head of communications, people and culture. >> Super. So my role is very, very new. I've started in this role like two months ago, so really, really new. And as you said I lead the communications, people and culture team, which is dedicated to understanding people's needs, fostering leadership development, increasing diversity and inclusion, enabling employee recognition, and of course mitigating burnout, which is something we're seeing all across the world due to working from home and all of that. So it's a huge, huge task. And of course it is aligned to Amazon's 15 leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer. So huge challenge. >> Lisa: So tell me a little- so this is a brand new role as you said, just a couple of months. Was the pandemic a factor? And you mentioned burnout. I mean, that's one of the things that I think we've all been struggling with. Was that an influence in creating the role that you're in? >> So there are many many things that led to creating this organization. I think that the first one is this new leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer. There's - people is our top priority and we want to work with them and for them so that we generate engaging content, training materials and we work on enabling them, right? So the first one is striving to be Earth's best employer and that alignment. The second is the priority that our VP in Latin America gives its people. It's the key differentiator that we have at AWS: our culture and it's people and how our people live the culture. And the third thing would be the fact that we're growing, we're growing so fast. We're hiring so many people in the last year so, and we need to make sure we keep this day one culture alive and strong. So yes, we need to make sure that all these people that were hired since March 2020 and never set foot in a physical office, in an AWS physical office live the leadership principles, understand them deeply and can apply all these mechanisms from our culture in their day to day basis. Those are the key three things that led to the creation of this org. >> So you mentioned the leadership principles striving to be Earth's best employer. How does that, how is that connected to International Women's Day and what you're doing in terms of really bringing diversity and equality and inclusion into AWS LATAM? >> I love this question. I think, as I said before, culture and people is our top priority. We're learning a lot. We, this new leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer acknowledges that we're not the best, but that we're working very hard to become Earth's best employer. And all the efforts that we're doing are related to feedback, right? We're listening a lot to our, what our employees are saying and what the market is saying to build the best employee experience we can for everybody. And first of all, I'd say that our culture and our mission is to become, or to be, the most customer-centric company in the world. And for that, we need to be super diverse and inclusive. We need to get as many backgrounds and life experiences we can so that we can invent in the name of our customers. So building this diverse team really helps our business but also, as Jeff Bezos says, "it's the right thing to do." It's what we need to do. So what do we mean when we talk about inclusion, diversity and equity? I think it's good to define these three things, these key pillars of our culture. The first one is inclusion, which about belonging, right? It's about giving the physical- the psychological, sorry, safety to people so that they feel represented. This is super important for us. How do we make people feel comfortable where they work at? And some examples of this that I wanted to share with you. First of all, there's a mechanism that we use internally at AWS, that it's called Connections. Connections is a daily live feedback tool. So at AWS, we don't believe in having an annual survey for listening to employees, to what employees have to say. We believe in having real time feedback and this tool is that, exactly that. So every day I would turn on my computer and I would see a question from this Connection system. And one of the things that we're tracking is, the team I'm on helps me feel included at work. So we would say yes, no, or different options that we give the employees. And we would track how they feel. And according to that data we would implement different initiatives. So we're working on real time feedback from the team so that we can act fast and help the team feel better, right? The other thing that I would would say about belonging is that in AWS we have 13 affinity groups. We have 90,000 Amazonians across hundreds of chapters around the world who work towards different initiatives. One of them, for example, if it's Women at Amazon, Women at Amazon is a huge organization within Amazon with more than 80 chapters worldwide. And the objective of this affinity group is attracting, developing, and retaining women in both tech and non-tech roles across all Amazon business. As an example of the kind of initiatives that they drive, we can talk about Break the Bias. I'm not sure if you heard about this, but it's a huge initiative. It's a webinar that we will be hosting in Latin America on International Women Day on the 8th of March and we will have women sharing amazing stories. We will have, for example, Marta Ferero. Marta Ferero is the founder of a startup, a Colombian startup, called Ubits, which is like the Netflix of corporate training in her own words, among others. And we will also have recruiting specialists that will give advice on how to give and accept in our careers. So those are the kind of initiatives that we're trying to do to attract and retain and develop talent. This is more like an attracting talent thing because it's an open webinar that we have that. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> So that's about inclusion, which is belonging and how do we make people belong to certain groups within Amazon? The second thing is about diversity which is feeling, it's about feeling represented, right? And it's not about only gender. It can be about race. It can be about ethnicity, sexual orientation, age. We want everyone to feel represented. But now, if we're talking about International Women's Day let me talk a little bit about female representation. And I am very proud to share that we finished 2021 with 18% of female representation in the leadership team in the LATAM leadership team, which means people reporting to the LATAM VP, the vice president, Jaime. And we started 2022 with 35% female representation which is a huge improvement from one year to the other. So that are the numbers, right? But it's not just about numbers. It's the fact that these women that are now part of the leadership team have been given very important tasks. And as my boss always says, "don't tell me about your strategy. Tell me about where you're putting your resources and I'll tell you what your strategy is." And I love the fact that he picked very amazing women to lead very important missions within LATAM. For example, let me just give you an example, Carolina Pina, who joined us from the public sector team is leading this massive training organization. And like the name implies, this organization focuses on generating talent at a huge scale. And this is, I don't know, one of the most long term oriented tasks that we have, and it has a huge impact on Latin America, not only AWS business, but on Latin America. It's focused on really transforming our region into something different so that people can have a better quality of life. So those are the things that really amaze me. We've been given very important tasks, like this one, to really move forward in terms of cloud transformation and the transformation of the countries we operate in, which is amazing, I think. >> It is amazing. >> The last - >> Go ahead. >> The last topic, I'm sorry, I'm speaking too much, but just to close. The last thing that I want to say is equity, which is one of the key things that we have in our culture and equity is about fairness. It's about generating or giving the same amount of opportunities to everybody. The fact that we're massively training people in Latin America is about fairness about generating the skills. And the other thing that we're doing that is super important is that we're changing our interview process so that we make sure we have diverse, a diverse set of interviewers participating in the processes, right? So that people feel represented from the moment they start their journey with AWS with the first phone screen, right? So those things for me are really transformative and talk about what we're trying to do. And of course it has an impact on gender, but it also has an impact on a broader scale from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective which I think talks about the humanity of AWS. It's not just about the technology it's about transforming people's lives and helping Latin America, or the countries we operate in, to be better, right? For the good. >> Right. That's a great focus. Is that kind of a shift in AWS' culture in terms of really focusing on diversity? Or is that something that's really kind of been there from the beginning? >> So I think it's been here from the beginning, but now, for example, in Latin America, we're growing a lot. So we have more resources that we can allocate to really focus on this initiative. So aligning to these new leadership principal that was launched in July, or published in July, we always were very committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, but now we have more resources so that we can double down on this huge bet. And I feel very proud about that. >> Lisa: Tell me a little bit about, in the few remaining minutes that we have, I'm curious about your background. Were you always interested in tech or STEM? Was that something that you gravitated towards from when you were young, or was it something that you got into a little bit later? >> So my background is communications. I studied advertising, so no. I'm not a science or engineer-focused person, but from at early age I started working in tech companies, so I learned a lot. I had the chance to live in different countries like Mexico or the UK or the US where I always had the chance to interact with many amazing men and women that were focused on technology. So, no, I'm not a technology expert but I've always been related to people who know a lot about this. And I learned a lot in that process. And, you know, I've always seen like this, I don't how to explain, but this initiative or this will to make everyone feel comfortable where they work. I've seen this at AWS. And as I said before, we started the interview I'm eight months pregnant at this point. I'm about to take a five month leave which is a lot more than what the law gives me in Argentina, for example, where I'm located. So those are the kind of things that really make me feel comfortable where I work with and really proud of where I work with. And I want everybody to have the chance to get this type of job so that they can feel the way I feel, right? And I'm talking about men, women, people with disabilities, and many other type of affinity people, right? >> Right. It's so important to be able to have that comfort because your productivity is better, your performance is better, and ultimately the company benefits as those employees feel comfortable in the environment in which they're working and that they have the freedoms to be curious. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things, you mentioned the stat of 2020 to - 2021, excuse me, to 2022, almost doubling the number of women. >> Yep. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you're looking forward to as 2022 progresses. >> Wow, I'm the, you know, every time we have a performance review at AWS you get asked this question, what are you most excited about? Right. And this year I was excited about so many things that the list, I mean I didn't have enough characters to write about that. I think we are always trying to just confirm our beliefs at AWS. And this is the, what I like the most about working here. AWS or Amazon really values people who are curious, are always learning, and always trying to listen to other opinions. And this is key for our culture. I'm very excited about the fact that we're putting, we're turning on mechanisms to have even more feedback than we used to have, not just from customers and partners, but also from our employees. So the fact that we're having real time feedback will really make us better as an organization and always with this day-one culture in mind, which is very fast, right? We're making decisions very fast. We're very dynamic, we're learning on the go. We fail, sometimes. We fail, but we learn very fast. We fail fast. We used to say that we learn, we fail fast. And failure is part of our culture of innovation. So we're learning, we're failing, at some point we're implementing changes. And it's like a very interesting flywheel, right. Of growth. And it's very fast. So my job is very dynamic and I'm very excited about this. I'm hiring a team. I have a team of four people. I already hired two people and I need one more. So I'm very excited about that. I'm very excited to see what our employees are capable of. I mean, they're always inventing on behalf of our customers and partners. And it's always amazing to see the results from the year end, right. You get to tell stories from customers and partners that you never imagined you were going to tell. So I'm very excited about all those things. >> Lisa: Excellent. Well, good luck with the baby. Thank you so much for sharing. What your role is doing and how it's really helping to drive that diversity and inclusion and equity within Amazon. It's such an important cultural element and it's exciting to hear this strategic focus that AWS has. Nicole, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. For Nicole Parafita, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching women in tech International Women's Day, 2022. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. To the cubes coverage here, coop con cloud native con 2021 in person. The Cuba's here. I'm John farrier hosted the queue with Dave Nicholson, my cohost and cloud analyst, man. It's great to be back, uh, in person. We also have a hybrid event. We've got two great guests here, the founders of deep fence, sham, Krista Swami, C co-founder and CTO, and said deep line founder. It's great to have you on. This is a super important topic. As cloud native is crossed over. Everyone's talking about it mainstream, blah, blah, blah. But security is driving the agenda. You guys are in the middle of it. Cutting edge approach and news >>Like, like we were talking about John, we had operating at the intersection of the awesome desk, right? Open source security and cloud cloud native, essentially. Absolutely. And today's a super exciting day for us. We're launching something called track pepper, Apache V2, completely open source. Think of it as an x-ray or MRI scan for your cloud scan, you know, visualize this cloud at scale, all of the modalities, essentially, we look at cloud as a continuum. It's not a single modality it's containers. It's communities, it's William to settle we'll list all of them. Co-exist side by side. That's how we look at it and threat map. It essentially allows you to visualize all of this in real time, think of fed map, but as something that you, that, that takes over the Baton from the CIS unit, when the lift shift left gets over, that's when the threat pepper comes into picture. So yeah, super excited. >>It's like really gives that developer and the teams ops teams visibility into kind of health statistics of the cloud. But also, as you said, it's not just software mechanisms. The cloud is evolving, new sources being turned on and off. No one even knows what's going on. Sometimes this is a really hidden problem, right? Yeah, >>Absolutely. The basic problem is, I mean, I would just talk to, you know, a gentleman 70 of this morning is two 70 billion. Plus public cloud spent John two 70 billion plus even 3 billion, 30 billion they're saying right. Uh, projected revenue. And there is not even a single community tool to visualize all the clouds and all the cloud modalities at scale, let's start there. That's what we sort of decided, you know what, let's start with utilizing everything else there. And then look for known badness, which is the vulnerabilities, which still remains the biggest attack vector. >>Sure. Tell us about some of the hood. How does this all work cloud scale? Is it a cloud service managed service it's code? Take us out, take us through product. Absolutely. >>So, so, but before that, right, there's one small point that Sandeep mentioned. And Richard, I'd like to elaborate here, right? He spoke about the whole cloud spending such a large volume, right? If you look at the way people look at applications today, it's not just single clone anymore. It's multicloud multi regions across diverse plants, right? What does the solution to look at what my interests are to this point? That is a missing piece here. And that is what we're trying to tackle. And that is where we are going as open source. Coming back to your question, right? How does this whole thing work? So we have a completely on-prem model, right? Where customers can download the code today, install it. It can bill, we give binary stool and Shockley just as the exciting announcement that came out today, you're going to see somewhat exciting entrepreneurs. That's going to make a lot more easy for folks out there all day. Yeah, that's fine. >>So how does this, how does this all fit into security as a micro service and your, your vision of that? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I'll tell you, this has to do with the one of the continual conferences I would sort of when I was trying to get an idea, trying to shape the whole vision really? Right. Hey, what about syncretism? Microservice? I would go and ask people. They mentioned that sounds, that makes sense. Everything is becoming a microservice. Really. So what you're saying is you're going to deploy one more microservice, just like I deploy all of my other microservices. And that's going to look after my microservices. That compute back makes logical sense, essentially. That was the Genesis of that terminology. So defense essentially is deployed as a microservice. You go to scale, it's deployed, operated just like you to your microservices. So no code changes, no other tool chain changes. It just is yet another microservice. That's going to look after you talk about >>The, >>So there's one point I would like to add here, which is something very interesting, right? The whole concept of microservice came from, if you remember the memo from Jeff Bezos, that everybody's going to go, Microsoft would be fired. That gave rise to a very conventional unconditionally of thinking about their applications. Our deep friends, we believe that security should be. Now. You should bring the same unconventional way of thinking to security. Your security is all bottom up. No, it has to start popping up. So your applications on microservice, your security should also be a micro. >>So you need a microservice for a microservice security for the security. You're starting to get into a paradigm shift where you starting to see the API economy that bayzos and Amazon philosophy and their approach go Beanstream. So when I got to ask you, because this is a trend we've been watching and reporting on the actual application development processes, changing from the old school, you know, life cycle, software defined life cycle to now you've got machine learning and bots. You have AI. Now you have people are building apps differently. And the speed of which they want to code is high. And then other teams are slowing them down. So I've heard security teams just screw people over a couple of days. Oh my God, I can wait five days. No, it used to be five weeks. Now it's five days. They think that's progress. They want five minutes, the developers in real time. So this is a real deal optimum. >>Well, you know what? Shift left was a good thing. Instill a good thing. It helps you sort of figure out the issues early on in the development life cycle, essentially. Right? And so you started weaving in security early on and it stays with you. The problem is we are hydrating. So frequently you end up with a few hundred vulnerabilities every time you scan oftentimes few thousand and then you go to runtime and you can't really fix all these thousand one. You know? So this is where, so there is a little bit of a gap there. If you're saying, if look at the CIC cycle, the in financial cycle that they show you, right. You've got the far left, which is where you have the SAS tools, snake and all of that. And then you've got the center where, which is where you hand off this to ops. >>And then on the right side, you've got tech ops defense essentially starts in the middle and says, look, I know you've had thousand one abilities. Okay. But at run time, I see only one of those packages is loaded in memory. And only that is getting traffic. You go and fix that one because that's going to heart. You see what I'm saying? So that gap is what we're doing. So you start with the left, we come in in the middle and stay with you throughout, you know, till the whole, uh, she asks me. Yeah, well that >>Th that, that touches on a subject. What are the, what are the changes that we're seeing? What are the new threats that are associated with containerization and kind of coupled with that, look back on traditional security methods and how are our traditional security methods failing us with those new requirements that come out of the microservices and containerized world. And so, >>So having, having been at FireEye, I'll tell you I've worked on their windows products and Juniper, >>And very, very deeply involved in. >>And in fact, you know what I mean, at the company, we even sold a product to Palo Alto. So having been around the space, really, I think it's, it's, it's a, it's a foregone conclusion to say that attackers have become more sophisticated. Of course they have. Yeah. It's not a single attack vector, which gets you down anymore. It's not a script getting somewhere shooting who just sending one malicious HTP request exploiting, no, these are multi-vector multi-stage attacks. They, they evolve over time in space, you know? And then what happens is I could have shot a revolving with time and space, one notable cause of piling up. Right? And on the other side, you've got the infrastructure, which is getting fragmented. What I mean by fragmented is it's not one data center where everything would look and feel and smell similar it's containers and tuberosities and several lessons. All of that stuff is hackable, right? So you've got that big shift happening there. You've got attackers, how do you build visibility? So, in fact, initially we used to, we would go and speak with, uh, DevSecOps practitioner say, Hey, what is the coalition? Is it that you don't have enough scanners to scan? Is it that at runtime? What is the main problem? It's the lack of visibility, lack of observability throughout the life cycle, as well as through outage, it was an issue with allegation. >>And the fact that the attackers know that too, they're exploiting the fact that they can't see they're blind. And it's like, you know what? Trying to land a plane that flew yesterday and you think it's landing tomorrow. It's all like lagging. Right? Exactly. So I got to ask you, because this has comes up a lot, because remember when we're in our 11th season with the cube, and I remember conversations going back to 2010, a cloud's not secure. You know, this is before everyone realized shit, the club's better than on premises if you have it. Right. So a trend is emerged. I want to get your thoughts on this. What percentage of the hacks are because the attackers are lazier than the more sophisticated ones, because you see two buckets I'm going to get, I'm going to work hard to get this, or I'm going to go for the easy low-hanging fruit. Most people have just a setup that's just low hanging fruit for the hackers versus some sort of complex or thought through programmatic cloud system, because now is actually better if you do it. Right. So the more sophisticated the environment, the harder it is for the hackers, AK Bob wire, whatever you wanna call it, what level do we cross over? >>When does it go from the script periods to the, the, >>Katie's kind of like, okay, I want to go get the S3 bucket or whatever. There's like levels of like laziness. Yeah. Okay. I, yeah. Versus I'm really going to orchestrate Spearfish social engineer, the more sophisticated economy driven ones. Yeah. >>I think, you know what, this attackers, the hacks aren't being conducted the way they worked in the 10, five years ago, isn't saying that they been outsourced, there are sophisticated teams for building exploiters. This is the whole industry up there. Even the nation, it's an economy really. Right. So, um, the known badness or the known attacks, I think we have had tools. We have had their own tools, signature based tools, which would know, look for certain payloads and say, this is that I know it. Right. You get the stuff really starts sort of, uh, getting out of control when you have so many sort of different modalities running side by side. So much, so much moving attack surfaces, they will evolve. And you never know that you've scanned enough because you never happened because we just pushed the code. >>Yeah. So we've been covering the iron debt. Kim retired general, Keith Alexander, his company. They have this iron dome concept where there's more collective sharing. Um, how do you see that trend? Because I can almost imagine that the open-source man is going to love what you guys got. You're going to probably feed on it, like it's nobody's business, but then you start thinking, okay, we're going to be open. And you have a platform approach, not so much a tool based approach. So just give me tools. We all know that when does it, we cross over to the Nirvana of like real security sharing. Real-time telemetry data. >>And I want to answer this in two parts. The first part is really a lot of this wisdom is only in the community. It's a tribal knowledge. It's their informal feeds in from get up tickets. And you know, a lot of these things, what we're really doing with threat map, but as we are consolidating that and giving it out as a sort of platform that you can use, I like to go for free. This is the part you will never go to monetize this. And we are certain about disaster. What we are monetizing instead is you have, like I said, the x-ray or MRI scan of the cloud, which tells you what the pain points are. This is feel free. This is public collective good. This is a Patrick reader. This is for free. It's shocking. >>I took this long to get to that point, by the way, in this discussion. >>Yeah, >>This is this timing's perfect. >>Security is collective good. Right? And if you're doing open source, community-based, you know, programs like this is for the collector group. What we do look, this whole other set map is going to be open source. We going to make it a platform and our commercial version, which is called fetch Stryker, which is where we have our core IP, which is basically think about this way, right? If you figured out all the pain points and using tech map, or this was a free, and now you wanted the remedy for that pain feed to target a defense, we targeted quarantining of those statin workloads and all that stuff. And that's what our IP is. What we really do there is we said, look, you figured out the attack surface using tech fabric. Now I'm going to use threat Stryker to protect their attacks and stress >>Free. Not free to, or is that going to be Fort bang? >>Oh, that's for, okay. >>That's awesome. So you bring the goodness to the party, the goods to the party, again, share that collective, see where that goes. And the Stryker on top is how you guys monetize. >>And that's where we do some uniquely normal things. I would want to talk about that. If, if, if, if you know public probably for 30 seconds or so unique things we do in industry, which is basically being able to monitor what comes in, what goes out and what changes across time and space, because look, most of the modern attacks evolve over time and space, right? So you go to be able to see things like this. Here's a party structure, which has a vulnerability threats. Mapper told you that to strike. And what it does is it tells you a bunch of stress has a vulnerable again, know that somebody is sending a Melissa's HTP request, which has a malicious payload. And you know what, tomorrow there's a file system change. And there is outbound connection going to some funny place. That is the part that we're wanting this. >>Yeah. And you give away the tool to identify the threats and sell the hammer. >>That's giving you protection. >>Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I love you guys love this product. I love how you're doing it. I got to ask you to define what is security as a microservice. >>So security is a microservice is a deployment modality for us. So defense, what defense has is one console. So defense is currently self posted by the customers within the infrastructure going forward. We'll also be launching a SAS version, the cloud version of it. But what happens as part of this deployment is they're running the management console, which is the gooey, and then a tiny sensor, which is collecting telemetric that is deployed as a microservice is what I'm saying. So you've got 10 containers running defenses level of container. That's, that's an eight or the Microsoft risk. And it utilizes, uh, EDP F you know, for tracing and all that stuff. Yeah. >>Awesome. Well, I think this is the beginning of a shift in the industry. You start to see dev ops and cloud native technologies become the operating model, not just dev dev ops are now in play and infrastructure as code, which is the ethos of a cloud generation is security is code. That's true. That's what you guys are doing. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. Absolutely breaking news here in the queue, obviously great stuff. Open source continues to grow and win in the new model. Collaboration is the cube bringing you all the cover day one, the three days. I'm Jennifer, your host with Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay thanks, Adam, and the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action, the keynotes are going on in the background. It's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante's on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE, but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, and kicking it off day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me! It's very exciting! I love what you guys have got over here, very fun! >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is, and also, Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> No, I mean, the atmosphere is absolutely palpable. Isn't it? You can just feel it. People walk in and see what the future looks like for the telecoms industry. Very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage, we're really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. After the keynotes are going on, we're going to have DR maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that out. But let's check out this videotape. This is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel, and we'll be right back, and we'll talk about it. (smooth electronic music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson space at MWC 21, and for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is their unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston, or DR, as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat instrumental music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona! I'm here for MWC 21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors, and 70 demos, to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience. We're going to talk about what's in store for the new network, and the future of work. And I'm really excited to create a community, and invite awesome telco executives to see this new feature. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC 21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get-go, we planned this amazing experience that we call Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series, where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs, and awesome vendors, talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud, hosted by John furrier and Dave Vallente. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests focused on telco in the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco, and 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, am on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements, and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested $1,000,000 in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market this week at MWC. The first is at planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement, coupling your network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement, and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing is a planetary scale BSS system, built on top of the TM Forum Open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show floor. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco! I'm super excited to bring to you the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona, and virtually around the world! (upbeat instrumental music) Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry, and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (groovy electronic music) >> Okay, thanks. Just rolling that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel, I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star. And I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision, and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there! I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, it really is. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world! She's innovative, she's exciting. And if we've learned anything over the last 18 months, it's that we need that in this industry, to grow for the future of the industry. So, so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration! >> And I love the fact that she's so takes the tiger by the tail. Because the telco industry is being disrupted, she's just driving the bus here. And I remember, I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon Web Services, she was running the public sector, and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC, and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player! And she was an exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing, and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" >> Now of course, it's always that way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time, people thinking what is going on here, we don't like change, why are being shaken up? But actually, afterwards, in retrospect, they think, "Oh, okay. I see why that happened, and we needed it." So, really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here on theCUBE. Obviously, the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you missed some of the action, this is obviously the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a hybrid event, a lot of virtual action going on. So, you got theCUBE Virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites. But in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, and what was happening around the show. Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (groovy electronic music) (cheerful instrumental music) (groovy electronic music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're on the main floor out here with Chloe, who is emceeing, hosting, and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean so far, day one, I was watching your presentations and fireside chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, no, for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage, and his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing. And in 10 years, it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So, really interesting! I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great. Everyone's excited. It's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content! It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. It's very exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event, so since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event, and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry because of COVID, and people are glad to be here. But a lot of stuff's changed! >> Yeah. It's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed! Digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though, John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> John: Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years. We know that! But what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years. >> Oh, man. That's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks, and telecom, which is basically radios, and wireless, and then mobile. But it's very global, a lot of networks. But now it's evolving! And many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting, that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe, because of all the technology from the cloud players, and from the chips, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So people look at the chips, the hardware. It's less about the speeds and feeds, it's more about the consumer experience. We got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I went, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, you order it, you pick it up. So that's kind of what can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. So, a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry? That is, the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is there anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well, I think the incumbents are going to lose their positions. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the the company that you don't see. (audience in background applauding) And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this! We saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. >> Chloe: Yeah, for sure. >> She just walked out there, and she's not afraid. >> Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up! And you can see as soon as she walks out, that is what she intends to do today. >> I love her mojo. She's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Chloe: Yep. >> I mean, even when Apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash, when Steve Jobs brought back Apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company, the iPad was a seminal, iPod, a seminal moment. Then the iPhone, and just, the rest is history. That kind of disruption is coming. You're going to see that now. >> Oh, it's exciting though, isn't it? To be future ready, rather than future proof! But actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about wire, as you're on AWS and Google Cloud, why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity. And it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. It's almost like global warming now, the icebergs are melting, and it's going to just change. And because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing, it's not like a better phone. It's a commercial app opportunity, because it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts, or football games, or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out. Can't upload their picture to Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them on the network. That's where 5G solves a problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth, and that's going to bring the edge to life, and that's money. So when you got money, and greed, and power, changing hands, if it's on the table, and the wheel's spinning, it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know! >> Oh, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved! And I suppose it circles back to the fact that DR is really leading the charge, and they're probably thinking, "Okay, what's going on here? This is different. We want something new." You did notice it, OpenRAN is something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here at Cloud City Live mention OpenRAN. What is it all about, Don? Because why all the buzz if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we get excited about it? >> That's a great thing. The 5G certainly will drive the main trend, for sure. OpenRAN is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular, and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation, has been the driver for most of the open source software. So, they're trying to make open software, and open architectures, to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware, and around infrastructure, because we need more infrastructure, we need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices. That could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology, and you want to minimize the licensing, and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What did we look at? So on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Phillip Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud, and within telco. So you just mentioned that OpenRAN is all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easily more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it at risk? >> I think it's going to increase the value of security, and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in a sense that could be explored by hackers, but open can also protect. And I think we've seen open source, and cloud in particular, be more secure. Because everyone said, cloud is not secure, open source is insecure. And as it turns out, when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security threats, but actually I was speaking to some leaders across various industries, and particularly in tech, and they were saying, actually, there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open-source environment, we are able to track them, and measure them, and defend more efficiently. So actually, they're being batted away. But the number is probably the same as it always was, we just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats, and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so to the threats. So on a net basis, it's more, because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look it, there's money involved, they are organized. There's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank, or ransomware is at an all time high. >> Yes! >> So this is like a big problem, and it's beyond the government. It's around individual freedom. So, security is huge. And I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think, the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's, again, about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time, but without collaboration, the industries are going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I'd just say on security, don't download that PDF, if you don't know who it came from. The phishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here of Mobile World Live. We're going to show this next segment, and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience, Chloe, for people who aren't here. To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona, and all the action. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Daniel Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDR. But you can call me DR! Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time! Let's do it. Holy shit! It sure is a great time to be a tech company! I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, Door Dash, or Uber, life's pretty great! Just look at these stock prices over the past five years, with their shareholder value going up and to the right. Totally amazing! But where's telco? Dare I add our stocks to this awesome chart? Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, TIM, America Movil, and Zain Group. Huh. Not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you, senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up! Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T than to Apple, because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people! I get it. You have the security blanket. You're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network, and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network, and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things. But because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far, you haven't had to. Every Telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best. Just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat. And it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting to WeChat, WhatsApp, and the other OTT apps. But it is not just texting. The total adjustable market, or TAM, of the mobile app disruptors is huge! Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love! They look at every interaction with the customer and say, how do we make the customer love this? Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive, they must make customers love them. So, they focus on it in a big way! And it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70, and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS, and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch, and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps, and becoming customer centered! Retooling around the customer is a huge change, so let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples, and drive big shareholder value, just like the tech companies on that chart! Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies in a variety of categories vying for your subscribers' disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services. Who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high valuations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You! Hello? What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAMs they throw around, you'd be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the cap ex to build out the network, I say to myself, hell yeah! We should totally go do it, and do whatever it takes to go get it. For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a Southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focus started in Rideshare, but then leveraged its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a Telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with the valuable services that helped grow your ARPU. That would be huge! So, how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app! A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great, but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called to Totogi that is going to help carriers build world-class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users. It's not the average order value. It's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user. That's the metric that matters. How many have you used that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top-up, or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences. Like Apple credit cards, no information required application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies. Like how Door Dash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings, because they do simple things, like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app, rather than forced you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. Hm, what do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder. While you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day, you have something that's 10 times better! You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network. 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to, your crappy, over customized, on-premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it, the public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi! Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions, and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network, and all the network interactions, into customer engagement. This is something that super apps don't have, but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focused to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying, massive cap ex investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps, with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day, and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100,000,000 into it. You heard me right. $100,000,000. Is this what it feels like to be SoftBank? I'm investing into Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage their network interactions into super app usage! Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience, and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those telco valuations will go from down here, (buzzes lips) to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts. And I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, "Click. Eh." Everyone says, no way. Telcos can't do it. Zero chance. Total goose egg. (egg cracking) One suggested I build a bonfire with a hundred million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well, I think those people are dead wrong! I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco, and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because Totogi takes the value of the network, and the power of the public cloud, to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focused guys, like the other telcos. Instead, you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors, they know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf, and make the customers want to choose you. You need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We'll have to give up the security blanket of the network, and change. Instead of NPS at the thirties, it needs to be in the seventies. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible! I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me, and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time, and I can't wait to see you there! >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier. Chloe Richardson's filling in for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her involving major action, major pump you up, punch in the face, "Wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here!" She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is, John, there's trillions of dollars on the table, and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in, and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> And it's not going to be, it's going to be a fight! Who will win? >> Who will win, but also who will build the next big thing? (John laughing) >> Someone needs to die in the media conversations. It's always a fight. Something's dead. Something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. Think what's happened is Telco's already acknowledged that they need to change. And the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple. They've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm. You've got all these new things. So, the chips are getting faster, and the software's more open source. And I'm telling you, the cloud is just going to drive that bus right down Cloud Street, and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peepin' on the board as it drives down. (John laughing) John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written, and one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me, what does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets, and growing markets, things behave differently, and certainly economics, and the people, and the makeup, and the mindset. So the telco has been kind of this mature market, it's been changing and growing, but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit. You know, to install a lot of cable, you got to get the rents out of that infrastructure. And that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market. And it's about building, not just operating. And you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together. Builders being software developers, new technology, and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking. But in a growth market, it's turbulent, and the ride might not be quiet, first-class ticket to paradise. It's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer? Are there parallels there? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, replatform with the cloud, and then refactor your business! If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over, or go out of business. And that's what the telcos with all these assets, they're going to get bought, rolled into a SPAC, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which is super hot in the United States. A lot of roll-ups going on with private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor, or replatform then refactor, they're going to be toast, and they're going to get rolled up, and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad, people, process, technology, and we think, process and technology really to the forefront here. But like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously, Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday, and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations, establishments. How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about? >> Yeah. I mean, education's huge, and this highlights the change that telco's now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around, and mobile was there. But once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So, you start to see people now aware of the value. And if you look at during COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses, and everyone survived because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad Zoom meetings here and there, and some teleconferences that didn't go well, but for the most part we survived, and they really saved everybody. So, they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education. People care about that stuff, so now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why the edge has got trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, "Oh, there's no jobs." Or, "I can't work." That's a bunch of BS, because you can just get online, get on YouTube, and just get a degree. You can get a degree. You can get an Amazon job. It pays a hundred thousand dollars a year! American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds, and be unemployed six months, and then be employed. So negative unemployment means, there's more jobs than people to fill them all, in fact. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that, because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in something, I think there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity. And there's such a skill shortage. There is nobody around to fill it! So it's an interesting problem to have, isn't it? Because it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades! And obviously, telco is in the same space. But what can we do about it do you think, to actually -- >> I think it's going to take leadership, and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university if they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money, if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there. But to me, it's the relationships, the mentorship. You're starting to see a women in tech, and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear courseware. Nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate, or degree, and accreditation, no problem. But the communities are out there, so that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that. And I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills. You can get that online, so why even go to school? So, people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also, even transferring. I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't they, so we could easily be talking to people from other industries, and bringing them into telco, and saying, "Look, bring what you know from your retail background, or your healthcare background, and help us at telco to, again, drive forwards." Just like DR was saying, it's all about the next big thing. >> Well, Danielle is always also driving a lot of change. And if you think about the jobs, and the pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy Leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to the school like that, and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now the jobs that are available weren't around five years ago, so there's no like pedigree or track record. There's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now, from a job standpoint, is people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy League, or the big degree, or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emerging and making things happen. Entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas! >> It's interesting you mention that, John, because we can't have more than five years experience in this space, we know that. But in telco, there is a problem. And maybe it's, again, it's a flipped problem where telco recruiters, or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> I think that's just, I mean I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening, one. But two, I think, you know, to be like a chip engineer, (laughs) you can't learn that online. But if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So, embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely paths you can specialize. Space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on. You see Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on a virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And you know, Danielle Royston always says, "What's going to happen first, Mars colony, or telco adopting public cloud?" And some people think Mars will happen first, but. >> What do you think, John? >> I think Telco's going to get cloud. I mean first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud, and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important, because it's an architectural beachhead. And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. So, the inside baseball, and the inside money, and all the investors are focusing on the edge, because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows, it's a public secret, and it's fun to watch everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah no, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So, it's an interesting flip. And I wonder if, with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development, this efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times, John. >> John: Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So, we're the hybrid CUBE, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. That is critical dynamic! And you're seeing it. Like virtual reality, for instance, now you're seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. You got, companies like Roblox went public recently. Metaverse. It's a good time to be in that business, because experiential human relations are coming. So, I think that's going to be powered by 5G. You know, gamers. So, all good stuff. Chloe, great to be with you here on theCUBE, and we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam, and the team. We're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City. And this is theCUBE, from Cloud City, back to you, Adam, and the studio.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks Adam in the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action. The keynotes are going on in the background, it's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante is on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City, with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and kicking it up day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting. I love what you guys have got over here, very fun. >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is. And also the Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> Know, I mean the atmosphere is absolutely palpable, isn't it? You can just feel as people walk in and see what the future looks like to the Telecoms industry, it's very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage. We've been really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. Actually the keynote is going on, we're going to have DR, maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that up. But let's check out this videotape of, this is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel and we'll be right back, we'll talk about it. (upbeat music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson's space at MWC21. And for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is the unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston or DR as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona. I'm here for MWC21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors and 70 demos to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience, we're going to talk about what's in store for the new network and the future of work. I'm really excited to create a community and invite awesome telco executives to see this new future. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get go we plan this amazing experience that we call, Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs and awesome vendors talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live, is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud hosted by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests, focused on telco and the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco. And 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, I'm on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested a hundred million dollars in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market, this week at MWC. The first is a planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement coupling dual network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing, is a planetary scale BSS system built on top of the TM forum, open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show for. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco. I'm super excited to bring to you, the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona and virtually around the world. (upbeat music) >> Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks. Just roll on that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel. I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star and I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there. I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, really isn't. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world. She's innovative, she's exciting and if we've learned anything over the last 18 months is that we need to in this industry to grow and for the future of the industry. So, it's so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration. >> And I love the fact that she's so, takes a tiger by the tail, because the telco industry is being disrupted. She's just driving the bus here and I remember I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon web services, she was running the public sector and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player. And she was exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, whoa, what's going on here? >> And of course, it's always the way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time people thinking what's going, we don't like change, why are we being shaken up. But actually afterwards, in retrospect, they think, oh, okay, I see why that happened and we needed it. So really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here in theCUBE. Obviously the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you miss some of the action, this is, I'll see the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a Hybrid event. A lot of virtual action going on. So you got theCUBE virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites, but in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, what was happening around the show? Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're the main floor out here with Chloe Richardson, who is emceeing, hosting and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean, so far day one, I was watching your presentations and inspire site chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, I know for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage. And his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing and in 10 years it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great, everyone's excited, there's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content. It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. Really exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event. So since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry cause of COVID and people are glad to be here, but a lot of stuff's changed. >> Yeah, it's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed, digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years, we know that, but what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years? >> Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks and telecom, which is basically radios and wireless and then mobile. It's very global, a lot of networks, but now it's evolving and many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe because what's all the technology from the cloud players and from the chips, are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So if you look at the chips, the hardware, it's less about the speeds and feeds. It's more about the consumer experience. You got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I'm like, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app, driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, if you order it you pick it up. So that's kind of can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. so a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry that is the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is that anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well I think the incumbents are going to lose their position. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. >> For sure. >> And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the company that's not, that you don't see. And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this. You saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. She just walked out there and she's not afraid. >> No. Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up and you can see as soon as she worked out. That is what she intends to do. >> I love her mojo, she's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Yep. >> I mean, even when apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash. When Steve Jobs brought back apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company. The iPad was a similar moment, then the iPhone and just the rest is history. That kind of disruption's coming. You're going to see that here. >> Yeah. Oh, it's exciting though isn't it? To be future ready rather than future proof but actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about why, as you're in MWS and Google Cloud? Why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot, hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity and it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. >> Okay. >> It's almost like global warming now. The icebergs are melting and it's going to just change and because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing. It's not like a better phone, it's a commercial app opportunity cause it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts or football games or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out, can't upload their pictures on Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them in the network. That's where 5G solves the problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth and that's going to bring the edge to life and that's money. So when you got money and greed and power changing hands, it's every, it's on the table and the wheel's spinning, and it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know. >> Yeah, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved. And I suppose it circles back to the fact that, DR is really leading the charge and they're probably thinking, okay, what's going on here? This is different, we want something new. You didn't know it's an open run or something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here constantly. I've mentioned open run. What is it all about John? Because why all the bars, if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we getting excited about it? >> That's a great thing. 5G certainly is Google Drive the main trend for sure. OpenRent is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation has been the driver for most of the open source software. So they're trying to bring software and open architectures to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware and around infrastructure because we need more infrastructure. We need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices that could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology and you want to minimize the licensing and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What if we look at, so on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Philippe Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud and within telco. So you just mentioned that. Open mind, it's all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easy, more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it a risk? >> I think that's going to increase the value of security and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in sense that could be explored by hackers, but it can be open to also protect. And I think we've seen open source and cloud in particular be more secure because everyone said, "Cloud is not secure, open source is not secure." And as it turns out when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security and threats. But actually I was speaking to some leaders in across various industries and particularly in tech. And they were saying, "Actually there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open source environment. We are able to track them and measure them and defend more efficiently. So actually they're being battered away, but the number is probably the same as it always was. We just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so do the threats. So on a net basis it's more because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look at it, there's money involved, they're organized, there's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank or ransomwares at an all time high. So this is like a big problem and it's beyond the government, it's our individual freedom. So security its huge and I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's again about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time but without collaboration that the industries aren't going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I just say in security, don't download that PDF if you don't know who came from. The fishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here on Mobile World Live, we're going to show this next segment and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience Chloe, for people who aren't here, right? >> Yeah. >> To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona and all the actions. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDr, but you can call me DR. Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time, let's do it. Holy shit. It sure is a great time to be a tech company. I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, DoorDash or Uber, life's pretty great. Just look at these stock prices over the past five years with their shareholder value going up into the right. Totally amazing. But where's telco? There I add our stocks to this awesome chart. Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, Tim, America Movil and Zain group. Huh, not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up. Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T and to Apple because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth, the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people. I get it, you have the security blanket, you're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street, to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things, but because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far you haven't had to. Every telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best, just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS, is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat and it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting, to WeChat, WhatsApp and the other OTT apps, but it is not just texting. The total adjustable market or term of the mobile app disruptors is huge. Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're a network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love. They look at every interaction with the customer and say, "How do we make the customer love this?" Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies, don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive they must make customers love them. So they focus on it in a big way and it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70 and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps and becoming customer centric. Retooling around the customer is a huge change. So let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples and drive big shareholder value just like the tech companies on that chart. Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies and a variety of categories vying for your subscriber's disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services, who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high evaluations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You. Hello. What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAAMs they throw around, you'll be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the CapEx, to build out the network, I say to myself, "Hell yeah, we should totally go do it and do whatever it takes to go get." For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focused started in rideshare, but then leverage its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with a valuable services that helped grow your ARPU, that would be huge. So how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app. A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called Totogi that is going to help carriers build world class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users, it's not the average order value, it's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user, that's the metric that matters. How many of you use that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top up or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences like Apple credit cards, no information required, application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies, like how DoorDash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings because they do simple things like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app rather than force you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. What do we do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder, why you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day. You have something that's 10 times better. You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to your crappy over customized on premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it. The public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network and all the network interactions into customer engagement. This is something the super apps don't have but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focus to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying massive CapEx investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100 million into it. You heard me right, $100 million. Is this what it feels like to be soft bank? I'm investing in Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage the network interactions into super app usage. Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those Telco valuations will go from down here to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts, and I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, click, everyone says, "No way, telcos can't do it." Zero chance, total goose egg. One suggested I build a bonfire with 100 million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well I think those people are dead wrong. I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing, the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because the Totogi takes the value of the network and the power of the public cloud to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focus guys like the other telcos, instead you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors. They know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf and make the customers want to choose you, you need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We will have to give up the security blanket of the network and change. Instead of NPS of the thirties, it needs to be in the 70s. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible. I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time and I can't wait to see you there. >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Chloe Richardson filling it for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her and while with major action, major pump me up, punch in the face, wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here. She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is John, there's trillions of dollars on the table and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> There's not going to be, it's going to be a fight, who will win. >> Who will win but also who will build the next big thing? >> Someone needs to die in the media conversation, it's always a fight, something's dead, something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. I think what's happened is, telco's already acknowledged that they need to change in the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple, they've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm, you've got all these new things. So the chips are getting faster and the software's more open source and I'm telling you, cloud is just going to drive that bus right down clouds street and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peeping on the board as it drives down. John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written. And one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me. What does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets and growing markets things behave differently and certainly economics and the people and the makeup and the mindset. >> Okay. >> So the telco has been kind of this mature market. It's been changing and growing but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit, you know, install a lot of cable. You got to get the rents out of that infrastructure and that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market, and it's about building, not just operating and you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together, builders being software developers, new technology and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. >> Okay. >> Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking, but in a growth market, it's turbulent and ride might not be quiet, first class ticket to paradise, but it's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer and the parallels? >> Yeah. I mean, the mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, re platform with the cloud and then refactor your business. If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over or go out of business. And that's what the telco with all these assets, they're going to get bought roll into a SPAC, special purpose acquisition company was a super hot in the United States. A lot of roll ups going on with Private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor or re platform, then refactor, they're going to be toast and they're going to get rolled up and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad. People process technology, and we think process and technology really take the forefront here but like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations establishments? How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about often? >> Yeah. I mean, education is huge and this highlights the change that telcos now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around and mobile was there, but once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So you start to see people now aware of the value and if you look at the, during the COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses and everyone was, survive because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there and some teleconferences that didn't go well but for the most part we survived and they really saved everybody, my goodness. So they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education, people care about that stuff. So now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why The Edge has checked trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, oh, there's no jobs or I can't work, that's a bunch of BS because you can just get online, get on YouTube and just get a degree. You can get a degree, you can get an Amazon job, it pays a hundred thousand dollars a year, American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds and be unemployed six months and then be employed. So negative unemployment means there's more jobs than people to fill them qualify. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in some of the things there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity and there's such a skill shortage, there is nobody around to fill it. So it's an interesting problem to have isn't it? Cause it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades and obviously telco is in the same space. What can we do about it? Do you think it will actually bring people in? >> I think it's going to take leadership and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university, they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there, but to me it's the relationships, the mentorship. You starting to see women in tech and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear course where nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate or degree and accreditation no problem, but communities are out there. So that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that and I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills, you can get that online. So why even go to school? So people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also even transferring, I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't there? So we could easily be talking to people from other industries and bringing them into telco and saying, look, bring what you know from your retail background or your healthcare background and help us at telco to again, drive forward, just like DR is saying it's all about the next big thing. >> Danielle, I was also driving a lot of change and if you think about the jobs and a pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to a school like that and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now, the jobs that are available, weren't around five years ago. So there's no like pedigree or track record, there's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now is, from a job standpoint is, people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy league or the big degree or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emergent and make things happen, entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas. >> It's interesting you mentioned that John, because we can have more than five years experience in this space, we know that but in telco there is a problem and maybe it's, again it's a flipped problem where, telco recruiters or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> Well, I mean, I think that's just, I mean, I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening one, but two, I think, you know, you've got to be like a chip engineer, you can't learn that online, but if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely parts, you can specialize, space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And, you know, Danielle Royston always says, who's going to happen first, Mars, colony, or telco adopting public cloud? Some people think Mars will happen first but. >> What do you think John? >> I think telco's going to get cloud. I mean, first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important because it's an architectural beachhead. >> Yeah. >> And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. >> Of course. >> So the inside baseball and the inside money and all the investors are focusing on the edge because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows it's a public secret and it's fun to watch, everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah, know, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So it's an interesting flip and I wonder if with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development its efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times John. >> Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So it's, we're the hybrid cube, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. >> Yeah. >> That is critical dynamic, and you seeing it. Like virtual reality for instance, now you seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. >> Exactly. >> You got, like Roblox went public recently. >> Yeah. >> Metaverse is a good time to be in that business because experiential human relations are coming. So I think that's going to be powered by 5G, you know, gamers. So all good stuff, Chloe, great to be with you here in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam and the team, we're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City and this is theCUBE, from Cloud City back to you, Adam in the studio.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the BizOps Manifesto Power panel talking about, "Embracing Agility Across the Business." I'm Lisa Martin, there are three guests here with me today, to break down this topic. Pierre Viljoen, CTO at Global Head of Enterprise Technology and Governance at HTL Enterprise Studio. Hey Pierre, welcome. >> Thank you >> Lisa: Dave West is also here, the CEO of Scrum.org. Hey Dave, good to have you with us. >> Hi Lisa, hi everybody. >> Lisa: And Serge Lucio is here as well, the general manager of Broadcom's Enterprise Software Division. Hey Serge, good to have you on the program. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about the people and the process and technology requirements that businesses need to adopt to be able to embrace agility across the business. We're going to also be talking a lot about this inaugural BizOps industry research survey, on the state of digital business. A lot of very interesting findings that we're going to go through in the next 20 minutes or so. So the first question guys is, the BizOps survey found that over 519 individuals over five countries business and technology executives. This survey found, most organizations still expect this year to be as challenging as last year. I want you to kind of walk us through why that is, and how is that going to impact digital transformation initiatives? Pierre, we'll start with you, then Dave, then Serge. >> Sure, thank you Lisa. So, I think these days, disruption is no longer an exception. It's kind of become the norm or the rule, in terms of how we operate. And as executives in companies have learned over the last year, with everything that's happened is that, you can only modernize to a point, and then you need to do a little bit more. And what really is needed is for us to understand, going forward, how we're actually going to remodel our business by harnessing the resources that we have in a much more agile way, in a more fluent way, from an organizational perspective. And I think our current midterm goal, probably, is that we're capable of remodeling how we can remove roadblocks. These kinds of roadblocks in the future, and get us in a better position where we are. I don't expect things to change dramatically over the next year. More in line with us making sure that we're more future proof in the way in which we're working. >> We still have remote workers, global uncertainty, the vaccine. Dave, what are your thoughts on the impact of this year on digital transformation initiatives? >> Yeah, it's funny. When I think of, sort of uncertainty and chaos, I think that COVID really started it rolling down a hill, but unfortunately it's literally like rolling down a hill, these chaos and complexity. It's getting faster and faster and harder and harder. We're talking about the new norm, right? What is the new normal? We just don't know. And I think the reality is that most organizations were surprised by the impact of COVID-19 and because of that, they responded very quickly. Many of them, people were working at home, they're looking at their supply chain, looking at localization, all sorts of really important things happen, but very quickly, not very strategically. I think the next few years we're going to see, hopefully, some of that realizing into strategy and actually starting to fundamentally change how the business is looking at the world. We've sort of entered the digital age, Lisa, this next age of innovation, we have moved out of mass production and the age of oil, into something very, very different. And I think those organizations, every organization out there is going to have to get a handle on that and COVID was the wake up, right? And I think the next five years are going to be very interesting. >> I agree with you that that accelerant was, I didn't think of it before as a big ball rolling downhill. And now I don't think I'm going to be able to get that out of my head. But Serge, talk to us about your thoughts, the impacts to digital transformation initiatives. >> Yeah, I think back to what Dave was describing. The big challenge is the uncertainty. Many organizations are faced with, currently, a lot of unknowns about, if and when things will go back to, quote unquote, some kind of normality. And with that kind of uncertainty, there's a lot of challenges to the planning from an investment point of view. So, Dave was talking about a short-term versus long-term Like, a lot of these organizations are basically focused on just getting by over the next 12 months and trying to figure out what needs to happen over the next 12 months. At the same time, there's a lot of challenges with respect to readiness and uncertainty. And so, in that context, you got kind of this tension between, "How much do I invest short term "on basically tactical initiatives, "How do I care about teams? "How do I enable these teams "to deliver in weeks as opposed to months? "And then at the same time, "how do I continue to invest "to fundamentally change my operating model?" And that tension is very real. Within many of the organizations we serve. >> One of the things that the survey found was that most of the respondents were very willing to embrace being more agile in order to be able to better respond to rapidly changing market conditions. But I want to get your opinion on what that actually really means, that willingness to embrace being agile. What does it really mean? And what do organize organizations have to do differently? Pierre, I'll start with you. >> Sure, I think we had a discussion a while back and Dave actually got into something interesting where he said, without quoting a famous sneaker brand, just go out and do it. I think that's probably the most important part of this. Most organizations are struggling to figure out, "How should we embrace Agile? "Should we jump in at full scale now? "Should we be looking Scrum? "Should we be doing Scrum-Falls? "Should we be falling over our own feet?" Nobody knows exactly, what might be the right sector? I think the most important part is to pick up a pair of solid principles that you're going to embrace, start executing on them, start learning as you go, and basically improve as you move forward. Over the last year, we've embraced digital product management quite a lot on our side. And it's had tremendous benefits without us, per se, aiming for those benefits at the end of the day. And these are things that you learn as you go. And if you're going to wait around, analysis paralysis is going to be the killer of Agile at the end of day >> "Just do it," I like that. Good advice. Dave, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I think that what's really interesting is, Agile has been around for 20 years. The manifesto was signed 20 years ago. Scrum came into the world 25 years ago. All of these sort of Agile approaches, but they were predominantly focused on technology. And I think that one thing that I've noticed, over and over again, is that the realization by C-level executives, level sevens, or whatever they're called, they've realized that it's not about technology. (chuckles) It's great, the technologies. I guess the technology's always worked in this complex world because customers never knew what they wanted. We didn't know how are we going to do it. We'd never worked together before. We didn't know how much it was going to cost. So, because of that (chuckles) we had to work in an agile way in technology. But ultimately, I think, one of the big differences going forward, is going to be that, there I say that intersection of business and technology, that BizOps kind of model that we talked about in the manifesto, and what the survey was really trying to tease out. I think that's really, really going to be interesting. And I don't know what that actually means, in terms of the execution. I hope it means that we're going to see teams better aligned to business outcomes. I hope it means that we're going to actually allow those teams that are actually know what they're approaching to make decisions. I hope it means that planning is going to be more directional rather than task level. I hope it means that we're going to start measuring the success in terms of business outcomes, not in terms of the work that we do. I hope it means all of these things. But we will wait and see, because experience would indicate that after a big disaster, lots of people tend to go back to exactly how they worked before, with that sort of emus kind of mentality or ostrich or whatever things sticks its head in the ground. I don't know. >> Sometimes we just want to go back to when things were safe and normal. But in terms of kind of following on, Dave, what you said, 94%, in this survey, 94% of respondents said we should adopt BizOps to increase competitiveness. So, that willingness is there in a vast majority of the respondents. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on what that willingness actually means and what they need to do differently. >> Yes. The problem is that, I think everybody understand that you have to be agile, right? You need to be able to respond quickly to your customer needs. You need to put the customer at the center of everything you do, right? So, conceptually, everybody understands that. The problem is really the operating model that many of these large organizations are dealing with to this day, right? So, you have these sort of Berkeley, kind of organized organization, with functional roles, specialized roles. And when you think about kind of generally, well, one of the big challenges is that you need to start to think horizontally, right? You need to start to start to think about what kind of value streams and what part of the cross functional teams that need to be organized and integrated to deliver on specific business outcomes. You need to start shifting from the traditional contract-based model that(indistinct) to a model which is much more based on trust, right? And we need to move away from vanity measurements and KPIs that many of the organizations typically lead by, to really focus on one thing and one thing only, which is that business value has been delivered. So, fundamentally, I think it requires a bit of a redesign of the operating model in these organizations. And one where, especially when you have a risk adversed kind of organizations, you need to start to be more accepting of risk, fundamentally. >> More accepting of risk. You brought something up there starts that I want to tackle in the next question with respect to culture. But one of the things that the survey uncovered was an interesting kind of seeming contradiction. The majority of respondents said, "We agreed, digital transformation "is about business outcomes "more than it is about technology." But 62% said, "We're still adopting technology for technology's sake." What does that actually mean? And what's the kind of cultural impact there for organizations to really get that more aligned on the digital transformation and the technology and the business outcomes? Pierre, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So, I think there were a number of reports this year talking about what's happened, what's not happened, and the majority of them focused on the fact that, as tech leaders, for years we've been praying to the gods to get budget approved to do all kinds of modernization activities to our infrastructure, our IT, tools, et cetera. And, lo and behold, the ball comes rolling down the hill, smashes a few things and we basically get some blank checks. So, we run around and we buy a whole bunch of stuff to modernize and to embrace this ability to do things differently. And in that whole process, what we basically did was buy more tools and buy more technology. And in that whole process, we didn't really embrace what it is that we're trying to achieve. So, basically aligning the technology to the actual business requirements getting closer to the customer, being able to understand where our market's moving, how we're capable of reducing the journey, if I can put it that way, and make sure that we're more aligned to where we need to be. So, although a lot of CIOs and CTOs got away with doing a lot of great stuff over the last year and users like me are like, "Ooh! I don't have to worry "about stupid VPNs and things anymore." That all went away. But in the same instance, I didn't really get anything that changed the organizational dynamic, which is a challenge. We still have the fundamental problems we have because the business leaders are not yet embracing the deep monitor of the processes that are supported by the technology. And then driving that in such a way that we can gain more business value which is important. To Serge's previous point, we're doing all these great things but we're not focusing on the incremental value that we're supposed to be getting. >> Dave, did it surprise you that there was this seemingly contradictory response? Yes, it's more about business outcomes and technology, but we're still adopting technology for technology's sake. What are your thoughts on that? And how can organizations actually start to move the needle on that? >> E-comm by cultural change, right? But you do know that your board and your leadership want you to do something, and the easiest thing you can do is buy something. I'm a sort of now an American, so, that's kind of my mantra in life, right? "When in doubt go shopping." Which is fantastic, just for the record. (Lisa laughs) But so, you've got to be seen to be doing something, whether it's replacing a VPN, which is always a fun thing to do, or whether it's getting on Slack. Everyone's going to be on Slack. that's going to help. But actually the core is that, exactly what Serge and Pierre have been saying all along, it's that, "Okay. So what is our business all about? "What are our customers? "what did they actually need? "What do our employees need? "How do we build a better value stream "from customer to the organization? "How do we align our teams to that? "How do we incentivize correctly "both the employees that are working "and our partners that are providing things "in this supply chain. How do we do all of those things?" Ultimately though, that means that we have to take a step back which is a very frustrating thing at the moment. And actually look at what is our business all about? What is the mission of it? Who are the customers? Take a moment to find what those are. And then, soon as we have that, and we don't have to do it. As Pierre said, we don't have to do it completely. We can do it incrementally. Organizations are very inward looking. That is the industrial mindset. That is that paradigm. It's looking, as Serge talked about, silos, "optimizing my department," "optimizing my budget, optimizing my kingdom." And what we're talking about is something that cross cuts all of that. So, the decision making is going to change around where the investments go and that's going to be really, really challenging. So, I'm not surprised, I'm not at all surprised that everybody says we should be doing this. And it's like classic. Everybody says we need to be fitter, but we're still all not fit. (Serge laughs) It's sort of, that's just the reality of the world that we live in, right? But we have to start making a stand. And the place we begin is customers. That's the place. And as soon as we start doing that, then everything else just becomes quite easy, actually. >> I like that. Focus on customers and it becomes easy. Serve, I'm kidding. What are your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I think Dave summarized it well. It's very easy to just buy a tool or buy something, right? Fundamentally changing kind of an operating model is very difficult, but you need to fundamentally rethink for instance, all the responding initiatives. So, something as mundane as, You know, as a leader in my organization I have a budget, right? What's my incentive of collaborating with my peers in terms of delivering credible analysis form. And so, that to me kind of a fundamental shift that we need to operate, and that's probably one of the reasons why many of our largest organizations that we're serving are starting to introduce some new roles like a Chief Digital Officer, as kind of a way to kind of bring kind of a slightly different organization design. The challenge, though, is that, well, all of these teams are still kind of integrated with this fabric of these large systems which exist. So when we look at these value streams, in fact they're not independent from one another. You have a bunch of interdependencies. You are looking at kind of networks of these value streams. But the fundamental shift that we need to see is what we want these organizations to think about, ultimately with the part of the products or services that need to be focused on, all of these become kind of the primary things that we measure from point of view, and how do we align teams and projects and funding along these kinds of outcomes? >> So being customer focused, also being more broadly focused you mentioned the Chief Digital Officer role, which has an interesting role. It's supposed to look more, holistically, internally and externally. And we know that these organizations know we need to be better at this. like Dave's joke about we know we need to be more fit. But what's it going to take to actually create that collaboration, so that IT and business leaders are really working in lockstep and doing so in a timely fashion, so, that they're able to stay competitive. I do want to know from each of you, are you seeing examples of this already in progress? Pierre, let's start with you. >> I can only give you another example and say, one of the interesting things that we did was we try to embrace the delivery of services at HR in kind of a different frame this year, and kind of productize the services that we deliver. Now, if you're most people, you're trying to think about, "How do I set up things like communities "of practice and collaboration between people so "that they can work together on developing new services "new features, new products, et cetera." And we set out with creating this agile way of working. What we didn't anticipate, which was a very nice side effect, is that, because of COVID, because of the catalyst that it provided us, the remote working, people sense of ownership is inherently there. Meaning that self-organization of teams started happening. Nobody needed to crack a whip to get a bunch of guys to talk together with one another to figure out how to get stuff done. It's not like you could walk over to the water cooler and have a chat to Bob. Bob is a thousand miles away, or Bobby's sitting in another State. So, all of a sudden, all dynamic changed. And I have to say, people are a lot more resilient than what they're being given credit for. And if, as organizations, we embrace the culture in such a way and harness it in a positive way, we can actually get this movement to happen. And we actually can make the sum of the parts to be more than the whole. And this year we've seen that happen. And by no means, are we done 'cause we still have a lot of work to do, like Serge said, we have budgets, and budgets give you finite amount of movement left or right. Then you have to do what's best and possible within the frame that you're given. But I think embracing the cultural change and helping people to really excel at that and empowering them makes a huge difference in the way that you can get stuff done. >> Absolutely. Dave, what are your thoughts on this? >> I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, I think. I'm not a big fan of Chief Digital Officers. It just seems like we've got a problem. And some would argue that, "Well, if you've got a problem with somebody "you should get a coach" and all this stuff "and you get it sorted." And that's probably a good thing. But most digital officers, they're going to build a long-term career and create yet another stove pipe and that stove pipe's responsible for bringing all the other stove pipes together. It sounds a bit odd. If a digital officer is really there as a short term enabler, 'cause you asked IT and business leaders, trying to get them to work together better. The best business leaders (bell dings) know about IT, right? The best business leaders are IT sanctuary. Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are great business leaders, but they know about technology, right? That's what brings them together. Technology is an asset and they may not be the most biggest expert in it, but they care deeply about learning about that stuff. So, I think the next few years we're going to see a lot of C-level and leaders in organizations become a lot more tech savvy, and maybe hire coaches to help them navigate. And the Chief Digital Officer will become more of a coach rather than a person that rolls out Slack or something, you know? (Pierre laughs) So, I think that is going to be the next big jump, really, when we realize that you don't get an additional thing. It's just part of what you do. >> Serge, agree, disagree? >> I agree. The reality is that it is happening, right? Don't get me wrong. We see that every day that so many States are highly integrated, organizations and teams are measuring business value, business outcomes. The problem is that it's oftentimes a very small subset of what these organizations are doing. And so, it's almost like the CEO is coming as kind of these new kind of, as Dave described. And it's got this new style organization which is really there to kind of scale what has been working with these organizations, but we're kind of creating this kind of almost shadow organization, as opposed to fundamentally rethinking and redesigning the organization and redesigning kind of the operating model. And so, we're kind of layering new stuff as opposed to fundamentally transforming. So, as long as it is just kind of just a step towards kind of a true transformation, I think that's fine. The challenge is to, again, create kind of a new set of silos, which are now called value streams, as opposed to young functional silos that we have today. >> So a lot of opportunities identified in this survey but there are still a lot of challenges there. So, I'd love to get you guys and our final question here in this panel to help us understand, from the BizOps coalition's perspective, how are you helping organizations to navigate these challenges, so, they can become successful, transform and actually become agile to respond to rapidly changing market conditions? Pierre, kick us off. >> Sure, from a coalition perspective, we're just trying to make sure that there's a set of sensible principles. That people can look at, can adopt that I think Dave mentioned it in another discussion, that give you that clarity of thought and mind in terms of what should you be thinking? How should you be thinking about it? What are the various aspects you need to consider? And then from that perspective, how do you implement these things in a sensible way for your organization? By no means is this this like, "Here are the 10 steps, you do them, and you're done." You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. It's not how it work. You're still going to have to work at it. You're still going to have to figure some stuff out. You're going to have to deep in yourself in your organizational policies, procedures, understand how the organization is actually working. You can't strap a V8 to Mini Cooper and expect to break the land speed record, without the wheels falling off, or something going wrong. So, you really need to harness that in a more sensible manner to move forward. And I think the coalition is on the right path to help organizations realize, "what is the sensible way to go?" "What are principles we can adopt "that we can abide by that will help us drive business "in a different way and close this chasm of disparity "between business and IT?" >> And Dave, your perspective on the BizOps coalition, helping organizations to sort through these challenges. >> Yeah. I'm going to share a little bit of a personal story. So, I must admit that I wasn't keen on the whole idea, and Serge sent me some stuff and he's like, "Could you just provide some feedback." And I did, and then there was a press release with my name on it. I saw, I was like, "Oh my God! "I better get involved because I don't want to "have my name associated "with something that doesn't make sense" But I've actually been surprisingly, I've actually found it a lot more positive than I thought because of exactly what Pierre's saying. So, basically, the coalition is a group of vendors, a bucolic of consultants, some pseudo thought leaders that think they are very thoughtful and maybe they're not, people like me. (Pierre laughs) And what we're doing though, is actually trying to get some clarity of terminology, get some clarity of, what are the principles? What are those key principles? How do they relate to each other? Get some, some synergy to allow, 'cause there's so much noise out there. And hopefully, this is going to say, "Okay, this is what BizOps is. "This is why it's important. "These are some simple things." And then hopefully, because of the breadth that Serge and others have managed to get in terms of membership, we're going to get all of those organizations to be consistently talking about these things, which will then create pressure on the market to actually start adopting these things in the way that we're proposing, or challenge those ideas and then make them better. So, I'm kind of excited about it, surprisingly, 'cause the last thing we need is yet another manifesto and group of people that spend their whole time talking about things and never getting anything done. But actually I think there might be some valuable stuff that comes out here and we're going to inspect and adapt to make sure it is valuable. And if it isn't, we will stop. (chuckles) (Lisa laughs) >> And Serge, strap us up with your thoughts and extending that value. >> Look, we started the BizOps manifesto really with kind of a very simple observation. Everybody's talking about the same stuff, right? But you have a value stream management church, the digital product management's church, the DevOps church, with Scrum church, the safe church. Right? But we're all saying the same thing. But we create so much confusion with our large enterprise customers, but it's just not a grain on a set of principles. And just saying like, look, fundamentally, we're all talking about the same thing. And there are process aspects, there are cultural aspects. There is what you measure. But fundamentally we agree on the same core set of principles. And so for me, the BizOps manifesto, first and foremost is to get the stakeholders from these different communities together, and recognize that, at the end of the day, we share the same values and create some clarity to the market as to how these pieces fit to one another. The second aspect, which is more from our point of view, as one of the vendors of tools, right? There's tons of tools out there. We talk a lot about kind of measuring business outcomes as a primary way to actually align to everybody in our organization. Well, today if you look at any of these organizations, on average, they use about 40 different tools on one of these value streams. None of that stuff integrates with one another. It's extremely difficult for an organization to be able to trace from an investment, all the way to stuff that delivers value and production to a customer. And so, one of my hopes for the coalition is that we start to actually provide some platform, data models, ontologies, to start to integrate those different tools to facilitate that kind of integration. So, those are kind of the two things which I think we can really help kind of develop and and improve on. >> Well, we know that there's a tremendous amount of folks out there that are wanting to embrace agility across the business, identifying areas where they need to do work. So, great advice from the three of you. Thank you so much for joining me on this power panel today and sharing what organizations can do to really embrace that agility across the organization. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Pierre Viljoen, Dave West and Serge Lucio. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special cloud virtual event, theCUBE on cloud. This is our continuing editorial series of the most important stories in cloud. We're going to explore the cutting edge most relevant technologies and companies that will impact business and society. We have special guests from Jeff Barr, Michael Liebow, Jerry Chen, Ben Haynes, Michael skulk, Mike Feinstein from AWS all today are presenting the top startups in the AWS ecosystem. This is the AWS showcase of startups. I'm showing with Dave Vellante. Dave great to see you. >> Hey John. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So awesome day today. We're going to feature a 10 grade companies amplitude, auto grid, big ID, cordial Dremio Kong, multicloud, Reltio stardog wire wheel, companies that we've talked to. We've researched. And they're going to present today from 10 for the rest of the day. What's your thoughts? >> Well, John, a lot of these companies were just sort of last decade, they really, were keyer kicker mode, experimentation mode. Now they're well on their way to hitting escape velocity which is very exciting. And they're hitting tens of millions dollars of ARR, many are planning IPO's and it's just it's really great to see what the cloud has enabled and we're going to dig into that very deeply today. So I'm super excited. >> Before we jump into the keynote (mumbles) our non Huff from AWS up on stage Jeremy is the brains behind this program that we're doing. We're going to do this quarterly. Jeremy great to see you, you're in the global startups program at AWS. Your job is to keep the crops growing, keep the startups going and keep the flow of innovation. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Made it to startup showcase day. I'm super excited. And as you mentioned my team the global startup program team, we kind of provide white glove service for VC backed startups and help them with go to market activities. Co-selling with AWS and we've been looking for ways to highlight all the great work they're doing and partnering with you guys has been tremendous. You guys really know how to bring their stories to life. So super excited about all the partner sessions today. >> Well, I really appreciate the vision and working with Amazon this is like truly a bar raiser from theCUBE virtual perspective, using the virtual we can get more content, more flow and great to have you on and bring that the top hot startups around data, data ops. Certainly the most important story in tech is cloud scale with data. You you can't look around and seeing more innovation happening. So I really appreciate the work. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, and don't forget, we're making this a quarterly series. So the next one we've already been working on it. The next one is Wednesday, June 16th. So mark your calendars, but super excited to continue doing these showcases with you guys in the future. >> Thanks for coming on Jeremy. I really appreciate it,. Dave so I want to just quick quickly before we get Jeff up here, Jeff Barr who's a luminary guests for us this week who has been in the industry has been there from the beginning of AWS the role of data, and what's happened in cloud. And we've been watching the evolution of Amazon web services from the beginning, from the startup market to dominate in the enterprise. If you look at the top 10 enterprise companies Amazon wasn't on that list in 2010 they weren't even bringing the top 10 Andy Jassy's keynote at reinvent this past year. Highlighted that fact, I think they were number five or four as vendor in just AWS. So interesting to see that you've been reporting and doing a lot of analysis on the role of data. What's your analysis for these startups and as businesses need to embrace the new technologies and be on the right side of history not part of that old guard, incumbent failed model. >> Well, I think again, if you look back on the early days of cloud, it was really about storage and networking and compute infrastructure. And then we collected all this data and now you're seeing the next generation of innovation and value. We're going to talk to Michael Liebow about this is really if you look at all the value points in the leavers, it's all around data and data is going through a massive change in the way that we think about it, that we talk about it. And you hear that a lot. Obviously you talk about the volumes, the giant volumes but there's something else going on as AWS brings the cloud to the edge. And of course it looks at the data centers, just another edge device, data is getting highly decentralized. And what we're seeing is data getting into the hands of business owners and data product builders. I think we're going to see a new parlance emerge and that's where you're seeing the competitive advantage. And if you look at all the real winners these days in the marketplace especially in the digital with COVID, it all comes back to the data. And we're going to talk about that a lot today. >> One of the things that's coming up in all of our cube interviews, certainly we've seen, I mean we've had a great observation space across all the ecosystems, but the clear thing that's coming out of COVID is speed, agility, scale, and data. If you don't have that data you are going to be a non-player. And I think I heard some industry people talking about the future of how the stock market's going to work and that if you're not truly in market with an AI or machine learning data value play you probably will be shorted on the stock market or delisted. I think people are looking at that as a table stakes competitive advantage item, where if you don't have some sort of data competitive strategy you're going to be either delisted or sold short. And that's, I don't think delisted but the point is this table-stakes Dave. >> Well, I think too, I think the whole language the lingua franca of data is changing. We talk about data as an asset all the time, but you think about it now, what do we do with assets? We protect it, we hide it. And we kind of we don't share it. But then on the other hand, everybody talks about sharing the data and that is a huge trend in the marketplace. And so I think that everybody is really starting to rethink the whole concept of data, what it is, its value and how we think about it, talk about it, share it make it accessible, and at the same time, protect it and make it governed. And I think you're seeing, computational governance and automation really hidden. Couldn't do this without the cloud. I mean, that's the bottom line. >> Well, I'm super excited to have Jeff Barr here from AWS as our special keynote guests. I've been following Jeff's career for a long, long time. He's a luminaries, he's a technical, he's in the industry. He's part of the community, he's been there from the beginning AWS just celebrate its 15th birthday as he was blogging hard. He's been a hardcore blogger. I think Jeff, you had one of the original ping service. If I remember correctly, you were part of the web services foundational kind of present at creation. No better guests to have you Jeff thanks for coming up on our stage. >> John and Dave really happy to be here. >> So I got to ask you, you've been blogging hard for the past decade or so, going hard and your job has evolved from blogging about what's new with Amazon. A couple of building blocks a few services to last reinvent them. You must have put out I don't know how many blog posts did you put out last year at every event? I mean, it must have been a zillion. >> Not quite a zillion. I think I personally wrote somewhere between 20 and 25 including quite a few that I did in the month or so run up to reinvent and it's always intense, but it's always really, really fun. >> So I've got to ask you in the past couple of years, I mean I quoted Andy Jassy's keynote where we highlight in 2010 Amazon wasn't even on the top 10 enterprise players. Now in the top five, you've seen the evolution. What is the big takeaway from your standpoint as you look at the enterprise going from Amazon really dominating the start of a year startups today, you're in the cloud, you're born in the cloud. There's advantage to that. Now enterprises are kind of being reborn in the cloud at the same time, they're building these new use cases rejuvenating themselves and having innovation strategy. What's your takeaway? >> So I love to work with our customers and one of the things that I hear over and over again and especially the last year or two is really the value that they're placing on building a workforce that has really strong cloud skills. They're investing in education. They're focusing on this neat phrase that I learned in Australia called upskilling and saying let's take our set of employees and improve their skill base. I hear companies really saying we're going to go cloud first. We're going to be cloud native. We're going to really embrace it, adopt the full set of cloud services and APIs. And I also see that they're really looking at cloud as part of often a bigger picture. They often use the phrase digital transformation, in Amazon terms we'd say they're thinking big. They're really looking beyond where they are and who they are to what they could be and what they could grow into. Really putting a lot of energy and creativity into thinking forward in that way. >> I wonder Jeff, if you could talk about sort of how people are thinking about the future of cloud if you look at where the spending action is obviously you see it in cloud computing. We've seen that as the move to digital, serverless Lambda is huge. If you look at the data it's off the charts, machine learning and AI also up there containers and of course, automation, AWS leads in all of those. And they portend a different sort of programming model a different way of thinking about how to deploy workloads and applications maybe different than the early days of cloud. What's driving that generally and I'm interested in serverless specifically. And how do you see the next several years folding out? >> Well, they always say that the future is the hardest thing to predict but when I talked to our enterprise customers the two really big things that I see is there's this focus that says we need to really, we're not simply like hosting the website or running the MRP. I'm working with one customer in particular where they say, well, we're going to start on the factory floor all the way up to the boardroom effectively from IOT and sensors on the factory floor to feed all the data into machine learning. So they understand that the factory is running really well to actually doing planning and inventory maintenance to putting it on the website to drive the analytics, to then saying, okay, well how do we know that we're building the right product mix? How do we know that we're getting it out through the right channels? How are our customers doing? So they're really saying there's so many different services available to us in the cloud and they're relatively easy and straightforward to deploy. They really don't think in the old days as we talked about earlier that the old days where these multi-year planning and deployment cycles, now it's much more straightforward. It's like let's see what we can do today. And this week and this month, and from idea to some initial results is a much, much shorter turnaround. So they can iterate a lot more quickly which is just always known to produce better results. >> Well, Jeff and the spirit of the 15th birthday of AWS a lot of services have been built from the original three. I believe it was the core building blocks and there's been a lot of history and it's kind of like there was a key decoupling of compute from storage, those innovations what's the most important architectural change if any has happened or built upon those building blocks with AWS that you could share with companies out there as many people are coming into the cloud not just lifting and shifting and having that innovation but really building cloud native and now hybrid full cloud operations, day two operations. However you want to look at it. That's a big thing. What architecturally has changed that's been innovative from those original building blocks? >> Well, I think that the basic architecture has proven to be very, very resilient. When I wrote about the 15 year birthday of Amazon S3 a couple of weeks ago one thing that I thought was really incredible was the fact that the same APIs that you could have used 15 years ago they all still work. The put, the get, the list, the delete, the permissions management, every last one of those were chosen with extreme care. And so they all still work. So one of the things you think about when you put APIs out there is in Amazon terms we always talk about going through a one-way door and a one way door says, once you do it you're committed for the indefinite future. And so you we're very happy to do that but we take those steps with extreme care. And so those basic building blocks so the original S3 APIs, the original EC2 APIs and the model, all those things really worked. But now they're running at this just insane scale. One thing that blows me away I routinely hear my colleagues talking about petabytes and exabytes, and we throw around trillions and quadrillions like they're pennies. It's kind of amazing. Sometimes when you hear the scale of requests per day or request per month, and the orders of magnitude are you can't map them back to reality anymore. They're simply like literally astronomical. >> If I can just jump in real quick Dave before you ask Jeff, I was watching the Jeff Bezos interview in 1999 that's been going around on LinkedIn in a 60 minutes interview. The interviewer says you are reporting that you can store a gigabyte of customer data from all their purchases. What are you going to do with that? He basically nailed the answer. This is in 99. We're going to use that data to create, that was only a gig. >> Well one of the things that is interesting to me guys, is if you look at again, the early days of cloud, of course I always talked about that in small companies like ours John could have now access to information technology that only big companies could get access to. And now you've seen we just going to talk about it today. All these startups rise up and reach viability. But at the same time, Jeff you've seen big companies get the aha moment on cloud and competition drives urgency and that drives innovation. And so now you see everybody is doing cloud, it's a mandate. And so the expectation is a lot more innovation, experimentation and speed from all ends. It's really exciting to see. >> I know this sounds hackneyed and overused but it really, really still feels just like day one. We're 15 plus years into this. I still wake up every morning, like, wow what is the coolest thing that I'm going to get to learn about and write about today? We have the most amazing customers, one of the things that is great when you're so well connected to your customers, they keep telling you about their dreams, their aspirations, their use cases. And we can just take that and say we can actually build awesome things to help you address those use cases from the ground on up, from building custom hardware things like the nitro system, the graviton to the machine learning inferencing and training chips where we have such insight into customer use cases because we have these awesome customers that we can make these incredible pieces of hardware and software to really address those use cases. >> I'm glad you brought that up. This is another big change, right? You're getting the early days of cloud like, oh, Amazon they're just using off the shelf components. They're not buying these big refrigerator sized disc drives. And now you're developing all this custom Silicon and vertical integration in certain aspects of your business. And that's because workload is demanding. You've got to get more specialized in a lot of cases. >> Indeed they do. And if you watch Peter DeSantis' keynote at re-invent he talked about the fact that we're researching ways to make better cement that actually produces less carbon dioxide. So we're now literally at the from the ground on up level of construction. >> Jeff, I want to get a question from the crowd here. We got, (mumbles) who's a good friend of theCUBE cloud Arate from the beginning. He asked you, he wants to know if you'd like to share Amazon's edge aspirations. He says, he goes, I mean, roadmaps. I go, first of all, he's not going to talk about the roadmaps, but what can you share? I mean, obviously the edge is key. Outpost has been all in the news. You obviously at CloudOps is not a boundary. It's a distributed network. What's your response to-- >> Well, the funny thing is we don't generally have technology roadmaps inside the company. The roadmap is always listen really well to customers not just where they are, but the customers are just so great at saying, this is where we'd like to go. And when we hear edge, the customers don't generally come to us and say edge, they say we need as low latency as possible between where the action happens within our factory floors and our own offices and where we might be able to compute, analyze, store make decisions. And so that's resulted in things like outposts where we can put outposts in their own data center or their own field office, wavelength, where we're working with 5G telecom providers to put computing storage in the carrier hubs of the various 5G providers. Again, with reducing latency, we've been doing things like local zones, where we put zones in an increasing number of cities across the country with the goal of just reducing the average latency between the vast majority of customers and AWS resources. So instead of thinking edge, we really think in terms of how do we make sure that our customers can realize their dreams. >> Staying on the flywheel that AWS has built on ship stuff faster, make things faster, smaller, cheaper, great mission. I want to ask you about the working backwards document. I know it's been getting a lot of public awareness. I've been, that's all I've learned in interviewing Amazon folks. They always work backwards. I always mentioned the customer and all the interviews. So you've got a couple of customer references in there check the box there for you. But working backwards has become kind of a guiding principles, almost like a Harvard Business School case study approach to management. As you guys look at this working backwards and ex Amazonians have written books about it now so people can go look at, it's a really good methodology. Take us back to how you guys work back from the customers because here we're featuring 10 startups. So companies that are out there and Andy has been preaching this to customers. You should think about working backwards because it's so fast. These companies are going into this enterprise market your ecosystem of startups to provide value. What things are you seeing that customers need to think about to work backwards from their customer? How do you see that? 'Cause you've been on the community side, you see the tech side customers have to move fast and work backwards. What are the things that they need to focus on? What's your observation? >> So there's actually a brand new book called "Working Backwards," which I actually learned a lot about our own company from simply reading the book. And I think to me, a principal part of learning backward it's really about humility and being able to be a great listener. So you don't walk into a customer meeting ready to just broadcast the latest and greatest that we've been working on. You walk in and say, I'm here from AWS and I simply want to learn more about who you are, what you're doing. And most importantly, what do you want to do that we're not able to help you with right now? And then once we hear those kinds of things we don't simply write down kind of a bullet item of AWS needs to improve. It's this very active listening process. Tell me a little bit more about this challenge and if we solve it in this way or this way which one's a better fit for your needs. And then a typical AWS launch, we might talk to between 50 and 100 customers in depth to make sure that we have that detailed understanding of what they would like to do. We can't always meet all the needs of these customers but the idea is let's see what is the common base that we can address first. And then once we get that first iteration out there, let's keep listening, let's keep making it better and better and better as quickly. >> A lot of people might poopoo that John but I got to tell you, John, you will remember this the first time we ever met Andy Jassy face-to-face. I was in the room, you were on the speaker phone. We were building an app on AWS at the time. And he was asking you John, for feedback. And he was probing and he pulled out his notebook. He was writing down and he wasn't just superficial questions. He was like, well, why'd you do it that way? And he really wanted to dig. So this is cultural. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the classic Amazon. And that's the best thing about it is that you can go from zero startups zero stage startup to traction. And that was the premise of the cloud. Jeff, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on this love to get your opinion. You've seen this grow from the beginning. And I remember 'cause I've been playing with AWS since the beginning as well. And it says as an entrepreneur I remember my first EC2 instance that didn't even have custom domain support. It was the long URL. You seen the startups and now that we've been 15 years in, you see Dropbox was it just a startup back in the day. I remember these startups that when they were coming they were all born on Amazon, right? These big now unicorns, you were there when these guys were just developers and these gals. So what's it like, I mean, you see just the growth like here's a couple of people with them ideas rubbing nickels together, making magic happen who knows what's going to turn into, you've been there. What's it been like? >> It's been a really unique journey. And to me like the privilege of a lifetime, honestly I've like, you always want to be part of something amazing and you aspire to it and you study hard and you work hard and you always think, okay, somewhere in this universe something really cool is about to happen. And if you're really, really lucky and just a million great pieces of luck like lineup in series, sometimes it actually all works out and you get to be part of something like this when it does you don't always fully appreciate just how awesome it is from the inside, because you're just there just like feeding the machine and you are just doing your job just as fast as you possibly can. And in my case, it was listening to teams and writing blog posts about their launches and sharing them on social media, going out and speaking, you do it, you do it as quickly as possible. You're kind of running your whole life as you're doing that as well. And suddenly you just take a little step back and say, wow we did this kind of amazing thing, but we don't tend to like relax and say, okay, we've done it at Amazon. We get to a certain point. We recognize it. And five minutes later, we're like, okay, let's do the next amazingly good thing. But it's been this just unique privilege and something that I never thought I'd be fortunate enough to be a part of. >> Well, then the last few minutes we have Jeff I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us for this inaugural launch of theCUBE on cloud startup showcase. We are showcasing 10 startups here from your ecosystem. And a lot of people who know AWS for the folks that don't you guys pride yourself on community and ecosystem the global startups program that Jeremy and his team are running. You guys nurture these startups. You want them to be successful. They're vectoring out into the marketplace with growth strategy, helping customers. What's your take on this ecosystem? As customers are out there listening to this what's your advice to them? How should they engage? Why is these sets of start-ups so important? >> Well, I totally love startups and I've spent time in several startups. I've spent other time consulting with them. And I think we're in this incredible time now wheres, it's so easy and straightforward to get those basic resources, to get your compute, to get your storage, to get your databases, to get your machine learning and to take that and to really focus on your customers and to build what you want. And we see this actual exponential growth. And we see these startups that find something to do. They listen to one of their customers, they build that solution. And they're just that feedback cycle gets started. It's really incredible. And I love to see the energy of these startups. I love to hear from them. And at any point if we've got an AWS powered startup and they build something awesome and want to share it with me, I'm all ears. I love to hear about them. Emails, Twitter mentions, whatever I'll just love to hear about all this energy all those great success with our startups. >> Jeff Barr, thank you for coming on. And congratulations, please pass on to Andy Jassy who's going to take over for Jeff Bezos and I saw the big news that he's picking a successor an Amazonian coming back into the fold, Adam. So congratulations on that. >> I will definitely pass on your congratulations to Andy and I worked with Adam in the past when AWS was just getting started and really looking forward to seeing him again, welcoming back and working with him. >> All right, Jeff Barr with AWS guys check out his Twitter and all the social coordinates. He is pumping out all the resources you need to know about if you're a developer or you're an enterprise looking to go to the next level, next generation, modern infrastructure. Thanks Jeff for coming on. Really appreciate it. Our next guests want to bring up stage Michael Liebow from McKinsey cube alumni, who is a great guest who is very timely in his McKinsey role with a paper he and his colleagues put out called cloud's trillion dollar prize up for grabs. Michael, thank you for coming up on stage with Dave and I. >> Hey, great to be here, John. Thank you. >> One of the things I loved about this and why I wanted you to come on was not only is the report awesome. And Dave has got a zillion questions, he want us to drill into. But in 2015, we wrote a story called Andy Jassy trillion dollar baby on Forbes, and then on medium and silken angle where we were the first ones to profile Andy Jassy and talk about this trillion dollar term. And Dave came up with the calculation and people thought we were crazy. What are you talking about trillion dollar opportunity. That was in 2015. You guys have put this together with a serious research report with methodology and you left a lot on the table. I noticed in the report you didn't even have a whole section quantified. So I think just scratching the surface trillion. I'd be a little light, Dave, so let's dig into it, Michael thanks for coming on. >> Well, and I got to say, Michael that John's a trillion dollar baby was revenue. Yours is EBITDA. So we're talking about seven to X, seven to eight X. What we were talking back then, but great job on the report. Fantastic work. >> Thank you. >> So tell us about the report gives a quick lowdown. I got some questions. You guys are unlocking the value drivers but give us a quick overview of this report that people can get for free. So everyone who's registered will get a copy but give us a quick rundown. >> Great. Well the question I think that has bothered all of us for a long time is what's the business value of cloud and how do you quantify it? How do you specify it? Because a lot of people talk around the infrastructure or technical value of cloud but that actually is a big problem because it just scratches the surface of the potential of what cloud can mean. And we focus around the fortune 500. So we had to box us in somewhat. And so focusing on the fortune 500 and fast forwarding to 2030, we put out this number that there's over a trillion dollars worth of value. And we did a lot of analysis using research from a variety of partners, using third-party research, primary research in order to come up with this view. So the business value is two X the technical value of cloud. And as you just pointed out, there is a whole unlock of additional value where organizations can pioneer on some of the newest technologies. And so AWS and others are creating platforms in order to do not just machine learning and analytics and IOT, but also for quantum or mixed reality for blockchain. And so organizations specific around the fortune 500 that aren't leveraging these capabilities today are going to get left behind. And that's the message we were trying to deliver that if you're not doing this and doing this with purpose and with great execution, that others, whether it's others in your industry or upstarts who were motioning into your industry, because as you say cloud democratizes compute, it provides these capabilities and small companies with talent. And that's what the skills can leverage these capabilities ahead of slow moving incumbents. And I think that was the critical component. So that gives you the framework. We can deep dive based on your questions. >> Well before we get into the deep dive, I want to ask you we have startups being showcased here as part of the, it will showcase, they're coming out of the ecosystem. They have a lot of certification from Amazon and they're secure, which is a big issue. Enterprises that you guys talk to McKinsey speaks directly to I call the boardroom CXOs, the top executives. Are they realizing that the scale and timing of this agility window? I mean, you want to go through these key areas that you would break out but as startups become more relevant the boardrooms that are making these big decisions realize that their businesses are up for grabs. Do they realize that all this wealth is shifting? And do they see the role of startups helping them? How did you guys come out of them and report on that piece? >> Well in terms of the whole notion, we came up with this framework which looked at the opportunity. We talked about it in terms of three dimensions, rejuvenate, innovate and pioneer. And so from the standpoint of a board they're more than focused on not just efficiency and cost reduction basically tied to nation, but innovation tied to analytics tied to machine learning, tied to IOT, tied to two key attributes of cloud speed and scale. And one of the things that we did in the paper was leverage case examples from across industry, across-region there's 17 different case examples. My three favorite is one is Moderna. So software for life couldn't have delivered the vaccine as fast as they did without cloud. My second example was Goldman Sachs got into consumer banking is the platform behind the Apple card couldn't have done it without leveraging cloud. And the third example, particularly in early days of the pandemic was Zoom that added five to 6,000 servers a night in order to scale to meet the demand. And so all three of those examples, plus the other 14 just indicate in business terms what the potential is and to convince boards and the C-suite that if you're not doing this, and we have some recommendations in terms of what CEOs should do in order to leverage this but to really take advantage of those capabilities. >> Michael, I think it's important to point out the approach at sometimes it gets a little wonky on the methodology but having done a lot of these types of studies and observed there's a lot of superficial studies out there, a lot of times people will do, they'll go I'll talk to a customer. What kind of ROI did you get? And boom, that's the value study. You took a different approach. You have benchmark data, you talked to a lot of companies. You obviously have a lot of financial data. You use some third-party data, you built models, you bounded it. And ultimately when you do these things you have to ascribe a value contribution to the cloud component because fortunate 500 companies are going to grow even if there were no cloud. And the way you did that is again, you talk to people you model things, and it's a very detailed study. And I think it's worth pointing out that this was not just hey what'd you get from going to cloud before and after. This was a very detailed deep dive with really a lot of good background work going into it. >> Yeah, we're very fortunate to have the McKinsey Global Institute which has done extensive studies in these areas. So there was a base of knowledge that we could leverage. In fact, we looked at over 700 use cases across 19 industries in order to unpack the value that cloud contributed to those use cases. And so getting down to that level of specificity really, I think helps build it from the bottom up and then using cloud measures or KPIs that indicate the value like how much faster you can deploy, how much faster you can develop. So these are things that help to kind of inform the overall model. >> Yeah. Again, having done hundreds, if not thousands of these types of things, when you start talking to people the patterns emerge, I want to ask you there's an exhibit tool in here, which is right on those use cases, retail, healthcare, high-tech oil and gas banking, and a lot of examples. And I went through them all and virtually every single one of them from a value contribution standpoint the unlocking value came down to data large data sets, document analysis, converting sentiment analysis, analytics. I mean, it really does come down to the data. And I wonder if you could comment on that and why is it that cloud is enabled that? >> Well, it goes back to scale. And I think the word that I would use would be data gravity because we're talking about massive amounts of data. So as you go through those kind of three dimensions in terms of rejuvenation one of the things you can do as you optimize and clarify and build better resiliency the thing that comes into play I think is to have clean data and data that's available in multiple places that you can create an underlying platform in order to leverage the services, the capabilities around, building out that structure. >> And then if I may, so you had this again I want to stress as EBITDA. It's not a revenue and it's the EBITDA potential as a result of leveraging cloud. And you listed a number of industries. And I wonder if you could comment on the patterns that you saw. I mean, it doesn't seem to be as simple as Negroponte bits versus Adam's in terms of your ability to unlock value. What are the patterns that you saw there and why are the ones that have so much potential why are they at the top of the list? >> Well, I mean, they're ranked based on impact. So the five greatest industries and again, aligned by the fortune 500. So it's interesting when you start to unpack it that way high-tech oil, gas, retail, healthcare, insurance and banking, right? Top. And so we did look at the different solutions that were in that, tried to decipher what was fully unlocked by cloud, what was accelerated by cloud and what was perhaps in this timeframe remaining on premise. And so we kind of step by step, expert by expert, use case by use case deciphered of the 700, how that applied. >> So how should practitioners within organizations business but how should they use this data? What would you recommend, in terms of how they think about it, how they apply it to their business, how they communicate? >> Well, I think clearly what came out was a set of best practices for what organizations that were leveraging cloud and getting the kind of business return, three things stood out, execution, experience and excellence. And so for under execution it's not just the transaction, you're not just buying cloud you're changing their operating model. And so if the organization isn't kind of retooling the model, the processes, the workflows in order to support creating the roles then they aren't going to be able, they aren't going to be successful. In terms of experience, that's all about hands-on. And so you have to dive in, you have to start you have to apply yourself, you have to gain that applied knowledge. And so if you're not gaining that experience, you're not going to move forward. And then in terms of excellence, and it was mentioned earlier by Jeff re-skilling, up-skilling, if you're not committed to your workforce and pushing certification, pushing training in order to really evolve your workforce or your ways of working you're not going to leverage cloud. So those three best practices really came up on top in terms of what a mature cloud adopter looks like. >> That's awesome. Michael, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Last question I have for you as we wrap up this trillion dollar segment upon intended is the cloud mindset. You mentioned partnering and scaling up. The role of the enterprise and business is to partner with the technologists, not just the technologies but the companies talk about this cloud native mindset because it's not just lift and shift and run apps. And I have an IT optimization issue. It's about innovating next gen solutions and you're seeing it in public sector. You're seeing it in the commercial sector, all areas where the relationship with partners and companies and startups in particular, this is the startup showcase. These are startups are more relevant than ever as the tide is shifting to a new generation of companies. >> Yeah, so a lot of think about an engine. A lot of things have to work in order to produce the kind of results that we're talking about. Brad, you're more than fair share or unfair share of trillion dollars. And so CEOs need to lead this in bold fashion. Number one, they need to craft the moonshot or the Marshot. They have to set that goal, that aspiration. And it has to be a stretch goal for the organization because cloud is the only way to enable that achievement of that aspiration that's number one, number two, they really need a hardheaded economic case. It has to be defined in terms of what the expectation is going to be. So it's not loose. It's very, very well and defined. And in some respects time box what can we do here? I would say the cloud data, your organization has to move in an agile fashion training DevOps, and the fourth thing, and this is where the startups come in is the cloud platform. There has to be an underlying platform that supports those aspirations. It's an art, it's not just an architecture. It's a living, breathing live service with integrations, with standardization, with self service that enables this whole program. >> Awesome, Michael, thank you for coming on and sharing the McKinsey perspective. The report, the clouds trillion dollar prize is up for grabs. Everyone who's registered for this event will get a copy. We will appreciate it's also on the website. We'll make sure everyone gets a copy. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks, Michael. >> Okay, Dave, big discussion there. Trillion dollar baby. That's the cloud. That's Jassy. Now he's going to be the CEO of AWS. They have a new CEO they announced. So that's going to be good for Amazon's kind of got clarity on the succession to Jassy, trusted soldier. The ecosystem is big for Amazon. Unlike Microsoft, they have the different view, right? They have some apps, but they're cultivating as many startups and enterprises as possible in the cloud. And no better reason to change gears here and get a venture capitalist in here. And a friend of theCUBE, Jerry Chen let's bring them up on stage. Jerry Chen, great to see you partner at Greylock making all the big investments. Good to see you >> John hey, Dave it's great to be here with you guys. Happy marks.Can you see that? >> Hey Jerry, good to see you man >> So Jerry, our first inaugural AWS startup showcase we'll be doing these quarterly and we're going to be featuring the best of the best, you're investing in all the hot startups. We've been tracking your careers from the beginning. You're a good friend of theCUBE. Always got great commentary. Why are startups more important than ever before? Because in the old days we've talked about theCUBE before startups had to go through certain certifications and you've got tire kicking, you got to go through IT. It's like going through security at the airport, take your shoes off, put your belt on thing. I mean, all kinds of things now different. The world has changed. What's your take? >> I think startups have always been a great way for experimentation, right? It's either new technologies, new business models, new markets they can move faster, the experiment, and a lot of startups don't work, unfortunately, but a lot of them turned to be multi-billion dollar companies. I thing startup is more important because as we come out COVID and economy is recovery is a great way for individuals, engineers, for companies for different markets to try different things out. And I think startups are running multiple experiments at the same time across the globe trying to figure how to do things better, faster, cheaper. >> And McKinsey points out this use case of rejuvenate, which is essentially retool pivot essentially get your costs down or and the next innovation here where there's Tam there's trillion dollars on unlock value and where the bulk of it is is the innovation, the new use cases and existing new use cases. This is where the enterprises really have an opportunity. Could you share your thoughts as you invest in the startups to attack these new waves these new areas where it may not look the same as before, what's your assessment of this kind of innovation, these new use cases? >> I think we talked last time about kind of changing the COVID the past year and there's been acceleration of things like how we work, education, medicine all these things are going online. So I think that's very clear. The first wave of innovation is like, hey things we didn't think we could be possible, like working remotely, e-commerce everywhere, telemedicine, tele-education, that's happening. I think the second order of fact now is okay as enterprises realize that this is the new reality everything is digital, everything is in the cloud and everything's going to be more kind of electronic relation with the customers. I think that we're rethinking what does it mean to be a business? What does it mean to be a bank? What does it mean to be a car company or an energy company? What does it mean to be a retailer? Right? So I think the rethinking that brands are now global, brands are all online. And they now have relationships with the customers directly. So I think if you are a business now, you have to re experiment or rethink about your business model. If you thought you were a Nike selling shoes to the retailers, like half of Nike's revenue is now digital right all online. So instead of selling sneakers through stores they're now a direct to consumer brand. And so I think every business is going to rethink about what the AR. Airbnb is like are they in the travel business or the experience business, right? Airlines, what business are they in? >> Yeah, theCUBE we're direct to consumer virtual totally opened up our business model. Dave, the cloud premise is interesting now. I mean, let's reset this where we are, right? Andy Jassy always talks about the old guard, new guard. Okay we've been there done that, even though they still have a lot of Oracle inside AWS which we were joking the other day, but this new modern era coming out of COVID Jerry brings this up. These startups are going to be relevant take territory down in the enterprises as new things develop. What's your premise of the cloud and AWS prospect? >> Well, so Jerry, I want to to ask you. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> The other night, last Thursday, I think we were in Clubhouse. Ben Horowitz was on and Martine Casado was laying out this sort of premise about cloud startups saying basically at some point they're going to have to repatriate because of the Amazon VIG. I mean, I'm paraphrasing and I guess the premise was that there's this variable cost that grows as you scale but I kind of shook my head and I went back. You saw, I put it out on Twitter a clip that we had the a couple of years ago and I don't think, I certainly didn't see it that way. Maybe I'm getting it wrong but what's your take on that? I just don't see a snowflake ever saying, okay we're going to go build our own data center or we're going to repatriate 'cause they're going to end up like service now and have this high cost infrastructure. What do you think? >> Yeah, look, I think Martin is an old friend from VMware and he's brilliant. He has placed a lot of insights. There is some insights around, at some point a scale, use of startup can probably run things more cost-effectively in your own data center, right? But I think that's fewer companies more the vast majority, right? At some point, but number two, to your point, Dave going on premise versus your own data center are two different things. So on premise in a customer's environment versus your own data center are two different worlds. So at some point some scale, a lot of the large SaaS companies run their own data centers that makes sense, Facebook and Google they're at scale, they run their own data centers, going on premise or customer's environment like a fortune 100 bank or something like that. That's a different story. There are reasons to do that around compliance or data gravity, Dave, but Amazon's costs, I don't think is a legitimate reason. Like if price is an issue that could be solved much faster than architectural decisions or tech stacks, right? Once you're on the cloud I think the thesis, the conversation we had like a year ago was the way you build apps are very different in the cloud and the way built apps on premise, right? You have assume storage, networking and compute elasticity that's independent each other. You don't really get that in a customer's data center or their own environment even with all the new technologies. So you can't really go from cloud back to on-premise because the way you build your apps look very, very different. So I would say for sure at some scale run your own data center that's why the hyperscale guys do that. On-premise for customers, data gravity, compliance governance, great reasons to go on premise but for vast majority of startups and vast majority of customers, the network effects you get for being in the cloud, the network effects you get from having everything in this alas cloud service I think outweighs any of the costs. >> I couldn't agree more and that's where the data is, at the way I look at it is your technology spend is going to be some percentage of revenue and it's going to be generally flat over time and you're going to have to manage it whether it's in the cloud or it's on prem John. >> Yeah, we had a quote on theCUBE on the conscious that had Jerry I want to get your reaction to this. The executive said, if you don't have an AI strategy built into your value proposition you will be shorted as a stock on wall street. And I even went further. So you'll probably be delisted cause you won't be performing with a tongue in cheek comment. But the reality is that that's indicating that everyone has to have AI in their thing. Mainly as a reality, what's your take on that? I know you've got a lot of investments in this area as AI becomes beyond fashion and becomes table stakes. Where are we on that spectrum? And how does that impact business and society as that becomes a key part of the stack and application stack? >> Yeah, I think John you've seen AI machine learning turn out to be some kind of novelty thing that a bunch of CS professors working on years ago to a funnel piece of every application. So I would say the statement of the sentiment's directionally correct that 20 years ago if you didn't have a web strategy or a website as a company, your company be sure it, right? If you didn't have kind of a internet website, you weren't real company. Likewise, if you don't use AI now to power your applications or machine learning in some form or fashion for sure you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to everyone else. And just like if you're not using software intelligently or the cloud intelligently your stock as a company is going to underperform the rest of the market. And the cloud guys on the startups that we're backing are making AI so accessible and so easy for developers today that it's really easy to use some level of machine learning, any applications, if you're not doing that it's like not having a website in 1999. >> Yeah. So let's get into that whole operation side. So what would you be your advice to the enterprises that are watching and people who are making decisions on architecture and how they roll out their business model or value proposition? How should they look at AI and operations? I mean big theme is day two operations. You've got IT service management, all these things are being disrupted. What's the operational impact to this? What's your view on that? >> So I think two things, one thing that you and Dave both talked about operation is the key, I mean, operations is not just the guts of the business but the actual people running the business, right? And so we forget that one of the values are going to cloud, one of the values of giving these services is you not only have a different technology stack, all the bits, you have a different human stack meaning the people running your cloud, running your data center are now effectively outsource to Amazon, Google or Azure, right? Which I think a big part of the Amazon VIG as Dave said, is so eloquently on Twitter per se, right? You're really paying for those folks like carry pagers. Now take that to the next level. Operations is human beings, people intelligently trying to figure out how my business can run better, right? And that's either accelerate revenue or decrease costs, improve my margin. So if you want to use machine learning, I would say there's two areas to think about. One is how I think about customers, right? So we both talked about the amount of data being generated around enterprise individuals. So intelligently use machine learning how to serve my customers better, then number two AI and machine learning internally how to run my business better, right? Can I take cost out? Can I optimize supply chain? Can I use my warehouses more efficiently my logistics more efficiently? So one is how do I use AI learning to be a more familiar more customer oriented and number two, how can I take cost out be more efficient as a company, by writing AI internally from finance ops, et cetera. >> So, Jerry, I wonder if I could ask you a little different subject but a question on tactical valuations how coupled or decoupled are private company valuations from the public markets. You're seeing the public markets everybody's freaking out 'cause interest rates are going to go up. So the future value of cash flows are lower. Does that trickle in quickly into the private markets? Or is it a whole different dynamic? >> If I could weigh in poly for some private markets Dave I would have a different job than I do today. I think the reality is in the long run it doesn't matter as much as long as you're investing early. Now that's an easy answer say, boats have to fall away. Yes, interest rates will probably go up because they're hard to go lower, right? They're effectively almost zero to negative right now in most of the developed world, but at the end of the day, I'm not going to trade my Twilio shares or Salesforce shares for like a 1% yield bond, right? I'm going to hold the high growth tech stocks because regardless of what interest rates you're giving me 1%, 2%, 3%, I'm still going to beat that with a top tech performers, Snowflake, Twilio Hashi Corp, bunch of the private companies out there I think are elastic. They're going to have a great 10, 15 year run. And in the Greylock portfolio like the things we're investing in, I'm super bullish on from Roxanne to Kronos fear, to true era in the AI space. I think in the long run, next 10 years these things will outperform the market that said, right valuation prices have gone up and down and they will in our careers, they have. In the careers we've been covering tech. So I do believe that they're high now they'll come down for sure. Will they go back up again? Definitely, right? But as long as you're betting these macro waves I think we're all be good. >> Great answer as usual. Would you trade them for NFTs Jerry? >> That $69 million people piece of artwork look, I mean, I'm a longterm believer in kind of IP and property rights in the blockchain, right? And I'm waiting for theCUBE to mint this video as the NFT, when we do this guys, we'll mint this video's NFT and see how much people pay for the original Dave, John, Jerry (mumbles). >> Hey, you know what? We can probably get some good bang for that. Hey it's all about this next Jerry. Jerry, great to have you on, final question as we got this one minute left what's your advice to the people out there that either engaging with these innovative startups, we're going to feature startups every quarter from the in the Amazon ecosystem, they are going to be adding value. What's the advice to the enterprises that are engaging startups, the approach, posture, what's your advice. >> Yeah, when I talk to CIOs and large enterprises, they often are wary like, hey, when do I engage a startup? How, what businesses, and is it risky or low risk? Now I say, just like any career managing, just like any investment you're making in a big, small company you should have a budget or set of projects. And then I want to say to a CIO, Hey, every priority on your wish list, go use the startup, right? I mean, that would be 10 for 10 projects, 10 startups. Probably too much risk for a lot of tech companies. But we would say to most CIOs and executives, look, there are strategic initiatives in your business that you want to accelerate. And I would take the time to invest in one or two startups each quarter selectively, right? Use the time, focus on fewer startups, go deep with them because we can actually be game changers in terms of inflecting your business. And what I mean by that is don't pick too many startups because you can't devote the time, but don't pick zero startups because you're going to be left behind, right? It'd be shorted as a stock by the John, Dave and Jerry hedge fund apparently but pick a handful of startups in your strategic areas, in your top tier three things. These really, these could be accelerators for your career. >> I have to ask you real quick while you're here. We've got a couple minutes left on startups that are building apps. I've seen DevOps and the infrastructure as code movement has gone full mainstream. That's really what we're living right now. That kind of first-generation commercialization of DevOps. Now DevSecOps, what are the trends that you've seen that's different from say a couple of years ago now that we're in COVID around how apps are being built? Is it security? Is it the data integration? What can you share as a key app stack impact (mumbles)? >> Yeah, I think there're two things one is security is always been a top priority. I think that was the only going forward period, right? Security for sure. That's why you said that DevOps, DevSecOps like security is often overlooked but I think increasingly could be more important. The second thing is I think we talked about Dave mentioned earlier just the data around customers, the data on premise or the cloud, and there's a ton of data out there. We keep saying this over and over again like data's new oil, et cetera. It's evolving and not changing because the way we're using data finding data is changing in terms of sources of data we're using and discovering and also speed of data, right? In terms of going from Basser real-time is changing. The speed of business has changed to go faster. So I think these are all things that we're thinking about. So both security and how you use your data faster and better. >> Yeah you were in theCUBE a number of years ago and I remember either John or I asked you about you think Amazon is going to go up the stack and start developing applications and your answer was you know what I think no, I think they're going to enable a new set of disruptors to come in and disrupt the SaaS world. And I think that's largely playing out. And one of the interesting things about Adam Selipsky appointment to the CEO, he comes from Tableau. He really helped Tableau go from that sort of old guard model to an ARR model obviously executed a great exit to Salesforce. And now I see companies like Salesforce and service now and Workday is potential for your scenario to really play out. They've got in my view anyway, outdated pricing models. You look at what's how Snowflake's pricing and the consumption basis, same with Datadog same with Stripe and new startups seem to really be a leading into the consumption-based pricing model. So how do you, what are your thoughts on that? And maybe thoughts on Adam and thoughts on SaaS disruption? >> I think my thesis still holds that. I don't think Selipsky Adam is going to go into the app space aggressively. I think Amazon wants to enable next generation apps and seeing some of the new service that they're doing is they're kind of deconstructing apps, right? They're deconstructing the parts of CRM or e-commerce and they're offering them as services. So I think you're going to see Amazon continue to say, hey we're the core parts of an app like payments or custom prediction or some machine learning things around applications you want to buy bacon, they're going to turn those things to the API and sell those services, right? So you look at things like Stripe, Twilio which are two of the biggest companies out there. They're not apps themselves, they're the components of the app, right? Either e-commerce or messaging communications. So I can see Amazon going down that path. I think Adam is a great choice, right? He was a longterm early AWS exact from the early days latent to your point Dave really helped take Tableau into kind of a cloud business acquired by Salesforce work there for a few years under Benioff the guy who created quote unquote cloud and now him coming home again and back to Amazon. So I think it'll be exciting to see how Adam runs the business. >> And John I think he's the perfect choice because he's got operations chops and he knows how to... He can help the startups disrupt. >> Yeah, and he's been a trusted soldier of Jassy from the beginning, he knows the DNA. He's got some CEO outside experience. I think that was the key he knows. And he's not going to give up Amazon speed, but this is baby, right? So he's got him in charge and he's a trusted lieutenant. >> You think. Yeah, you think he's going to hold the mic? >> Yeah. We got to go. Jerry Chen thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on our inaugural cube on cloud AWS startup event. Now for the 10 startups, enjoy the sessions at 12:30 Pacific, we're going to have the closing keynote. I'm John Ferry for Dave Vellante and our special guests, thanks for watching and enjoy the rest of the day and the 10 startups. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Well, good day and welcome back to the Cube as we continue our segment, featuring AWS Startup Showcase and we're with now Mike Bilodeau who's in corporate development and operations at Kong. Mike, thank you for joining us here on the Cube and particularly on the Startup Showcase. Nice to have you and Kong represented here today. >> Thanks for having me, John. Great to be here. >> You better and first off let's just tell us about Kong a little bit and column cadet which I know is your feature program or service. I love the name by the way, but tell us a little bit about Kong and then what Kong is all about too? >> Sure, so Kong as a company really came about in the past five years. Our two co-founders came over from Italy in the late aughts early to 20 teens and had a company called Mashape. And so what they were looking at and what they were betting on at that time, was that APIs were going to be the future of how software was built and how developers interacted with software. And so what came from that was a piece of they were running Mashape as a marketplace at the time. So connecting developers to different APIs so they can consume them and use them to build new software. And what they found was that actually the most valuable piece of technology that they had created was the backbone for running that marketplace. And that backbone is what Kong is. And so they created it to be able to handle a massive amount of traffic, a massive amount of APIs, all simultaneously. This is a problem that a lot of enterprises have especially now that we've started to get some microservices, started to have more distributed technologies. And so what Kong is really is, it's a way to manage all of those different APIs. All of the connections between different microservices through a single platform which is Kong connect. And now that we've started to have Kubernetes the sort of the birth and the nascent space of service mesh. Kong connect allows all of those connections to be managed and to be secured and made reliable through a single platform. >> So what's driving this, right? I mean you mentioned microservices and Kubernetes and that environment which is kind of facilitating this, I guess transformation you might say. But what's the big driver in your opinion in terms of what's pushing this microservices phenomenon if you will or this revolution? >> Sure, and when I think it starts out at the simple active of technology acceleration in general. So when you look at just the real shifts that have come in enterprise to hack especially looking, you know start with that at the cloud but you could even go back to VMware and virtualization is it's really about allowing people to build software more rapidly. All of these different innovations that have happened with cloud, with virtualization, now with containers, Kubernetes, microservices they're really focused on making it so that developers can build software a lot more quickly. Develop the latest and greatest in a more rapid way. I think a huge driver out of this is just making it easier for developers, for organizations to bring new technologies to market. And we see that as a key driver in a lot of these decisions that are being made. I think another piece of it that's really coming about is looking at security as a really big component. You know we have a huge monolithic app. It can become very challenging to actually secure that. If somebody gets into the initial Ops space they're really past the point of no return and can get access to some things that you might not want them to. Similar for compliance and governance reasons, that becomes challenging. So I think you're seeing this combination of where people are looking at breaking things into smaller pieces, even though it does come with its own challenges around security that you need to manage. It's making it so that there's less ability to just get in and cause a lot of damage all at once from malicious attackers. >> Yeah, you bring up security and so, yeah to me it's almost in some cases it's almost counterintuitive. I think about if I got this model to gap and I've got a big parameter around it, right. And I know that I can confine this thing. I can contain this, this is is good. Now microservices, now got a lot of, it's almost like a lot of villages, right? They're all around. And I don't have the castle anymore. I've got all these villages. So I have to build walls around all these villages. But you're saying that that's actually easier to do or at least you're more capable of doing that now as opposed to maybe where we were two, three years ago. >> Well you can almost think of it as if you have those villages, right. And if you have one castle and somebody gets inside they're going to be able to find whatever treasure you may have you know, to extend the analogy here a bit. But now if you have 50 different villages that an attacker needs to look in it starts to become really time consuming and really difficult. And now when you're looking at, especially this idea of cybersecurity, the ability to secure a monolithic app is typically not all that different from what you can do with a microservice or once you get past that initial point. Instead of thinking of it as, you know I have my one wall around everything you now think of it almost as a series of walls where it gets more and more difficult. Again this all depends on that you're managing that security well which can get really time-consuming more than anything else and challenging from a pure management standpoint. But from an actual security posture it is a way of where you can strengthen it because you're you're creating more difficult ways of accessing information for attackers as well as just more layers potentially of security that they need to get them. >> But what do you do to lift that burden then from the customers because like you said that's a concern they really don't want to have. They want you to do that. They want somebody to do that before them. So what do you do to alleviate those kinds of stresses on their systems? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And this is really where the idea of API management in its infancy came from. Was thinking about, how do we abstract a way these different tasks that people don't really want to do when they're managing how people can interact with their APIs whether that be a device or another human? And part of that is just taking away. So what we do and what API game management tools have always done is abstract that into a new piece of software. So instead of having to kind of individually develop and write code for security, for logging, for routing logic, all these different pieces of how those different APIs will communicate with each other we're putting that into a single piece of software, And we're allowing that to be done in a really easy way. And so what we've done now with Kong connect and where we've extended that to is making it even easier to do that at a microservices level of scale. So if you're thinking about hundreds or thousands of different microservices that you need to understand and be able to manage that's what we're really building to allow people to do. And so that comes with being able to make it extremely easy to actually add policies like authentication, rate limiting whatever it may be as well as giving people the choice to use what they want to use. We have great partners looking at the Datadog's, the Okta's of the world who provide a pretty, pretty incredible product. We don't necessarily want to reinvent the wheel on some of these things that are already out there and that are widely loved and accepted by technology practitioners and developers. We just want to make it really easy to actually use those different technologies. And so that's a lot of what we're doing is providing a a way to make it easy to add these policies and this logic into each one of these different services. >> So what if you're providing these kinds of services and they're new and you're merging them sometimes with kind of legacy components? That transition or that interaction I would assume could be a little complex. And you've got your work cut out for you in some regards to kind of retrofit, right? In some respects to make this seamless, to make this smooth. So maybe you shine a little light on that process in terms of not throwing all the bath out with the baby or the water here, but just making sure it all works. And that it makes it simple and takes away that kind of complexity that people might be facing. >> Yeah, that's really the name of the game. We do not believe that there is a one size fits all approach in general to how people should build software. There are going to be instances of where building a monolithic app makes the most sense. There are going to be instances where building a Kubernetes makes the most sense. The key thing that we wonna solve is making sure that it works and that you're able to make the best technical decision for your products and for your organization. And so in looking at how we help to solve that problem, I think the first is that we have first-class support for everything. So we support everything down to kind of the oldest bare metal servers, to IBMs to containers across the board. And we've had that mindset with every product that we brought to market. So thinking about our service mesh for instance Kuma is the open-source project that all depends now on an enterprise one. But looking at Kuma, one of the first things that we did when we brought it out because we saw this gap in the space was to make sure that they have first-class support for virtual machines. At the time that wasn't something that was commonly done at all. Now more people are moving in that direction because they do see it as it need which is great for the space. But that's something where we understand that the important thing is making sure your point you said it kind of the exact way that we like to which is it needs to be reliable. It needs to work. So I have a huge estate of older applications, older potentially environments even I might have data centers, I might have cloud been trying to do everything all at once. Isn't really a pragmatic approach always. It needs to be able to support the journey as you move to a more modern way of building. So in terms of going from on-premise to the cloud, running in a hybrid approach, whatever it may be, all of those things shouldn't be an all-or-nothing proposition. It should be a phased approach and moving to really where it makes sense for your business and for the specific product. >> You've been talking about cloud deployments obviously. AWS comes into play there in a major way for you guys. Tell me a little bit about that. About how you're leveraging that relationship and how you're partnering with them and then bringing the value then to your customer base. And how long that's been going on and the kinds of work that you guys are doing together ultimately to provide this kind of exemplary product or at least options to your customers. >> Yeah, of course. I think the way that we're doing it first and foremost is that we know exactly who AWS is in the space. And great number of our customers are running on AWS. So again, I think that first-class support in general for AWS environments, services both from the container service, their Kubernetes services, everything that they can have and that they offer to their customers we wonna be able to support. One of the first areas really that comes to mind in terms of first-class integration and support is thinking about Lambda and serverless. So at the time when we first came out with that, again it was early for us or early in our journey as product and as company, but really early for the space. And so how we were able to support that and how we were able to see that it could support our vision and what we wanted to bring as a value proposition to the market has been really powerful. So I think in looking at how we work with AWS certainly on a partnership level of where we share a lot of the same customers we share a very similar ethos and wanting to help people do things in the most cost-effective rapid manner possible and to build the best software. And I mean for us we have a little bit of a backstory with AWS 'cause Jeff Bezos was an early investor in Kong. >> That didn't hurt really. Yeah exactly, I mean the whole memo that he wrote about build an API or you're fired was certainly an inspiration to us. And just it catalyzed so much change in the technology landscape in general about how everyone viewed APIs about building a software that could be reused and and was composable. And so that's something that we look at and kind of carry it forward and we've been building on that momentum ever since. >> So I'm going to just kind of take, again a high level. Look at this in terms of microservices and how that's changing in terms of cloud connectivity. Think you actually have a graphic too that maybe we can pull up and take a look at this and let's talk about this evolution. What's occurring here a little bit and as we take a look at this tell us what you think these impacts are at the end of the day for your customers and how they're better able to provide their services and satisfy their customer needs. >> Absolutely, so this is really the heart of the connect platform and of our vision in general. We've spoken just a minute ago about thinking how we can support the entire journey or the enterprise reality that is managing a relatively complex environment of monoliths, different services, microservices, serverless functions, whatever it may be as well as lots of different deployment methods and underlying tech platforms. If you have virtual machines and Kubernetes whatever it may be. But what we look at is just the different design patterns that can occur in thinking about a monolithic application. Okay, mainly that's an edge concern of thinking about how you going to handle connectivity coming in from the edge in looking at a Kubernetes environment of where you going to have many Kubernetes clusters that need to be able to communicate with each other. That's where we start to think about our ingress products and Kubernetes ingress that allows for that cross application communication. And then within the application itself and looking at service mesh which we talked a little bit about of just how do I make sure that I can instrument and secure every transaction that's happening in a truly microservices deployment within Kubernetes or outside of it? How do I make sure that that's reliable and secure? And so what we look at is part of it is evolution. And part of it is going to be figuring out what works best when. Certainly if you're building something from scratch it doesn't always make sense to build it. Your MDP as microservices running on Kubernetes it probably makes sense to go with the shortest path. At the same time if you're trying to run it at massive scale and big applications and make sure they're as reliable as possible it very well does make sense to spend the time and the effort to make Kubernetes work well for you. And I think that's the beauty of how the space is shifting is that it's going towards a way of the most practical solution to get towards business value to move software quicker to give customers the value that they want to delight them to use Amazon's phraseology if that's a word. It's something that is becoming more and more standard practice versus just trying to make sure that you're doing the latest and greatest for the sake of doing it. >> So we've been talking about customers in rather generic terms in terms of what you're providing them. We've talked about new services that are certainly providing added value and providing them with solutions to their problems. Can you give us maybe just a couple of examples of some real life success stories where you've had some success in terms of providing services that I assume people needed or at least maybe they didn't know they needed until you provided that kind of development. But give us an idea, maybe just shine a little light on some success that you've had so that people at home and are watching this can perhaps relate to that experience and maybe give them a reason to think a little more about Kong and Kong connect. >> Yeah, absolutely, there's a number that come to mind but certainly one of the customers that I have spent a lot of time with, become almost friends with a couple of the practitioners who work there, is company called Cargill. It's a shared one with us and AWS. It's one we've written about in the past but this is one of the largest companies in the world. And the way that they describe it as is that if you've ever eaten a McMuffin or eaten from McDonald's and had breakfast there, you've used a Cargill service because they provide so much of the food supply chain business and the logistics for it. You know, it's a century and a half old company. It has a really story and a legacy and it's grown to be an extremely large company that's still private. But they have some of the most unique challenges, I think that I've seen in the space in terms of needing to be able to ensure that they're able to kind of move quickly and build a lot of new services and software that touch so many different spaces. So the challenge that was put in front of them was looking at really modernizing a century and a half old company. Modernizing their entire tech stack. And we're certainly not all of that in any way shape or form but we are something that can help that process quite a bit. And so as they were migrating to AWS as they were looking at creating a CICB process for really being able to shape and deploy new software as quickly as possible. As they were looking at how they could distribute the new APIs and services that they were building, we were helping them with every piece of that journey by being able to to make sure that the services that they deployed performed in the way that they expected them to. We're able to give them a lot of confidence in being able to move more rapidly and move a lot of software over from these tried and true older or more legacy ways of doing things to a much more cloud native build. As they were looking at using Kubernetes in AWS and being able to support that handle scale, again we're something that was able to kind of bridge that gap and make sure that there weren't going to be disruptions. So there are a lot of great reasons of why their numbers really speak for themselves in terms of how much velocity they were able to get. Saying them out loud will sound fake in some cases because they were able to, you know, I think like something around the order of 20 X the amount of new APIs and services that they were building over a six month period. Really kind of crazy, crazy numbers. But it is something where, for us we got a lot out of them because they were open-source users. So Kong is first and foremost an open-source company. And so they were helping us before they even became paying customers. Just by testing the software, providing feedback, really putting it through its paces and using it at a scale that's really hard to replicate. You know the scale of a couple of hundred thousand person company, yeah. >> Talk about a win-win. That worked out well. Certainly the proof is in the pudding and I'm sure that's just one of many examples of success that you've had. We appreciate the time here and certainly the insights and I wish you well on down the road. Thanks for joining us Mike. >> Thanks John, thanks for having me. >> Been peaking with Mike Bilodeau from Kong. He is in corporate development and operations there. I'm John Walls and you're watching "On the Cube" the AWS Startup Showcase. (soft music)