>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Presenting, The People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here at Mayfield Fund, on Sand Hill Road and Menlo Park. As part of Mayfield's People First Network, co-creation with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Mayfield. Next guest, Beth Devin, Managing Director of Innovation Network and Emerging Technologies at Citi Ventures. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Hey, thanks for coming in. We're here for the Mayfield fiftieth anniversary, where they're featuring luminaries like yourself, and we're talking about conversations around how the world's changing and the opportunities and the challenges can be met, and how you can share some of your best practices. Talk about what your role is at Citi Ventures and what your focus is. >> Sure, sure, and boy howdy, has it been changing. It's hard to keep up with. I've been at Citi Ventures about two years and one of the reasons I joined was to stand up an Emerging Technology practice. Citi Ventures does a lot of work in corporate venture investing. We tend to be strategic investors, for start up companies that are aligned with the strategy of Citi, as well as our client. We serve probably, eighty percent of the Fortune Five Hundred companies in the world. But we also are a really important part of the innovation ecosystem at Citi. Which is looking at how to drive culture change, broaden mindset, and really, enlist our employees to be part of the innovation process. So, we have an internal incubator, we have a Shark Tank-like process we call Discover Ten X. And what I really bring to the table with my team is monitoring, and learning about, and digesting technology that's not quite ready for commercialization but we think it might be disruptive in a good or challenging way for the bank or our clients. We try to educate and provide content that's helpful to our executives, and just the employee body at large. >> I want to get into a LinkedIn post you wrote, called the Tech Whisperer, which I love. >> Thank you. >> You're there to identify new things to help people understand what that is. But that's not what you've done. You've actually implemented technology. So, on the other side of the coin, in your career. Tell us about some of the things you've done in your career, because you've been a practitioner. >> Beth: Yeah. >> and now you're identifying trends and technologies, before you were on the other side of the table. >> That's right, and sometimes I'll tell you, I have that itch. I miss the operator role, sometimes. Yeah, you know, I feel so fortunate I sort of stumbled on computer science early when I was going to school. And, the first, I'd say twenty years of my career, were working in enterprise I.T, which at that time I couldn't even have made that distinction, like why do you have to say enterprise I.T. I was a software developer, and I was then a DBA, and I even did assembler language programing. So way back when, I think I was so fortunate to fall in to software engineering. It's like problem solving, or puzzle making, and you with your own brain and sort of typing can figure out these problems. Then over the years I became more of a manager and a leader, and sort of about a reputation for being somebody you could put on any hard problem and I'd figure a way out. You know tell me where we're trying to go it looks knotty, like not a fun project, and I would tackle that. And then I'd say, I had some experience working in lots of different industries. Which really gave me an appreciation, for you know, at the end of the day, we can all debate the role that technology plays in companies. But industries, whether it's health care or media, or financial services. There's a lot of the same challenges that we have. So I worked at Turner Broadcasting before it was acquired, you know by Time Warner and AOL. And I learned about media. And then I had a fantastic time working at Charles Schwab. That was my first big Financial Services role when it came back to the bay area. I worked at Art.Com, it was a need converse company, the first company I worked at where I was in charge of all the technology. We had no brick and mortar, and if the technology wasn't working, we weren't earning revenue, in fact, not only that, we were really making customers angry. I also had a role at a start up, where I was the third person to join the company, and we had a great CEO who had a vision, but it was on paper. And we hadn't really figured out how to build this. I was very proud to assemble a team, get an office, and have a product launch in a year. >> So you're a builder, you're a doer, an assembler, key coding, hexadecimal cord dumps back in the day. >> Way back when. We didn't even have monitors. I'll tell ya, it was a long time ago. >> Glory days, huh? Back when we didn't have shoes on. You know, technology. But what a change. >> Huge change. >> The variety of backgrounds you have, The LinkedIn, the Charles Schwab, I think was during the growth years. >> And the downturn, so we got both sides. >> Both sides of that coin, but again, the technologies were evolving. >> Yes. >> To serve that kind of high frequency customer base. >> Beth: That's right. >> With databases changing, internet getting faster. >> It has. >> Jeff: More people getting online. >> We were early adopters, I'll tell you. I still will tell people, Charles Schwab is one of the best experiences I have, even though at the end I was part of the layoff process. I was there almost seven years, and I watched, we had crazy times in the internet boom. Going in 98, 99, 2000, I can't even tell you some of the experiences we had. And we weren't a digital native. But we were one of the first companies to put trading online, and to build APIs so our customers could self service, and they could do that all online. We did mobile trading. I remember we had to test our software on like twenty different phone sets. Today, it's actually, so much easier. >> It's only three. Or two. Or one. Depending on how you look at it. >> That's right. We couldn't even test on all the phone sets that were out then. But that was such a great experience, and I still, that Schwab network, is still people I'm in touch with today. And we all sort of sprinkled out to different places. I think, I dunno, there's just something special about that company in terms of what we learned, and what we were able to accomplish. >> You have a fantastic background. Again the waves of innovation you have lived through, been apart of, tackling hard problems, taking it head on. Great ethos, great management discipline. Now more than ever, it seems to be needed, because we're living in an age of massive change. Cause you have the databases are changing, the networks changing, the coding paradigms changing. Dev ops, you've got the role of data. Obviously, mobile clearly is proliferated. And now the business models are evolving. Now you got business model action, technical changes, cultural people changes. All of those theaters are exploding with opportunity, but also challenges. What's your take on that as you look at that world? >> You know, I'm a change junkie, I think. I love when things are changing, when organizations are changing, when companies are coming apart and coming together. So for me, I feel like, I've been again, so fortunate I'm in the perfect place. But, one of the things that I really prided myself on early in my career, is being what I call the bridge, or the, the translator between the different lines of business folks that I work with. Whether it was head of marketing, or somebody in a sales or customer relationship, or service organization, and the technology teams I built and led. And I think I've had a natural curiosity about what makes a business tick, and not so much over indexing on the technology itself. So technology is going to come and go, there's going to be different flavors. But actually, how to really take advantage of that technology, to better engage your customers, which as you said, their needs and their demands are changing, their expectations are so high. They really set the pace now. Who would have though that ten years ago we'd live in an environment where industries and businesses are changing because consumers have sort of set the bar on the way we all want to interact, engage, communicate, buy, pay. So there's this huge impact on organizations, and you know, I have a lot of empathy for large established enterprises that are challenged to make it through this transformation, this change, that somehow, they have to make. And I always try to pay attention on which companies have done it. And I call out Microsoft as an example. I can still remember several years ago, being at a conference. I think it was Jeffrey Moore who was speaking, and he had on one slide... Here's all the companies in technology that have had really large success. Leading up to the internet boom days, there would be a recipe for the four companies that would come together. I think it was Sun, Oracle, and Microsoft. And then he said, and now here's the companies of today. And most young people coming out of college, or getting computer science degrees won't use any of these old technology companies. But Microsoft proved us all wrong, but they did it, focused on people, culture, being willing to say where they screwed up, and where they're not going to focus anymore, and part ways with those parts of their business. And really focus on who are their customers, what are their customer needs. I think there's something to be learned from those changes they made. And I think back to the Tech Whisperer, there's no excuse for an executive today, not to at least understand the fundamentals of technology. So many decisions have to be made around investment, capital, hiring, investment in your people. That without that understanding, you're sort of operating blind. >> And this is the thing that I think I love, and was impressed by that Tech Whisperer article. You know, a play on the Horse Whisperer, the movie. You're kind of whispering in the ears of leaders who won't admit that they're scared. But they're all scared! They're all scared. And so they need to get, maybe it's cognitive dissonance around decision making, or they might not trust their lead. Or they don't know what they're talking about So this certainly is there, I would agree with that. But there's dynamics at play, and I want to get your thoughts on this. I think this plays into the Tech Whisperer. The trend we're seeing is the old days was the engineers are out coding away, hey they're out there coding away, look at them coding away. Now with Cloud they're in the front lines. They're getting closer to the customer, the apps are in charge. They're dictating to the infrastructure what can be done. With data almost every solution can be customized. There's no more general purpose. These are the things we talk about, but this changes the personnel equation. Now you got engineering and product people talking to sales and marketing people, business people. >> And customers. >> They tend not to, they traditionally weren't going well. Now they have to work well, engineers want to work with the customers. This is kind of a new business practice, and now I'm a scared executive. Beth, what do I do? What's your thoughts on that dynamic? >> You know, I'm not sure I would have had insight in that if I hadn't had the oppurtunity to work at this little start up, which we were a digital native. And it was the first time I worked in an environment where we did true extreme programming, pair programming, we had really strong product leads, and engineers. So we didn't have project managers, business analysts, a lot of things that I think enterprise I.T tends to have. Because the folks, historically, at an enterprise, the folks that are specifying the need, the business need, are folks in the lines of business. And they're not product managers, and even product managers, I say in banking for example, they aren't software product managers. And so that change, if you really do want to embrace these new methods and dev ops, and a lot of the automation that's available to engineering and software development organizations today, you really do have to make that change. Otherwise it's just going to be a clumsy version of what you use to do, with a new name on it. The other thing though that I would say, is I don't want to discount for large enterprises is partnerships with start up companies or other tech partners. You don't need to build everything. There's so much great technology out there. You brought up the Cloud. Look at how rich these Cloud stacks are getting. You know, it's not just now, can you provision me some compute, and some storage, and help me connect to the internet. There's some pretty sophisticated capabilities in there around A.I and machine learning, and data management, and analysis. So, I think overtime, we'll see richer and richer Cloud stacks, that enables you know, every company to benefit from the technology and innovation that's going on right now. >> Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Search, has always said whenever I've interviewed him, he always talks publicly now about it is, two pizza teams, and automate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In tech we all know what that is, the boring, mundane, patching, provisioning, ugh. And deploying more creative research. Okay so, I believe that. I'm a big believer of that philosophy. But it opens up the role, the question of the roles of the people. That lonely DBA, that you once were, I did some DBA work myself. System admins, storage administrator, these were roles, network administrator, the sacred God of the network, they ran everything. They're evolving to be much more coding oriented, software driven changes. >> It's a huge change. And you know, one thing that I think is sad, is I run into folks often that are, I'll just say, technology professionals, just say, you know, we're at large. Who are out of work. You know, who sort of hang their head, they're not valued, or maybe there's some ageism involved, or they get marked as, oh that's old school, they're not going to change. So, I really do believe we're at a point, where there's not enough resources out there. And so how we invest in talent that's available today, and help people through this change, not everybody is going to make it. It starts with you, knowing yourself, and how open-minded you are. Are you willing to learn, are you willing to put some effort forth, and sort of figuring out some of these new operating models. Because that's just essential if you want to be part of the future. And I'll tell you, it's hard, and it's exhausting. So I don't say this lightly, I just think. You know about my career, how many changes and twists and turns their have been. Sometimes you're just like, okay I'm ready, I'm ready to just go hiking. (Beth laughs) >> It can be, there's a lot of institutional baggage, associated with the role you had, I've heard that before. Old guard, old school, we don't do that, you're way too old for that, we need more women so lets get women in. So there's like a big dynamic around that. And I want to get your thoughts on it because you mentioned ageism, and also women in tech has also grown. There's a need for that. So there's more opportunities now than ever. I mean you go to the cyber security job boards, there are more jobs for cyber security experts than any. >> Oh, I'll tell you, yesterday, we held an event at our office, in partnership with some different start ups. Because that's one of the things you do when you're in a corporate venture group, and it was all on the future of authentication. So it was really targeted at an audience of information security professionals and chief information security officers. And it was twenty men and one woman. And I thought, wow, you know I'm use to that from having been a CIO that a lot of the infrastructure roles in particular, like as you were saying, the rack and stack, the storage management, the network folks, just tend to be more male dominant, than I think the product managers, designers, even software engineers to some extent. But here you know, how many times can you go online and see how many openings there are for that type of role. So I personally, am not pursuing that type of role, so I don't know what all the steps would need to be, to get educated, to get certified, but boy is there a need. And that needs not going to go away. As more, if everything is digitized and everything is online. Then security is going to be a constant concern and sort of dynamic space. >> Well, we interview a lot of women in tech, great to have you on, you're a great leader. We also interview a lot of people that are older. I totally believe that there's an ageism issue out there. I've seen it first hand, maybe because I'm over fifty. And also women in tech, there's more coming but not enough. The numbers speak for themselves. There's also an opportunity, if you look at the leveling up. I talked to a person who was a network engineer, kind of the same thing as him, hanging his head down. And I said, do you realize that networking paradigm is very similar to how cyber works. So a lot of the old is coming back. So if you look at what was in the computer science programs in the eighties. It was a systems thinking. The systems thinking is coming back. So I see that as a great opportunity. But also the aperture of the field of computer science is changing. So it's not, there are some areas that frankly, women are better than men at in my opinion. In my opinion, might get some crap for that. But the point, I do believe that. And there are different roles. So I think it's not just, there's so much more here. >> Oh, that's what I try to tell people. It's not just coding, right. There's so many different types of roles. And unfortunately I think we don't market ourselves well. So I encourage everyone out there that knows somebody. (Beth laughs) Who's looking-- >> If someone was provisioned Sun micro-systems, or mini computers, or workstations, probably has a systems background that could be a Cloud administrator or a Cloud architect. Same concepts. So I want to get your thoughts on women in tech since you're here. What's your thoughts on the industry, how's it going, things you advise, other folks, men and women, that they could do differently. Any good signs? What's your thoughts in general? >> Yeah so, first of all, I'm just a big advocate for women in general. Young girls, and, young women, just getting into the work force, and always have been. Have to say again, very fortunate early in my career working for companies like a phone company, and Schwab, we had so many amazing female leaders. And I don't even think we had a program, it was just sort of part of the DNA of the company. And it's really only in the last couple of years I really seen we have a big problem. Whether it's reading about some of the cultures of some of the big tech companies, or even spending more time in the valley. I think there's no one answer, it's multifaceted. It's education, it's families, it's you know, each one of us could make a difference in how we hire, sort of checking in what our unintended biases are, I know at Citi right now, there's a huge program around diversity and inclusion. Gender, and otherwise. And one of the ways I think it's going to be impactful. They've set targets that I know are controversial, but it holds people accountable, to make decisions and invest in developing people, and making sure there's a pipeline of talent that can step up into even bigger roles with a more diverse leadership team. It will take time though, it will take time. >> But mind shares are critical. >> It absolutely is. Self-awareness, community awareness, very much so. >> What can men do differently, it's always about women in tech, but what can we, what can men do? >> I think it's a great question. I would say, women can do this too. I hate when I see a group together, and it's all women working on the women issue. Shame on us, for not inviting men into the organization. And then I think it's similar to the Tech Whisperer. Don't be nervous, don't be worried, just step in. Because, you know, men are fathers, men are leaders, men are colleagues. They're brothers, they're uncles. We have to work on this together. >> I had a great guest, and friend, I was interviewing. And she was amazing, and she said, John, it's not diversity and inclusion, it's inclusion and diversity. It's I-N-D not D-I. First of all, I've never heard of it, what's D-N-I? My point exactly. Inclusion is not just the diversity piece, inclusion first is inclusive in general, diversity is different. So people tend to blend them. >> Yes they do. >> Or even forget the inclusion part. >> Final question, since you're a change junkie, which I love that phrase, I'm kind of one myself. Change junkies are always chasing that next wave, and you love waves. Pat Gelsinger at VMWare, wave junkie, always love talking with him. And he's a great wave spotter, he sees them early. There's a big set of waves coming in now, pretty clear. Cloud has done it's thing. It's only going to change and get bigger, hybrid, private, multi Cloud. Data, AI, twenty year cycle coming. What waves are you most excited about? What's out there? What waves are obvious, what waves aren't, that you see? >> Yeah, oh, that's a tough one. Cause we try to track what those waves are. I think one of the things that I'm seeing is that as we all get, and I don't just mean people, I mean things. Everything is connected, and everything has some kind of smarts, some kind of small CPU senser. There's no way that our existing, sort of network, infrastructure and the way we connect and talk can support all of that. So I think we're going to see some kind of discontinuous change, where new models are going to, are going to absolutely be required cause we'll sort of hit the limit of how much traffic can go over the internet, and how many devices can we manage. How much automation can the people and an enterprise sort of oversee and monitor, and secure and protect. That's the thing that I feel like it's a tsunami about to hit us. And it's going to be one of these perfect storms. And luckily, I think there is innovation going on around 5G and edge computing, and different ways to think about securing the enterprise. That will help. But it couldn't come soon enough. >> And model also meaning not just technical business. >> Absolutely. Machine the machine. Like who's identity is on there that's taken an action on your behalf, or the companies behalf. You know, we see that already with RPA, these software robots. Who's making sure that they're doing what they're suppose to do. And they're so easy to create, now you have thousands of them. In my mind, it's just more software to manage. >> And a great contrary to Carl Eschenbach, former VMware CEO now at Sequoia, he's on the board of UIPath, they're on the front page of Forbes today, talking about bots. >> Yes, yes, yes, I've heard them speak. >> This is an issue, like is there a verification. Is there a fake bots coming. If there's fake news, fake bots are probably going to come too. >> Absolutely they will. >> This is a reality. >> And we're putting them in the hands of non-engineers to build these bots. Which there's good and bad, right. >> Regulation and policy are two different things, and they could work together. This is going to be a seminal issue for our industry. Is understanding the societal impact, tech for good. Shaping the technologies. This is what a Tech Whisperer has to do. You have a tough job ahead of you. >> But I love it. >> Jeff: Beth thank you for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Jeff Furrier for the People First Network here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield as part of theCUBE and SiliconANGLE's co-creation with Mayfield Fund, thans for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBEConversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, the co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In theCUBE we're here with Alan Cohen, CUBE alumni, joining us today for a special segment on the future of technology and the impact to society. Always good to get Alan's commentary, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Illumio, industry veteran, has been through many waves of innovation and now more than ever, this next wave of technology and the democratization of the global world is upon us. We're seeing signals out there like cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin to the disruption of industries from media and entertainment, biotech among others. Technology is not just a corner industry, it's now pervasive and it's having some significant impacts and you're seeing that in the news whether it's Facebook trying to figure out who they are from a data standpoint to across the board every company. Alan, great to see you. >> Always great to be here, I always feel like, I can't tell whether I'm at the big desk at ESPN or I've got the desk chair at CNBC, but that's what it's like being on theCUBE. >> Great to have you on extracting the signal noises, a ton of noise out there, but one of things of the most important stories that we're tracking is, that's becoming very obvious, and you're seeing it everywhere from Meed to all aspects of technology. Is the impact of technology to people in society, okay you're seeing the election, we all know what that is, that's now a front and center in the big global conversation, the Russian's role of hacking, the weaponizing of data, Facebook's taking huge brand hits on that, to emerging startups, and the startup game that we're used to in Silicon Valley is changing. Just the dynamics, I mean cryptocurrency raises billions of dollars but yet (laughs) something like 10, 20% of it's been hacked and stolen. It's a really wild west kind of environment. >> Well it's a very different environment. John, you and I have been in the technology industry certainly for a whole bunch of lines under our eyes over the years have gone there. My friend Tom Friedman has this phrase that he says, "Everybody's connected and nobody's in control," so the difference is that, as you just said, the tech industry is not a separate industry. The tech industry is in every product and service. Cryptocurrency is like, the concept of that money is just code. You know, our products and services are just code, it raises a couple of really core issues. Like for us on the security point of view, if I don't trust people with the products they're selling me, that I feel like they're going to be hacked, including my personal data, so your product now includes my personal information, that's a real problem because that could actually melt down commerce in a real way. Obviously the election is if I don't trust the social systems around it, so I think we're all at an, and I'd like to say world is still kind of like iRobot moment, and if you remember iRobot, it's like, people build all these robots to serve humankind and then one day the robots wake up and they go, "We have our own point of view on how things are going to work" and they take over, and I think whether it's the debate about AI, whether cryptocurrency's good or bad, or more importantly, the products and services I use, which are now all digitally connected to me, whether I trust them or not is an issue that I think everyone in our industry has to take a step back because without that trust, a lot of these systems are going to stop growing. >> Chaos is an opportunity, I think that's been quoted many times, a variety-- >> You sound like Jeff Goldblum in like Jurassic Park, yeah. (laughing) >> So chaos is upon us, but this is an opportunity. The winds are shifting, and that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs. The technology industry has to start working for us but we've got to be mindful of these blind spots and the blind spots are technology for good not necessarily just for profits, so that also is a big story right now. We see things like AI for good, Intel has been doing a lot of work on that area, and you see stars dedicated to societal impact, then young millennials, you see the demographic shift where they want to work on stuff that empowers people and changes society so a whole kind of new generation revolution and kind of hippie moment, if you look at the 60s, what the 60s were, right? >> Well there's people out in the street protesting, right? There were a couple of million women out in the street this weekend, so we are in that kind of moment again, people are not happy with things. >> And I believe this is a signal of a renaissance, a change, a sea change at enormous levels, so I want to get your thoughts on this. As technology goes out in mainstream, certainly from a security standpoint, your business Illumio is in that now where there's not a lot of control, just like you were mentioning before we came on that all the spends happening but no one has more than 4% market share. These are dynamics and this is not just within one vertical. What's your take on this, how do you view this sea change that's upon us, this tech revolution? >> Well, you know, think about it. You and I grew up in the era where clients server took over from main frame, right? So remember there was this big company called IBM and they owned a lot of the industry, and then it blew up for client server and then there were thousands of companies and it consolidated its way down, but when those thousands of new companies, like you didn't know what was going to be Apollo and what was going to be Oracle right? Like you didn't know how that was going to work out, there was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. I think now we're seeing this on a scale like that's 10x of this that there's so much innovation and there's so much connectedness going on very rapidly, but no one is in control. In the security market, you know, what's happening in our world is like, people said, okay I have to reestablish control over my data, I've lost that control, and I've lost it for good reasons, meaning I've evolved to the cloud, I've evolved to the app economy, I've done all of these things, and I've lost it for bad reasons because like am I, like I'm not really running my data center the way I should. We're in the beginning of a move in of people kind of reasserting that control, but it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because the world itself is so much more dynamic and more distributed. >> It's interesting, I've been studying communities and online communities for over a decade in terms of dynamics. You know, from the infrastructural level, how packets move to a human interaction. It's interesting, you mentioned that we're all connected and no one's in control, but you now see a ground swell of organic self-forming networks where communities are starting to work together. You kind of think about the analog world when we grew up without computers and networks, you kind of knew everyone, you knew your neighbor, you knew who the town loony was, you kind of knew things and people watch each other's kids and parents sat from the porch, let the kid play, that's the way that I grew up, but it was still chaotic but yet somewhat controlled by the group. So I got to ask you, when you see things like cryptocurrency, things like KYC, know your customer, anti money laundering, which is, you know these are policy based things, but we're in a world now where, you know, people don't know who their neighbors are. You're starting to see a dynamic where people are-- >> Put the phone down. >> Asserting themselves to know their neighbor, to know their customer, to have a connected tissue with context and so your trust and reputation become super important. >> Well I think people are really, so like every time there is a shift in technology, there's scary stuff. There's the fuddy-duddy moment where people are saying, "Oh we can't use that," or "I don't know that," and you know, clearly we're in this kind of new kam-ree and explosion of this cloud mobile blah blah blah type of computing thing and ... Blah blah blah is always a good intersection when you don't have a term. Then things form around it, and just as you said, so if you think about 25 years ago, right, people created The WELL and there was community writing first bulletin boards and like now we have Facebook and you go through a couple of generations and for a while, things feel out of control and then it reforms. I personally am an optimist. Ultimately I believe in the inherent goodness of people, but inherent goodness leaves you open and then, you know, could be manipulated, and people figure these things out. Whether it's cryptocurrency or AI, they are really exciting technologies that don't have any ground rules, right? What's going to happen I believe is that people are going to reestablish ground rules, they're going to figure out some of the core issues, and some of these things may make it, and some of these things may not make it. Like cryptocurrency, like I don't know whether it makes it or not, but certainly the blockchain as a technology we're going to be incorporating in what we do, and maybe the blockchain replaces VPNs and last generation's way of protecting zeros and ones. If AI is figuring out how to read an MRI in five minutes, it's a good thing, and if the AI is teaching you how to exclude old folks for me finding jobs, it's a bad thing. I think as technology forms, there's always Spectre and 007, right? There's always good and bad sides and you know, I think if you believe-- >> I'm with you on that. I think value shifts and I think ultimately it's like however you want to look at it will shift to something, value activity will be somewhere else. Behind me in the bookshelf is a book called The World is Flat and you're quoted in it a lot as a futurist because you have inherently that kind of view, well that's not what you do for a living, but you're kind of in an opt-- >> Alan: Marketing, futurist, kind of same thing. >> Thomas Friedman, the book, that was a great book and at that time, it was game changing. If you take that premise into today where we are living in a flat world and look at cryptocurrency, and then over with the geo political landscape, I mean I just can't see why the Federal Reserve wouldn't reign in this cryptocurrency because if Japan's going to control a bunch of, or China, it's going to be some interesting conversations. I mean I would be like all over that if I was in the Federal Reserve. >> I think people-- Look, cryptocurrency's really interesting and I think people a little over-rotated. If you look at the amount of GDP that's invested in cryptocurrency, it's like, I don't know, there might've been, you know 20 years ago the same amount involved invested in Beanie Babies, right? I mean things show up for a while and the question is is it sustainable over time? Now I'm trained as an economist, you and I have had this conversation, so I don't know how you have a series of monetary without kind of governmental backing, I just don't understand. But I do understand that people find all kinds of interesting ways to trade, and if it's an exchange, like I mean what's the difference between gold and cryptocurrency? Somebody has ascribed a value to something that really has no efficacy outside of its usage. Yeah I mean you can make a filling or bracelets out of gold but it doesn't really mean anything except people agree to a unit of value. If people do that with cryptocurrency, it does have the ability to become a real currency. >> I want to pick your perspective on this being an economist, this is is the hottest area of cryptocurrency, it's also known as token economics, is a concept. >> Alan: Token economics. >> You know that's an area that theCUBE, with CUBE coins, experimenting with tokens. Tokens technically are used for things in mobile and whatnot but having a token as a utility in a network is kind of the whole concept, so the big trend that we're seeing and no one's really talking about this yet is instead of having a CTO, Chief Technology Officer, they're looking for a CEO, a Chief Economist Officer, because what you're seeing with the MVP economy we're living in and this gamification which became growth hack which didn't really help users, the notion of decentralized applications and token economics can open the door for some innovation around value and it's an economic problem, how you have a fiscal policy of your token, there's a monetary policy, what's it tied to? A product and a technology, so you now have a now a new, twisted, intertwined mechanism. >> Well you have it as part of this explosion, right? We're at a period of time, it feels like there's a great amount of uncertainly because everything's, you know, there's a lot of different forces and not everybody's in control of them, and you know, it's interesting. Google has this architecture, they call it BeyondCorp, where the concept is like networks are not trusted so I will just put my trust in this device, Duo Security's a great example of a company that's built a technology, a security technology around it which is completely antithetical to everything we know about networks and security. They're saying everything's the internet, I'll just protect the device that it's on. It's a kind of perfect architecture for a world like where nobody is in charge, so just isolate those, buy this, what is a device? It's a token too, it's a person, your iPhone's your personal token. Then over time, systems will form around it. I think we just have to, we always have to learn how to function in a different type of economy. I mean democracy was a new economy 250 years ago that kind of screwed around with most of the world, and a lot of people didn't think it would make it, in fact we went through two World War wars that it was a little on the edge whether democracy was going to make it and it seems to have done okay, like it was pretty good IPO to buy into. You know, in 1776. But it's always got risks and struggles with it. I think if, ultimately it comes together, it's whether a large group of people can find a way to function socially, economically, and with their personal safety in these systems. >> You bring up a great point, so I want to go to the next level in this conversation which is around-- >> Alan: You've got the wrong guy if you're going to the next level because I just tapped out. >> No, no, no we'll get you there. It's my job to get you there. The question is that everyone always wants to look at, whether it's someone looking at the industry or actors inside the industries across the board, mainly the tech and we'll talk about tech, is the question of are we innovating? You brought up some interesting nuances that we talk about with token economics. I mean Steve Jobs had the classic presentation where he had street signs, technology meets liberal arts. That's a mental image that people who know Steve Jobs, know Apple, was a key positioning point for Apple at that time which was let's make computers and technology connect with society, liberal arts. But we were just talking about is the business impact of technology, the economics, and that's just not like just some hand waving, making technology integrate with business. You're in the security business, There are some gamification technology, gamification that's business built into the products. So the question is, if we have the integration of business, technology, economics, policy, society rolling into the product definitions of innovation, does that change the lens and the aperture of what innovation is? >> I think it does, right? The IT industry's somewhere between three and four trillion dollars depends on how it counts in. It grows pretty slowly, it grows by a low single digit. That tells me as composite, like is that, that slow growth is a structural signal about how consumers of technology think in a macro sense. On a micro sense, things shift very rapidly, right? New platforms show up, new applications show up, all kinds of things show up. What I don't think we have done yet, to your point, is in this new integrated world, the role of technology is not just technology anymore. I don't think, you know you said you need Chief Economical Officer, what about Chief Political Officer? What about a Chief Social Officer? How many heads of HR make decisions about the insertion of systems into their business? And that's what this kind of iRobot concept is in my mind which is that you know, we are exceeding control of things that used to be done by human beings to systems and when you see control, the social mores, the political mores, the cultural mores, and the human emotional mores have to move with it. We don't tend to think about things like that. We're like, "I win and my competitors lose." Like technology used to be much more of a zero sum, my tech's better than yours. But the question is not just is my tech better than yours, is my customer better off in their industry for the consumption of my technology of inserting it into their offering or their service? You know what, that is probably going to be the next area of study. The other thing that's very important in whether, any of you have read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, the nature of competition technology used to feel like a flat playing field and now the other thing that's rising is do you have super winners? And then what is the power of the super winners? So you mentioned whether it's Facebook or Google or Amazon or you know, or Microsoft, the FANG companies right? Their roles are so much more significant now than the Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq were in 2000 when you had Intel and Cisco and Oracle and Saht-in it's a different game. >> You're seeing that now. That's a good point, so you're reinforcing kind of this notion that the super players if you will are having an impact, you're mentioning the confluence of these new sectors, you know, government, policy, social are new areas. The question is, this sounds like a strategic imperative for the industry, and we're early so it's not like there's a silver bullet or is there, it doesn't sound like there, so to me that's not really in place yet, I mean. >> Oh no. We're not even in alpha. We have demo code for the new economy and we're trying to get the new model funded. >> John: That's the demo version, not the real version. It's the classic joke. >> Yeah this not the alpha or the beta version that like you're going to go launch it. If people think they're launching it, I think it's a little preliminary and you know, it's not just financial investment, it's like do I buy in? I'll tell you something that's really interesting. I've been visiting a bunch of our customers lately and the biggest change I'd say in the last two years is they now have to prove to their customers they're going to be good custodians of their data. Think about that, like you could go to any digital commerce you do, any website you use and you give them basically the ticket to the Furrier family privacy, you do, but you don't spend a lot of time questioning whether they're really going to protect your data. That has changed. And it's really changing in B2B and in government organizations. >> The role of data to us is regulation, GDPR in Europe, but this is a whole new dynamic. >> It's not just my data because I'm worried about my credit card getting hacked, I'm worried about my identity. Like am I going to show up as a meme in some social media feed that's substituted for the news? I don't want to use the FN word, but you know what I mean? It is a really brave new world. It's like a hyper-democracy and a hyper-risky state at the same time. >> We're living in an area of massive pioneering, new grounds, this is new territory so there's a lot of strategic imperatives that are yet not defined. So now let's take it to how people compete. We were talking before we came on camera, you mentioned the word we're in an MVP economy, minimum viable product concept, and you're seeing that being a standard operating procedure for essentially de-risking this challenge. The old way of you know, build it, ship it, will it work? We're seeing the impact from Hollywood to big tech companies to every industry. >> Well you've got a coffee mug for a company that does both. Amazon does MVP in entertainment, like we'll create one pilot and see if it goes as opposed to ordering a season for 17 million dollars to hey, let's try this feature and put it out on AWS. What's interesting is I don't think we've completely tilted but the question is will buyers of technology, of entertainment products, of any product start to say, "I'll try it." You know like, look, I've done four startups and I always know there's somebody I can go to get and try my early product. There are people that just have an appetite, right? The Jeffrey Moores, early adapter, all the way to the left of the-- >> They'll buy anything new. >> They'll try it, they're interested, they have the time and the resources, or they're just intellectually curious. But it was always a very small group of people in the IT industry. What I think that the MVP economy is starting to do is look, I Kickstarted my wallet. I don't know if I'm the only person who bought that skinny little wallet on Kickstarter, it doesn't matter to me, it had appeal. >> What's the impact of the MVP economy? Is it going to change to the competitive landscape like Peter Thiel was suggesting? Does it change the economics? Does it change the makeup of the team? All of the above? What's your thoughts on how this is going to impact? Certainly the encumbrance will seem to be impacted or not. >> I think two things happen. One, it attacks the structural way markets work. If you go back to classical economics, land, labor, and capital, and people who own those assets, now you add information as a fourth. If those guys were around now they would say that would be the fourth core asset, production, I'm sorry, means of production is the term. The people who can dominate that would dominate a market. Now that that's flattened out, you know, I think it pushes against the traditional structures and it allows new giants to kind of show up overnight. I mean the e-commerce market is rife with companies that have, like look at Stich Fix. A company driven by AI, fashions, tries to figure out what you like, sends it to you every month, just had a monster IPO. We invented, by the way the Spiegal Catalog, except like with a personal assistant and you know, it's changed that in just a short number of years. I think two things happen. One is you'll get new potential giants but certainly new players in the market quickly. Two, it'll force a change in the business model of every company. If you're in a cab in any city in the world, I'm not saying whether the app works there or not, Uber and Lyft has forced every cab company to show you here's the app to call the cab. They haven't quite caught up to the rest of the experience. What I think happens is ultimately, the larger players in an industry have to accommodate that model. For people like me, people who build companies or large technology companies, we may have to start thinking about MVPing of features early on, working with a small group, which is a little what the beta process is but now think about it as a commercial process. Nobody does it, but I bet sure a lot of people will be doing it in five years. >> I want to get your take on that approach because you're talking about really disrupting, re-imagining industry, the Spiegal catalog now becomes digital with technology, so the role of technology in business, we kind of talked about the intertwine of that and its nuance, it's going to get better in my opinion. But specifically the IT, the information technology industry is being disrupted. Used to be like a department, and the IT department will give you your phone on your desk, your PC on your desk or whatever, now that's being shattered and everyone that's participating in that IT industry is evolving. What's your take on the IT industry's disruption? >> Well look, it started 20 years ago when Marc Benioff and Salesforce decided to sell the sales forces instead of IT people, right? They went around to the end buyer. I don't think it's a new trend, I think a lot of technology leaders now figure out how to go to the business buyer directly and make their pitch and interestingly enough, the business buyer, if the IT team doesn't get on board, will do that. >> John: Because of cloud computing and ... >> Because of everything. The modern analog I think in our world is that the developers are increasingly in control. Like my friend Martin Casado up in Andreessen talks about this a lot. The traditional model on our industry is you build a product, you launch it, you launch your company, you work with the traditional analyst firms, you try to get a little bit of halo, you get customer references, those are the things you do and there was a very wall structured, for example, enterprise buying cycle. >> And playbook. >> Playbook, and there's the challenger sale and there's Jeffrey Moore and there's like seeing God. You've got your textbooks on how it's been done. As everything turns into code, the people who work with code for a living increasingly become the front end of your cycle and if you can get to them, that changes. Like I mean think about like, you know, Tom wrote about this actually in The World is Flat, like Linux started as a patchy. It didn't start with the IT department, it started with developers and there was the Linux foundation and now Linux is everything. >> There's a big enemy called the big mini computer, and not operating systems and work stations. >> Wiped out whole parts of Boston and other parts of the world, right? >> Exactly, that's why I moved out here. >> You filed client's server out here. >> I filed a smell of innovation. No but this is interesting because this location of industries is happening, so with that, so they also on the analog, so Martin's at Andreessen, so we'll do a little VC poke there at the VCs because we love them of course, they're being dislocated-- >> I don't (mumbles) my investors. >> Well no, their playbook is being challenged. Here's an example, go big or go home investment thesis seems not to be working. Where if you get too much cash on the front end, with the MVP economy we were just riffing on and with the big super powers, the Amazons and the Googles, you can't just go big or go home, you're going to be going home more than going big. >> I think they know that. I mean Dee-nuh Suss-man who's I think Chief Investment Officer at Nasdaq has a very well known talking line that there are half as many public companies as there were 10 years ago, so the exit scenario for our industry is a little bit different. We now have things like acqui-hires, right we have other models for monetization, but I think what the flip side of it is, we're in the-- >> Adapt or die because the value will shift. Liquidity's changing, which acqui-hires-- >> I think the investment community gets it completely and they spend a lot more time with the developer mindset. In fact I think there's been a doubling down focus on technical founders versus business founders for companies for just that reason because as everything turns to code, you got to hang out with the code community. I think there are actually-- >> You think there'll be more doubling down on technical founders? You do, okay. >> Yeah I think because that is ultimately the shift. There are business model shifts, but it's, you know, I mean like Uber was a business model shift, I mean the technology was the iPhone and GPS and they wrote an app for it, but it was a business model shift, so it can be a business model shift. >> And then scale. >> And then scale and then all of those other things. But I think if you don't think about developers when you're in our, and it's like we built Illumio because a developer could take the product and get started. I mean you can, developers actually can write security policy with our product because there's a class of customers, where as not everyone where that matters. There's other people where the security team is in charge or the infrastructure team is in charge but I think everything is based on zeros and ones and everything is based on code and if you're not sensitive to how code gets bought, consumed, I mean there's a GitHub economy which is I don't even have to write the code, I'll go look at your code and maybe use pieces of it, which has always been around. >> Software disruption is clear. Cloud computing is scale. Agile is fast, and with de-risking capabilities, but the craft is coming back and some will argue, we've talked about on theCUBE before is that, you know, the craftsmanship of software is moving to up the stack in every industry, so-- >> I think it's more like a sports league. I love the NBA, right? In the old days, your professional team, you'd scout people in college. Now they used to scout them in high school, now they're scouting kids in middle school. >> (laughs) That's sad. >> Well what it says is that you have to-- >> How can you tell? >> You know but they can, right? I think you know, your point about it craft, you're going to start tracking developers as they go through their career and invest and bet on them. >> Don't reveal our secrets to theCUBE. We have scouts everywhere, be careful out there. (laughs) >> But think about that, imagine it's like there's such a core focus on hiring from college, but we had an intern from high school two years ago. We hire freshman. >> Okay so let's go, I want to do a whole segment on this but I want to just get this point because we're both sports fans and we can riff on sports all day long. >> I'm just not getting the chance >> And the greatness of Tom Brady >> to talk about the Patriots. >> And Tom Brady's gotten his sixth finger attached to his hands for his sixth ring coming up. No but this is interesting. Sports is highly data driven. >> Alan: Yep. >> Okay and so what you're getting at here, with an MVP economy, token economics is more of a signal, not yet mainstream, but you can almost go there and think okay data driven gives you more accuracy so if you can bring data driven to the tech world, that's kind of an interesting point. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I mean look, I think you have to track everything. You have to follow things, and by the way, we have great tools now, you can track people through LinkedIn. There's all kinds of vehicles to tracking individuals, you track products, you track everything, and you know look, we were talking about this before we went on the show right, people make decisions based on analytics increasingly. Now the craft part is what's interesting and I'm not the complete expert, I'm on the business side, I'm not an engineer by training, but look a lot of people understand a great developer is better than five bad developers. >> Well Mark Andris' 10x is a classic example of that. >> There's clearly a star system involved, so if I think in middle school or in high school, you're going to be a good developer, and I'm going to track your career through college and I'm going to try to figure out how to attach. That's why we started hiring freshmen. >> Well my good friend Dave Girouard started a company that does that, will fund the college education for people that they want to bet on. >> Sure, they're just taking an option in them. >> Yeah, option on their earnings. Exactly. >> They are. >> It sounds like token economics to me. (laughs) >> You know you can sell anything. We are in that economy, you can sell those pieces. The good news is I think it can be a great flattener, meaning that it can move things back more to a meritocracy because if I'm tracking people in high school, I'm not worrying whether they're going to go to Stanford or Harvard or Northwestern, right? I'm going to track their abilities in an era and it's interesting, speaking about craft, you know, what are internships? They're apprenticeships. I mean it is a little bit like a craft, right? Because you're basically apprenticing somebody for a future payout for them coming to work for you and being skilled because they don't know anything when they come and work, I shouldn't say that, they actually know a lot of things. >> Alan, great to have you on theCUBE as always, great to come in and get the update. We'll certainly do more but I'd like to do a segment on you on the startup scene and sort of the venture capital dynamics, we were tracking that as well, we've been putting a lot of content out there. We believe Silicon Valley's a great place. This mission's out there, we've been addressing them, but we really want to point the camera this year at some of the great stuff, so we're looking forward to having you come back in. My final question for you is a personal one. I love having these conversations because we can look back and also look forward. You do a lot of mentoring and you're also helping a lot of folks in the industry within just your realm but also startups and peers. What's your advice these days? Because there's a lot of things, we just kind of talked a lot of it. When people come to you for advice and say, "Alan, I got a career change," or "I'm looking at this new opportunity," or "Hey, I want to start a company," or "I started a company," how is your mentoring and your advisory roles going on these days? Can you share things that you're advising? Key points that people should be aware of. >> Well look, ultimately ... I never really thought about it, you just asked the question so, ultimately, I think to me it comes down to own your own fate. What it means is like do something that you're really passionate about, do something that's going to be unique. Don't be the 15th in any category. Jack Welch taught us a long time ago that the number one player in a market gets 70% of the economic value, so you don't want to play for sixth place. It's like Ricky Bobby said, if you're not first, you're last. (John chuckles) I mean you can't always be first, but you should play for that. I think for a lot of companies now, I think they have to make sure that, and people participating, make sure that you're not playing the old playbook, you're not fighting yesterday's battle. Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind said, "There's a lot of money in building up an empire, "and there's even more money in tearing it down." There are people who enter markets to basically punish encumbrance, take share because of innovation, but I think the really inspirational is you know, look forward five years and find a practical but aggressive path to being part of that side of history. >> So are we building up or are we taking down? I mean it seems to me, if I'm not-- >> You're always doing both. The ocean is always fighting the mountains, right? That is the course of, right? And then new mountains come up and the water goes someplace else. We are taking down parts of the client server industry, the stack that you and I built a lot of our personal career of it, but we're building this new cloud and mobile stack at the same time. And you're point is we're building a new currency stack and we're going to have to build a new privacy stack. It's never, the greatest thing about our industry is there's always something to do. >> How has the environment of social media, things out there, we're theCUBE, we do our thing with events, and just in general, change the growth plans for individuals if you were, could speak to your 23 year old self right now, knowing what you know-- >> Oh I have one piece of advice I give everybody. Take as much risk as humanly possible in your career earlier on. There's a lot of people that have worked with me or worked for me over the years, you know people when they get into their 40s and they go, "I'm thinking about doing a startup," I go, "You know when you got two kids in college "and you're trying to fund your 401K, "working for less cash and more equity may not be "the most comfortable conversation in your household." It didn't work well in my household. I mean I'm like Benjamin Button. I started in big companies, I'm going to smaller companies. Some day it's just going to be me and a dog and one other guy. >> You went the wrong way. >> Yeah I went the wrong way and I took all the risk later. Now I was lucky in part that the transition worked. When I see younger folks, it's always like, do the riskiest thing humanly possible because the penalty is really small. You have to find a job in a year, right? But you know, you don't have the mortgage, and you don't have the kids to support. I think people have to build an arc around their careers that's suitable with their risk profile. Like maybe you don't buy into bitcoin at 19,000. Could be wrong, could be 50,000 sometime, but you know it's kind of 11 now and it's like-- >> Yeah don't go all in on 19, maybe take a little bit in. It's the play and run-- >> Dollar cost averaging over the years, that's my best fidelity advice. I think that's what's really important for people. >> What about the 45 year old executive out there, male or female obviously, the challenges of ageism? We're in economy, a gig economy, whatever you want to call, MVP economics, token economics, this is a new thing. Your advice to someone who's 45 who just says "Hey you're too old for our little hot startup." What should they do? >> Well being on the other side of that history I understand it firsthand. I think that you have an incumbent role in your career to constantly re-educate yourself. If you show up, whether you're a 25, 35, 45, 55, or 65, I hope I'm not working when I'm 75, but you never know right? (mumbles) >> You'll never stop working, that's my prediction. >> But you know have you mastered the new skills? Have you reinvented yourself along the way? I feel like I have a responsibility to feed the common household. My favorite part of my LinkedIn profile, it says, "Obedient worker bee at the Cohen household," because when I go home, I'm not in charge. I've always felt that it's up to me to make sure I'm not going to be irrelevant. That to me is, you know, that to me, I don't worry about ageism, I worry about did I-- >> John: Relevance. >> Yeah did I make myself self-obsolescent? I think if you're going to look at your career and you haven't looked at your career in 15 years and you're trying to do something, you may be starting from a deficit. So the question, what can I do? Before I make that jump, can I get involved, can I advise some small companies? Could I work part time and on the weekends and do some things so that when you finally make that transition, you have something to offer and you're relevant in the dialogue. I think that's, you know, nobody trains you, right? We're not good as an industry-- >> Having a good community, self-learning, growth mindset, always be relevant is not a bad strategy. >> Yeah, I mean because I find increasingly, I see people of all ages in companies. There is ageism, there is no doubt. There's financial ageism and then there's kind of psychological bias ageism, but if you keep yourself relevant and you are the up to speed in your thing, people will beat a path to want to work for you because there's still a skill gap in our industry-- >> And that's the key. >> Yeah, make sure that you're on the right side of that skill gap, and you will always have something to offer to people. >> Alan, great to have you come in the studio, great to see you, thanks for the commentary. It's a special CUBEConversation, we're talking about the future of technology impact the society and a range of topics that are emerging, we're on a pioneering, new generational shift and theCUBE is obviously covering the most important stories in Silicon Valley from figuring out what fake news is to impact to the humans around the world and again, we're doing our part to cover it. Alan Cohen, CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Live here in Las Vegas is the CUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017, our fifth year of covering the massive growth of Amazon Web Services. I'm John Furrier, cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc. with my cohost, Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. We've got two amazing guests here from Druva, a hot startup, a hot company. Guss Gustafson is the executive chairman of the board, and Matt Morgan is the chief marketing officer at Druva. Been on the CUBE but many times. We've had you in the studio. You guys are doing extremely well. You've always got some news for us, always executing. You are like the Amazon of your sector. You've always got stuff going on, what's up? Tell us, share the news. >> Super excited about announcing a new technology, a new product line. It's called Druva Apollo, and Druva Apollo basically completes the cloud data protection story, so as you guys know, we've wrapped endpoints with data protection and data management, and we call it data management as a service. We've wrapped servers with the data management as a service. We took the data, we've protected within the cloud, but with Druva Apollo, what we've announced is cloud-to-cloud data protection, meaning that data that's born inside an EC2 existence, for example, can be wrapped with the same data protection and management as we do for endpoints and the servers. It really is an extension of the platform. Now you can start looking at the data holistically, any data, no matter if it's on the endpoint, the server, or now, within the cloud can be protected within the same controlled data set, getting the full global D2 technology, plus the governance and intelligence capability. I'm really excited about this announcement. >> Now, I want to ask a question on that, because one of the things we talked about in the past on is the cloud has changed the game around perimeter, no more perimeter. >> Right. >> There is no wall from the cloud, a lot of holes to get in there if you are a hacker, but you have a product leadership, but and ease-of-use. One of the things that the cloud is the ability to acquire the resources, right? The server list is out there, how do you guys compete in this now potentially data protection-less world, or is that a term? I mean, you've got to be seamless, but you've got to have good tech. How do you guys do both of those? >> I think you actually just underscore the paradigm shift that's happening. We used to think of data being localized to a server, to a machine, and you had to protect that machine. You wanted to, quote, backup hard drive if you will. Well, data is now in a serverless environment. It's in the air, it's in the cloud, it's tied to applications that may or may not be running within a specific instance. You don't have the control factors, right? >> John: Or some other database. >> That's exactly right. >> Mobile databases now. >> That's exactly the point, right? What we are doing is, because we are stateless, because we exist on these multiple planes, you can have a much more universal conversation around data protection and management, but there is another big "ah-hah" about moving to the cloud for data protection and management, and it's all about ease-of-use and simplicity. Now with a single login, with a single set of credentials, I can access and search across massive data sets that could contain all my endpoints, or it could contain multiple servers, or now it can contain cloud-to-cloud data protected instances. This is a very big deal. Think about the past. If I was a classic hardware acquisition play where I purchased specific silos of data storage or secondary storage, I needed to manage each and every one, and there could be hundreds. I would need to manage hundreds of logins. I had to keep them all up to date. All of that is gone with Druva. >> Let's talk about user experience. This is a developer-focused conference. >> Matt: Totally. >> I'm amazed at the number of shorts and hoodies I've seen (laughing) At a proper enterprise conference. >> John: It's a developer conference turned enterprise. >> Yes, developer conference-- >> Not an enterprise conference. (talking over each other) unlike everybody else. >> The infrastructure company having a hackerthon, for example, but developers don't care about servers. They care about data and interacting with that data. >> Matt: That's right. >> What is the developer experience for recovering and protecting data within Druva? Do they have to go through some backup grandfather-son, son-father set up to back up data? What is the experience? >> There are some vendors that actually still require that. (laughing) Some of them have acted like it's a breakthrough to put it in an appliance, but at the end of the day, it's the same conversation. It's just a localized piece of hardware. Druva's conversation is very different. Data protection is all about where that date is going to be managed and stored, and how you connect it up to the service. By being stateless, we've created an entire architecture that allows all of that data to be collected centrally. Once it's there, the developer has the capability to access it, but the real value comes on the governance side, and on the legal side, so if I'm in a situation where I need to manage critical corporate IP, and know it's protected, and and now I have an audit trail on that data, who has touched it, what they did with it, where it was copied. I have that information. I can search for that information. So it moves a little bit beyond a classic developer point of view and extends that data control to the other players. >> Gus, I want to get your take on this because you are the chairman of the board, but also you have a lot of industry experience. We are seeing a shift in the business now where scale of the cloud is causing a lot of disruption. You guys are taking advantage of it at Druva, but also you are seeing some deviants in Silicon Valley, in our backyard. You've got startups that were born before 2012 with the "go big or go home" attitude, Andreessen Horowitz in Sequoia writing fat checks, $100 million. They can't scale up to compete against this other scale. They got out-scaled, so they end up getting acquired, you know, accu-hired. Barracuda's going private. A gem in the valley, great company, no cloud strategy, so scale is dessimating and creating value at the same time. How should businesses look at this business model paradigm shift where it's not go big or go home, it's find a spot in the ecosystem (laughing) and milk it, or get a position. You can't compete. It's hard to compete against scale. >> Scale, you are right, the whole scale paradigm has now gone from-- it's beyond comprehension, to be honest with you. I think the other thing that we've learned, and this is how Druva looks at this, you can't compress experience. You can't compress learning and application of learning, and so for eight years plus we've been at this game thinking about scale, and in some cases, to be quite blunt, we experience it with our customers because there is no predetermined path in a lot of these things, but for companies of scale today, I think you would have to have a cloud-first mentality. That's what Druva brought to the party. I think we are seeing a lot of people that have looked at this and said, "How do I actually get all the way over here?" Our message is really simple. Let's just get started. Whatever applications or use cases it is to get started, whether it is endpoint, whether it's a server, cloud apps, but we've thought about and built the vision around the entire end-to-end strategy, so we will bump into things at scale. We will figure out how to handle those. We recently brought on board a customer with 75,000 employees, another one with another 50,000, and we've done this before, but those are new layers of scale. >> John : You guys are taking a pragmatic approach. >> We are. >> You guys aren't trying to overbuild, get over your skis, or whatever people call it, but don't create a situation where there is diseconomies. Leverage what you've got, and know your place in the world. >> If you don't mind, I'll just make a comment on the funding round we just received. We just received $80 million in net new funds. It was a preemptive interest in investing in the company. Quite honestly, we could have potentially taken more, but the focuses are on executing what we can actually do today. >> More discipline too. The less capital you take-- >> There is that. >> The more discipline. >> There is that, but you know when you think about the growth and the opportunity, in large part for us, it's all about staying pragmatic-focused and executing well on what is ahead of us. >> The product market fit is always one they talk about with the funding, but also it's the sales channels. If you try to compete with sales, say Amazon for instance, others have tried, it's hard. I know a few companies getting bought up by private equity left and right because they just, size wise, can never get there. >> Gus: Right. >> You guys are inside the tornado, as Jeffrey Moore would say, which is kind of the strategy for you guys. You get in the cloud, you've got product discipline. How is it going on the sales side? What are some of the metrics you are seeing? Any success metrics you can share customer success? >> Yeah, absolutely, and you know for us, AWS is a strategic partner and a great partner in terms of the alliance that we have around bring in net new customers to the cloud, working with them, et cetera, so in the last six months we've added 300 net new enterprise customers. That brings our total to well over 4,000 enterprise customers, and we've done that by, again, staying very focused around that first bite, a very simple approach, and then once people start, they see how simple it is, so you had asked about the developer experience, Keith, it is so simple. In some cases what we say in their actual experience is they don't believe us. When Matt was talking about the "ah-hah" moment, once they experience it, they continue to build, and build, and build. >> So the developers, again, we've talked about this because we are at a developer conference, they just want to solve problems. One of the things that we've always kind of harped on developers about, and Matt, you talked about this a little bit with governance, with data governance, GDPR is coming to be fully enforced May of next year. >> Matt: That's right. >> Very serious consequences for companies that don't kind of handle that. Have you guys seen an uptick in conversations around GDPR with customers and how Druva helps to mitigate some of the challenges around GDPR? >> Keith, one of the most amazing things that's come out of GDPR is the rise of this new executive persona, the chief data protection officer. >> John: Oh, another one! >> For a vendor that's in the data protection business, it is wonderful to have a C-level executive responsible for the value that we deliver. >> Some of the penalties is 4% of revenue. >> How many chiefs will there be these days? >> Well that is true, there are a lot of chiefs. >> There's a lot of chiefs in the kitchen. >> There are a lot of chiefs. >> More than Indians. Oh you guys are the-- >> Yeah, I'm going to defend the chief data protection officer. >> Keith: Yeah, we will keep that one. >> I'll keep that one. (laughing) You keep in mind that the risks that people are dealing with, and GDPR is an extension of extending individual rights to the data sets that are collected on them. The idea of the right to be forgotten. >> You guys have challenges not even within the customers, the external customers, but an organization with 75,000 users, they have rights in themselves, so there is this differentiation between protect internal corporate data and that policy, and keeping that data. If I'm a developer searching for data, I'm just searching for data, so how do I control, what's the controls available for making sure that that doesn't go afoul of GDPR? >> Absolutely, so we have phenomenal security capabilities that are built into our product both from an identification point of view giving rights and privileges, as well as protecting that data from any third-party access. All of this information is going to be compliant with these regulations beyond GDPR. There is enormous regulations around data that require us to keep our security levels as high as we go. In fact, we would argue that AWS itself is now typically more secure, more secure than your classic data set. >> Yeah, they've done the work. >> So we are building on top of the AWS security framework which gives you even better security, and because, this is important, it's off-site, logically by conception of the cloud, we also add immutability, so when you think about ransomware, ransomware is not going to crawl up to the cloud in the classic way that you would have the type of infections that have happened. Druva is going to give you the capability to ensure that that data is whole, and you can recover from those types of malware attacks. It's a little bit of a pivot from GDPR, but I think all of this stuff around data risks are related. >> Talking about the government, public sector market, you guys just got FedRAMP approved. >> Yes. >> It's a big certification. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> What does that mean for your business? More customers coming in on the public-sector side? >> Public-sector is off the charts for us. The FedRAMP ATO certification, we are the only data protection vendor that has that, and it gives us the capability to qualify for data protection possibilities within the public-sector. I don't know if, Gus, you want to comment anymore on that. >> John: Visa cross is gonna love that. >> It's a massive market opportunity. It also puts you at a higher level in terms of, obviously, the security capabilities that they went through and tested to give us the ATO, which is the authority to operate in the FedRAMP sector. It opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity. When you look at, kind of, the Fortune one as far as US government, this is a massive opportunity for us. >> Well, save the date in Washington DC. This morning they announced the AWS Public Sector Summit on June 20th and 21st. The CUBE will be there. I've got the verbal. Well, we already have the deal with Theresa Carlson. The CUBE will be there probably with two sets too. That's turned into a re:Invent. It grew from a hotel room two years ago, to a ball room, to now the convention center, and they're expecting again, this year in DC, Amazon Public Sector Summit, everything, nonprofits, gov cloud, huge. >> Yeah, it's amazing. AWS has become the 21st-century operating system, and at first it was for individuals or small businesses, but now it is the enterprise. Look around, right? We are all re-platforming, if you will, to be able to provide this architecture as the best possibility. >> So you're betting on Amazon? >> Absolutely. >> Other clouds? >> So we are a multi-cloud provider. We have a solution that also runs on Microsoft Dejour. There's lots of customers that choose Dejour. They are Microsoft customers. They're customers that enjoy the different data centers that Microsoft offers, but the vast majority of our customers really embrace the AWS solution. >> You'll protect whatever the customer needs. Whatever environment they have, you'll support the major platforms? >> We're gonna support either one, and you've got to realize the idea of different data centers that are localized to different countries give you different soverignty options with Microsoft you may not get with AWS, at least not today. >> Yeah, and same with Google too. Google has not a big presence outside the US. >> That's right. >> So they're limited. >> So data protection is starting to become a catch-all term. The, what, $80 million in funding the last round? >> Gus: Yes. >> It's not just about data protection, but now multi-cloud data mobility. Being able to take my data, my hybrid IT data and move it to where I need to move it to. Can you talk about Druva's capability when it comes to data mobility? >> One of the most popular use cases of the acquisition of the Druva technology is all around MNA. The opportunity to bring in data from a variety of different endpoints and bring their customers new companies that are being acquired into the fold. You have all kinds of governance capabilities you could do on that data, and you could prevent the typical data leakage. The employee turnover, where people basically walk out the door. They take their hard drive with them, or take the computer. It's not being tracked, and you don't know what data was there, and you can't track it. With Druva, you have that data. They can take the hard drive. You know exactly what they took. You have information, and you have saved that IP for the company, and you gained that. If I'm acquiring a company, that information obviously is important to me. >> Thanks Gus, thanks for coming on the CUBE, thanks for the update. Congratulations on all the business success and public sector is right around the corner as well, another growing market. Back up and recovery data protection is hot in the cloud, it's hard to do. These guys have got a great solution in Druva. It's the CUBE bringing you more live coverage. We're taking a short break. We'll be right back with our next guest. Stay with us.

(techy music playing) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc., also cohost of theCUBE. We're here for a CUBE Conversation on Thought Leader Thursday and I'm here with Chris Cummings, who's a senior manager, advisor, big-time industry legend, but he's also the Chasm Group, right now, doer, Crossing the Chasm, famous books and it's all about the future. Formerly an exec at Netapp, been in the storage and infrastructure cloud tech business, also friends of Stanford. Season tickets together to go to the tailgates, but big Cal game coming up of course, but more importantly a big-time influence in the industry and we're going to do some drill down on what's going on with cloud computing, all the buzzword bingo going on in the industry. Also, AWS, Amazon Web Services re:Invent is coming up, do a little preview there, but really kind of share our views on what's happening in the industry, because there's a lot of noise out there. We're going to try to get the signal from the noise, thanks for watching. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you so much for having me, glad to be here. >> Great to see you, so you know, you have seen a lot of waves of innovation and right now you're working with a lot of companies trying to figure out the future. >> That's right. >> And you're seeing a lot of significant industry shifts. We talk about it on theCUBE all the time. Blockchain from decentralization all the way up to massive consolidation with hyper-convergence in the enterprise. >> Mm-hmm. >> So a lot of action, and because of the day the people out in the marketplace, whether it's a developer or a CXO, CIO, CDO, whatever enterprise leader's doing the transformations. >> Chris Collins: We got all of them. >> They're trying to essentially not go out of business. A lot of great things are happening, but at the same time a lot of pressure on the business is happening. So, let's discuss that, I mean, you are doing this for work at the Chasm Group. Talk about your role, you were formerly at Netapp, so I know you know the storage business. >> Right. >> So we're going to have a great conversation about storage and impact infrastructure, but at the Chasm Group how are you guys framing the conversation? >> Yeah, Chasm Group is really all about helping these companies process their thinking, think about if they're going to get to be a platform out in the industry. You can't just go and become a platform in the industry, you got to go knock down problem, problem, problem, solution, solution, solution. So we help them prioritize that and think about best practices for achieving that. >> You know, Dave Alante, my co-CEO, copartner, co-founder at SiliconANGLE Media and I always talk about this all the time, and the expression we use is if you don't know what check mate looks like you shouldn't be playing chess, and a lot of the IT folks and CIOs are in that mode now where the game has changed so much that sometimes they don't even know what they're playing. You know, they've been leaning on this Magic Quadrant from Gartner and all these other analyst firms and it's been kind of a slow game, a batch kind of game, now it's real time. Whatever metaphor you want to use, the game has changed so the chessboard has changed. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> So I got to get your take on this because you've been involved in strategy, been on product, you worked at growth companies, big companies, start-ups, and now looking at the bigger picture, what is the game? I mean, right now if you could lay out the chessboard, what are people looking at, what is the game? >> So, we deal a lot with customer conversations and that's where it all kind of begins, and I think what we found is this era of pushing product and just throwing stuff out there. It worked for a while but those days are over. These folks are so overwhelmed. The titles you mentioned, CIO, CDO, all the dev ops people, they're so overwhelmed with what's going on out there. What they want is people to come in and tell them about what's happening out there, what are their peers doing and what problems are they trying to solve in order and drive it that way. >> And there's a lot of disruption on the product side. >> Yes. >> So tech's changing, obviously the business models are changing, that's a different issue. Let's consider the tech things, you have-- >> Mm-hmm. >> A tech perspective, let's get into the tech conversation. You got cloud, you got private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, micro-machine learning, hyper-machine learning, hyper-cloud, all these buzzwords are out there. It's buzzwords bingo. >> Chris: Right. >> But also the reality is you got Amazon Web Services absolutely crushing it, no doubt about it. I mean, I've been looking at Oracle, I've been looking at Google, I've been looking at SAP, looking at IBM, looking at Alibaba, looking at Microsoft, the game is really kind of a cloak and dagger situation going on here. >> That's right. >> A lot of things shifting on the provider side, but no doubt scale is the big issue. >> Chris: That's right. >> So how does a customer squint through all this? >> The conversations that I've had, especially with the larger enterprises, is they know that they've got to be able to adopt and utilize the public cloud capabilities, but they also want to retain that degree of control, so they want to maintain, whether it's their apps, their dev ops, some pieces of their infrastructure on prem, and as you talked about that transition it used to be okay, well we thought about cloud was equal to private cloud, then it became public cloud. Hybrid cloud, people are hanging on to hybrid cloud, sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons. Right reasons are because it's critical for their business. You look at somebody, for instance, in media and entertainment. They can't just push everything out there. They've got to retain control and really have their hands around that content because they've got to be able to distribute it, right? But then you look at some others that are hanging on for the wrong reasons, and the wrong reasons are they want to have their control and they want to have their salary and they want to have their staff, so boy, hybrid sounds like a mix that works. >> So I'm going to be having a one-on-one with Andy Jassy next week, exclusive. I do that every year as part of theCUBE. He's a great guy, good friend, become a good friend, because we've been a fan of him when no one loved Amazon. We saw the early, obviously at SiliconANGLE, now he's the king of the industry, but he's a great manager, great executive, and has done a great job on his ethos of Bezos and Amazon. Ship stuff faster, lower prices, the flywheel that Amazon uses. Everything's kind of on that-- And they own Twitch, which we stream, too, and we love. But if you could ask Andy any questions what questions would you ask him if you get to have that one-on-one? >> Yeah, well, it stems from conversations I've had with customers, which was probably once a week I would be talking to a CIO or somebody on that person's staff, and they'd slide the piece of paper across and say this is my bill. I had no idea that this was what AWS was going to drive me from a billing perspective, and I think we've seen... You know, we've had all kinds of commentary out there about ingress fees, egress fees, all of that sort of stuff. I think the question for Andy, when you look at the amount of revenue and operating margin that they are generating in that business, how are they going to start diversifying that pricing strategy so that they can keep those customers on without having them rethink their strategy in the future. >> So are you saying that when they slide that piece of paper over that the fees are higher than expected or not... Or low and happy, they're happy with the prices. >> Oh, they're-- I think they're-- I think it's the first time they've ever thought that it could be as expensive as on-premise infrastructure because they just didn't understand when they went into this how much it was going to cost to access that data over time, and when you're talking about data that is high volume and high frequency data, they are accessing it quite a bit, as opposed to just stale, cold, dead stuff that they want to put off somewhere else and not have to maintain. >> Yeah, and one of the things we're seeing that we pointed at the Wikibon team is a lot of these pricings are... The clients don't know that they're being billed for something that they may not be using, so AI or machine learning could come in potentially. So this is kind of what you're getting at. >> Exactly. >> The operational things that Amazon's doing to keep prices low for the customer, not get bill shock. >> Chris: That's right. >> Okay, so that's cool. What else would you ask him about culture or is there anything you would ask him about his plans... What else would you ask him? >> I think another big thing would be just more plans on what's going to be done around data analytics and big data. We can call it whatever we want, but they've been so good at the semi-structured or unstructured content, you know, when we think about AWS and where AWS was going with S3, but now there's a whole new phenomenon going on around this and companies are as every bit as scared about that transition as they were about the prior cloud transition, so what really are their plans there when they think about that, and for instance, things like how does GPU processing come into play versus CPU processing. There's going to be a really interesting discussion I think you're going to have with him on that front. >> Awesome, let's talk about IT. IT and information technology departments formerly known as DP, data processing, information-- All that stuff's changed, but there were still guys that were buying hardware, buying Netapp tries that you used to work for, buying EMC, doing data domain, doing a lot of stuff. These guys are essentially looking at potentially a role where-- I mean, for instance, we use Amazon. We're a big customer, happy customer. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> We don't have those guys. >> Chris: Right. >> So if I'm an IT guy I might be thinking shit, I could be out of a job, Amazon's doing my job, so I'm not saying that's the case but that's certainly a fear. >> Chris: Absolutely. >> But the business models have to shift from old IT to new IT. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> What does that game look like? What is this new IT game? Is it more, not a department view, is it more of a holistic view, and what's the sentiment around the buyers and your customers that you talk to around how do they message to the IT guys, like, look, there's higher valued jobs you could go to. >> Right. >> You mention analytics... >> That's right. >> What's the conversation? Certainly some guys won't make the transition and might not make it, but what's the narrative? >> Well, I think that's where it just starts with what segment are you talking about, so if you look at it and say just break it down between the large enterprise, the uber enterprise that we've seen for so long, mid-size and smaller, the mid-size and smaller are gone, okay. Outside of just specific industries where they really need that control, media and entertainment might be an example. That mid-size business is gone for those vendors, right? So those vendors are now having to grab on and say I'm part of that cloud phenomenon, my hyper-cloud of the future. I'm part of that phenomenon, and that becomes really the game that they have to play, but when you look at those IT shops I think they really need to figure out where are they adding value and where are they just enabling value that's being driven by cloud providers, and really that's all they are is a facilitator, and they've got to shift their energy towards where am I adding value, and that becomes more that-- >> That's differentiation, that's where differentiation is, so non-differentiated labor is the term that Wikibon analysts use. >> Oh, okay. >> That's going down, the differentiated labor is either revenue generating or something operationally more efficient, right? >> That's right, and it's all going to be revenue generating now. I mean, I used to be out there talking about things like archiving, and archiving's a great idea. It's something where I'm going to save money, okay, but I got this many projects on my list if I'm a CIO of where I can save money. I'm being under pressure about how am I going to go generate money, and that's where I think people are really shifting their eyeballs and their attention, is more towards that. >> And you got IOT coming down the pike. I mean, we're hearing is from what I hear from CIOs when we have a few in-depth conversations is look, I got to get my development team ramped up and being more cloud native, more microservice and I got to get more app development going that drives revenue for my business, more efficiency. >> Chris: Right. >> I have a digital transformation across the company in terms of hiring culture and talent. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> And then I got pressure to do IOT. >> Chris: Right. >> And I got security, so of those five things, IOT tends to fall out, security takes preference because of the security challenges, and then that's already putting their plate full right there. >> That's right, that's real time and those people are-- >> Those are core issues. >> Putting too much pressure on that right now and then you're thinking about IT and in the meantime, by the way, most of these places don't have the dev ops shop that's operating on a flywheel, right? So you're not... What's it, Goldman Sachs has 5,000 developers, right? That's bigger than most tech companies, so as a consequence you start thinking about well, not everybody looks like that. What the heck are they going to do in the future. They're going to have to be thinking about new ways of accessing that type of capability. >> This is where the cloud really shines in my mind. I think in the cloud, too, it's starting to fragment the conversations. People will try to pigeonhole Amazon. I see Microsoft-- I've been very critical of Microsoft in their cloud because-- First of all, I love the move that they're making. I think it's a smart move business-wise, but they bundle in 365 Office, that's not really cloud, it's just SAS, so then you start getting into the splitting of the hairs of well, SAS is not included in cloud. But come on, SAS is cloud. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Well, maybe Amazon should include their ecosystem that would be a trillion dollar revenue number, so all companies don't look the same. >> That's right. >> And so from an enterprise that's a challenge. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Do I got to hire developers for Asger, do I got to hire developers for Amazon, do I got to hire developers for Google. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> There's no stack consistency across private enterprises to cloud. >> Chris: So I have-- >> Because I'm a storage guy, I've got Netapp drives and now I've got an Amazon thing. I like Amazon, but now I got to go Asger, what the hell do I do? >> I got EMCs here and I got Nimbles there and HP and I've still got tape from IBM from five decades ago, so, John, I got a great term for you that's going to be a key one, I think, in the ability. It's called histocompatibility, and this is really about... >> Oh, here we go. Let's get nerdy with the tape glasses on. >> It's really about the ability to be able to inter-operate with all this system and some of these systems are live systems, they're current systems. Some of it's garbage that should've been thrown out a long time ago and actually recycled. So I think histocompatibility is going to be a really, really big deal. >> Well, keep the glasses on. Let's get down in the weeds here. >> Okay. >> I like the-- With the pocket protector, if you had the pocket protector we'd be in good shape. >> Yep. >> So, vendors got to compete with these buzzwords, become buzzword bingo, but there are trends that you're seeing. You've done some analysis of how the positionings and you're also a positioning guru as well. There's ways to do it and that's a challenge is for suppliers, vendors who want to serve customers. They got to rise above the noise. >> Chris: That's right. >> That's a huge problem. What are you seeing in terms of buzzword bingo-- >> Oh, my goodness. >> Because like I said, I used to work for HP in the old days and they used to have an expression, you know, don't call it what it is because that's boring and make it exciting, so the analogy they used was sushi is basically cold, dead fish. (laughing) So, sushi is a name for cold, dead fish. >> Chris: Yeah. >> So you don't call your product cold, dead fish, you call it sushi. >> Chris: Right. >> That was the analogy, so in our world-- >> Chris: That was HP-UX. >> That was HP-UX, you know, HP was very engineering. >> Yes. >> That's not-- Sushi doesn't mean anything. It's cold, dead fish, that's what it is. >> Right. >> That's what it does. >> That's right. >> So a lot of vendors can error in that they're accurate and their engineers, they call it what it is, but there's more sex appeal with some better naming. >> Totally. >> What are you seeing in terms of the fashion, if you will, in terms of the naming conventions. Which ones are standing out, what's the analysis. >> Well, I think the analysis is this, you start with your adjectives with STEM words, John, and what I mean by that is things like histocompatibility. It could start with things like agility, flexibility, manageability, simplicity, all those sorts of things, and they've got to line those terms up and go out there, but I think the thing that right now-- >> But those are boring, I saw a press release saying we're more agile, we're the most effective software platform with agility and dev ops, like what the hell does that mean? >> Yeah, I think you also have to combine it with a heavy degree of hyperbole, right? So hyperbole, an off-the-cuff statement that is so extreme that you'd never really want to be tested on it, so an easy way to do that is to add hyper in front of all that. So it's hyper-manageability, right, and so I think we're going to see a whole new class of words. There are 361 great adjectives with STEMs, but-- >> Go through the list. >> Honestly. >> Go through the list that you have. >> I mean, there's so many, John, it's... >> So hyper is an easy one, right? >> Hyper is easy, I think that's a very simple one. I think now we also see that micro is so big, right, because we're talking about microservices and that's really the big buzzword in the industry right now. So everything's going to be about micro-segmenting your apps and then allowing those apps to be manifest and consumed by an uber app, and ultimately that uber app is an ultra app, so I think ultra is going to be another term that we see heading into the spectrum as well. >> And so histocompatibility is a word you mentioned, just here in my notes. >> Yep. >> You mentioned, so histo means historical. >> Exactly. >> So it means legacy. >> Chris: That's right. >> So basically backwards compatible would be the boring kind of word. >> Chris: That's right. >> And histocompatibility means we got you covered from legacy to cloud, right. >> Uh-huh. >> Or whatever. >> You bet. >> Micro-segmentility really talks to the granularity of data-driven things, right? >> That's right, another one would be macro API ability, it's kind of a mouthful, but everyone needs an API. I think we've seen that and because they're consuming so many different pieces and trying to assemble those they've got to have something that sits above. So macro API ability, I think, is another big one, and then lastly is this notion of mobility, right. We talk about-- As you said earlier, we talked about clouds and going from-- It's not just good enough to talk about hybrid cloud now, it's about multi-cloud. Well, multi-cloud means we're thinking about how we can place these apps and the data in all kinds of different spaces, but I've got to be able to have those be mobile, so hyper-mobility becomes a key for these applications as well. >> So hyper-scale we've seen, we've seen hyper-convergence. Hyper is the most popular-- >> Chris: Absolutely. >> Adjective with STEM, right? >> Chris: It's big. >> STEM words, okay, micro makes sense because, you know, micro-targeting, micro-segmentation, microservices, it speaks to the level of detail. >> Chris: Right. >> I love that one. >> Chris: Right. >> Which ones aren't working in your mind? We see anything that's so dead on arrival... >> Sure, I think there's a few that aren't working anymore. You got your agility, you got your flexibility, you got your manageability, and you got your simplicity. Okay, I could take all four of those and toss those over there in the trash because every vendor will say that they have those capabilities for you, so how does that help you distinguish yourself from anyone else. >> So that's old hat. >> It's just gone. >> Yeah, never fight fashion, as Jeremy Burton at EMC, now at Dell Technologies, said on theCUBE. I love that, so these are popular words. This is a way to stand out and be relevant. >> That's right. >> This is the challenge for vendors. Be cool and relevant but not be offensive. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what's your take on the current landscape for things like how do companies market themselves. Let's say they get the hyper in all the naming and the STEM words down. They have something compelling. >> Chris: Right. >> Something that's differentiated, something unique, how do companies stand out above the crowd, because the current way is advertising's not working. We're seeing fake news, you're seeing the analyst firms kind of becoming more old, slower, not relevant. I mean, does the Magic Quadrant really solve that problem or are they just putting that out there? If I'm a marketer, I'm a B2B marketer. >> Yeah. >> Obviously besides working with theCUBE and our team, so obviously great benefits. Plug there, but seriously, what do you advise? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, you know, you think about marketing as not only reaching your target market, but also enabling your sales force and your channel partners, and frankly, the best thing that I've found in doing that, John, is starting every single piece that we would come up with with a number. How much value are we generating, whether it's zero clicks to get this thing installed. It's 90% efficiency, and then prove it. Don't just throw it out there and say isn't that good enough, but numbers matter because they're meaningful and they stimulate the conversation, and that's ultimately what all of this is. It's a conversation about is this going to be relevant for you, so that's the thing that I start with. >> So you're say being in the conversation matters. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> What's the thought leadership view, what's your vision on how a company should be looking at thought leadership. Obviously you're seeing more of a real-time-- I call it the old world was batch marketing. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> E-mail marketing, do the normal things, get the white papers, do those things. You know, go to events, have a booth, and then the new way is real-time. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> Things are happening very fast-- >> That's right. >> In the market, people are connected now. It's a global, basically, message group. >> That's right. >> Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and all this stuff. >> It's really an unfulfilled need that you guys are really looking to fill, which is to provide that sort of real-time piece of it, but I think vendors trip over themselves and they think about I need a 50 page vision. They don't need a 50 page vision. What they need is here are a couple of dimensions on which this industry is going to change, and then commit to them. I think the biggest problem that many vendors have is they won't commit, they hedge, as opposed to they go all in behind those and one thing we talk about at Chasm Institute is if you're going to fail, fail fast, and that really means that you commit full time behind what you're pushing. >> Yeah, and of course what the Chasm, what it's based upon, you got to get to mainstream, get to early pioneers, cross the chasm. The other paradigm that I always loved from Jeffrey Moore was inside the tornado. Get inside the tornado because if you don't get in you're going to be spun out, so you've got to kind of get in the game, if you will. >> Chris: That's right. >> Don't overthink it, and this is where the iteration mindset comes in, "agile" start-up or "agile" venture. Okay, cool, so let's take a step back and reset to end the segment here. >> Mm-hmm. >> Re:Invent's coming up, obviously that's the big show of the year. VMworld, someone was commenting on Facebook VMworld 2008 was the big moment where they're comparing Amazon now to VMworld in 2008. >> Chris: Right. >> But you know, Pat Gelsinger essentially cut a great deal with Andy Jassy on Vmware. >> Chris: Right. >> And everything's clean, everything's growing, they're kicking ass. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> They got a private cloud and they got the hybrid cloud with Amazon. >> Yeah, it's that VMcloud on Amazon, that really seems to be the thing that's really driving their move into the future, and I think we're going to see from both of those folks, you are going to see so much on containers. Containerization, ultra-containers, hyper-containers, whatever it may be. If you're not speaking container language, then you are yesterday's news, right? >> And Kubernetes' certainly the orchestration piece right underneath it to kind of manage it. Okay, final point, what's in store for the legacy, because you're seeing a few major trends that we're pointing out and we're watching very closely, which really I put into two buckets. I know Wikibon's a more disciplined approach, I'm more simple about that. The decentralization trend we're seeing with Blockchain, which is kind of crazy and bubbly but very infrastructure relevant, this decentralized, disrupting, non-decentralized incumbence, so that's one trend and the other one is what cloud's doing to legacy IT vendors, Oracle, you know, these traditional manufacturers like that HP and Dell and all these guys, and Netapp which is transforming. So you've got disruption on both sides, cloud and like a decentralized model, apps, what's the position, view, from your standpoint, for these legacy guys? >> It's going to be quite an interesting one. I think they have to ride the wave, and I'll steal this from Peter Levine, from Andreessen, right? He talks about the end of cloud computing, and really what that is is just basically saying everything is going to be moving to the edge and there's going to be so much more compute at the edge with IOT and you can think about autonomous vehicles as the ultimate example of that, where you're talking about more powerful computers, certainly, than this that are sitting in cars all over the place, so that's going to be a big change, and those vendors that have been selling into the core data center for so long are going to have to figure out their way of being relevant in that universe and move towards that. And like we were talking about before, commit to that. >> Yeah. >> Right, don't just hedge, but commit to it and move. >> What's interesting is that I was talking with some executives at Alibaba when I was in China for part of the Alibaba Cloud Conference and Amazon had multiple conversations with Andy Jassy and his team over the years. It's interesting, a lot of people don't understand the nuances of kind of what's going on in cloud, and what I'm seeing is it's essentially, to your point, it's a compute game. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Right, so if you look at Intel for instance, Alibaba told me on my interview, they don't view Intel as a chip company anymore, they're a compute company, right, and CJ Bruno, one of the executives there, reaffirmed that. So Intel's looking at the big picture saying the cloud's a computer. Intel Inside is a series of compute, and you mentioned that the edge, Jassy is building a set of services with his team around core compute, which has storage, so this is essentially hyper-converged cloud. >> That's right. >> This is a pretty big thing. What's the one thing that people might not understand about this. If you could kind of illuminate this trend. I mean, the old Intel now turned into the new Intel, which is a monster franchise continuing to grow. >> Mm-hmm. >> Amazon, people see the numbers, they go oh, my god, they're a leader, but they have so much more headroom. >> Chris: Right, right. >> And they've got everyone else playing catch up. >> Yeah. >> What's the real phenomenon going on here? >> I think you're going to see more of this aggregation phenomenon where one vendor can't solve this entire problem. I mean, look at most recently, in the last two weeks, Intel and AMD getting together. Who would've thought that would happen? But they're just basically admitting we got a real big piece of the equation, Intel, and then AMD can fulfill this niche because they're getting killed by NVIDIA, but you're going to see just more of these industry conglomerations getting together to try and solve the problem. >> Just to end the segment, this is a great point. NVIDIA had a niche segment, graphics, now competing head to head with Intel. >> Chris: That's right. >> So essentially what's happening is the landscape is completely changing. Once competitors no longer-- New entrants, new competitors coming in. >> Chris: Mm-hmm. >> So this is a massive shift. >> Chris: It is. >> Okay, Chris Cummings here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier of CUBE Conversation. There's a massive shift happening, the game has changed and it's incumbent upon start-ups, venture capital, you know, Blockchain, ICOs or whatever's going on. Look at the new chessboard, look at the game and figure it out. Of course, we'll be broadcasting live at AWS re:Invent in a couple weeks. Stay tuned, more coverage, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)

>> Man: Let me check. >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 20 17. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Day two, we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. This is Silicon Angle's The Cube coverage of IBM's cloud event. The CEO, Ginni Rometty, was just on stage. We're kickin' off wall to wall coverage for three days. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante, here for all three days. >> And, our next guest is Andy Lin, who's the VP of (mumbles) Mark Three Systems. A, 20 plus year IBM platinum partner. Doin' some real cutting edge work with cognitive as Ginny Rometty said cognitive to the core, is IBM's core strategy. Data first, enterprise strong is kind of the buzz words. Andy, welcome to The Cube. Appreciate you comin' on. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> So, obviously, enterprise strong, you know, it's, it's a kind of whole nother, you know, conversation that we can go deep on, but data first and cognitive to the core is really kind of the things that you guys are really getting into. All kinds of data types. Automating it and making it almost frictionless to move insights out. So, take a minute to explain what Mark Three's doing and what your role is with the company. >> Sure. Absolutely. So, I'm Vice President of strategy in Mark Three, so I work sort of across all our initiatives, especially areas that are emerging. Just a little bit about Mark Three, just historically for background purposes. So, we're a 22 year IBM platinum partner, as you pointed out. We actually started in the mid 90's, actually doing IT infrastructure around the IBM stack at that time. So, we sort of been with IBM over the last 20 years since the beginning. We've sort of grown up throughout the stack as IBM's evolved over the last two decades. About two and a half years ago, we started a digital development unit, called BlueChasm. And what BlueChasm does, is it basically builds open digital and cognitive platforms on the IBM cloud that are around a lot of services you pointed out. And, we basically designed it based on use cases that the ecosystem and our clients talk about. And, to give you a couple examples, one of the, one of the big ones that we're seeing a lot of interest around is called video recon. Video recon is a video analytics platform that's API enabled and open at it's core. So, regardless of where the video comes from, if it's a content management system, if it's a camera, we're able to basically take in that video, basically watch and listen to the video using Watson and some elements of our own intellectual property. And, then basically return insights based on what it sees and hears along with time stamps, back to the user to actually take action. >> Yeah. I love the name BlueChasm. It brings up, you know, Jeffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. Blue, IBM, big blue, so you know, it's a nice clever play. The BlueChasm opportunity. So, in your mind, for people watching, squint through some of the trends and extract out where you see these opportunities. Because if you're talkin' about new opportunities are emerging because of cloud horsepower and compute and storage and all the greatness of cloud, and you got real time analytics kind of really hittin' the main stream. That's going to, that's highlighted by internet of things is you can't go anywhere these days without hearing about autonomous vehicles, industrial (mumbles) things, AI, Mark Benioff was sayin', you know, we've seen the movies like Terminator and we've all dreamed about AI, so we can kind of get excited about the prospects. But, the chasm you're talkin' about, this is where these things that were ungettable before, unreachable new things, what are some of those things that you guys are doin' in that chasm? >> Yeah, so I think some of the things that we're doing are basically enabling, like I'll use video recon as an example, right, we're enabling a class to be able to get new insights using basically computer vision, but in an open and accessible way, that they've never had been able to do before. Vision itself, I don't think is new or revolutionary. You know, a lot of folks are doing it, self driving cars, etcetera. >> John: Yeah. >> But, I think what is new is being able to make it open and easily accessible to the normal enterprise, the normal service provider. Up to now, it's been, you know you've had, really had to have your own team of, you know, really, really deep AI develops or PHD's to be able to produce it for your own platform. What we're trying to do is basically demarketize that. >> John: Yeah. >> So, to give you an example, some use cases that we're, we're sort of working on today, the ability to do things like read meters and gages, as an example, with a camera. That way you can avoid a situation where somebody has to walk around all the time, you know, look at different things that could be dangerous. That there could be issues actually looking at what you see from a metering perspective. Or to be able to, for instance, for in the media entertainment industry or the video production industry, be able to do things like identify shot types, be able to more quickly allow our enterprise users in that particular space to be able to create video content quickly. And, the underlying theme with all this, I think it's really about speed to market. And, how quickly can you iterate and please whatever your customers in that particular space that you're in. >> So with the video recon, so your, your videos are searchable, essentially. >> (Andy) Correct. >> So, so what do you do? Use Watson, natural language processing to sort of translate them? Now (mumbles), of course, you know, NLP is maybe I don't know 75, 80 percent accurate, how do you close that gap? >> Yeah, so video recon does both visual and audio. So, the audio portion you are correct. There is some degree of trade off in accuracy relative to what I think the average human can do today. Assuming the human is focused and able to really tag these videos accurately. So, we are able to train it based on things like proper words and things that are enterprise focused. Because I know there, there are a lot of different ways that I think you can maybe attack this today from a video analytics perspective, where we're focused primarily just on the enterprise, solving business problems with, with video analytics. So, you know, taking advantage of if Watson improves, cause we do use (mumbles) tech at it's core from, on the audio perspective. Applying some of our own techniques to basically improve the accuracy of certain words that matter most to the enterprise. One of the things we've noticed is it's an entirely collaborative relationship with our, with our, with our enterprise clients but really partners. Because what works well for one, may not work well for another. One thing about cognitive is it really depends on the end user as to if this is a good idea or not. Or if this will work for their use case, just based on error, as you pointed out. >> So, to your point, you're identifying enterprise use cases and then tuning the system. Building solutions, essentially, for those use cases. >> Andy: Absolutely. >> Now, you said 22 year IBM platinum partner, so you obviously started well before this so-called digital transformation. >> Andy: Yes. >> You see digital transformation as, you know, revolutionary, or is it more of an evolution of your business? >> I'd definitely say it's an evolution. I think, you know, a lot of the industry buzz words out there are all around, you know, transformation or transition, but for us it's been completely additive. You know, at the end of the day we're just doing what our clients want, you know. And, we're still continuing the core part of our business around modernizing and optimizing IT infrastructure, tech sacks in the data center, also infrastructure service in the cloud. Also, up through the middle where it's still really as strong as ever. I mean, in fact that business has actually been very much reinforced by some of these capabilities that we brought in on the digital development side. Because, at the end of the day, you know, clients may have a digital unit and they may have, you know, IT, but they're really viewed sort of all in the same. A lot of people try to put 'em in two different buckets bimodal or whatever you want to use. But, you know, inevitably, you know, clients just see a business problem they want to address. >> Yep. >> And, they're saying how can I address it the fastest and the most effectively as relative to what their stakeholders want. And, we just realized early on that we had to have that development capability, be able to build platforms, but also guide out clients. If they don't want one of our platforms, if they don't want video recon or cognitive call center platform, that's perfectly fine. We're more than happy to guide them on how to build something similar for their developers with our developers relative to their tech stack, you know, hopefully on the IBM cloud. >> Andy, one of the things you were pointing out that I think is worth highlighting is the digital transformation buzz word, which has been around for a few years now, really is in main stream right now. >> Andy: Yes. >> People are really working hard to figure this out. We're seeing the disruption on the business model side. You mentioned speed and time to market, that's agility. That's not just a technical development term anymore. It's actually business model. It's business related. >> Andy: Yes. >> But there's two axes of things going on. There's the under the hood, heavy lifting stuff that goes on around getting stuff digitally to work. That's IT, security, and you know, Ginni Rometty talks about a lot of that on stage. That's being enterprise grade or enterprise strong. The other one is this digitization of the real world, right? So, that's creative. That requires insights. That requires kind of a different, it's actually probably maybe more fun for some people, but I mean it depends on who your profile is, but you have kind of two spectrums. Cool and relevant and exciting and intoxicating, creative, user experience driven. You mentioned reading meters. >> Andy: Yeah. >> That's the analog world. >> Andy: Yes. >> That's actually space. That's the world. That's like, you got the sky you got the meter. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You got physical impressions. This is the digitization of our world. What's your perspective? How do you talk to customers when they say, "Hey I want to digitize my business." >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> How does it go? What do you say? I mean, do you break it down into those axes? Do you go, did they see it that way? Can you share some color on this digital transformation of digitizing business? >> Yeah, so I mean it really depends on, I think, it normally it has to do with interacting with some other stakeholders in a certain way, you know. I think from our perspective it really is about, you know, how they want to interface. And, most of the time you pointed out speed. Speed I think is the number one reason why people are doing the digital transformation. It's not really about cost or these other factors. It's how quickly can I adjust my business model so I can win in the market place? And, you know, I think I pointed this earlier, but like, you know IOT is huge now. It covers what I call three out of the five senses in my mind. It covers basically touch, smell and taste in many ways. And, for us, I think we're basically trying to help them even get beyond IOT with video. Video really covers, you know, sight and hearing as well. It covers all the five senses. And, then you take that and figure out how do I digitize that experience and be able to allow you to interact with your stakeholders. Whether it be your customers, your suppliers or your partners out in the market place. And, then based on that we'll take these building blocks on how we, you know, extend the experience, and work with them on their specific use case. >> So, you got to ingest the data, which is the, you know, the images or data coming in. >> Correct. >> Then you got to prep it available for insights. >> Correct. >> And, produce them in, like really fast. >> Andy: Yep. >> That's hard. >> Andy: It is, yeah. >> It's not trivial. >> No it is not, it's not a trivial problem. Yeah, absolutely. And, I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity here in the space over the next I think two to two to five years. But you're absolutely right. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean it is, it is a challenging. >> And, I want to get your thoughts too, and if you can share your reaction to some of the trends around machine learning, for instance. It's really kind of fueling this democratization. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You mention in the old days it was really hard, there was kind of a black art to, to machine learning or unique special, specialties. And, even data science that's at one level was really, really hard. Now you have common people doing things with visualization. What's the same with machine learning? I mean, you got more data sets coming in. Do you see that trend relevant to what you guys are working on in BlueChasm? >> Absolutely. I think at the core of it, and this wasn't our plan initially three years ago, we didn't realize that this was happen, but every single one of the platforms or prototypes or apps we've built, they all incorporate some degree of machine learning, deep learning within it's core. And, this is primarily just driven by I think what, to give a client a unique platform or a unique service on the market. Because, much of the base digitization, I mean Ginny likes to talk a lot about, you know, the key to being, differentiating yourself from digital world is being cognitive. And, we've seen this really play out in practice. And, I think what's changed, as you pointed out is, that it's easily accessible now to sort of the common man, as I put it. In years past, you really had to have people that are highly specialized. You build your own product. But now through open source- >> There's building blocks out there. >> Absolutely. >> You can just take an open source library and say hey, and then tweak the machine learning. >> Absolutely. And, the ramp up time has come down, you know, dramatically, even for our developers. Just watching them work. I mean, the prototype to video recon was built over the course of a weekend by one of our developers. He just came in one Monday and said, you know, is this, is this interesting? >> He's fired. >> Exactly. And, we were like, yes I think this is interesting. >> Well this is the whole inspiration thing that I talk about, the creativity. This is the two axes, right? >> You try to do that in the old days, I got to get a server provision. >> Andy: Yeah. >> I'm done. >> Andy: Right. >> You know, I'm going to go have a a beer. Whatever. I mean, there's almost an abandonment going on. We talked to Indiegogo yesterday about how they're funding companies. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You have this new creative action. >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> So you guys are seeing that. Any other examples you can share in terms of color around this kind of innovation? >> Yeah, so we, at BlueChasm we try to let our developers sort of have free reign over what they like to create. So video recon was spawned literally by a, on a side project, you know as with a lot of companies. It was, you know, a platform that sort of evolved into a commercial product, almost by accident, right? And, we've had others that have been anchored by like what clients had done, but like around the cognitive call center, which basically takes phone calls that are recorded and then basically transcribes and makes them easily searchable for audit reasons, training reasons, etcetera. Same kind of idea. We built things around like cognitive drones. A lot of folks are trying to do things with drones. Drones themselves aren't really not novel anymore, but being able to utilize them to collect data in unique ways, I think that industry is definitely evolving. We've built other things like, what I call the minority report board, after the scene in the movie where the board sort of looks at you and then based on what it sees of you, of different data points, it shows you an ad or shows you a piece of visual content to allow you to interact. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, these are, these are examples. You know, we have others. But, you know we've just seen like in this organization if we allow creativity to sort of reign, you know, have free reign. We're able to sort of bring it back in along with some of the strengths of core Mark Three about being (mumbles). >> I mean the cognitive is really interesting. It's a programmatic approach to life. And, if you think about it, it's like if you have this collective intelligence with the data, you could offer an augmented reality experience- >> Andy: Yes. >> To anybody now, based upon what you're doin'. >> Absolutely. So I mean, I think that the toughest part I think right now is figuring out which of the opportunities to pursue. Because, there are so many out there and everyone has some interest in some degree, you know. You have to figure out how to prioritize about, you know, which, which of the ones you want to address first. >> John: Yeah. >> And, in what order. Because, what we've noticed is that a lot of these are building blocks that lead to other greater and greater platform concepts, and part of the challenge is figuring out what order you want to actually build these into. And, through you know, microservices through retainerization all these, you know, awesome evolutions as far as like with cloud and infrastructure technology, you're really able to piece together these pieces to build amazing (mumbles) quickly. >> The cloud native stuff is booming right now. >> Yeah. >> It's really fun to watch. Microservices, (mumbles), this orchestration, composability is just kickin' ass. >> Absolutely. >> And, all your clients are basically becoming software companies. They're takin' your services and building out their own sas capabilities. >> Andy: Right. >> Right? >> Without a doubt. I mean, you know the cloud (mumbles), container revolution's been significant for us. I mean we, we added the audio component to video recon based on some of the work we've been doing on the call center side. It was almost by accident. And, we were able to really put them together in a day because we were able to basically easily compose the overall platform at that time, or the prototype of the platform at that time just by linking together those services. So, we see this as a pattern moving forward. >> Andy, thanks for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate it. In the quick 30 seconds, what are you doin' here at the show? What are you guys talkin' about? What's some of the activity? Coolest thing you're seeing? Share some insight, what's going on here in Las Vegas. Share some perspective. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, we have a booth here in Vegas. We're demoing some of the platforms we talked about: video recon, cognitive call center. We're at booth six 87, which is toward the center back of the expo center. We have four break outs that we'll be doing as well. Talking about some of these concepts, as well as some of our projects that involve, you know, modernization of the data center as well. So, the true what I call IBM full stack. >> And, for the folks that aren't here watching, is there, the website address? Where can they go to get more information? >> Yeah, absolutely. You can go to Mark Three sys. M A R K triple I S Y S dot com, which is our website. If you want to learn a little bit more about video recon you can go to video recon dot I O. We have a very simple demo page, but you know, if you're interested in learning more or you want to explore if we can accommodate your specific use case, please feel free to reach out to me. Also, Mark Three systems, M A R K triple I systems at Twitter as well, and I can get back to you. >> Well, you know we're going to follow up with you. Going to get all of our Cube videos into the cognitive era. You'll be seeing us, pinging you online for that. >> Yeah. >> Love the video recon, just great. BlueChasm, great, great initiative. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for comin' on. Its The Cube live here in Las Vegas. Day two of coverage, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More great interviews after this short break.

but cute at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff Creek we're back hi everybody this is Dave vellante with Jeff Frick we're here live at knowledge 14 this is service now it's big customer event about 6,600 people up from about four thousand last year as we've been saying it's kind of tracking the growth of service now which has been pretty meteoric we heard from Mike scarpelli the CFO Frank's loot men they're really doubling down and it's exciting to see we're here in San Francisco where all the action is Jeffrey Moore is here author consultant pundits all-around smart guy cube alum greatly again thank you here so um so you're speaking at the CIO decisions i love the fact that they got so many CIOs here who real CIA a lot of times these conferences you get to you know the infrastructure guys but so what's the vibe like over there well you know it's kind of cool because if you think about service now and you go back to say 10 years this was all about how to make IT more productive around the ITIL model and you know and you'd use these automated services to do this stuff what's happening and Frank nailed it in the keynote he said look this infrastructure can be turned inside out and you can service enable the entire enterprise not just IT need a service enterprise you know HR you can decision a marketing eight-day any other shared service you can turn into a bunch of services that you can sort of call in and use service now as a platform so so the cios it was all about well that that's a different that's a different vision and so how do we map from the old way of sort of thinking about this is an internal productivity facility to this new way of saying no this is an enterprise enablement platform that's a big that's a big move a little bit like Salesforce going to force calm that same flavor yes sir frank's keynote was talking about how the CIO has to become you know more business savvy and of course we've heard that a lot for years and years and years but in fact a number of the folks that we've had on here at the service now are actually of that hill maybe they came from the business but most CIOs didn't necessarily come from the business they weren't P&L managers they weren't running sales do you see that changing yeah I think what happened in the 20th century was IT was sufficiently complex that frankly you had to be a technical person to do it it just it was just really hard and and yes you needed business consultants but the end of the day you needed ten percent business consultants and ninety percent technical people I think we've come a long way since then in the next generation of stuff is more around systems of engagement these things that that communicate with each other as opposed to systems of record and so the profile the winning IT strategy is migrating from help us run information about our business in the back office to help us actually re-engineer the dynamics of our business in the world in the present and that's like going from from data to behavior them it's a big we call it going from systems of record to systems of engagement it's a big show and is that that transition in your mind is very disruptive so what happens to all those purveyors and buyers of systems of engagement to they morph into obsessive record do they morph into systems of engagement do they just get blown away no it's interesting so so so first of all you're never going to get rid of your systems of record but at the margin we've probably extracted most of the lifetime value from that investment already so you need to maintain them and so the industry is consolidating a round of an anchor set of vendors who we trust to do that but the growth is going to be like if you look at systems of engagement we might have gotten five percent of the lifetime value there so at their margin if you have a dollar to spend people want to spend it in there so the challenge of being an incumbent is I'm not going to lose my base but man the growth is happening over here so the real challenge for that for the incumbent vendors is how can i participate in the new world and still maintain my relationships in the old world whereas the new guys are just coming and saying i don't i'll leave the old world of you guys i just want to play over here i can get your take on the structure of the IT business is you've observed as have i sort of these disruptions and these changes over time so obviously we went from being framed at pc you saw that the competitive line started to get more disintegrated yes i could use that that term a competition occurred on those I see that Intel's ascendancy in Microsoft and Oracle the best database companies the emc was the storage company and everything was sort of you know siloed and but leadership the leadership matrix has largely stayed intact I mean even IBM and okay HP said its ends up and down but it's largely stayed intact do you see the cloud changing that fundamentally changing the economic yes I think yes I think what happened is so in the client server error we did we built the stack what you're just described and every layer of the stack had a leader now I think since 2000 y2k that stack is being compressed meaning there are fewer and fewer vendors that are still in the in that in that leadership cadre and as we go to like cloud and computing the service you start saying well yeah i still have cisco in there i still have IBM in there but maybe i'm buying them as a service rather than as a set of equipment so you kind of can feel that world just I think compressing this look is the right word and where is the experimentation the opportunity to sort of find new places to go to it's very much in this world outboard of the IT data center where it it is about engaging engaging with your customer engaging with your employee engaging with your supply chain and using mobile things and social and you know analytics and cloud and all these new technologies the freedom to do that is is actually outboard of the of the old style I show you what you described as sort of an oligopoly and you've got these big whales and I've always asking you know guys who follow this it are we going to see somebody to disrupt that Amazon is the obvious you have to go to them a three billion dollar you know company growing at sixty percent a year with marginal economics of services that look like software yep but at the same time it's okay they've got this huge lead but it doesn't just make sense to me that it's sustainable I mean because hardware economics never will go to 0 so you would think that somebody was almost like the IBM early pc days remember IBM heavily yep we're domin to play that's kind of what kind of way amazon is now do you do you see that you see more competition from amazon why is it that they don't have direct competition so the less of the last book i wrote in the last the thing i've been working on most recently is around why is it so hard for the established incumbents to catch the next wave and the problem is so you look at why amazon's why is Amazon so unopposed in many of its initiatives well their business model in the economic model is completely divorced from the incumbent model and so you look at the incumbent in there going it's not that I don't see what the guys are doing I get what they're doing I just don't see how I can get my investors or my my whole infrastructure on to that new place in my example that was code at so you know Antonio Perez came from HP he knew what he was getting into he understood digital everybody at Kodak understood digital but they couldn't get to the other place so in this it would call it escape velocity how do you free yourself from your own paths and you you really do have to take a pretty dramatic approach to it and I think by the way i think i'm looking at microsoft in particular i think it I think Microsoft's going to give a very very big run at doing it and but I think that they're still more the exception than the rule you would wish that every one of those vendors would say look you know because every CIO here if any of those vendors came to him and said hey we're going to really try to play here will you help they'd say yes they don't want to change their relationships but but we get trapped in these business models and then you sort of grind and you grind and grind and after a while it's like well man you've just ground yourself to do I owe the classic label Christensen right individuals dilemma and it also makes a question is d said David's been the same characters kind of changing companies had not Jeff Bezos and Amazon come in with a completely different model to drive cloud with the other people who still has to transfer so they want to give credit to you want to bet it to be so so you want to give credit to Benioff by the way Benioff has been has been the kind of prow of a ship that brings in the illusory at work day brings in netsuite brings in service service now you know so the software-as-a-service thing is coming in at one level and remember if you were an on-premise guy it's very very how many years did did SI p commit an enormous amount of money to say we're going to have a great cloud offering and it just it's so hard so so it is so and then you're looking now at this sort of this next layer of collaborative IT and you're seeing box and octant hang all these cool thing and analytics and splunk consumer logic and all these companies going really I mean I you know I mean if your fear of my age is like okay you have a t-shirt they got love to you think I'm a teacher but but but the point is this free space and they're saying there's these cool problems to solve we're not encumbered by any of the legacy we're going to race ahead and so if you're a CIO well we spent most of our time with the cios today was ok i have established set of relationships here i'm not going to abandon them but at the margin i need them to help me think about the future I thought these really start sparkly new startups some i'm sure not going to exist next year but some are going to be the leaders so how play that game right now and and the pressure it's putting on the IT organization is the people I know that are good at this are not the people that are good at this and so how do I so we had to talk about talent and how do you manage and how do you create career paths and and is it or do you have a infrastructure officer vs an innovation office I'm it was all around that same prob right and then oh by the way there's Hadoop and mobile and big data and some of these other just open source innovations that are being just thrown all these guys played it is so from a technology plate from a technology play if you're technologists it's like bring it on right but I think the interesting thing is and most of my career aighty was about the business so you ran a business and you had IT systems which gave you information about your business what's happened in the last 15 years is that more and more sectors of the economy i T is becoming the business so you saw what happened the newspapers in facilitate with IT isn't about the newspaper business IT is displacing the newspaper business Google is displaced in the media business amazon is displacing retail you know mobile banking is displacing banking Airbnb uber I mean this so there we have the taxi guys are worried them it and so you start saying it isn't IT isn't about the business it's a digital world and and so all of us and that was it i think that was probably at the core of the discussion so which cio am i what do I have permission to be would do my colleagues get this you know am I competent to do it if they do I mean you've talked about this a lot and you've given a number of examples so so was nicked car just dead wrong in 2003 or just to a narrow it is to keep what he was saying I believe is that systems of record okay are dead I think at that time by the way it wasn't obvious there was anything else because it no serious i can remember to you know the whole venture community kind of abandoned itv4 about researcher ivan on 101 yeah it was and even in the end even in the physical infrastructure there's still the idea is the basis of the competitive and about the reporting system yeah and i think this issue about so i think there's still a few businesses we're really IT still is about the business and you know what you can kind of stick with whatever you were doing you'll be okay but if your business is under an existential threat meaning the new IT model eviscerates your business model which arguably you could say all those both those incumbent stack vendors you know I mean cloud does eviscerate the on-premise hardware data center business model which was the fundamental foundation of IT as I knew it for all my business career and now all this it's like holy how do i how do i how do I deal with it so we talk about Amazon as a potential you know new you know big whale Salesforce is obviously he's got it but they've been around since 99 there's going to be exception mm-hmm proves the rule I don't maybe a service now or a workday you know we'll see if this market is big enough it looks like it it might be what often happens is they these guys let's get gobbled up or Larry Ellison writes a check you say these to denigrate people who write write checks not code I think the biggest matter and they got such mass never was afraid to reinvent himself change the game change the dynamics of the industry so do you think we will see a another big player and where will that comfort will it be the SAS guys will it be the sum of the guys out of the hadoop world what I don't think it will so here here's what I don't think will work I don't think you can be an established incumbent vendor under this compression power and write a check and get yourself back I think what happens when you write a check if you just bring a hot property into cold molecules and it loses its exactly exactly so I don't think that will work I think if you want to be one of these incumbents and succeed over here you have to actually pull part of your own DNA and capability and we literally just jump and then I think you can acquire it to it to build a thing there but what Larry did was he consolidate he basically was the first guy to figure out Nick Carr is right I need to buy up all the properties yep and brother George ball and run a maintenance business which by the way came to read and Georgia computer associates had that play up in the eighties it's the same play with this is a different plan well I love what you say in emc is an interesting one to watch the way to chi is setting up this Federation with pivotal and VMware you know who see we'll see what happens with the quarry NC and I think VI 3 of 8 yeah I think that that is I mean VMware's one of the wonderful examples of think we're a company did not cause the hot molecules become the cold molecules the thing you wonder there though is it feels a little bit like a like a holding company if you will and so and by the way vmware is in a curious tweener right like they kind of were the most they made the old stack incredibly productive so in some sense they can feel like they're part of the old world right they're probably the newest kid on the old world but then you think well yeah but I want to look at their plan now they want to be into software-defined networks they wanted me to software-defined data centers they definitely want to play over here and what it's in this case so state partners Wow one could argue that that was it because of what big in the cloud virtualize computing absolutely absolutely so what're you working on these days that's exciting well so that I think this issue of working with management teams to say okay look this is a self-imposed exile that we're putting ourselves under you know we get it i'll call it the Kodak problem because I don't want to talk about anybody in high tech specifically at the moment but the point is every management team in the established vendor group puts itself on a self imposed discipline to make you know certain kinds of eps things certain kinds of growth you know whatever it is the expectations of their investors and you look at the situation you say guys that is a slope glide path to extinction we all know that and by the way off the record they know it's no it's not that that is this is not a failure of it like this is a failure of will so then the question is well so how do you negotiate a different path and part of it is you have to make you have you have to be able to tell a story of your investors part of it is you have to negotiate a different operating model inside the company and what they've done so far is they said well okay we've got our established businesses and we've got our innovative businesses and we know enough to keep them apart so that part is not the problem and they actually come up with cool stuff the the moment of truth is when can you scale any of these innovative businesses to compete to actually be a material part of your historical portfolio meaning in my terminology at least ten percent of your total revenue going to twenty percent in what happens in that journey is it a key point you have to draw on the resources of your established business and all the people that make their living and they're compensated on getting the next quarter in the next quarter go guys I can't make the quarter and do this and you've got it you've got to find a way to say you know if we don't figure out a way to pull some of that resource over here and play our next hand will invent everything in the world but we'll never get it to scale and so there's there's a bunch of stuff around business model planning and then Investor Relations organizational development it's all around saying and the key there's two key ideas idea number one is it's a go-to-market problem not an RD problem you do not have an innovation problem you can't get your thing to market and the second cool idea is you can only do one of the time and everybody says well but give have the risk to so high you got a three or four or five of these things maybe want to work it's like know the sacrifice is so great if you put two or more horses in the race people people won't even run so the other one that's a focus and don't it's ok not to make the quarter that's like on American looking like michael dunn right i mean that's obsessively what he's hoping to be able to do and i think one of the reasons you see people go private is to say i can't play this game bye-bye normal public company protocol i mean i like to but i can't get there from here now i actually don't think every company ought to have to go private to do this but i think they do have to change their playboys all right Jeff we have to leave it there hey great to see you thank you very much me feel smarter just hanging out with you right there buddy we'll be right back after this is the cube you