>> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (intro music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE's" day three coverage of MWC23. Lisa Martin here in Spain, Barcelona, Spain with Dave Nicholson. We're going to have a really interesting conversation next. We're going to really dig into MWC, it's history, where it's going, some of the controversy here. Please welcome our guests. We have Jim Harris, International Best Selling Author of "Blindsided." And Carolina Milanese is here, President and Principle Analyst of creative strategies. Welcome to "theCUBE" guys. Thank you. >> Thanks. So great to be here. >> So this is day three. 80,000 people or so. You guys have a a lot of history up at this event. Caroline, I want to start with you. Talk a little bit about that. This obviously the biggest one in, in quite a few years. People are ready to be back, but there's been some, a lot of news here, but some controversy going on. Give us the history, and your perspective on some of the news that's coming out from this week's event. >> It feels like a very different show. I don't know if I would say growing up show, because we are still talking about networks and mobility, but there's so much more now around what the networks actually empower, versus the network themselves. And a little bit of maybe that's where some of the controversy is coming from, carriers still trying to find their identity, right, of, of what their role is in all there is to do with a connected world. I go back a long way. I go back to when Mobile World Congress was called, was actually called GSM, and it was in Khan. So, you know, we went from France to Spain. But just looking at the last full Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, in pre-pandemic to now, very different show. We went from a show that was very much focused on mobility and smartphones, to a show that was all about cars. You know, we had cars everywhere, 'cause we were talking about smart cities and connected cars, to now a show this year that is very much focused on B2B. And so a lot of companies that are here to either work with the carriers, or also talk about sustainability for instance, or enable what is the next future evolution of computing with XR and VR. >> So Jim, talk to us a little bit about your background. You, I was doing a little sleuthing on you. You're really focusing on disruptive innovation. We talk about disruption a lot in different industries. We're seeing a lot of disruption in telco. We're seeing a lot of frenemies going on. Give us your thoughts about what you're seeing at this year's event. >> Well, there's some really exciting things. I listened to the keynote from Orange's CEO, and she was complaining that 55% of the traffic on her network is from five companies. And then the CEO of Deutsche Telecom got up, and he was complaining that 60% of the traffic on his network is from six entities. So do you think they coordinated pre, pre-show? But really what they're saying is, these OTT, you know, Netflix and YouTube, they should be paying us for access. Now, this is killer funny. The front page today of the show, "Daily," the CO-CEO of Netflix says, "Hey, we make less profit than the telcos, "so you should be paying us, "not the other way around." You know, we spend half of the money we make just on developing content. So, this is really interesting. The orange CEO said, "We're not challenging net neutrality. "We don't want more taxes." But boom. So this is disruptive. Huge pressure. 67% of all mobile traffic is video, right? So it's a big hog bandwidth wise. So how are they going to do this? Now, I look at it, and the business model for the, the telcos, is really selling sim cards and smartphones. But for every dollar of revenue there, there's five plus dollars in apps, and consulting and everything else. So really, but look at how they're structured. They can't, you know, take somebody who talks to the public and sells sim cards, and turn 'em in, turn 'em in to an app developer. So how are they going to square this circle? So I see some, they're being disrupted because they're sticking to what they've historically done. >> But it's interesting because at the end of the day, the conversation that we are having right now is the conversation that we had 10 years ago, where carriers don't want to just be a dumb pipe, right? And that's what they are now returning to. They tried to be media as well, but that didn't work out for most carriers, right? It is a little bit better in the US. We've seen, you know, some success there. But, but here has been more difficult. And I think that's the, the concern, that even for the next, you know, evolution, that's the, their role. >> So how do they, how do they balance this dumb pipe idea, with the fact that if you make the toll high enough, being a dumb pipe is actually a pretty good job. You know, sit back, collect check, go to the beach, right? So where, where, where, where does this end up? >> Well, I think what's going to happen is, if you see five to 15 X the revenue on top of a pipe, you know, the hyperscalers are going to start going after the business. The consulting companies like PWC, McKinsey, the app developers, they're... So how do you engage those communities as a telco to get more revenue? I think this is a question that they really need to look at. But we tend to stick within our existing business model. I'll just give you one stat that blows me away. Uber is worth more than every taxi cab company in North America added together. And so the taxi industry owns billions in assets in cars and limousines. Uber doesn't own a single vehicle. So having a widely distributed app, is a huge multiplier on valuation. And I look to a company like Safari in Kenya, which developed M-Pesa, which Pesa means mo, it's mobile money in Swahili. And 25% of the country's GDP is facilitated by M-Pesa. And that's not even on smartphones. They're feature phones, Nokia phones. I call them dumb phones, but Nokia would call them "feature phones." >> Yeah. >> So think about that. Like 25, now transactions are very small, and the cut is tiny. But when you're facilitating 25% of a country's GDP, >> Yeah. >> Tiny, over billions of transactions is huge. But that's not the way telcos have historically thought or worked. And so M-Pesa and Safari shows the way forward. What do you think on that? >> I, I think that the experience, and what they can layer on top from a services perspective, especially in the private sector, is also important. I don't, I never believe that a carrier, given how they operate, is the best media company in the world, right? It is a very different world. But I do think that there's opportunity, first of all, to, to actually tell their story in a different way. If you're thinking about everything that a network actually empowers, there's a, there's a lot there. There's a lot that is good for us as, as society. There's a lot that is good for business. What can they do to start talking about differently about their services, and then layer on top of what they offer? A better way to actually bring together private and public network. It's not all about cellular, wifi and cellular coming together. We're talking a lot about satellite here as well. So, there's definitely more there about quality of service. Is, is there though, almost a biological inevitability that prevents companies from being able to navigate that divide? >> Hmm. >> Look at, look at when, when, when we went from high definition 720P, very exciting, 1080P, 4K. Everybody ran out and got a 4K TV. Well where was the, where was the best 4K content coming from? It wasn't, it wasn't the networks, it wasn't your cable operator, it was YouTube. It was YouTube. If you had suggested that 10 years before, that that would happen, people would think that you were crazy. Is it possible for folks who are now leading their companies, getting up on stage, and daring to say, "This content's coming over, "and I want to charge you more "for using my pipes." It's like, "Really? Is that your vision? "That's the vision that you want to share with us here?" I hear the sound of dead people walking- (laughing) when I hear comments like that. And so, you know, my students at Wharton in the CTO program, who are constantly looking at this concept of disruption, would hear that and go, "Ooh, gee, did the board hear what that person said?" I, you know, am I being too critical of people who could crush me like a bug? (laughing) >> I mean, it's better that they ask the people with money than not consumers to pay, right? 'Cause we've been through a phase where the carriers were actually asking for more money depending on critical things. Like for instance, if you're doing business email, then were going to charge you more than if you were a consumer. Or if you were watching video, they would charge you more for that. Then they understood that a consumer would walk away and go somewhere else. So they stopped doing that. But to your point, I think, and, and very much to what you focus from a disruption perspective, look at what Chat GTP and what Microsoft has been doing. Not much talk about this here at the show, which is interesting, but the idea that now as a consumer, I can ask new Bing to get me the 10 best restaurants in Barcelona, and I no longer go to Yelp, or all the other businesses where I was going to before, to get their recommendation, what happens to them? You're, you're moving away, and you're taking eyeballs away from those websites. And, and I think that, that you know, your point is exactly right. That it's, it's about how, from a revenue perspective, you are spending a lot of money to facilitate somebody else, and what's in it for you? >> Yeah. And to be clear, consumers pay for everything. >> Always. Always. (laughs) >> Taxpayers and consumers always pay for everything. So there is no, "Well, we're going to make them pay, so you don't have to pay." >> And if you are not paying, you are the product. Exactly. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Carolina, talk a little bit about what you're seeing at the event from some of the infrastructure players, the hyperscalers, obviously a lot of enterprise focus here at this event. What are some of the things that you're seeing? Are you impressed with, with their focus in telco, their focus to partner, build an ecosystem? What are you seeing? >> I'm seeing also talk about sustainability, and enabling telco to be more sustainable. You know, there, there's a couple of things that are a little bit different from the US where I live, which is that telcos in Europe, have put money into sustainability through bonds. And so they use the money that they then get from the bonds that they create, to, to supply or to fuel their innovation in sustainability. And so there's a dollar amount on sustainability. There's also an opportunity obviously from a growth perspective. And there's a risk mitigation, right? Especially in Europe, more and more you're going to be evaluated based on how sustainable you are. So there are a lot of companies here, if you're thinking about the Ciscos of the world. Dell, IBM all talking about sustainability and how to help carriers measure, and then obviously be more sustainable with their consumption and, and power. >> Going to be interesting to see where that goes over the years, as we talk to, every company we talk to at whatever show, has an ESG sustainability initiative, and only, well, many of them only want to work with other companies who have the same types of initiative. So a lot of, great that there's focus on sustainability, but hopefully we'll see more action down the road. Wanted to ask you about your book, "Blind," the name is interesting, "Blindsided." >> Well, I just want to tag on to this. >> Sure. >> One of the most exciting things for me is fast charging technology. And Shalmie, cell phone, or a smartphone maker from China, just announced yesterday, a smartphone that charges from 0 to 100% in five minutes. Now this is using GAN FEST technology. And the leader in the market is a company called Navitas. And this has profound implications. You know, it starts with the smartphone, right? But then it moves to the laptops. And then it'll move to EV's. So, as we electrify the $10 trillion a year transportation industry, there's a huge opportunity. People want charging faster. There's also a sustainability story that, to Carolina's point, that it uses less electricity. So, if we electrify the grid in order to support transportation, like the Tesla Semi's coming out, there are huge demands over a period. We need energy efficiency technologies, like this GAN FEST technology. So to me, this is humongous. And it, we only see it here in the show, in Shalmie, saying, "Five minutes." And everybody, the consumers go, "Oh, that's cool." But let's look at the bigger story, which is electrifying transportation globally. And this is going to be big. >> Yeah. And, and to, and to double click on that a little bit, to be clear, when we talk about fast charging today, typically it's taking the battery from a, not a zero state of charge, but a relatively low state of charge to 80%. >> Yep. >> Then it tapers off dramatically. And that translates into less range in an EV, less usable time on any other device, and there's that whole linkage between the power in, and the battery's ability to be charged, and how much is usable. And from a sustainability perspective, we are going to have an avalanche of batteries going into secondary use cases over time. >> They don't get tossed into landfills contrary to what people might think. >> Yep. >> In fact, they are used in a variety of ways after their primary lifespan. But that, that is, that in and of itself is a revolutionary thing. I'm interested in each of your thoughts on the China factor. Glaringly absent here, from my perspective, as sort of an Apple fanboy, where are they? Why aren't they talking about their... They must, they must feel like, "Well we just don't need to." >> We don't need to. We just don't need to. >> Absolutely. >> And then you walk around and you see these, these company names that are often anglicized, and you don't necessarily immediately associate them with China, but it's like, "Wait a minute, "that looks better than what I have, "and I'm not allowed to have access to that thing." What happens in the future there geopolitically? >> It's a pretty big question for- >> Its is. >> For a short little tech show. (Caroline laughs) But what happens as we move forward? When is the entire world going to be able to leverage in a secure way, some of the stuff that's coming out of, if they're not the largest economy in the world yet, they shortly will be. >> What's the story there? >> Well, it's interesting that you mentioned First Apple that has never had a presence at Mobile World Congress. And fun enough, I'm part of the GSMA judges for the GLOMO Awards, and last night I gave out Best Mobile Phone for last year, and it was to the iPhone4 Team Pro. and best disruptive technology, which was for the satellite function feature on, on the new iPhone. So, Apple might not be here, but they are. >> Okay. >> And, and so that's the first thing. And they are as far as being top of mind to every competitor in the smartphone market still. So a lot of the things that, even from a design perspective that you see on some of the Chinese brands, really remind you of, of Apple. What is interesting for me, is how there wouldn't be, with the exception of Samsung and Motorola, there's no one else here that is non-Chinese from a smartphone point of view. So that's in itself, is something that changed dramatically over the years, especially for somebody like me that still remember Nokia being the number one in the market. >> Huh. >> So. >> Guys, we could continue this conversation. We are unfortunately out of time. But thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about your perspectives on the event, the industry, the disruptive forces. It's going to be really interesting to see where it goes. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's the consumers that just want to make sure I can connect wherever I am 24 by seven, and it just needs to work. Thank you so much for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Lisa, it's been great. Dave, great. It's a pleasure. >> Our pleasure. For our guests, and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching, "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage coming to you day three of our coverage of MWC 23. Stick around. Our next guest joins us momentarily. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the program, and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization, that's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me to discuss this critical topic area, are Jim Shook, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks Dave, great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart, they adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more, kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's, let's protect as much as possible so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can, but then let's have the ability to adapt to, and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect a hundred percent of the time against a hundred percent of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, you know, I like what Jim was saying, about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect. But, so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production, and not only that but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe seem to be data or an active directory or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails that you can protect it, and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and, where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put in a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it, actually entails as one aspect of it and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated? That's the other portion of it. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And then as you got toward the middle part of the decade and I'd say clearly by 2016 it, security became a boardroom issue. It was on the agenda, you know, every quarter at the board meetings. So, compliance is no longer the driver, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, or money, et cetera. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean the, you know, bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, tens, hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly, if they're larger organizations, but that's also on the table too. So you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do, you know, A, B, and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business and then come up with the strategy from there. >> You know, Jim, staying with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability, but that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out or corrupt it or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So, the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place, let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then, as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure which commonly we might say a cyber vault, although there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others, and that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this is, prior to the pandemic, they, you know, had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place but they felt like they weren't business resilient and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So, Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient it includes operational resiliency, it includes understanding at the C-level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data but also how to recover it in real-time. So DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution, since we architect these specific each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out we look at not only how to protect the data but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real-time. How to understand what we should do when a breaches in progress. Putting together with our security operations centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client. And then being able to cleanse and remediate so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover, and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep 'em out, to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO, I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery 'cause it was too risky or, you know, maybe they tested it on, you know, July 4th or something like that. But I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery, how hard is it to test that recovery and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data, again. Financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy, but it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected it's focused on the recovery, that's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So, there are scenarios where the attack might be small, it might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly-based, like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment, we call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery kind of muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications? What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense, understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately is around, you know, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, you know, traditionally operations technologies have been air-gapped often by design. But as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0 and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're, you know, driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So, a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah, so bad actors can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering, we've seen, USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IOT devices is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So, when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about, where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IOT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front-end protection but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IOT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there, everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them or controlling theM, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly but there was uncertainty around that and the IT systems hadn't been secured so that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So, you really have to take all of those into account. And I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services and then the applications and data, and other components that support those and drive those and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean you made the point, I mean, you're right, the adversary is highly capable, they're motivated 'cause the ROI is so, it's so lucrative. It's like this never ending battle that cybersecurity pros, you know, go through. It really is kind of frontline, sort of technical heroes, if you will. And so, but sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guys' perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave, so that focus. I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be a hundred percent capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real world stuff. So, just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities but there's a lot more information sharing, there's a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier, it used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now as we have been in the market for a while we continue to mature the offerings, it's further education for not only the business itself but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep up the good work, appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time. Really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and infrastructure services both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your business particularly the operating model. So my first question Jim is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation and resilience. >> So, thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate everybody's sort of concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know understands the innovation and agility piece at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business might not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> You know, priority is often an overused term in digital transformation, you know people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC'S philosophy not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized for instance, in many cases you can run applications, you know in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments in a hybrid environment or multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint, and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the bring the things to the business that the clients are you know, that their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And we advocate for, you know there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people process and technology, technology oftentimes CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part, We'll figure that out whether it's true or not but I agree, people and process are sometimes the tough ones. So Jay, why don't you start, what do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> Well, I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from, you know, the standards that are being built by, you know best in class models, and there's many people that have gone on, you know cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments, there's a, you know, there's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for, you know, where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients, you know and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know their own challenges if you would. So they need advocacy to help, you know bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through you know, technology advances, which, you know Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah. Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is, thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want, and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments, are really important to get maximizing your business return on a journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then we had in January 17th we had our Supercloud two event and Supercloud is basically, it's really what multi-cloud should have been, I'd like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds, and you guys were talking about, you know there's different governance, there's different security there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event, in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table and what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, on the edge. They're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now and they've really brought, you know a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there's somebody who could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscaler activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment, and they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know both private and public, you know to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know what's the best optimal running environment, you know for us to be able to bring, you know the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know, and, you know the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah. You know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not a zero sum game. And I think, you know, you're right Jay, I think initially people felt like, oh wow, it is a zero sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi-cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction and I've, you know, look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out Jim (all laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table, and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners, to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition, Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach but a cloud right approach, where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe, it might include an on-premises infrastructure, it could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. It's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, but chime in here. >> And now if you were speaking still specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership they put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship, we do regular QBR meetings, we have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client with the partners, you know, in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them, you know there's other OEM partners of course in the market there's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, kind of over the years, taking your arrows, you know, over decades, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on the cube right back. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to the program, and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization. That's cybersecurity. Survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me, to discuss this critical topic area, are Jim Shook, who's the global director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart, they adapt to everything that we do, so, we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land, they're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think, though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's let's protect as much as possible, so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can, but then let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So, we're recognizing that we can't be perfect 100% of the time against 100% of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So, Andrew, I like what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. And as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect, but so, given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown-jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe SIM2B data, or an Active Directory, or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails, so that you can protect it, and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put in a yellow sticky? You know, it's got to be somewhere safe, right? So, you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. So, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown-jewel data, let's call it, actually entails is one aspect of it, and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated, that's the other portion of it. >> If I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, cybersecurity was kind of a check-off item, and then as you got toward the middle part of the decade, and I'd say clearly by 2016, security became a boardroom issue, it was on the agenda every quarter at the board meetings. So, compliance is no longer the driver is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation, or data, or money, etc. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean, the bad actors are good at what they do, these losses by organizations tens, hundreds of millions into the billions, sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly, if they're larger organizations. But that's also on the table too. So, you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do A, B and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business, and then come up with the strategy from there. >> Jim, staying with you. One of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So, how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability. But that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities, and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out, or corrupt it, or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful, and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So, the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure, you've already got it in place, let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then, as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we might say a cyber vault, or there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others. And that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this prior to the pandemic, they had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business-resilient, and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So, Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency, it includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown-jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So, DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution, since we architect these specific to each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point, objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration, but, when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in realtime. How to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress. Putting together with our security operations centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client. And then being able to cleanse and remediate, so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep 'em out, to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> This discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO, I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery, 'cause it was too risky, or maybe they tested it on July 4th or something like that, but I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could double-click on recovery, how hard is it to test that recovery, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So, it depends, right? On the industry vertical, what kind of data, again, financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours, in some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple days, we do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems, the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about, it's not on the technology of how the data gets protected, it's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so, the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So, there are scenarios where the attack might be small, it might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based, like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. In the regulatory environment we call those attacks severe but plausible. So, you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure, others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise, or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery kind of muscle memory, so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications. What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately, is around IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, traditionally, operations technologies have been air gapped, often by design, but as businesses increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0, and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, etc. So, a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure, and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah. So, bad actors can come in many forms, we've seen instances of social engineering, we've seen USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IOT device is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So, when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually, it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about, where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IOT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So, when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IOT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So, even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them, or controlling them SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly, but there was uncertainty around that, and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So, that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same, that the business couldn't operate. So, you really have to take all of those into account, and I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services, and then the applications and data, and other components that support those and drive those, and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean, you made the point, I mean, you're right. The adversary is highly capable, they're motivated, 'cause the ROI is so lucrative. It's like this never-ending battle that cybersecurity pros go through, it really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. But sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guys' perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave, so that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be 100% capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real-world stuff. So, just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time, and, of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities, but there's a lot more information sharing, there's a lot more focus from the business side of the house, and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah. To add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier, it used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings, it's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected, and continue to be evolved, and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check-the-box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right, guys. We got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real-world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there.

>> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud Transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today, welcome to The Cube. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> Thank you, Dave, appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeroes to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well there are really 3 aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeroes. One is cost optimization. And that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, in governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment. Which, the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these 3 aspects. Cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, thank you for that, so, Jay, I got to ask you, the current climate, ever body's sort of concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization, that seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are, consolidating redundant vendors, and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mine today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and agility piece. At least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. >> Sure >> And then the business resilience piece is really interesting, because, you know, prior to the pandemic, people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow my business may not be that resilient. So, Jay, my question to you is, what are you hearing when you talk to customers, what's the priority today? >> You know, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients, and what their branding is. What we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that, but, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on Pram or, in other environments, in the hybrid environment or multi cloud environment, and still be very optimized from a cost/spend standpoint. And also put yourself in position for modernization and be able to bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO etc. trying to use IT as a leverage to drive business and to drive business acceleration and to drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients, environments, and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So, lets talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in the context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We already talked about people, process, and technology. Technology oftentimes CIO's will tell us 'Well that's the easy part. We'll figure that out.' Whether it's true or not; but I agree. People and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers particularly from a business standpoint? I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from the standards that are being built by Best in Class models. And there's many people who that have got on cloud juries have been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet, or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a change management aspect that you need to look at with the environments. There's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people to deliver with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now. There's just a lot of different elements. It's not just that this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try and look at things holistically and make sure that we're being as much of a consultative advocate for the client for where they want to go, what their destiny is and based on what we've learned with other clients and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own challenges, if you would. So they need advocacy to help bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through technology advances which Jim is really good at doing for us. >> Yeah Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue? You know, bench strength? Are their other considerations from your perspective? >> We've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change; in moving to cloud. When it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the other cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want; and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy, and timing your investments are really important to maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your costs savings, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You mentioned multi-cloud just then. On January 17th we had our Super Cloud 2 event. And Super Cloud is basically what multi-cloud should have been I like to say. So it's creating a common experience across clouds. You guys were talking about you know, there's different governance, different securities, different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event and talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you'd talk about your partnership strategy? What do partners bring to the table? What is DXC's unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great >> We've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and the history of the company. I use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology. They're a great partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just storage and compute play anymore. They're on the edge. They've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought a lot of value to us as a partner. You can look at Dell Technology as somebody that might have a victim effect because of all of the hyper-scaling activity and all of the cloud activity but they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said listen not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment. And they like to be apart of those discussions to see how they can, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, both private and public to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and what's the best optimal running environment for us to be able to bring the greatest value to the business with speed, with security and the the things that they want to keep close to the business are often things that you want to keep on your premise or keep in your own data centers. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced this well, partnered in this well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah you know Jim, Matt Baker who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not zero-sum game and I think you're right Jay. I think initially people felt like oh wow, it is a zero-sum game but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it Super Cloud or Uber Cloud or Multi Cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction. Look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to end to end? Wondering if you could help us understand that. >> Help us figure it out Jim, here. >> Glad to expand on that. Well, one of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customer's changing needs overtime. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now; pre-dates the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think- go ahead Jim >> I would say our unique approach is, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include main frame, it might include and on-premises infrastructure it could include private cloud, public cloud and SAS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah Jay please. Let me tell you, this is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. But, chime in here. >> Yeah if you're speaking specifically to Dell here like, they also walk the talk right. They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground. Their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell, arm in arm, in front of clients. And it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QVR meetings. We have regular executive touch-point meetings. It's really important that you keep high level of intimacy with the clients, with the partners in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell Technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there, and continue to show a lot of support both for them. And there's other OEM partners of course in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us and our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust over the years. Ticking your arrows over decades, and that just doesn't happen overnight. Guys I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting Cloud Right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you >> Jay, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on The CUBE. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hello and welcome to the Cube's coverage here at AWS Reinvent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furry, your host of the Cube at two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is gonna be the topic. Paul Dardy, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, global managing director of thought Leadership and Technology research. Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube for this conversation around your new hit book. Radically human. >>Thanks, John. It's great to, great to be with you and great, great to be present at reinvent. >>You know, we've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're kind of in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolutions going on now where things have consequences and, and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as, as humans. And so I love the book. Very, very strong content, really. Right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations. But, you know, I noticed you got the, the structure part one and part two, This book seems to be packing a big punch. What's, what was the motivation and, and what was some of the background in, in putting the book together? >>That's a great question, John, and I'll start, and then, you know, Jim, my co-author and, and part colleague and partner on this, on the book and join in too. You know, the, if you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called, you know, Human Plus Machine, which talked about the, you know, focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the Human plus machine pairing. And then, you know, when we started, you know, working on the next book, Covid was, you know, it was kinda the Covid era. Covid came online as, as we were writing the book. And, but that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing, you know, once Covid hit, every company became more dependent on technology. >>Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies ba, you know, and what was different from the first, you know, research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that, is that, you know, pre pandemic, the, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of two x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic. We redid the research and the gap widen into five x. And I think that's, and, and that's kind of played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline, you know, from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around, you know, inflation energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. >>And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in, in Radically Human. And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud data and ai and the metaverse that signal out is three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. And the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are gonna set companies apart as they look to, you know, to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >>Jim, weigh in on this. Flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. No, >>You, you, you used a really important word there, and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as kind of a point solution. They don't think of about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that, all right, if you're gonna build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the, the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability. >>You know, I like this, I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you kind of set the table. It's like, cuz people right now are like in the mode of, you know, what's going on around me. I'm been living through three years of covid. But coming out the other side, the world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where I am, where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home, like, here's the current situation and then part two is, here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or you know, society. >>Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where, you know, radically human, you know, the title came from. And you know, the, what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot and, and that, you know, the whole hypothesis, you know, or premise of the book I should say, is that the more humanlike the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the, you know, the, the the, the human potential improvement is the more, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I, you know, talk about, you know, talked about, you know, talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. >>Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the eye and ideas is each of the, the ideas framework is the first part of the book, The five areas to flip your Assumptions, The eye stands for intelligence. And we're talking about more, more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques, things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build, using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And you know, things like emotional ai, common sense ai, new techniques in addition to machine the big data driven machine learning techniques which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's, that's just an example of, you know, how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >>I love the, we've been, >>We've >>Go ahead Jim. >>I was gonna say we've been used to adapting to technology, you know, and you know, contorting our fingers to keyboards and and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus. In fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the, one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >>You know, I love the idea of flipping the script, flicking assumptions, but, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, s for strategy, notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution really kind of interesting kind of how you guys put that together. It kind of feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and it's how it's gonna be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think, you know, observing how developers becoming much more part of, of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is kind of how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation? If you take it down to a conclusion, strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need. Is that, can you, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, yeah, I think, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in, in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old, old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to, you know, to lay out with the, the essence ideas, you know, the strategy and the, the, the fun. You know, the, the subtitle that chapter is is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, That's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential world that technology plays and therefore they need to, to master technology, well, you need to think about strategy differently than because of the pace of technology innovation. >>And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really report it's about continuous strategy in all cases. Yet an example is one of the techniques we talk about forever beta, which is, you know, think about a Tesla, you know, companies that, you know, it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along, you know, the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we, we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions, you know, might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days. As Paul was saying, >>It's interesting because that's the kind of the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation. But the human plays a much critical role. And, and just as a side on the Tesla example, you know, is well documented, I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off script and get to humans back in charge cuz it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up the, the part two, which I like, which is, you know, this human piece of it, you know, we always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that, that second half, you know, trust, talent experiences, that's the more the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group is talent. The scarce resource now where that's the, that's the goal, that's the, the key because I mean, it all could point to that in a way, you know, skills gap kind of points to, hey, you know, humans are valuable, in fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think, you know, that's something that is not kind of nuance point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, it's, go ahead Jim. I was gonna say it, you know, we're, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book. You know, really zooming in on talent. I think, you know, you might think that for every, you know, a hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you know, you might put 50 or 75 into reskilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw a, a economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely gonna need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means, you know, on talent, on, on getting the best talent on reskilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >>That's a huge point. >>I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we, we talked about in the book are, are becoming a talent creator. We believe that the successful companies of the future are gonna be able not, not just to post, you know, post a job opening and hire, hire people in because there's not gonna be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist, you know, cause the technology changing so fast. So companies that succeed are gonna know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such and, and, and, you know, shape to tail as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're gonna be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what you know, employees want. And then democratizing access to technology, You know, things like, you know, Amazon's honey code is an example, you know, low code, no code development to spread, you know, development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical, you know, going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the, the human talent's important, but it's magnified to multiplied by the power of people, you know, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new >>Ways. I think you nailed it, That's super important. That point about the force multiplier, when you put things in combination with it's group constructs, two pizza teams, flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is kind of a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think, you know, groups and collectives, you're gonna start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these kind of, you know, ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or, or, or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously Metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're gonna start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the Metaverse play into this new radically human world and and what does it mean for the future of business? >>Yeah, I think the Metaverse is radically, you know, kind of misunderstood to use the word title, word of a, when we're not with the title of our book, you know, and we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So, you know, that that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's about, it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse in the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I, I believe you know that it is, has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. >>And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You, you have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward that's gonna shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, you know, in infused with, you know, the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. You have cloud AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to, to generate experiences for, for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds. But trust becomes more important because the, just as AI raises new questions around trust, you know, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five part framework or or five, you know, essential, you know, parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >>Yeah, we're seeing that, you know, about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, you know, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their it, so they're, you know, they're focusing on security and privacy transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems. Explainability. One of the, you know, the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we're doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by kind of a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, the, they're, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So kind of turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI kind of using that sense of humanity cuz you know, the other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that that AI system is learning from or some really interesting innovations kind of happening in that trust space. John, >>Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about because you know, you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the, the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and you know, we've been calling it super cloud, some call it multicloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's gonna happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with Chad and some video, you know, it's, it's group behavior, it's group con groups, convening, talking, getting things done, you know, debating doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low code no code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >>Yeah, no, I go back to, you know, one of the, the, the, the e and the ideas frameworks is expertise. And we talk about, you know, from machine learning to machine teaching, which, which is exactly that, you know, it's, you know, machine learning is, you know, maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with ai? One of the examples we give is one of the, the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to code in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create, you know, amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >>Well you, what's interesting is that I wanna to get your thoughts as we can wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in, in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the, the future, they gotta start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table where, you know, we were, we were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are, these are new things you guys are hitting on this in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge, certainly that is an opportunity. How, how do you apply all this stuff for, for business >>Now? I'll go first then Jim Canad. But the, the first thing I think starts with, with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right, you know, technology, talent, you know, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why, you know, the fact you're at reinvent is so important because companies are, you know, again rebuilding that, that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that, you know, as the foundation to go forward, to do, you know, to, to build the other, other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. You know, do you, do you have the right the, do you have the right talent brand? Are you attacking the right, attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward and then you marry the two together and that's what, you know, gives you the radically human formula. >>Yeah. When, you know, when we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of, of research, and this was ju and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. You know, one statistic is that 70% of, there was a, there was a of companies that had never tried AI before, went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies are not, or we're not trying to do it themselves and to, you know, to necessarily, you know, build an it, a AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to, to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the, that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >>If you see the transformation of just aws, we're here at reinvent just since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been kind of a thematic thing. It was, you know, startups, enterprise now builders and now, now change your company this year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and, and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming, categorical applications in for this new era. And you know, we're calling it super cloud super services, super apps cuz they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and you know, we've been talking about a lot lately, so I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like when, what is radical? How do, how can I put a pin in that say that could take a temperature or we like radical enough what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening. How do you know if you're, you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to, to take advantage? >>Yeah, I think one, yeah, I was gonna say one of the, one of the tests is is you know, the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. Yeah. That that's still something you need to do. But now we, our focus, you know, with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's, what is, you know, how, how, what's the platform you know, that you're using to, you know, for your, the new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test. Whether being radical, you know, radical enough is on the one hand, is this really, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping, you know, people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the the two tests that I would give. Totally agree. >>Yeah. You know, interesting enough, we, you know, we, we love this topic and guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs a big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think, you know, one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like ideas your framework and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the, in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean some, you're building clouds on top of clouds or, or something's happening. You can, I think you see it like look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >>Yeah, and that's a good example and it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is, is, is is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you know, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great again that you're at reinvents. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times cuz we tell a lot of cus of cus customer and company stories about how they're leveraging aws, AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in your, in their business. And I, I think that's what it's, that's what it's all about. >>Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great cuz it has kind of a, the systems thinking it's got really relevant information but you know, you guys have seen the, seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. You know, we're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing, you know, all kinds of new things, emerging thoughts on the global impact cuz you, you take your book and you overlay that to business. Like you gotta, you gotta operate all over the world as a human issue. It's a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >>Well that's, that's why the, the, you gotta think about cloud as as one technology, you know, we talked about in the book and cloud is a lot, I think a lot of people think, well clouds it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to reinvent since 2013. You know, cloud is really just getting, you know, just getting started. And, and it's cuz the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability, if you're in Europe for many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities. You need to deploy, you know, differently in different, in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid, hybrid cloud, you know, capability that they, they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which is comes into play in, in different ways. >>And, and so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in and ideas is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and mod and you know, just modularity was kind of the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's, that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the, with the pace of technology advancement. >>You know, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is gonna be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's gonna be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on the queue as we break down your new book, Radically Human and how it, how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at reinvent. Thanks so much for, for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >>You know, Thanks John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the, the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. You know, people who need to, you know, be, be relevant to the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those who need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds for the book are being donated to not NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling. Those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human new, you know, change in technology that's happening >>Great by the book proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book if you're in the middle of this big way that's coming. This is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to, to reset re flip the scripts. Refactor, re-platform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing, really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >>Thanks, John. John, great discussion. >>Okay, you're watching the Cube here, covering the executive forum here at AWS Reinvent 22. I'm John Furrier, your host with aen. Thanks for watching.

>> (bright music) >> Narrator: The Cube, presents Kubecon and Cloudnativecon, year of 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Now what we're opening. Welcome to Valencia, Spain in Kubecon Cloudnativecon, Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host, Paul Gillin, who is the senior editor for architecture at Silicon angle, Paul. >> Keith you've been asking me questions all these last two days. Let me ask you one. You're a traveling man. You go to a lot of conferences. What's different about this one. >> You know what, we're just talking about that pre-conference, open source conferences are usually pretty intimate. This is big. 7,500 people talking about complex topics, all in one big area. And then it's, I got to say it's overwhelming. It's way more. It's not focused on a single company's product or messaging. It is about a whole ecosystem, very different show. >> And certainly some of the best t-shirts I've ever seen. And our first guest, Jim has one of the better ones. >> I mean a bit cockroach come on, right. >> Jim Walker, principal product evangelist at CockroachDB and Christian Huning, tech director of cloud technologies at Finleap Connect, a financial services company that's based out of Germany, now offering services in four countries now. >> Basically all over Europe. >> Okay. >> But we are in three countries with offices. >> So you're CockroachDB customer and I got to ask the obvious question. Databases are hard and started the company in 2015 CockroachDB, been a customer since 2019, I understand. Why take the risk on a four year old database. I mean that just sounds like a world of risk and trouble. >> So it was in 2018 when we joined the company back then and we did this cloud native transformation, that was our task basically. We had very limited amount of time and we were faced with a legacy infrastructure and we needed something that would run in a cloud native way and just blend in with everything else we had. And the idea was to go all in with Kubernetes. Though early days, a lot of things were alpha beta, and we were running on mySQL back then. >> Yeah. >> On a VM, kind of small setup. And then we were looking for something that we could just deploy in Kubernetes, alongside with everything else. And we had to stack and we had to duplicate it many times. So also to maintain that we wanted to do it all the same like with GitOps and everything and Cockroach delivered that proposition. So that was why we evaluate the risk of relatively early adopting that solution with the proposition of having something that's truly cloud native and really blends in with everything else we do in the same way was something we considered, and then we jumped the leap of faith and >> The fin leap of faith >> The fin leap of faith. Exactly. And we were not dissatisfied. >> So talk to me a little bit about the challenges because when we think of MySQL, MySQL scales to amazing sizes, it is the de facto database for many cloud based architectures. What problems were you running into with MySQL? >> We were running into the problem that we essentially, as a finTech company, we are regulated and we have companies, customers that really value running things like on-prem, private cloud, on-prem is a bit of a bad word, maybe. So it's private cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud in our own data centers in Frankfurt. And we needed to run it in there. So we wanted to somehow manage that and with, so all of the managed solution were off the table, so we couldn't use them. So we needed something that ran in Kubernetes because we only wanted to maintain Kubernetes. We're a small team, didn't want to use also like full blown VM solution, of sorts. So that was that. And the other thing was, we needed something that was HA distributable somehow. So we also looked into other solutions back at the time, like Vitis, which is also prominent for having a MySQL compliant interface and great solution. We also got into work, but we figured, this is from the scale, and from the sheer amount of maintenance it would need, we couldn't deliver that, we were too small for that. So that's where then Cockroach just fitted in nicely by being able to distribute BHA, be resilient against failure, but also be able to scale out because we had this problem with a single MySQL deployment to not really, as it grew, as the data amounts grew, we had trouble to operatively keep that under control. >> So Jim, every time someone comes to me and says, I have a new database, I think we don't need it, yet another database. >> Right. >> What problem, or how does CockroachDB go about solving the types of problems that Christian had? >> Yeah. I mean, Christian laid out why it exists. I mean, look guys, building a database isn't easy. If it was easy, we'd have a database for every application, but you know, Michael Stonebraker, kind of godfather of all database says it himself, it takes seven, eight years for a database to fully gestate to be something that's like enterprise ready and kind of, be relied upon. We've been billing for about seven, eight years. I mean, I'm thankful for people like Christian to join us early on to help us kind of like troubleshoot and go through some things. We're building a database, it's not easy. You're right. But building a distributor system is also not easy. And so for us, if you look at what's going on in just infrastructure in general, what's happening in Kubernetes, like this whole space is Kubernetes. It's all about automation. How do I automate scale? How do I automate resilience out of the entire equation of what we're actually doing? I don't want to have to think about active passive systems. I don't want to think about sharding a database. Sure you can scale MySQL. You know, how many people it takes to run three or four shards of MySQL database. That's not automation. And I tell you what, this world right now with the advances in data how hard it is to find people who actually understand infrastructure to hire them. This is why this automation is happening, because our systems are more complex. So we started from the very beginning to be something that was very different. This is a cloud native database. This is built with the same exact principles that are in Kubernetes. In fact, like Kubernetes it's kind of a spawn of borg, the back end of Google. We are inspired by Spanner. I mean, this started by three engineers that worked at Google, are frustrated, they didn't have the tools, they had at Google. So they built something that was, outside of Google. And how do we give that kind of Google like infrastructure for everybody. And that's, the advent of Cockroach and kind of why we're doing, what we're doing. >> As your database has matured, you're now beginning a transition or you're in a transition to a serverless version. How are you doing that without disrupting the experience for existing customers? And why go serverless at all? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, you know, serverless was, it was kind of a an R&D project for us. And when we first started on a path, because I think you know, ultimately what we would love to do for the database is let's not even think about database, Keith. Like, I don't want to think about the database. What we're building too is, we want a SQL API in the cloud. That's it. I don't want to think about scale. I don't want to think about upgrades. I literally like. that stuff should just go away. That's what we need, right. As developers, I don't want to think about isolation levels or like, you know, give me DML and I want to be able to communicate. And for us the realization of that vision is like, if we're going to put a database on the planet for everybody to actually use it, we have to be really, really efficient. And serverless, which I believe really should be infrastructure less because I don't think we should be thinking of just about service. We got to think about, how do I take the context of regions out of this thing? How do I take the context of cloud providers out of what we're talking about? Let's just not think about that. Let's just code against something. Serverless was the answer. Now we've been building for about a year and a half. We launched a serverless version of Cockroach last October and we did it so that everybody in the public could have a free version of a database. And that's what serverless allows us to do. It's all consumption based up to certain limits and then you pay. But I think ultimately, and we spoke a little bit about this at the very beginning. I think as ISVs, people who are building software today the serverless vision gets really interesting because I think what's on the mind of the CTO is, how do I drive down my cost to the cloud provider? And if we can basically, drive down costs through either making things multi-tenant and super efficient, and then optimizing how much compute we use, spinning things down to zero and back up and auto scaling these sort of things in our software. We can start to make changes in the way that people are thinking about spend with the cloud provider. And ultimately we did that, so we could do things for free. >> So, Jim, I think I disagree Christian, I'm sorry, Jim. I think I disagree with you just a little bit. Christian, I think the biggest challenge facing CTOs are people. >> True. >> Getting the people to worry about cost and spend and implementation. So as you hear the concepts of CoachDB moving to a serverless model, and you're a large customer how does that make you think or react to your people side of your resources? >> Well, I can say that from the people side of resources luckily Cockroach is our least problem. So it just kind of, we always said, it's an operator stream because that was the part that just worked for us, so. >> And it's worked as you have scaled it? without you having ... >> Yeah. I mean, we use it in a bit of a, we do not really scale out like the Cockroach, like really large. It's like, more that we use it with the enterprise features of encryption in the stack and our customers then demand. If they do so, we have the Zas offering and we also do like dedicated stacks. So by having a fully cloud native solution on top of Kubernetes, as the foundational layer we can just use that and stamp it out and deploy it. >> How does that translate into services you can provide your customers? Are there services you can provide customers that you couldn't have, if you were running, say, MySQL? >> No, what we do is, we run this, so the SAS offering runs in our hybrid private cloud. And the other thing that we offer is that we run the entire stack at a cloud provider of their choosing. So if they are an AWS, they give us an AWS account, we put it in there. Theoretically, we could then also talk about using the serverless variant, if they like so, but it's not strictly required for us. >> So Christian, talk to me about that provisioning process because if I had a MySQL deployment before I can imagine how putting that into a cloud native type of repeatable CICD pipeline or Ansible script that could be difficult. Talk to me about that. How CockroachDB enables you to create new onboarding experiences for your customers? >> So what we do is, we use helm charts all over the place as probably everybody else. And then each application team has their parts of services, they've packaged them to helm charts, they've wrapped us in a super chart that gets wrapped into the super, super chart for the entire stack. And then at the right place, somewhere in between Cockroach is added, where it's a dependency. And as they just offer a helm chart that's as easy as it gets. And then what the teams do is they have an inner job, that once you deploy all that, it would spin up. And as soon as Cockroach is ready it's just the same reconcile loop as everything. It will then provision users, set up database schema, do all that. And initialize, initial data sets that might be required for a new setup. So with that setup, we can spin up a new cluster and then deploy that stack chart in there. And it takes some time. And then it's done. >> So talk to me about life cycle management. Because when I have one database, I have one schema. When I have a lot of databases I have a lot of different schemas. How do you keep your stack consistent across customers? >> That is basically part of the same story. We have get offs all over the place. So we have this repository, we see the super helm chart versions and we maintain like minus three versions and ensure that we update the customers and keep them up to date. It's part of the contract sometimes, down to the schedule of the customer at times. And Cockroach nicely supports also, these updates with these migrations in the background, the schema migrations in the background. So we use in our case, in that integration SQL alchemy, which is also nicely supported. So there was also part of the story from MySQL to Postgres, was supported by the ORM, these kind of things. So the skill approach together with the ease of helm charts and the background migrations of the schema is a very seamless upgrade operations. Before that we had to have downtime. >> That's right, you could have online schema changes. Upgrading the database uses the same concept of rolling upgrades that you have in Kubernetes. It's just cloud native. It just fits that same context, I think. >> Christian: It became a no-brainer. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Jim, you mentioned the idea of a SQL API in the cloud, that's really interesting. Why does such a thing not exist? >> Because it's really difficult to build. You know, SQL API, what does that mean? Like, okay. What I'm going to, where does that endpoint live? Is there one in California one on the east coast, one in Europe, one in Asia? Okay. And I'm asking that endpoint for data. Where does that data live? Can you control where data lives on the planet? Because ultimately what we're fighting in software today in a lot of these situations is the speed of light. And so how do you intelligently place data on this planet? So that, you know, when you're asking for data, when you're maybe home, it's a different latency than when you're here in Valencia. Does that data follow and move you? These are really, really difficult problems to solve. And I think that we're at that layer of, we're at this moment in time in software engineering, we're solving some really interesting, interesting things cause we are budding against this speed of light problem. And ultimately that's one of the biggest challenges. But underneath, it has to have all this automation like the ease at which we can scale this database like the always on resilient, the way that we can upgrade the entire thing with just rolling upgrades. The cloud native concepts is really what's enabling us to do things at global scale it's automation. >> Let's alk about that speed of light in global scale. There's no better conference for speed of light, for scale, than Kubecon. Any predictions coming out of the show? >> It's less a prediction for me and more of an observation, you guys. Like look at two years ago, when we were here in Barcelona at QCon EU, it was a lot of hype. It's a lot of hype, a lot of people walking around, curious, fascinated, this is reality. The conversations that I'm having with people today, there's a reality. There's people really doing, they're becoming cloud native. And to me, I think what we're going to see over the next two to three years is people start to adopt this kind of distributed mindset. And it permeates not just within infrastructure but it goes up into the stack. We'll start to see much more developers using, Go and these kind of the threaded languages, because I think that distributed mindset, if it starts at the chip all the way to the fingertip of the person clicking and you're distributed everywhere in between. It is extremely powerful. And I think that's what Finleap, I mean, that's exactly what the team is doing. And I think there's a lot of value and a lot of power in that. >> Jim, Christian, thank you so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your story. You know what we're past the hype cycle of Kubernetes, I agree. I was a nonbeliever in Kubernetes two, three years ago. It was mostly hype. We're looking at customers from Microsoft, Finleap and competitors doing amazing things with this platform and cloud native in general. Stay tuned for more coverage of Kubecon from Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with Paul Gillin and you're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're winding down theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We're here at the Seaport in Boston. It's been two days of a little different Red Hat Summit. We're used to eight, 9,000 people. It's much smaller event this year, fewer developers or actually in terms of the mix, a lot more suits this year, which is kind of interesting to see that evolution and a big virtual audience. And I love the way, the keynotes we've noticed are a lot tighter. They're pithy, on time, they're not keeping us in the hall for three hours. So we appreciate that kind of catering to the virtual audience. Dave Vellante here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. As to say things are winding down, there was an analyst event here today, that's ended, but luckily we have Jim Mercer here as a research director at IDC. He's going to share maybe some of the learnings from that event today and this event overall, we're going to talk about DevSecOps. And Kirsten Newcomer is director of security, product management and hybrid platforms at Red Hat. Folks, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Security's everywhere, right? You and I have spoken about the supply chain hacks, we've done some sort of interesting work around that and reporting around that. I feel like SolarWinds created a new awareness. You see these moments, it's Stuxnet, or WannaCry and now is SolarWinds very insidious, but security, Red Hat, it's everywhere in your portfolio. Maybe talk about the strategy. >> Sure, absolutely. We feel strongly that it's really important that security be something that is managed in a holistic way present throughout the application stack, starting with the operating system and also throughout the life cycle, which is partly where DevSecOps comes in. So Red Hat has kind of had a long history here, right? Think SELinux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for mandatory access control. That's been a key component of securing containers in a Kubernetes environment. SELinux has demonstrated the ability to prevent or mitigate container escapes to the file system. And we just have continued to work up the stack as we go, our acquisition of stack rocks a little over a year ago, now known as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, gives us the opportunity to really deliver on that DevSecOps component. So Kubernetes native security solution with the ability to both help shift security left for the developers by integrating in the supply chain, but also providing a SecOps perspective for the operations and the security team and feeding information between the two to really try and do that closed infinity loop and then an additional investment more recently in sigstore and some technologies. >> Interesting. >> Yeah, is interesting. >> Go ahead. >> But Shift Left, explain to people what you mean by Shift Left for people might not be familiar with that term. >> Fair enough. For many, many years, right, IT security has been something that's largely been part of an operations environment and not something that developers tended to need to be engaged in with the exception of say source code static analysis tools. We started to see vulnerability management tools get added, but even then they tend to come after the application has been built. And I even ran a few years ago, I ran into a customer who said my security team won't let me get this information early. So Shift Left is all about making sure that there are security gates in the app dev process and information provided to the developer as early as possible. In fact, even in the IDE, Red Hat code ready dependency analytics does that, so that the developers are part of the solution and don't have to wait and get their apps stalled just before it's ready to go into deployment. >> Thank you. You've also been advocating for supply chain security, software supply chain. First of all, explain what a software supply chain is and then, what is unique about the security needs of that environment? >> Sure. And the SolarWinds example, as Dave said, really kind of has raised awareness around this. So just like we use the term supply chain, most people given kind of what's been happening with the pandemic, they've started hearing that term a lot more than they used to, right? So there's a supply chain to get your groceries, to the grocery store, food to the grocery store. There's a supply chain for manufacturing, where do the parts come for the laptops that we're all using, right? And where do they get assembled? Software has a supply chain also, right? So for years and even more so now, developers have been including open source components into the applications they build. So some of the supplies for the applications, the components of those applications, they can come from anywhere in the world. They can come from a wide range of open source projects. Developers are adding their custom code to that. All of this needs to be built together, delivered together and so when we think about a supply chain and the SolarWinds hack, right, there are a couple of elements of supply chain security that are particularly key. The executive order from May of last year, I think was partly in direct response to the SolarWinds hack. And it calls out that we need a software bill of materials. Now again, in manufacturing that's something folks are used to, I actually had the opportunity to contribute to the software package data exchange format, SPDX when it was first started, I've lost track of when that was. But an S-bomb is all about saying, what are all of those components that I'm delivering in my solution? It might be an application layer. It might be the host operating system layer, but at every layer. And if I know what's in what I'm delivering, I have the opportunity to learn more information about those components to track where does Log4Shell, right? When the Log4j or Spring4Shell, which followed shortly thereafter. When those hit, how do I find out which solutions that I'm running have the vulnerable components in them and where are they? The software bill of materials helps with that but you also have to know where, right. And that's the Ops side. I feel like I missed a piece of your question. >> No, it's not a silver bullet though, to your point and Log4j very widely used, but let's bring Jim into the conversation. So Jim, we've been talking about some of these trends, what's your focus area of research? What are you seeing as some of the mega trends in this space? >> I mean, I focus in DevOps and DevSecOps and it's interesting just talking about trends. Kirsten was mentioning the open source and if you look back five, six, seven years ago and you went to any major financial institution, you asked them if they use an open source. Oh, no. >> True. >> We don't use that, right. We wrote it all here. It's all from our developers-- >> Witchcraft. >> Yeah, right, exactly. But the reality is, they probably use a little open source back then but they didn't realize it. >> It's exactly true. >> However, today, not only are they not on versed to open source, they're seeking it out, right. So we have survey data that kind of indicates... A survey that was run kind of in late 2021 that shows that 70% of those who responded said that within the next two years 90% of their applications will be made up of open source. In other words, the content of an application, 10% will be written by themselves and 90% will come from other sources. So we're seeing these more kind of composite applications. Not, everybody's kind of, if you will, at that 90%, but applications are much more composite than they were before. So I'm pulling in pieces, but I'm taking the innovation of the community. So I not only have the innovation of my developers, but I can expand that. I can take the innovation to the community and bring that in and do things much quicker. I can also not have my developers worry about things that, maybe just kind of common stuff that's out there that might have already been written. In other words, just focus on the business logic, don't focus on, how to get orders or how to move widgets and those types of things that everybody does 'cause that's out there in open source. I'll just take that, right. I'll take it, somebody's perfected it, better than I'll ever do. I'll take that in and then I'll just focus and build my business logic on top of that. So open source has been a boom for growth. And I think we've heard a little bit of that (Kirsten laughs) in the last two days-- >> In the Keynotes. >> From Red Hat, right. But talking about the software bill of materials, and then you think about now I taking all that stuff in, I have my first level open source that I took in, it's called it component A. But behind component A is all these transitive dependencies. In other words, open source also uses open source, right? So there's this kind of this, if you will, web or nest, if you want to call it that, of transitive dependencies that need to be understood. And if I have five, six layers deep, I have a vulnerability in another component and I'm over here. Well, guess what? I picked up that vulnerability, right. Even though I didn't explicitly go for that component. So that's where understanding that software bill of materials is really important. I like to explain it as, during the pandemic, we've all experienced, there was all this contact tracing. It was a term where all came to mind. The software bill of materials is like the contact tracing for your open source, right. >> Good analogy. >> Anything that I've come in contact with, just because I came in contact with it, even though I didn't explicitly go looking for COVID, if you will, I got it, right. So in the same regard, that's how I do the contact tracing for my software. >> That 90% figure is really striking. 90% open source use is really striking, considering that it wasn't that long ago that one of the wraps on open source was it's insecure because anybody can see the code, therefore anybody can see the vulnerabilities. What changed? >> I'll say that, what changed is kind of first, the understanding that I can leapfrog and innovate with open source, right? There's more open source content out there. So as organizations had to digitally transform themselves and we've all heard the terminology around, well, hey, with the pandemic, we've leapfrog up five years of digital transformation or something along those lines, right? Open source is part of what helps those teams to do that type of leapfrog and do that type of innovation. You had to develop all of that natively, it just takes too long, or you might not have the talent to do it, right. And to find that talent to do it. So it kind of gives you that benefit. The interesting thing about what you mentioned there was, now we're hearing about all these vulnerabilities, right, in open source, that we need to contend with because the bad guys realize that I'm taking a lot of open source and they're saying, geez, that's a great way to get myself into applications. If I get myself into this one open source component, I'll get into thousands or more applications. So it's a fast path into the supply chain. And that's why it's so important that you understand where your vulnerabilities are in the software-- >> I think the visibility cuts two ways though. So when people say, it's insecure because it's visible. In fact, actually the visibility helps with security. The reality that I can go see the code, that there is a community working on finding and fixing vulnerabilities in that code. Whereas in code that is not open source it's a little bit more security by obscurity, which isn't really security. And there could well be vulnerabilities that a good hacker is going to find, but are not disclosed. So one of the other things we feel strongly about at Red Hat, frankly, is if there is a CVE that affects our code, we disclose that publicly, we have a public CVE database. And it's actually really important to us that we share that, we think we share way more information about issues in our code than most other users or consumers of open source and we work that through the broad community as well. And then also for our enterprise customers, if an issue needs to be fixed, we don't just fix it in the most recent version of the open source. We will backport that fix. And one of the challenges, if you're only addressing the most recent version, that may not be well tested, it might have other bugs, it might have other issues. When we backport a security vulnerability fix, we're able to do that to a stable version, give the customers the benefit of all the testing and use that's gone on while also fixing. >> Kirsten, can you talk about the announcements 'cause everybody's wondering, okay, now what do I do about this? What technology is there to help me? Obviously this framework, you got to follow the right processes, skill sets, all that, not to dismiss that, that's the most important part, but the announcements that you made at Red Hat Summit and how does the StackRox acquisition fit into those? >> Sure. So in particular, if we stick with DevSecOps a minute, but again, I'll do. Again for me, DevSecOps is the full life cycle and many people think of it as just that Shift Left piece. But for me, it's the whole thing. So StackRox ACS has had the ability to integrate into the CI/CD pipeline before we bought them. That continues. They don't just assess for vulnerabilities, but also for application misconfigurations, excess proof requests and helm charts, deployment YAML. So kind of the big, there are two sort of major things in the DevSecOps angle of the announcement or the supply chain angle of the announcement, which is the investment that we've been making in sigstore, signing, getting integrity of the components, the elements you're deploying is important. I have been asked for years about the ability to sign container images. The reality is that the signing technology and Red Hat signs everything we ship and always have, but the signing technology wasn't designed to be used in a CI/CD pipeline and sigstore is explicitly designed for that use case to make it easy for developers, as well as you can back it with full CO, you can back it with an OIDC based signing, keyless signing, throw away the key. Or if you want that enterprise CA, you can have that backing there too. >> And you can establish that as a protocol where you must. >> You can, right. So our pattern-- >> So that would've helped with SolarWinds. >> Absolutely. >> Because they were putting in malware and then taking it out, seeing what happened. My question was, could sigstore help? I always evaluate now everything and I'm not a security expert, but would this have helped with SolarWinds? A lot of times the answer is no. >> It's a combination. So a combination of sigstore integrated with Tekton Chains. So we ship Tekton, which is a Kubernetes supply chain pipeline. As OpenShift pipelines, we added chains to that. Chains allows you to attest every step in your pipeline. And you're doing that attestation by signing those steps so that you can validate that those steps have not changed. And in fact, the folks at SolarWinds are using Tekton Chains. They did a great talk in October at KubeCon North America on the changes they've made to their supply chain. So they're using both Tekton Chains and sigstore as part of their updated pipeline. Our pattern will allow our customers to deploy OpenShift, advanced cluster manager, advanced cluster security and Quay with security gates in place. And that include a pipeline built on Tekton with Tekton Chains there to sign those steps in the pipeline to enable signing of the code that's moving through that pipeline to store that signature in Quay and to validate the image signature upon deployment with advanced cluster security. >> So Jim, your perspective on this, Red Hat's, I mean, you care about security, security's everywhere, but you're not a security company. You follow security companies. There's like far too many of them. CISOs all say my number one challenge is lack of talent, but I have all these tools to deal with. You see new emerging companies that are doing pretty well. And then you see a company that's highly respected, like an Okta screw up the communications on a pretty benign hack. Actually, when you peel the onion on that, it's just this mess (chuckles) and it doesn't seem like it's going to get any simpler. Maybe the answer is companies like Red Hat kind of absorbing that and taking care of it. What do you see there? I mean, maybe it's great for business 'cause you've got so many companies. >> There's a lot of companies and there's certainly a lot of innovation out there and unique ways to make security easier, right. I mean, one of the keys here is to be able to make security easier for developers, right. One of the challenges with adopting DevSecOps is if DevSecOps creates a lot of friction in the process, it's hard to really... I can do it once, but I can't keep doing that and get the same kind of velocity. So I need to take the friction out of the process. And one of the challenges a lot of organizations have, and I've heard this from the development side, but I've also heard it from the InfoSec side, right. Because I take inquiry for people on InfoSec, and they're like, how do I get these developers to do what I want? And part of the challenge they have is like, I got these teams using these tools. I got those teams using those tools. And it's a similar challenge that we saw on DevOps where there's just too many, if you will, too many dang tools, right. So that is a challenge for organizations is, they're trying to kind of normalize the tools. Interestingly, we did a survey, I think around last August or something. And one of the questions was around, where do you want your security? Where do you want to get your DevSecOps security from, do you want to get it from individual vendors? Or do you want to get it from like, your platforms that you're using and deploying changes in Kubernetes. >> Great question. What did they say? >> The majority of them, they're hoping they can get it built into the platform. That's really what they want. And you see a lot of the security vendors are trying to build security platforms. Like we're not just assess tool, we're desk, we're this, whatever. And they're building platforms to kind of be that end-to-end security platform, trying to solve that problem, right, to make it easier to kind of consume the product overall, without a bunch of individual tools along the way. But certainly tool sprawl is definitely a challenge out there. Just one other point around the sigstore stuff which I love. Because that goes back to the supply chain and talking about digital providence, right. Understanding where things... How do I validate that what I gave you is what you thought it was, right. And what I like about it with Tekton Chains is because there's a couple things. Well, first of all, I don't want to just sign things after I built the binary. Well, I mean, I do want to sign it, but I want to just sign things once, right. Because all through the process, I think of it as a manufacturing plant, right. I'm making automobiles. If I check the quality of the automobile at one stage and I don't check it to the other, things have changed, right. How do I know that I did something wasn't compromised, right. So with sigstore kind of tied in with Tekton Chains, kind of gives me that view. And the other aspect I like it about is, this kind of transparency in the log, right-- >> The report component. >> Exactly. So I can see what was going on. So there is some this kind of like public scrutiny, like if something bad happened, you could go back and see what happened there and it wasn't as you were expected. >> As with most discussions on this topic, we could go for an hour because it's really important. And thank you guys for coming on and sharing your perspectives, the data. >> Our pleasure. >> And keep up the good work. Kirsten, it's on you. >> Thanks so much. >> The IDC survey said it, they want it in platforms. You're up. >> (laughs) That's right. >> All right. Good luck to both you. >> Thank you both so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching. We're back to wrap right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gill. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>>from the bellagio Hotel >>in Las Vegas. >>It's the >>cube covering >>Ui Path forward. >>Four brought to >>you by Ui Path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is here. We've been here for two days covering Ui Path Forward for lisa martin here with David Monty. We've talked about automation and many industries. Now this segment is going to focus on automation and healthcare. We've got two guests joining us Jim Petrosea Cto of Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Gadget. Dhaliwal. The global C. I. O. Industry lead at you. I pass guys welcome to the program. Thank you. So let's start unpacking from the CTO level and the ceo level the agenda for automation. Jim let's start with you. What does that look like >>for us. It's actually pretty strategic and part of as we think about digital and what digital transformation means, it actually plays a pretty key role. Um There are a lot of processes that can be very manual within a big organization like Blue cross and Blue shield and to be able to streamline that and take away kind of what I would call the mundane work. Right? The the you know, going through a spreadsheet and then typing it into the screen, there are a lot of processes like that that are legacy. But what if you could take that away um and actually create a better work experience for the people that work there right? And and focus on higher value type uh type things and it's really key. And it really It goes down to our our business folks right? There are a lot of things we can drive with automation. We started a program um in 2019. Um that's been quite successful. We now have 250 box, we measure what we call annualized efficiency gains. So how much efficiency are we getting by these bots? So the bots are doing um this repetitive work that people would do. Um And what we're finding is, you know, we've got about $11 million in any wise efficiency gain through the process and we're just getting started. Um But we're all we're not stopping there too though, we're enabling citizen developers. So we're saying, hey business, if you want to automate, you know, parts of your job, we're gonna help you do that. So we've got about 60 people that were training. Um We run bad Ethan's where they come together and they actually create bots uh And it's really really creating some some impact and buzz in our business >>anywhere from your lens, where does automation fit within the C. I. O. S. Agenda? And how do you work together in unison with the C. T. O. To help roll this out across the enterprise? >>Yeah, no, definitely. And in fact as a part of introduction, I can actually share that. How I'm wearing a Ceo had within your path since I'm just joining join path and I'm actually now helping a client ceos in their automation strategy but I was a deputy ceo in my prior role at L. A. County where actually I ran the automation strategy. So if we look at from our organization perspective B complex as L. A County which is such a Federated organization. From a Ceo perspective, the way we look at the strategy is it's always driven by the business goals of the city or a county and we typically drive into three different areas. One is how we can transform our operational processes so that we can save the tax dollars. It's all about doing more with the less dollars. And then second is about how we can transform our residents experience because end of the day it is all about how we can improve the quality of life for our residents. So we've got 10 million people for L. A. County, the largest populous county in us. So it was an uphill task to serve that such a diverse population need and that the third area is about how to transform the new business models because as we are moving away from a government centric approach to the residents centric approach, you really need to come up with a new digital solutions. And Ceo is in the center of all these three elements when you look at it. So it's a very appear to us to keep keep improving your efficiency and then at a time keep adding the new digital solutions and that's where automation strategy is kind of a horizontal strategy which enables all these components. So what I hear from >>that is alignment with the business. Yeah. Right. Change management. Absolutely. That's like really fundamental and then see IOS this this agent of transformation uh you can see or she has a horizontal purview across the organization now now jim the cto role is the automation at blue cross blue shield lead by you or you there to make sure the technology plugs into your enterprise architecture. What's your shoulder? >>You know? Uh my my role is really to drive uh what I'll call technology enabled business change. Right. So I actually uh started our our automation journey uh at hc sc and I did that by partnering with our business. Um There was actually a lot of buzz around automation and there were actually some small pockets of it, none of it was enterprise scale. Um Right. And we really wanted to go big in this and and working with the business sponsors, they saw value in it. Um and we've you know, we've generated um a lot of uh efficiency, better quality of work because of it but but I very closely had a partner with our business, we have a committee that is lead of business folks that I facilitate. So I view my role as an enabler, um we have to communicate the change management pieces is huge. Uh the education just having a common vernacular on what is automation mean, Right, because everybody interpreted it differently um and then being able to do it at an enterprise scale is quite challenging. Um You know, I I really enjoyed um one of the key notes, I don't know if you had a chance to see shankar by Duncan from the hidden brain, right? But he talked a lot about the brain aspect and how do you get people to change? And and that's a large part of it. There's a lot about technology, but there's really a lot about being a change agent um and and really working very closely with your business, >>how does one measure? I'm hearing a lot time saved. Our saved. How does one measure that and quantify the dollar impact, which by the way, I'm on record as saying the soft dollars are way bigger. And but when you're talking to the, you know, the bottom line CFO and it's all about, you know, the cash flow, whatever is, how do you measure that? >>I can take it. So we, what we do is as we define these use cases right? We we go through an actual structure product process where we we gather them. Um we then rate them and we actually prioritize them based on those that are going to have the greatest impact. Um and we can tell based on, you know, what is the manual effort today. So we understand there are X number of people that do this X number of days and we think this body can take that some load off of them. Right? Um So we we go in with the business case. Um And then the Ui Path platform actually allows us to measure well, how much is that pot running? Right. So we can actually sit there and say, well we wanted that thing to run 10 hours a day and it did and it's generated this kind of efficiency because otherwise the human would have had to do that work. >>So the business case is kind of redeploying >>human. It really is is really maximizing human capital and make and and you know really using because the bots do repetitive stuff really well. They don't do higher level thinking and and we don't view it as replacing people, we view it as augmenting and actually making them more efficient and more effective at what, how do you get the dollars out of that? Well, a couple of ways. Right. And so one of the things we've we've done is we we create and measure the efficiency our business users and financed by the way is one of our bigger ones. And the CFO is one of the sponsors of the program, um can decide how to reinvest it in a lot of cases it is actually cost avoidance as we grow, literally being able to grow without adding staff. I mean that's very measurable. Um in some cases it is actually taking, you know cost out um in in certain cases, but a lot of times that's just through attrition, right? You don't back fill positions, you let it happen naturally. Um and and then there's just things that happen to your business that you have to respond to give you a great example, state of texas, um passes what's the equivalent of the no surprise attack. But they did it there before the federal government did it. Um but it requires a lot of processes to be put in place, because now you have providers and payers having to deal with disputes, right? It actually generates a boatload of work. And we thought there might be, you know, 5000 of these in the first year, where there were 21,000 in the first year. And so far this year we're doubling that amount, right. We were able to use automation to respond to that without having to add a bunch of stuff. If we had to add staff for that, it would have literally been, you know, maybe hundreds of people, right? And but now, you know, there's, you can clearly put a value on it and it's millions of dollars a year, that we would have otherwise had to expect. >>The reason I'm harping on this lease is because I've been through a lot of cycles, as you know, and after the dot com boom, the the cost avoidance meant not writing the check to the software company, right? And that's what nick Carr wrote this, i. T matter. And then, and then, you know, post the financial crisis, we've entered uh a decade plus of awareness on the impact of technology. And I wonder if it's, I think this, I think this the cycle is changing I think. And I wonder if you have an opinion here where people, I think organizations are going to look at Technology completely different than they did like in the early 2000s when it was just easy to cut. >>No, I think the other point I will add to it. I agree with the gym. So we typically look at our away but it doesn't always have to be the cost. Right? If you look from the outcomes of the value, there are other measures also right? If you look at the how automation was able to help in the Covid generate. It was never about costs at that time. It was about a human lives. So you always may not be able to quantify it what you look at. Okay. What how are we maximizing the value or what kind of situations where we are and where we may not even have a human power to do that work. And we are running against the time. It could be the compliance needs. I'll give example of our covid use case which was pretty big success uh within L. A. County we deployed bots for the covid contact tracing program. So we were actually interviewing all the people who were testing positive so that we actually can keep track of them and then bring back that data within our HR so that our criminologists actually can look at the trends and see how we are doing as a county as compared to other counties and nationally. And we were in the peak, we were interviewing about 5000 people a day And we had to process that data manually into our nature and we deployed 15 members to do that. And they were doing like about 600 interviews a day. So every day we had a backlog of 2500 interviews. So it is not about a cost saving or a dollar value here because nobody planned for these unplanned events and now we don't have a time and money to find more data entry operators and parts were able to actually clear up all the backlog. So the value which we were able to bring it is way beyond the cost element. >>I I believe that 100% and I've been fighting this battle for a long time and it's easier to fight now because we're in this economic cycle even despite the pandemic, but I think it can be quantified. I honestly believe it can be tied to the income statement or in the case of a public sector, it could be tied to the budget and the mission how that budget supports the mission of the company. But I really believe it. And and I've always said that those soft factors are dwarf the cost savings, but sometimes, you know, sometimes the CFO doesn't listen, you know, because he or she has to cut. I think automation could change that >>for public sector. We look at how we can do more about it. So it's because we don't look at bottom line, it's about the tax dollars, we have limited dollars, but how we can maximize the value which we are giving to residents, it is not about a profit for us. We look at the different lens when it comes to the commercial >>Side, it's similar for us. So as a as a health care pair, because we're a mutual right? Our members and we have 17 million of them are really the folks that own the company and we're very purpose driven. Our our purpose is to do everything in our power to stand by members in sickness and in health. So how do you get the highest quality, cost effective health care for them? So if automation allows you to be more effective and actually keep that cost down, that means you can cover more people and provide higher quality care to our members. So that's really the driver for mission driven, >>I was gonna ask you as a member as one of your 17 million members, what are some of the ways in which automation is benefiting me? >>Um you know, a number of different ways. First off, you know, um it lowers our administrative costs, right? So that means we can actually lower our rights as as we go out and and and work with folks? That's probably the the the the bottom line impact, but we're also automating processes uh to to make it easier for the member. Right? Uh the example I used earlier was the equivalent of no surprises. Right. How do we take the member out of the middle of this dispute between, you know, out of network providers and the payer and just make it go away. Right, and we take care of it. Um but that that creates potentially administrative burden on our side, but we want to keep their costs down and we do it efficiently using it. So there's a number of use cases that we've we've done across, you know, different parts of our business. We automate a lot of our customer service, right? When you call um there's bots in the background that are helping that that agent do their job. And what that means is you're on the show, you're on the phone a lot shorter of a period of time. And that agent can be more concise and more accurate in answering your question. >>So your employee experience is dramatically improved, as is the member experience? >>Yes, they go hand in hand. They do go hand, unhappy members means unhappy employees, 100% >>mentioned scale before, you said you can't scale in this particular, the departmental pockets. Talk about scale a little bit. I'm curious as to how important cloud is to scale. Is it not matter. Can you scale without cloud? What are the other dimensions of scale? >>Well, you know, especially with my CTO had, we're we're pushing very heavily to cloud. We view ourselves as a cloud first. We want to do things in a cloud versus our own data centers, partially because of the scale that it gives us. But because we're healthcare, we have to do it very securely. So. We are very meticulous about guarding our data, how we encrypt information um, not only in our data center but in the cloud and controlling the keys and having all the controls in place. You know, the C. So and I are probably the best friends right now in the company because we have to do it together and you have to take that that security mind set up front. Right cloud first. Put security first with it. Um, so we're moving what we can to the cloud because we think it's just going to give us better scale as we grow and better economics overall, >>Any thoughts on that? I think a similar thoughts but if we look from L. A. county because of the sheer volume itself because the data which we are talking about. We had 40 departments within the county. Each department is serving a different business purpose for the resident beit voting or B justice or being social services and all and the amount of data which we are generating for 10 million residents and the amount of duplicate asi which it comes out because it's a very government centering model. You have a different systems and they may not be talking to each other. The amount of diplomacy and identity delicacy which we are creating and as we are enabling the interoperability between these functions to give us seamless experience keeping security in mind so fully agree on that because the end of the day we have to ensure that customer guarantee but it's a sheer volume that as and when we are adding these data sets and the patient's data as well as the residents data and now we have started adding a machine data because we have deployed so many IOT solutions so the data which is coming from those machines, the logs and all its exponential so that's where the scale comes into picture and how we can ensure that we are future ready for the upscale which we need and that's where cloud ability definitely helps a lot. >>What do you mean by future ready? >>So if you look at from a future smart city or a smart community perspective, imagine when machines are everywhere machines and IOT solutions are deployed, beat even healthcare, your bad information, you're even patient information, everything is interconnected and amount of data which is getting generated in that your automobile they're going to start talking to entertainment or we have to potentially track a single resident might be going same person going to the justice or maybe same person might be having a mental health issues, A same person might be looking for a social services, how we're going to connect those dots and what all systems they are touching. So all that interconnections needs to happen. So that exponential increase of data is a future readiness, which I'm talking about. Are we future ready from a technology perspective? Are we future ready from the other ecosystem perspective and how and how we're gonna manage those situations? Uh, so those are the things which we >>look at it and it's a it's a multiplier to, right? We all have this influx of information and you need to figure out what to do with it. Right. This is where artificial intelligence, machine learning is so important. But you also have interoperability standards that are coming. So now we're we have this massive data that each of our organizations have. But now you have interoperability which is a good thing for the member saying now I need to be able to share that data. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about >>that because a lot of changes in health care, um, are meaningful use. You have to show that to get paid but the standards weren't mature. Right? And so now that's changing what role does automation play in facilitating those standards. >>So, you know, we're big, big supporters of the fire standard that's out there um to in order to be able to support the standards and and create a P. I. S. And and pull together the information. What what will happen sometimes in the background is there's actually um artificial intelligence, machine learning models that create algorithms right? The output of that though often has to be active. Now a person can do something with that information or a vodka. Right? So when you start taking the ideal of artificial intelligence and now you have a robotic process that can use that to pull together the information and assimilated in a way to make it higher quality. But now it's available. It's kind of in the background. You don't see it but it's there helping. >>What are some of the things that you see? I know we're out of time but I just have a couple more questions. Some of the things that you see here we are you I path forward for we're in person. This is a bold company that's growing very quickly. Some of the announcements that were made, what are what are some of your reaction to that? And how do you see it helping move blue crush blue shield forward even >>faster. Well you know a lot of the announcements in terms of some of the features that that they've added around their robotics processing are great right? The fact that they're in the cloud and and some of the capabilities and and and better ability to to support that the process mining is key. Right. In order for abouts to be effective, you have to understand your process and you just don't want to necessarily automate the bad practices. Right? So you want to take a look at those processes to figure out how you can automate things smartly. Um and some of their capabilities around that are very interesting. We're going to explore that quite a bit but but I think they're the ambition here is beyond robotics. Right. It's actually creating um you know, applications that actually are using bots in the background which is very intriguing and has a lot of potential potentially to drive even more digital transformation. This can really affect all of our workers and allow us to take digital solutions out to the market a lot faster >>and to see what was going to ask you, you are here for four weeks at UI Path, you got to meet a lot of your colleagues, which is great. But what about this company attracted you to leave your former role and come over here to the technology vendor side. >>Well, I think I was able to achieve the similar role within L. A. County, able to establish the automation practice and achieve the maturity, able to stand up things and I feel that this is the same practitioner activity which I can actually take it back to the other clients ceos because of one thing which I really like about your hypothesis. RP is just a small component of it. I really want to change that mindset that we have to start looking ui path as an end to end full automation enterprise solution and it is not only the business automation, it's the idea automation and it's a plus combination and whether we are developing a new industry solutions with our partners to help the different industry segments and we actually helping Ceo in the center of it because Ceo is the one who is driving the automation, enabling the business automation and actually managing the automation ceo and the governess. So CEO is in left and center of it and my role is to ensure that I actually help those Ceos to make successful and get that maturity and you will path as a platform is giving that ability of length and breath and that's what is really fascinating me and I'm really looking forward that how that spectrum is changing that we are getting matured in a process mining area and how we are expanding our horizons to look at the whole automation suit, not just the R. P. Product and that's something which I'm really looking forward and seeing that how we're going to continue expanding other magic quadrants and we're actually going to give the seamless experience so the client doesn't have to worry about okay for this, I have to pick this and further, I have to pick something else >>that's seamless experience is absolutely table stakes these days. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining. David me, talking about automation and health care. Your recommendations for best practices, how to go about doing that and and the change management piece. That's a critical piece. We appreciate your time. >>Thanks for having. Thank >>you. Our pleasure for day Volonte. I'm lisa martin live in las Vegas. The cubes coverage of you a path forward for continues next. Mhm. Mhm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I am Lisa Martin. Jim Richberg joins me next, public sector CISO at Fortinet. Welcome to the program. Great to see you. >> Okay, good to be with you, Lisa. >> Lots of stuff has happened in the last year. I mean that's an epic understatement, right? But one of the things that... We saw this massive shift to work from home, and now we're... I hope I can say coming out of the pandemic, and we're starting to see this hybrid model of kind of work from anywhere. We also saw the massive spike in ransomware last year. Ransomware now being suddenly a household term. There's so much money in it. From a hybrid approach, what are some of the things that you're seeing? >> So, when we talk about hybrid, what we go back to is not going to be the office that we left. Some of us aren't going back at all. Some of us are going back in. We're not going to have assigned desks. Some of the offices are going to be in different places, and the nature of the work that we've been doing has changed. So it definitely means the new normal isn't going to look like the old normal did before March of 2021. So I tell organizations that they really need to think about what that means in terms of how they structure work, how they structured their networks. Because as you said, Lisa, it's going to be work from anywhere. Some of us are going to go back out on the road. We'll be the road warriors again. So you're not going back to a classic network, in an office with CAT5 Cat 5 cables, connecting everybody's desktop. And some of us are even going to get hired who never ever go to the office. So this is a situation where we really have to think through what this means in terms of how we work, the culture we have as a workplace, and unfortunately, it's not just the enterprise and the workforce that have been innovating. The threat actors have gone hybrid. There was a little pause while they started working from home, figuring out what to do, but the reality is they took us to lunch when they figured out exactly what these vulnerabilities in the small office, home office environment were, and how to exploit them. Lisa, you talked about ransomware rising 700% in the latter half of last year. And this is actually indicative of what I think is the biggest problem we have in cyber security. It's not technology. If you're willing to do a rip and replace and put in state of the art technology, there's some really good solutions. Some of that technology, when it starts incorporating artificial intelligence and automation, actually goes a long way to compensate for the workforce and skills gap we all hear about, 3 million people short. That's a true number. But Lisa, the biggest problem in cyber security from my perspective, and I've been doing this for 35 years, is metrics. We can't measure what's going on and say, "If I do this, this is how it affects the network security and this is how it affects the adversary's behavior." And that's exactly what we saw in this pivot to remote telework. It took networking and security working hand in hand to make that pivot. Because I've seen those two as the centerpiece of their organization. In March of last year, when we all went into lockdown, we would've gone and do shutdown if we haven't had the ability to forward deploy that IT to the home environment. And we can measure our success on the IT side. Did we have enough bandwidth? Did we give them the right platforms? Did the latency mean things froze up or not? We couldn't measure cybersecurity as well. We said, "Okay, due diligence says we'll give you a two-factor authentication, and we're going to do a secure connection back to the office. But then they said we were basically treating it as if you were logged on from your cube or your office, and the reality is you weren't. You were logged in from an environment that your organization had very little, if any, visibility or control into what was going on there, and that's how we got exploited. And because we couldn't measure that, it was only in hindsight that we could see exactly how insecure that was for many organizations. We cut corners. We had to do this to get up and running. That's not a good jumping off point for your status quo going into this hybrid environment in the future. >> So it sounds like you said the ransomware... When I spoke with with Derek Manky, I think about last month or so, ransomware were up 700%. I can only imagine what's happening this year, but one of the things I want to get your perspective on, Jim, is, what's top of mind for both public sector and private sector folks? As you're saying from a measurement perspective, There's a challenge there. There's this hybrid model that's amorphous we'll say. What are some of the things that are top of mind for them, and then how are you helping advise them? Because, as you say, the threat actors got to work pretty quick, so there's a race here. >> Well, top of mind for both of course is ransomware. And the ironic thing is ransomware is not a new phenomenon. It's been with us for a long time. It used to affect retail, one computer at a time, and it was 50 or 100 bucks to decrypt your personal computer. What has changed is the rise of cryptocurrency. It's so easy to monetize the ability to cash out with the victim now. There was a time five to 10 years ago where there were basically three places that were essentially the clearinghouses for this kind of stuff. So government could target those through law enforcement, and that meant that you really had the equivalent of the pawnbroker you needed to watch out for who was the fence that people were going to. Now, come on, cryptocurrency is essentially a fiat currency in some countries. So it's going everywhere. The fact that we have commoditized the ability to do it, you're familiar with ransomware as a service. You don't have to be a coder now. You rent the stuff. Sometimes you pay as much as 80% of the profit to the person you're renting it from. You're basically the mule doing the grunt work, but we've made it so that you don't need to know anything about computer science to carry this kind of crime off. And frankly, we've got some safe haven, some geopolitical safe heavens. It's much like spam was 10 years ago where there were a few countries where probably more traffic coming out as email was spammed in legitimate traffic. And we've got some big nation stages that are basically complicit in allowing this to occur, so safe haven. So this is why ransomware has become such a problem for everybody, and then of course you've got supply chain. You look at solar winds, you look at Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 vulnerability. This again is a problem that's been with us for a long time. It's one that tends to be focused primarily on government customers, because this is something where, yeah, you can do it as a criminal activity, but this really tends to be a game that nation states play against nation state terms. But something like SolarWinds was such an epiphany, was so serious that a lot of organizations said, "Oh my goodness, this attacked the root of trust. This fundamentally got into the system from the inside out." It scared people. And the reality is something like that infected far more people than were actively exploited. I've talked to some people in both the public sector at the state level, and in private sector who say, "Yes, my organization was compromised by this, but we weren't affected." So from my perspective, we were collateral damage. We were caught in the crossfire of a war between nation states. Do we want to spend our scarce cyber security resources trying to mitigate that kind of sophisticated threat? No, not when we know we've got ransomware, when we've got these vulnerabilities in the work from anywhere environment. That's where I want to put my next dollars. So it's been a health conversation with some of them as to what's most concerning to them and what they want to prioritize in mitigation. >> So if we look at some of the executive orders, Jim, that have come down, ransomware I said became a household word. I'm pretty sure my mom even knows the term ransomware, the Colonial Pipeline, the meat packing, where we're starting to see, wow, this is not just, as you said earlier in the beginning, isolated incidents or attacks. This is now affecting infrastructure, potentially public health and safety. Talk to me about some of the executive orders. What do you think they're going to do and where should agencies start? This race is going on. Like you said, they've got to be able to prioritize how they defend themselves. >> So two things to keep in mind when you look at an executive order. An executive order is the chief executive telling the executive branch what to do. If you look at the last executive order that President Biden signed on the 12th of May, people became seized with the fact that, "Oh my goodness, it tells the private sector it has to give threat information, it has to give breach information to the federal government, it has to change what it does in supply chain." You go no. It says when the federal government is your customer, when you're selling them a service, you have to do this. But otherwise, you don't do, by an executive order, something... It doesn't have the force of law. It just is the way you tell the executive branch to behave. So use that executive order as a case on point. Very large, very complex executive order that touched a lot of these things, ransomware, supply chain issues. The problem is you put a whole lot of good ideas in one executive order. You put a whole lot of aggressive time frame. Some things had to be done in 30, 45 days, 60 days, which is two weeks from now. It's crazy because one thing an executive order doesn't do is give you more money. The only way a government agency can spend money on this is if it aligned with the program it already had, or it has contingency funds, reserved funds to do it. So the problem is you take an executive order, you cram it full of good ideas, and you have too many good ideas. So the reality is this executive order tells the government to do a lot of things at once, and it has to by law, well, by the president's direction, focus on all this at once. But if I could pick and choose these, I would say start with the section that said focus on modernizing the cybersecurity of the federal government. There's goodness to come out of that. It has zero trust architecture. Federal government did a great idea of articulating what that was, even years before we called it zero trust. Federal government was segmenting its networks. It had need-to-know access. It was doing things. I come from the national security community. That was just the way we worked. We didn't call it anything fancy like zero trust. We didn't trust anybody. That's the way it worked in the spy business. But zero trust architecture, accelerating migration to the cloud, putting in multi-factor authentication and encryption of data at rest and in transit, deploying endpoint detection and response. Those are things in the executive order that if agencies could focus on those and make progress on implementing those, thumbs up, you have appreciably increased security without even touching the harder things that unfortunately are going to distract people like supply chain, and definitions of what critical software is and the cyber safety board. All good things, but the problem is if you try to do everything at once, the reality is you end up making progress on, appreciable progress on nothing. >> Right, which obviously we don't have the time for that. I'm curious getting your point, because one of the challenges with respect, well, threat vectors with respect to cybersecurity is people. With this shift to home, we had people using corporate devices on home networks and random devices, and now we've got this, as we talked about earlier, this hybrid approach coming back. But how much can zero trust help agencies really educate or really help defend form the human error that is often the cause of getting ransomware through email or an attachment. >> So, Lisa, that is exactly... We're handicapped by the name because zero trust sounds like I don't trust you, you're not trustworthy, rather than trust should be based on the transaction. Like if you need to read data to a file, why am I giving the ability to write to the file or, even worse, delete the file? Just give you what you need to get the job done. And this is tech that is your safety net. It's not Big Brother. When you do real-time monitoring as part of dynamic zero trust, it looks at it and says, "Well, Lisa is doing something she doesn't normally do with this application. Did she make a mistake? Did she say reply all on this, which was sending inside data to outside people on the email list? Do I at least want to ask her? Hey, Lisa, did you mean to do that?" So if you can educate people to say this is the organization looking out for you, it's looking over your shoulder as a friend. It's not here to be checking up on you. Language matters, and it's like we call things insider threat, recognizing that far more damage in an organization happens from people making mistakes. It's insider risk that we need to manage. An organization of any appreciable size has bad apples. That's just a law of nature. But when we call it.... I'm dealing with the insider threat. I've been in government. I've been shot at in some of my dicey situations. I want to avoid being attacked. I want to avoid threats. If I'm an organization, I don't want to avoid my insiders. That's my workforce. That's my biggest asset. They bring risk by their behavior. I need to manage that, but that's constructive. Don't make an adversarial by typecasting them all as threats. They're humans. They make mistakes. You can help them avoid some of those mistakes through technology, and zero trust gets into that. >> Got it. And then last question for you. Here we are, July 1st, crazy. Half a year has gone already. What are some of the things that you're expecting that are going to happen the rest of the year? What can organizations... You talked about some of the things they can implement now. Some of the things seems to be sort of like back to basics. But anything that you see on the horizon in the next six to nine months that organizations really need to be focused on? >> So as they put together their posture for operating in the new normal, I said security and IT were successful in getting us where we got in the pivot to remote telework because they worked hand in hand. So find things like that that you can use to demonstrate to your organization that you really are in the middle of the mix. So as we make this pivot to software defined networking. Because again, if we're going back to offices that are different, places with different kinds of infrastructure, we don't want to pull cable. We don't want to do that. Software-defined networking is a good way to do it, and there are different ways to do software-defined networking, some of which are inherently secure. So pick that one. In software-defined networking, the users love the fact that it gives them better latency, better performance on the apps they care about. The front office likes the fact that they get flexibility for continuity of operations, and they save money. This is the example of something that you can pick that allows you to say, "I'm giving you great performance and great security." Cloud is the same way. People understand I think at this point how to operate in a cloud, the challenge comes in saying, "I'm operating in multiple clouds." I need to say I don't really care. I don't really care where the data go or the compute resource is. I just need to connect the user, the device, data, and resources, regardless of location. And that's where this big approach to say, you know, it's about convergence. It's about convergence of IT and security, and really it's about convergence of computing to say, "I don't care if it's edge computing, or cloud computing, or work from home." It's all just computing, and we've got to connect, and we've got to enable that to be secure. That's the priority that if you take that mindset, thinking about the problem going forward, I think will allow CIOs and CISOs to say, "Look, we're making a difference for the organization, performance, cost, and security." >> Performance, cost, and security. It also sounds like a bit of a cultural change there, which is always challenging, but certainly that convergence as you mentioned, we've seen it be successful, and it's something that sounds now more important than ever. Jim, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, sharing all of your insights, some of the things that you're seeing in what organizations can do to protect themselves from this big threat of ransomware that probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon. >> I wouldn't expect it to, but it's been a pleasure talking to you, Lisa, and we'll have to look back and see how accurate we were with this crystal ball. >> Good, yeah. Jim, great to have you on the program. For Jim Richberg, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation. (gentle music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Data Citizens'21. Brought to you by Collibra. >> We're back talking all things data at Data Citizens '21. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage, virtual coverage #DataCitizens21. I'm here with Jim Cushman who is Collibra's Chief Product Officer who shared the company's product vision at the event. Jim, welcome, good to see you. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> Now one of the themes of your session was all around self-service and access to data. This is a big big point of discussion amongst organizations that we talk to. I wonder if you could speak a little more toward what that means for Collibra and your customers and maybe some of the challenges of getting there. >> So Dave our ultimate goal at Collibra has always been to enable service access for all customers. Now, one of the challenges is they're limited to how they can access information, these knowledge workers. So our goal is to totally liberate them and so, why is this important? Well, in and of itself, self-service liberates, tens of millions of data lyric knowledge workers. This will drive more rapid, insightful decision-making, it'll drive productivity and competitiveness. And to make this level of adoption possible, the user experience has to be as intuitive as say, retail shopping, like I mentioned in my previous bit, like you're buying shoes online. But this is a little bit of foreshadowing and there's even a more profound future than just enabling a self-service, that we believe that a new class of shopper is coming online and she may not be as data-literate as our knowledge worker of today. Think of her as an algorithm developer, she builds machine learning or AI. The engagement model for this user will be, to kind of build automation, personalized experiences for people to engage with data. But in order to build that automation, she too needs data. Because she's not data literate, she needs the equivalent of a personal shopper. Someone that can guide her through the experience without actually having her know all the answers to the questions that would be asked. So this level of self-service goes one step further and becomes an automated service. One to really help find the best unbiased in a labeled training data to help train an algorithm in the future. >> That's, okay please continue. >> No please, and so all of this self and automated service, needs to be complemented with kind of a peace of mind that you're letting the right people gain access to it. So when you automate it, it's like, well, geez are the right people getting access to this. So it has to be governed and secured. This can't become like the Wild Wild West or like a data, what we call a data flea market or you know, data's everywhere. So, you know, history does quickly forget the companies that do not adjust to remain relevant. And I think we're in the midst of an exponential differentiation in Collibra data intelligence cloud is really kind of established to be the key catalyst for companies that will be on the winning side. >> Well, that's big because I mean, I'm a big believer in putting data in the hands of those folks in the line of business. And of course the big question that always comes up is, well, what about governance? What about security? So to the extent that you can federate that, that's huge. Because data is distributed by its very nature, it's going to stay that way. It's complex. You have to make the technology work in that complex environment, which brings me to this idea of low code or no code. It's gaining a lot of momentum in the industry. Everybody's talking about it, but there are a lot of questions, you know, what can you actually expect from no code and low code who were the right, you know potential users of that? Is there a difference between low and no? And so from your standpoint, why is this getting so much attention and why now, Jim? >> You don't want me to go back even 25 years ago we were talking about four and five generational languages that people were building. And it really didn't re reach the total value that folks were looking for because it always fell short. And you'd say, listen, if you didn't do all the work it took to get to a certain point how are you possibly going to finish it? And that's where the four GLs and five GLs fell short as capability. With our stuff where if you really get a great self-service how are you going to be self-service if it still requires somebody right though? Well, I guess you could do it if the only self-service people are people who write code, well, that's not bad factor. So if you truly want the ability to have something show up at your front door, without you having to call somebody or make any efforts to get it, then it needs to generate itself. The beauty of doing a catalog, new governance, understanding all the data that is available for choice, giving someone the selection that is using objective criteria, like this is the best objective cause if it's quality for what you want or it's labeled or it's unbiased and it has that level of deterministic value to it versus guessing or civic activity or what my neighbor used or what I used on my last job. Now that we've given people the power with confidence to say, this is the one that I want, the next step is okay, can you deliver it to them without them having to write any code? So imagine being able to generate those instructions from everything that we have in our metadata repository to say this is exactly the data I need you to go get and perform what we call a distributed query against those data sets and bringing it back to them. No code written. And here's the real beauty Dave, pipeline development, data pipeline development is a relatively expensive thing today and that's why people spend a lot of money maintaining these pipelines but imagine if there was zero cost to building your pipeline would you spend any money to maintain it? Probably not. So if we can build it for no cost, then why maintain it? Just build it every time you need it. And it then again, done on a self-service basis. >> I really liked the way you're thinking about this cause you're right. A lot of times when you hear self self-service it's about making the hardcore developers, you know be able to do self service. But the reality is, and you talk about that data pipeline it's complex a business person sitting there waiting for data or wants to put in new data and it turns out that the smallest unit is actually that entire team. And so you sit back and wait. And so to the extent that you can actually enable self-serve for the business by simplification that is it's been the holy grail for a while, isn't it? >> I agree. >> Let's look a little bit dig into where you're placing your bets. I mean, your head of products, you got to make bets, you know, certainly many many months if not years in advance. What are your big focus areas of investment right now? >> Yeah, certainly. So one of the things we've done very successfully since our origin over a decade ago, was building a business user-friendly software and it was predominantly kind of a plumbing or infrastructure area. So, business users love working with our software. They can find what they're looking for and they don't need to have some cryptic key of how to work with it. They can think about things in their terms and use our business glossary and they can navigate through what we call our data intelligence graph and find just what they're looking for. And we don't require a business to change everything just to make it happen. We give them kind of a universal translator to talk to the data. But with all that wonderful usability the common compromise that you make as well, its only good up to a certain amount of information, kind of like Excel. You know, you can do almost anything with Excel, right? But when you get to into large volumes, it becomes problematic and now you need that, you know go with a hardcore database and application on top. So what the industry is pulling us towards is far greater amounts of data not that just millions or even tens of millions but into the hundreds of millions and billions of things that we need to manage. So we have a huge focus on scale and performance on a global basis and that's a mouthful, right? Not only are you dealing with large amounts at performance but you have to do it in a global fashion and make it possible for somebody who might be operating in a Southeast Asia to have the same experience with the environment as they would be in Los Angeles. And the data needs to therefore go to the user as opposed to having the user come to the data as much as possible. So it really does put a lot of emphasis on some of what you call the non-functional requirements also known as the ilities and so our ability to bring the data and handle those large enterprise grade capabilities at scale and performance globally is what's really driving a good number of our investments today. >> I want to talk about data quality. This is a hard topic, but it's one that's so important. And I think it's been really challenging and somewhat misunderstood when you think about the chief data officer role itself, it kind of emerged from these highly regulated industries. And it came out of the data quality, kind of a back office role that's kind of gone front and center and now is, you know pretty strategic. Having said that, the you know, the prevailing philosophy is okay, we got to have this centralized data quality approach and that it's going to be imposed throughout. And it really is a hard problem and I think about, you know these hyper specialized roles, like, you know the quality engineer and so forth. And again, the prevailing wisdom is, if I could centralize that it can be lower cost and I can service these lines of business when in reality, the real value is, you know speed. And so how are you thinking about data quality? You hear so much about it. Why is it such a big deal and why is it so hard in a priority in the marketplace? You're thoughts. >> Thanks for that. So we of course acquired a data quality company, not burying delete, earlier this year LGQ and the big question is, okay, so why, why them and why now, not before? Well, at least a decade ago you started hearing people talk about big data. It was probably around 2009, it was becoming the big talk and what we don't really talk about when we talk about this ever expanding data, the byproduct is, this velocity of data, is increasing dramatically. So the speed of which new data is being presented the way in which data is changing is dramatic. And why is that important to data quality? Cause data quality historically for the last 30 years or so has been a rules-based business where you analyze the data at a certain point in time and you write a rule for it. Now there's already a room for error there cause humans are involved in writing those rules, but now with the increased velocity, the likelihood that it's going to atrophy and become no longer a valid or useful rule to you increases exponentially. So we were looking for a technology that was doing it in a new way similar to the way that we do auto classification when we're cataloging attributes is how do we look at millions of pieces of information around metadata and decide what it is to put it into context? The ability to automatically generate these rules and then continuously adapt as data changes to adjust these rules, is really a game changer for the industry itself. So we chose OwlDQ for that very reason. It's not only where they had this really kind of modern architecture to automatically generate rules but then to continuously monitor the data and adjust those rules, cutting out the huge amounts of costs, clearly having rules that aren't helping you save and frankly, you know how this works is, you know no one really complains about it until there's the squeaky wheel, you know, you get a fine or exposes and that's what is causing a lot of issues with data quality. And then why now? Well, I think and this is my speculation, but there's so much movement of data moving to the cloud right now. And so anyone who's made big investments in data quality historically for their on-premise data warehouses, Netezzas, Teradatas, Oracles, et cetera or even their data lakes are now moving to the cloud. And they're saying, hmm, what investments are we going to carry forward that we had on premise? And which ones are we going to start a new from and data quality seems to be ripe for something new and so these new investments in data in the cloud are now looking up. Let's look at new next generation method of doing data quality. And that's where we're really fitting in nicely. And of course, finally, you can't really do data governance and cataloging without data quality and data quality without data governance and cataloging is kind of a hollow a long-term story. So the three working together is very a powerful story. >> I got to ask you some Colombo questions about this cause you know, you're right. It's rules-based and so my, you know, immediate like, okay what are the rules around COVID or hybrid work, right? If there's static rules, there's so much unknown and so what you're saying is you've got a dynamic process to do that. So and one of the my gripes about the whole big data thing and you know, you referenced that 2009, 2010, I loved it, because there was a lot of profound things about Hadoop and a lot of failings. And one of the challenges is really that there's no context in the big data system. You know, the data, the folks in the data pipeline, they don't have the business context. So my question is, as you it's and it sounds like you've got this awesome magic to automate, who would adjudicates the dynamic rules? How does, do humans play a role? What role do they play there? >> Absolutely. There's the notion of sampling. So you can only trust a machine for certain point before you want to have some type of a steward or a assisted or supervised learning that goes on. So, you know, suspect maybe one out of 10, one out of 20 rules that are generated, you might want to have somebody look at it. Like there's ways to do the equivalent of supervised learning without actually paying the cost of the supervisor. Let's suppose that you've written a thousand rules for your system that are five years old. And we come in with our ability and we analyze the same data and we generate rules ourselves. We compare the two themselves and there's absolutely going to be some exact matching some overlap that validates one another. And that gives you confidence that the machine learning did exactly what you did and what's likelihood that you guessed wrong and machine learning guessed wrong exactly the right way that seems pretty, pretty small concern. So now you're really saying, well, why are they different? And now you start to study the samples. And what we learned, is that our ability to generate between 60 and 70% of these rules anytime we were different, we were right. Almost every single time, like almost every, like only one out of a hundred where was it proven that the handwritten rule was a more profound outcome. And of course, it's machine learning. So it learned, and it caught up the next time. So that's the true power of this innovation is it learns from the data as well as the stewards and it gives you confidence that you're not missing things and you start to trust it, but you should never completely walk away. You should constantly do your periodic sampling. >> And the secret sauce is math. I mean, I remember back in the mid two thousands it was like 2006 timeframe. You mentioned, you know, auto classification. That was a big problem with the federal rules of civil procedure trying to figure out, okay, you know, had humans classifying humans don't scale, until you had, you know, all kinds of support, vector machines and probabilistic, latent semantic indexing, but you didn't have the compute power or the data corpus to really do it well. So it sounds like a combination of you know, cheaper compute, a lot more data and machine intelligence have really changed the game there. Is that a fair assumption? >> That's absolutely fair. I think the other aspect that to keep in mind is that it's an innovative technology that actually brings all that compute as close into the data as possible. One of the greatest expenses of doing data quality was of course, the profiling concept bringing up the statistics of what the data represents. And in most traditional senses that data is completely pulled out of the database itself, into a separate area and now you start talking about terabytes or petabytes of data that takes a long time to extract that much information from a database and then to process through it all. Imagine bringing that profiling closer into the database, what's happening in the NAPE the same space as the data, that cuts out like 90% of the unnecessary processing speed. It also gives you the ability to do it incrementally. So you're not doing a full analysis each time, you have kind of an expensive play when you're first looking at a full database and then maybe over the course of a day, an hour, 15 minutes you've only seen a small segment of change. So now it feels more like a transactional analysis process. >> Yeah and that's, you know, again, we talked about the old days of big data, you know the Hadoop days and the boat was profound was it was all about bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, but that didn't happen. We shoved it all into a central data lake. I'm really excited for Collibra. It sounds like you guys are really on the cutting edge and doing some really interesting things. I'll give you the last word, Jim, please bring us on. >> Yeah thanks Dave. So one of the really exciting things about our solution is, it trying to be a combination of best of breed capabilities but also integrated. So to actually create a full and complete story that customers are looking for, you don't want to have them worry about a complex integration in trying to manage multiple vendors and the times of their releases, et cetera. If you can find one customer that you don't have to say well, that's good enough, but every single component is in fact best of breed that you can find in it's integrated and they'll manage it as a service. You truly unlock the power of your data, literate individuals in your organization. And again, that goes back to our overall goal. How do we empower the hundreds of millions of people around the world who are just looking for insightful decision? Did they feel completely locked it's as if they're looking for information before the internet and they're kind of limited to whatever their local library has and if we can truly become somewhat like the internet of data, we make it possible for anyone to access it without controls but we still govern it and secure it for privacy laws, I think we do have a chance to to change the world for better. >> Great. Thank you so much, Jim. Great conversation really appreciate your time and your insights. >> Yeah, thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. >> All right and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Data Citizens'21. My name is Dave Vellante. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>>Hi everyone. And welcome to data citizens. Thank you for making the time to join me and the over 5,000 data citizens like you that are looking to become United by data. My name is Jim Cushman. I serve as the chief product officer at Collibra. I have the benefit of sharing with you, the product, vision, and strategy of Culebra. There's several sections to this presentation, and I can't wait to share them with you. The first is a story of how we're taking a business user and making it possible for him or her data, use data and gain. And if it and insight from that data, without relying on anyone in the organization to write code or do the work for them next I'll share with you how Collibra will make it possible to manage metadata at scales, into the billions of assets. And again, load this into our software without writing any code third, I will demonstrate to you the integration we have already achieved with our newest product release it's data quality that's powered by machine learning. >>Right? Finally, you're going to hear about how Colibra has become the most universally available solution in the market. Now, we all know that data is a critical asset that can make or break an organization. Yet organizations struggle to capture the power of their data and many remain afraid of how their data could be misused and or abused. We also observe that the understanding of and access to data remains in the hands of just a small few, three out of every four companies continue to struggle to use data, to drive meaningful insights, all forward looking companies, looking for an advantage, a differentiator that will set them apart from their peers and competitors. What if you could improve your organization's productivity by just 5%, even a modest 5% productivity improvement compounded over a five-year period will make your organization 28% more productive. This will leave you with an overwhelming advantage over your competition and uniting your data. >>Litter employees with data is the key to your success. And dare I say, sorry to unlock this potential for increased productivity, huge competitive advantage organizations need to enable self-service access to data for everyday to literate knowledge worker. Our ultimate goal at Cleaver has always been to enable this self-service for our customers to empower every knowledge worker to access the data they need when they need it. But with the peace of mind that your data is governed insecure. Just to imagine if you had a single integrated solution that could deliver a seamless governed, no code user experience of delivering the right data to the right person at the right time, just as simply as ordering a pair of shoes online would be quite a magic trick and one that would place you and your organization on the fast track for success. Let me introduce you to our character here. >>Cliff cliff is that business analyst. He doesn't write code. He doesn't know Julian or R or sequel, but is data literate. When cliff has presented with data of high quality and can actually help find that data of high-quality cliff knows what to do with it. Well, we're going to expose cliff to our software and see how he can find the best data to solve his problem of the day, which is customer churn. Cliff is going to go out and find this information is going to bring it back to him. And he's going to analyze it in his favorite BI reporting tool. Tableau, of course, that could be Looker, could be power BI or any other of your favorites, but let's go ahead and get started and see how cliff can do this without any help from anyone in the organization. So cliff is going to log into Cleaver and being a business user. >>The first thing he's going to do is look for a business term. He looks for customer churn rate. Now, when he brings back a churn rate, it shows him the definition of churn rate and various other things that have been attributed to it such as data domains like product and customer in order. Now, cliff says, okay, customer is really important. So let me click on that and see what makes up customer definition. Cliff will scroll through a customer and find out the various data concepts attributes that make up the definition of customer and cliff knows that customer identifier is a really important aspect to this. It helps link all the data together. And so cliff is going to want to make sure that whatever source he brings actually has customer identifier in it. And that it's of high quality cliff is also interested in things such as email address and credit activity and credit card. >>But he's now going to say, okay, what data sets actually have customer as a data domain in, and by the way, why I'm doing it, what else has product and order information? That's again, relevant to the concept of customer churn. Now, as he goes on, he can actually filter down because there's a lot of different results that could potentially come back. And again, customer identifier was very important to cliff. So cliff, further filters on customer identifier any further does it on customer churn rate as well. This results in two different datasets that are available to cliff for selection, which one to use? Well, he's first presented with some data quality information you can see for customer analytics. It has a data quality score of 76. You can see for sales data enrichment dataset. It has a data quality score of 68. Something that he can see right at the front of the box of things that he's looking for, but let's dig in deeper because the contents really matter. >>So we see again the score of 76, but we actually have the chance to find out that this is something that's actually certified. And this is something that has a check mark. And so he knows someone he trusts is actually certified. This is a dataset. You'll see that there's 91 columns that make up this data set. And rather than sifting through all of that information, cliff is going to go ahead and say, well, okay, customer identifier is very important to me. Let me search through and see if I can find what it's data quality scores very quickly. He finds that using a fuzzy search and brings back and sees, wow, that's a really high data quality score of 98. Well, what's the alternative? Well, the data set is only has 68, but how about, uh, the customer identifier and quickly, he discovers that the data quality for that is only 70. >>So all things being equal, customer analytics is the better data set for what cliff needs to achieve. But now he wants to look and say, other people have used this, what have they had to say about it? And you can see there are various reviews for different reviews from peers of his, in the organization that have given it five stars. So this is encourages cliffs, a confidence that this is great data set to use. Now cliff wants to look a little bit more detailed before he finally commits to using this dataset. Cliff has the opportunity to look at it in the broader set. What are the things can I learn about customer analytics, such as what else is it related to? Who else uses it? Where did it come from? Where does it go and what actually happens to it? And so within our graph of information, we're able to show you a diagram. >>You can see the customer analytics actually comes from the CRM cloud system. And from there you can inherit some wonderful information. We know exactly what CRM cloud is about as an overall system. It's related to other logical models. And here you're actually seeing that it's related to a policy policy about PII or personally identifiable information. This gets cliff almost the immediate knowledge that there's going to be some customer information in this PII information that he's not going to be able to see given his user role in the organization. But cliff says, Hey, that's okay. I actually don't need to see somebody's name and social security number to do my work. I can actually work with other information in the data file. That'll actually help me understand why our customers churning in, what can I actually do about it. If we dig in deeper, we can see what is personally identifiable information that actually could cause issues. >>And as we scroll down and take a little bit of a focus on what we call or what you'll see here is customer phone, because we'll show that to you a little bit later, but these show the various information that once cliff actually has it fulfilled and delivered to him, he will see that it's actually massed and or redacted from his use. Now cliff might drive in deeper and see more information. And he says, you know what? Another piece that's important to me in my analysis is something called is churned. This is basically suggesting that has a customer actually churned. It's an important flag, of course, because that's the analysis that he's performing cliff sees that the score is a mere 65. That's not exactly a great data quality score, but cliff has, is kind of in a hurry. His bosses is, has come back and said, we need to have this information so we can take action. >>So he's not going to wait around to see if they can go through some long day to quality project before he pursues, but he is going to come up and use it. The speed of thinking. He's going to create a suggestion, an issue. He's going to submit this as a work queue item that actually informs others that are responsible for the quality of data. That there's an opportunity for improvement to this dataset that is highly reviewed, but it may be, it has room for improvement as cliff is actually typing in his explanation that he'll pass along. We can also see that the data quality is made up of multiple components, such as integrity, duplication, accuracy, consistency, and conformity. Um, we see that we can submit this, uh, issue and pass it through. And this will go to somebody else who can actually work on this. >>And we'll show that to you a little bit later, but back to cliff, cliff says, okay, I'd like to, I'd like to work with this dataset. So he adds it to his data basket. And just like if he's shopping online, cliff wants that kind of ability to just say, I want to just click once and be done with it. Now it is data and there's some sensitivity about it. And again, there's an owner of this data who you need to get permission from. So cliff is going to provide information to the owner to say, here's why I need this data. And how long do I need this data for starting on a certain date and ending on a certain date and ultimately, what purpose am I going to have with this data? Now, there are other things that cliff can choose to run. This one is how do you want this day to deliver to you? >>Now, you'll see down below, there are three options. One is borrow the other's lease and others by what does that mean? Well, borrow is this idea of, I don't want to have the data that's currently in this CRM, uh, cloud database moved somewhere. I don't want it to be persistent anywhere else. I just want to borrow it very short term to use in my Tablo report and then poof be gone. Cause I don't want to create any problems in my organization. Now you also see lease. Lease is a situation where you actually do need to take possession of the data, but only for a time box period of time, you don't need it for an indefinite amount of time. And ultimately buy is your ability to take possession of the data and have it in perpetuity. So we're going to go forward with our bar use case and cliff is going to submit this and all the fun starts there. >>So cliff has actually submitted the order and the owner, Joanna is actually going to receive the request for the order. Joanna, uh, opens up her task, UCS there's work to perform. It says, oh, okay, here's this there's work for me to perform. Now, Joanna has the ability to automate this using incorporated workflow that we have in Colibra. But for this situation, she's going to manually review that. Cliff wants to borrow a specific data set for a certain period of time. And he actually wants to be using in a Tablo context. So she reviews. It makes an approval and submits it this in turn, flips it back to cliff who says, okay, what obligations did I just take on in order to work for this data? And he reviews each of these data sharing agreements that you, as an organization would set up and say, what am I, uh, what are my restrictions for using this data site? >>As cliff accepts his notices, he now has triggered the process of what we would call fulfillment or a service broker. And in this situation we're doing a virtualization, uh, access, uh, for the borrow use case. Cliff suggests Tablo is his preferred BI and reporting tool. And you can see the various options that are available from power BI Looker size on ThoughtSpot. There are others that can be added over time. And from there, cliff now will be alerted the minute this data is available to them. So now we're running out and doing a distributed query to get the information and you see it returns back for raw view. Now what's really interesting is you'll see, the customer phone has a bunch of X's in it. If you remember that's PII. So it's actually being massed. So cliff can't actually see the raw data. Now cliff also wants to look at it in a Tablo report and can see the visualization layer, but you also see an incorporation of something we call Collibra on the go. >>Not only do we bring the data to the report, but then we tell you the reader, how to interpret the report. It could be that there's someone else who wants to use the very same report that cliff helped create, but they don't understand exactly all the things that cliff went through. So now they have the ability to get a full interpretation of what was this data that was used, where did it come from? And how do I actually interpret some of the fields that I see on this report? Really a clever combination of bringing the data to you and showing you how to use it. Cliff can also see this as a registered asset within a Colibra. So the next shopper comes through might actually, instead of shopping for the dataset might actually shop for the report itself. And the report is connected with the data set he used. >>So now they have a full bill of materials to run a customer Shern report and schedule it anytime they want. So now we've turned cliff actually into a creator of data assets, and this is where intelligent, it gets more intelligence and that's really what we call data intelligence. So let's go back through that magic trick that we just did with cliff. So cliff went into the software, not knowing if the source of data that he was looking for for customer product sales was even available to him. He went in very quickly and searched and found his dataset, use facts and facets to filter down to exactly what was available. Compare to contrast the options that were there actually made an observation that there actually wasn't enough data quality around a certain thing was important to him, created an idea, or basically a suggestion for somebody to follow up on was able to put that into his shopping basket checkout and have it delivered to his front door. >>I mean, that's a bit of a magic trick, right? So, uh, cliff was successful in finding data that he wanted and having it, deliver it to him. And then in his preferred model, he was able to look at it into Tableau. All right. So let's talk about how we're going to make this vision a reality. So our first section here is about performance and scale, but it's also about codeless database registration. How did we get all that stuff into the data catalog and available for, uh, cliff to find? So allow us to introduce you to what we call the asset life cycle and some of the largest organizations in the world. They might have upwards of a billion data assets. These are columns and tables, reports, API, APIs, algorithms, et cetera. These are very high volume and quite technical and far more information than a business user like cliff might want to be engaged with those very same really large organizations may have upwards of say, 20 to 25 million that are critical data sources and data assets, things that they do need to highly curate and make available. >>But through that as a bit of a distillation, a lifecycle of different things you might want to do along that. And so we're going to share with you how you can actually automatically register these sources, deal with these very large volumes at speed and at scale, and actually make it available with just a level of information you need to govern and protect, but also make it available for opportunistic use cases, such as the one we presented with cliff. So as you recall, when cliff was actually trying to look for his dataset, he identified that the is churned, uh, data at your was of low quality. So he passed this over to Eliza, who's a data steward and she actually receives this work queue in a collaborative fashion. And she has to review, what is the request? If you recall, this was the request to improve the data quality for his churn. >>Now she needs to familiarize herself with what cliff was observing when he was doing his shopping experience. So she digs in and wants to look at the quality that he was observing and sure enough, as she goes down and it looks at his churn, she sees that it was a low 65% and now understands exactly what cliff was referring to. She says, aha, okay. I need to get help. I need to decide whether I have a data quality project to fix the data, or should I see if there's another data set in the organization that has better, uh, data for this. And so she creates a queue that can go over to one of her colleagues who really focuses on data quality. She submits this request and it goes over to, uh, her colleague, John who's really familiar with data quality. So John actually receives the request from Eliza and you'll see a task showing up in his queue. >>He opens up the request and finds out that Eliza's asking if there's another source out there that actually has good is churned, uh, data available. Now he actually knows quite a bit about the quality of information sturdiness. So he goes into the data quality console and does a quick look for a dataset that he's familiar with called customer product sales. He quickly scrolls down and finds out the one that's actually been published. That's the one he was looking for and he opens it up to find out more information. What data sets are, what columns are actually in there. And he goes down to find his churned is in fact, one of the attributes in there. It actually does have active rules that are associated with it to manage the quality. And so he says, well, let's look in more detail and find out what is the quality of this dataset? >>Oh, it's 86. This is a dramatic improvement over what we've seen before. So we can see again, it's trended quite nicely over time each day, it hasn't actually degraded in performance. So we actually responds back to realize and say, this data set, uh, is actually the data set that you want to bring in. It really will improve. And you'll see that he refers to the refined database within the CRM cloud solution. Once he actually submits this, it goes back to Eliza and she's able to continue her work. Now when Eliza actually brings this back open, she's able to very quickly go into the database registration process for her. She very quickly goes into the CRM cloud, selects the community, to which she wants to register this, uh, data set into the schemas community. And the CRM cloud is the system that she wants to load it in. >>And the refined is the database that John told her that she should bring in. After a quick description, she's able to click register. And this triggers that automatic codeless process of going out to the dataset and bringing back its metadata. Now metadata is great, but it's not the end all be all. There's a lot of other values that she really cares about as she's actually registering this dataset and synchronizing the metadata she's also then asked, would you like to bring in quality information? And so she'll go out and say, yes, of course, I want to enable the quality information from CRM refined. I also want to bring back lineage information to associate with this metadata. And I also want to select profiling and classification information. Now when she actually selects it, she can also say, how often do you want to synchronize this? This is a daily, weekly, monthly kind of update. >>That's part of the change data capture process. Again, all automated without the require of actually writing code. So she's actually run this process. Now, after this loads in, she can then open up this new registered, uh, dataset and actually look and see if it actually has achieved the problem that cliff set her out on, which was improved data quality. So looking into the data quality for the is churn capability shows her that she has fantastic quality. It's at a hundred, it's exactly what she was looking for. So she can with confidence actually, uh, suggest that it's done, but she did notice something and something that she wants to tell John, which is there's a couple of data quality checks that seem to be missing from this dataset. So again, in a collaborative fashion, she can pass that information, uh, for validity and completeness to say, you know what, check for NOLs and MPS and send that back. >>So she submits this onto John to work on. And John now has a work queue in his task force, but remember she's been working in this task forklift and because she actually has actually added a much better source for his churn information, she's going to update that test that was sent to her to notify cliff that the work has actually been done and that she actually has a really good data set in there. In fact, if you recall, it was 100% in terms of its data quality. So this will really make life a lot easier for cliff. Once he receives that data and processes, the churn report analysis next time. So let's talk about these audacious performance goals that we have in mind. Now today, we actually have really strong performance and amazing usability. Our customers continue to tell us how great our usability is, but they keep asking for more well, we've decided to present to you. >>Something you can start to bank on. This is the performance you can expect from us on the highly curated assets that are available for the business users, as well as the technical and lineage assets that are more available for the developer uses and for things that are more warehoused based, you'll see in Q1, uh, our Q2 of this year, we're making available 5 million curated assets. Now you might be out there saying, Hey, I'm already using the software and I've got over 20 million already. That's fair. We do. We have customers that are actually well over 20 million in terms of assets they're managing, but we wanted to present this to you with zero conditions, no limitations we wouldn't talk about, well, it depends, et cetera. This is without any conditions. That's what we can offer you without fail. And yes, it can go higher and higher. We're also talking about the speed with which you can ingest the data right now, we're ingesting somewhere around 50,000 to a hundred thousand records per and of course, yes, you've probably seen it go quite a bit faster, but we are assuring you that that's the case, but what's really impressive is right now, we can also, uh, help you manage 250 million technical assets and we can load it at a speed of 25 million for our, and you can see how over the next 18 months about every two quarters, we show you dramatic improvements, more than doubling of these. >>For most of them leading up to the end of 2022, we're actually handling over a billion technical lineage assets and we're loading at a hundred million per hour. That sets the mark for the industry. Earlier this year, we announced a recent acquisition Al DQ. LDQ brought to us machine learning based data quality. We're now able to introduce to you Collibra data quality, the first integrated approach to Al DQ and Culebra. We've got a demo to follow. I'm really excited to share it with you. Let's get started. So Eliza submitted a task for John to work on, remember to add checks for no and for empty. So John picks up this task very quickly and looks and sees what's what's the request. And from there says, ah, yes, we do have a quality check issue when we look at these churns. So he jumps over to the data quality console and says, I need to create a new data quality test. >>So cliff is able to go in, uh, to the solution and, uh, set up quick rules, automated rules. Uh, he could inherit rules from other things, but it starts with first identifying what is the data source that he needs to connect to, to perform this. And so he chooses the CRM refined data set that was most recently, uh, registered by Lysa. You'll see the same score of 86 was the quality score for the dataset. And you'll also see, there are four rules that are associated underneath this. Now there are various checks that, uh, that John can establish on this, but remember, this is a fairly easy request that he receives from Eliza. So he's going to go in and choose the actual field, uh, is churned. Uh, and from there identify quick rules of, uh, an empty check and that quickly sets up the rules for him. >>And also the null check equally fast. This one's established and analyzes all the data in there. And this sets up the baseline of data quality, uh, for this. Now this data, once it's captured then is periodically brought back to the catalog. So it's available to not only Eliza, but also to cliff next time he, uh, where to shop in the environment. As we look through the rules that were created through that very simple user experience, you can see the one for is empty and is no that we're set up. Now, these are various, uh, styles that can be set up either manually, or you can set them up through machine learning again, or you can inherit them. But the key is to track these, uh, rule creation in the metrics that are generated from these rules so that it can be brought back to the catalog and then used in meaningful context, by someone who's shopping and the confidence that this has neither empty nor no fields, at least most of them don't well now give a confidence as you go forward. >>And as you can see, those checks have now been entered in and you can see that it's a hundred percent quality score for the Knoll check. So with confidence now, John can actually respond back to Eliza and say, I've actually inserted them they're up and running. And, uh, you're in good status. So that was pretty amazing integration, right? And four months after our acquisition, we've already brought that level of integration between, uh, Colibra, uh, data intelligence, cloud, and data quality. Now it doesn't stop there. We have really impressive and high site set early next year. We're getting introduced a fully immersive experience where customers can work within Culebra and actually bring the data quality information all the way in as well as start to manipulate the rules and generate the machine learning rules. On top of it, all of that will be a deeply immersive experience. >>We also have something really clever coming, which we call continuous data profiling, where we bring the power of data quality all the way into the database. So it's continuously running and always making that data available for you. Now, I'd also like to share with you one of the reasons why we are the most universally available software solutions in data intelligence. We've already announced that we're available on AWS and Google cloud prior, but today we can announce to you in Q3, we're going to be, um, available on Microsoft Azure as well. Now it's not just these three cloud providers that were available on we've also become available on each of their marketplaces. So if you are buying our software, you can actually go out and achieve that same purchase from their marketplace and achieve your financial objectives as well. We're very excited about this. These are very important partners for, uh, for our, for us. >>Now, I'd also like to introduce you our system integrators, without them. There's no way we could actually achieve our objectives of growing so rapidly and dealing with the demand that you customers have had Accenture, Deloitte emphasis, and even others have been instrumental in making sure that we can serve your needs when you need them. Uh, and so it's been a big part of our growth and will be a continued part of our growth as well. And finally, I'd like to actually introduce you to our product showcases where we can go into absolute detail on many of the topics I talked about today, such as data governance with Arco or data privacy with Sergio or data quality with Brian and finally catalog with Peter. Again, I'd like to thank you all for joining us. Uh, and we really look forward to hearing your feedback. Thank you..