>> 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)

(relaxing music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. We got a great lineup of of guests this program and this segment, we got talking about hot company called, MessageBird. We got three amazing executives and leaders. Rachel Thornton, who's the chief marketing officer, and Andrea Euenheim, Chief People Officer, and Asha Thurthi, Chief Product Officer, We've got the CMO, Chief People Officer, and the Chief Product Officer. We've got everyone who's building that company. This is about building a startup culture that empowers women in tech. Ladies, thanks for coming on and thanks for taking the time. >> Thank you, John, for having us. >> Rachel, you know, you've seen big organizations, you're the CMO at AWS, now at MessageBird. This is a world where now there's new standards, you've got global culture, you can start off anywhere. A lot of things involved in being a C-suite leader, from not only marketing product to customers, but building a product, hiring the right team, team dynamics, power dynamics. So as female leaders, you guys are building that culture that empowers women to not only find their voices, but to use their voices to lead. What's the secret? What are you guys doing? Give us a taste of what's it like right now. Give us a feeling for what's going on in this world for you guys right now. >> I'll go first. I actually want to say that I was the, when MessageBird was building out their team, I was super excited to join because I was so impressed with the fact that the product officer was a woman, the HR officer was a woman. It was so great to see women in those leadership roles and I was just really positive and bullish on that. I felt like any company that was really building out that leadership team and thinking about being conscious of how do we have diverse perspectives and doing that is only going to make the product better. So I was super excited to join and I have really, really enjoyed being on a leadership team where I think we're 50% women. I think that is true. Like it's half women, which is really amazing. >> And that's to be the standard because I mean, software is in every product. Digital transformation is everyone and the world is not 17% women. I mean, let's just face it. So this is really a product issue as well and team issue because I mean, it just makes sense. I mean, this is really still, the industry's behind, this is a big problem. >> But I do think that, like I said, watching what's happening here, it gives me hope. Actually, it makes me inspired for to see other companies adopt it. I think, you know, both Asha and Andrea and you guys chime in, have just, you know, they're doing great jobs as leaders. I feel like we're all sort of, you know, able to speak, able to share our voice and able to inspire the folks in the company when they see that. >> Asha, talk, wait, Asha, could you weigh in on this because people matter in companies and now you have work at home, remote, you're seeing very successful configurations of teams, technical to business across the board, building products and working as a team. What's your take on this and what's your perspective? >> No, no, great question. The time is now. I really feel like the time has come for women to take what's really due for them and not just because we're women, because we are equally strong and contributing on the table. So I'm super excited for the generation that's to come because great voices really represent great customers because customers come in all different shapes and forms and people who are building the products, plus running companies should represent the customers, that end of the day, buy your products. So voice on the table is extremely important and so is making an attempt to make sure that you are hiring across all walks of life, all the way from sea level to even at IC level, ensuring that there is inclusion and diversity from a representation perspective. >> You've got the keys to the kingdom there as the product officer, Chief Product Officer, you know, you got to interface with engineering, you got to interface with the customers and like I mentioned earlier, the products are used by everyone now. This is all the, what's your experience been? What have you learned? Because again, a lot of engineers are male dominated and around the world, teams are male. What's your experience? How do you blend that together? How do you bring that harmony and so, and productivity? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, like I think the first thing is I think acknowledging the current state, which is women in tech, specifically because you asked about my role, continues to be a challenge. Women in tech be it in the product side of the equation or design side of the equation or engineering side of the equation, I think continues to be a challenge. I think all companies will have to lean in, especially starting education from STEM degrees, going forward to see how do you kind of make an effort to ensure that women in technology is not as high of a barrier that it used to be. Women in color in technology is not as high of a barrier as well. And how do you kind of make sure that when you are hiring, when you are advocating for your company, when you're setting up your interview loops, to actually setting up the right platform for all of these employees to thrive. You are ensuring that every walk of this, is kind of including women and making sure that all voice are voices are represented. Andrea, Rachel, I'd love your take as well because products just one piece of this whole equation where you build product. I'm kind of curious to see how you-- >> Andrea, weigh in, because this is like a hiring thing too. Like if you have a special test, like, okay, do we have the right makeup this person's going to, is there a bro test for example? I've heard companies have that where they have this kind of special questions that identify bros 'cause they don't want that in their culture. Is there a playbook? Is there a best practice in sourcing and identifying and interviewing loops? For instance, we just heard, Asha, that was great on the product side, Andrea, this is a big challenge. Putting teams together, having the right cohesive harmony, talent, looking for people, having the right interview loops, identifying that bro or the right makeup that you want to bring in or interview out. What's the strategy? How do you put these teams together because this is the real secret sauce. >> Not sure whether it's a secret sauce, but I think what we have shown that message for, is that we have made a very conscious effort and decision to start leading by example from the top to really build a leadership team that is already combining all the great traits on top of a good diversity in the team. Not only from a gender but also a skills and personality point of view. And then, from there, really making a planful intentional way down to say where do we hire which talent? What is it that we're still missing as a piece of the puzzle to really make the right decisions on leadership but also team compositions to really look at what's the customer needs, how can we build great products, how can we also compose great engineering teams to meet those expectations that our customers have and how do we build for the future? And that needs to happen in all different parts of the organization to really see that we can make a great effort across the board. >> And, you know, Rachel, last year, your talk inspired a lot of folks in conversation around sponsorship and you talk about networking and mentoring, but you highlighted sponsorship, I remember that clearly and that got great play in the conversation. So it's not just mentoring for mentoring's sake, there's also sponsorships. So there's really identifying, hiring, and then working with. And according to McKenzie's report that you guys are highlighting at me, MessageBird one in four C-suite leaders are identified as women and and with more hurdles to climb every day, especially at a startup. >> And I think that's why it has to be a combination of how do you think about your team composition? How do you think about your leadership composition? So all the things that Andrea just said, but then how do you make sure, as you're bringing folks in, you're constructing the right loop so people feel like this is a great place they want to be a part of, that it represents a diverse group of people. And then once they're in, how do you mentor people? What's the mentorship program you put in place? But the sponsorship program, I think like, sponsorship as well as mentorship also matters because you want to make sure when you identify folks in the organization, that you feel are ready for the next step, that you have identified as high potential, how do you come together as a leadership team and have a program that sponsors them, that gets them training or maybe it's executive coaching but also just makes them visible to leaders across the organization. So when it's time to put together the case for that promotion or maybe that new project or that that new group they would lead, everyone is aware of them and everyone has had some sort of interaction with them. So it really is building the right sort of sponsorship framework to help people get the kind of visibility and the kind of support they need to then unlock their potential in other areas. Whether, again, that's promotion or just taking on new groups or taking on new projects. >> Awesome. Well, you guys are fabulous. >> And in addition to this. >> Oh, go ahead, go ahead. >> No, in addition to this, I think it's also what is critical. Even though we're not the biggest company without Amazon and not Microsoft, but I think it's still important to also give exposure to the great people that we have, to make sure that everybody has visibility, everybody has a voice, and to make sure that we can then build sponsorship and mentorship across the different levels and teams and to build a great succession pipeline to really make sure that people can be considered for the next big project that is coming independent of any skill that they might have. But being a voice and having the experience that counts as most important. >> I love that inclusion, you jumped ahead. I wanted to get some questions 'cause you guys are a great group here. I guess the first question I had on the list here, is for you guys, what does it take to build an environment of inclusion? Because that's really key where female identified employees aren't just asked to questions, they take risks, they ask the right questions, they get involved, they're heard, they're recognized. What's it take to build that kind of environment? >> I can go, I think two things come to mind. One, I would say is commitment. Like commitment at the top. That you're not just going to lip sync, but you're going to walk the talk, that this is important to you as a company and who you stand or what you stand for as a human being. And you are going to put in the effort as a leadership team at the top to actually set the right example. Like MessageBird, I think Rachel said in her intro, 50% of the C level is women and you start right there. The second thing I would say is giving our people voice, you know, giving them confidence. Women because of, I don't know, thousands of years of social conditioning as such, hesitate to kind of speak up. So setting the right example, giving them the voice and encouraging them to take the challenges even if they're sponsored or not, to kind of make sure that they're willing to try new things and be not afraid of risk as much, I think is also super important. >> I think that's very, it is so, so true about the voice and about encouragement and just, I think all, you know, making sure people feel like across, you know, the entire organization, that they feel like they have a voice, their voice can be heard. And that we as a leadership team are supportive in those environments and people feel like I can take risks, I can't ask questions, I can push the envelope in terms of, "Hey, do you know, do we agree with this point? Is there room for discussion?" I think when people see that that's encouraged and it's encouraged for everyone, that's powerful. >> The McKinsey study had a lot of data in there. What's the summary on that on the people side? Obviously, the women are underrepresented, one in four, the C-suite leaders are women, but there's also people who are climbing through the ranks. I mean, what's the big takeaway from the McKinsey study beyond the obvious one in four stat? Is there any other messages in there that people should pay attention to? >> I think Asha said it really well with building the pipeline at the top. And I think that's something that we all think about every day. I think Andrea and her team do such a great job in helping us with that, but that is huge. Like, you're going to, you have to really think how can you build that pipeline out? And I think encouraging people, women, underrepresented groups, everyone to just think what do I want to do? What are the companies out there that I think would be great to work for? How can I find the right environment to support me? I think that's important and I think that helps build that pipeline. >> Okay. When you're a startup, you're a lot different than the big company, right? So the big companies are different. You guys are growing, startups are a lot about, you know, don't run a cash, hard charging, creative, teamwork. But it could be tough under fire. The startup, what's the learnings? How do you guys look at that and how do you guys manage that? Because it's super impart of the culture, of where the phase of these startups are in. >> I think the advantage that we have is we're not a big company. So I think in that way, there is a way to really build a culture of empowerment and us making decisions together and independent of where you come from, what experience you have, it's really what you can bring to the table. It's not having the fear of political cohesion. >> Yeah. >> That you have in larger corporations at times. To really build that great team that we are building right now. To say, all that matters to us is to build great products for our customers. And there's a lot of discussion about quota and one in four and I know large corporations are a lot more tied to meeting requirements that are depending on national laws and whatever, which is sometimes required to force a change in culture and how to do business. But I think us as a company, we just see a strong, strong benefit in not worrying about the gender. It's really like making an effort at the beginning to build the culture and the company that is just looking for a great team and a great culture independent of quotas. >> Actually, on the product side, Asha, on the product side. I want to get your thoughts because I know from startups, you know, being done a few myself, product market fit is huge, right? So you got, that's the goal and there's a lot of pressure. Rachel, you got to go to put the go to market together and you got to build the product. If you don't hit it, you got to br agile, you got to be fast, which could cause a lot of friction. You know, it's 'cause people got to reset, regroup. It's not for the faint of heart. How do you, pipeline folks, women are great for that. Are people aware? Do you have to, are people ready for it? Is there a training? How do you get someone ready or is there a test if they're startup ready? >> No, no, it's a great question. So like, we have a value at the company that's called move 200 miles an hour. All startups, I think, will totally resonate with this. As Andrea was saying, it's a balancing act. >> John: Yeah. >> How do you ensure that you're moving 200 miles an hour, but at the same time ensuring that you're hiring the right people who ultimately represent the customer. One example, Rachel and I were talking about this earlier, we actually represent 40% of the B2C emails that send globally. Imagine as the audience who's receiving one of these emails, think your favorites, you know, brand in Nordstrom that's actually sending you an email on the other end. Think about the customer on the other end. So it does require company commitment to ensure that the people you hire, represent ultimately the customer you're going after. So even if you're a startup, that's moving 200 miles an hour with lesser resources than any other bigger company, you have to commit to actually ensuring that your team has the right diversity. Starting all the way from sourcing to ensuring that this person is thriving and getting hopefully promoted to one day replace all of us. Let's put it that way. >> Rachel, weigh in on the startup velocity, challenges, dynamism, thoughts. >> You go, Andrea. >> It's not for everyone, you know, in that way, but it's something that if you find the right environment and the right people who thrive in such an environment like we do, it's magic. And building on that magic that we have is so powerful that we cannot afford giving voice to one group that is stronger than the others. We're counting on each other and this is a key element to who we are and how we want to build going forward. >> Rachel, your reaction, you're in a startup scene, whitewater rafting, heavy. Speed. >> It is very different. It's very different. But I love it. And what Andrea said is totally true. I think it isn't for everyone, but when you find a great organization and when you find a great group of people, it is magic. You know, it just, it's amazing the things you can do and it is a palpable feeling in the company when everyone is, you know, working on the same thing and excited about the same thing. >> You know, it's interesting about startups, not to take a tangent here, but a lot of startups just, it's not as much resource as a big company that that department doesn't exist. A lot of people doing multiple things. Wait a minute, someone doesn't write my emails for me, doesn't do the PowerPoints. Where's the marketing department? Where's the big budgets? There's a lot of juggling and a lot of versatility required, but also, there's opportunities to identify talent that could be hired for something that could move into something else. And this is part of the growth. And that's one side. On the other side, and this is a question, I promise, there's burnout, right? So you have burnout and fatigue, whether it's cultural and, or, I don't see an opportunity to really, truly a lot of aperture for new opportunities. So can you guys share your thoughts on this dynamic? Because in startups, there's a double-edged sword that could be burnout or there could be opportunity. >> I'll go and then I'll have Asha on the product side. I think that's true everywhere. I don't know, it could be that in some startups, it's exasperated, but I think that actually is true whether you're in a big company or a small company. I think, you know, depending on the industry, depending on the company size, depending on what you're going after, you know, you have to be clear about what it is you're going to deliver, how you're going to do it. And I do think it's important that everyone be able to say for themselves, "Hey, I'm excited about this product or I'm excited about this company and here's what I'm going to do," but I'm also going to make sure that I'm not putting myself in such a way that it does, you know, burnout does happen, but I don't think it can confine it to startups. I think it can happen anywhere. >> Okay. Yeah, exactly. We've seen that now. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. John, you've three moms on the call and definitely, we've all kind of come out of Covid into this space. I'm not going to lie, it's really hard. >> Yeah. >> It's really hard, actually balancing and juggling multiple different priorities that you have to. Especially in a startup world, when you move so many different miles an hour and you don't have enough support around you, it is really hard. The one advice I do have for women, which I kind of tell myself very repeatedly, is it's completely okay to be honest, I have taken an intentional action to be a lot more vulnerable over the years. Talk about, you know, having to pick up my child or, you know, having to spend the evening out when I need to spend time with my family. And being open about it because when I do it at the top, I can accept the space for enough people to talk about it a as well. So really, helping women set their own boundaries without feeling guilty about it. Because by nature, we end up, you know, taking care of everything around us. So how do you take care of yourself, fill your cup first so you don't burnout, to your question, I think is extremely critical. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great point. Good point. I think about honesty and transparency comes in with boundaries, but also empathy. I think a lot of people, there's a lot of awareness now to this factor of teamwork and remote and creativity. Productivity is kind of a new, not new thing, but it's kind of more forefront and that's super important. How do you guys promote that? Because you still got to move fast, you got to schedule things differently. I mean, I find myself much more schedule oriented and it's hard to coordinate. How do you guys balance that because it's a management challenge, an opportunity at the same time to have that inclusivity vibe. >> I think on the empathy part on balancing, I just think you have to focus on it. It has to be a conscious choice. And I think, you know, sometimes we do it great and I only speak for myself. Sometimes I do it great, sometimes I don't. But I definitely think you have to focus on it. Think about it, think about where are you, you know, where are you scheduling things, what are you doing? How are you making sure you're thinking about your team, thinking about the, you know, the example you're providing or the example you're setting. >> Thoughts on the boundaries and when does something not a boundary, when it's not productive. 'Cause, you know, so I got my boundaries and they're like, "Wait, whoa, whoa, stay in your lane." No one likes to hear that. Stay in your lane thing. I mean, not to say that that people shouldn't stay in their lane. I just find that a little bit off-putting like, you know, stay in your lane. That sounds like a, it's against the culture. What do you guys think about how people should be thinking about their norms in these environments whether it's inclusivity and diversity? What are some of the areas to stay away from and what are the areas to promote in terms of how they'll communicate these boundaries and, or, good lanes, I should say. I mean, maybe I shouldn't say, stay in your lane's a bad thing, but, so it could be more off-putting. >> I can touch on something which is what can you do more of? I really resonated so much with Rachel's comment from last year on sponsorship. I am the product of sponsorship so it really resonates with me. Also, wouldn't even be sitting here with these two wonderful women and you. In addition to that, I think allyship, I think that's extremely important. What I would love to, you know, see everybody set the right example on is promoting a lot more of allyship where you kind of encourage, not just women, underrepresented minority, knowing really well the backgrounds that they come from and the, you know, situational context around it and seeing how can you be a great ally. And what great ally looks like for me is simple things. If you're in a meeting full of people and you see the underrepresented folks not talking or sharing their voice, how can you, as the senior person in the room, and you know, any person in the room, actually share the voice out and get their thoughts. If you can have many different people present in your company, all hands or what have you, what other forums that can be, how do you ensure that it's not just you always, but like you're putting in the spotlight on other people and, you know, when calibrations come in, when recruiting comes in, how do you ensure that your loops are diverse? So long story short, how do you ensure that you are setting the right example even if you don't belong to one of these groups, that I think do more of. >> Well, that's a great call out on the allies on mentorship programs and support networks. These are important. How should someone go forward and build a mentorship program and support networks so people can help each other out? Is there a way you guys have found best practices, Rachel and team? Is there a strategy that works well? >> Actually, Asha has some great examples here, so I'm going to toss it over to her. >> Thank you, Andy. Team, like this is what I would love for everyone to do more of. Like, we just kicked off 2023, why not make it a goal for this year? Let's seize the year to ensure that, you know, I'll start off with tech, especially where women are underrepresented. We ensure that all of your rock stars, all of your women, at least have a mentor, either within the organization or you reach out to your network externally and pair this person up with a mentor. What ultimately helps us, people having somebody they can bounce off their ideas off, get tips, get advice on how to tackle a particular situation. So really, pairing people up to ensure that they have a way to kind of bounce off ideas and see how can they elevate themselves, I think will go a long way. >> I mean, this is a big problem. Rachel, you've been a leader, you've seen this happen before. How do people climb through the ranks successfully? And you've seen people, maybe, fail a little bit. Is there a best practice or advice you could share with folks that are out there watching and listening on, you know, how to be savvy on climbing through the ranks, whether it's finding mentors being the right place at the right time. I always have the old saying, you know, "Hang around the basketball rim and you'll get a rebound." So is it timing, is it placement? What's your best practice advice for coming through the rim? >> I have a little, and then again, I think I've been very impressed with the team Asha built and just the things that she's done in her career. And I think that for women in tech, that's crucial. I would just say overall, finding your voice, using your voice, but also thinking about who's around you, who's supportive, who are the mentors or who are the people you would love to either mentor or have mentored you. And be sure to speak up and and make that known. And then I also think, don't be afraid to, like I said, use your voice, ask questions. Don't be afraid to also help people up. I think, Asha, what you said a few minutes ago is so true. Like, if there are folks in the room that aren't, you know, as vocal, that you know have amazing ideas, be sure that you're there to help them up, to help them with their voice 'cause you want to make sure that it just brings more to the conversation. >> Asha, you're running a product group, that's a big challenge. What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your opinion? >> Yeah, imposter syndrome is a real thing. I would definitely say confidence is self-taught is what I have really learned over the years and really kind of knowing that the next person to you may not be any smarter than you or may not be any less smart than you. So really, treating everybody as an equal around you and finding that inner strength and inner voice to be able to speak for yourself and to be able to share your ideas and do the best that you possibly can. Bring the A game and when you need help, asking for it. So really, just knowing that and taking initiative and we're here to help. >> Awesome. Andrea, you're here. I want to get your thoughts on building out a mentoring program and networks for women so they can have this great environment. What's it take to do that? I mean, it's hard to do. Building out meaningful networking mentorship program and sport network for women to help each other's hard. What's your experience? >> I think you need some strong leaders within an organization who are willing to sponsor and support. You need somebody to start it. It's usually senior female leaders who are kickstarting a networking environment and some good groups to have some great impact and then, also making sure that they get the visibility to see we accomplish great things together. We raise the topics that not everybody would see. And really bringing the other voice to the table to have like contradicting perspectives on what a company should do on the product side, but also on the general strategic side of things. And then building from there to say, "How can we also build great project teams that support these ideas and to really get the momentum going." Not big programs, but will really impact all communities that will push the topics. >> Awesome. Well, great, great, great panel here. Building a startup culture that empowers women in tech. You guys are amazing. Final question, rapid fire, go down the line. We'll start with Rachel, Andrea, Asha. What's it take to have that kind of success for startup? If you could share quickly what your advice is for people watching and succeeding in a startup. >> I would say focus, intention, and commitment. >> John: Andrea. >> I would say courage, backbone, authenticity. >> I couldn't agree more with Rachel. Focus and commitment. It is for me too. >> Well, you guys are amazing. Congratulations. And MessageBird, again, great ratios. You guys are succeeding. You're a standard for the industry and congratulations and thank you for taking the time on theCUBE's coverage National Women's Day. We also have women in data science at Stanford, with other programs going on today. It's a big day. Thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thank you, Jim. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of international news. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (relaxing 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)

>> If you really want to make an impact to your business, it takes more than just moving your workloads into the cloud. So-called lift and shift is fine to reduce data center footprints and associated costs, but to really drive change, you don't want to simply "pave the cow path," as the saying goes. Rather, you need to think about the operating model, and that requires more comprehensive systems thinking. In other words, how will changes in technology affect business productivity? Or, you know what? Even flip that. What changes in my business process could lower cost, cut elapse times, and accelerate time to market, increase user productivity, and lower operational risks? And what role can technology play in supporting these mandates through modernization, automation, machine intelligence, and business resilience? And that's what we're here to discuss today. Welcome to Driving Business Results with Cloud Transformation, made Possible by Dell and DXC. My name is Dave Vellante, and today we're going to zoom out and explore many aspects of cloud transformation that leading organizations are acting on today. Yeah, sure, we're going to look at optimizing infrastructure, but we'll also dig deeper into cloud considerations, governance, compliance, and security angles, as well as the impact of emerging opportunities around edge and Industry 4.0. Our focus will be on how to remove barriers and help you achieve business outcomes. And to do this, our program features the long-term partnership between Dell and DXC. And we bring to this program six experts in three separate sessions, who are working directly with top organizations in virtually every industry to achieve high impact results. We're going to start with a conversation about cloud, the cloud operating model, and transforming key aspects of your infrastructure. And then we'll look into governance, security, and business resilience. And in our third session, we'll discuss exciting transformations that are occurring in smart manufacturing and facilities innovations. So let's get right into it with our first session. Enjoy the program. (bright 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, Americas Sales Lead for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to theCube. >> 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, 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 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, so thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate, everybody's, you know, 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, and, 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? >> Yeah, 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. 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 goes to, 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, 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, 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, you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So if, let's talk about some of the, the barriers to realizing value in, in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and, and, and resilience. But there's a business angle, and there's a technical angle here. 'Cause we always talk about people, process, and technology. Technology, oftentimes, CIOs will tell us, "Well, that's the easy part. We'll figured 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, that are out there in the market from, you know, the, the standards that are being built by, you know, best in class models. And, 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 set 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, and the models that 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 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 spectra 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, 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, is it, is it a, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of, 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, and we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to, 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 at 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 cost savings, and, 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 2 event. And Supercloud is basically, it's really multi, what multi-cloud should have been, I, I like to say. So it's this 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, 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, 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, and the history of the company. I could 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, they're on the edge. They're, you know, they're, 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, there's somebody, you could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know, have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscale activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and say, "Listen, not all things are destined for cloud, or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment." And they 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, they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market. And, 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, 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's, it is a zero sum game." But it's clearly not, and this idea of of, whether you call it supercloud or ubercloud or multicloud, clearly Dell is headed in in that direction. And I, you know, look at some of their future projects. There's 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, here. (group 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, the name DXC and that, 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, we call it cloud right. And that, that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a, play a key role in that. So we, 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, 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. >> If you were... >> That is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. Chime in here. (Jay chuckles) >> And now, if you were speaking specifically to Dell here, like they, 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 a true partnership. They, they, 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, and, and the, and the GSI community. And I, I've been with several GSIs, and, and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on, 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 in our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation, is a lot of it's about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, the kind of, over the, over the years taking your arrows, you know, of over decades. And, 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. (chuckles) (Dave chuckles) >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Dave, thank you. >> Jay, Jim, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on theCube. Be right back. (upbeat guitar music) (keyboard clicks) Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante, and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the Global CTO of Smart Manufacturing Edge and Digital Twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd chuckles) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee who's the Vice President, General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Nice to be here. So, Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain like what is Industry 4.0 all about, and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while. And it's got, it's gone by multiple different names, as you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory, but it all really means the same thing. Its really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time?" So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this not as a one-off, two-off, individual use case point of view. But instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this, not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum." I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's predictive maintenance, and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor. But it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And, and, and really, to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it, and truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future, or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right? And so really that's a key thing, and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah so, Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely. Though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation, what we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments, or improving the quality of products, right? So I think these are a lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, I wonder if I could stay with you. And maybe this is a bit esoteric. But when I first started researching IoT and, and, and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage in a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers. Its like, blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive, but, so, but they got to continue. The incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses, very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So my question is, How are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing and the, the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right, for the machines. For example, industrial IoT, having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right? Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at, "How do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine?" And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right? So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right? So perhaps they start with the innovation program, and then they look at the business case, and they scale it up, right? >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security. Because if you think about the operations technology, you know, folks, historically, they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's, that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It, it, it absolutely is Dave. And, and you know, you can no longer just segment that because really, to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IoT and Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory. But then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from a, kind of that, that hybrid, you know, "write once, run anywhere" on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of the things we're seeing, too, is to help distinguish between what is the edge, and that, and, and bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT. And also help that, what Aditi talked about, is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those. Is, it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plan. It consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity. The hard stuff about, "How do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it?" And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that, which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is, is, needs to be done because that's the only way that its going to, it's going to work because of security requirements, because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you kind of, you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise and applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the, the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it, it, it's, (chuckles) it, it, so. Yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that, in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, we, this is not new. Smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, it's, people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch, or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here, and a gateway there, and a server there, I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a, or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this at enterprise all the time. We, we know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications, really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory, and start to bring that same capabilities down into the, on the factory floor." That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers, yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that, think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that, what you've done in that one factory, and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories, including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat, almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it. Thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these, to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean definitely, a lot. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right? Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is, is important. But the, the digital skillset sets like, you know, IoT, having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right, that experience that comes with it, data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So you know, it's a lot more connectivity software, data driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of skill, resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation, as well as consulting firms like DXC Technology and others. We, we, we recruit. We, we train our talent to, to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership. You know, and we work very closely together to, to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we, we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right, how that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right? So we have several areas that we collaborate in. And our approach is that we, we want to bring solutions to our client, and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question, kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where do you, are you confident that, you know, you're going to be, deliver the best value to, to customers? >> Absolutely. Great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things. And just, and, and, and that's, that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is, we do the optimization, the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together, right? The power of our scalables, enterprise-grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global, trusted, trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And, and Dell's infrastructure, and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that, at that scalable infrastructure, to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's again, not just one individual solutions, it's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases, but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, the, you're right, the partnership has gone, I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010, May of 2010, we had you, you guys both on theCube. I think you were talking about converged infrastructure. And I had a customer on, and it was, actually a manufacturing customer, was quite interesting. And back then it was, "How do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud?" And, and you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation, and love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCube. (bright 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, 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, 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, and as Jim is saying, you, 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 CMBD 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 on a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, (chuckles) you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. You, 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. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And 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, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, it's, 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, 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, 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 on, 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 a 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 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, 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, 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, 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 real time, 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 them out to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and, 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, but it, I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery? How hard is it to, to, to test that recovery, and, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data. Again, a 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 of 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, that recovery kind of muscle, 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, 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, you know, can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering. We've seen, you know, a 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 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, your business is, right? So when, 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 what data entails to put in the vault from an IoT perspective is just as critical as as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the, 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, of cyber from the good guy's perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave. So that, that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be hundred percent capable every single time, and let's figure that out, right? That's, 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, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You, 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, on a really important topic. Keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> 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. (bright music) Okay, we hope you enjoyed the program and learned some things about cloud transformation and modernizing your business that will inspire you to action. Now if you want to learn more, go to the Dell DXC partner page shown here, or click on the URL in the description. Thanks for watching everybody and on behalf of our supporters, Dell and DXC, good luck. And as always, get in touch if we can be of any assistance. (bright 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.

>>Good afternoon from the Venetian Expo, center, hall, whatever you wanna call it, in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here. It's day four. I'm not sure what this place is called. Wait, >>What? >>Lisa Martin here with Dave Ante. This is the cube. This is day four of a ton of coverage that we've been delivering to you, which, you know, cause you've been watching since Monday night, Dave, we are almost at the end, we're almost at the show wrap. Excited to bring back, we've been talking about security, a lot about security. Excited to bring back a, an alumni to talk about that. But what's your final thoughts? >>Well, so just in, in, in the context of security, we've had just three in a row talking about cyber, which is like the most important topic. And I, and I love that we're having Palo Alto Networks on Palo Alto Networks is the gold standard in security. Talk to CISOs, they wanna work with them. And, and it was, it's interesting because I've been following them for a little bit now, watch them move to the cloud and a couple of little stumbling points. But I said at the time, they're gonna figure it out and, and come rocking back. And they have, and the company's just performing unbelievably well despite, you know, all the macro headwinds that we love to >>Talk about. So. Right. And we're gonna be unpacking all of that with one of our alumni. As I mentioned, Anker Shaw is with us, the SVP and GM of Palo Alto Networks. Anker, welcome back to the Cub. It's great to see you. It's been a while. >>It's good to be here after a couple years. Yeah, >>Yeah. I think three. >>Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a blur after Covid. >>Everyone's saying that. Yeah. Are you surprised that there are still this many people on the show floor? Cuz I am. >>I am. Yeah. Look, I am not, this is my fourth, last year was probably one third or one fourth of this size. Yeah. But pre covid, this is what dream went looked like. And it's energizing, it's exciting. It's just good to be doing the good old things. So many people and yeah. Amazing technology and innovation. It's been incredible. >>Let's talk about innovation. I know you guys, Palo Alto Networks recently acquired cyber security. Talk to us a little bit about that. How is it gonna compliment Prisma? Give us all the scoop on that. >>Yeah, for sure. Look, some of the recent, the cybersecurity attacks that we have seen are related to supply chain, the colonial pipeline, many, many supply chain. And the reason for that is the modern software supply chain, not the physical supply chain, the one that AWS announced, but this is the software supply chain is really incredibly complicated, complicated developers that are building and shipping code faster than ever before. And the, the site acquisition at the center, the heart of that was securing the entire supply chain. White House came with a new initiative on supply chain security and SBO software bill of material. And we needed a technology, a company, and a set of people who can really deliver to that. And that's why we acquired that for supply chain security, otherwise known as cicd, security, c >>IDC security. Yeah. So how will that complement PRIs McCloud? >>Yeah, so look, if you look at our history lease over the last four years, we have been wanting to, our mission mission has been to build a single code to cloud platform. As you may know, there are over 3000 security vendors in the industry. And we said enough is enough. We need a platform player who can really deliver a unified cohesive platform solution for our customers because they're sick and tired of buying PI point product. So our mission has been to deliver that code to cloud platform supply chain security was a missing piece and we acquired them, it fits right really nicely into our portfolio of products and solution that customers have. And they'll have a single pin of glass with this. >>Yeah. So there's a lot going on. You've got, you've got an adversary that is incredibly capable. Yeah. These days and highly motivated and extremely sophisticated mentioned supply chain. It's caused a shift in, in CSO strategies, talking about the pandemic, of course we know work from home that changed things. You've mentioned public policy. Yeah. And, and so, and as well you have the cloud, cloud, you know, relatively new. I mean, it's not that new, but still. Yeah. But you've got the shared responsibility model and not, not only do you have the shared responsibility model, you have the shared responsibility across clouds and OnPrem. So yes, the cloud helps with security, but that the CISO has to worry about all these other things. The, the app dev team is being asked to shift left, you know, secure and they're not security pros. Yeah. And you know, kind audit is like the last line of defense. So I love this event, I love the cloud, but customers need help in making their lives simpler. Yeah. And the cloud in and of itself, because, you know, shared responsibility doesn't do that. Yeah. That's what Palo Alto and firms like yours come in. >>Absolutely. So look, Jim, this is a unable situation for a lot of the Cisco, simply because there are over 26 million developers, less than 3 million security professional. If you just look at all the announcement the AWS made, I bet you there were like probably over 2000 features. Yeah. I mean, they're shipping faster than ever before. Developers are moving really, really fast and just not enough security people to keep up with the velocity and the innovation. So you are right, while AWS will guarantee securing the infrastructure layer, but everything that is built on top of it, the new machine learning stuff, the new application, the new supply chain applications that are developed, that's the responsibility of the ciso. They stay up at night, they don't know what's going on because developers are bringing new services and new technology. And that's why, you know, we've always taken a platform approach where customers and the systems don't have to worry about it. >>What AWS new service they have, it's covered, it's secured. And that's why the adopters, McCloud and Palo Alto Networks, because regardless what developers bring, security is always there by their side. And so security teams need just a simple one click solution. They don't have to worry about it. They can sleep at night, keep the bad actors away. And, and that's, that's where Palo Alto Networks has been innovating in this area. AWS is one of our biggest partners and you know, we've integrated with, with a lot of their services. We launch about three integrations with their services. And we've been doing this historically for more and >>More. Are you still having conversations with the security folks? Or because security is a board level conversation, are your conversations going up a stack because this is a C-suite problem, this is a board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Look, you know, there was a time about four years ago, like the best we could do is director of security. Now it's just so CEO level conversation, board level conversation to your point, simply because I mean, if, if all your financial stuff is going to public cloud, all your healthcare data, all your supply chain data is going to public cloud, the board is asking very simple question, what are you doing to secure that? And to be honest, the question is simple. The answer's not because all the stuff that we talked about, too many applications, lots and lots of different services, different threat vectors and the bad actors, the bad guys are always a step ahead of the curve. And that's why this has become a board level conversation. They wanna make sure that things are secure from the get go before, you know, the enterprises go too deep into public cloud adoption. >>I mean there, there was shift topics a little bit. There was hope or kinda early this year that that cyber was somewhat insulated from the sort of macro press pressures. Nobody's safe. Even the cloud is sort of, you know, facing those, those headwinds people optimizing costs. But one thing when you talk to customers is, I always like to talk about that, that optiv graph. We've all seen it, right? And it's just this eye test of tools and it's a beautiful taxonomy, but there's just too many tools. So we're seeing a shift from point tools to platforms because obviously a platform play, and that's a way. So what are you seeing in the, in the field with customers trying to optimize their infrastructure costs with regard to consolidating to >>Platforms? Yeah. Look, you rightly pointed out one thing, the cybersecurity industry in general and Palo Alto networks, knock on wood, the stocks doing well. The macro headwinds hasn't impacted the security spend so far, right? Like time will tell, we'll, we'll see how things go. And one of the primary reason is that when you know the economy starts to slow down, the customers again want to invest in platforms. It's simple to deploy, simple to operationalize. They want a security partner of choice that knows that they, it's gonna be by them through the entire journey from code to cloud. And so that's why platform, especially times like these are more important than they've ever been before. You know, customers are investing in the, the, the product I lead at Palo Alto network called Prisma Cloud. It's in the cloud network application protection platform seen app space where once again, customers that investing in platform from quote to cloud and avoiding all the point products for sure. >>Yeah. Yeah. And you've seen it in, in Palo Alto's performance. I mean, not every cyber firm has is, is, >>You know, I know. Ouch. CrowdStrike Yeah. >>Was not. Well you saw that. I mean, and it was, and and you know, the large customers were continuing to spend, it was the small and mid-size businesses Yeah. That were, were were a little bit soft. Yeah. You know, it's a really, it's really, I mean, you see Okta now, you know, after they had some troubles announcing that, you know, their, their, their visibility's a little bit better. So it's, it's very hard to predict right now. And of course if TOMA Brava is buying you, then your stock price has been up and steady. That's, >>Yeah. Look, I think the key is to have a diversified portfolio of products. Four years ago before our CEO cash took over the reins of the company, we were a single product X firewall company. Right. And over time we have added XDR with the first one to introduce that recently launched x Im, you know, to, to make sure we build an NextGen team, cloud security is a completely net new investment, zero trust with access as workers started working remotely and they needed to make sure enterprises needed to make sure that they're accessing the applications securely. So we've added a lot of portfolio products over time. So you have to remain incredibly diversified, stay strong, because there will be stuff like remote work that slowed down. But if you've got other portfolio product like cloud security, while those secular tailwinds continue to grow, I mean, look how fast AWS is growing. 35, 40%, like $80 billion run rate. Crazy at that, that scale. So luckily we've got the portfolio of products to ensure that regardless of what the customer's journey is, macro headwinds are, we've got portfolio of solutions to help our customers. >>Talk a little bit about the AWS partnership. You talked about the run rate and I was reading a few days ago. You're right. It's an 82 billion arr, massive run rate. It's crazy. Well, what are, what is a Palo Alto Networks doing with aws and what's the value in it to help your customers on a secure digital transformation journey? >>Well, absolutely. We have been doing business with aws. We've been one of their security partners of choice for many years now. We have a presence in the marketplace where customers can through one click deploy the, the several Palo Alto Networks security solutions. So that's available. Like I said, we had launch partner to many, many new products and innovation that AWS comes up with. But always the day one partner, Adam was talking about some of those announcements and his keynote security data lake was one of those. And they were like a bunch of others related to compute and others. So we have been a partner for a long time, and look, AWS is an incredibly customer obsessed company. They've got their own security products. But if the customer says like, Hey, like I'd like to pick this from yours, but there's three other things from Palo Alto Networks or S MacCloud or whatever else that may be, they're open to it. And that's the great thing about AWS where it doesn't have to be wall garden open ecosystem, let the customer pick the best. >>And, and that's, I mean, there's, there's examples where AWS is directly competitive. I mean, my favorite example is Redshift and Snowflake. I mean those are directly competitive products, but, but Snowflake is an unbelievably great relationship with aws. They do cyber's, I think different, I mean, yeah, you got guard duty and you got some other stuff there. But generally speaking, the, correct me if I'm wrong, the e the ecosystem has more room to play on AWS than it may on some other clouds. >>A hundred percent. Yeah. Once again, you know, guard duty for examples, we've got a lot of customers who use guard duty and Prisma Cloud and other Palo Alto Networks products. And we also ingest the data from guard duty. So if customers want a single pane of glass, they can use the best of AWS in terms of guard duty threat detection, but leverage other technology suite from, you know, a platform provider like Palo Alto Networks. So you know, that that, you know, look, world is a complicated place. Some like blue, some like red, whatever that may be. But we believe in giving customers that choice, just like AWS customers want that. Not a >>Problem. And at least today they're not like directly, you know, in your space. Yeah. You know, and even if they were, you've got such a much mature stack. Absolutely. And my, my frankly Microsoft's different, right? I mean, you see, I mean even the analysts were saying that some of the CrowdStrike's troubles for, cuz Microsoft's got the good enough, right? So >>Yeah. Endpoint security. Yeah. And >>Yeah, for sure. So >>Do you have a favorite example of a customer where Palo Alto Networks has really helped them come in and, and enable that secure business transformation? Anything come to mind that you think really shines a light on Palo Alto Networks and what it's able to do? >>Yeah, look, we have customers across, and I'm gonna speak to public cloud in general, right? Like Palo Alto has over 60,000 customers. So we've been helping with that business transformation for years now. But because it's reinvented aws, the Prisma cloud product has been helping customers across different industry verticals. Some of the largest credit card processing companies, they can process transactions because we are running security on top of the workloads, the biggest financial services, biggest healthcare customers. They're able to put the patient health records in public cloud because Palo Alto Networks is helping them get there. So we are helping accelerated that digital journey. We've been an enabler. Security is often perceived as a blocker, but we have always treated our role as enabler. How can we get developers and enterprises to move as fast as possible? And like, my favorite thing is that, you know, moving fast and going digital is not a monopoly of just a tech company. Every company is gonna be a tech company Oh absolutely. To public cloud. Yes. And we want to help them get there. Yeah. >>So the other thing too, I mean, I'll just give you some data. I love data. I have a, ETR is our survey partner and I'm looking at Data 395. They do a survey every quarter, 1,250 respondents on this survey. 395 were Palo Alto customers, fortune 500 s and P 500, you know, big global 2000 companies as well. Some small companies. Single digit churn. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very, very low replacement >>Rates. Absolutely. >>And still high single digit new adoption. Yeah. Right. So you've got that tailwind going for you. Yeah, >>Right. It's, it's sticky because especially our, our main business firewall, once you deploy the firewall, we are inspecting all the network traffic. It's just so hard to rip and replace. Customers are getting value every second, every minute because we are thwarting attacks from public cloud. And look, we, we, we provide solutions not just product, we just don't leave the product and ask the customers to deploy it. We help them with deployment consumption of the product. And we've been really fortunate with that kind of gross dollar and netten rate for our customers. >>Now, before we wrap, I gotta tease, the cube is gonna be at Palo Alto Ignite. Yeah. In two weeks back here. I think we're at D mgm, right? We >>Were at D MGM December 13th and >>14th. So give us a little, show us a little leg if you would. What could we expect? >>Hey, look, I mean, a lot of exciting new things coming. Obviously I can't talk about it right now. The PR Inc is still not dry yet. But lots of, lots of new innovation across our three main businesses. Network security, public cloud, security, as well as XDR X. Im so stay tuned. You know, you'll, you'll see a lot of new exciting things coming up. >>Looking forward to it. >>We are looking forward to it. Last question on curf. You, if you had a billboard to place in New York Times Square. Yeah. You're gonna take over the the the Times Square Nasdaq. What does the billboard say about why organizations should be working with Palo Alto Networks? Yeah. To really embed security into their dna. Yeah. >>You know when Jim said Palo Alto Networks is the gold standard for security, I thought it was gonna steal it. I think it's pretty good gold standard for security. But I'm gonna go with our mission cyber security partner's choice. We want to be known as that and that's who we are. >>Beautifully said. Walker, thank you so much for joining David in the program. We really appreciate your insights, your time. We look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks back here in Vegas. >>Absolutely. Can't have enough of Vegas. Thank you. Lisa. >>Can't have in Vegas, >>I dunno about that. By this time of the year, I think we can have had enough of Vegas, but we're gonna be able to see you on the cubes coverage, which you could catch up. Palo Alto Networks show Ignite December, I believe 13th and 14th on the cube.net. We want to thank Anker Shaw for joining us. For Dave Ante, this is Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(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)

>>Hey everyone. Hello from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with you, and I'm on the show floor at Reinvent. But we have a very special program series that the Cube has been doing called Women of the Cloud. It's brought to you by aws and I'm so pleased to have an excellent panel of women leaders in technology and in cloud to talk about their tactical recommendations for you, what they see as found, where they've helped organizations be successful with cloud. Please welcome my three guests, Tara Kapor, president and Chief Revenue Officer, consulting and Digital Transformations, NTT Data. We have Rachel Mu, aws, head of North America, partner sales from aws, and Jimmy Barnes joins us as well, managing director, investment banking engineering at Goldman Sachs. It is so great to have you guys on this power panel. I love it. Thank you for joining me. >>Thank >>You. Let's start with you. Give us a little bit of, of your background at NTT Data and I, and I understand NTT has a big focus on women in technology and in stem. Talk to us a little bit about that and then we'll go around the table. >>Perfect, thank you. Thank you. So brand new role for me at Entity Data. I started three months back and it's a fascinating company. We are about 22 billion in size. We work across industries on multiple innovative use cases. So we are doing a ton of work on edge analytics in the cloud, and that's where we are here with aws. We are also doing a ton of work on the private 5G that we are rolling out and essentially building out industry-wide use cases across financial services, manufacturing, tech, et cetera. Lots of women identity. We essentially have women run cloud program today. We have a gal called Nore Hanson who is our practice leader for cloud. We have Matine who's Latifa, who's our AWS cloud leader. We have Molly Ward who leads up a solutions on the cloud. We have an amazing lady in Mona who leads up our marketing programs. So a fantastic plethora of diverse women driving amazing work identity on cloud. >>That's outstanding to hear because it's one of those things that you can't be what you can't see. Right. We all talk about that. Rachel, talk a little bit about your role and some of the focus that AWS has. I know they're big customer obsession, I'm sure obsessed with other things as well. >>Sure. So Rachel Muir, pleased to be here again. I think this will be my third time. So a big fan of the Cube. I'm fortunate enough to lead our North America partner and channel business, and I'll tell you, I've been at AWS for a little under two years, and honestly, it's been probably the best two years of my career. Just in terms of where the cloud is, where it's headed, the business outcomes that we can deliver with our customers and with our partners is absolutely remarkable. We get to, you know, make the impossible possible every day. So I'm, I'm thrilled to be here and I'm thrilled to, to be part of this inaugural Women of the Cloud panel. >>Oh, I'm prepared to have all three of you. One of the things that feedback, kind of pivoting off what, Rachel, one of the things that you said that one of our guests, some of several of our guests have said is that coming out of Adams keynote this morning, it just seems limitless what AWS can do and I love that it gives me kind of chills what they can do with cloud computing and technology, with its ecosystem of partners with its customers like Goldman Sachs. Jimmy, talk to us a little bit about you, your role at Goldman Sachs. You know, we think of Goldman Sachs is a, is a huge financial institution, but it's also a technology company. >>Yeah. I mean, since the age of 15 I've been super passionate about how we can use technology to transform business and simplify modernized business processes. And it's, I'm so thrilled that I have the opportunity to do that at Goldman Sachs as an engineer. I recently moved about two years ago into the investment banking business and it's, you know, it's best in class, one of the top companies in terms of mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, et cetera. But what surprised me is how technology enables all the businesses across the board. Right? And I get to be leading the digital platform for building out the digital platform for in the investment banking business where we're modernizing and transforming existing businesses. These are not new businesses. It's like sometimes I liken it to trying to change the train while it's moving, right? These are existing businesses, but now we get to modernize and transform on the cloud. Right. Not just efficiency for the business by efficiency for technologists as >>Well. Right, right. Sticking with you, Jimmy. I wanna understand, so you've been, you've been interested in tech since you were young. I only got into tech and accidentally as an adult. I'm curious about your career path, but talk to us about that. What are some of the recommendations that you would have for other women who might be looking at, I wanna be in technology, but I wanna work for some of the big companies and they don't think about the Goldman Sachs or some of the other companies like Walmart that are absolutely technology driven. What's your advice for those women who want to grow their career? >>I also, growing up, I was, I was interested in various things. I, I loved doing hair. I used to do my own hair and I used to do hair for other students at school and I was also interested in running an entertainment company. And I used actually go around performing and singing and dancing with a group of friends, especially at church. But what amazed me is when I landed my first job at a real estate agent and everything was being done manually on paper, I was like, wow, technology can bring transformation anywhere and everywhere. And so whilst I have a myriad of interest, there's so many ways that technology can be applied. There's so many different types of disciplines within technology. It's not, there's hands on, like I'm colder, I like to code, but they're product managers, there are business analysts, there are infrastructure specialist. They're a security specialist. And I think it's about pursuing your passion, right? Pursuing your passion and identifying which aspects of technology peak your interest. And then diving in. >>Love that. Diving in. Rachel, you're shaking your head. You definitely are in alignment with a lot of what >>Duties I am. So, you know, interesting enough, I actually started my career as a civil engineer and eventually made it into, into technology. So very similar. I saw in, you know, heavy highway construction how manual some of these processes were. And mind you, this was before the cloud. And I sat down and wrote a little computer program to automate a lot of these manual tasks. And for me it was about simplification of the customer journey and really figuring out how do you deliver value. You know, on fast forward, say 20 plus years, here I am with AWS who has got this amazing cloud platform with over 200 services. And when I think about what we do in tech, from business transformation to modernizing to helping customers think about how do they create new business models, I've really found, I've really found my sweet spot, and I'll say for anyone who wants to get into tech or even switch careers, there's just a couple words of advice that I have. And it's really two words, just start. >>Yes, >>That's it. Just start. Because sometimes later becomes never. And you know, fuel your passion, be curious, think about new things. Yes. And just >>Start, I love that. Just start, you should get t-shirts made with that. Tell me a little bit about some of your recommendations. Obviously just start is great when follow your passion. What would you say to those out there looking to plan the letter? >>So, you know, my, my story's a little bit like jus because I did not want to be in tech. You know, I wanted an easy life. I did well in school and I wanted to actually be an air hostess. And when I broke that to my father, you know, the standard Indian person, now he did, he, you know, he wanted me to go in and be an engineer. Okay? So I was actually push into computer engineering, graduated. But then really two things today, right? When I look back, really two pieces, two areas I believe, which are really important for success. One is, you know, we need to be competent. And the second is we need to be confident, right? Yes, yes. It's so much easier to be competent because a lot of us diverse women, diverse people tend to over rotate on knowing their technical skills, right? Knowing technical skills important, but you need to know how to potentially apply those to business, right? Be able to define a business roi. And I see Julie nodding because she wants people to come in and give her a business ROI for programs that you're executing at Goldman Sachs. I presume the more difficult part though is confidence. >>Absolutely. It's so hard, especially when, when we're younger, we don't know. Raise your hand because I guarantee you either half the people in the, in the room or on the zoom these days weren't listening or have the same question and are too afraid to ask because they don't have the confidence. That's right. Give me, let's pivot on confidence for a minute, Jim, and let's go back to how would you advise your younger self to find your confidence? >>That's, that's a tough one because I feel like even this older self is still finding exercise to, to be real. But I think it's about, I would say it's not praise. I think it's about praising yourself, like recognizing your accomplishments. When I think about my younger self, I think I, I like to focus more on what I didn't do or what I didn't accomplish, instead of majoring and focusing on all the accomplishments and the achievements and reminding myself of those day after day after day. And I think it's about celebrating your wins. >>I love that. Celebrating your wins. Do you agree, Rachel? >>I do. Here's the hard part, and I look around this table of amazing business leaders and I can guarantee that every single one of us sometime this year woke up and said, oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that. Oh >>Yeah. But >>What we haven't followed that by is, I don't know how to do that yet. Right. And here's the other thing I would tell my younger self is there will be days where every single one of us falls apart. There will be days when we feel like we failed at work. There will be days when you feel like you failed as a parent or you failed as a spouse. There'll be days where you have a kid in the middle of target screaming and crying while you're trying to close a big business deal and you just like, oh my gosh, is this really my life? But what I would tell my younger self is, look, the crying, the chaos, the second guessing yourself, the successes, every single one of those are milestones. And it's triumphant, it's tragic, but every single thing that we have been through is fiercely worthwhile. And it's what got us >>Here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Think of all the trials and tribulations and six and Zacks that got you to this table right now. Yep. So Terry, you brought up confidence. How would you advise the women out there won't say you're gonna know stuff. The women out there now that are watching those that are watching right there. Hi. How would you advise them to really find their, their ability to praise themselves, recognize all of the trials and the tribulations as milestones as Rachel said, and really give themselves a seat at the table, raise their hand regardless of who else is in the room? >>You know, it's a, it's a more complex question just because confidence stems from courage, right? Confidence also stems from the belief that you're going to be treated fairly right now in an organization for you to be treated fairly. You need to have, be surrounded by supporters that are going to promote your voice. And very often women don't invest enough in building that support system around them. Yeah. Right. We have mentors, and mentors are great because they come in and they advise us and they'll tell us what we need to go out and do. We really need a team of sponsors Yes. Who come in and support us in the moment in the business. Give us the informal channel because very often we are not plugged into the informal channel, right. So we don't get those special projects or assignments or even opportunities to prove that we can do the tough task. Yeah. So, you know, my, my advice would be to go out and build a network of sponsors. Yes. And if you don't have one, be a sponsor for someone else. That's right. I love that. Great way to win sponsorship is by extending it todos. >>And sometimes too, it's about, honestly, I didn't even know the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a few years ago. And I started thinking, who are I? And then I started realizing who they were. That's right. And some of the conversations that we've had on the cube about women in technology, women of the cloud with some of the women leaders have said, build, and this is kind of like, sort of what you were saying, build your own personal board of directors. Yeah. And that, oh, it gives me chills. It's just, it's so important for, for not just women, but anybody, for everybody. But it's so important to do that. And if you, you think about LinkedIn as an example, you have a network, it's there, utilize it, figure out who your mentors are, who your sponsors are, who are gonna help you land the next thing, start building that reputation. But having that board of directors that you can kind of answer to or have some accountability towards, I think is hugely very >>Important. Yeah. >>Very important. I think, you know, just for, just for those that are listening, a really important distinction for me was mentors are people that you have that help you with, Hey, here's the situation that you were just in. They advise you on the situation. Sponsors are the people that stick up for you when you're not in the room to them. Right. Sponsors are the ones that say, Hey, I think so and so not only needs to have a seat at the table, but they need to build the table. And that's a really important delineation. Yeah. Between mentors and sponsors. And everybody's gotta have a sponsor both within their company and outside of their company. Someone that's advocating for them on their behalf when they don't even know it. Yeah. Yeah. >>I love that you said that. Build the table. It reminds me of a quote that I heard from Will I am, I know, very random. It was a podcast he did with Oprah Winfrey on ai. He's very into ai and I was doing a panel on ai, so I was doing a lot of research and he said, similar for Rachel to build the table, don't wait for a door to open. You go build a door. And I just thought, God, that is such brilliant advice. It is. It's hard to do. It is. Especially when, you know, the four of us in this room, there's a lot of women around here, but we are in an environment where we are the minority women of color are also the minority. What do you guys think where tech is in terms of de and I and really focusing on De and I as as really a very focused strategic initiative. Turner, what do you think? >>So, you know, I just, I, I spoke earlier about the women that we have at Entity Data, right? We have a fabulous team of women. And joining this team has been a moment of revelation for me coming in. I think to promote dni, we all need to start giving back, right? Yes. So today, I would love to announce that we at Entity would like to welcome all of you out there. You know, folks that have diverse ideas, you know, ISV, partners with diverse solutions, thought leaders out there who want to contribute into the ecosystem, right? Customers out there who want to work with companies that are socially responsible, right? We want to work with all of you, come back, reach out to us and be a part of the ecosystem because we can build this together, right? AWS has an amazing platform that gives us an opportunity to do things differently. Yes. Right. Entity data is building a women powered cloud team. And I want to really extend that out to everyone else to be a part this ecosystem, >>But a fantastic opportunity. You know, when we talk about diversity and inclusion and equity, it needs to be intentional for organization. It sounds very intentional at ntt. I know that that intention is definitely there at AWS as well. What are your thoughts on where tech is with respect to diversity? Even thought diversity? Because a lot of times we tend to go to our comfort zones. We do. And so we tend to start creating these circles of kind of like, you know, think tanks and they think alike people to go outside of that comfort zone. It's part of building the table, of building the, is the table and getting people from outside your comfort zone to come in and bring in diverse thought. Because can you imagine the potential of technology if we have true thought diversity in an organization? >>Right? It's, it's incredible. So one of the things that I always share with my team is we've got the opportunity to really change the outcome, right? As you know, you talked about Will I am I'm gonna talk about Bono from you too, right? One of, one of his favorite quotes is, we are the people we've been waiting for. Oh, I love that. And when you think about that, that is us. There is no one else that's gonna change the outcome and continue to deliver some of the business outcomes and the innovation that we are if we don't continue to raise our hand and we don't continue to, to inspire the next generation of leaders to do the same thing. And what I've found is when you start openly sharing what your innovation ideas are or how you're leveraging your engineering background, your stories and your successes, and, and frankly, some of your failures become the inspiration for someone you might not even know. Absolutely. And that's the, you know, that's the key. You're right. Inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility, yes. Have to be at the forefront of every business decision. And I think too often companies think that, you know, inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility is one thing, and business outcomes are another. And they're not. No, they are one in the same. You can't build business outcomes without also focusing on inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility. That's the deliberate piece. >>And, and it has to be deliberate. Jimmy, I wanna ask you, we only have a couple of minutes left, but you're a woman in tech, you're a woman of color. What was that like for you? You, you were very intentional knowing when you were quite young. Yeah. What you wanted to do, but how have you navigated that? Because I can't imagine that was easy. >>It wasn't. I remember, I always tell the story and the, the two things that I really wanted to emphasize today when I thought about this panel is rep representation matters and showing up matters, right? And there's a statement, there's a flow, I don't know who it's attributed to, but be the change you want to see. And I remember walking through the doors of Goldman Sachs 15 years ago and not seeing a black female engineer leader, right? And at that point in time, I had a choice. I could be like, oh, there's no one look like, there's no one that looks like me. I don't belong here. Or I could do what I actually did and say, well, I'm gonna be that person. >>Good, >>Right? I'm going to be the chain. I'm going to show up and I am going to have a seat at the table so that other people behind me can also have a seat at the table. And I think that I've had the privilege to work for a company who has been inclusive, who has had the right support system, the right structures in place, so that I can be that person who is the first black woman tech fellow at Goldman Sachs, who is one of the first black females to be promoted up the rank as a, from analysts to managing director at the company. You know, that was not just because I determined that I belong here, but because the company ensure that I felt that I belong. >>Right. >>That's a great point. They ensure that you felt that. Yeah. You need to be able to feel that. Last question, we've only got about a minute left. 2023 is just around the corner. What comes to your mind, Jimmy will stick with you as you head into the new year. >>Sorry, can you repeat >>What comes to mind priorities for 2023 that you're excited about? >>I'm excited about the democratization of data. Yeah. I'm excited about a lot of the announcements today and I, I think there is a, a huge shift going on with this whole concept of marketplaces and data exchanges and data sharing. And I think both internally and externally, people are coming together more. Companies are coming together more to really de democratize and make data available. And data is power. But a lot of our businesses are running, running on insights, right? And we need to bring that data together and I'm really excited about the trends that's going on in cloud, in technology to actually bring the data sets together. >>Touro, what are you most excited about as we head to 2023? >>I think I'm really excited about the possibilities that entity data has right here, right now, city of Las Vegas, we've actually rolled out a smart city project. So saving citizens life, using data edge analytics, machine learning, being able to predict adverse incidents before they happen, and then being able to take remediation action, right? So that's technology actually working in real time to give us tangible results. We also sponsor the Incar races. Lots of work happening there in delivering amazing customer experience across the platform to millions of users real time. So I think I'm just excited about technology coming together, but while that's happening, I think we really need to be mindful at this time that we don't push our planet into per right. We need to be sustainable, we need to be responsible. >>Absolutely. Rachel, take us out. What are you most excited about going into 2023? >>So, you know, there are so many trends that are, that we could talk about, but I'll tell you at aws, you know, we're big. We, we impact the world. So we've gotta be really thoughtful and humble about what it is that we do. So for me, what I'm most excited about is, you know, one of our leadership principles is about, you know, with what broad responsibility brings, you know, you've got to impact sustainability and many of those other things. And for me, I think it's about waking up every day for our customers, for our partners, and for the younger generations. And being better, doing better, and making better for this planet and for, you know, the future generations to come. So >>I think your tag line just start applies to all of that. It does. It has been an absolute pleasure. And then really an honor to talk to you on the program. Thank you all for joining me, sharing your experiences, sharing what you've accomplished, your recommendations for those others who might be our same generation or older or younger. All really beautiful advice. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. We appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hi everybody, John Wallace here and welcome to theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Glad to have you aboard here as we continue our coverage here at re:Invent 2022. We're out at The Venetian in Las Vegas. A lot of energy down on that exhibit floor, I promise you. We're a little bit away from the maddening crowd, but we're here with the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. I've got two guests I want to introduce you to. Jason Beyer who is the vice president of Data and Analytics at Bridgestone Americas. Jason, good to see you, sir. >> Hello, John. >> And Josh von Schaumburg, who is the managing director and North America lead for AWS Security at Accenture. Josh, good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, first off, just quick take on the show. I know you've only been here about a day or so, but just your thoughts about what you're seeing on the floor in terms of energy, enthusiasm and, I think, turnout, right? I'm really impressed by it. We've got a lot of people down there. >> Yeah, I've been certainly impressed, John, with the turnout. But just as you say, the energy of the crowd, the excitement for the new things coming, it seems like it's a really pivotal moment for many organizations, including my own, and really excited to see what's coming over the next couple days. >> Let's jump into Bridgestone then. I kind of kidded you before we started the interview saying, all right, tires and golf balls, that's what I relate to, but you have a full array of consumer products and solution you're offering and your responsibility is managing the data and the analytics and making sure those business lines are as efficient as possible. >> Absolutely, John. So in my role, I have the privilege of being in an enterprise position. So I get to see the vast array of Bridgestone, which it is a large, highly vertically integrated company all the way from raw material sourcing of natural rubber to retail services in the automotive industry. We're at scale across those areas. The exciting thing about the company right now is we're going through this business transformation of becoming, you know, building on that heritage and that great legacy of having high quality high performance, highly focused on safety products to becoming a product and solutions company, and particular a sustainable solutions company. So what that means is we're bringing not only those great products to market, tires, golf balls, hoses, all kinds of rubber, air springs products to market, but thinking about how do we service those after they're in the market, how do we bring solutions to help fleets, vehicle owners, vehicle operators operate those in a sustainable way, in a cost effective way? So those solutions, of course, bring all new sets of data and analytics that come with it, and technology and moving to the cloud to be cloud native. So this new phase for the organization that we refer to as Bridgestone 3.0, and that business strategy is driving our cloud strategy, our technology strategy, and our data strategy and AWS and Accenture are important partners in that. >> Yeah, so we hear a lot about that these days about this transformation, this journey that people are on now. And Josh, when Bridgestone or other clients come to you and they talk about their migrations and what's their footprint going to look like and how do they get there, in the case of Bridgestone when they came to you and said, "All right, this is where we want to go with this. We're going to embark on a significant upgrade of our systems here," how do you lead 'em? How do you get 'em there? >> Yeah, I think there are a couple key cloud transformation value drivers that we've emphasized and that I've seen at Bridgestone in my time there. I mean, number one, just the rapid increase in the pace of innovation that we've seen over the last couple years. And a lot of that is also led by the scalability of all of the cloud native AWS services that we're leveraging, and in particular with the CDP platform. It really started off as a single-use case and really a single-tenant data lake. And then through the strategic vision of Jason and the leadership team, we've been able to expand that to 10 plus tenants and use cases. And a big reason behind that is the scalability of all these AWS services, right? So as we add more and more tenants, all the infrastructure just scales without any manual provisioning any tuning that we need to do. And that allows us to go really from idea, to POC, to production in really a matter of months when traditionally it might take years. >> So- >> If I can build upon that. >> Please do, yeah. >> The CDP, or central data platform, is part of a broader reference architecture that reflects that business strategy. So we looked at it and said, we could have taken a couple of different approaches to recognize the business challenges we're facing. We needed to modernize our core, our ERP, our manufacturing solutions move to smart factory and green factories, our PLM solutions. But at the same time, we're moving quickly. We have a startup mindset in our mobility solutions businesses where we're going to market on our customer and commerce solutions, and we needed to move at a different pace. And so to decouple those, we, in partnership with Accenture and AWS, built out a reference architecture that has a decoupling layer that's built around a data fabric, a data connected layer, integrated data services as well. A key part of that architecture is our central data platform built on AWS. This is a comprehensive data lake architecture using all the modern techniques within AWS to bring data together, to coalesce data, as well as recognize the multiple different modes of consumption, whether that's classic reporting, business intelligence, analytics, machine learning data science, as well as API consumption. And so we're building that out. A year ago it was a concept on a PowerPoint and just show and kind of reflect the innovation and speed. As Josh mentioned, we're up to 10 tenants, we're growing exponentially. There's high demand from the organization to leverage data at scale because of the business transformation that I mentioned and that modernization of the core ecosystem. >> That's crazy fast, right? And all of a sudden, whoa! >> Faster than I expected. >> Almost snap overnight. And you raise an interesting point too. I think when you talk about how there was a segment of your business that you wanted to get in the startup mode, whereas I don't think Bridgestone, I don't think about startup, right? I think in a much more, I wouldn't say traditional, but you've got big systems, right? And so how did you kind of inject your teams with that kind of mindset, right? That, hey, you're going to have to hit the pedal here, right? And I want you to experiment. I want you to innovate. And that might be a little bit against the grain from what they were used to. >> So just over two years ago, we built and started the organization that I have the privilege of leading, our data and analytics organization. And it's a COE. It's a center of expertise in the organization. We partner with specialized teams in product development, marketing, other places to enable data and analytics everywhere. We wanted to be pervasive, it's a team sport. But we really embraced at that moment what we refer to as a dual speed mindset. Speed one, we've got to move at the speed of the business. And that's variable. Based on the different business units and lines of lines of business and functional areas, the core modernization efforts, those are multi-year transformation programs that have multiple phases to them, and we're embedded there building the fundamentals of data governance and data management and reporting operational things. But at the same time, we needed to recognize that speed of those startup businesses where we're taking solutions and service offerings to market, doing quick minimum viable product, put it in a market, try it, learn from it adapt. Sometimes shut it down and take those learnings into the next area as well as joint ventures. We've been much more aggressive in terms of the partnerships in the marketplace, the joint ventures, the minority investments, et cetera, really to give us that edge in how we corner the market on the fleet and mobility solutions of the future. So having that dual speed approach of operating at the speed of the business, we also needed to balance that with speed two, which is building those long term capabilities and fundamentals. And that's where we've been building out those practical examples of having data governance and data management across these areas, building robust governance of how we're thinking about data science and the evolution of data science and that maturity towards machine learning. And so having that dual speed approach, it's a difficult balancing act, but it's served us well, really partnering with our key business stakeholders of where we can engage, what services they need, and where do we need to make smart choices between those two different speeds. >> Yeah, you just hit on something I want to ask Josh about, about how you said sometimes you have to shut things down, right? It's one thing to embark on I guess a new opportunity or explore, right? New avenues. And then to tell your client, "Well, might be some bumps along the way." >> Yeah. >> A lot of times people in Jason's position don't want to hear that. (laughs) It's like, I don't want to hear about bumps. >> Yeah. >> We want this to be, again, working with clients in that respect and understanding that there's going to be a learning curve and that some things might not function the way you want them to, we might have to take a right instead of a left. >> Yeah, and I think the value of AWS is you really can fail fast and try to innovate and try different use cases out. You don't have any enormous upfront capital expenditure to start building all these servers in your data center for all of your use cases. You can spin something up easily based in idea and then fail fast and move on to the next idea. And I also wanted to emphasize I think how critical top-down executive buy-in is for any cloud transformation. And you could hear it, the excitement in Jason's voice. And anytime we've seen a failed cloud transformation, the common theme is typically lack of executive buy-in and leadership and vision. And I think from day one, Bridgestone has had that buy-in from Jason throughout the whole executive team, and I think that's really evident in the success of the CDP platform. >> Absolutely. >> And what's been your experience in that regard then? Because I think that's a great point Josh raised that you might be really excited in your position, but you've got to convince the C-suite. >> Yeah. >> And there are a lot of variables there that have to be considered, that are kind of out of your sandbox, right? So for somebody else to make decisions based on a holistic approach, right? >> I could tell you, John, talking with with peers of mine, I recognize that I've probably had a little bit of privilege in that regard because the leadership at Bridgestone has recognized to move to this product and solutions organization and have sustainable solutions for the future we needed to move to the cloud. We needed to shift that technology forward. We needed to have a more data-driven approach to things. And so the selling of that was not a huge uphill a battle to be honest. It was almost more of a pull from the top, from our global group CEO, from our CEOs in our different regions, including in Bridgestone Americas. They've been pushing that forward, they've been driving it. And as Josh mentioned, that's been a really huge key to our success, is that executive alignment to move at this new pace, at this new frame of innovation, because that's what the market is demanding in the changing landscape of mobility and the movement of vehicles and things on the road. >> So how do you two work together going forward, Ben? Because you're in a great position now. You've had this tremendous acceleration in the past year, right? Talking about this tenfold increase and what the platform's enabled you to do, but as you know, you can't stand still. Right? (laughs) >> Yeah. There's so much excitement, so many use cases in the backlog now, and it's really been a snowball effect. I think one of the use cases I'm most excited about is starting to apply ML, you know, machine learning to the data sets. And I think there's an amazing IoT predictive maintenance use case there for all of the the censored data collected across all of the tires that are sold. There's an immense amount of data and ultimately we can use that data to predict failures and make our roads safer and help save lives >> Right. >> It's hard to not take a long time to explain all the things because there is a lot ahead of us. The demand curve for capabilities and the enabling things that AWS is going to support is just tremendous. As Josh mentioned, the, the AI ML use cases ahead of us, incredibly exciting. The way we're building and co-innovating things around how we make data more accessible in our data marketplace and more advanced data governance and data quality techniques. The use of, you know, creating data hubs and moving our API landscape into this environment as well is going to be incredibly empowering in terms of accessibility of data across our enterprise globally, as well as both for our internal stakeholders and our external stakeholders. So, I'll stop there because there's a lot of things in there. >> We could be here a long time. >> Yes, we could. >> But it is an exciting time and I appreciate that you're both sharing your perspectives on this because you've got a winning formula going and look forward to what's happening. And we'll see you next year right back here on the Executive Summit. >> Absolutely. >> To measure the success in 2023. How about that? >> Sounds good, thank you, Jim. >> Is that a deal? >> Awesome. >> Sounds good. >> Excellent, good deal. You've been watching AWS here at Coverage of Reinvent '22. We are the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture and you are watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. 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(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.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The technology spending outlook is not pretty and very much unpredictable right now. The negative sentiment is of course being driven by the macroeconomic factors in earnings forecasts that have been coming down all year in an environment of rising interest rates. And what's worse, is many people think earnings estimates are still too high. But it's understandable why there's so much uncertainty. I mean, technology is still booming, digital transformations are happening in earnest, leading companies have momentum and they got cash runways. And moreover, the CEOs of these leading companies are still really optimistic. But strong guidance in an environment of uncertainty is somewhat risky. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we share takeaways from ETR'S latest spending survey, which was released to their private clients on October 21st. Today, we're going to review the macro spending data. We're going to share where CIOs think their cloud spend is headed. We're going to look at the actions that organizations are taking to manage uncertainty and then review some of the technology companies that have the most positive and negative outlooks in the ETR data set. Let's first look at the sample makeup from the latest ETR survey. ETR captured more than 1300 respondents in this latest survey. Its highest figure for the year and the quality and seniority of respondents just keeps going up each time we dig into the data. We've got large contributions as you can see here from sea level executives in a broad industry focus. Now the survey is still North America centric with 20% of the respondents coming from overseas and there is a bias toward larger organizations. And nonetheless, we're still talking well over 400 respondents coming from SMBs. Now ETR for those of you who don't know, conducts a quarterly spending intention survey and they also do periodic drilldowns. So just by the way of review, let's take a look at the expectations in the latest drilldown survey for IT spending. Before we look at the broader technology spending intentions survey data, followers of this program know that we reported on this a couple of weeks ago, spending expectations that peaked last December at 8.3% are now down to 5.5% with a slight uptick expected for next year as shown here. Now one CIO in the ETR community said these figures could be understated because of inflation. Now that's an interesting comment. Real GDP in the US is forecast to be around 1.5% in 2022. So these figures are significantly ahead of that. Nominal GDP is forecast to be significantly higher than what is shown in that slide. It was over 9% in June for example. And one would interpret that survey respondents are talking about real dollars which reflects inflationary factors in IT spend. So you might say, well if nominal GDP is in the high single digits this means that IT spending is below GDP which is usually not the case. But the flip side of that is technology tends to be deflationary because prices come down over time on a per unit basis, so this would be a normal and even positive trend. But it's mixed right now with prices on hard to find hardware, they're holding more firms. Software, you know, software tends to be driven by lock in and competition and switching costs. So you have those countervailing factors. Services can be inflationary, especially now as wages rise but certain sectors like laptops and semis and NAND are seeing less demand and maybe even some oversupply. So the way to look at this data is on a relative basis. In other words, IT buyers are reporting 280 basis point drop in spending sentiment from the end of last year. Now, something that we haven't shared from the latest drilldown survey which we will now is how IT bar buyers are thinking about cloud adoption. This chart shows responses from 419 IT execs from that drilldown and depicts the percentage of workloads their organizations have in the cloud today and what the expectation is through years from now. And you can see it's 27% today and it's nearly 50% in three years. Now the nuance is if you look at the question, that ETRS, it's they asked about IaaS and PaaS, which to some could include on-prem. Now, let me come back to that. In particular, financial services, IT, telco and retail and services industry cited expectations for the future for three years out that we're well above the average of the mean adoption levels. Regardless of how you interpret this data there's most certainly plenty of public cloud in the numbers. And whether you believe cloud is an operating environment or a place out there in the cloud, there's plenty of room for workloads to move into a cloud model well beyond mid this decade. So you know, as ho hum as we've been toward recent as-a-service models announced from the likes of HPE with GreenLake and Dell with APEX, the timing of those offerings may be pretty good actually. Now let's expand on some of the data that we showed a couple weeks ago. This chart shows responses from 282 execs on actions their organizations are taking over the next three months. And the Deltas are quite traumatic from the early part of this charter than the left hand side. The brown line is hiring freezes, the black line is freezing IT projects, and the green line is hiring increases and that red line is layoffs. And we put a box around the sort of general area of the isolation economy timeframe. And you can see the wild swings on this chart. By mid last summer, people were kickstarting things and more hiring was going on and the black line shows IT project freezes, you know, came way down. And now, or on the way back up as our hiring freezes. So we're seeing these wild swings in organizational actions and strategies which underscores the lack of predictability. As with supply chains around the world, this is likely due to the fact that organizations, pre pandemic they were optimized for efficiency, not a lot of waste rather than business resilience. Meaning, you know, there's again not a lot of fluff in the system or if there was it got flushed out during the pandemic. And so the need for productivity and automation is becoming increasingly important, especially as actions that solely rely on headcount changes are very, very difficult to manage. Now, let's dig into some of the vendor commentary and take a look at some of the names that have momentum and some of the others possibly facing headwinds. Here's a list of companies that stand out in the ETR survey. Snowflake, once again leads the pack with a positive spending outlook. HashiCorp, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Freshworks and ServiceNow, they round out the top six. Microsoft, they seem to always be in the mix, as do a number of other security and related companies including CyberArk, Zscaler, CloudFlare, Elastic, Datadog, Fortinet, Tenable and to a certain extent Akamai, you can kind of put them sort of in that group. You know, CDN, they got to worry about security. Everybody worries about security, but especially the CDNs. Now the other software names that are highlighted here include Workday and Salesforce. On the negative side, you can see Dynatrace saw some negatives in the latest survey especially around its analytics business. Security is generally holding up better than other sectors but it's still seeing greater levels of pressure than it had previously. So lower spend. And defections relative to its observability peers, that's really for Dynatrace. Now the other one that was somewhat surprising is IBM. You see the IBM was sort of in that negative realm here but IBM reported an outstanding quarter this past week with double digit revenue growth, strong momentum in software, consulting, mainframes and other infrastructure like storage. It's benefiting from the Kyndryl restructuring and it's on track IBM to deliver 10 billion in free cash flow this year. Red Hat is performing exceedingly well and growing in the very high teens. And so look, IBM is in the midst of a major transformation and it seems like a company that is really focused now with hybrid cloud being powered by Red Hat and consulting and a decade plus of AI investments finally paying off. Now the other big thing we'll add is, IBM was once an outstanding acquire of companies and it seems to be really getting its act together on the M&A front. Yes, Red Hat was a big pill to swallow but IBM has done a number of smaller acquisitions, I think seven this year. Like for example, Turbonomic, which is starting to pay off. Arvind Krishna has the company focused once again. And he and Jim J. Kavanaugh, IBM CFO, seem to be very confident on the guidance that they're giving in their business. So that's a real positive in our view for the industry. Okay, the last thing we'd like to do is take 12 of the companies from the previous chart and plot them in context. Now these companies don't necessarily compete with each other, some do. But they are standouts in the ETR survey and in the market. What we're showing here is a view that we like to often show, it's net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis. And it's a measure, that's a measure of the net percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular platform. So ETR asks, are you spending more or less? They subtract less from the mores. I mean I'm simplifying, but that's what net score is. Now in the horizontal axis, that is a measure of overlap which is which measures presence or pervasiveness in the dataset. So bigger the better. We've inserted a table that informs how the dots in the companies are positioned. These companies are all in the green in terms of net score. And that right most column in the table insert is indicative of their presence in the dataset, the end. So higher, again, is better for both columns. Two other notes, the red dotted line there you see at 40%. Anything over that indicates an highly elevated spending momentum for a given platform. And we purposefully took Microsoft out of the mix in this chart because it skews the data due to its large size. Everybody else would cluster on the left and Microsoft would be all alone in the right. So we take them out. Now as we noted earlier, Snowflake once again leads with a net score of 64%, well above the 40% line. Having said that, while adoption rates for Snowflake remains strong the company's spending velocity in the survey has come down to Earth. And many more customers are shifting from where they were last year and the year before in growth mode i.e. spending more year to year with Snowflake to now shifting more toward flat spending. So a plus or minus 5%. So that puts pressure on Snowflake's net score, just based on the math as to how ETR calculates, its proprietary net score methodology. So Snowflake is by no means insulated completely to the macro factors. And this was seen especially in the data in the Fortune 500 cut of the survey for Snowflake. We didn't show that here, just giving you anecdotal commentary from the survey which is backed up by data. So, it showed steeper declines in the Fortune 500 momentum. But overall, Snowflake, very impressive. Now what's more, note the position of Streamlit relative to Databricks. Streamlit is an open source python framework for developing data driven, data science oriented apps. And it's ironic that it's net score and shared in is almost identical to those of data bricks, as the aspirations of Snowflake and Databricks are beginning to collide. Now, however, the Databricks net score has held up very well over the past year and is in the 92nd percentile of its machine learning and AI peers. And while it's seeing some softness, like Snowflake in the Fortune 500, Databricks has steadily moved to the right on the X axis over the last several surveys even though it was unable to get to the public markets and do an IPO during the lockdown tech bubble. Let's come back to the chart. ServiceNow is impressive because it's well above the 40% mark and it has 437 shared in on this cut, the largest of any company that we chose to plot here. The only real negative on ServiceNow is, more large customers are keeping spending levels flat. That's putting a little bit pressure on its net score, but that's just conservatives. It's kind of like Snowflakes, you know, same thing but in a larger scale. But it's defections, the ServiceNow as in Snowflake as well. It's defections remain very, very low, really low churn below 2% for ServiceNow, in fact, within the dataset. Now it's interesting to also see Freshworks hit the list. You can see them as one of the few ITSM vendors that has momentum and can potentially take on ServiceNow. Workday, on this chart, it's the other big app player that's above the 40% line and we're only showing Workday HCM, FYI, in this graphic. It's Workday Financials, that offering, is below the 40% line just for reference. Now let's talk about CrowdStrike. We attended Falcon last month, CrowdStrike's user conference and we're very impressed with the product visio, the company's execution, it's growing partnerships. And you can see in this graphic, the ETR survey data confirms the company's stellar performance with a net score at 50%, well above the 40% mark. And importantly, more than 300 mentions. That's second only to ServiceNow, amongst the 12 companies that we've chosen to highlight here. Only Microsoft, which is not shown here, has a higher net score in the security space than CrowdStrike. And when it comes to presence, CrowdStrike now has caught up to Splunk in terms of pervasion in the survey. Now CyberArk and Zscaler are the other two security firms that are right at that 40% red dotted line. CyberArk for names with over a hundred citations in the security sector, is only behind Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Zscaler for its part in the survey is seeing strong momentum in the Fortune 500, unlike what we said for Snowflake. And its pervasion on the X-axis has been steadily increasing. Again, not that Snowflake and CrowdStrike compete with each other but they're too prominent names and it's just interesting to compare peers and business models. Cloudflare, Elastic and Datadog are slightly below the 40% mark but they made the sort of top 12 that we showed to highlight here and they continue to have positive sentiment in the survey. So, what are the big takeaways from this latest survey, this really quick snapshot that we've taken. As you know, over the next several weeks we're going to dig into it more and more. As we've previously reported, the tide is going out and it's taking virtually all the tech ships with it. But in many ways the current market is a story of heightened expectations coming down to Earth, miscalculations about the economic patterns and the swings and imperfect visibility. Leading Barclays analyst, Ramo Limchao ask the question to guide or not to guide in a recent research note he wrote. His point being, should companies guide or should they be more cautious? Many companies, if not most companies, are actually giving guidance. Indeed, when companies like Oracle and IBM are emphatic about their near term outlook and their visibility, it gives one confidence. On the other hand, reasonable people are asking, will the red hot valuations that we saw over the last two years from the likes of Snowflake, CrowdStrike, MongoDB, Okta, Zscaler, and others. Will they return? Or are we in for a long, drawn out, sideways exercise before we see sustained momentum? And to that uncertainty, we add elections and public policy. It's very hard to predict right now. I'm sorry to be like a two-handed lawyer, you know. On the one hand, on the other hand. But that's just the way it is. Let's just say for our part, we think that once it's clear that interest rates are on their way back down and we'll stabilize it under 4% and we have clarity on the direction of inflation, wages, unemployment and geopolitics, the wild swings and sentiment will subside. But when that happens is anyone's guess. If I had to peg, I'd say 18 months, which puts us at least into the spring of 2024. What's your prediction? You know, it's almost that time of year. Let's hear it. Please keep in touch and let us know what you think. Okay, that's it for now. Many thanks to Alex Myerson. He is on production and he manages the podcast for us. Ken Schiffman as well is our newest addition to the Boston Studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoff is our EIC, editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE. He does some wonderful editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. Or feel free to comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. If you haven't checked that out, you should. It'll give you an advantage. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (soft upbeat music)

>>Hi, we're back. We're watching, you're watching the cube coverage of Falcon 2022 live from the aria in Las Vegas, Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson and we, yes, folks, there are females in the cyber security industry. Amanda Adams is here. So the vice president of America Alliance at CrowdStrike. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>We it's, it's fantastic to, to actually, as I was starting to wonder, but we >>Do have females in leadership. >>Wait, I'm just kidding. There are plenty of females here, but this cybersecurity industry in general, maybe if we have time, we can talk about that, but I wanna talk about the, the Alliance program, but before I do, yeah. You know, you, you got a nice career here at CrowdStrike, right? You've kind of seen the ascendancy, the rocket ship you've been on it for five years. Yep. So what's that been like? And if you had to put on the binoculars and look five years forward, what can you tell us in that 10 year span? Oh >>My goodness. What a journey it's been over the last five, six years. I've been with CrowdStrike almost six years and really starting with our first core group of partners and building out the alliances, seen obviously the transformation with our sales organization. And as we scaled, I think of our, of our technology. We started with, I think, two products at that time, we were focused on reinventing how our customers thought about NextGen AB but also endpoint detection response. From there, the evolution is really driving towards that cloud security platform, right? How our partners fit into that. And, and how we've evolved is it's not just resell. It's not just focusing on the margin and transactions. We really have focused on building the strategic relationships with our partners, but also our customers and fitting them in that better together story with that CrowdStrike platform. It's been the biggest shift. Yeah. >>And you've got that. The platform chops for that. It's just, I think you're up to 22 modules now. So you're not a point product. You guys make that, that, that point lot now in terms of the, the partners and the ecosystem, you know, it's, it's, it's good here. I mean, it's, this it's buzzing. I've said it's like service. I've said, number of times, it's like service. Now back in 2013, I was there now. They didn't have the down market, the SMB that you have that's right. And I think you you're gonna have an order. You got 20,000 customers. That's right. I predict CrowdStrike's gonna have 200,000. I, I'm not gonna predict when I need to think about that. But, but in thinking about the, the, the co your colleagues and the partners and the skill sets that have evolved, what's critical today. And, and, and what do you see as critical in the future? >>So from a skill set standpoint, if I'm a partner and engaging with CrowdStrike and our customers, if you think about, again, evolving away from just resell, we have eight routes to market. So while that may sound complicated, the way that I like to think about it is that we truly flex to our partners, go to market their business models of what works best for their organization, but also their customers. The way that they've changed, I think from a skillset standpoint is looking beyond just the technology from a platform, building a better together story with our tech Alliance partners or store, if thinking about the XDR Alliance, which we are focusing on, there's so much great value in bringing that to our customers from a skillset standpoint, beyond those services services, we've talked about every day. I know that this is gonna be a top topic for the week yesterday through our partner summit, George, our CEO, as well as Jim Cidel, that's really the opportunity as we expand in new modules. If you think about humo or log scale identity, and then cloud our partners play a critical role when it comes into the cloud migration deployment integration services, really, we're not gonna get bigger from a services organization. And that's where we need our partners to step in. >>Yeah. And, you know, we we've talked a lot about XDR yeah. Already in day one here. Yeah. With, with the X extending into other areas. That's right. I think that services be, would become even more critical at that point, you know, as you spread out into the, really the internet of things that's right. Especially all of the old things that are out there that maybe should be on the internet, but aren't yet. Yeah. But once they are security is important. So what are you doing in that arena from a services perspective to, to bolster that capability? Is it, is it, is it internally, or is it through partners generally? >>It's definitely, I think we look to our partners to extend beyond the core of what we do. We do endpoint really well, right? Our services is one of the best in the business. When you look at instant response, our proactive services, supporting our customers. If you think to XDR of integration, building out those connect air packs with our customers, building the alliances, we really do work with our partners to drive that successful outcome with our customers. But also too, I think about it with our tech alliances of building out the integration that takes a lot of effort and work. We have a great team internally, which will help guide those services to be, to be built. Right. You have to have support when you're building the integrations, which is great, but really from like a tech Alliance and store standpoint, looking to add use cases, add value to more store apps for our customers, that's where we're headed. Right. >>What about developers? Do you see that as a component of the ecosystem in the future? Yeah, >>Without a doubt. I mean, I think that as our partner program evolves right now working with our, our developers, I mean, there's different personas that we work with with our customer standpoint, but from a partner working with them to build our new codes, the integration that's gonna be pretty important. >>So we were, we sort of tongue in cheek at the beginning of this interview yeah. With women in tech. And it's a, it's a topic that, on the cube that we've been very passionate about since day one yep. On the cube. So how'd you get in to this business? H how did your, your career progress, how did you get to where you are? >>You know, I have been incredibly fortunate to have connections, and I think it's who, you know, and your network, not necessarily what, you know, to a certain extent, you have to be smart to make it long term. Right. You have to have integrity. Do what you're saying. You're gonna do. I first started at Cisco and I had a connection of, it was actually a parent of somebody I grew up with. And they're like, you would fit in very nicely to Cisco. And I started with their channel marketing team, learned a ton about the business, how to structure, how to support. And that was the first step into technology. If you would've asked me 20 years ago, what did I wanna do? I actually wanted to be a GM of an organization. And I was coming outta I come on, which is great, which I'm, it really is right up. >>If you knew me, you're like, that actually makes a lot of sense. But coming outta college, I had an opportunity. I was interviewing with the golden state warriors in California, and I was interviewing with Cisco and that I had two ops and I was living in San Jose at the time. The golden state warriors of course paid less. It was a better opportunity in sales, but it was obviously where I wanted to go from athletics. And I grew up in athletics, playing volleyball. Cisco paid me more, and it was in San Jose. And really the, the golden state warriors seemed that I was having that conversation. They said, one year community is gonna be awful. It's awful from San Jose to Oakland, but also too, like you have more money on the table. Go take that. And so I could have very much ended up in athletics, most likely in the back office, somewhere. Like I would love that. And then from there, I went from Cisco. I actually worked for a reseller for quite some time, looking at, or selling into Manhattan when I moved from California to Manhattan, went to tenable. And that was when I shifted really into channel management. I love relationships, getting snow people, building partnerships, seeing that long term, that's really where I thrive. And then from there came to CrowdStrike, which in itself has been an incredible journey. I bet. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think there's an important thread there to pull on. And that is, we, we put a lot of emphasis on stem, which people, some sometimes translate into one thing, writing code that's right. There are, but would you agree? There are many, many, many opportunities in tech that aren't just coding. >>Absolutely. >>And I think I, as a father of three daughters, it's, it's a message that I have shared with them. Yeah. They are not interested in the coding part of things, but still, they need to know that there are so many opportunities and, and it's always, sometimes it's happenstance in terms of finding the opportunity in your case, it was, you know, cosmic connection that's right. But, but that's, you know, that's something that we can foster is that idea that it's not just about the hardcore engineering and coding aspect, it's business >>That's right. So if, if there was one thing that I can walk away from today is I say that all the time, right? If you look at CrowdStrike in our mission, we really don't have a mission statement. We stop breaches every single day. When I come to work and I support our partners, I'm not super technical. I obviously know our technology and I, I enable and train our partners, but I'm not coding. Right. And I make an impact to our business, our partners, more importantly, our customers, every single day, we have folks that you can come from a marketing operations. There is legal, there's finance. I deal with folks all across the business that aren't super technical, but are making a huge impact. And I, I don't think that we talk about the opportunities outside of engineering with the broader groups. We talk about stem a lot, but within college, and I look to see like getting those early in career folks, either through an intern program could be sales, but too, if they don't like, like sales, then they shift into marketing or operations. It's a great way to get into the industry. >>Yeah. But I still think you gotta like tech to be in the tech business. Oh, you >>Do? Yeah. You do. I'm >>Not saying it's like deep down is like, not all of us, but a lot of us are kind of just, you know, well, at least you, >>At least you can't hate it. >>Right. Okay. But so women, 50% of the population, I think the stat is 17% in the technology. Yeah. Industry, maybe it's changed a little bit, but you know, 20% or, or less, why do you think that is? >>I, you know, I always go back to within technology, people hire from their network and people that they know, and usually your network are people that are very like-minded or similar to you. I have referred females into CrowdStrike. It's a priority of mine. I also have a circle that is also men, but also too, if you look at the folks that are hired into CrowdStrike, but also other technology companies, that's the first thing that I go to also too. I think it's a little bit intimidating. Right. I have a very strong personality and I'm very direct, but also too, like I can keep up with our industry when it comes to that stereotypes essentially. And some people maybe are introverted and they're not quite sure where they fit in. Right. Whether it's marketing operations, et cetera. So they, they're not sure of the opportunities or even aware of where to get started. You know what I mean? >>Yeah. I mean, I think there is a, a, a stereotype today, but I'm not sure why it's, is it unique to the, to the technology industry? No. Is it not? Right? It happens >>Thinking, I mean, there's so many industries where healthcare, >>Maybe not so much. Right. Because you know, >>You have nurses versus doctors. I feel like that is flipped. >>Yeah. That's true. Nurses versus doctors. Right. Well, I, I know a lot of women doctors though, but >>Yeah. That's kind of flipped. It's better. >>Yeah. Says >>Flipped over. Yeah. I think it's more women in medical school now, but than than men. But, >>And, and I do think in our industry, you know, when you look at companies like IBM, HPE, Cisco, Dell, and, and, and many others. Yeah. They are making a concerted effort for on round diversity. They typically have somebody who's in charge of diversity. They report, you know, maybe not directly to the CEO, but they certainly have a seat at the table. That's right. And you know, maybe you call it, oh, it's quotas. Maybe the, the old white guys feel, you know, a little slighted, whatever. It's like, nobody's crying for us. I mean, it's not like we got screwed. >>See, I know problema we can do this in Spanish. Oh, oh, >>Oh, you're not a old white guy. Sorry. We can do >>This in Spanish if you want. >>Okay. Here we go. So, no, but, but, but I, so I do think that, that the industry in general, I talked to John Chambers about this recently and he was like, look, we gotta do way better. And I don't disagree with that. But I think that, I think the industry is doing better, but I wonder if like a rocket ship company, like CrowdStrike who has so many other things going on, you know, maybe they gotta get you a certain size. I mean, you've reached escape velocity. You're doing obviously a lot of corporate, you know, good. Yeah. You know, and, and, and, and we just had earlier on we, you know, motor motor guides was very cool. Yeah. So maybe it's a maturity thing. Maybe these larger companies with you crowd size $40 billion market cap, but maybe the, the hundred plus billion dollar market cap companies. I don't know. I don't know. You guys got a bigger market cap than Dell. So >>I, I don't think it's necessarily related to market cap. I think it's the size of the organization of how many roles are open that we currently write. So we're at just over 6,000 employees. If you look at Cisco, how many thousands of employees they have there's >>Right. Maybe a hundred thousand employees. >>That's right. There's >>More opportunities. How many, what's a headcount of crowd strike >>Just over 6,000, >>6,000. So, okay. But >>If you think about the, the areas of opportunity for advancement, and we were talking about this earlier, when you look at early and career or entry level, it's actually quite, even right across the Americas of, we do have a great female population. And then as progression happens, that's where it, it tees off from a, a female in leadership. And we're doing, we're focusing on that, right? Under JC Herrera's leadership, as well as with George. One of the things that I always think is important though, is that you're mindful as, as the female within the organization and that you're out seeking somebody, who's not only a mentor, but is a direct champion for you when you're not in the room. Right. This is true of CrowdStrike. It's true of every organization. You're not gonna be aware of the opportunities as the roles are being created. And really, as the roles are being created, they probably have somebody in mind. Right. And so if you have somebody that's in that room says, you know what, Amanda Adams would be perfect for that. Let's go talk to her about it. You have to have somebody who's your champion. Yeah. >>There there's, there's, there's a saying that 80% of the most important moments in your life happen in your absence. Yeah. And that's exactly right. You know, when they're, when someone needs to be there to champion, you, >>Did that happen for you? >>Yes. I have a very strong champion. >>So I mean, I, my observation is if, if you are a woman in tech and you're in a senior leadership position, like you are, or you're a, you're a general manager or a P and L manager or a CEO, you have to be so incredibly talented because all things being equal, maybe it's changing somewhat in some of those companies I talked about, but for the last 30 years, all takes be equal. A, a, a woman is gonna lose out to a man who is as qualified. And, and I think that's maybe slowly changing. Maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't. And maybe that's, some people think that's unfair, but you know, think about people of color. Right. They, they, they, they grew up with less op opportunities for education. And this is just the statistics that's right. Right. So should society overcompensate for that? I personally think, yes, the, the answer is just, they should, there should still be some type of meritocracy that's right. You know, but society has a responsibility to, you know, rise up all ships. >>I think there's a couple ways that you can address that through Falcon funds, scholarship programs, absolutely. Looking at supporting folks that are coming outta school, our internship program, providing those opportunities, but then just being mindful right. Of whether or not you publish the stats or not. We do have somebody who's responsible for D I, within CrowdStrike. They are looking at that and at least taking that step to understand what can we do to support the advancement across minorities. But also women is really, really important. >>Did you not have a good educational opportunity when you were growing up where you're like you had to me? Yeah, no, seriously, >>No. Seriously. I went to pretty scary schools. Right. >>Okay. So you could have gone down a really bad path. >>I, a lot of people that I grew up with went down really, really bad paths. I think the inflection point at, at least for me what the inflection point was becoming aware of this entire universe. Yeah. I was, I was headed down a path where I wasn't aware that any of this existed, when I got out of college, they were advertising in the newspaper for Cisco sales engineers, $150,000 a year. We will train. I'm a smart guy. I had no idea what that meant. Right. I could have easily gone and gotten one of those jobs. It was seven or eight years before I intersected with the tech world again. And so, you know, kind of parallel with your experience with you had someone randomly, it's like, you'd be great at Cisco. Yeah. But if, if you're not around that, and so you take people in different communities who are just, this might as well be a different planet. Yes. Yeah. The idea of eating in a restaurant where someone is serving you, food is uncomfortable, right? The idea of checking into a hotel, the idea of flying somewhere on an airplane, we talk about imposter syndrome. That's right. There are deep seated discomfort levels that people have because they just, this is completely foreign, but >>You're saying you could have foreign, you could have gone down a path where selling drugs or jacking cars was, was, was lucrative. >>I had, I had, yeah. I mean, we're getting, we're getting like deep into societal things. I was, I was very lucky. My parents were very, very young, but they're still together to this day. I had loving parents. We were very, very poor. We were surrounded by really, really, really bad stuff. So. >>Okay. So, so, okay. So this, >>I, I don't, I don't compare my situation to others. >>White woman. That's I guess this is my point. Yeah. The dynamic is different than, than a kid who grew up in the inner city. Yes. Right. And, and, and they're both important to address, but yeah. I think you gotta address them in different ways. >>Yes. But if they're, but if they're both completely ignorant of this, >>They don't know it. So it's lack of >>A, they'll never be here. >>You >>Never be here. And it's such a huge, this is such a huge difference from the rest of the world and from the rest, from the rest of our economy. >>So what would you tell a young girl? My daughters, aren't interested in tech. They want to go into fashion or healthcare, whatever Dave's daughters maybe would be a young girl, preteen, maybe teen interested in, not sure which path, why tech, what would advice would you give? >>I think just understanding what you enjoy about life, right? Like which skills are you great at? What characteristics about roles and not really focusing on a specific product. Definitely not cybersecurity versus like the broader network. I mean, literally what do you enjoy doing? And then the roles of, you know, from the skillset that's needed, whether that be marketing, and then you can start to dive into, do I wanna support marketing for a corporate environment for retail, for technology like that will come and follow your passion, which I know is so easy to say, right? But if you're passionate about certain things, I love relationships. I think that holding myself from integrity standpoint, leading with integrity, but building strong relationships on trust, that's something I take really pride in and what I get enjoyment with. It's >>Obviously your superpower. >>It, >>It is. >>But >>Then it will go back to OST too, just being authentic in the process of building those relationships, being direct to the transparency of understanding, like again, knowing what you're good at and then where you can fit into an organization, awareness of technology opportunities, I think will all lend that to. But I also wouldn't worry, like when I was 17 year old, I, I thought I would be playing volleyball in college and then going to work for a professional sports team. You know, life works out very differently. Yeah. >>Right. And then, and for those of you out there, so I love that. Thank you for that great interview. Really appreciate letting us go far field for those of you might say, well, I don't know, man. I don't know what my passion is. I'll give you a line from my daughter, Alicia, you don't learn a lot for your kids. She said, well, if you don't know what your passion is, follow your curiosity. That's great. There you go. Amanda Adams. Thanks so much. It was great to have you on. Okay. Thank you. Keep it right there. We're back with George Kurtz. We're to the short break. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson. You watching the cube from Falcon 22 in Las Vegas.

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break