(gentle music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, California for our live stage performance. Supercloud 2 is our second Supercloud event. We're going to get these out as fast as we can every couple months. It's our second one, you'll see two and three this year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. A panel here to break down the Supercloud momentum, the wave, and the developer impact that we bringing back Vittorio Viarengo, who's a VP for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Sarbjeet Johal, industry influencer and Analyst at StackPayne, his company, Cube alumni and Influencer. Sarbjeet, great to see you. Vittorio, thanks for coming back. >> Nice to be here. >> My pleasure. >> Vittorio, you just gave a keynote where we unpacked the cross-cloud services, what VMware is doing, how you guys see it, not just from VMware's perspective, but VMware looking out broadly at the industry and developers came up and you were like, "Developers, developer, developers", kind of a goof on the Steve Ballmer famous meme that everyone's seen. This is a huge star, sorry, I mean a big piece of it. The developers are the canary in the coal mines. They're the ones who are being asked to code the digital transformation, which is fully business transformation and with the market the way it is right now in terms of the accelerated technology, every enterprise grade business model's changing. The technology is evolving, the builders are kind of, they want go faster. I'm saying they're stuck in a way, but that's my opinion, but there's a lot of growth. >> Yeah. >> The impact, they got to get released up and let it go. Those developers need to accelerate faster. It's been a big part of productivity, and the conversations we've had. So developer impact is huge in Supercloud. What's your, what do you guys think about this? We'll start with you, Sarbjeet. >> Yeah, actually, developers are the masons of the digital empires I call 'em, right? They lay every brick and build all these big empires. On the left side of the SDLC, or the, you know, when you look at the system operations, developer is number one cost from economic side of things, and from technology side of things, they are tech hungry people. They are developers for that reason because developer nights are long, hours are long, they forget about when to eat, you know, like, I've been a developer, I still code. So you want to keep them happy, you want to hug your developers. We always say that, right? Vittorio said that right earlier. The key is to, in this context, in the Supercloud context, is that developers don't mind mucking around with platforms or APIs or new languages, but they hate the infrastructure part. That's a fact. They don't want to muck around with servers. It's friction for them, it is like they don't want to muck around even with the VMs. So they want the programmability to the nth degree. They want to automate everything, so that's how they think and cloud is the programmable infrastructure, industrialization of infrastructure in many ways. So they are happy with where we are going, and we need more abstraction layers for some developers. By the way, I have this sort of thinking frame for last year or so, not all developers are same, right? So if you are a developer at an ISV, you behave differently. If you are a developer at a typical enterprise, you behave differently or you are forced to behave differently because you're not writing software.- >> Well, developers, developers have changed, I mean, Vittorio, you and I were talking earlier on the keynote, and this is kind of the key point is what is a developer these days? If everything is software enabled, I mean, even hardware interviews we do with Nvidia, and Amazon and other people building silicon, they all say the same thing, "It's software on a chip." So you're seeing the role of software up and down the stack and the role of the stack is changing. The old days of full stack developer, what does that even mean? I mean, the cloud is a half a stack kind of right there. So, you know, developers are certainly more agile, but cloud native, I mean VMware is epitome of operations, IT operations, and the Tan Zoo initiative, you guys started, you went after the developers to look at them, and ask them questions, "What do you need?", "How do you transform the Ops from virtualization?" Again, back to your point, so this hardware abstraction, what is software, what is cloud native? It's kind of messy equation these days. How do you guys grokel with that? >> I would argue that developers don't want the Supercloud. I dropped that up there, so, >> Dave: Why not? >> Because developers, they, once they get comfortable in AWS or Google, because they're doing some AI stuff, which is, you know, very trendy right now, or they are in IBM, any of the IPA scaler, professional developers, system developers, they love that stuff, right? Yeah, they don't, the infrastructure gets in the way, but they're just, the problem is, and I think the Supercloud should be driven by the operators because as we discussed, the operators have been left behind because they're busy with day-to-day jobs, and in most cases IT is centralized, developers are in the business units. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? So they get the mandate from the top, say, "Our bank, they're competing against". They gave teenagers or like young people the ability to do all these new things online, and Venmo and all this integration, where are we? "Oh yeah, we can do it", and then build it, and then deploy it, "Okay, we caught up." but now the operators are back in the private cloud trying to keep the backend system running and so I think the Supercloud is needed for the primarily, initially, for the operators to get in front of the developers, fit in the workflow, but lay the foundation so it is secure.- >> So, so I love this thinking because I love the rift, because the rift points to what is the target audience for the value proposition and if you're a developer, Supercloud enables you so you shouldn't have to deal with Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> What you're saying is get the operating environment or operating system done properly, whether it's architecture, building the platform, this comes back to architecture platform conversations. What is the future platform? Is it a vendor supplied or is it customer created platform? >> Dave: So developers want best to breed, is what you just said. >> Vittorio: Yeah. >> Right and operators, they, 'cause developers don't want to deal with governance, they don't want to deal with security, >> No. >> They don't want to deal with spinning up infrastructure. That's the role of the operator, but that's where Supercloud enables, to John's point, the developer, so to your question, is it a platform where the platform vendor is responsible for the architecture, or there is it an architectural standard that spans multiple clouds that has to emerge? Based on what you just presented earlier, Vittorio, you are the determinant of the architecture. It's got to be open, but you guys determine that, whereas the nirvana is, "Oh no, it's all open, and it just kind of works." >> Yeah, so first of all, let's all level set on one thing. You cannot tell developers what to do. >> Dave: Right, great >> At least great developers, right? Cannot tell them what to do. >> Dave: So that's what, that's the way I want to sort of, >> You can tell 'em what's possible. >> There's a bottle on that >> If you tell 'em what's possible, they'll test it, they'll look at it, but if you try to jam it down their throat, >> Yeah. >> Dave: You can't tell 'em how to do it, just like your point >> Let me answer your answer the question. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I think we need to build an architect, help them build an architecture, but it cannot be proprietary, has to be built on what works in the cloud and so what works in the cloud today is Kubernetes, is you know, number of different open source project that you need to enable and then provide, use this, but when I first got exposed to Kubernetes, I said, "Hallelujah!" We had a runtime that works the same everywhere only to realize there are 12 different distributions. So that's where we come in, right? And other vendors come in to say, "Hey, no, we can make them all look the same. So you still use Kubernetes, but we give you a place to build, to set those operation policy once so that you don't create friction for the developers because that's the last thing you want to do." >> Yeah, actually, coming back to the same point, not all developers are same, right? So if you're ISV developer, you want to go to the lowest sort of level of the infrastructure and you want to shave off the milliseconds from to get that performance, right? If you're working at AWS, you are doing that. If you're working at scale at Facebook, you're doing that. At Twitter, you're doing that, but when you go to DMV and Kansas City, you're not doing that, right? So your developers are different in nature. They are given certain parameters to work with, certain sort of constraints on the budget side. They are educated at a different level as well. Like they don't go to that end of the degree of sort of automation, if you will. So you cannot have the broad stroking of developers. We are talking about a citizen developer these days. That's a extreme low, >> You mean Low-Code. >> Yeah, Low-Code, No-code, yeah, on the extreme side. On one side, that's citizen developers. On the left side is the professional developers, when you say developers, your mind goes to the professional developers, like the hardcore developers, they love the flexibility, you know, >> John: Well app, developers too, I mean. >> App developers, yeah. >> You're right a lot of, >> Sarbjeet: Infrastructure platform developers, app developers, yes. >> But there are a lot of customers, its a spectrum, you're saying. >> Yes, it's a spectrum >> There's a lot of customers don't want deal with that muck. >> Yeah. >> You know, like you said, AWS, Twitter, the sophisticated developers do, but there's a whole suite of developers out there >> Yeah >> That just want tools that are abstracted. >> Within a company, within a company. Like how I see the Supercloud is there shouldn't be anything which blocks the developers, like their view of the world, of the future. Like if you're blocked as a developer, like something comes in front of you, you are not developer anymore, believe me, (John laughing) so you'll go somewhere else >> John: First of all, I'm, >> You'll leave the company by the way. >> Dave: Yeah, you got to quit >> Yeah, you will quit, you will go where the action is, where there's no sort of blockage there. So like if you put in front of them like a huge amount of a distraction, they don't like it, so they don't, >> Well, the idea of a developer, >> Coming back to that >> Let's get into 'cause you mentioned platform. Get year in the term platform engineering now. >> Yeah. >> Platform developer. You know, I remember back in, and I think there's still a term used today, but when I graduated my computer science degree, we were called "Software engineers," right? Do people use that term "Software engineering", or is it "Software development", or they the same, are they different? >> Well, >> I think there's a, >> So, who's engineering what? Are they engineering or are they developing? Or both? Well, I think it the, you made a great point. There is a factor of, I had the, I was blessed to work with Adam Bosworth, that is the guy that created some of the abstraction layer, like Visual Basic and Microsoft Access and he had so, he made his whole career thinking about this layer, and he always talk about the professional developers, the developers that, you know, give him a user manual, maybe just go at the APIs, he'll build anything, right, from system engine, go down there, and then through obstruction, you get the more the procedural logic type of engineers, the people that used to be able to write procedural logic and visual basic and so on and so forth. I think those developers right now are a little cut out of the picture. There's some No-code, Low-Code environment that are maybe gain some traction, I caught up with Adam Bosworth two weeks ago in New York and I asked him "What's happening to this higher level developers?" and you know what he is told me, and he is always a little bit out there, so I'm going to use his thought process here. He says, "ChapGPT", I mean, they will get to a point where this high level procedural logic will be written by, >> John: Computers. >> Computers, and so we may not need as many at the high level, but we still need the engineers down there. The point is the operation needs to get in front of them >> But, wait, wait, you seen the ChatGPT meme, I dunno if it's a Dilbert thing where it's like, "Time to tic" >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that >> "Time to develop the code >> Five minutes, time to decode", you know, to debug the codes like five hours. So you know, the whole equation >> Well, this ChatGPT is a hot wave, everyone's been talking about it because I think it illustrates something that's NextGen, feels NextGen, and it's just getting started so it's going to get better. I mean people are throwing stones at it, but I think it's amazing. It's the equivalent of me seeing the browser for the first time, you know, like, "Wow, this is really compelling." This is game-changing, it's not just keyword chat bots. It's like this is real, this is next level, and I think the Supercloud wave that people are getting behind points to that and I think the question of Ops and Dev comes up because I think if you limit the infrastructure opportunity for a developer, I think they're going to be handicapped. I mean that's a general, my opinion, the thesis is you give more aperture to developers, more choice, more capabilities, more good things could happen, policy, and that's why you're seeing the convergence of networking people, virtualization talent, operational talent, get into the conversation because I think it's an infrastructure engineering opportunity. I think this is a seminal moment in a new stack that's emerging from an infrastructure, software virtualization, low-code, no-code layer that will be completely programmable by things like the next Chat GPT or something different, but yet still the mechanics and the plumbing will still need engineering. >> Sarbjeet: Oh yeah. >> So there's still going to be more stuff coming on. >> Yeah, we have, with the cloud, we have made the infrastructure programmable and you give the programmability to the programmer, they will be very creative with that and so we are being very creative with our infrastructure now and on top of that, we are being very creative with the silicone now, right? So we talk about that. That's part of it, by the way. So you write the code to the particle's silicone now, and on the flip side, the silicone is built for certain use cases for AI Inference and all that. >> You saw this at CES? >> Yeah, I saw at CES, the scenario is this, the Bosch, I spoke to Bosch, I spoke to John Deere, I spoke to AWS guys, >> Yeah. >> They were showcasing their technology there and I was spoke to Azure guys as well. So the Bosch is a good example. So they are building, they are right now using AWS. I have that interview on camera, I will put it some sometime later on there online. So they're using AWS on the back end now, but Bosch is the number one, number one or number two depending on what day it is of the year, supplier of the componentry to the auto industry, and they are creating a platform for our auto industry, so is Qualcomm actually by the way, with the Snapdragon. So they told me that customers, their customers, BMW, Audi, all the manufacturers, they demand the diversity of the backend. Like they don't want all, they, all of them don't want to go to AWS. So they want the choice on the backend. So whatever they cook in the middle has to work, they have to sprinkle the data for the data sovereign side because they have Chinese car makers as well, and for, you know, for other reasons, competitive reasons and like use. >> People don't go to, aw, people don't go to AWS either for political reasons or like competitive reasons or specific use cases, but for the most part, generally, I haven't met anyone who hasn't gone first choice with either, but that's me personally. >> No, but they're building. >> Point is the developer wants choice at the back end is what I'm hearing, but then finish that thought. >> Their developers want the choice, they want the choice on the back end, number one, because the customers are asking for, in this case, the customers are asking for it, right? But the customers requirements actually drive, their economics drives that decision making, right? So in the middle they have to, they're forced to cook up some solution which is vendor neutral on the backend or multicloud in nature. So >> Yeah, >> Every >> I mean I think that's nirvana. I don't think, I personally don't see that happening right now. I mean, I don't see the parody with clouds. So I think that's a challenge. I mean, >> Yeah, true. >> I mean the fact of the matter is if the development teams get fragmented, we had this chat with Kit Colbert last time, I think he's going to come on and I think he's going to talk about his keynote in a few, in an hour or so, development teams is this, the cloud is heterogenous, which is great. It's complex, which is challenging. You need skilled engineering to manage these clouds. So if you're a CIO and you go all in on AWS, it's hard. Then to then go out and say, "I want to be completely multi-vendor neutral" that's a tall order on many levels and this is the multicloud challenge, right? So, the question is, what's the strategy for me, the CIO or CISO, what do I do? I mean, to me, I would go all in on one and start getting hedges and start playing and then look at some >> Crystal clear. Crystal clear to me. >> Go ahead. >> If you're a CIO today, you have to build a platform engineering team, no question. 'Cause if we agree that we cannot tell the great developers what to do, we have to create a platform engineering team that using pieces of the Supercloud can build, and let's make this very pragmatic and give examples. First you need to be able to lay down the run time, okay? So you need a way to deploy multiple different Kubernetes environment in depending on the cloud. Okay, now we got that. The second part >> That's like table stakes. >> That are table stake, right? But now what is the advantage of having a Supercloud service to do that is that now you can put a policy in one place and it gets distributed everywhere consistently. So for example, you want to say, "If anybody in this organization across all these different buildings, all these developers don't even know, build a PCI compliant microservice, They can only talk to PCI compliant microservice." Now, I sleep tight. The developers still do that. Of course they're going to get their hands slapped if they don't encrypt some messages and say, "Oh, that should have been encrypted." So number one. The second thing I want to be able to say, "This service that this developer built over there better satisfy this SLA." So if the SLA is not satisfied, boom, I automatically spin up multiple instances to certify the SLA. Developers unencumbered, they don't even know. So this for me is like, CIO build a platform engineering team using one of the many Supercloud services that allow you to do that and lay down. >> And part of that is that the vendor behavior is such, 'cause the incentive is that they don't necessarily always work together. (John chuckling) I'll give you an example, we're going to hear today from Western Union. They're AWS shop, but they want to go to Google, they want to use some of Google's AI tools 'cause they're good and maybe they're even arguably better, but they're also a Snowflake customer and what you'll hear from them is Amazon and Snowflake are working together so that SageMaker can be integrated with Snowflake but Google said, "No, you want to use our AI tools, you got to use BigQuery." >> Yeah. >> Okay. So they say, "Ah, forget it." So if you have a platform engineering team, you can maybe solve some of that vendor friction and get competitive advantage. >> I think that the future proximity concept that I talk about is like, when you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing. Where do you go to get that thing, right? So that is very important. Like your question, John, is that your point is that AWS is ahead of the pack, which is true, right? They have the >> breadth of >> Infrastructure by a lot >> infrastructure service, right? They breadth of services, right? So, how do you, When do you bring in other cloud providers, right? So I believe that you should standardize on one cloud provider, like that's your primary, and for others, bring them in on as needed basis, in the subsection or sub portfolio of your applications or your platforms, what ever you can. >> So yeah, the Google AI example >> Yeah, I mean, >> Or the Microsoft collaboration software example. I mean there's always or the M and A. >> Yeah, but- >> You're going to get to run Windows, you can run Windows on Amazon, so. >> By the way, Supercloud doesn't mean that you cannot do that. So the perfect example is say that you're using Azure because you have a SQL server intensive workload. >> Yep >> And you're using Google for ML, great. If you are using some differentiated feature of this cloud, you'll have to go somewhere and configure this widget, but what you can abstract with the Supercloud is the lifecycle manage of the service that runs on top, right? So how does the service get deployed, right? How do you monitor performance? How do you lifecycle it? How you secure it that you can abstract and that's the value and eventually value will win. So the customers will find what is the values, obstructing in making it uniform or going deeper? >> How about identity? Like take identity for instance, you know, that's an opportunity to abstract. Whether I use Microsoft Identity or Okta, and I can abstract that. >> Yeah, and then we have APIs and standards that we can use so eventually I think where there is enough pain, the right open source will emerge to solve that problem. >> Dave: Yeah, I can use abstract things like object store, right? That's pretty simple. >> But back to the engineering question though, is that developers, developers, developers, one thing about developers psychology is if something's not right, they say, "Go get fixing. I'm not touching it until you fix it." They're very sticky about, if something's not working, they're not going to do it again, right? So you got to get it right for developers. I mean, they'll maybe tolerate something new, but is the "juice worth the squeeze" as they say, right? So you can't go to direct say, "Hey, it's, what's a work in progress? We're going to get our infrastructure together and the world's going to be great for you, but just hang tight." They're going to be like, "Get your shit together then talk to me." So I think that to me is the question. It's an Ops question, but where's that value for the developer in Supercloud where the capabilities are there, there's less friction, it's simpler, it solves the complexity problem. I don't need these high skilled labor to manage Amazon. I got services exposed. >> That's what we talked about earlier. It's like the Walmart example. They basically, they took away from the developer the need to spin up infrastructure and worry about all the governance. I mean, it's not completely there yet. So the developer could focus on what he or she wanted to do. >> But there's a big, like in our industry, there's a big sort of flaw or the contention between developers and operators. Developers want to be on the cutting edge, right? And operators want to be on the stability, you know, like we want governance. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right, so they want to control, developers are like these little bratty kids, right? And they want Legos, like they want toys, right? Some of them want toys by way. They want Legos, they want to build there and they want make a mess out of it. So you got to make sure. My number one advice in this context is that do it up your application portfolio and, or your platform portfolio if you are an ISV, right? So if you are ISV you most probably, you're building a platform these days, do it up in a way that you can say this portion of our applications and our platform will adhere to what you are saying, standardization, you know, like Kubernetes, like slam dunk, you know, it works across clouds and in your data center hybrid, you know, whole nine yards, but there is some subset on the next door systems of innovation. Everybody has, it doesn't matter if you're DMV of Kansas or you are, you know, metaverse, right? Or Meta company, right, which is Facebook, they have it, they are building something new. For that, give them some freedom to choose different things like play with non-standard things. So that is the mantra for moving forward, for any enterprise. >> Do you think developers are happy with the infrastructure now or are they wanting people to get their act together? I mean, what's your reaction, or you think. >> Developers are happy as long as they can do their stuff, which is running code. They want to write code and innovate. So to me, when Ballmer said, "Developer, develop, Developer, what he meant was, all you other people get your act together so these developers can do their thing, and to me the Supercloud is the way for IT to get there and let developer be creative and go fast. Why not, without getting in trouble. >> Okay, let's wrap up this segment with a super clip. Okay, we're going to do a sound bite that we're going to make into a short video for each of you >> All right >> On you guys summarizing why Supercloud's important, why this next wave is relevant for the practitioners, for the industry and we'll turn this into an Instagram reel, YouTube short. So we'll call it a "Super clip. >> Alright, >> Sarbjeet, you want, you want some time to think about it? You want to go first? Vittorio, you want. >> I just didn't mind. (all laughing) >> No, okay, okay. >> I'll do it again. >> Go back. No, we got a fresh one. We'll going to already got that one in the can. >> I'll go. >> Sarbjeet, you go first. >> I'll go >> What's your super clip? >> In software systems, abstraction is your friend. I always say that. Abstraction is your friend, even if you're super professional developer, abstraction is your friend. We saw from the MFC library from C++ days till today. Abstract, use abstraction. Do not try to reinvent what's already being invented. Leverage cloud, leverage the platform side of the cloud. Not just infrastructure service, but platform as a service side of the cloud as well, and Supercloud is a meta platform built on top of these infrastructure services from three or four or five cloud providers. So use that and embrace the programmability, embrace the abstraction layer. That's the key actually, and developers who are true developers or professional developers as you said, they know that. >> Awesome. Great super clip. Vittorio, another shot at the plate here for super clip. Go. >> Multicloud is awesome. There's a reason why multicloud happened, is because gave our developers the ability to innovate fast and ever before. So if you are embarking on a digital transformation journey, which I call a survival journey, if you're not innovating and transforming, you're not going to be around in business three, five years from now. You have to adopt the Supercloud so the developer can be developer and keep building great, innovating digital experiences for your customers and IT can get in front of it and not get in trouble together. >> Building those super apps with Supercloud. That was a great super clip. Vittorio, thank you for sharing. >> Thanks guys. >> Sarbjeet, thanks for coming on talking about the developer impact Supercloud 2. On our next segment, coming up right now, we're going to hear from Walmart enterprise architect, how they are building and they are continuing to innovate, to build their own Supercloud. Really informative, instructive from a practitioner doing it in real time. Be right back with Walmart here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Mhm Yes. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm john Kerry host of the cube here in Palo alto California. We've got two great guests all the way from Ohio and here in the bay area with sequence securities is our focus on cloud growth companies. Sri and met a co founder and CTO of sequence security and Jason Kent hacker in residence at sequence security. We're gonna find out what that actually means in the second but this is a really important company in the sense of A P. I. S. As they are starting to be the connective tissue between systems and and data. Um you're starting to see more vulnerabilities, more risk but also more upside. So risk, reward is high. And anyone who's doing things in the cloud obviously deals with the A. P. I. So Trey and Jason. Thanks for let's keep conversation. >>Happy to be here >>guys. Let's let's talk about A P. I. Security. And but first before we get there trans what does sequence security do? What do you guys specifically build? And what do you sell >>sequences in the business protecting your web and um A P. I. S from various kinds of attacks? Uh We protect from business logic attacks, A P. I. Uh do your api inventory, uh also the detect and defend against things like a town taker. Where's fake account creation, scraping pretty much anything and everything. An application on a PDA is exposed to from from the Attackers. >>Jason. What do you what do you do there as hacker and residents? I also want to get your perspective on api security from the point of view of, you know, uh attack standpoint from a vector. How are people doing it? So first explain what you do and uh love the title hacker and residents. But also what does that actually mean from a security standpoint? >>Yeah. So we can't be in the business that we're in without having an adversarial approach to where our customers are deployed and how we look at them. So a lot of times I spend my time trying to be on the client's backdoors and and try to hit their A. P. I. S. With as many kinds of attacks that I can. It helps us understand how an attacker is going to approach a specific client as well as helps us tune for our machine learning models to make sure that we can defend against those kinds of things. Um as a hacker and residents, my mostly my position is client facing. But I do spend an awful lot of time being research and looking for the next api threat that's out there. >>You gotta stay ahead of the bad guys. But let's bring up some kind of cutting edge relevant topics. One is all over the news cycle. You heard peloton, very highly visible company, It represents that new breed of digital companies that have a new approach and it's absolutely doing very, very well. The new consumers like this product and you're seeing a lot more peloton, like companies out there that are leveraging technology, so they're fully integrated, they had an A. P. I. Issue recently. Um what does it mean? Is that, is that something we're gonna see more of these kind of leaks in these kind of vulnerabilities? What do you guys think about this political thing, >>You know, from an attacker's perspective as a really boring attack? Um, but it led to a huge amount of data leaking out. Same with, you know, the news has been been right with this lately, right, john Deere got hit. Um We've seen yet another credit bureau got hit right. Um and these attacks are coming off as fairly simple attacks that are dumping huge amounts of data, just proving that the FBI attack surface is really a great place to get a rich amount of data, but you have to have a good understanding of how the application works so you can spend a little bit of time on it. But once you've taken a look at how the data flows, you end up with, you know, pretty rich data set as an attacker. I go after them just by simply utilizing their products, utilizing the programs and understanding how they work. And then I drag out all the pieces that I think are going to be interesting and start plucking away at it. If I see a like a profile, for instance, that I can edit, I wonder can I edit someone else's profile. And this is how the peloton attack work. I'm logged in, I'm allowed to see my things, what other things can I see? And it turns out they can see everything. >>So we also saw a hack with clubhouse, which is the hot app now I think just opened up to android users, but they were simply calling it back and Agora, which is, you know, I've seen china, but once you've understood that the tokens work, once you understood what they were doing, you could essentially go in and figure things out. There seems to be like pretty like trivial stuff, but it gets exposed. No one kind of thinks it through. How does someone protect themselves against these things? Because that's the real issue, like just make it less secure. Our Api is gonna be more secure in the future. What can customers do about what do you guys to think about this? >>Yeah, but the reality is, I mean that's just uh too many babies out there. I mean if you see the transition that is happening and that is the transformation where it used to be like a one app or two apps before and now there are like hundreds and thousands of applications driven by the devops world, a child development and and what matters is, I mean the starting point really is you cannot protect what, you cannot see what used to be. Uh an up hosted in your data center is now being hosted in the cloud environments, in the virtual environments, in several less environments and coordinators, you name it, they're out there. So the key is really to understand your attack surface, that's your starting point. So you're you're tooling your applications need to uh I need to be able to provide that visibility that that that is needed to protect these applications and you can't rely just on your developers to do this for you. So you need a right tool that can secure these applications, >>Jason what's the steps that an attacker takes to uncover vulnerabilities? What goes through the mind of the attacker? Um I mean the old days you used to just do port scans and try to penetrate you get through the perimeter. Now with this no perimeter mindset, the surface area Schramm was talking about is huge. What what's going on the mind of the attacker here and the A P I S and vulnerabilities. >>So the very first thing that we do is we sign up for an account, we use the thing, right? We look at all the different endpoints. Um I've got scripts running in my attack tools that do things like show me comments uh in case the developer left some comments in there to tell me where things are. Um I basically I'm just going to poke around using it like a regular user, but in that I'm going to look for places. That makes sense to try to do an attack. So the login screen is a really easy thing. Everybody understands that you put in a user name, you put in a password, you can't go. What I'm gonna do is put in a bad username and a bad password. I'm gonna put in a good user name and a bad password and I'm gonna see what changes, what are the different things that your application is telling me. And so when we look at an application for flaws and ways to get to the data on the back end, all we're doing is seeing what data do you present me on standard use. And then I'm going to look at, well, how can I change these parameters or what are the things that I can change in my requests to get a different response? So in the early phases of an attack, Attackers are very difficult to a seat. Right. They just look like a regular user just doing regular things. It's when we decide. All right. I've found something that starts to get actually interesting and we start to try to pull data out. >>What are some of the common vulnerabilities and risks that you guys see in the A. P. I is when you look when you poke at them that people are are doing is that they're not really doing their homework. Doing good. Security designers are just more of tech risk. What's the most common vulnerabilities and risks? >>Well, so for me, I I've noticed a lot of the OAS KPI top 10, the first couple of things you see them on almost all applications, so broken object level authorization is the first one. It's mouthful. Um but basically all it is is I log onto the platform, I'm authorized to be there, but I can see someone else's stuff and that's exactly what happened in peloton. Um that and what we call insecure direct object reference where I don't have to be logged in, I can just make the request without any authentication and get information back. So those are pretty common areas um that you know people need to focus on, but there's a few others that are outside the top 10 that really make a lot more sense as a defender strains probably has a little better answer to me. >>Yeah. So um I'm like like we said um creating that inventories is key, but where are they being hostess? Another another aspect of things. So so when when Jason spoke about um like hackers are actually probing, trying to figure out what are the different entry points? It could be your production environment, it could be your QA environment staging environment and you're not even aware of, but once you've actually figured out those entry points, the next step of attack was like at peloton and and other places is really eggs filtering. Exfiltrate ng that that information. Right. Is it, is it the O P II information, ph I information um and and you don't want to exfiltrate as a hacker, just one person's information. You you're automating that business logic that is behind it ability to protect and defend against those kinds of attacks, giving that visibility, even though you might not have instrumented that application for for that kind of visibility is key. Once you are bubbling up those behaviors, then you can go ahead and and and protect from these kinds of attacks. And it could be about just simply enumerating through I. D. S. Uh that paladin might have or uh experience might have and just enumerate through that and exfiltrate the information behind it. So the tools need to be able to protect from those kinds of attacks out there. >>Yeah, I think I was actually on clubhouse when um that went down that hole enumerating through the I. D. S. Room I. D. S. And then the people just querying once they got an I. D. They essentially just sucked all the content out because they were just calling the back end. It was just like the most dumbest thing I've ever seen, but they didn't think about, I mean, you know, they were just rushing really fast. So So the question I have for transit and on a defense basis, people are going first party um with a P. I. S. A. P. I. First strategies because it's just some benefits there as we were talking about what do I need to do to protect myself? So I don't have that clubhouse problem or the pelton problem. Is there a Is there a playbook or is their software tools that I could use? How do I build? My apologies from day one and my principles around it to be good hygiene or good design? What's the what's the >>yeah. So aPI security is sort of a looking uh less known given that it's constantly evolving and changing. And the adoption of A P. S. Have gone up significantly. So what you need to start with effectively is the runtime security aspect of things. When a an aPI is live, how do I actually protected? And it ranges from simple syntactic protection things around people. Can can go ahead and break these ap is by providing sort of uh going after endpoints that you don't think exist anymore or going after certain functions by giving large values that they're not sort of coded to accept and so on so forth. Once you've done that runtime protection from a syntactic aspect, you also need to protect from a business logic aspect. I mean, mps will will expose uh information, interact with the customers and partners, what what business logic are they actually exposing and how can it be abused? Understanding that is another big aspects and then you can go ahead and protect from a runtime uh from a long time security perspective, once you've done that and understood that, well then you can start shifting lap things, invest in your uh sort of uh Dass tools or static analysis tools which can catch these things early so that they don't bubble up all the way, but none of them are actually silver bullets, right? So that you have a good uh time security tools, so I don't need to invest in dust or assessed whatever I have invested in my shift left aspect of things and uh and nothing will flow through. So you you need to start shifting left uh but covered all your bases properly, >>you can't shift left, there's nothing to shift from. I mean if you don't have that baseline foundation, what does that even mean to shift left and get that built into the Ci cd pipeline? So that's a great point. How does how does someone and some companies and teams set that foundation with the run time? Do you think it's a critical problem right now or most people are do a good job or they just get get lazy or just lose track of it or you know what, what's what's the common um, use case? Do you see behavior behaviorally inside these enterprises? >>Yeah. So what, what we're seeing is adoption of new technologies and environments um, and they're not um, well suited for the traditional way of doing that time. Security. Like if if you have an app running in your kubernetes environment, if you have an app running in in in a serval less environment, how do you actually protected with the traditional appliance based approach? So I think being able to get that visibility into these environments, understanding the the user behavior, how these applications are interacted with being able to differentiate from that uh, normal human behavior or even sometimes legitimate automation uh from from the malicious intents or or the the probing and the business logic attacks is key to understanding and defending these applications. >>Before we wrap up, I want to just get your expert opinion since you guys are both here around, you know, the next level of of innovation. Also you got cloud public cloud showed us a P. I. S are great. Now you're starting to see cloud operations, they call day two operations or whatever you call it A IOP. There's all kinds of buzz words are for it, but hybrid cloud and multi cloud, Edge five G. These are all basically pointing to distributed computing systems, basically distributed cloud. So that means more A P. I. Is gonna be out there. Um So in a way the surface area of a piece is increasing. What's your what's your view on this as a market? I mean, early days developing fast and what's, what's the, what's the landscape look like? What do you guys see from a attack and defense standpoint? >>Well, just from the attacker's perspective, you know, I see a lot more traffic going, what we call east west traffic, where it's traveling inside the application, it's a P is feeding a ps more data. Um, but what is really happening is we're trying to figure out how to hook third parties into our api is more and more. The john Deere attack was just simply their development api platform that they open up for other organizations to integrate with them. Um, you know, it's, it's very beneficial for John Deere to be able to say I planted this seed at an inch and a half of depth and later, uh, I harvested 280 bushels of corn off that acres. So I know that's perfect. I can feed that back to my seed guy. Well that kind of data flow that's going around from AP to AP means that there's far more attack surface and we're going to see it more and more. I I don't think that we're going to have less Ap is communicating in the near future. I think this is the foundation that we're building for what it's gonna look like for almost every business in the near term. >>I mean this is the plumbing of integration. I mean as people work with each other data transfer, data knowledge format, you mentioned syntax and all these basic things in computer science are coming to A PS which was supposed to be just a dumb pipe or just, you know, rest api those glory days now it's not there. They're basically, it's basically connections. >>Yeah. You're absolutely right. John, I mean like what Jason mentioned earlier, uh, in terms of the way the A. P. I. S are going to grow and the bad guys are going to go after it. You need to think like a bad guy, what are they going to go after? Uh, these assets that are going to be in the cloud, in your hybrid environment, in in your own prem environment. And, and it's, it's a flip of a switch where an internal API can be externally exposed or, or just a new api getting rolled out. So all those things you need to be able to protect, um, and get that visibility first and then being then protect these environments. >>That's awesome. You guys represent the new kind of company that's going to take advantage of the cloud scale and as people shift to the new structural change and people are re factoring security, This is an area that's going to be explosive in development. Obviously the upside is huge. Um Quickly before to end, you guys take a minute to give a plug for the company. Um This is pretty cool. I love love what you guys do. I think it's very relevant and cool at the same time. So sequence security. What are you guys doing funding hiring? What's the plug? Tell folks about it. >>Yeah. So uh we we we started about six years ago but we like starting in the the body defense space by focusing on obscenity ice. And from then we we've grown and we've grown significantly in terms of our customer base, the verticals that we're going after in financial retail social media, you name it, we are there because pretty much all these these uh articles depends on A. P. I. S. To interact with their customers. Uh We've we've raised our cities we last year we've we've grown our customer base. Uh Just in the last year when there was a lockdown people were all these retailers were transforming from brick and mortar to online. Social media also also grew and we grew with them. So >>Jason your thoughts. >>I think that sequence is his ability to scale out to any size environment. We've got a customer that does a billion and a half transactions a month. Um That are ap is from 1000 other clients of theirs. Being able to protect environments that are confusing and cloudy like that. Um Is really it makes what we do shine. We use a lot of machine learning models and ai in order to surface real problems. And we have a lot of great humans behind all of that, making sure that the bad guy maybe they're right now, but they're going away and we're going to keep them away. >>It's super, super awesome. I think it's a combination of more connections, distributed computing at large scale with a data problem. That's, that's playing out. You guys are solving great stuff and hey, you know when the cube studio ap I gets built, we're gonna need to call you guys up to to help us secure the cube data. >>Absolutely right. Absolutely. >>Hey, thanks for coming on the q Great uh, great insight and thanks for sharing about sequence. Appreciate you coming on, >>appreciate the time. >>Okay. It's a cube conversation here in Palo alto with remote guests. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

(vibrant music) >> Everyone, welcome to our Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here for a digital conversation. Part of our new digital events, part of our new structure of bringing people into the studio and also doing remotes. We'd love to do that in the era of the travel bans, but it's always great to have local Silicon Valley executives and startups here. Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry IO is here with me. Former VM-ware industry executive, CEO of Sentry IO hot startup. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you can drive in. You don't have to fly anywhere. It's all good. No wearing masks. The coronavirus is crazy. I'm so glad we have you at this studio and get this content acquisition. Thanks for coming in. I want to get your take on your company before we get into the industry thing. I think you look at some of the most successful categories that just came out of nowhere. You know, you look at AIOps for instance in driving, you know, observability. But what is observability? That beginning, that comes with public page or do the list just goes on and on. The cloud has created this agile market where real time and then a lot of automation is going on so whether it's error logs like a Splunk does and that's scaled up. You get to doing something variation with software code that's not just something breaks, a phone rings. There's a lot a going on. You're this really kind of the tailwind here for you with cloud scale. What does Sentry doing? What's their secret sauce? >> So, the simplest way I would put it is we help you measure and monitor your code in production in close to real time. So what does that mean? You look at all, all of the companies that we talk about, whether it's a John Deere on one end or a Spotify on the other. They're all getting more digital in nature, which means they all trying to interact with their customers more often, building apps with an interface with an API. And as we all know, through our own personal experiences, if you don't get a great experience, you simply move on. So, you pull up your app, you pull up Uber, it's not working, let me look at Lyft. Right? That's the kind of consumer behavior that's starting to take in. >> So-- >> Meaning you don't really know as the owner of the app if they're abandoning or not, it's just down sales or? >> Correct. And so, what we do is we help developers monitor how the usages of their code in production. So, as users hit editors, a checkout button is not working or a user is having a bad experience on a mobile phone, whereas the same application on a browser looks fine. We in real time giving notification saying X number of users on this type of device, on this type of interface are having issues. And not just that, it's an alert, it's an alert that says this is the issue, this is the line of code where the issue's taking place, this is the potential commit that you did in your getRepository, which is causing it. So, it's the full kind of metadata around the issue. Which typically would be, what, two days? I take it as filed. Support me, look at it. Hey, customer has an issue, let's reproduce it. Well the customer is gone. So this is all done in real-- >> Or it could be a complete blindspot too. You don't know, right? This is the thing. This is why I love this whole digital transformation role where instrumentation is re-imagining how everything's being done. So for instance, you could see a code push and you go, okay, it's in production. And then why are sales down? Why is usage down? And then you've got to do a postmortem. >> Correct. >> No one called, just going what the hell happened? Fingers are blaming. He did it! Here you're trying to get to the point where you can see that error earlier or before or after, during as it work. >> It's almost in real time. Close to real time. As the user has the error immediately through either PagerDuty, Slack, email, whichever your communication medium is. You get to know a user or a set of users are having an issue. You click it, you go to this portal. All the metadata is right there. So, it's in real time. And so to exactly your point, it's not after the fact. >> Yeah. >> Right, it's happening. And so, the CTO of tackled.io, said it best, it's a startup that helps companies get on to marketplaces. He said, "Hey, we found issues before our customers even filed a issue against us." So, you know, this helps us deliver true customer experience, as a development team. >> So, on the developers that target profile get that and they're coding away. They don't have time to do research. They'll be like, "Oh, I better bolt on some instrumentation here." That's been the successful move. Look at like what Datadog has done in DevOps. Just the easy onboarding, free use it. Is that the same model you guys are taking this free land, adopt then expand. So, is it a freemium, could you explain the business model? >> Yeah, so, a Sentry is a open source. And so customers can take the piece of software that we have as is, fully functional and run it themselves on their data center on their cloud, or they can choose a SaaS version from us and we offer kind of like a free version and then you pay for the plan. So, what we typically see is customers turn it on, developers turn it on and they like it. And then, the best score I got recently was, one CEO who said, "Hey, you know, I don't send you that many events, but I see the value of what you do, so I decided to pay you." Right, so, they went from free to paid. And that's kind of typical pattern that we see. And the best thing about this is, it takes you approximately four lines of code to get started. Four lines of code in your code and you get started getting the benefits of Sentry. >> What's good sign for monetization when you got the paying it forward literally with cash. I want to ask you the difference between the open source version because I saw in the origination story it's really interesting. They were at jobs and they saw this side project grow into a real opportunity. And it's always good to see the open source not die, right. So, this been maintain the project. When would someone use the open sources? Is that the hardcore folks or, so SaaS, obviously makes sense. It's easier if you're doing a lot of the extra support and whatnot on top of it. But what's the use case for the folks who are going to bring it in house loaded on their cloud? >> I think we'll leave it to our customers to decide that. And we've seen, folks who say, "Hey, you know, we have, we're going to try it out, it's a small, we have got a good DevOps practice. We're going to get it up and running." Here's what happened with one of my teams at VMware. The engineer in charge looked at it and said, "It's not worth my time given what the price on SaaS is." Right, so, like our smallest plan is $29, which satisfies most startups or small software projects. And his point was like, "Hey, you know, it's almost better for me to start and using that versus--" >> Well they weren't using NSX. I'm sure Pat Gels would be like, "Get shipped the next product." Well this is the trade off, right? I mean, so that's what's beautiful of open source. You want to bring it in and make it work for yourself. That trade off has to be economically there. >> Correct. >> So you have a nice balance of if you're hardcore, no problem. >> Please use-- >> Use it, contribute, be part of the team. But if you want ease of use and all the bells and whistles and the speed. >> I think it comes down to what we are starting to see, which is, how much do you care about getting to value faster and where is your value? Is it in kind of running and operating all these pieces of software or is it in, you know, getting value to your end customer? So, if you are focused on building your business, we are this value add that kind of gets you there faster. So, stop focusing on kind of building the infrastructure. Start delivering kind of the value to the business. >> So I'm going to ask you, so, are you the CEO? So the founders who I've not met. I look forward to interviewing them. They seem pretty cool. I'm sure they probably say, "Oh this guy from VMware, he's probably the big company guy." 'Cause they were like, we're going to Dropbox now. Engineers, I could almost imagine their, what they're like. Probably skeptical, this is VMware guy. How did you get through the interview process? Obviously, you're the CEO, you made it. Were they skeptical ? What worked? Why you, why'd you go there? >> You know, the best thing about this transition is Chris and David. So, David was the CEO. He is now the CTO. He's the founder creator along with Chris. And it was his decision, to bring someone into the company, given that we are seeing this, you know, we are now at 20000 plus customers and he felt like he wanted to kind of go back to building and creating and bring a partner in crime. So, that was the good part. I would say like, we started talking and we are at the same energy level, you know? So, I think it just worked out in the way we communicated. And you've known me for a bit. I'm kind of hands on. I like, you know, to kind of get into things and build businesses. So, I think the profile matched out and both of us took our time. So it was, a long dating process, where we got to know each other. Not just as, you know, what we do for work. But, you know, how we operate and had coffee and lunch and dinner and--- >> Well, it is a dating, dating and marriage is always thinking, but the founders are, it's a tough move to make. I mean, for founders to be self-aware, to bring in someone else. But also the fit has to be there. And a lot of entrepreneurs just check the box and try to hire someone too fast that could fail or gets jammed down by the VCs, you know. So, the founders are pretty kind of reluctant. So, that's interesting that you did that. >> Yeah, he's been thinking. You know, the thing about David is he's super thoughtful and hopefully you'll get to see him soon. He's been thinking about this for a bit. And he took his time. And he worked through the process and that's why I said it felt like we were not just talking about, me joining as a CEO, as much as us getting to know each other and building this for the long run. And so we really took our time on both ends--- >> And he want to to get back on the engine of the business? He's a developer, right? He's like the code. >> Just don't want to, >> It was-- >> 20000 customers, you going to get hiring people. It's HR issues. This probably, I don't want to do that. >> That and you know it was kind of the personality thing, right? Grit and grind, you know. We kind of, can somebody come in and have the passion, the same that he believes in what we do. And he saw that and I saw that in him and I'm like, this is a great opportunity that I cannot forego. >> So talk about the, I say love modern, the modern startups because, you know, you're on the right side of history when you got cloud at your tailwind and kind of DevOps, like vibe you get going on with, I know it's not DevOps, but it's common like cloud scale and the agility. How are you guys organized? You guys have virtual teams. You have a central office. Is there a physical place? Do people come in? What's the, how is the company's philosophy on work environment? >> So, we actually have three locations. One in San Francisco, which is the headquarters, where we are located. And then in Vienna, Austria, where one of the early engineers and pioneers live. And so we built around that person and that location. >> No one's complaining about that. >> No. >> Vienna's not a bad place there-- >> Not a bad place. I haven't visited yet. (laughs) I am looking forward to it. I was supposed to be there in April, but, given the circumstances, I'm postponing it. And we recently started this past year in Toronto. And so, we are--- >> So three strong areas for tech talent for sure. >> And then we do have some employees working from home. So, we try and hire the best, and then we accommodate. But we do try to kind of cluster around these three locations. >> So, I got to get your take as the CEO, obviously we're all grappling with this, work at home, Covid 19, the coronavirus, is impacting. Everything's being canceled here in Silicon Valley. I would say Seattle has more of a hotspot than our area. Mostly China as China. What's the view that you guys are taking right now? You're telling people who work at home. Obviously, events are being canceled. Places where people doing Biz Dev, KubeCon was canceled, Dell Technology World is can-- I mean everything's being canceled. How's that affecting your business and what's your philosophy? How are you guys are executing through this tough time? >> I think as a company we've kind of taken the step for having people work from home and we did it on a location by location basis. So, for folks in San Francisco, especially because folks who are commuting on public transportation and other things. We wanted to make our team feel comfortable. And so we've instituted a work from home policy, for, I think we said two weeks, but I think it's going to keep going until we get a clear signal from the government, both locally and at the federal level. So that's kind of where we are as a team. And then what we noticed was the Austrian government kind of had similar regulations of everyone's working from home. Slack, you know, Google Hangouts. We spending a lot of time on video, making sure we are connected as a team. And you know, just that spirit of how we operate and talk to each other continues. As a business, we are a bottoms up business. So, what I mean by that is folks sign up, they use the product. And developers are right now globally still fully functional. The only difference being they're now working from home. So we feel like as a business, we'll be fine. And we are ensuring that our customers through this transition and through this period of kind of unknowns are able to continue to be successful for their customers. >> It's funny, I was talking with someone, it's like there's going to be some, obviously, sectors, like events are going to take a big hit. South by got canceled, Coachella's being canceled. All the tech events are being canceled. That's why we're going to be doing our stuff at the studio with virtual events, for theCUBE. But certain things are going to be different. You going to see pregnancy, boom. You know, nine months later, people are going to be having kids cause they're home alone or divorces depending on how you look at it. But productivity, developer wise has been talked about as actually developers want to just crank out some code. They don't have to come into the office. You can be more, I mean you can still be productive. Developers have been doing this for decades. >> I think-- >> At least if they are more. >> You know, I think you, you know, I think there might be a scenarios of adjustment, a period of adjustment. And then folks will get comfortable. So, it's super important to create that engagement model. Whether, do you have the tooling to keep the team engaged. And there companies that are completely remote. And so we're making sure we learn from their best practices around that. But I do believe that, for tech companies or even for manufacturing companies focused on building software, developers are going to be productive. >> Okay, so a baby boom's coming, divorce rate's going to go up and productivity is skyrocketing. (both laugh) >> For developers. >> For developers. Well, I mean it's a good time. Okay, can I get your take on the industry now. Honestly, putting all the coronavirus aside, we saw a surge in public cloud check. Done. And ask you when your VMware with NSX coming in and becoming the engine with software defined networking as part of the Series piece. You're starting to see hybrid clear as day. It's going to happen. Multi clouds on the horizon. So, you now have a three wave cloud game going on. Wave one, done. Wave two is hybrid. Wave three maybe bigger than them all with multicloud. Do you agree with that trend analysis and what's your take on that? >> So, this is where I'll probably kind of look back at my time at VMware. I think, you know, definitely see the multicloud wave catching on. But I would use the word multicloud as in, not a app spread across three clouds as much as, you know, a company choosing to have a certain assets in AWS, certain assets in Azure, certain in Google. So, I don't see yet this idea of an app being stretched across the three clouds but definitely, while I was-- >> VMware tried that. (both laugh) >> While I was at VMware and in talking to customers, we definitely saw adoption of multiple clouds. And that's where when I was working with the cloud health team, this idea of managing cost and security across three clouds became very common as a pattern that came up. You definitely see that as a kind of directional thing that a lot of organizations are doing. >> Yeah, the idea of just rapidly shifting up workloads based on pricing, all that stuff. I think it's aspirational at best because development teams are now just getting their groove on with hybrid and operation, cloud operations. So, I can see a day where if you can manage the latency network issues, maybe some day, but I mean, come on, really? I think about how hard that is, just latency alone. >> And the issue is like, architecturally you have to make really good choices to get there. So, I think you might see that in like kind of tech software firms. We're thinking about, how do I stay cloud neutral? But for the most part, if you want to take the full value of AWS or full value of GCP, you want to go deeper in there. And use all their services. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight. Let's riff on that a little bit because one of the things I was talking to Dave Alante and Stu Miniman about was, if you look at the multicloud, I don't think it's going to come from a vendor. I think if you look at the success of the Facebooks of the world, even Dropbox where your founders came from, early on, they had to just basically build it from cloud native, from ground up. And all the hyper scalers use open source. They built all their stuff. No one was selling them anything. They just did it. So, I think you'll see smart architectural moves, but that'll be the unicorn. That'll not be the standard. That'll be the exception, not the rule. I don't think you can sell multicloud, in my opinion, yet, or I don't think that'll even be possible. But I think someone will come out and say, make those architectural decisions saying, "I have an architecture that works multicloud because we architect it that way." >> Yup, yup. And I think that's kind of the more, kind of from an engineering standpoint, I think you'll see more of that. I think from a, you know, from a kind of solution standpoint, you will see folks saying, "I will help you manage or secure or build into each of the clouds and give you kind of common pattern versus the latter of it." And engineering team says, "Here's a way to architect for multicloud." >> You know, we pay a lot of attention to the next gen kind of psychologies. Obviously, we do a lot of coding on with our cube cloud that's coming out now. But, how do you see the founders you're working with and that in this new peer group that's developing. I call it, the next gen entrepreneur, technical entrepreneur. As they look at the vast resources of cloud and all of the data opportunities there and mobility, internet things and all this stuff going on. What is the general mindset right now of these kinds of entrepreneurs from a technology perspective? How are they looking at the problem space? What's your take on this new landscape as an entrepreneur? >> Yeah, I'll give you kind of what got me super excited about Sentry. Like how, why did I think about that? Which is if you look at 2000 to 2010, we did software defined infrastructure. Things started moving into software. 2010 to 2020 was, as you correctly wanted a cloud, hybrid, everything became kind of as a service. I think this next decade will be about data. So, companies using the data to get a competitive advantage or figuring out, you know, how to stay ahead, whether it's competitively or even to win a market. And the other aspect of this is because everything is so, as a service, API centric, I think it's going to explode how we develop things. And I think this is going to be truly now the decade for the developer, who's going to make deeper choices, greater choices, buying decisions. And so, with data kind of exploding, and the management of it and getting insights out of it is one aspect of it. And, you know, as somebody who's looking at Sentry, we do a lot of that, right? Which is how are customers using it? What are they using? What languages? And everything else that goes with that. But on the other end, developers are going to start kind of using things and create a whole new set of use cases that's going to change the way we think about it. So I think there's a whole set of elements around how to use this infrastructure to build new applications, creative products, that is going to be a massive boom. >> I think that's a great point. I think that's great insight. Because you think about observability, which I was just joking earlier on about, but I think the relevance observability is network management applied to value real time, right? Because if you can instrument everything, the smart people are going to saying, "Hey, I can just instrument this and get the data I need rather than dealing with this hassle process we had before." So, it brings up that kind of philosophy of kill the old to bring in the new or something new that kills the old. So, it's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's very relevant. But I want to get your, question as a CEO now, you've got, you're at the helm, helm of a company is technical. And talking about architecture, what's your architecture for the venture? What's your plans? How do you see the, you said you're going to come and build this next level growth. What's your architecture look like? Are you going to, do more of the same? Any new things that we see? What are you going to... What's your plan? >> Fundamentally, you know, we as a kind of set of users in the world today, have spent a lot of time monitoring, as I told you earlier, machines, systems and applications, right? And so there's a lot of successful companies doing that. But if you fundamentally believe that this is the decade where you're going to write more code than we've ever before or refresh more applications than we've ever before. Our focus is code and how it does whether it's in a staging environment, in a canary deployment, or in production. How do we measure code and monitor code in production. And the impact of that code to the end users. So it could be errors and now increasingly code performance. So you will see us kind of venture into this idea of helping developers. Not only find issues that they run into production like we talked about before, but also be able to say, looks like over the past three releases, our logins per second have gone down progressively by 10%. Why is that happening? Where is that happening? Which team made that change? So, you will see us kind of really double down on this idea of measuring and monitoring code going forward, complimenting how we measure monitor systems, machines and applications today. >> Yeah, I mean, code has got to be managed, as people more, people contribute. It's like a compiler for the compiler. (laughs) >> It's like if code fails, your business-- >> Code for the code. >> Yeah. >> Meta three meta meta as they say, but code for the code. But that's, it's basically code management in a way, right? It's the code data. You're leveraging that code relationship to the application. >> And so we talk about applications a lot. And so we write code, we store code, you know, in a getRepository. Now there's a whole set of elements around securing it. We deploy it. What about measuring and monitoring it? That is the element where we focus and kind of bring that whole cycle together. Helping that application developer be successful. >> What's it like for you going from VMware to the startup? What's the biggest, coolest thing that's happened? >> It's been a great transition. You know, and I always say this to folks who ask me for career advice. They say, always choose the people you work with and the people you work for. And I've been fortunate enough to do that and I think this transition has been great for that reason alone. Which is I've had the time to get to know the team at Sentry. They got to know me and it's just been, it's been fantastic. I think the velocity of and the pace at which I can make changes, has been the most fun part of it. >> And you've got like 25, 20000 paying customers 50000 total customers roughly in that range. Pretty sizeable. Employee count, how many employees do you have? >> 100 plus employees and-- >> Still small, still small. >> Yeah, still small. And we're going to probably double this year, give or take. And you know, it's 20000 customers from every startup. I've spoken to a startups, over 100 startups in two months. And it's amazing to see their reaction and their love for Sentry. >> And funding, how many rounds of funding have you guys done? >> We just finished Series C, in September of last year. 40 million, any Accel growth. So, we feel really good about where we are. With the revenue ramp that we've seen, we're in great shape. >> And pretty good numbers in terms of a head count too, very leveraged SaaS model. Get the developers. >> Yes. >> Great. Well, we're going to be entertaining a lot of developers at DockerCon this year. DockerCon used to be an event for Docker. Now they sold half the business to Mirantis. They're focusing on Docker developers. We have an event here. We're doing a virtual event. So, a lot more developer action coming. We'll talk more about that. Love to meet your founders, have them come in too. We want to thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Milin Desai, CEO of sentry.io, former VMware executive with a great hot startup, Series C funded, growing here in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and in Austria. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

>> From Boston, Massachusets, it's The Cube. Covering Actifio 2019: Data Driven, Brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental Hotel at Actifio's Data Driven conference, day one. You're watching The Cube. The leader in on-the-ground tech coverage. My name is is Dave Valante, Stu Minamin is here, so is John Ferrer, my friend Frank Gens is here, he's the Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC and Head Dot Connector. Frank, welcome to The Cube. >> Well thank you Dave. >> First time. >> First time. >> Newbie. >> Yep. >> You're going to crush it, I know. >> Be gentle. >> You know, you're awesome, I've watched you over the many years, of course, you know, you seem to get competitive, and it's like who gets the best rating? Frank always had the best ratings at the Directions conference. He's blushing but I could- >> I don't know if that's true but I'll accept it. >> I could never beat him, no matter how hard I tried. But you are a phenomenal speaker, you gave a great conversation this morning. I'm sure you drew a lot from your Directions talk, but every year you lay down this, you know, sort of, mini manifesto. You describe it as, you connect the dots, IDC, thousands of analysts. And it's your job to say okay, what does this all mean? Not in the micro, let's up-level a little bit. So, what's happening? You talked today, You know you gave your version of the wave slides. So, where are we in the waves? We are exiting the experimentation phase, and coming in to a new phase that multiplied innovation. I saw AI on there, block-chain, some other technologies. Where are we today? >> Yeah, well I think having mental models of the6 industry or any complex system is pretty important. I mean I've made a career dumbing-down a complex industry into something simple enough that I can understand, so we've done it again now with what we call the third platform. So, ten years ago seeing the whole raft of new technologies at the time were coming in that would become the foundation for the next thirty years of tech, so, that's an old story now. Cloud, mobile, social, big data, obviously IOT technologies coming in, block-chain, and so forth. So we call this general era the third platform, but we noticed a few years ago, well, we're at the threshold of kind of a major scale-up of innovation in this third platform that's very different from the last ten or twelve years, which we called the experimentation stage. Where people were using this stuff, using the cloud, using mobile, big data, to create cool things, but they were doing it in kind of a isolated way. Kind of the traditional, well I'm going to invent something and I may have a few friends help me, whereas, the promise of the cloud has been , well, if you have a lot of developers out on the cloud, that form a community, an ecosystem, think of GitHub, you know, any of the big code repositories, or the ability to have shared service as often Amazon, Cloud, or IBM, or Google, or Microsoft, the promise is there to actually bring to life what Bill Joy said, you know, in the nineties. Which was no matter how smart you are, most of the smart people in the world work for someone else. So the questions always been, well, how do I tap into all those other smart people who don't work for me? So we can feel that where we are in the industry right now is the business model of multiplied innovation or if you prefer, a network of collaborative innovation, being able to build something interesting quickly, using a lot of innovation from other people, and then adding your special sauce. But that's going to take the scale of innovation just up a couple of orders of magnitude. And the pace, of course, that goes with that, is people are innovating much more rapid clip now. So really, the full promise of a cloud-native innovation model, so we kind of feel like we're right here, which means there's lots of big changes around the technologies, around kind of the world of developers and apps, AI is changing, and of course, the industry structure itself. You know the power positions, you know, a lot of vendors have spent a lot of energy trying to protect the power positions of the last thirty years. >> Yeah so we're getting into some of that. So, but you know, everybody talks about digital transformation, and they kind of roll their eyes, like it's a big buzzword, but it's real. It's dataware at a data-driven conference. And data, you know, being at the heart of businesses means that you're seeing businesses transition industries, or traverse industries, you know, Amazon getting into groceries, Apple getting into content, Amazon as well, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, so, my question is, what's a tech company? I mean, you know, Bennyhoff says that, you know, every company's a sass company, and you're certainly seeing that, and it's got to be great for your business. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely >> Quantifying all those markets, but I mean, the market that you quantify is just it's every company now. Banks, insurance companies, grocers, you know? Everybody is a tech company. >> I think, yeah, that's a hundred percent right. It is that this is the biggest revolution in the economy, you know, for many many decades. Or you might say centuries even. Is yeah, whoever put it, was it Mark Andreson or whoever used to talk about software leading the world, we're in the middle of that. Only, software now is being delivered in the form of digital or cloud services so, you know, every company is a tech company. And of course it really raises the question, well what are tech companies? You know, they need to kind of think back about where does our value add? But it is great. It's when we look at the world of clouds, one of the first things we observed in 2007, 2008 was, well, clouds wasn't just about S3 storage clouds, or salesforce.com's softwares and service. It's a model that can be applied to any industry, any company, any offering. And of course we've seen all these startups whether it's Uber or Netflix or whoever it is, basically digital innovation in every single industry, transforming that industry. So, to me that's the exciting part is if that model of transforming industries through the use of software, through digital technology. In that kind of experimentation stage it was mainly a startup story. All those unicorns. To me the multiplied innovation chapter, it's about- (audio cuts out) finally, you know, the cities, the Procter & Gambles, the Walmarts, the John Deere's, they're finally saying hey, this cloud platform and digital innovation, if we can do that in our industry. >> Yeah, so intrapreneurship is actually, you know, starting to- >> Yeah. >> So you and I have seen a lot of psychos, we watched the you know, the mainframe wave get crushed by the micro-processor based revolution, IDC at the time spent a lot of time looking at that. >> Vacuum tubes. >> Water coolant is back. So but the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law forever. Even Thomas Friedman when he talks about, you know, his stuff and he throws in Moore's Law. But no longer Moore's Law the sort of engine of innovation. There's other factors. So what's the innovation cocktail looking forward over the next ten years? You've talked about cloud, you know, we've talked about AI, what's that, you know, sandwich, the innovation sandwich look like? >> Yeah so to me I think it is the harnessing of all this flood of technologies, again, that are mainly coming off the cloud, and that parade is not stopping. Quantum, you know, lots of other technologies are coming down the pipe. But to me, you know, it is the mixture of number one the cloud, public cloud stacks being able to travel anywhere in the world. So take the cloud on the road. So it's even, I would say, not even just scale, I think of, that's almost like a mount of compute power. Which could happen inside multiple hyperscale data centers. I'm also thinking about scale in terms of the horizontal. >> Bringing that model anywhere. >> Take me out to the edge. >> Wherever your data lives. >> Take me to a Carnival cruise ship, you know, take me to, you know, an apple-powered autonomous car, or take me to a hospital or a retail store. So the public cloud stacks where all the innovation is basically happening in the industry. Jail-breaking that out so it can come, you know it's through Amazon, AWS Outpost, or Ajerstack, or Google Anthos, this movement of the cloud guys, to say we'll take public cloud innovation wherever you need it. That to me is a big part of the cocktail because that's you know, basically the public clouds have been the epicenter of most tech innovation the last three or four years, so, that's very important. I think, you know just quickly, the other piece of the puzzle is the revolution that's happening in the modularity of apps. So the micro services revolution. So, the building of new apps and the refactoring of old apps using containers, using servos technologies, you know, API lifecycle management technologies, and of course, agile development methods. Kind of getting to this kind of iterative sped up deployment model, where people might've deployed new code four times a year, they're now deploying it four times a minute. >> Yeah right. >> So to me that's- and kind of aligned with that is what I was mentioning before, that if you can apply that, kind of, rapid scale, massive volume innovation model and bring others into the party, so now you're part of a cloud-connected community of innovators. And again, that could be around a Github, or could be around a Google or Amazon, or it could be around, you know, Walmart. In a retail world. Or an Amazon in retail. Or it could be around a Proctor & Gamble, or around a Disney, digital entertainment, you know, where they're creating ecosystems of innovators, and so to me, bringing people, you know, so it's not just these technologies that enable rapid, high-volume modular innovation, but it's saying okay now plugging lots of people's brains together is just going to, I think that, here's the- >> And all the data that throws off obviously. >> Throws a ton of data, but, to me the number we use it kind of is the punchline for, well where does multiplied innovation lead? A distributed cloud, this revolution in distributing modular massive scale development, that we think the next five years, we'll see as many new apps developed and deploye6d as we saw developed and deployed in the last forty years. So five years, the next five years, versus the last forty years, and so to me that's, that is the revolution. Because, you know, when that happens that means we're going to start seeing that long tail of used cases that people could never get to, you know, all the highly verticalized used cases are going to be filled, you know we're going to finally a lot of white space has been white for decades, is going to start getting a lot of cool colors and a lot of solutions delivered to them. >> Let's talk about some of the macro stuff, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's probably three trillion, maybe it's four trillion now, big market. You talked today about the market's going two x GDP. >> Yeah. >> For the tech market, that is. Why is it that the tech market is able to grow at a rate faster than GDP? And is there a relationship between GDP and tech growth? >> Yeah, well, I think, we are still, while, you know, we've been in tech, talk about those apps developed the last forty years, we've both been there, so- >> And that includes the iPhone apps, too, so that's actually a pretty impressive number when you think about the last ten years being included in that number. >> Absolutely, but if you think about it, we are still kind of teenagers when you think about that Andreson idea of software eating the world. You know, we're just kind of on the early appetizer, you know, the sorbet is coming to clear our palates before we go to the next course. But we're not even close to the main course. And so I think when you look at the kind of, the percentage of companies and industry process that is digital, that has been highly digitized. We're still early days, so to me, I think that's why. That the kind of the steady state of how much of an industry is kind of process and data flow is based on software. I'll just make up a number, you know, we may be a third of the way to whatever the steady state is. We've got two-thirds of the way to go. So to me, that supports growth of IT investment rising at double the rate of overall. Because it's sucking in and absorbing and transforming big pieces of the existing economy, >> So given the size of the market, given that all companies are tech companies. What are your thoughts on the narrative right now? You're hearing a lot of pressure from, you know, public policy to break up big tech. And we saw, you know you and I were there when Microsoft, and I would argue, they were, you know, breaking the law. Okay, the Department of Justice did the right thing, and they put handcuffs on them. >> Yeah. >> But they never really, you know, went after the whole breakup scenario, and you hear a lot of that, a lot of the vitriol. Do you think that makes sense? To break up big tech and what would the result be? >> You don't think I'm going to step on those land mines, do you? >> Okay well I've got an opinion. >> Alright I'll give you mine then. Alright, since- >> I mean, I'll lay it out there, I just think if you break up big tech the little techs are going to get bigger. It's going to be like AT&T all over again. The other thing I would add is if you want to go after China for, you know, IP theft, okay fine, but why would you attack the AI leaders? Now, if they're breaking the law, that should not be allowed. I'm not for you know, monopolistic, you know, illegal behavior. What are your thoughts? >> Alright, you've convinced me to answer this question. >> We're having a conversation- >> Nothing like a little competitive juice going. You're totally wrong. >> Lay it out for me. >> No, I think, but this has been a recurring pattern, as you were saying, it even goes back further to you know, AT&T and people wanting to connect other people to the chiraphone, and it goes IBM mainframes, opening up to peripherals. Right, it goes back to it. Exactly. It goes back to the wheel. But it's yeah, to me it's a valid question to ask. And I think, you know, part of the story I was telling, that multiplied innovation story, and Bill Joy, Joy's Law is really about platform. Right? And so when you get aggregated portfolio of technical capabilities that allow innovation to happen. Right, so the great thing is, you know, you typically see concentration, consolidation around those platforms. But of course they give life to a lot of competition and growth on top of them. So that to me is the, that's the conundrum, because if you attack the platform, you may send us back into this kind of disaggregated, less creative- so that's the art, is to take the scalpel and figure out well, where are the appropriate boundaries for, you know, putting those walls, where if you're in this part of the industry, you can't be in this. So, to me I think one, at least reasonable way to think about it is, so for example, if you are a major cloud platform player, right, you're providing all of the AI services, the cloud services, the compute services, the block-chain services, that a lot of the sass world is using. That, somebody could argue, well, if you get too strong in the sass world, you then could be in a position to give yourself favorable position from the platform. Because everyone in the sass world is depending on the platform. So somebody might say you can't be in. You know, if you're in the sass position you'll have to separate that from the platform business. But I think to me, so that's a logical way to do it, but I think you also have to ask, well, are people actually abusing? Right, so I- >> I think it's a really good question. >> I don't think it's fair to just say well, theoretically it could be abused. If the abuse is not happening, I don't think you, it's appropriate to prophylactically, it's like go after a crime before it's committed. So I think, the other thing that is happening is, often these monopolies or power positions have been about economic power, pricing power, I think there's another dynamic happening because consumer date, people's data, the Facebook phenomenon, the Twitter and the rest, there's a lot of stuff that's not necessarily about pricing, but that's about kind of social norms and privacy that I think are at work and that we haven't really seen as big a factor, I mean obviously we've had privacy regulation is Europe with GDPR and the rest, obviously in check, but part of that's because of the social platforms, so that's another vector that is coming in. >> Well, you would like to see the government actually say okay, this is the framework, or this is what we think the law should be. I mean, part of it is okay, Facebook they have incentive to appropriate our data and they get, okay, and maybe they're not taking enough responsibility for. But I to date have not seen the evidence as we did with, you know, Microsoft wiping out, you know, Lotus, and Novel, and Word Perfect through bundling and what it did to Netscape with bundling the browser and the price practices that- I don't see that, today, maybe I'm just missing it, but- >> Yeah I think that's going to be all around, you know, online advertising, and all that, to me that's kind of the market- >> Yeah, so Google, some of the Google stuff, that's probably legit, and that's fine, they should stop that. >> But to me the bigger issue is more around privacy.6 You know, it's a social norm, it's societal, it's not an economic factor I think around Facebook and the social platforms, and I think, I don't know what the right answer is, but I think certainly government it's legitimate for those questions to be asked. >> Well maybe GDPR becomes that framework, so, they're trying to give us the hook but, I'm having too much fun. So we're going to- I don't know how closely you follow Facebook, I mean they're obviously big tech, so Facebook has this whole crypto-play, seems like they're using it for driving an ecosystem and making money. As opposed to dealing with the privacy issue. I'd like to see more on the latter than the former, perhaps, but, any thoughts on Facebook and what's going on there with their crypto-play? >> Yeah I don't study them all that much so, I am fascinated when Mark Zuckerberg was saying well now our key business now is about privacy, which I find interesting. It doesn't feel that way necessarily, as a consumer and an observer, but- >> Well you're on Facebook, I'm on Facebook, >> Yeah yeah. >> Okay so how about big IPOs, we're in the tenth year now of this huge, you know, tail-wind for tech. Obviously you have guys like Uber, Lyft going IPO,6 losing tons of money. Stocks actually haven't done that well which is kind of interesting. You saw Zoom, you know, go public, doing very well. Slack is about to go public. So there's really a rush to IPO. Your thoughts on that? Is this sustainable? Or are we kind of coming to the end here? >> Yeah so, I think in part, you know, predicting the stock market waves is a very tough thing to do, but I think one kind of secular trend is going to be relevant for these tech IPOs is what I was mentioning earlier, is that we've now had a ten, twelve year run of basically startups coming in and reinventing industries while the incumbents in the industries are basically sitting on their hands, or sleeping. So to me the next ten years, those startups are going to, not that, I mean we've seen that large companies waking up doesn't necessarily always lead to success but it feels to me like it's going to be a more competitive environment for all those startups Because the incumbents, not all of them, and maybe not even most of them, but some decent portion of them are going to wind up becoming digital giants in their own industry. So to me I think that's a different world the next ten years than the last ten. I do think one important thing, and I think around acquisitions MNA, and we saw it just the last few weeks with Google Looker and we saw Tab Low with Salesforce, is if that, the mega-cloud world of Microsoft, Ajer, and Amazon, Google. That world is clearly consolidating. There's room for three or four global players and that game is almost over. But there's another power position on top of that, which is around where did all the app, business app guys, all the suite guys, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, you name it. Where did they go? And so we see, we think- >> Service Now, now kind of getting big. >> Absolutely, so we're entering a intensive period, and I think again, the Tab Low and Looker is just an example where those companies are all stepping on the gas to become better platforms. So apps as platforms, or app portfolio as platforms, so, much more of a data play, analytics play, buying other pieces of the app portfolio, that they may not have. And basically scaling up to become the business process platforms and ecosystems there. So I think we are just at the beginning of that, so look for a lot of sass companies. >> And I wonder if Amazon could become a platform for developers to actually disrupt those traditional sass guys. It's not obvious to me how those guys get disrupted, and I'm thinking, everybody says oh is Amazon going to get into the app space? Maybe some day if they happen to do a cam expans6ion, But it seems to me that they become a platform fo6r new apps you know, your apps explosion.6 At the edge, obviously, you know, local. >> Well there's no question. I think those appcentric apps is what I'd call that competition up there and versus kind of a mega cloud. There's no question the mega cloud guys. They've already started launching like call center, contact center software, they're creeping up into that world of business apps so I don't think they're going to stop and so I think that that is a reasonable place to look is will they just start trying to create and effect suites and platforms around sass of their own. >> Startups, ecosystems like you were saying. Alright, I got to give you some rapid fire questions here, so, when do you think, or do you think, no, I'm going to say when you think, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception, rather than the norm? Buy into the autonomous vehicles hype? Or- >> I think, to me, that's a ten-year type of horizon. >> Okay, ten plus, alright. When will machines be able to make better diagnosis than than doctors? >> Well, you could argue that in some fields we're almost there, or we're there. So it's all about the scope of issue, right? So if it's reading a radiology, you know, film or image, to look for something right there, we're almost there. But for complex cancers or whatever that's going to take- >> One more dot connecting question. >> Yeah yeah. >> So do you think large retail stores will essentially disappear? >> Oh boy that's a- they certainly won't disappear, but I think they can so witness Apple and Amazon even trying to come in, so it feels that the mix is certainly shifting, right? So it feels to me that the model of retail presence, I think that will still be important. Touch, feel, look, socialize. But it feels like the days of, you know, ten thousand or five thousand store chains, it feels like that's declining in a big way. >> How about big banks? You think they'll lose control of the payment systems? >> I think they're already starting to, yeah, so, I would say that is, and they're trying to get in to compete, so I think that is on its way, no question. I think that horse is out of the barn. >> So cloud, AI, new apps, new innovation cocktails, software eating the world, everybody is a tech company. Frank Gens, great to have you. >> Dave, always great to see you. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy. You're watching The Cube, from Actifio: Data Driven nineteen. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Washington D.C., it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in wonderful Washington D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are welcoming Dave Levy to the program, he is the Vice President, Federal Government at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >> Yeah, thank you for having me. >> Rebecca: This is your first time, your first rodeo. >> It is my first time. >> Rebecca: Welcome. >> Glad to be here. >> You're now a Cube alumni, welcome to the Cube alumni club. >> Well exactly, right, exactly. So you have been with AWS for about two years now. AWS famously has this day one mentality. I want you to talk a little bit about the culture of the company and how the culture helps create more innovative products and services. >> Yeah, and it is always day one. You hear about that but truly working in my first two years, you really get the experience when you're here everyday, that excitement and that enthusiasm for customers. It's interesting and somebody was asking me the other day, how do you get influence inside of Amazon, how do you get you points across? And in large part because Amazon's not a PowerPoint culture, being charismatic or having some of those traits really doesn't carry the day. What really carries the day inside of Amazon is what customers want and so I can't tell you how many times in the first few years that I've been here that we have been in meetings, going through our customer working backwards process, where somebody has said, wait a minute, we heard customers say we prioritize these four things versus these three things. And that kind of sentiment carries a lot of currency inside of the business for what we prioritize and what's important to us and it's how we innovate on behalf of customers. So that's what happens everyday, it happens day one at AWS and it's been really exciting these first few years. >> That's been a great formula for Amazon. That long game as Bezos always says, Andy always says, customer first, customer-centric thinking. But this working backwards process we've learned, come to learn, it's really critical within Amazon. But also making sure customers have the right journey, right, they get what they need, they get value, lower costs, living with undifferentiated heavy lifting. I feel like I'm messaging for Amazon. (laughing) Got it memorized. I sit down and interview so many people from Amazon, I got the rap down but digital transformation is about the long game 'cause all the shifts that are going on now aren't incremental, small improvements, it's really moving the ball down the field, big time. So you're seeing major shifts within customer bases saying, like the CIA did in 2013, >> Dave: Sure. >> which was initially a hedge against big data, we heard on stage today, turned out to be a critical decision for their innovation, this modernization. Could you share some other customer experiences around this IT modernization trend that's, it's totally real, it's happening right now in D.C. in Public Sector. >> Sure, there are a lot of examples. IT modernization is something that takes on a lot of different forms and a lot of different agencies think about it in different ways but fundamentally, it's about taking the systems that are serving citizens or a war fighter and allowing for an ability and an agility to do things better and faster and cheaper and doing it in a way that continues to innovate. And you see a lot of examples of that. CMS has the 76 million records of Americans on AWS. You see large data sets starting to be hosted on AWS from agencies across the civilian sector. DOD is really starting to lean in on workloads that are traditional things like ERP. >> DOD is more than leaning in, they're really going big. There's a paper that they put out was very comprehensive-- >> Yeah, I think there's a tremendous advantage from this digital transformation and agencies are really just at the beginning of it. They're really beginning to see what flexibility it provides. I think the other thing that it's doing is it's really helping to modernize the workforce. It's allowing the IT workforce to start focusing on things that are really valuable instead of managing hardware or managing IT environment strictly. It's giving the ability to deliver solutions and that's really exciting, that's what modernization is doing. >> One of the things that comes up in the modernization talks, it's not that obvious on the mainstream press, but the whole red tape argument of government process. People process technology, again, we've done these conversations all the time but in each one, the process piece, there's red tape in all of them. People who go slower, the process has red tape in it but this idea of busting through and cutting the red tape. >> Dave: Yeah. >> All these bottlenecks, Teresa calls them blockers. >> Yeah. >> Right. That's her different word. >> Yeah, yeah. >> These are real, now people are identifying that they can be taken away, not just dealing with them. Your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, well, I agree. There's a lot of opportunity. Digitizing work flows gives you the opportunity to re-examine all of these operational processes which frankly, may have been in place for very sound reasons in the past but when you modernize and you digitize and you do it in a cloud way, you're going to start to see that some of those things and those processes that were in place, really aren't necessary any more. And it allows you to move faster, it gives you more speed and we're seeing that across customers and the US government. We're seeing it really everywhere. >> And one of the things you were saying too about the digitizing the work flow, it's really about ensuring that citizens, civilians or members of the armed forces are interacting with government in a more meaningful way. That is the overarching problem that you're trying to solve here. >> It is and it can be as simple as citizens getting the kind of content that they need from a modern website, accessing it quickly, going to higher level functions around chatbots and things like that. So these modern cloud architectures are allowing agencies to deliver services faster, deliver things to citizens in a way they haven't before. Could be citizens that need assistive technology. It's giving agencies the opportunity to do things around 508 compliance that they haven't done before. So it's really opening up the aperture for a lot of agencies on what they can deliver. >> We've been doing a lot of reporting around Jedi, the DOD, actually been following a lot of the white papers from a cloud perspective. We're not really in the political circle so we don't know sometimes whose toes we're stepping on when we poke round but one thing that's very clear from the agencies that I report, even here in the hallways this week, CIA and other agencies I've talked to, all talk about the modernization in the context of one common theme, data. Data is the critical piece of the equation and it's multifold, this single cloud with the workload objective or multiple clouds in an architecture like the DOD put out. So there's clear visibility on what it looks like architecturally, multicloud, some hybrid, some pure public cloud based on workloads, the right cloud with the right job and people are getting that. But data is evolving, the role of data 'cause you got AI which is fed by machine learning. This really is a game changer. How is that playing out in conversations that you're seeing with customers and talk about that dynamic because if you get it right, good things happen, if you get it wrong, you could be screwed. It's really one of those linchpin, core items, your thoughts. >> Every agency, virtually every agency we talk to, every customer we're talking to is saying that data is the most important thing, their data strategy. Data, you know, we've all heard the sayings, data has gravity, data is the new oil. So there's a lot of ways to characterize it but once you have the opportunity to get your data both unstructured and structured, in a place, in a cloud, in an environment where you can start to do things with it, create data lakes, you can start to apply analytics to it, build machine learning models in AI. Then you're really starting to get into delivering things that you haven't thought about before. And up until then it's been tough because the data, in a lot of our customers, has been spread out. It's been in different data centers, it's been in different environments, sometimes it's under somebody's desk. So this idea of data and data management is really exciting to a lot of our customers. >> Now a lot of people don't understand that there's also down, and this is what we're getting, we're hearing from customers as well is that, they set up the data lakes or whatever they're calling it, data strategy, data lake, whatever, then there's downstream benefits to having that data just materialize and as an anecdote to what is, you look at the Ground Station after we've had a couple great interviews here about Ground Station which I love by the way. I think that's totally the coolest thing because of the, well, the real impact is going to be great back hog, IoT is going to boom, blossom from it but it only happens because you got Amazon scale. So again, data has that similar dynamic where as you start collecting and managing it in a holistic way, new things emerge, new value emerges. >> Yeah, I would say-- >> What are some of those things that you're seeing with your customers there? >> I would say there are real-world challenges that our customers have to deal with with data, right. When you start to have volumes, terabytes, petabytes of data, they've got decisions to make. Do they expand the wall, knock out a wall and expand their data center and buy more appliances which require more heating, more cooling? Maybe they do do that but there's an alternative now. There's a place for that data to go and be safe and secure and they can start doing the things that they want to do with that data. And like you said, downstream effects. There are some things that they can do with that data that they don't even know about today, right, and Ground Station's a good example of that. >> You talk to people in the military, for example, because we just had Keith Alexander, our General, the General was on. They think tactical ads using data, save lives, protect our nation, et cetera but there's also the other benefit of it that has nothing to do with the tactical, it's a business value. The enablement is a huge conversation >> Dave: Sure. >> that you hear in these modernization trends. Not just the benefits tactically, but the enablement setup, talk about that dynamic. >> Well, you think about the data that is collected. You think about the valuable data at the VA and that has potential implications for population health and so this day is just enormously valuable. I think we're at the very beginning of what we can do with some of these things across federal and you look at agencies like Department of Interior and some of the data sets they have are just fascinating. What we can do. We've got millions of visitors to our national parks every day and we don't know what's possible with a lot of those data sets. >> Talk about some of the tools and techniques that are being used to work with that data and talk about AI and machine learning and how they have been a real game changer for some of your federal customers. >> Well, ML and AI is really, we're really at the very beginning of this transformation. I think in the fullness of time, the vast majority of applications are going to be effused with machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think that day is not too far away and they're using tools on our platform like SageMaker to make predictions in this data. And one of the great things about having a platform that has really three, different parts to the stack which are machine learning, that's where you have your frameworks. I say that's where all the really, really smart people live, all the data scientists that we're all so desperate for and then you've got that middle layer which are tools like our SageMaker which everyday developers can use. So if you've got geospatial data and you're trying to determine what's in a given area, everyday developers can use SageMaker to build machine learning models. Those are some of the things they're doing, very exciting. >> Hey, I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Teresa Carlson just made earlier today. I'm not sure she said this on camera or not but it was memorable. She said, "It used to be an aha moment with the cloud "but this year it's not, it's real, people now recognize "that cloud adoption is legit, proof is in the--" >> Rebecca: Cloud is the new normal. >> The proof is in the pudding, it's right there. You can start seeing evidence, all the doubting people out there can now see the evidence and make their own judgment, it's clear. >> Yeah. >> Cloud is of great benefit, creates disruption. As this continues to increase, and it is, numbers are there, see the business performance, what are the challenges and drivers for continued success? >> Yeah. I think the first conversation starter, so Teresa's spot on as she always is. I think the first conversation starter is always cost savings. That was the way everybody thought about the cloud in the beginning and I think there are cost savings that customers are going to realize. But I think the real value, the real reasons why customers do it is, there's an agility that happens when you move to cloud that you don't necessarily have in your other environments, there's the ability to move fast, to spin up a lot of capability in just a few minutes, in just even minutes and change the experience for users, change the experience for citizens. I think the other thing that cloud is delivering is this whole breadth of functionality that we didn't really have before. We talked about machine learning and AI but there are tools around IoT now. There's Greengrass on AWS which is simply AWS IoT inside. And places like John Deere, we have hundred thousands of telematically enabled tractors sending data back to planters. So customers are getting involved because there's this huge breadth of functionality. I think, and so that's exciting, those are the enablers, that's what's driving. I think some of the things that are getting in the way is, we've got a workforce by and large, especially in the federal government, well, this is new and that learning is happening, that enablement is happening about cloud. We're teaching about security in the cloud. It's a shared responsibility model. So it's the new normal, we know what can be done in the cloud but now there are some new paradigms about how to do it and AWS and a lot of our partners are out there talking about how to get that done. >> I want to get a double down on that because one of the things that we're doing a report on, I've been investigating, is kind of a boring topic but it's your world right on which is how Amazon bare-knuckled their way into this market through cost saving which for the federal government, I would say, is a great lead 'cause they care about cost savings. A financial institution in Wall Street might not care about cost savings. They might want arbitrage on the other side but again, government's government. You guys have earned, done the work to get all the certifications. Your team, Teresa's team has done that and now you're at the beginning of the next level. But procurement is really broken, right. I was talking to an official in an interview off the record and he said, I won't say his name till I can say it here, he said, "You know, we're living procurement in the 80s. "We still have a requirement to ship a manual "on a lot of these things." So the antiquated, inadequate procurement process is lagging so much that the technology shifts are happening in a shorter period of time. Amazon which produces thousands of new services every year and reinvents Jace's big slide thousands, next year it'll be probably 5000, who knows but it'll be a big number. That's happening, all this is happening right now, really fast but procurement's lagging behind it, really stunting the innovation equation, >> Dave: Yeah. >> the growth of innovation. Your thoughts on fixing that, how you get around it, all these old tripwire rules. >> Well, first I'll say, procurement reform is something that's on everybody's mind. This is, it's not just a blocker for cloud, it's a blocker for everybody. Technology is far outpacing what our federal government can do. So I don't, there's nobody that I talk to that thinks that we're headed in the right place with procurement reform, even our customers inside of the government. So I think what I'd say is it's really collective approach. It's an industry approach that's going to be taken to change a procurement, to help them adapt to modern laws. Do we need changes in the far perhaps, yes, but I think we need fundamental policy changes, a legislative approach to change procurement for technology. It's only going to move faster, you're right. Indie announced in 2018 I think, nearly 2000 services so you can expect there's going to be more this year. Part of that is understanding new models. Our marketplace, for example, is a way to buy and access software quickly, fast, even by the hour if necessary. That's a total-- >> Rebecca: Like Ground Station >> Yeah. >> in that way, yeah. >> By the minute if necessary. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> So it's a totally new paradigm. As far as how we're approaching now, it takes having good partners. We have good partners that are helping us with respect to contract vehicles. I think we're being transparent around how we bill, how these services translate, what's in the services that they're getting charged and I think agencies are starting to feel more comfortable with that. >> I learned a term from Charlie Bell, Engineer Lead for Amazon, did an interview, a term you guys use internally at Amazon called, dogs not barking. >> Dave: Yes. >> And it means that everyone, the barking dog everyone hears and they go after, they solve that problem. It's what you don't see, the blind spot, aka blind spots. What do you see in federal that's not barking >> Yeah, what are our dogs? >> that you're aware of? What keeps you up at night? >> What are our dogs not barking? >> John: Yeah. >> I would say, it really is our customer workforce. I think our customers really need to get enablement and training and support from us and the partner community on how to make this transition to cloud. It's incumbent upon us and it's incumbent upon the agencies to really deliver it. That does keep me up at night because this is new. This is new for, the ATO process is a little bit different. The accreditation process is different. So there's a lot of new things out there and if there's a dog that's not barking, it's somebody needs help and they're not really letting us-- >> They might not even know they need it. >> They don't know they need help or they're not saying that that they need help and they don't know where to go. >> Right. >> Right. >> They should come to you. >> Well, thanks for coming on. (laughing) >> Dave, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >> Yeah, thank you, all right. >> Thank you, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Cube AWS Public Sector Summit, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios, the conference season is getting ready to ramp up, it hasn't really hit full speed yet, so, it gives us the opportunity to have CUBE Conversations, and we're really excited to have our next guest, we haven't had him on for quite a while, George Mathew. He's the chairman and CEO of Kespry. George great to see you. >> Jeff, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So, you used to be big time in the data analytics world we used to see you at all the big data shows, and now you've made the move to autonomous flying machines. >> I did, I did, and there's a very strong relationship between the two, right? When you look at the lot worth that I was doing in the horizontal data analytic space, there was really a need to be able to accumulate data and process and understand that, and make better decisions off of it. Well, when you look at the industrial world that Kespry serves today, the ability to drive a full, complete application, where sensor based data is now being processed in our cloud infrastructure, and packaged up as complete applications, is exactly the market that we're focused on. >> So, George also a lot of big words. Let's talk about the fun words. >> Sure. >> You have drones, you have cool industrial drones. >> That's right. >> So, but what you've done is different than some the more popular drones that people know, some of the big names. You guy are really kind of single purpose, industrial only, totally integrated solution, sold as a service. >> Is that accurate? >> That's right. When you look at the drone space today, it's a big market. Its actually a 100 billion dollar market overall for drones. just in the commercial aspect of the drone space, it's a 15, 16 billion dollar market. Industrial use cases are proliferating everywhere. Kespry actually started in the mining aggregate space, where we were able to take our industrial grade drone, be able to do volumetric stock pile measurement to a level of accuracy that was literally down to one, two percent forecast accuracy, because we can now take imagery and convert that to super accurate three dimensional models of a mine site, of a query, and be able to make better decisions on how much inventory you had on that work site. >> Now, let's dive into that a little bit, cus most people when they think of drones, they think of, aerial photography at their wedding, and sweeping shots at the beach of their Maui vacation. But the industrial applications are real, and these are huge pieces of real estate that you're operating over. Huge masses of material, and men, and machines. So, the impacts, of small incremental impacts in being able to measure, and make decisions on that, have huge financial impact. >> So, what's amazing with drone tech that's available today, think about it as the new sensor network Jeff, so it's not just the fact that we can take images off a drone. It's the fact that we can take those images, and combine that with additional sensor based input. One of the key elements that Kespry introduced into the market, is taking imagery, and being able to augment the ability to have precision GPS along with that images. So, you can now have images that are processed in our cloud that are converted into full three dimensional models, and each one of those models are hyper accurate within three centimeters of real space. So, when you want to apply that for a full topological assessment of what a construction site looks like. If you wanted to measure the amount of volumetric stock pile of material that might be on 250 acres, you can fly a drone overhead in 30 minutes, be able to collect all that sensor based input, and process that in the cloud and have very accurate answers in terms of what's happening on an industrial work site without the danger and the challenges of manually collecting that information. >> Cus how did they do it before? >> Yup >> What was state of the art three years ago? >> The status quo in the market was being able to collect that data using a GPS backpack or laser guided precision equipment, but you still needed to have someone manually be able to bring that equipment to the work site. Often times, the data that you were collecting, you know, on a volumetric measurement of a stock pile, might be 20, 30, 40 points of measurement. When you're flying a drone overhead, and converting the imagery into a point cloud, you're creating five, six hundred thousand points of measurement. >> Right. >> And so the accuracy of what you're able to now accomplish with a level of safety, is unprecedented. >> Well, it's interesting, one of the Kespry tag lines is no joysticks, which I think is kind of funny. >> That's right. >> But the fact that it's really an automated system. You're selling us solutions. I'm teasing you about having fun with drones and flying with vacation, but that's not what it is. Basically it's a platform in which to deploy sensors. Which could be visual sensors, could be infrared sensors, could be GPS, could be all kinds of stuff, so it really opens up a huge opportunity to put different types of payloads, for different use cases into use. >> That's right, when you think about where Kespry's differentiation in the market is. We've introduced that capability to have different payloads, and be able to fuse those sensors together in a meaningful way, and combine that with a fully autonomous solution for flight control. So, now you don't have to have specialist piloting skills to be able to collect that information. The sensor based input is fused in a way where we can process that in our cloud infrastructure. We add a series of artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms to augment what's coming off of these sensors, and then package them as industrial grade applications. Good examples: inventory management in the mining aggregate space. Being able to do full earth works topological assessment in construction projects. Being able to do claims management for what the dimensionality, and their current state of a roof might be after a weather event has occurred. To be able to understand the number of missing shingles. The amount of hail damage that's occurred, and so all of these applications are packaged in an end to end manner, so that, you as a decision maker, and you as a user, don't have to be, you know, basically, playing with broken toys, to be able to get very clean answers in terms of what's happening in physical space. >> The roof story is so fascinating to me, 'cause people just think "oh it's a roof," they have no idea to really think through the impact of roofing in commercial real estate, and in industrial real estate. You know, roofs are where buildings fail, and so roofs, roof inspections is a really really important piece of title processes, and operational processes, so to be able now to automate that. It's classic right, automated, data driven, software driven, processes, really is a game changer versus having to send somebody up on a roof to physically inspect, I mean the accuracy's got to just be ore's of magnitude better. >> So, a few facts there, right. First of all, it's a multi billion dollar industry. You won't believe that just hail alone as far as damage that occurs on an annualized basis, is a 2.4 billion dollar challenge. It's also, the third most-- >> Is that in the U.S only? >> In the US, it's the third most occupationally hazardous job in the country, where people fall off roofs all the time when they're doing this kind of inspection. So, when you're able to now apply a drone to fly over that roof autonomously, collect that data, do the dimensional analysis, as well as being able to create the hail damage model, or the missing shingle model. You're now effectively enabling that claim process, for instance for the insurance carrier to adjudicate a claim to effectively happen within hours, right, after you know, you're on site. What we're seeing today in the market, is, if you're effectively looking at a claims assessment process, a claims adjuster would usually take about a day to cover three homes. With the use of a Kespry drone, we're seeing that same claims adjuster cover three homes in an hour. It's a massive productivity gain for this industrial use case. >> So, that brings up another topic. We've gone to a couple commercial drone shows and obviously it's a cool space, it's a fun space, but it's also really important space. I just think back to the end of World War I, when suddenly there were these things called airplanes, and the military trying to figure out, what do we do with this new asset, and those people maybe don't know that the Air Force was actually, the Army Air Force at the beginning. They didn't think that they needed a different branch, with different tactics, strategy, training, governance, et cetera. So, as we look at kind of, commercial drones entering into the business space, and I'm sure you've seen it, in some of these aggregate examples, construction. How having an air force, as a company, as a resource, you know, air deployed assets is such a big game changer. It's going to people a long time to figure out how to use it beyond the obvious in the short term, but it's a completely different tool, to apply to your business problems. >> This is why we consider this a whole new category of aerial intelligence, right. When you think about the capabilities that we're going to be able to deliver, as far as very accurate views of physical space, and being able to digitize it, to be able to model it, to be able to predict the material assets that are on a work site, and understand what the future value is, what the challenges might be for a maintenance cycle, to be able to understand the level and extent of damage, the anomaly detection, these are all incredible use cases that are opening up as we speak. I remember when I was on the show years ago, and we talked about the data analytics space, and particularly the self service aspect that I was pretty involved in, we used to talk about it being in the early innings of a ball game. Well, in the aerial intelligence market, we were literally in the first inning of the ball game. Like it is just getting off the ground, and when you think about the regulatory frameworks that are effectively in place, even as of 2016. The commercial operations in the United States have just opened up. You're now able to legitimately fly below 400 feet of air space. Maintaining the drone with a visual line of sight where a human operator is involved, that has actually passed the part 107 pilots exam. So, it's a framework. It's a start, but there's so much more expansion opportunities that occur when we're flying over people, when we're de-conflicting the air space, when we have the ability to do night flights, when we have the ability to be able to literally have that drone fly, without having a human operator controlling it, and understanding the visual line of sight where the drone is operating. So, these are all going to happen in the next several years, and completely open up the aerial intelligence market accordingly. >> It's fascinating, and of course the other thing that you're doing, which all good companies do, and all good entrepreneurs do, is build on the shoulders of others. So you're leveraging cloud, you're leveraging A.I., you're using the flight controls, you're using mobile applications, you're using all these bits and pieces of infrastructure, and you've packaged it up to deliver it as a service, which is fantastic. >> This is one of the fundamentals tenants for Kespry, even as of our founding in 2013. We knew that there was a lot of broken toys in the market, because if you had to take a consumer grade solution, be able to roll your own software, to be able to look at the way you collect that data on a manual basis, to be able to process that information, and get to results without having this connectivity involved with the entire end to end experience, we knew that a lot of companies could not succeed in their aerial intelligence offerings. And this is why Kespry believed that a full end to end solution, the way we built it, was better for the industrial markets that we serve, and so far so good. This past week we actually announced, just in the mining aggregate space alone, we have over 170 customers, and-- >> 170? >> Correct. Just in mining aggregate. >> How long has Kespry been around? >> We've been in business since we were founded in 2013. We started commercial operations in 2015. >> Wow. >> Amazingly, we covered over 10,400 just, mining query work sites, just in those last two and a half years that we've been in commercial operation. So, this is something that has really exponentialized, just in that market, and we're seeing similar adoptions starting to take off in the insurance roofing space, as well the construction markets. >> It's so funny. I just consider, you're an autonomous vehicle. You're just one that flies, not, that drives on the road, but, there's so much going on on the commercial side that people don't see, you know? They see the Lambo cars driving around the neighborhood, and we read about what's going on with Tesla, but on the agg side, on the commercial side, with John Deere, and these huge mining trucks, that many of them are already autonomous. This stuff is really moving very very quickly on the commercial side. >> If you think about the digital transformation of industrial work. This is a one trillion dollar market opportunity over the next several decades, and the ability to sense physical assets, and be able to make better decisions using drone tech, using other sensor based information. This is transforming the nature of industrial work, right? This is, in my view, the beginning of the fourth industrial age, and in that regard, we see this as something that's not just, like I said, you know, the first few innings of a ball game. We're going to see this evolve for decades, as we move forward. And drones are effectively a critical piece of that infrastructure evolving. >> Yeah, just in delivery. Just sensor delivery is basically what it is. Place it in places that people maybe shouldn't go, don't want to go, that dangerous to go, it makes a ton of sense. >> And then being able to blend that with the other sensors that might be on the ground, that might be in other places, that you can fuse that information together to get better understanding of physical space. >> Yeah, I love it. I love the solution approach, right. Nobody ever buys a new platform, but it sure is great to build a platform underneath a terrific application, that then you can expand after you knock it out of the park with that first application. >> And that's exactly the approach that we're going after >> All right. Well Mat, hopefully it won't be a, we looked it up before. Last time you were on was like 2014, so hopefully-- >> It's been a while. >> It won't be so long before we see you next, and thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks for having me on board, Jeff. >> All right, he's George Mathew. I'm Jeff Frick, You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. This is Silicon Angle's exclusive coverage with theCUBE, here at Amazon, re:Invent 2017. It's our 5th year covering Amazon's explosive growth. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle media. I'm here with Justin Warren, my cohost here, our next guest on set one is Tom Siebel, who is the founder and CEO of C3 IOT, industry legend, knows the software business, been around the block a few times, and now part of the new wave of innovation. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I hear you just got in from San Francisco. What a world we're living in. You're at the front-end of your company that you founded and are running, an IOT big data play, doing extremely well. Even last year, the whisper in the hallway was C3 IOT is absolutely doing great, in the industrial side, certainly in the federal government side, and on commercial, congratulations! >> Thank you. >> What's the update, what's the secret formula? >> Well, we live at the convergence of elastic cloud computing, big data, AI, and IOT, and at the point where those converge, I think, is something called digital transformation, where you have these CEOs that, candidly, I think, they're concerned that companies are going through a mass-extinction event. I mean, companies are being, 52% of the Fortune 500 companies, as of 2000 are gone, right, they've disappeared and it's estimated as many 70% might disappear in the next 10 years, and we have this new species of companies with new DNA that look like Tesla and Uber, and Amazon, and, they have no drivers, no cars, and yet they own transportation, and I think that these CEOs are convinced that, unless they take advantage of this new class of technologies that they might be extinct. >> And it's certainly, we're seeing it, too, in a lot of the old guard, as Andy Jassy calls it, really talking about Oracle, IBM, and some of the other folks that are trying to do cloud, but they're winning. I gotta ask you, what's the main difference, from your perspective, that's different now that the culture of a company that's trying to transform, what's the big difference between the old way and new way now, that has to be implemented quickly, or extinction is a possibility? I mean, it's not just suppliers, it's the customers themselves. >> The customers have changed. >> What's the difference? >> So, this is my 4th decade in the information technology business and I've seen the business grow from a couple hundred billion to, say, two trillion worldwide, and I've seen it go from mainframe to mini-computers, to personal computers to the internet, all of that, and I was there when, in all of those generations of technology, when we brought those products to market, would come up in the organization, through the IT organization, to the CIO, and the CIO would say, "well, we're never gonna use a mini computer." or, "we're never gonna use relations database technology." or, "we're never gonna use a PC." And so, you'd wait for that CIO to be fired, then he'd come back two years later, right? Now, so meanwhile we build a two trillion dollar information technology business, globally. Now, what's happening in this space of big data, predictive analytics, IOT, is all of a sudden, it's the CEO at the table. CEO was never there before, and the CEO is mandating this thing called digital transformation, and he or she is appointing somebody in the person of a Chief Digital Officer, who has a mandate and basically a blank check to transform this company and get it done, and whereas it used to be the CIO would report to the CEO once a quarter at the quarterly off-site, the Chief Digital Officer reports to the CEO every week, so, and virtually everyone of our customers, CAT, John Deere, United Healthcare, you name, ENGIE, Enel, it's a CEO-driven initiative. >> You bring up a good point I wanna get your thoughts on, because the old way, and you mentioned, was IT reporting to the CIO. They ran things, they ran the business, they ran the plumbing, software was part of that, now software is the business. No one goes to the teller. The bank relationship's the software, or whatever vertical you're in there's now software, whether it's at the edge, whether it's data analytics, is the product to the consumer. So, the developer renaissance, we see software now changing, where the developer's now an influencer in this transformation. >> True. >> Not just, hey, go do it, and here's some tools, they're in part of that. Can you share your perspective on this because, if we're in a software renaissance, that means a whole new creativity's gonna unleash with software. With that role of the CDO, with the blank check, there's no dogma anymore. It's results. So, what's your perspective on this? >> Well, I think that there's enabling technologies that include the elastic cloud that include, computation and storage is basically free, right? Everything is a computer, so IOT, I used to think about IOT being devices, it's that IOT is a change in the form-factor of computers. In the future, everything's a computer, your eyeglasses, your watch, your heart monitor, your refrigerator, your pool pump, they're all computers, right, and then we have the network effect of Metcalfe's law, say we have 50 billion of theses devices fully connected and well, that's a pretty powerful network. Now, these technologies, in turn, enable AI, they enable machine learning and deep learning. Hey, that's a whole new ball game. Okay, we're able to solve classes of problems with predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics that were simply unsolvable before in history and this changes everything about the way we design products, the way we service customers, the way we manage companies. So, I think this AI thing is not to be underestimated. I think the cloud, IOT, big data, devices, those are just enablers, and I think AI is-- >> So, software and data's key, right? Data trains the AI, data is the fundamental new lifeblood. >> Big data, because now we're doing, what big data is about, people think that big data is the fact that an exabyte is more than a gigabyte, that's not it. Big data is about the fact that there is no sampling error. We have all the data. So, we used to, due to limitations to storage and processing we used to, you know, basically, take samples and infer results from those samples, and deal with it on the level of confidence error that was there. With big data, there's no sampling error. >> It's all there. >> It is a whole different game. >> We were talking before, and John, you mentioned before about the results that you need to show. Now, I know that you picked up a big new customer that I hope you can talk about publicly, which is a public-sector company, but that sounds like something where you're doing predictive maintenance for the Air Force, for the U.S. Air Force, so that's a big customer, good win there, but what is the result that they're actually getting from the use of big data and this machine learning analytics that you're doing? >> By aggregating all the telemetry and aggregating all their maintenance records, and aggregating all their pilot records, and then building machine learning class of ours, we can look at all the signals, and we can predict device failure or systems failure well in advance of failure, so the advantage is some pretty substantial percentages, say of F16s, will not deploy, of F18s will not deploy because, you know, they go to push the button and there's a system failure. Well, if we can predict system failure, I mean, the cost of maintenance goes down dramatically and, basically, it doubles the size of your fleet and, so the economic benefit is staggering. >> Tom, I gotta ask you a personal question. I mean, you've been through four decades, you're a legend in the industry, what was the itch that got you back with this company. Why did you found and run C3 IOT? What was the reason? Was it an itch you were scratching, like, damn, I want the action? I mean, what was the reason why you started the company? >> Well, I'm a computer scientist and out of graduate school, I went to work with a young entrepreneur by the name of Larry Ellison, turned out to be a pretty good idea, and then a decade later, we started Siebel Sytems, and I think, well, we did invent the CRM market and then it turned out to be a pretty good idea and I just see, at this intersection of these vectors we talked about, everything changes about computing. This has been a complete replacement market and I though, you know, there's opportunity to play a significant role in the game, and this what I do, you know. I collect talented people and try to build great companies and make customers satisfied. This is my idea of a good time. You're on the beach, you're on your board hangin' 10 on the big waves. What are the waves? We're seeing this inflection point, a lotta things comin' together, what are the waves that you're ridin' on right now? Obviously, the ones you mentioned, what's the set look like, if I can use a surfing analogy. What's coming in, what are the big waves? The two biggest ones are IOT and AI. I mean, since 2000 we've deployed 19 billion IOT sensors around the world. The next five years, we'll deploy 50 billion more. Everything will be a computer, and you connect all these things that they're all computing and apply AI, I mean we're gonna do things that were, you know, unthinkable, in terms of serving customers, building products, cost efficiencies, we're gonna revolutionize healthcare with precision health. Processes like energy extraction and power delivery will be much safer, much more reliable, much more environmentally-friendly, this is good stuff. So, what's your take on the security aspect of putting a computer in everything, because, I mean, the IT industry hasn't had a great track record of security, and now we're putting computers everywhere. As you say, they're gonna be in watches, they're gonna be in eyeglasses, what do you see as the trend in the way that security is gonna be addressed for this, computers everywhere? Well, I think that it is clearly not yet solved, okay, and it is a solvable problem. I believe that it's easier to secure data in cyber space than it is in your own data room. Maybe you could secure data in your data room when it took a forklift to move a storage device. It doesn't take a forklift anymore, right? It takes one of these little flash drives, you know, to move, to take all the data. So, I think the easiest place we can secure it is gonna be in cyber space. I think we'll use encryption, I think we'll be computing on encrypted data, and we haven't figured out algorithms to do that yet. I think blockchain will play an important role, but there's some invention that needs to happen and this is what we do. >> So, you like blockchain? >> I think blockchain plays a role in security. >> It does. So, I gotta ask you about the way, you're sinking your teeth into a new venture, exciting, it's on the cutting-edge, on the front lines of the innovation. There are a lotta other companies that are trying to retool. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, if you were back them, probably not as exciting as what you're doing because you've got a new clean sheet of paper, but if you're Oracle, if you're Larry, and he went to be CTO, he's trying to transform, he's getting into the action, they got a lot to do there, IBM same thing, same with Microsoft, what's their strategy in your mind? If you were there, at the helm of those companies, what would you do? >> Well, number one, I would not bet against Larry. I know Larry pretty well and Larry is a formidable player in the information technology industry, and if you have to identify one of four companies that's surviving the long-run, it'll be Oracle that's in that consideration, in that set, so I think betting against Larry is a bad idea. >> He'll go to the mat big time, won't he? I mean, Jassy, there's barbs going back and forth, you gotta be careful there. >> Well, I mean, Andy Jassy is extraordinarily competent, I think, as it relates to this elastic cloud I think he's kinda got a lock on that, but, you know, IBM is hard to explain. I mean, IBM is a sad story. I think IBM is, there's some risk that IBM is the next Hewlett-Packard. I mean, they might be selling this thing off for piece parts this, you mean, if we look at the last 23 quarters, I mean, it's not good. >> And Microsoft's done a great job recently with Satya Nadella, and they're retooling fast. You can see them beavering away. >> But IBM, I mean, how do you bet against the cloud. I mean, are you kidding me? I mean, hello! IBM's a sad story. It's one of the world's great companies, it's an icon. If it fails, and companies like IBM's size do fail, I mean let's look at GE, that would be a sad state for America. >> Okay, on a more positive upbeat, what's next for you? Obviously, you're doing great, the numbers are good. Again, the rumors in the hallways we're hearing that you guys are doing great financially. Not sure if you can share any color on that, big wins, obviously, these are not little deals you're on, but what's next? What's the big innovation that you got comin' around the corner for C3 IOT. Well, so our business grew last year about 600%, this year it'll grow about 300%. We're a profitable, cash-positive business. Our average customer is, say, 20 to $200 billion business. We're engaged in very, very large transactions. In the last 18 months, we've done a lotta work in deep learning, okay. In the next 18 months, we'll do a lotta work in NLP. I think those technologies are hugely important. Technologically, this is where we'll be going. I think machine learning, traditional ML, we have that nailed, now we're exploiting deep learning in a big way using GPUs, and a lotta the work that Jensen Wang's doing at Nvidia, and now NLP, I think, is the next frontier for us. >> Final question for you, advice to other entrepreneurs. You're a serial entrepreneur. you've been very successful, inventive categories. You're looking at Amazon, how do you work with the Amazons of the world. What should entrepreneurs be thinking about in terms of how to enter the market, funding, just strategy in general. The rules have changed a little bit. What advice would you give the young entrepreneurs out there? >> Okay, become a domain expert at whatever domain you're proposing and whatever field you're gonna enter, and then surround yourself with people, whatever job they're doing, engineering, marketing, sales, F&A, who are better than you at what they do and, to the extent that I have succeeded, this is why I've succeeded. Now this might be easier for me than for others, but I try to surround myself with people who are better than me and, to the extent that I've been successful, that's why. >> We really appreciate you taking the time coming on. You're an inspiration, a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO Tom Siebel of C3 IOT, hot company, big part of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. Doing great stuff, again, serial entrepreneur. Great four-decade career. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Tom Siebel. Here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier and Justin Warren, here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Thanks guys, good job.

>> Announcer: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (rippling music) Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, along with my cohost Peter Burris. We are joined by Brett Roscoe. He is the Vice President for Solutions and Service Marketing at NetApp, and Laura Dubois, who is a Group Vice President at IDC. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. So, NetApp and IDC partner together and worked on this big research project, as you were calling it, a thought leadership project, to really tease out what the companies that are thriving and being successful with their data strategies are doing, and what separates those from those that are merely just surviving. Do you want to just lay the scene for our viewers and explain why you embarked on this? Well, you know, it's interesting. NetApp has embarked on its own journey, right, its own transformation. If you look at where the company's been really over the past few years in terms of becoming a traditional storage company to a truly software, cloud-focused, data-focused company, right? And that means a whole different set of capabilities that we provide to our customers. It's a different, our customers are looking at data in a different way. So what we did was look at that and say we know that we're going through a transformation, so we know our customers are going through a journey themselves. And whatever their business model is, it's being disrupted by this digital economy. And we wanted a way to work with IDC and really help our customers understand what that journey might look like, where they might be on that path, and what are the tools and what are the engagement models for us to help them along that journey? So that was really the goal, was really, it's engagement with our customers, it's looking and being curious about where they are on their journey on digital, and how do they move forward in that, in doing all kinds of new things like new customer opportunities and new business and cost optimization, all that kind of stuff. So that's really what got us interested in the project to begin with. Yeah, and I would just add to that. Revenue's at risk of disruption across pretty much every industry, and what's different is the amount of revenue that's at risk within one industry to the next. And all of this revenue that's at risk, is really as a consequence of new kinds of business models, new kinds of products and services that are getting launched new ways of engaging with customers. And these are some of the things that we see thrivers doing and outperforming merely just survivors, or even just data resisters. And so we want to understand the characteristics of data thrivers, and what are they doing that's uniquely different, what are their attributes versus companies that are just surviving. So let's tease that out a little bit. What are these data thrivers doing differently? What are some of the best practices that have emerged from this study? Well I mean, I think if you look at there's a lot of great information that came out of the study for us in terms of what they're doing. I think in a nutshell, it's really they put a focus on their data and they look at it as an asset to their business. Which means a lot of different things in terms of how is the data able to drive opportunities for them. I mean, there's so many companies now that are getting insights from their data, and they're able to push that back to their customer. I mean, NetApp is a perfect example of that. We actually do that with our customers. All the telemetry data we collect from our own systems, we provide that information back to our customers so they can help plan and optimize their own environments. So I think data is certainly, it's validated our theory, our message of where we're going with data, but I think the data focus, I mean, there's lot of other attributes, there's the focus of hiring chief data officers within the company, there's certainly lots of other attributes, Laura, that you can comment on. Yeah, I mean, we see new roles emerging around data, right, and so we see the rise of the data management office. We see the emergence of a Chief Data Officer, we see data architects, certainly data scientists, and this data role that's increasingly integrated into sort of the traditional IT organization, enterprise, architecture. And so enterprise, architecture and these data roles very, very closely aligned is one, I would say, example of a best practice in terms of the thriver organizations, is having these data champions, if you will, or data visionaries. And certainly there's a lot of things that need to be done to have a successful execution, and a data strategy as a first place, but then a successful execution around data. And there's a lot of challenges that exist around data as well. So the survey highlighted that obviously data's distributed, it's dynamic and it's diverse, it's not only in your private cloud but in the public cloud, I think it's at 34% on average of data is in a public cloud. So, how to deal with these challenges is, I think, also one of the things that you guys wanted to highlight. Yeah, and I think the other big revelation was the thrivers, one of the aspects, so not their data focus but also they're making business decisions with their data. They tend to use that data in terms of their operations and how they drive their business. They tend to look for new ways to engage with their customers through a digital or data-driven experience. Look at the number of mobile apps coming out of consumer, really B to C kind of businesses. So there's more and more digital focus, there's more and more data focus, and there's business decisions made around that data. So, I want to push you guys on this a little bit. 'Cause we've always used data in business, so that's not new. There's always been increasing amounts of data being used. So while the volume's certainly new, it's very interesting, it's by itself not that new. What is new about this? What is really new about it that's catalyzing this change right now? Have you got some insights into that? Well, I would just say if you look at some of the largest companies that are no longer here, so you've got Blockbuster, you've got Borders Books and Music, you've got RadioShack, look at what Amazon has done to the retail industry. You look at what Uber is doing to the transportation industry. Look at every single industry, there's disruption. And there's the success of this new innovative company, and I think that's why now. Yes, data has always been an important attribute of any kind of business operation. As more data gets digital, combine that with innovation and APIs that allow you to, and the public cloud, allow you to use that as a launch pad for innovation. I think those are some of the things about why now. I mean, that would be my take, I don't know-- Yeah, I think there's a couple things. Number one, I think yes, businesses have been storing data for years and using data for years, but what you're seeing is new ways to use the data. There's analytics now, it is so easy to run analytics compared to what it was just years ago, that you can now use data that you've been storing for years and run historical patterns on that, and figure out trends and new ways to do business. I think the other piece that is very interesting is the machine learning, the artificial intelligence, right? So much of the industry now, I mean, look at the automotive industry. They are collecting more information than I bet they ever thought they would, because the autonomous driving effort, all of that, is all about collecting information, doing analytics on information, and creating AI capabilities within their products. So there's a whole new business that's all new, there's whole new revenue streams that are coming up as a result of leveraging insights from data. So let me run something by ya, 'cause I was looking for something different. It used to be that the data we were working was what I call stylized data. You can't go out here in Berlin and wander the streets and find Accounting. It doesn't exist, it's human-made, it's contrived. HR is contrived. We have historically built these systems based on transactions, highly stylized types of data. There's only so much you can do with it. But because of technology, mobile, IOT, others, we now are utilizing real world data. So we're collecting an entirely new class of data that has a dramatic impact in how we think about business and operations. Does that comport with what the study said, that study respondents focusing on new types of data as opposed to just traditional sources of data? We certainly looked at correlations of what data thrivers are doing by different types of data. I would say, in terms of the new types of data that are emerging, you've got time series data, stream data, that's increasingly important. You've got machine-generated data from sensors. And I would say that one thing that the thrivers do better than merely just survivors, is have processes and procedures in place to action the data. To collect it and analyze it, as Brett pointed out, is accessible, and it's easy. But what's not easy to is to action results out of that data to drive change and business processes, to drive change in how things are brought to market, for example. So, those are things that data thrivers are doing that maybe data survivors aren't. I don't know if you have anything to add to that. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I think, yes, traditional data, but it's interesting because even those traditional data sets that have been sitting there for years have untapped value. >> Peter: Wikibon knew types of data. That's right. But we've also been doing data warehousing, analytics for a long time. So it seems as though, I would guess, that the companies that are leading, many that you mentioned, are capturing data differently, they're using analytics and turning data into value differently, and then they are taking action based on that data differently. And I'm wondering if across the continuum that you guys have identified, of thrivers all the way down to survivors, and you mentioned one other, data-- >> Laura: resisters. resisters, and there was, anyways. So there's some continuum of data companies. Do they fall into that pattern, where I'm good at capturing data, I'm good at generating analytics, but I'm not good at taking action on it? Is that what a data resister is? So a data resister is sort of the one extreme. Companies that don't have well-aligned processes where they're doing digital transformation on a very ad hoc basis, it's not repeatable. They're somewhat resistant to change. They're really not embracing that there's disruption going on that data can be a source of enablement to do the disrupting, not being disrupted. So they're kind of resisting those fundamental constructs, I would say. They typically tend to be very siloed. Their IT's in a very siloed architecture where they're not looking for ways to take advantage of new opportunities across the data they're generating, or the data they're collecting, rather. So that would be they're either not as good at creating business value out of the data they have access to. Yes, that's right, that's right. And then I think the whole thing with thrivers is that they are purposeful. They set a high level objective, a business-level objective that says we're going to leverage data and we're going to use digital to help drive our business forward. We are going to look to disrupt our own business before somebody disrupts it for us. So how do you help those data resistors? What's your message to them, particularly if they may not even operate with the belief that data is this asset? I mean, that's the whole premise of the study. I think the data that comes out, like you know, hey data thrivers, you're two times more likely to draw two times more profitability to there's lots of great statistics that we pulled out of this to say thrivers have a lot more going for them. There is a direct corelation that says if you are taking a high business value of your data, and high business value of the digital transformation that you are going to be more profitable, you're going to generate more revenue, and you're going to be more relevant in the next 10 to 20 years. And that's what we want to use that, to say okay where are you on this journey? We're actually giving them tools to measure themselves by taking assessments. They can take an assessment of their own situation and say okay, we are a survivor Okay, how do we move closer to being a thriver? And that's where NetApp would love to come in and engage and say let us show you best practices, let us show you tools and capabilities that we can bring to bear to your environment to help you go a little bit further on that journey, or help you on a path that's going to lead you to a data thriver. Yeah, that's right, I agree with that. (laughs) What is the thing that keeps you up at night for the data resister, though, in the sense of someone who is not, does not have, maybe not even capturing and storing the data but really has no strategy to take whatever insights the data might be giving them to create value? I don't know, that's a hard question. I don't know, what keeps you up at night? Well, I think if I were looking at a data resister, I think the stats, the data's against them. I mean, right? If you look at a Fortune 500 company in the 1950s, their average lifespan was something like 40 years. And by the year 2020, the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company is going to be seven years, and that's because of disruption. Now, historically that may have been industrial disruption, but now it's digital disruption, and that right there is, if you're feeling like you're just a survivor, that ought to keep a survivor up at night. If I can ask too. It's, for example, one of the reasons why so many executives say you have to hire millennials, because there's this presumption that millennials have a more natural affinity with data, than older people like me. Now, there's not necessarily a lot of stats that definitely prove that, but I think that's one of the, the misperceptions, or one of the perceptions, that I have to get more young people in because they'll be more likely to help me move forward in an empirical style of management than some older people who are used to a very, very different type of management practice. But still there are a lot of things that companies, I would presume, would need to be able to do to move from one who's resisting these kinds of changes to actually taking advantage of it. Can I ask one more question? Is it that, did the research discover that data is the cause of some of these, or just is correlated with success? In other words, you take a company like Amazon, who did not have to build stores like traditional retailers, didn't have to carry that financial burden, didn't have to worry so much about those things, so that may be starting to change, interestingly enough. Is that, so they found a way to use data to alter that business, but they also didn't have to deal with the financial structure of a lot of the companies they were competing with. They were able to say our business is data, whereas others had said our business is serving the customer with these places in place. So, which is it? Do you think it's a combination of cause and effect, or is it just that it's correlated? Hmm. I would say it's probably both. We do see a correlation, but I would say the study included companies whose business was data, as well as companies that were across a variety of industries where they're just leveraging data in new ways. I would say there's probably some aspects of both of that, but that wasn't like a central tenent of the study per se, but maybe that will be phase two. Maybe we'll mine the data and try and find some insights there. Yeah, there's a lot more information that we can glean from this data. We think this'll be an ongoing effort for us to kind of be a thought leader in this area. I mean, the data proved that there was 11% of those 800 respondents that are thrivers, which means most people are not in that place yet. So I think it's going to be a journey for everyone. Yes, I agree that some companies may have some laws of physics or some previous disruptions like brick and mortar versus online retail, but it doesn't mean there's not ways that traditional companies can't use technology. I mean, you look at, in the white paper, we used examples like General Electric and John Deere. These are very traditional companies that are using technology to collect data to provide insights into how customers are using their products. So that's kind of the thought leadership that any company has to have, is how do I leverage digital capabilities, online capabilities, to my advantage and keep being disruptive in the digital age? I think that's kind of the message that we want them to hear. Right, and I would just add to that. It's not only their data, but it's third-party data. So it's enriching their data, say in the case of Starbucks. So Starbucks is a company that certainly has many physical assets. They're taking their customer data, they're taking partner data, whether that be music data, or content from the New York Times, and they're combining that all to provide a customer experience on their mobile app that gives them an experience on the digital platform that they might have experienced in the physical store. So when they go to order their coffee in their mobile pay app, they don't have to wait in line for their coffee, it's already paid for and ready when they go to pick it up. But while they're in their app, they can listen to music or they can read the New York Times. So there's a company that is using their own data plus third party data to really provide a more enriched experience for their company, and that's a traditional, physical company. And they're learning about their customers through that process too. Exactly, exactly, right. Are there any industries that you think are struggling more with this than others? Or is it really a company-specific thing? Well, the research shows that companies in ever industry are facing disruption, and the research shows that companies in every industry are reacting to that disruption. There are some industries that tend to have, obviously by industry they might have more thrivers or more resisters, but nothing I can per se call out by industry. I think retail is the one that you can point to and say there's an industry that's really struggling to really keep up with the disruption that the large, people like Amazon and others have really leveraged digital well advanced of them, well in advance of their thought process. So I think the white paper actually breaks down the data by industry, so you can kind of look at that, I think that will provide some details. But I think every, there is no industry immune, we'll just put it that way. And the whole concept of industry is undergoing change as well. That's true, that is true, everything's been disrupted. Great, well, Brett and Laura thank you so much for coming on our show. We had a great conversation. Thank you. Enjoy your time. You're watching theCUBE, we'll have more from NetApp Insight after this. (rippling music)

(gentle music) >> Announcer: Live, from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit, North America, 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Okay welcome back, and we're live here in Los Angeles, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Chris Aniszczyk, who's the COO, Chief Operating Officer of the CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, formerly Cube-Con, Cloud Native Foundation, all rolled into the most popular Linux Foundation project right now, very fashionable, cloud native, running on native clouds, Chris welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Awesome, it's been a while, great to be back. >> So you are the Chief Operating Officer of the hottest project, to me at least, in the Foundation. Not the most important, because there's a lot of really important, everything's important, you don't pick a favorite child, but, if one's trending, the CNCF is certainly trending, it's got the most sponsors, it's got the most participants, there's so much action going on, there's so much change and opportunity, around Kubernetes, around containers, around writing cloud-native applications. You've guys have really put together a nice foundation around that, nice group, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Take a step back and explain to us, what the hell is the CNCF? We know what it is, we were there present at creation, but it's super-important, it's growing in relevance every day. Take a minute to explain. >> So I mean, you know, CNCF is all about providing a neutral home for cloud-native technology, and it's been about almost two years since our first board meeting and the idea was, there's a certain set of technology out there that are essentially micro-service-based, that live in containers that are centrally orchestrated by some process, right, that's essentially what we mean when we say cloud-native, right, and CNCF was seeded with Kubernetes as its first project, and as we've seen over the last couple of years, Kubernetes has grown quite well, they have a large community, diverse contributor base, and have done kind of extremely well. They're one of actually the fastest, highest velocity open source projects out there, maybe only, compared to the kernel is maybe a little bit faster but it's just great to kind of see it growing. >> Why is it so hot right now? What's the catalyst? >> So I think if we kind of step back and we look at the trends in industry, right, more and more companies are becoming software companies, you know, folks like John Deere, building IoT platforms. You need some type of infrastructure to run this stuff, and especially at scale. You know, imagine sensors in every tractor, farm or in every vehicle, you're going to need serious infrastructure and cloud native really is a way to scale those type of infrastructure needs and so this is kind of I think why you're seeing a lot of interest being piqued in CNCF-related technology. >> A lot of prototypes too. >> Chris, see you know, it's interesting, I look back you know, a year or two ago, and it was like, oh, it was like the orchestration wars, it was Swarm versus Mesos, and now I look at it in the last year it's like, wait, Mesos fully embracing it, MesosCon they're going to be talking about how Mesos is the best place to you know, Kubernetes on DCOS, containerd now part of the container wars, so the container wars, we're going to talk about OCI, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, of course Google, out there at the beginning. Is there anybody that's not on board that Kubernetes... >> I mean we really have the top five cloud providers in the world, depending on what metrics you look at, part of CNCF, you know there's some others out there that still aren't fully part of the family. Hopefully if you stay tuned over the next week or so you may hear some announcements coming from CNCF of other large cloudy-type companies joining the family. >> Every week there's a new platinum sponsor (Chris laughs) and you guys are getting a check every week it seems. >> To me it's great to see companies stepping up to the play and actually sustaining open source foundations that are critical to the actual business, and I think that it's great to see this involvement. So to me I'm personally thrilled, 'cause otherwise we'd be in a situation where if the top five cloud providers in the world weren't part of CNCF, maybe they'd be trying to do their own initiative, so it's great that we have these companies at the table, and all trying to build, you know, find their own pathway to cloud-native. >> You guys are hyper-growth right now, and you're new too, you're still kind of you know, >> Chris: Less than two years old! >> I mean it's amazing. So I want to put a little Jim Zemlin test to you, (Chris laughs) which is, in his keynote today he talked about, this is the big kind of event for the whole community of open source to come together, and again, you're talking 64 million libraries out there now. He projected by 2026, 400 million, it literally is a hockey stick growth, so you got growth there, so he talked about four things, my summary. Project health, so healthiness, sustainability, secure code, training, new members. What's your strategy re those four things? Keeping the CNCF healthy, you don't eat too much and choke on all of that growth... >> Yeah, so in terms of projects, we have a very unique governance structure in place when we designed CNCF. So we kind of have this independent technical operating committee, we kind of jokingly refer to them as a technical supreme court, but they are made up of people from, kind of luminaries in the container cloud-native space, they're from competing companies too, but they try to really wear an independent hat and make sure that we're, projects that we're accepting are high quality, are a good fit for the foundation, and so it's actually fairly hard to get a project in CNCF, 'cause it really requires the blessing of this TOC. So, even though we have 10 projects now in about two years, I think that's about a project every two months, which is an okay pace. The other unique thing that we're doing is we have different levels of projects, we have inception, incubation and graduation. Right now, we have no graduated projects in CNCF, believe it or not, Kubernetes has not graduated yet because they're still finalizing their governance for the project and they're almost there. Once they do that, they'll most likely graduate. >> They'll walk cap and gown all nine yards, eh? >> Exactly, it'll be great. December we'll have the cap and gown ceremony. But the other unique thing is we're not, we do annual kind of reviews for some of our projects, certain levels will be annually reviewed, and if they're not longer healthy or a good fit, we're okay archiving them, or telling, you know, telling them you know, maybe you're not a good fit anymore for the foundation, or you know. And so I think you have to have a process in place where sometimes you do have to move things to the attic. >> Do you have a high bar on the projects >> The initial bar is extremely, extremely high, and I think over time, we may see some projects that get recycled or moved to the attic, or maybe they maybe merged together, we'll see, so we're thinking about this already, so... >> John: Okay, security? >> Security, so we, all projects in CNCF that graduate have to partake in the core infrastructures best practices badging program, so if the CII has this great effort that is basically helping to ensure projects meet a minimal level of best practices that make their projects secure. You know, it doesn't give you like full-blown guarantee, but these are good practices. >> So you were leveraging pre-existing work, classic, open-source ethos. >> Exactly, and they have like a set of domain experts completely focused on security building out these practices and you'll notice Kubernetes recently merged in the CII Best Practices badge, so if you go to the readme, you'll actually see it, and you'll click through and you'll see all the things that they've had to sign off and check on that they participate in, and so all of our projects are kind of going >> Training. >> Training, yeah, we just recently announced couple things. One is we have a >> Looking good so far, you get an A plus. >> Yeah, so as of today we've launched the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Program or CKA for short. So we have folks that are getting trained on, and are having official stamps that they are certified Kubernetes administrators, and to me that's huge, given like how hot the space is, having some stamp of approval that they are really certified in the space is huge. So we also offer free training through edX, so we launched some training courses earlier, and to be honest, if you look at our member companies, lots of great folks out there providing training material. >> So one of the keynotes that Christine Corbett Moran was talking about in her keynote was, more inclusion so there's no ruling class. Now I know you really have a ruling class going on with your high bar, I get that. How are you getting new members in, what's the strategy, who are the new members, how are you going to manage the perception possibly that a few people control the swing votes at potentially big projects? >> So here what's interesting is, people joining CNCF, like I mentioned before, we have a TOC, right? So there's kind of this separation of, I don't say church and state, but like, so the governing board, people who pay to join CNCF, they pay to sustain our open source projects, and so essentially they help with, they pay for marketing, staff, events and so on. They actually don't have technical influence over the projects. You don't have to be a member to have technical influence over our projects. People join CNCF because they want to have a say in the overall budget of how marketing, events and stuff, and just overall support the organization. But on the technical side, there's this kind of firewall, there's an independent TOC, they make the technical decisions. You can't really pay to join that at all, you have to actually be heavily participating in that community. >> John: How does someone get in that group? Is there a code? >> They have to just be like a luminary, we have a kind of election process that happens every two or three years, depending on how things are structured, and it's independently elected by the CNCF member community, essentially, is the simplest way I can explain it. >> The other announcement you talked about, kind of the individual certification, but the KCSP sort of programs >> Correct, exactly. >> Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. >> Yes, so we had a program set up so it's Kubernetes Certified Service Provider, KCSP, that basically >> rolls right off the tongue >> I know, right, exactly. Herbal space program, whatever, I think of sometimes video games when we say it, but essentially, the program was put in place that a lot of end users out there in companies that are new to cloud native, and they're new to Kubernetes, essentially want to find a trusted set of partners that they can rely on, services and other things, so we created KCSP as a way to vet a certain set of companies that have at least a minimum of three people that have passed the Kubernetes certification exam that I talked about, and are essentially participating upstream in some way actively in the Kubernetes community. So we got a couple handfuls of companies that have launched, which is great, and so now, given that we're growing so fast, companies out there that are early end users that are exploring the space now have a trusted set of companies that go look at, and we're hoping to grow that program over time too. So this is just phase one. >> All right, so Chris, the other thing that I want to make sure we talk about, the Open Container Initiative, so I think it was originally OCP, which of course is, >> Open Container Project which when OCP was announced, it was like, okay, the cold war of Docker versus CoreOS versus everybody else, (Chris laughs) trying to figure out what that container format was, we all shook hands, I took a nice selfie with Ben who was CEO at the time, and everybody. So 1.0 is out. So, container's fully mature, ready to be rolled out right? But what does it mean? >> So I mean it's funny 'cause I basically joined the Linux Foundation, to help both start CNCF and OCI around the same time, right, and OCI was very narrowly scoped to only care about a small set of container-specific issues. One around how do you actually really run containers, start, stop, all that kind of life cycle bit, and how are containers laid out on disk, we call that the image specification. So you have the runtime spec and the image spec, and those are just very limited core pieces, like that OCI was not opinionated on networking or storage or any of, those are all left to other initiatives. And so after almost two years, we shipped 1.0, we got basically all the major container players to agree that this is 1.0 and we're going to build off from this, and so if you look at Docker with it's containerd project, or you know, fully adopting OCI, the Mesos community is, Cloud Foundry, even AWS announced their container register's supporting OCI, so we got the 1.0 out there, now we're going to see an abundance of people building tools and other things. I think you'll see more end users out there exploring containers. I've talked to a lot of companies that I can't necessarily name, but there's a lot of folks out there that may not dive into container technology until there is actually a mature standard and they feel like this technology is just not going to go away or they're going to get locked into some specific platforms. So, with 1.0 out the door, you'll see over the next six to 12 months, more tools being built. We're actually working to roll out a certification program so you get that nice little, you know, hey, this product is OCI-certified and supports the spec, so you'll see that happen over the next... >> Okay, so you've got the runtime spec and the image format spec, >> Yep, those are the two big ones. >> All 1.0, we're ready to roll, what's the roadmap >> Yeah, what's next. So there are early discussions about what other mature areas are out there kind of in container land right now. There are some discussions around distribution, so having a standard API to basically fetch and push container images out there. If you look at it, each container registry has basically a different set of APIs, and wouldn't it be nice if we could all kind of easily work together and have maybe one set, a way to kind of distribute these things. So there are some early discussions around potentially building out a distribution specification, but that's something that the technical community has to decide within OCI to do, and so over the next couple of months we're having some meetings, we're doing a bigger meeting at DockerCon Europe coming up in October to basically try to figure out what's really next. So I think after we shipped 1.0 a lot of people took a little bit of a breather, a break, and say like, congratulate themselves, take some vacation over the summer, and now we're going to get back into the full swing of things over the next couple of months. >> Say, what's the big conversation here, obviously at your event in Austin, it's got a plug for, theCUBE will be live covering it as well. >> I know, I'm excited. >> What's the uptake, what's the conversation in the hallways, any meetings, give us some >> Yeah, so we're doing >> I know there's some big announcement coming on Wednesday, there's some stuff happening >> Yeah, so, you know, first coming Wednesday, so like I mentioned, we have 10 projects right now in CNCF. We have two projects currently out for vote. So one of them is Envoy. There's a company you've probably heard of, Lyft, ride-sharing company, but Envoy essentially is their fancy service mesh that powers the Lyft platform, and many other companies out there are actually taking advantage of Envoy. Google's playing around with it, integrating into the Istio project, which is pretty powerful, but Envoy is currently, it was invited by the TOC for a formal vote, the voting period started last week, so we're collecting votes from the nine TOC members, and once that voting period is hopefully we can announce whether the project was accepted or not. The other project in the pipeline is a project called Jaeger, which is from Uber, you know, nice to have Uber >> John: Jaegermeister. >> Yeah, Jaegermeister, a bit like it. It's nice to have a product from Uber, another product from Lyft, kind of it's nice to see >> And if you have too much Jaeger, you have to take the Lyft to get home, right? >> Exactly, correct. So you know, just like Envoy, Jaeger is, you know, was formally invited by the TOC, it's out for vote, and hopefully we'll count the votes soon and figure out if it gets accepted or not. So Jaeger is focused on distributed tracing, so one problem in micro-services land is once you kind of like refactor your application to kind of be micro-services-based, actually tracing and figuring out what happens when things go wrong is hard, and you need a really good set of distributed tracing tools, 'cause otherwise it's like the worst murder mystery, you have like no idea what's happened, so having solid distributed tracing solution like Jaeger is great, 'cause in CNCF we're going to have a project called OpenTracing, but that's just kind of like the spec of how you do things, there's no full-blown client-server distributed >> For instance you usually need it for manageability >> Exactly, and that's what Jaeger provides, and I'm excited to kind of have these two projects under consideration in CNCF. >> Is manageability the hottest thing going on right now in terms of conversations? (Chris sighs) Or is it more stability and getting projects graduating? >> Yeah, so like our big focus is like, we want to see projects graduate, kind of meet the minimum bar that the TOC set up for graduated projects. In terms of other hot areas that are under discussion in CNCF are storage, so for example we have a storage working group that's been working hard to kind of bring in all the vendors and different storage folks together, and there's some early work called the container storage interface, we call it CSI for short, and so you know there's another project at CNCF called CNI, which basically tried to build a standard around how networking is done in container land. CSI is doing the same thing because, you know, it's no fun rewriting your storage drivers for all the different orchestration systems out there, and so why not get together and build out a standard that is used by Kubernetes, by Mesos, by Cloud Foundry, by Docker, and just have it so they all work across these things. So that's what's happening, and it's still early days, but there's a lot of excitement in that. >> Okay, the event in Austin, what can people expect? Cube-Con. >> You're literally going to have the biggest gathering of Kubernetes and cloud-native talent. It's actually going to be one of our biggest events probably for the Linux Foundation at all. We're probably going to get 3-4,000 people minimum out there, and I'm stoked, we're going to have some... Schedule's not fully announced yet. I do secretly know some of the keynotes potentially, but just wait for that announcement, I promise you it's going to be great. >> And one question I get, just I thought I'd bring it up since you're here in the hot seat, lot of people coming in with, supporting you guys on the governing side, not even cyclical. How are you going to service them, how are you going to scale up, do you have confidence that you have the ability to execute against those sponsorships, support the members, what's your plan, can you share some insights, clarify that? >> You know, pressure makes diamonds, right? We have a lot of people at the right table, and we are doing some hiring, so we have a couple spots open for developer advocacy, technical writing, you know additive things that help our project overall. We're also trying to hire a head of marketing. So like, we are in the process of expanding the organization. >> Do you feel comfortable... >> I feel comfortable, like things are growing, things are moving at a fast clip, but we're doing the best we can to hire and don't be surprised if you hear some announcements soon about some fun hires. >> Well it's been great for us covering, we've been present and creating, if you will, this movement, which has been kind of cool, because it kind of a confluence of a couple of things coming together. >> Chris: Yeah, absolutely. >> It's just been really fun to watch, just the momentum from the cloud really early days, 2009 timeframe to now, it's been a real nice ride and congratulations to the entire community. >> Thank you, like for me it's just exciting to have all these companies sitting together at the same table, having Amazon join, and the other top fighters, all basically committing to saying, we are in the cloud-native, we may have different ways of getting there, but we're all committed working together at some level. So I'm stoked. >> Great momentum, and you guys doing some great work, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> And you know it's working when I get focused, hey can you, so and so, I'm like, oh yeah, no problem, oh wow, they're big time now, you guys are big time. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's in phase one now, like we have the right people at the table >> Don't screw it up! (John and Chris laugh) As they say. It's on yours. Chris Aniszczyk, who's the COO of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, the hottest area of Linux Foundation right now, a lot of action on cloud, cloud-native developers where DevOps is meeting, lot of progress in application development. Still, they're really only two years old, get involved, more inclusion the better. It's theCUBE, Cube coverage of CNCF. We'll be in Austin in December. >> Chris: Yep, six to eight. >> December 6 to 8, we'll be there live. More live coverage coming back in Los Angeles here for the Open Source Summit North America after this short break.

(exciting music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversations at our Palo Alto studio, taking advantage of a little break in the conference season to catch up with some people, and a little bit of a quieter time's kind of nice. We're really excited to have our next guest. first time on theCUBE. He's Bob Glotfelty. He's the head of Supplier Success at Taulia. Bob, welcome. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. So for people that aren't familiar with Taulia give us a little information on what's Taulia all about. >> Yeah, so we're a financial supply chain company. And we help businesses get paid early when they need cash. So if you do business with a large buyer, you can use Taulia to receive money early, earlier than your normal net payment. >> So, cash flow is always important especially >> in small businesses. >> Bob: Always >> So why Taulia? What's different than if I just did factoring or went to my local bank or whatever? How do you guys fit and what's kind of your value of that service there? >> Yeah. So we work with really large brands common household names, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, John Deere, brands like that. And we allow them to offer early payment financing to their entire supply chain. So these big multinational companies, they have tens of thousands of suppliers, all of them looking for the ability to get cash when they need it. And for us it's just a click of a button away and you can get paid and get any sort of cash flow you need right then and there. >> Right. So you're obviously kind of a network >> Bob: We are. >> You're in between parties and generally it's a one way direction in terms of who's the supplier and who the buyer is for a particular transaction. So how do you go to market? You mentioned a bunch of big names, I assume there's a bunch of big name suppliers but also small suppliers. You're in charge of those suppliers' success. So how do you go to market? It's always the classic kind of network problem, chicken and egg problem, right? You need the customers to make the network work, but you can't get the network working until you have people on both sides. So how do you guys kind of solve that puzzle going to market? >> Yeah, so today we have over two million businesses >> Jeff: Two million >> Two million >> Jeff: I guess you solved the chicken and egg problem. >> We solved the chicken and egg. We see pretty good network effects at this point but the way we go to market is to first sell the very large brands. And they bring their supply chain onto our network where they can do invoicing and see the status of their invoices and payments, deliver purchase orders, any sort of financial transaction between the parties. But the real nugget of value is the ability to get paid early. So yeah, we have about 130 billion dollar plus companies that act as the payer for that early payment and their supply chains are pretty sizeable so that's how they get that number up to two million. >> And then you guys just take a little piece of the transaction I imagine. >> In some cases, yes. In other cases we do it for a subscription, but primarily yes. >> Okay. So it's interesting we've been having a lot of conversations about engagement and kind of lifetime value of the customer versus transactional. Obviously, a payment is a very transactional thing. How do you guys think of the world not purely in terms of transactional and try to get more of a deeper relationship with the customers? >> Yeah, so I think the piece there that you really want to think about first is who is our customer? It's really obvious that these big global brands are a customer of ours. They pay us. And we're taking a fee on that transaction. That makes sense. But a real shift that we did about two years ago was to really view the supplier as the customer in the equation and making their experience absolutely the best it can be and that shift has brought implications in terms of how we've gone to market and how we've serviced these companies. Some of them are huge. We have billion dollar plus companies that are receiving payments from other billion dollar companies. And then we have the flower shop down the road and they do four invoices a year and it's this full market from the biggest companies in the world to the smallest. All looking for cashflow on their own terms. And it's a pretty effective solution for everybody in that chain. >> So it's pretty easy to identify fortune 50, fortune 100, send a sales person out there and get it done. It's a completely different animal toward kind of the broad side of that supply chain network so how do you service them? How do you stay engaged with them? A lot of them, I'm sure, cannot support a direct sales effort. It's just too expensive for the transactional volume or the dollars going through the system. So how are you approaching them and as to your title, helping them be successful? >> Yeah, so you're absolutely right. If you have a small mom and pop shop they might have the highest need, but you can't afford to have a sales person call them and say, "Hey we have this great opportunity for you." So for them it has to be extremely low touch but really effective, really easy, really simple. And so for them they receive an email from us, log in, takes about 35 seconds and once they're in, they can see their invoices, take an early payment. We take all of the effort away for them. And it's so easy to do because we've worked with these large companies before that to get them live and pull all these invoices, all this information into our system and just make it really easy and self service. For the larger companies, we have one pair of buyer and supplier that transact over a billion dollars on our network and for them it's very high touch because, as you can imagine, that level of transaction.. You can have a lot of sales people calling. >> Right. So I got a lot of questions running through my head. But I'm curious, just on this billion dollar to billion dollar connection, again, what value do you add that two billion dollar entities couldn't just work out between themselves? >> So it's an interesting dynamic, right? So if you're billion dollar company A, and you're working with your customer, you want to get paid as soon as possible. You want your money on day one. I provide the service, pay me. A billion dollars over the course of a year, right? That's a lot of money >> Greg: That's real money. >> If you're the payer, well, what if I could just hold my billion dollars a little bit longer.. I get interest on that, I can invest that elsewhere, so there's working capital in play for both sides. And so there's this dynamic where both people want the money. One wants it now and one wants to pay it later. And we're the intermediary that makes that transaction seamless. >> Right. And it's interesting, we talked a little bit before we turned that cameras on is that you guys can add a lot more granularity in the transactional options that aren't traditionally offered beyond one or two or three kind of three percent, 15, net 30. You guys can kind of break that down to almost create a marketplace of what's the right number on a much larger continuum than just those two options. >> Yeah, so that concept is referred to as dynamic discounting. And it's different than a traditional early payment term in that, you know, you said three percent, 15, net 30, it's pretty expensive, but okay. On day 20, the invoice gets approved and you're not going to get paid til day 30. Well in that traditional term, you just wait. And on day 30 you make that payment at zero. But both parties could benefit if, on day 20, it could be a two percent discount or on day 25 a one percent discount so we use a sliding scale to say, this is the daily rate so if you get paid late or even before that day 15, the rate adjusts and both parties are happy with that outcome. >> Interesting. So you're here as part of Marketo covereage. So how do you use Marketo? How have you been using it? I think you said this kind of supplier side initiative.. Smaller supplier side has been a couple years old, has this been a part of that effort? And give it a little color on what Marketo let's you do that you couldn't do before. >> Yeah, so personally a big fan of Marketo. I've been using Marketo now for a little over three years. And I used it on our marketing team when we were selling the big buyer customers, right? We've probably used Marketo now for I think five or six years and yeah we love it. So the big transformation that we did about two years ago was this sort of strategic shift from looking at just these buyers, these payers as our customers, and really looking at the suppliers. The ones receiving money. And we implemented Marketo strictly for them as a sort of a second step, we have two instances of Marketo and it's to engage our users at pretty much every touch point along the life cycle between first hearing about who they are all the way to taking early payments, submitting invoices, and doing all of these various aspects on our network. >> And what are some of those kind of engagement touch points that you do outside the core transaction and how are you measuring success on engagement specifically? >> Yeah, I think we probably touch everything in terms of our marketing stack and what we do. As long as it's something that's targeted. So for us, advertising, doing pay per click advertising it doesn't really help us. We know who the user is, we know who their company is, and we want to target them, so it's more of an account based marketing at scale and we're trying to sort of touch them in any of those tools. So heavy on email, direct mail, retargeting, things of that nature. Some industries, we even use fax. So whatever touch points we can get into a business where we can target that individual or that company, we use. How do we measure success? It's a variety of things, it's engagement. How frequently is somebody logging in? How often are they logging in? How much are they doing on the network? Are they submitting invoices through us? Are support calls going down? But then, ultimately, the big piece of value is do they choose to take an early payment and are they boosting their own cash balance through us? >> I would imagine you're way focused on getting many more transactions through the machine once you have a customer, you know, kind of that point to point relationship set up between two entities. Huge opportunity to do more, kind of, spread their wings within the network and run more transactions through. >> Yeah, and so every time we bring on a new buyer or a new payer, a new billion dollar entity that's making payments, we want to engage them and get them into that dynamic of saying, hey, I'm getting early payment with one and yeah maybe my terms are different or there's different relationships going on, but we're always trying to build the network, build engagement, build their recognition of us, so they think, hey I have a capital project coming up and it's really expensive. I should just take an early payment. That's right there. There's no paperwork, it's not debt just click the button, there's the money. And we want to be top of mind for them at any time, and it's necessary 'cause with two million suppliers, you don't necessarily know when they're going to have a need and the way we've solved that is through engagement. >> Right. So as you look forward, I can't believe were almost to August I usually say, "What's your plan for 2017?" but we're kind of past most of 2017. But as you look forward, kind of, what are your priorities as you guys move forward? You said you've been at this latest initiative for a couple years, what are you looking forward to down the road, what are some hurdles that you want to overcome, and what are some successes that you are kind of striving towards? >> Yeah, so if I look at our team that does this today, two years ago it was zero. Today it's about 20. And we're a company of about 250. So we've gone from essentially minimal focus on this to about 10 percent of the company. And for a software company, that's quite significant and that's just folks that are 100 percent dedicated to the experience and the education of our suppliers. We have an entire support team and all these other teams that interact, but a customer success focus of 20 is pretty good growth so I think when I look out a lot of it will be continuing to expand on what we've done. I think we've only begun to touch on the surface of the need that these suppliers have and we haven't done enough touch points with all of them, both big and small And we're continuing to see the hockey stick go straight up. So it's continuing to add fuel onto the fire of these existing initiatives that we've been doing. >> That's great and you talked, again, a little bit before we turned the cameras on about, you know, this has really significant impact and can make or break a company and you obviously feel that. >> Yeah, so I've spoken with many companies that just couldn't be happier to have a finance instrument right there for them whenever they need it. And I've spoken with some that say that, you know, hey we were close to going out of business we expanded too quickly or we didn't quite understand how long it was going to take to get paid and you get in these liquidity crunches, and if you're a small business or a relatively young business, the banks won't finance you. And so we've had some that they're in business today because they're able to leverage that opportunity, and it's not just those that are looking to save their business, it's a lot that are looking to grow. Right, they're saying-- >> Greg: Growth can kill you right? It's like the joke, you have some little product and you know, guess what? You just got a PO from Walmart. Guess what? You just got a PO from Walmart. >> Exactly >> And you've suddenly got a really big debt 'cause you got to put a lot of bits and parts together to get that shipment out to fill all the stores, so growth is as bad, if not a worse problem on the cash flow side, than not growing. >> Yeah, and so we fill that gap. And for many small businesses, we're the best option out there both in terms of price, but hands down the easiest, so it's a pretty effective thing and you talk to these businesses and you hear how happy they are to be so much more successful while using Taulia you can't help but be really happy for them. >> Alright, well, Bob thanks for stopping by >> Yeah of course. >> And sharing the story of Taulia, and for businesses out there that need cash, Go to Taulia. T A U L I A. Not quite like it sounds so thanks again for stopping by, and really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thank you. Happy to be here. >> Alright he's Bob Glotfelty from Taulia I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (exciting music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, Rachel Mushahwar is here, from Intel. She's the general manager and head of America's Industry Sales, and she's joined by Jason Kimrey, who's Managing Director of America's Sales at Intel. Folks, welcome to theCube, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright so Rachel, let's start with you. First of all, this event, you guys are partners with Nutanix, we'll get into that in a minute, but what's Intel doing here, what's the vibe of the event, what are you talking about? >> So there's a variety of things that we're talking about, first of all, Nutanix is a fabulous partner of ours, but it's not just about the technology that Intel is supplying to Nutanix, and that's what's great about this event, is you see so many different business folks that are focused on what are the right outcomes for their businesses, and how do you start to use technology to solve business problems, and that's a big part of what Intel is helping companies do, it's all about the digital transformation, and how to keep pace with your competitors, so that you don't fall behind, or worse, fall off the Fortune 500 list, like most companies have done. >> So Jason, how's that conversation translate into the discussions you're having with customers? >> You know I think digital transformation, that topic is everywhere, and there isn't a company on the planet that isn't trying to figure out how to transform their business through digital, and at Intel there's pretty much two ways the company can transform their business, either through culture, or through technology, and we see Intel playing a key role in being that technology enabler to a digital transformation strategy, and that's a big part of our conversations and our strategy with Nutanix, is how to enable companies to be more data driven, move towards a more on demand infrastructure, be more secure, and really look at how we can help companies adopt those technologies faster. >> And frankly, how do we help them move more quickly, right? The average age of a company used to be about 60 years. The average age of a company today is less than 12 years old. Think about what that means from a digital transformation perspective, and how fast companies have to move to adapt to what consumers are expecting, and that's a big part of what we do. >> So Jason, I'm glad you mentioned data, so Rachel, you were talking about digital transformation, it's kind of a buzz word that's thrown around, but when we unpack it, it seems like it's all about the data. Becoming data driven, digital means data. We just saw Amazon buy Whole Foods, and you would never think that a retailer would get into the grocery business like that, but data allows you to sort of jump these industry value chains. So I wonder if you could talk about digital disruption and the data relevance. >> So there's a variety of digital disruptions that are happening across every industry, whether you're, you know, retail, or you're a transportation company, or you're a health and life sciences company. Data is at the heart of all of that, and figuring out how do I address what my consumers are looking for, in as close to real time as possible. How do you make those decisions just like that so that you can provide those answers back to you consumers? Amazon, is it a retailer, is it a supply chain company, it's all of... >> Content company. >> It's all of those things, and a lot of companies are taking a step back saying "Holy moly, how do we start "to transform everything all at once, "and how do we use technology "to leapfrog where are competitors are?" They don't want to be knocked off that Fortune 500 list. Who's saw >> Yeah, that... >> Yeah, go ahead. That's what's... There's just so many cool examples of where traditional mainstay companies are integrating digital, and becoming data companies almost overnight. We looked at John Deere, which is one of these old line agriculture companies that's really now a data company, they're applying analytics to help do more crop forensics and determine what the optimal time to plant. They're using IOT with the use of drones to survey fields. They're even using autonomous driving capabilities, inputting sensors in directly into the equipment to make sure that they're planting within, you know, driving large 120 foot wide pieces of equipment to one inch of accuracy. Just seeing incredible use of technology, and it's all centered around better use of data to transform their business. >> I mean John Deere comes up a lot, we hear that example. Do you feel like they're sort of a leading edge of the bell curve, or are they to the more mainstream now? I mean they're certainly a mainstream company, but I feel like they're advanced, in terms of their data, more advanced than the average bear, with their data usage, what do you think? >> What's interesting about that is between now and 2018, the board of directors from all of the major companies out there will have digital transformation as part of their agenda. Probably about 60% of all of the companies that we talk to are talking about some level of digital transformation, so it's not just John Deere. You think about all of the big brands, especially with some of the big changes that are happening from a technology perspective, whether it's autonomous driving, it's you know, the use of the smartphones, right? Apple just celebrated what, it's tenth birthday for an iPhone? This is the least amount of change that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. Just because of how fast technology is moving. >> So Jason, we've been interviewing Intel I think every show we go to, the cloud shows, server storage, you know, across the board. How did Nutanix differentiate itself, how do you partner with them? Understand of course, they've got the x86, but a lot of it's software, the hooks that Intel's been building for a long time. Bring us a little bit inside some of the sausage making. >> We've been talking about re-imagining the data center for years, and I think what's been really cool about Nutanix is they really are bringing that concept alive, and really re-imagining the data center platform. And I think what we've done is through silicon and a lot of our enabling technologies, we've always tried to provision those up for our partners to build innovation on top of, and Nutanix has done as good of a job as anyone, has really taken advantage of those capabilities, and bringing them to their customer in a way that they can consume and digest quickly, implement quickly, and really start moving fast on a data center transformation strategy, almost overnight. >> So you talked about the digital transformation, Nutanix is one of those leading indicators out there, as a strategic partner for us, of how do you help companies evolve to what they need to be to make consumer demand, and using some of those amazing data center technologies, and re-imagine what the data center looks like, that's Nutanix. >> Yeah, and Rachel, it's curious, you know, I said I've yet to find a CIO that said they have a convergence challenge or issue. Talked to lots of companies that are trying to figure out their cloud strategy, but it's more how are they transforming into being more a software company? I interviewed a large financial service company that says "We're going to be a software company that happens "to deliver these type of solutions." So what are those critical issues that your customers are talking to and how do you see Nutanix, you know, you said they're helping with the digital transformation, how do they get there? And how do they do even more? >> So there's a variety of ways that Nutanix is really transforming that whole data center industry, and a big part of it is time to market. One of the biggest roadblocks from a CIO's perspective, as you said, it's not about what they want to do, it's about how they go do it, and they start running up against a variety of roadblocks, of "Oh my gosh, that particular application stack "isn't certified on this, or this software won't work "on this hardware", and all of a sudden, a project that should take three to six months is now over a year, right? Time kills all deals, and it includes, it, you know, kills all innovation. So with the Nutanix and Intel platform, that time to delivery is shrunk so dramatically. You don't have to worry about certifying all those different types of things, and when you go to an upgrade, it's invisible. That's the way technology should be, it should just work. When you answer your phone, do you think about it not working? >> Yeah. I want to go back, you said 10 years ago was the slowest that things will ever be, if you look going forward. How do you find customers are keeping up with this? Continuous innovation, continuous change, continuous updates coming. We used to just know the tick tock of Intel, and that made upgrades a little bit easier, Now it's a software world. How do you find customers are keeping up with it, how do they try? >> So I think customers are struggling with how fast technology is moving, but one way to start to start to keep up with it is to use products like Nutanix. It takes some of the guesswork out of a variety of things in your data center. >> So how should we think about Nutanix inside of the Intel? I mean Intel is the gold standard of how to build an ecosystem. Where does Nutanix fit? How should we think about this new type of company? >> I think it starts with looking at them not as a hardware company, as much as a software company. They are truly agnostic across the platform that they deploy on. Their whole goal is to extract the applications from the hardware that it sits on, and I think really providing cloud-like capabilities for an on-prem environment so I think that's a pretty big differentiator, because they really have this software platform that runs on multiple Intel based hardware platforms, and our goal working with them is to really help proliferate that as quickly as we can because it really creates an upgrade path and a path towards transformation much quicker than was historically possible. >> So we call that, what you just described, cloud-like on prem, we call it true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the public cloud, we came up with that term because there were so many fake private clouds out there. You obviously, you see the growth, in all these markets, and the decline in many markets. You see the public cloud explode. We see this notion of mimicking the public cloud on-prem as a huge growth area. Are you seeing the same thing, can you add some color to that narrative? >> When we talk to customers, again, across multiple industries, whether it's an energy industry, it's a transportation industry, it's manufacturing, you name the industry, they're all struggling with the same thing. Yes, public cloud is exploding, but a lot of CIOs are taking a step back saying, "Hey, there's some part of my data "that I want to keep absolutely inside of my private cloud. "There's some data that I always want "to keep on prem, and there's some pieces that I want "to put out to the public cloud." So we're seeing a lot of companies kind of normalize back in that middle, where the pendulum swung so far to the right of "Hey, boom, public cloud", and now I think they're taking a step back from a privacy and security perspective saying "What's the happy medium here?" >> I think we just, public Cloud, which we love, did an incredible job of making people aware of how quickly it was possible to deploy resources or deploy VMs very quickly, in a way that was never possible before in an on-prem environment. Partners like Nutanix, and I would say Nutanix really led a lot of this, really bringing that public cloud capability to an on-prem environment. The application at rationalization and the application virtualization, a lot of those capabilities that were very simple in a cloud environment are now just as simple in an on-prem environment. That's why we see that normalization that Rachel was talking about. >> So just when we thought that this was a zero sum game, it was like public cloud versus on-prem, IOT comes in and advances in connectivity and data, it's like a tide that lifts all boats. What are you guys seeing in IOT, maybe you can make some comments there? >> Sure. So I think IOT is just beginning to catch the next wave. For a while folks have been talking about the internet of things and how it's going to help transform industries, and how you can use sensors to detect everything from soil erosion, as related to the John Deere, to "What are we doing for an average consumer "who walks down in the aisle in your favorite retail store. "How do we start to deliver them personalized messages?" So IOT is again, changing that game and moving up that sigmoid curve of change. And you go back to, look, today, right now, at this moment, is the least amount of change that you'll see, in five minutes from now, there's going to be some other big tech announcement or some big evolution, and that's the beauty of where we sit in today's world. About every hundred years we enter this big change, or this big disruption, and this one is going to be driven by compute and Intel is all about compute. >> David: Are you guys paranoid? >> Absolutely >> I think we're excited, but paranoid as well. >> Only the paranoid survive. >> That's right, that's right. >> This data explosion through IOT, it really fuels what Intel calls our virtuous cycle of growth. The more data, the more endpoints, that hit the network, the more data that creates, the more requirement for data center and data capabilities >> I totally agree, we used to say it was kind of customers that were the flywheel, and data is the potential to be the flywheel for the next ten years. >> Jason: Yeah to Rachel's point, we're excited. >> Data is the new oil. But the magic is going to be in how we refine that data. >> Yeah, I mean, I always say data is plentiful, but insights aren't, and those companies that can find those insights, and gain a competitive advantage, and as you've been pointing out, both of you, Rachel and Jason, the cycles are so fast, one insight is not enough, it's not sufficient, you have to continuously innovate, speed is the game. >> Rachel: It is the game. >> And you guys play that game well, so thanks very much for sharing your insights. Great segment. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome, alright, keep right there everybody. Stu and I will be back right after this short break, this is theCube, we're live from DC, and Nutanix .NEXT, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. (futuristic electronic music) >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier looking to angle the Cube. My co-host, Peter Burris, head of research for SiliconANGLE media, also general manager of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Albrecht Powell who's the enterprise information management global lead at Accenture Analytics. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks very much. Good to be here today. >> John: See you're sporting the sideways A, not to be confused with siliconANGLE red A, which is the other way around. Great to have you on. >> That would be the accent on the future. (laughing) Our moniker. >> So, um. Great to have you on. Center analytics. A lot of people may or may not know-- huge investment in data science. You guy's are doing a lot of work, and integrating in with customers. Not just on the management consulting side, but, you know, a lot of the architecture, a lot of the delivery-- You essentially manage services across the board. >> Albrecht: Oh yeah. >> There's a lot of architecture going on, so I got to ask you about the data powered enterprise vision that you have, because that's the theme that you guys have. What does that mean, first of all? And how does it relate to Informatica World, and ultimately the customers just trying to get to the Cloud, lower their costs, increase their top line. What's the digital transformation connection? >> Boy, lots of questions in there. So, you know, to us, in the digital revolution that's happening right now, the expectations on companies are just growing exponentially. You've got customers, you've got shareholders, business partners. You've got stockholders that all have so much more insight on companies. They want more, and they're putting so many demands on companies today. So, it's causing disruption in the industry. We all know about the Uber's. We all know about going from print media to digital media. But you've got companies like John Deere; they sell tractors, right? But they're moving toward a platform based company now, where they're now working with farmers, they're working with agriculture, helping to support. So, when you've got that as a different business model, you've got that coupled with the explosion in data. So, you know, the statistics-- Amazon, I think it took six years to get their first trillion. Now it's you know, the next trillion they got in one year. By the year, I think 2020, 1.7 megabytes of data is going to be created per person per second. These are staggering numbers. And when you put those two together, I personally think that the next big wave, the next big value proposition for clients, is going to be data, and harnessing the power of that. When I look back over my 28 year career, I go back to the ERP days. That was the big wave. Right? You had to be on Oracle or SAP or PeopleSoft or JD Edwards. I think right now, we're just starting in this phenomenal wave of opportunity. >> You mentioned re-platforming, or platform approach. The word re-platforming is an industry buzzword. But that really is an impact to IT, business operations, and personnel, and ultimately the business model! I mean, this is like a serious impact. >> It really is, and that is where this data powered enterprise comes in. We're trying to work with our clients to figure out how to harness this value proposition, unlock the data that they've got stuck in their systems, the dark data wherever it may be, and unleash that and try to gain business insights from that. >> Alright. Take us through the playbook, because okay-- I buy it. I see the train coming down the tracks that is really high speed. I bet I got to move to the new model. You look at Amazon, it's a great proof point. Hockey sticks since 2010. No doubt about it. Just one tell sign. I want to move. Now, I got to be careful, if I move too fast I get over my ski's, or over-rotate-- whatever metaphor you want to use, but how do I get there? What are you guys doing with clients and what's the strategy? Playbook. >> You know, the biggest thing we try and do is the relationships we have with clients are long term, trust based relationships. And when we go in, we're not selling a product. We're trying to help them drive business value. So, what we typically do around the data space is help them figure out what's the strategy, what's the vision, where do they want to go? They may think they need a data quality solution, an MDM solution. But you know, we come in and we talk to them and we realize: what are you trying to get out of it? Where do you want to go? And lay out a vision, a set of guiding principles. And that framework often times help them drive within the next one-two years, a much more sustainable set of growth as opposed to trying to do a point solution. So typically, we'll start there. But, you know, we'll also come in if they're hemorrhaging, if they're bleeding, if they've got major problems. Or, if they're trying to hit a strategic adjective, procurement spend analytics, or growth, or disruption in the market. Those are the type of things that we'll come in and talk to them about to start with. >> Is there a mindset-- obviously, there's a mindset shift. But given that, certainly if the certain room's on fire, you take care of those first. I get the critical piece of it, 'cause sometimes it is mission critical right out of the gate. But, is there an architectural mindset? Is it a building blocks approach? Has there been a shift in how to deploy and iterate through, in an agile way, that you've seen a pattern that's emerged? >> I mean obviously Cloud is big with everybody today, and the hype out there is everybody's moving everything to Cloud. And in reality, a lot of our clients-- They've invested a lot in these data centers, so they're reticent to make the leap. So, we're working with them to help, and Informatica has been phenomenal with some of the tools and solutions that they have to help them pull over to you know, Cloud based solutions. And you know, most of our clients right now, they have a hybrid architecture. They're moving in that way. They've got some stuff that they want to keep close and tight, they've got some stuff that they want to move. But between OpenSource with the new subscription models-- For instance, and Informatica has. It's a game changer for our clients. Because now, they're able to get solutions up faster, quicker, and we do a lot of work with our liquid studios to help them pile at those type of solutions. >> But it's still got to be in service to some outcome, or to some idea? >> Albrecht: Absolutely. >> So, that suggests that one of the challenges that people have been having in the big data universe is this disconnect between what we want to do, and implementing a dupe on a cluster. And that notion of how do we actually introduce some of the concepts of design into that process so that we can see realistically, and practically, and in a way that executed, a process to go from the idea down to the actual implementation? So, use cases are a big issue. Getting developers more involved and active is a big issue. But, what is the role of design in this process? >> So one of the things that we've shifted to is we have a set of innovation centers, where we'll bring clients in, and we might start with a workshop or two, right? To talk to them about the capabilities. But very quickly we evolve that into design thinking sessions, to really draw out what's the real challenge they're trying to find? Because half the time, they think they know what the problem is, but they really don't, and we help them uncover that. And then, from a design standpoint, we do a lot more prototyping now, where we'll go through and actually build in a matter of weeks, a real time capability that they can go take and run with. We have this thing called the Accenture Insights Platform, where we've negotiated with a lot of partners, such as Informatica, to have their tools, their software, in a hot, ready Cloud-based environment, where again, in the matter of a couple of weeks, we can stand something up, and they can see it, they can touch it. It's no longer the big capital investments to go start these type of projects. >> But it has to again, be something that people can touch and can play with. >> Albrecht: Exactly. >> And start themselves, to start saying, "Well, yes, "it works here. It doesn't work here." So they can start iterating on it. It's a way of increasing the degree to which iteration is the dominant feature of how things roll out. Ties back to the use case. As you guys think about the tooling that's available, from Informatica and elsewhere, how does the tooling-- Is the tooling robust enough at this point to really support that process, or is there still some holes we have to fill? >> Yeah, you know, I almost feel like the technology is there, right? We can do so much. The challenge that I run into when I meet with the C-suite-- I always ask the question, "What's your holy grail question?" If you knew this piece of information, how would that be a game changer? Eight times out of ten, I hear, "If I knew sales by quarter by region, "and that is was accurate, "I could really do something." It's like, that's not your question. The question should be: Who should I acquire? When is a customer going to walk out of the store? What's the weather going to be? What's the minimum amount of water I need to put in a plant for it to grow? You, know, in a drought situation. And those are the kind of questions that we are trying to draw out from our clients. And again, these design thinking sessions help us drive to that. >> John: Is that liquid studio's and the innovation centers the same thing? You mentioned liquid studios. What is that? Real quick. >> They are. So, again the whole idea behind these studios is that instead of doing, you know, starting with a massive project, or driving a massive five year RFP for a program. Again, get it in a liquid fashion; very agile, very prototypical, you know, build something. >> John: Very fluid. (laughs) >> Exactly right. And so that they can see, touch, feel, and manipulate these things. And then from there, they may want to scale that up. And you know, they may do it themselves. Often times, they'll partner with us to do it. >> You're partnering in the real time requirements definition of what they're trying to do. >> Albrecht: Correct. >> Well, it must be organized. I saw on Twitter that Accenture received the Informatica Ecosystem Impact Award last evening. Congratulations. >> Albrecht: Thank you very much, I appreciate that. Very excited. >> Where did that come from, and why is it important to you guys? Obviously, the recognition with Informatica, you guys are doing well with them. >> Now, Informatica is a very strong strategic partner of ours. I mean, we've worked with them for the last 18 or so years. I personally been involved with them the whole time. The company has vision, you know, when you talk to Anel, you talk to Ahmet, who was just on-- The vision that they have for their products, they know where they want to go. The reinvention that they've done here with the new branding, and the new marketing-- A lot of our clients had traditionally thought of them as more the power center, and more the-- >> John: The plumbing. >> Exactly. >> John: I'll say it. >> And we keep challenging them. It's like, you know, why aren't you bigger? Why isn't everybody using you? Because I think the tool set is robust enough right now. And again, it's finding these use cases to be able to apply this. >> Well, they made a big bed. The joke in silicon valley right now, in infrastructure companies, is that plumbers are turning into machinists, as kind of an analogy. But now with machine learning, you're starting to see things that they've made a bed on that's flowering, and it's important. And I think they made some good bets. They'll be on the right side of history, in my opinion. But I want to ask you a personal question, because you know, you mention waves. You mention the ERP waves and the software wave of the mini computer, which then became local area networks, inter-networking, et cetera. Basically the premise of what IT has turned into. With now, the disruption that's going on, how is it different? Because Informatica seems to be on that same software cycle in a new way. What is different about this new world order that's different than those days, the glory days, of rolling out SAP implementations, or Oracle ERP and CRM's. Shorter time cycles. What are the things that you're seeing that are key things that customers should pay attention to, they need to avoid, and things they should double down on, relative to this new wave of software? And how does Informatica fit into all that? >> Sure. The ERP wave was critical. It was the way to get everything under one umbrella. Very important, right? But today, the idea of single instance, companies can't keep up. They can't do that. So it's the nimble, it's the agile. I'm really excited about Informatica is that they've got the end to end solution, which is phenomenal, but they've also got the piece parts. And there's a lot of our clients that you know, they're trying to integrate multiple ERP systems together, they're trying to integrate multiple platforms, so MDM is becoming much more important today. Data governance. Absolutely critical out there. They've had a gap, frankly, in data governance for years. And yeah their acquisition, their AXON tool-- Again, it's a game changer out there and a lot of our clients are aggressively looking at that, and trying to do that. >> Paul: How does it change the game for some of your clients? Give an example. You don't have to name the customer, but in the use case basis. >> Everybody needs, you know. We talk about the need for governance, right? And it comes into whether it's paper based, whether it's automation-- Some way to get processes standardization and so forth around governance, and get people accountable. The tools that have been out in the market-- There are some that are good, but they're not integrated. There's no interoperability between them. And what I like about AXON now is they can sell it as a single point solution. Great way to get in the door of a client. But, they can also then integrate that with all of the other platform pieces that Informatica has, and that tie is really powerful. >> Well, governance also plays a role when you think about, for example, the idea that we want greater distribution of data-- Data is going to be more distributed. We want some visibility into that data through metadata, and (mumbles) talked about that. But, we heard from healthcare conversation this morning, and others, that one of the big barriers is, do I have access? Do I have rights? Do I have privileges to this data? And governance has to follow that process where people know in advance: What rights do I have? What access do I have? Am I using it properly? Am I breaking rules? That notion of governance can't just be centered on compliance and regulation, it has to be moved into more of an asset management approach. Do you agree? >> Right. Agreed. And the way we look at governance, it's expanding now. It's not the traditional data-owner, data-steward, data-operator any more. >> Yeah, it's not the central group. It's a corporate set of responsibilities. >> Right. And we're rolling governance now out to the end-user. So, how they are looking at data and interacting with data. Because data, now, it's a utility. It is something that everybody touches, everybody uses, not just an IT thing anymore. When you take that, and again you take the expanse of that into security. You know, as you talked about-- Secured source for example. The play in tying the two of those together. Very powerful solution. And even within Accenture, you know, we're tying our data, our governance, our security practices, much more tightly together as a single, unified solution. >> John: How does the AI machine learn, 'cause we hear in Claire their new interface, see LX out there, and Amazon. I mean Google I/O's announcing neural nets that train computers! Certainly it's a lot of buzzwords out there. Does that make the master data management, and the MDM, and the data quality more relevant? Or less relevant? >> I think just as relevant as it's always been. There's a lot of people that sit and say that the traditional data stuff is a commodity now. And again, machine learning is absolutely essential, AI. We need that because we're scaling so much bigger out in industry today. But, MDM is not going away. The integration between platforms, the need for good data quality. And I think, we almost took a shift in the industry to the buzzwords. Right? It's all about big data and AI and everything, and in some ways we almost left the traditional behind. And now we're coming back to realizing that you need good data to power the different data sources you've got, the big data and everything else, that then needs to be scaled, and that's where the machine learning-- >> And freed up for developers who have a DevOps mindset don't want to get into the nuances of being a data wrangler. >> Well, the patterns of data usage are going to be important, thinking about MDM. Because at the end of the day, you're not going to have copies of everything. >> No. >> You're going to have relationships, increasingly. >> Right. >> Peter: And MDM has to be able to capture that, too. >> Exactly. >> Alright, final question I have to ask you, what's the future for you guys? What do you guys see? 'Cause you guys always got the top brains in the industry working on things. what is Accenture's view of the future? What's the most important things coming down after this wave? Or is this wave just multiple sets, and to your clients, what are the top three things, or top things that you guys see as future waves or items that you're working on? >> You know, again, this data wave right now-- Again, it's the most exciting time that I've ever had in the career. And I see the growth that we're doing. And you know at Accenture, we have a lot of investment in research and development, we've got a team of data scientists that's out trying to mine data, figure out, you know, what the insights are that are out there. The liquid studios that we're pulling together. And, you know, as we talk to our clients, it's all about the art of the possible. It's not so much trying to sell a tool or solution. That's obviously important. But, where can we take you? What are the things that the industry hasn't thought of yet that we can take you as a company and help you disrupt into a new business market? >> Re-imagining the future. Thanks for coming, Albrecht. Appreciate it. Albrecht Powell with Accenture Analytics. Exciting this time in the industry-- I would agree data is certainly intoxicating at one level, but really great value opportunity. Thanks for coming on the Cube, and sharing the data with us as we analyze. Here on the Cube, more great coverage after this short break. At Informatica World 2017, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more. (futuristic electronic music)