(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(active upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of Women in Tech global event, celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great guest, Cornelia Robinson, Who's the Senior Manager of the Global Inclusion and Outreach Programs at AWS, Amazon web services. Cornelia, welcome to this cube presentation. >> Thank you, so happy to be here, John. >> So you got a very interesting background, about involving in communities, you're in outreach and inclusion, which is awesome. International Women's Day is about global celebration. What's your role at AWS? Tell us more about what you do there and we'll get into some of the background and your experiences. >> All right. Thanks John. So, I lead a program that's called Inclusion and Outreach within AWS, specifically for our global data center community. So, AWS infrastructure is all over the world and we strive to make sure that in the places where we build and operate our cloud, that we're being good neighbors and also striving to be Earth's best employer. And so my role, it ultimately aligns both of those things into both inclusion and outreach. >> One of the things that we see with the cloud is it... There's always the talk, "Oh, democratization and..." If you see what cloud has done inside the global communities, it's been interesting. As regions expand, cloud computing has actually enabled kind of new things. You're seeing a lot more diversity inclusion, women events for instance, in Bahrain was one we saw a lot. Asia Pacific and all around the world you're seeing a lot more community because of the opportunities around the new applications and the new use cases is creating economic, but also empowering opportunities. And you've had a lot of experience in there and seeing some of these trends up close, what have you seen around this? Cause this is a new thing that cloud's enabling. This new revitalization inside these communities and areas. >> Yeah, cloud is definitely an enabler and it also enables people to scale, right? In ways that you wouldn't have been able to scale in the past. With AWS, it's like flip on a switch and all of a sudden you have access to so much compute power. It's actually incredible and it's exciting to be a part of this movement. >> How did you get started with AWS? >> I guess the way that I would describe it is tech kind of found me. I have an unusual background to be in tech. So, I graduated from law school and I was looking for a job and ended up in procurement. And then some years later, I got a call from AWS and I thought that it sounded like an interesting opportunity. I'd have an opportunity to build some new things and try some new things. And so, I said, "Hey, why not?" And that's how I ended up at AWS, starting out in our Northern Virginia office. And then I moved to Seattle for about five years. And now I'm back in the Northern Virginia area. >> So you're an Amazonian, true and true then. You've seen all the growth. But I think the thing about at Amazon is just that there's so much opportunities internally. A lot of people don't know that and I'd love to get your take on what it was like moving from procurement, which probably was very structured and good fit there, to Amazon Web Services, which was at that time just growing really fast and you built a global community program. So, kind of two worlds. Take us through that. >> Yeah, you're right. Procurement and community engagement are very different in many ways, but also very similar in many ways as well. With community engagement, we were completely starting from scratch with the idea of a structured community engagement program. Even though there was an element of community engagement that was happening in our infrastructure locations. So ultimately, the way that I ended up making that shift is that I was in an offsite, which is a team meeting, where people who have different functions come together and we were discussing opportunities that we had to just do a better job overall, because as you know, that's one thing that we're always looking at as Amazonians. It's how can we be better and show up better for our customers. We're always trying to start with our customers and work backwards to meet their needs. And so, one of the things that was identified in that discussion is community engagement. We had an opportunity to be even more engaged than we already were and to do it in a structured way. And so, I shot my hand up and said, "I like trying things, let me try this." And the rest is history. It's been about four years. >> And obviously you had to go through... (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) And all that procedure. Amazon is pretty open about ideas. Is that true? Is that a true thing? Is that what it's like there? People say that they'd like to try things and then if it works, they double down on it. Is that kind of how this went down? >> That's exactly how it went down, John. So, when I think about the process of working backwards, it's really something that never stops. And again, community engagement was all about working backwards from the needs of our customers. And in this instance, when I think about my customer, my customer is our community members. It's community members who live and work in our data center regions. And also our employees who are living and working and raising their families in those regions. >> What was the double down moment? When did you say, "Wow, this is working." When you developed this program. When were some of those moments, where you said, "Wow, this is actually working." And take us through some of those progressions. >> Some of the moments that really stand out to me are moments where I've been in the community and I say, "AWS." And someone says, "Oh, what's AWS?" And then you'll hear someone else chime in and explain, "Oh, AWS does all of these great things in the community." So, that actually happened. It was our very first AWS Girls' Tech Day, we'd scaled it from a small program into a global program. We went from having one in one year to having eight the next year around the world. And at this particular AWS Girls' Tech Day, someone did ask that question. It was a little girl. She was standing next to her sister. And when she asked me what AWS is, her sister looked at her and said, "You don't know what AWS is? "AWS does so much in our community "and AWS has this big space in my school." And she went on and on about how much she works with our employees and how excited she is about technology. And also those are those moments where you say, "You know what? This is working." And it's really working. >> That's awesome. What advice would you give people who are developing a community program? Because you're a pioneer, this has been a top priority for people now, in all companies and all groups, all tribes, as community is becoming a really important part of our fabric of society and business. People are sourcing information, they're sourcing relationships and jobs and in products. We are seeing a lot of organic community. What advice would you give folks who are developing a community program? >> There are few things. So, for me the biggest and most important thing is working backwards. So, start with your customer, who is your customer? It's really important to listen to them and to identify their needs. In this community engagement space, you have a lot of things being thrown at you all the time. You also have your own ideas and it's like, "Oh, it'd be really cool "if we did this thing." But is that really what the community needs? Is that really what the community wants? So, when I first started in this role, that was the most important thing and it continues to be the most important thing. I started picking up the phone, talking to people, going to a region, talking to folks who actually live and work in the community, understanding their perspectives, understanding their needs. There was a lot of discovery during that time. They were able to tell me things that I never would've even thought of. Never would've known, wouldn't have been able to consider because I wasn't a part of that community at the time. And so, that's the thing about becoming a community member, you got to be able to sit down and listen. And so, the principle of working backwards, it just applies so well in that instance. And so, that's the first thing. It's listening, understanding your customers, knowing who they are, and then trying to get as many perspectives as you can. And the next thing I would say is think big with your customers, right? And think big on behalf of your customers, but then from there, start somewhere. Because if you try to execute on the really big thing all at once, now, it may not go as well as you'd hoped it would. And you could actually diminish trust. So, we started working on just a couple of things based on customers needs. And as we were able to prove that they were successful and constantly get that feedback from customers saying, "Yeah, this works or that doesn't work." That's how we then eventually started to scale the program. >> Yeah. That trust angle, (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) because you look at trust. If you overplay your idea and it blows up, then no one's going to be motivated. Take little baby steps. I Love that insight. Great call out there. What about this Think Big Space you mentioned, and that other example about in the school, because I like this idea of having this Think Big Space that you pointed out. Is that just the place that you guys could provide? Or was that something that they did? The customer did or the community did? Can you share more about the Think Big Space? >> Yes. Our Think Big Spaces. So, the Think Big Space also started as a result of sitting down in a conference room with some teachers and administrators in a local school district, actually, here in the Northern Virginia area. And the teachers were talking about the fact that as teachers, there's a lot of emerging technology and it can be difficult to keep up with, what's next? What's current? What's next? What do we need? How do we help our students prepare for jobs that may not even exist right now? And so, it just seemed to align so well with our leadership principles within Amazon, learn and be curious, think big. And initially, they threw out the idea of a Tech Lab and we started working back and forth and thinking, "Well, how do we make this "a space where students would actually "come and learn and explore "and make things and get their hands dirty "and really be creative "and tie it back to technology "and just being really disruptive." And together, we came up with the idea of, "Hey, we got to teach students to think big." So, we started working on the first Think Big Space together. The school district actually hired an instructional lead and we worked with them to design curriculum and now there's a classroom, it's got eight Amazon's leadership principles on the walls and the students come in they are engineers for the day. And we've been able to scale that program globally to other locations. We've got Think Big Spaces in Ireland and Australia and India and of course in the US. And it's been really exciting to see how students get so excited when they're able to tinker and try new things. And they know that if they break something it's okay because we can come up with a way to fix it. And in the process of fixing it, they come up with something else. And we teach them about working backwards and it's just really fun. It's an exciting program to be a part of. And I've been excited just to see the growth and the way that our community members have benefited from it. >> It's really such an amazing program if you think about it because you're training builders and you're giving them a place to be disruptive, which is a natural part for young people to do and do it in a safe environment where they can build something and have fun doing it. It's amazing. >> That's right. So congratulations, that's a great program. Let me get into the theme here, on this International Women's Day around breaking the bias it's one of the core principles of this year's event globally and for International Women's Day, break the bias is the theme. Where do you see bias? and what would you like to see change? And what does change look like? >> Yeah. So, I would say, with the experience of setting up in communities, activities, and also collaborating with schools, what we see is that bias starts early. This is not something that people show up for work and all of a sudden there's all of this bias. There's bias in the way that young people and students are socialized. And so, you start to see things at an early age where girls may be encouraged to do things that are different. So, maybe girls are not encouraged to take on leadership roles or they're getting pushed into the arts. Of course, there's nothing wrong with arts, but we should be encouraging people to pursue certain areas based on interest and not on gender. And if we want to really break bias, we've got to think about the seeds that we plant. So, we've got to be really careful about what we say, how we nurture. It's about, "You can do this. "Yes. Try it, see." Not, "Oh, no, you shouldn't do this "because you're a girl." No, you're a girl and you belong here. You should be here. We need more people like you, you're going to do really big things. Like you've got to start telling students this at an early age, because all it takes, sometimes is one person to tell a student that they can't do something. And then if they believe them, then it can change their whole trajectory. And so, for me, when it comes to breaking the bias, it starts really early. It starts really, really early. >> Yeah. And I think... (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) Even like the Think Big program you mentioned, which sounds so exciting, it's just providing access. And I think having an open collaboration is key, but role models matter too. You want to see people in there too. I think this comes up a lot. what's your view on that? Because when you see people in positions, they're inspiring. And I think that also comes up a lot in these conversations. >> Yeah, definitely. When you see people in positions and you see people who look like you, you see yourself in that person and you say, "Hey, maybe if they can do it, "I can do it too." And so, it is important for us to have great strong role models who can show up and who can be there for students. That's one of the things that we try to do with our programming. So, as we develop programs like the Think Big Space, it's not just, "Okay, well we have a Think Big Space "and that's the end." It's we have a Think Big Space and our employees are coming into the Think Big Space. They're engaging with the student, they're volunteering, they're taking on causes in their community. And it provides that natural mentorship and ability for students to just see themselves. Because again, if you don't see yourself reflected, then you also may be receiving a message that says, "Okay. Well, that's not for me." >> Yeah. I was talking with a leader at AWS and she's in space area and we were talking about how the younger generation are nerd native, she called it. And they're born with inherent tech now. So, unlike when we were born, we had to kind of just found us, or we stumbled into it, or we got addicted somehow to tech. Now they got the tech around them. And I think this is an interesting new dynamic that could play well for the bias issue. And would love to get your reaction to that, as the generations come in, they're seeing all the world problems, they're seeing the digital transformation it's native to them. So, I wonder what your thoughts are. How we could be better at, I don't know, shaping the paths, pathways, multiple pathways. Seems to be many opportunities. So, if people are nerd native, how do we do that? So, we had a great riff on that. I'd love to get your reaction on that. >> Yeah. I think that we have to make sure that we are fostering this idea of playing outside of the box instead of in the box. It used to be with really traditional careers. If I want to be a doctor, I go to medical school, right. If I want to be a lawyer, I go to law school. If I want to work in tech, what do I do? Well, here's the thing, with tech, you're engaging in tech so much. I remember that when my nephew and nieces were little, before they could even read, they could do things on my phone. Like, I would get my phone and all of a sudden I had all of these game apps. How did they know how to do that? It's like you can't even read a word, but you can put all of these apps on my phone. They're engaging with technology. And so, how do we take that and nurture it and say, "Hey, just embrace it." Just put more technology in front of students, let them break things, let them fix things. I remember being a part of a panel with a woman who is an engineer and she said she became an engineer because she liked to break things though. So, she'd break her computer and she would get in trouble for it. She would be told, "Hey, figure out "how to put it back together." And so, if we can create more environments and encourage students that it's not about perfection, let's be inventive here. Let's try new things. Let's think outside the box. Think big, go find a solution. Go find an issue and work backwards from the issue that someone is having to come up with a solution that works and then get feedback. That process, that can start early. It doesn't have to be, once you're in a full fledged career, you can start that at any age. >> Cornelia, great insights. (voice distortion noise drowns out other sounds) My final question, what's new for you? What are you going to be up to? What's next? What are you going to break next? What are you going to do? >> So, what's new for me. I now lead Inclusion and Outreach within AWS for our data center community. And so, I'm back really to square one when it comes to doing a lot of listening, trying to understand. Understanding what the things are that are pain points within and outside of the organization. And I'll be working with employees and community members to continue iterating, and to continue solving problems and working together on those solutions. And so, I'm really excited about it. Hopefully, at some point we'll be able to come back together and I'll be able to give you some insight and how that's going. >> Well, we certainly will. We appreciate your time and thanks for joining our cube community. We really appreciate it. You're now cube alumni. Our door is always open here at theCUBE, and we want to hear more of those stories. We're going to do a lot more coverage, a lot more sharing of stories, certainly in this area, that's important and we're committed to it. Thank you for your time today and sharing the insights and your experience on the Women in Tech celebration of International Women's Day. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. Happy International Women's Day. >> Okay. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching the presentation of Women in Tech global event, celebrating International Women's Day. This is the season one episode one, of our ongoing program that we're going to have here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft instrumental music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to the DockerCon 2021 virtual coverage. I'm John Furrie host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto with a remote interview with a great guest Cuban alumni, Jim Walker VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs. Jim, great to see you remotely coming into theCUBE normally we're in person, soon we'll be back in real life. Great to see you. >> Great to see you as well John, I miss you. I miss senior live and in person. So this has got to do, I guess right? >> We we had the first multi-cloud event in New York city. You guys had was I think one of the last events that was going on towards the end of the year before the pandemic hit. So a lot's happened with Cockroach Labs over the past few years, accelerated growth, funding, amazing stuff here at DockerCon containerization of the world, containers everywhere and all places hybrid, pure cloud, edge everywhere. Give us the update what's going on with Cockroach Labs and then we'll get into what's going on at DockerCon. >> Yeah Cockroach Labs, this has been a pretty fun ride. I mean, I think about two and a half years now and John it's been phenomenal as the world kind of wakes up to a distributed systems and the containerization of everything. I'm happy we're at DockerCon talking about containerization 'cause I think it has radically changed the way we think about software, but more importantly it's starting to take hold. I think a lot of people would say, oh, it's already taken hold but if you start to think about like just, these kind of modern applications that are depending on data and what does containerization mean for the database? Well, Cockroach has got a pretty good story. I mean, gosh, before Escape I think the last time I talked to you, I was at CoreOS and we were playing the whole Kubernetes game and I remember Alex Povi talking about GIFEE Google infrastructure for everyone or for everyone else I should say. And I think that's what we've seen that kind of happened with the infrastructure layer but I think that last layer of infrastructure is the database. Like I really feel like the database is that dividing line between the business logic and infrastructure. And it's really exciting to see, just massive huge customers come to Cockroach to rethink what the database means in cloud, right? What does the database mean when we moved to distributed systems and that sort of thing, and so, momentum has been building here, we are, upwards of, oh gosh, over 300 paying customers now, thousands of Cockroach customers in the wild out there but we're seeing this huge massive attraction to CockroachCloud which is a great name. Come on, Johnny, you got to say, right? And our database as a service. So getting that out there and seeing the uptake there has just been, it's been phenomenal over the past couple of years. >> Yeah and you've got to love the Cockroach name, love it, survive nuclear war and winter all that good stuff as they say, but really the reality is that it's kind of an interesting play on words because one of the trends that we've been talking about, I mean, you and I've been telling this for years with our CUBE coverage around Amazon Web Services early on was very clear about a decade ago that there wasn't going to be one database to rule the world. They're going to many, many databases. And as you started getting into these cloud native deployments at scale, use your database of choice was the developer ethos just whatever it takes to get the job done. Now you start integrating this in a horizontally scalable way with the cloud, you have now new kinds of scale, cloud scale. And it kind of changed the game on the always on availability question which is how do I get high availability? How do I keep things running? And that is the number one developer challenge whether it's infrastructure as code, whether it's security shifting left, it all comes down to making sure stuff's running at scale and secure. Talk about that. >> Yeah, absolutely and it's interesting it's been, like I said, this journey in this arc towards distributed systems and truly like delivery of what people want in the cloud, it's been a long arc and it's been a long journey and I think we're getting to the point where people, they are starting to kind of bake resilience and scale into their applications and I think that's kind of this modern approach. Look we're taking legacy databases today. There are people are kind of lift and shift, move them into the cloud, try to run them there but they aren't just built for that infrastructure like the there's a fundamentally different approach and infrastructure when it talks, when you talk about cloud it's one of the reasons why John early on your conversations with the AWS Team and what they did, it's like, yeah, how do we give resilient and ubiquitous and always on scalable kind of infrastructure people. Well, that's great for those layers but when you start to get into the software that's running on these things, it isn't lift and shift and it's not even move and improve. You can't like just take a legacy system and change one piece of it to make it kind of take advantage of the scale and the resilience and the ubiquity of the cloud, because there's very very explicit challenges. For us, it's about re-architect and rebuild. Let's tear the database down and let's rethink it and build from the ground up to be cloud native. And I think the technologies that have done that, that have kind of built from scratch, to be cloud native are the ones that are I believe, three years from now that's what we're going to be talking about. I mean, this comes back to again, like the Genesis of what we did is Google Cloud Spanner. Spanner white paper and what Google did, they didn't build, they didn't use an existing database because they needed something for a transactional relational database. They hire a bunch of really incredible engineers, right? And I got like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat over there, like designing and doing all these cool things, they build and I think that's what we're seeing and I think that's, to me the exciting part about data in the cloud as we move forward. >> Yeah, and I think the Google cloud infrastructure, everyone I think that's the same mindset for Amazon is that I want all the scale, but I don't want to do it like over 10 years I to do it now, which I love I want to get back to in a second, but I want to ask you specifically this definition of containerization of the database. I've heard that kicked around, love the concept. I kind of understand what it means but I want you to define it for us. What does it mean when someone says containerizing the database? >> Yeah, I mean, simply put the database in container and run it and that's all that I can think that's like, maybe step one I think that's kind of lift and shift. Let's put it in a container and run it somewhere. And that's not that hard to do. I think I could do that. I mean, I haven't coded in a long time but I think I could figure that out. It's when you start to actually have multiple instances of a container, right? And that's where things get really, really tricky. Now we're talking about true distributed systems. We're talking about how do you coordinate data? How do you balance data across multiple instances of a database, right? How do you actually have fail over so that if one node goes down, a bunch of them are still available. How do you guarantee transactional consistency? You can't just have four instances of a database, all with the same information in it John without any sort of coordination, right? Like you hit one node and you hit another one in the same account which transaction wins. And so the concepts in distributed systems around there's this thing called the cap theorem, there's consistency, availability, and partition tolerance and actually understanding how these things work especially for data in distributed systems, to make sure that it's going to be consistent and available and you're going to scale those things are not simple to solve. And again, it comes back to this. I don't think you can do it with legacy database. You kind of have to re-architect and it comes down to where data is stored, it comes down to how it's replicated, it comes down to really ultimately where it's physically located. I think when you deploy a database you think about the logical model, right? You think about tables, and normalization and referential integrity. The physical location is extremely important as we kind of moved to that kind of containerized and distributed systems, especially around data. >> Well, you guys are here at DockerCon 2021 Cockroach Labs good success, love the architectural flexibility that you guys offer. And again, bringing that scale, like you mentioned it's awesome value proposition, especially if people want to just program the infrastructure. What's going on with with DockerCon specifically a lot of talk about developer productivity, a lot of talk about collaboration and trust with containers, big story around security. What's your angle here at DockerCon this year? What's the big reveal? What's the discussion? What's the top conversation? >> Yeah, I mean look at where we are a containerized database and we are an incredibly great choice for developers. For us, it's look at there's certain developer communities that are important on this planet, John, and this is one of them, right? This is I don't know a developer doesn't have that little whale up in their status bar, right? And for us, you know me man, I believe in this tech and I believe that this is something that's driven and greatly simplify our lives over the next two to three to 10 to 15 years. And for us, it's about awareness. And I think once people see Cockroach, they're like oh my God, how did I ever even think differently? And so for us, it's kind of moving in that direction. But ultimately our vision where we want to be, is we want to abstract the database to a SQL API in the cloud. We want to make it so simple that I just have this rest interface, there's end points all over the planet. And as a developer, I never have to worry about scale. I never have to worry about DR right? It's always going to be on. And most importantly, I don't have to worry about low latency access to data no matter where I'm at on the planet, right? I can give every user this kind of sub 50 millisecond access to data or sub 20 millisecond access to data. And that is the true delivery of the cloud, right? Like I think that's what the developer wants out of the cloud. They want to code against a service like, and it's got to be consumption-based and you secure and I don't want to have to pay for stuff I'm not using and that all those things. And so, for us, that's what we're building to, and interacting in this environment is critical for us because I think that's where audiences. >> I want to get your thoughts on you guys do have success with a couple of different personas and developers out there, groups, classic developers, software developers which is this show is that DockerCon full of developers KubeCon a lot of operators cool, and some dads, but mostly cloud native operations. Here's a developer shops. So you guys got to hit the developers which really care about building fast and building the scale and last with security. Architects you had success with, which is the classic, cloud architecture, which now distributed computing, we get that. But the third area I would call the kind of the role that both the architects and the developers had to take on which is being the DevOps person or then becomes the SRE in the group, right? So most startups have the DevOps team developers. They do DevOps natively and within every role. So they're the same people provisioning. But as you get larger and an enterprise, the DevOps role, whether it's in a team or group takes on this SRE site reliability engineer. This is a new dynamic that brings engineering and coding together. It's like not so much an ops person. It's much more of like an engineering developer. Why is that role so important? And we're seeing more of it in dev teams, right? Seeing an SRE person or a DevOps person inside teams, not a department. >> Yeah, look, John, we, yeah, I mean, we employ an army of SREs that manage and maintain our CockroachCloud, which is CockroachDB as a service, right? How do you deliver kind of a world-class experience for somebody to adopt a managed service a database such as ours, right? And so for us, yeah I mean, SREs are extremely important. So we have personal kind of an opinion on this but more importantly, I think, look at if you look at Cockroach and the architecture of what we built, I think Kelsey Hightower at one point said, I am going to probably mess this up but there was a tweet that he wrote. It's something like, CockroachDB is the Spanner as Kubernetes is the board. And if you think about that, I mean that's exactly what this is and we built a database that was actually amenable to the SRE, right? This is exactly what they want. They want it to scale up and down. They want it to just survive things. They want to be able to script this thing and basically script the world. They want to actually, that's how they want to manage and maintain. And so for us, I think our initial audience was definitely architects and operators and it's theCUBE con crowd and they're like, wow, this is cool. This is architected just like Kubernetes. In fact, like at etcd, which is a key piece of Kubernetes but we contribute back up to NCD our raft implementation. So there's a lot of the same tech here. What we've realized though John, with database is interesting. The architect is choosing a database sometimes but more often than not, a developer is choosing that database. And it's like they go out, they find a database, they just start building and that's what happens. So, for us, we made a very critical decision early on, this database is wire compatible with Postgres and it speaks to SQL syntax which if you look at some of the other solutions that are trying to do these things, those things are really difficult to do at the end. So like a critical decision to make sure that it's amenable so that now we can build the ORMs and all the tools that people would use and expect that of Postgres from a developer point of view, but let's simplify and automate and give the right kind of like the platform that the SREs need as well. And so for us the last year and a half is really about how do we actually build the right tooling for the developer crowd too. And we've really pushed really far in that world as well. >> Talk about the aspect of the scale of like, say startup for instance, 'cause you made this a great example borg to Kubernetes 'cause borg was Google's internal Kubernetes, like thing. So you guys have Spanner which everyone knows is a great product at Google had. You guys with almost the commercial version of that for the world. Is there, I mean, some people will say and I'll just want to challenge you on this and we'll get your thoughts. I'm not Google, I'll never be Google, I don't need that scale. Or so how do you address that point because some people say, well this might dismiss the notion of using it. How do you respond to that? >> Yeah, John, we get this all the time. Like, I'm not global. My application's not global. I don't need this. I don't need a tank, right? I just need, like, I just need to walk down the road. You know what I mean? And so, the funny thing is, even if you're in a single region and you're building a simple application, does it need to be always on does it need to be available. Can it survive the failure of a server or a rack or an AZ it doesn't have to survive the failure of a region but I tell you what, if you're successful, you're going to want to start actually deploying this thing across multiple regions. So you can survive a backhoe hit in a cable and the entire east coast going out, right? Like, and so with Cockroach, it's real easy to do that. So it's four little SQL commands and I have a database that's going to span all those regions, right? And I think that's important but more importantly, think about scale, when a developer wants to scale, typically it's like, okay, I'm going to spin up Postgres and I'm going to keep increasing my instance size. So I'm going to scale vertically until I run out of room. And then I'm going to have to start sharding this database. And when you start doing that, it adds this kind of application complexity that nobody really wants to deal with. And so forget it, just let the database deal with all that. So we find this thing extremely useful for the single developer in a very small application but the beauty thing is, if you want to go global, great just keep that in notes. Like when that application does take off and it's the next breakthrough thing, this database going to grow with you. So it's good enough to kind of start small but it's the scale fast, it'll go global if you want to, you have that option, I guess, right? >> I mean, why wouldn't you want optionality on this at all? So clearly a good point. Let me ask you a question, take me through a use case where with Cockroach, some scenario develops nicely, you can point to the visibility of the use case for the developer and then kind of how it played out and then compare that and contrast that to a scenario that doesn't go well, like where where we're at plays out well, for an example, and then if they didn't deploy it they got hung up and went sideways. >> Yeah like Cockroach was built for transactional workloads. That that's what we are like, we are optimized for the speed of light and consistent transactions. That's what we do, and we do it very well. At least I think so, right. But I think, like my favorite customer of all of ours is DoorDash and about a year ago DoorDash came to us and said, look at we have a transactional database that can't handle the right volume that we're getting and falls over. And they they'd significant challenges and if you think about DoorDash and DoorDash is business they're looking at an IPO in the summer and going through these, you can't have any issues. So like system's got to be up and running, right? And so for them, it was like we need something that's reliable. We need something that's not going to come down. We need something that's going to scale and handle burst and these sort of things and their business is big, their businesses not just let me deliver food all the time. It's deliver anything, like be that intermediary between a good and somebody's front door. That's what DoorDash wants to be. And for us, yeah, their transactions and that backend transactional system is built on Cockroach. And that's one year ago, they needed to get experienced. And once they did, they started to see that this was like very, very valuable and lots of different workloads they had. So anywhere there's any sort of transactional workload be it metadata, be it any sort of like inventory, or transaction stuff that we see in companies, that's where people are coming to us. And it's these traditional relational workloads that have been wrapped up in these transactional relational databases what built for the cloud. So I think what you're seeing is that's the other shoe to drop. We've seen this happen, you're watching Databricks, you're watching Snowflake kind of do this whole data cloud and then the analytical side John that's been around for a long time and there's that move to the cloud. That same thing that happened for OLAP, is got to happen for OLTP. Where we don't do well is when somebody thinks that we're an analytic database. That's not what we're built for, right? We're optimized for transactions and I think you're going to continue to see these two sides of the world, especially in cloud especially because I think that the way that our global systems are going to work you don't want to do analytics across multiple regions, it doesn't make sense, right? And so that's why you're going to see this, the continued kind of two markets OLAP and OLTP going on and we're just, we're squaring that OLTP side of the world. >> Yeah talking about the transaction processing side of it when you start to change a distributed architecture that goes from core edge, core on premises to edge. Edge being intelligent edge, industrial edge, whatever you're going to have more action happening. And you're seeing, Kubernetes already kind of talking about this and with the containers you got, so you've got kind of two dynamics. How does that change the nature of, and the level of volume of transactions? >> Well, it's interesting, John. I mean, if you look at something like Kubernetes it's still really difficult to do multi-region or multicloud Kubernetes, right? This is one of those things that like you start to move Kubernetes to the edge, you're still kind of managing all these different things. And I think it's not the volumes, it's the operational nightmare of that. For us, that's federate at the data layer. Like I could deploy Cockroach across multiple Kubernetes clusters today and you're going to have one single logical database running across those. In fact you can deploy Cockroach today on top of three public cloud providers, I can have nodes in AWS, I could have nodes in GCP, I could have nodes running on VMs in my data center. Any one of those nodes can service requests and it's going to look like a single logical database. Now that to me, when we talked about multicloud a year and a half ago or whatever that was John, that's an actual multicloud application and delivering data so that you don't have to actually deal with that in your application layer, right? You can do that down in the guts of the database itself. And so I think it's going to be interesting the way that these things gets consumed and the way that we think about where data lives and where our compute lives. I think that's part of what you're thinking about too. >> Yeah, so let me, well, I got you here. One of the things on my mind I think people want to maybe get clarification on is real quick while you're here. Take a minute to explain that you're seeing a CockroachDB and CockroachCloud. There are different products, you mentioned you've brought them both up. What's the difference for the developers watching? What's the difference of the two and when do I need to know the difference between the two? >> So to me, they're really one because CockroachCloud is CockroachDB as a service. It's our offering that makes it a world-class easy to consume experience of working with CockroachDB, where we take on all the hardware we take on the SRE role, we make sure it's up and running, right? You're getting connection, stringing your code against it. And I think, that's side of our world is really all about this kind of highly evolved database and delivering that as a service and you can actually use it's CockroachDB. I think it was just gets really interesting John is the next generation of what we're building. This serverless version of our database, where this is just an API in the cloud. We're going to have one instance of Cockroach with multi-tenant database in there and any developer can actually spin up on that. And to me, that gets to be a really interesting world when the world turns serverless, and we have, we're running our compute in Lambda and we're doing all these great things, right? Or we're using cloud run and Google, right? But what's the corresponding database to actually deal with that? And that to me is a fundamentally different database 'cause what is scale in the serverless world? It's autonomous, right? What scale in the current, like Cockroach world but you kind of keep adding nodes to it, you manage, you deal with that, right? What does resilience mean in a serverless world? It's just, yeah, its there all the time. What's important is latency when you get to kind of serverless like where are these things deployed? And I think to me, the interesting part of like the two sides of our world is what we're doing with serverless and kind of this and how we actually expose the core value of CockroachDB in that way. >> Yeah and I think that's one of the things that is the Nirvana or the holy grail of infrastructure as code is making it, I won't say irrelevant, but invisible if you're really dealing with a database thing, hey I'm just scaling and coding and the database stuff is just working with compute, just whatever, how that's serverless and you mentioned Lambda that's the action because you don't want the file name and deciding what the database is just having it happen is more productivity for the developers that kind of circles back to the whole productivity message for the developers. So I totally get that I think that's a great vision. The question I have for you Jim, is the big story here is developer simplicity. How you guys making it easier to just deploy. >> John is just an extension of the last part of the conversation. I don't want to developer to ever have to worry about a database. That's what Spencer and Peter and Ben have in their vision. It's how do I make the database so simple? It's simple, it's a SQL API in the cloud. Like it's a rest interface, I code against it, I run queries against it, I never have to worry about scaling the thing. I never have to worry about creating active, passive, and primary and secondary. All these like the DevOps side of it, all this operation stuff, it's just kind of done in the background dude. And if we can build it, and it's actually there now where we have it in beta, what's the role of the cost-based optimizer in this new world that we've had in databases? How are you actually ensuring data is located close to users and we're automating that so that, when John's in Australia doing a show, his data is going to follow him there. So he has fast access to that, right? And that's the kind of stuff that, we're talking about the next generation of infrastructure John, not like we're not building for today. Like, look at Cockroach Labs is not building for like 2021. Sure, do we have something that's great. We're building something that's 22 and 23 and 24, right? Like what do we need to be as a extremely productive set of engineers? And that's what we think about all day. How do we make data easy for the developer? >> Well, Jim, great to have you on VP of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs, we've known each other for a long time. I got to ask you while I had got you here final question is, you and I have chatted about the many waves of in open source and in the computer industry, what's your take on where we are now. And I see you're looking at it from the Cockroach Labs perspective which is large scale distributed computing kind of you're on the new side of history, the right side of history, cloud native. Where are we right now? Compare and contrast for the folks watching who we're trying to understand the importance of where we are in the industry, where are we in and what's your take? >> Yeah John I feel fortunate to be in a company such as this one and the past couple that I've like been around and I feel like we are in the middle of a transformation. And it's just like the early days of this next generation. And I think we're seeing it in a lot of ways in infrastructure, for sure but we're starting to see it creep up into the application layer. And for me, it is so incredibly exciting to see the cloud was, remember when cloud was like this thing that people were like, oh boy maybe I'll do it. Now it's like, it's anything net new is going to be on cloud, right? Like we don't even think twice about it and the coming nature of cloud native and actually these technologies that are coming are going to be really interesting. I think the other piece that's really interesting John is the changing role of open source in this whole game, because I think of open source as code consumption and community, right? I think about those and then there's license of course, I think people were always there. A lot of people wrapped around the licensing. Consumption has changed, John. Back when we were talking to Dupe, consumption was like, oh, it's free, I get this thing I could just download it use it. Well consumption over the past three years, everybody wants everything as a service. And so we're ready to pay. For us, how do we bring free back to the service? And that's what we're doing. That's what I find like I am so incredibly excited to go through this kind of bringing back free beer to open source. I think that's going to be great 'cause if I can give you a database free up to five gig or 10 gig, man and it's available all over the planet has fully featured, that's coming, that's bringing our community and our code which is all open source and this consumption model back. And I'm super excited about that. >> Yeah, free beer who doesn't like free beer of course, developers love free beer and a great t-shirt too that's soft. Make sure you get that, get the soft >> You just don't want free puppy, you know what I mean? It was just like, yeah, that sounds painful. >> Well Jim, great to see you remotely. Can't wait to see you in person at the next event. And we've got the fall window coming up. We'll see some events. I think KubeCon in LA is going to be in-person re-invent a data breast for sure we'll be in person. I know that for a fact we'll be there. So we'll see you in person and congratulations on the work at Cockroach Labs. >> Thanks, John, great to see you again. All right, this keep coverage of DockerCon 2021. I'm John Furrie your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpenShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus bolted on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of three out of three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpeShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus built it on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of the outer three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(bright music) >> In 2009, Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist said that statisticians would be the sexiest job in the coming decade. The modern big data movement really took off later in the following year, after the second Hadoop World, which was hosted by Cloudera, in New York city. Jeff Hama Bachar, famously declared to me and John Furrie, in "theCUBE," that the best minds of his generation were trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. And he said that sucks. The industry was abuzz with the realization that data was the new competitive weapon. Hadoop was heralded as the new data management paradigm. Now what actually transpired over the next 10 years was only a small handful of companies could really master the complexities of big data and attract the data science talent, really necessary to realize massive returns. As well, back then, cloud was in the early stages of its adoption. When you think about it at the beginning of the last decade, and as the years passed, more and more data got moved to the cloud, and the number of data sources absolutely exploded, experimentation accelerated, as did the pace of change. Complexity just overwhelmed big data infrastructures and data teams, leading to a continuous stream of incremental technical improvements designed to try and keep pace, things like data lakes, data hubs, new open source projects, new tools, which piled on even more complexity. And as we reported, we believe what's needed is a complete bit flip and how we approach data architectures. Our next guest is Zhamak Dehgani, who is the Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks. Zhamak is a software engineer, architect, thought leader and advisor, to some of the world's most prominent enterprises. She's in my view, one of the foremost advocates for rethinking and changing the way we create and manage data architectures, favoring a decentralized over monolithic structure, and elevating domain knowledge as a primary criterion, and how we organize so-called big data teams and platforms. Zhamak, welcome to the cube, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Hi David, it's wonderful to be here. >> Okay. So you're pretty outspoken about the need for a paradigm shift, in how we manage our data, and our platforms at scale. Why do you feel we need such a radical change? What's your thoughts there? >> Well, I think if you just look back over the last decades, you gave us a summary of what happened since 2010. But even if we got it before then, what we have done over the last few decades is basically repeating, and as you mentioned, incrementally improving how we manage data, based on certain assumptions around, as you mentioned, centralization. Data has to be in one place so we can get value from it. But if you look at the parallel movement of our industry in general, since the birth of internet, we are actually moving towards decentralization. If we think today, like if in this move data side, if we said, the only way web would work, the only way we get access to various applications on the web or pages is to centralize it, we would laugh at that idea, but for some reason, we don't question that when it comes to data, right? So I think it's time to embrace the complexity that comes with the growth of number of sources, the proliferation of sources and consumptions models, embrace the distribution of sources of data, that they're not just within one part of organization. They're not just within even bounds of organizations. They're beyond the bounds of organization, and then look back and say, okay, if that's the trend of our industry in general, given the fabric of compensation and data that we put in globally in place, then how the architecture and technology and organizational structure incentives need to move, to embrace that complexity. And to me, that requires a paradigm shift. A full stack from how we organize our organizations, how we organize our teams, how we put a technology in place to look at it from a decentralized angle. >> Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit. I mean, you've spoken about and written today's big architecture, and you've basically just mentioned that it's flawed. So I want to bring up, I love your diagrams, you have a simple diagram, guys if you could bring up figure one. So on the left here, we're adjusting data from the operational systems, and other enterprise data sets. And of course, external data, we cleanse it, you've got to do the quality thing, and then serve them up to the business. So what's wrong with that picture that we just described, and give granted it's a simplified form. >> Yeah. Quite a few things. So, and I would flip the question maybe back to you or the audience. If we said that there are so many sources of the data and actually data comes from systems and from teams that are very diverse in terms of domains, right? Domain. If you just think about, I don't know, retail, the E-Commerce versus auto management, versus customer. These are very diverse domains. The data comes from many different diverse domains, and then we expect to put them under the control of a centralized team, a centralized system. And I know that centralization probably, if you zoom out is centralized, if you zoom in it's compartmentalized based on functions, and we can talk about that. And we assume that the centralized model, will be getting that data, making sense of it, cleansing and transforming it, then to satisfy a need of very diverse set of consumers without really understanding the domains because the teams responsible for it are not close to the source of the data. So there is a bit of a cognitive gap and domain understanding gap, without really understanding how the data is going to be used. I've talked to numerous, when we came to this, I came up with the idea. I talked to a lot of data teams globally, just to see, what are the pain points? How are they doing it? And one thing that was evident in all of those conversations, that they actually didn't know, after they built these pipelines and put the data in, whether the data warehouse tables or linked, they didn't know how the data was being used. But yet they're responsible for making the data available for this diverse set of use cases. So essentially system and monolithic system, often is a bottleneck. So what you find is that a lot of the teams are struggling with satisfying the needs of the consumers, are struggling with really understanding the data, the domain knowledge is lost, there is a loss of understanding and kind of it in that transformation, often we end up training machine learning models on data, that is not really representative of the reality of the business, and then we put them to production and they don't work because the semantic and the syntax of the data gets lost within that translation. So, and we are struggling with finding people to manage a centralized system because still the technology's fairly, in my opinion, fairly low level and exposes the users of those technology sets and let's say they warehouse a lot of complexity. So in summary, I think it's a bottleneck, it's not going to satisfy the pace of change or pace of innovation, and the availability of sources. It's disconnected and fragmented, even though there's centralized, it's disconnected and fragmented from where the data comes from and where the data gets used, and is managed by a team of hyper specialized people, they're struggling to understand the actual value of the data, the actual format of the data. So it's not going to get us where our aspirations, our ambitions need to be. >> Yeah, so the big data platform is essentially, I think you call it context agnostic. And so as data becomes more important in our lives, you've got all these new data sources injected into the system, experimentation as we said, the cloud becomes much, much easier. So one of the blockers that you've cited and you just mentioned it, is you've got these hyper specialized roles, the data engineer, the quality engineer, data scientist. And it's a losery. I mean, it's like an illusion. These guys, they seemingly they're independent, and can scale independently, but I think you've made the point that in fact, they can't. That a change in a data source has an effect across the entire data life cycle, entire data pipeline. So maybe you could add some some color to why that's problematic for some of the organizations that you work with, and maybe give some examples. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in fact initially, the hypothesis around data mesh came from a series of requests that we received from our both large scale and progressive clients, and progressive in terms of their investment in data architecture. So these were clients that were larger scale, they had diverse and rich set of domain, some of them were big technology, tech companies, some of them were big retail companies, big healthcare companies. So they had that diversity of the data and a number of the sources of the domains. They had invested for quite a few years in generations, of they had multi-generations of PROPRICER data warehouses on prem that were moving to cloud. They had moved through the various revisions of the Hadoop clusters, and they were moving to that to cloud, and then the challenges that they were facing were simply... If I want to just simplify it in one phrase, they we're not getting value from the data that they were collecting. They were continuously struggling to shift the culture because there was so much friction between all of these three phases of both consumption of the data, then transformation and making it available. Consumption from sources and then providing it and serving it to the consumer. So that whole process was full of friction. Everybody was unhappy. So it's bottom line is that you're collecting all this data, there is delay, there is lack of trust in the data itself, because the data is not representative of the reality, it's gone through the transformation, but people that didn't understand really what the data was got delayed. And so there's no trust, it's hard to get to the data. Ultimately, it's hard to create value from the data, and people are working really hard and under a lot of pressure, but it's still struggling. So we often, our solutions, like we are... Technologies, we will often point out to technology. So we go. Okay, this version of some proprietary data warehouse we're using is not the right thing. We should go to the cloud and that certainly will solve our problem, right? Or warehouse wasn't a good one, let's make a data Lake version. So instead of extracting and then transforming and loading into the database, and that transformation is that heavy process because you fundamentally made an assumption using warehouses that if I transform this data into this multidimensional perfectly designed schema, that then everybody can draw on whatever query they want, that's going to solve everybody's problem. But in reality, it doesn't because you are delayed and there is no universal model that serves everybody's need, everybody needs are diverse. Data scientists necessarily don't like the perfectly modeled data, they're for both signals and the noise. So then we've just gone from ATLs to let's say now to Lake, which is... Okay, let's move the transformation to the last mile. Let's just get load the data into the object stores and sort of semi-structured files and get the data scientists use it, but they still struggling because of the problems that we mentioned. So then what is the solution? What is the solution? Well, next generation data platform. Let's put it on the cloud. And we saw clients that actually had gone through a year or multiple years of migration to the cloud but it was great, 18 months, I've seen nine months migrations of the warehouse versus two year migrations of various data sources to the cloud. But ultimately the result is the same, unsatisfied, frustrated data users, data providers with lack of ability to innovate quickly on relevant data and have an experience that they deserve to have, have a delightful experience of discovering and exploring data that they trust. And all of that was still amiss. So something else more fundamentally needed to change than just the technology. >> So the linchpin to your scenario is this notion of context. And you pointed out, you made the other observation that "Look we've made our operational systems context aware but our data platforms are not." And like CRM system sales guys are very comfortable with what's in the CRMs system. They own the data. So let's talk about the answer that you and your colleagues are proposing. You're essentially flipping the architecture whereby those domain knowledge workers, the builders if you will, of data products or data services, they are now first-class citizens in the data flow, and they're injecting by design domain knowledge into the system. So I want to put up another one of your charts guys, bring up the figure two there. It talks about convergence. She showed data distributed, domain driven architecture, the self-serve platform design, and this notion of product thinking. So maybe you could explain why this approach is so desirable in your view. >> Sure. The motivation and inspirations for that approach came from studying what has happened over the last few decades in operational systems. We had a very similar problem prior to microservices with monolithic systems. One of the things systems where the bottleneck, the changes we needed to make was always on vertical now to how the architecture was centralized. And we found a nice niche. And I'm not saying this is a perfect way of decoupling your monolith, but it's a way that currently where we are in our journey to become data driven, it is a nice place to be, which is distribution or a decomposition of your system as well as organization. I think whenever we talk about systems, we've got to talk about people and teams that are responsible for managing those systems. So the decomposition of the systems and the teams, and the data around domains. Because that's how today we are decoupling our business, right? We are decoupling our businesses around domains, and that's a good thing. And what does that do really for us? What it does is it localizes change to the bounded context of that business. It creates clear boundary and interfaces and contracts between the rest of the universe of the organization, and that particular team, so removes the friction that often we have for both managing the change, and both serving data or capability. So if the first principle of data meshes, let's decouple this world of analytical data the same to mirror. The same way we have decoupled our systems and teams, and business. Why data is any different. And the moment you do that, so the moment you bring the ownership to people who understands the data best, then you get questions that well, how is that any different from silos of disconnected databases that we have today and nobody can get to the data? So then the rest of the principles is really to address all of the challenges that comes with this first principle of decomposition around domain context. And the second principle is, well, we have to expect a certain level of quality and accountability, and responsibility for the teams that provide the data. So let's bring products thinking and treating data as a product, to the data that these teams now share, and let's put accountability around it. We need a new set of incentives and metrics for domain teams to share the data, we need to have a new set of kind of quality metrics that define what it means for the data to be a product, and we can go through that conversation perhaps later. So then the second principle is, okay, the teams now that are responsible, the domain teams responsible for their analytical data need to provide that data with a certain level of quality and assurance. Let's call that a product, and bring product thinking to that. And then the next question you get asked off at work by CIO or CTO is the people who build the infrastructure and spend the money. They say, well, "It's actually quite complex to manage big data, now where we want everybody, every independent team to manage the full stack of storage and computation and pipelines and access control and all of that." Well, we've solved that problem in operational world. And that requires really a new level of platform thinking to provide infrastructure and tooling to the domain teams to now be able to manage and serve their big data, and I think that requires re-imagining the world of our tooling and technology. But for now, let's just assume that we need a new level of abstraction to hide away a ton of complexity that unnecessarily people get exposed to. And that's the third principle of creating self-serve infrastructure to allow autonomous teams to build their domains. But then the last pillar, the last fundamental pillar is okay, once he distributed a problem into smaller problems that you found yourself with another set of problems, which is how I'm going to connect this data. The insights happens and emerges from the interconnection of the data domains, right? It's just not necessarily locked into one domain. So the concerns around interoperability and standardization and getting value as a result of composition and interconnection of these domains requires a new approach to governance. And we have to think about governance very differently based on a federated model. And based on a computational model. Like once we have this powerful self-serve platform, we can computationally automate a lot of covenants decisions and security decisions, and policy decisions, that applies to this fabric of mesh, not just a single domain or not in a centralized. So really, as you mentioned, the most important component of the data mesh is distribution of ownership and distribution of architecture in data, the rest of them is to solve all the problems that come with that. >> So, very powerful. And guys, we actually have a picture of what Zhamak just described. Bring up figure three, if you would. So I mean, essentially, you're advocating for the pushing of the pipeline and all its various functions into the lines of business and abstracting that complexity of the underlying infrastructure which you kind of show here in this figure, data infrastructure as a platform down below. And you know why I love about this, Zhamak, is, to me it underscores the data is not the new oil. Because I can put oil in my car, I can put it in my house but I can't put the same code in both places. But I think you call it polyglot data, which is really different forms, batch or whatever. But the same data doesn't follow the laws of scarcity. I can use the same data for many, many uses, and that's what this sort of graphic shows. And then you brought in the really important, sticking problem, which is that the governance which is now not a command and control, it's federated governance. So maybe you could add some thoughts on that. >> Sure, absolutely. It's one of those, I think I keep referring to data mesh as a paradigm shift, and it's not just to make it sound grand and like kind of grand and exciting or important, it's really because I want to point out, we need to question every moment when we make a decision around, how we're going to design security, or governance or modeling of the data. We need to reflect and go back and say, "Am I applying some of my cognitive biases around how I have worked for the last 40 years?" I've seen it work? Or "Do I do I really need to question?" And do need to question the way we have applied governance. I think at the end of the day, the role of the data governance and the objective remains the same. I mean, we all want quality data accessible to a diverse set of users and its users now know have different personas, like data persona, data analysts, data scientists, data application user. These are very diverse personas. So at the end of the day, we want quality data accessible to them, trustworthy in an easy consumable way. However, how we get there looks very different in as you mentioned that the governance model in the old world has been very command and control, very centralized. They were responsible for quality, they were responsible for certification of the data, applying and making sure the data complies with all sorts of regulations, make sure data gets discovered and made available. In the world of data mesh, really the job of the data governance as a function becomes finding the equilibrium between what decisions need to be made and enforced globally, and what decisions need to be made locally so that we can have an interoperable mesh of data sets that can move fast and can change fast. It's really about, instead of kind of putting those systems in a straight jacket of being constantly and don't change, embrace change, and continuous change of landscape because that's just the reality we can't escape. So the role of governance really, the modern governance model I called federated and computational. And by that I mean, every domain needs to have a representative in the governance team. So the role of the data or domain data product owner who really were understands that domain really well, but also wears that hats of the product owner. It's an important role that has to have a representation in the governance. So it's a federation of domains coming together. Plus the SMEs, and people have Subject Matter Experts who understand the regulations in that environment, who understands the data security concerns. But instead of trying to enforce and do this as a central team, they make decisions as what needs to be standardized. What needs to be enforced. And let's push that into that computationally and in an automated fashion into the platform itself, For example. Instead of trying to be part of the data quality pipeline and inject ourselves as people in that process, let's actually as a group, define what constitutes quality. How do we measure quality? And then let's automate that, and let's codify that into the platform, so that every day the products will have a CICD pipeline, and as part of that pipeline, law's quality metrics gets validated, and every day to product needs to publish those SLOs or Service Level Objectives, or whatever we choose as a measure of quality, maybe it's the integrity of the data, or the delay in the data, the liveliness of the data, whatever are the decisions that you're making. Let's codify that. So it's really the objectives of the governance team trying to satisfies the same, but how they do it, it's very, very different. And I wrote a new article recently, trying to explain the logical architecture that would emerge from applying these principles, and I put a kind of a light table to compare and contrast how we do governance today, versus how we'll do it differently, to just give people a flavor of what does it mean to embrace decentralization, and what does it mean to embrace change, and continuous change. So hopefully that could be helpful. >> Yes. There's so many questions I have. But the point you make it too on data quality, sometimes I feel like quality is the end game, Where the end game should be how fast you can go from idea to monetization with a data service. What happens again? And you've sort of addressed this, but what happens to the underlying infrastructure? I mean, spinning up EC2s and S3 buckets, and MyPytorches and TensorFlows. That lives in the business, and who's responding for that? >> Yeah, that's why I'm glad you're asking this question, David, because I truly believe we need to reimagine that world. I think there are many pieces that we can use as utilities are foundational pieces, but I can see for myself at five to seven year road map building this new tooling. I think in terms of the ownership, the question around ownership, that would remain with the platform team, but I don't perhaps a domain agnostic technology focused team, right? That there are providing a set of products themselves, but the users of those products are data product developers, right? Data domain teams that now have really high expectations, in terms of low friction, in terms of a lead time to create a new data products. So we need a new set of tooling and I think the language needs to shift from I need a storage bucket, or I need a storage account, to I need a cluster to run my spark jobs. Too, here's the declaration of my data products. This is where the data file will come from, this is a data that I want to serve, these are the policies that I need to apply in terms of perhaps encryption or access control, go make it happen platform, go provision everything that I need, so that as a data product developer, all I can focus on is the data itself. Representation of semantic and representation of the syntax, and make sure that data meets the quality that I have to assure and it's available. The rest of provisioning of everything that sits underneath will have to get taken care of by the platform. And that's what I mean by requires a reimagination. And there will be a data platform team. The data platform teams that we set up for our clients, in fact themselves have a fair bit of complexity internally, they divide into multiple teams, multiple planes. So there would be a plane, as in a group of capabilities that satisfied that data product developer experience. There would be a set of capabilities that deal with those nitty gritty underlying utilities, I call them (indistinct) utilities because to me, the level of abstraction of the platform needs to go higher than where it is. So what we call platform today are a set of utilities we'll be continuing to using. We'll be continuing to using object storage, we will continue to using relational databases and so on. So there will be a plane and a group of people responsible for that. There will be a group of people responsible for capabilities that enable the mesh level functionality, for example, be able to correlate and connect and query data from multiple nodes, that's a mesh level capability, to be able to discover and explore the mesh of data products, that's the mesh of capability. So it would be a set of teams as part of platform. So we use a strong, again, products thinking embedded in a product and ownership embedded into that to satisfy the experience of this now business oriented domain data teams. So we have a lot of work to do. >> I could go on, unfortunately, we're out of time, but I guess, first of all, I want to tell people there's two pieces that you've put out so far. One is how to move beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a distributed data mesh. You guys should read that in the "Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture," is kind of part two. I guess my last question in the very limited time we have is are organizations ready for this? >> I think how the desire is there. I've been overwhelmed with the number of large and medium and small and private and public, and governments and federal organizations that reached out to us globally. I mean, this is a global movement and I'm humbled by the response of the industry. I think, the desire is there, the pains are real, people acknowledge that something needs to change here. So that's the first step. I think awareness is spreading, organizations are more and more becoming aware, in fact, many technology providers are reaching to us asking what shall we do because our clients are asking us, people are already asking, we need the data mesh and we need the tooling to support it. So that awareness is there in terms of the first step of being ready. However, the ingredients of a successful transformation requires top-down and bottom-up support. So it requires support from chief data analytics officers, all above, the most successful clients that we have with data mesh are the ones that, the CEOs have made a statement that, "We'd want to change the experience of every single customer using data, and we're going to commit to this." So the investment and support exists from top to all layers, the engineers are excited, the maybe perhaps the traditional data teams are open to change. So there are a lot of ingredients of transformations that come together. Are we really ready for it? I think the pioneers, perhaps, the innovators if you think about that innovation curve of adopters, probably pioneers and innovators and lead adopters are making moves towards it, and hopefully as the technology becomes more available, organizations that are less engineering oriented, they don't have the capability in-house today, but they can buy it, they would come next. Maybe those are not the ones who are quite ready for it because the technology is not readily available and requires internal investments to make. >> I think you're right on. I think the leaders are going to lean in hard and they're going to show us the path over the next several years. And I think that the end of this decade is going to be defined a lot differently than the beginning. Zhamak, thanks so much for coming to "theCUBE" and participating in the program. >> Thank you for hosting me, David. >> Pleasure having you. >> It's been wonderful. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back right after this short break. (slow music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube. Covering South By Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're here live in Austin, Texas, for South By Southwest Cube coverage at the Intel AI Lounge, #IntelAI if you're watching, put it out on Twitter. I'm John Furrier of Silicon Angle for the Cube. Our next guest is Alison Yu who's with Cloudera. And in the news today, although they won't comment on it. It's great to see you, social media manager at Cloudera. >> Yes, it's nice to see you as well. >> Great to see you. So, Cloudera has a strategic relationship with Intel. You guys have a strategic investment, Intel, and you guys partner up, so it's well-known in the industry. But what's going on here is interesting, AI for social good is our theme. >> Alison: Yes. >> Cloudera has always been a pay-it-forward company. And I've known the founders, Mike Olson and Amr Awadallah. >> Really all about the community and paying it forward. So Alison, talk about what you guys are working on. Because you're involved in a panel, but also Cloudera Cares. And you guys have teamed up with Thorn, doing some interesting things. >> Alison: Yeah (laughing). >> Take it away! >> Sure, thanks. Thanks for the great intro. So I'll give you a little bit of a brief introduction to Cloudera Cares. Cloudera Cares was founded roughly about three years ago. It was really an employee-driven and -led effort. I kind of stepped into the role and ended up being a little bit more of the leader just by the way it worked out. So we've really gone from, going from, you know, we're just doing soup kitchens and everything else, to strategic partnerships, donating software, professional service hours, things along those lines. >> Which has been very exciting to see our nonprofit partnerships grow in that way. So it really went from almost grass-root efforts to an organized organization now. And we start stepping up our strategic partnerships about a year and a half ago. We started with DataKind, is our initial one. About two years ago, we initiated that. Then we a year ago, about in September, we finalized our donation of an enterprise data hub to Thorn, which if you're not aware of they're all about using technology and innovation to stop child-trafficking. So last year, around September or so, we announced the partnership and we donated professional service hours. And then in October, we went with them to Grace Hopper, which is obviously the largest Women in Tech Conference in North America. And we hosted a hackathon and we helped mentor women entering into the tech workforce, and trying to come up with some really cool innovative solutions for them to track and see what's going on with the dark web, so we had quite a few interesting ideas coming out of that. >> Okay, awesome. We had Frederico Gomez Suarez on, who was the technical advisor. >> Alison: Yeah. >> A Microsoft employee, but he's volunteering at Thorn, and this is interesting because this is not just donating to the soup kitchens and what not. >> Alison: Yeah. >> You're starting to see a community approach to philanthropy that's coding RENN. >> Yeah. >> Hackathons turning into community galvanizing communities, and actually taking it to the next level. >> Yeah. So, I think one of the things we realize is tech, while it's so great, we have actually introduced a lot of new problems. So, I don't know if everyone's aware, but in the '80s and '90s, child exploitation had almost completely died. They had almost resolved the issue. With the introduction of technology and the Internet, it opened up a lot more ways for people to go ahead and exploit children, arrange things, in the dark web. So we're trying to figure out a way to use technology to combat a problem that technology kind of created as well, but not only solving it, but rescuing people. >> It's a classic security problem, the surface area has increased for this kind of thing. But big data, which is where you guys were founded on in the cloud era that we live in. >> Alison: Yeah. >> Pun intended. (laughing) Using the machine learning now you start with some scale now involved. >> Yes, exactly, and that's what we're really hoping, so we're partnering with Intel in the National Center of Missing Exploited Children. We're actually kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow, and our hope is we can figure out some different innovative ways that AI can be applied to scraping data and finding children. A lot of times we'll see there's not a lot of clues, but for example, if we can upload, if there can be a tool that can upload three or four different angles of a child's face when they go missing, maybe what happens is someone posts a picture on Instagram or Twitter that has a geo tag and this kid is in the background. That would be an amazing way of using AI and machine learning-- >> Yeah. >> Alison: To find a child, right. >> Well, I'll give you guy a plug for Cloudera. And I'll reference Dr. Naveen Rao, who's the GM of Intel's AI group, was on earlier. And he was talking about how there's a lot of storage available, not a lot of compute. Now, Cloudera, you guys have really pioneered the data lake, data hub concept where storage is critical. >> Yeah. >> Now, you got this compute power and machine learning, that's kind of where it comes together. Did I get that right? >> Yeah, and I think it's great that with the partnership with Intel we're able to integrate our technology directly into the hardware, which makes it so much more efficient. You're able to compute massive amounts of data in a very short amount of time, and really come up with real results. And with this partnership, specifically with Thorn and NCMEC, we're seeing that it's real impact for thousands of people last year, I think. In the 2016 impact report, Thorn said they identified over 6,000 trafficking victims, of which over 2,000 were children. Right, so that tool that they use is actually built on Cloudera. So, it's great seeing our technology put into place. >> Yeah, that's awesome. I was talking to an Intel person the other day, they have 72 cores now on a processor, on the high-end Xeons. Let's get down to some other things that you're working on. What are you doing here at the show? Do you have things that you're doing? You have a panel? >> Yeah, so at the show, at South by Southwest, we're kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow at our Austin offices for South by Southwest. Everyone's welcome to come. I just did the liquor order, so yes, everyone please come. (laughing) >> You just came from Austin's office, you're just coming there. >> Yeah, exactly. So we've-- >> Unlimited Red Bull, pizza, food. (laughing) >> Well, we'll be doing lots and lots tomorrow, but we're kicking that off, we have representatives from Thorn, NCMEC, Google, Intel, all on site to answer questions. That's kind of our kickoff of this month-long virtual hackathon. You don't need to be in Austin to participate, but that is one of the things that we are kicking off. >> And then on Sunday, actually here at the Intel AI Lounge we're doing a panel on AI for Good, and using artificial intelligence to solve problems. >> And we'll be broadcasting that live here on The Cube. So, folks, SiliconAngle.tv will carry that. Alison, talk about the trend that, you weren't here when we were talking about how there's now a new counterculture developing in a good way around community and social change. How real is the trend that you're starting to see these hackathons evolve from what used to be recruiting sessions to people just jamming together to meet each other. Now, you're starting to see the next level of formation where people are organizing collectively-- >> Yeah. >> To impact real issues. >> Yeah. >> Is this a real trend or where is that trend, can you speak to that? >> Sure, so from what I've seen from the hackathons what we've been seeing before was it's very company-specific. Only one company wanted to do it, and they would kind of silo themselves, right? Now, we're kind of seeing this coming together of companies that are generally competitors, but they see a great social cause and they decide that they want to band together, regardless of their differences in technology, product, et cetera, for a common good. And, so. >> Like a Thorn. >> For Thorn, you'll see a lot of competitors, so you'll see Facebook and Twitter or Google and Amazon, right? >> John: Yeah. >> And we'll see all these different competitors come together, lend their workforce to us, and have them code for one great project. >> So, you see it as a real trend. >> I do see it as a trend. I saw Thorn last year did a great one with Facebook and on-site with Facebook. This year as we started to introduce this hackathon, we decided that we wanted to do a hackathon series versus just a one-off hackathon. So we're seeing people being able to share code, contribute, work on top of other code, right, and it's very much a sharing community, so we're very excited for that. >> All right, so I got to ask you what's they culture like at Cloudera these days, as you guys prepare to go public? What's the vibe internally of the company, obviously Mike Olson, the founder, is still around, Amr's around. You guys have been growing really fast. Got your new space. What's the vibe like in Cloudera now? >> Honestly, the culture at Cloudera hasn't really changed. So, when I joined three years ago we were much smaller than we are now. But I think one thing that we're really excited about is everyone's still so collaborative, and everyone makes sure to help one another out. So, I think our common goal is really more along the lines of we're one team, and let's put out the best product we can. >> Awesome. So, what's South by Southwest mean to you this year? If you had to kind of zoom out and say, okay. What's the theme? We heard Robert Scoble earlier say it's a VR theme. We hear at Intel it's AI. So, there's a plethora of different touchpoints here. What do you see? >> Yeah, so I actually went to the opening keynote this morning, which was great. There was an introduction, and then I don't know if you realized, but Cory Booker was on as well, which is great. >> John: Yep. >> But I think a lot of what we had seen was they called out on stage that artificial intelligence is something that will be a trend for the next year. And I think that's very exciting that Intel really hit the nail on the head with the AI Lounge, right? >> Cory Booker, I'm a big fan. He's from my neighborhood, went to the same school I went to, that my family. So in Northern Valley, Old Tappan. Cory, if you're watching, retweet us, hashtag #IntelAI. So AI's there. >> AI is definitely there. >> No doubt, it's on stage. >> Yes, but I think we're also seeing a very large, just community around how can we make our community better versus let's try to go in these different silos, and just be hyper-aware of what's only in front of us, right? So, we're seeing a lot more from the community as well, just being interested in things that are not immediately in front of us, the wider, either nation, global, et cetera. So, I think that's very exciting people are stepping out of just their own little bubbles, right? And looking and having more compassion for other people, and figuring out how they can give back. >> And, of course, open source at the center of all the innovation as always. (laughing) >> I would like to think so, right? >> It is! I would testify. Machine learning is just a great example, how that's now going up into the cloud. We started to see that really being part of all the apps coming out, which is great because you guys are in the big data business. >> Alison: Yeah. >> Okay, Alison, thanks so much for taking the time. Real quick plug for your panel on Sunday here. >> Yeah. >> What are you going to talk about? >> So we're going to be talking a lot about AI for good. We're really going to be talking about the NCMEC, Thorn, Google, Intel, Cloudera partnership. How we've been able to do that, and a lot of what we're going to also concentrate on is how the everyday tech worker can really get involved and give back and contribute. I think there is generally a misconception of if there's not a program at my company, how do I give back? >> John: Yeah. >> And I think Cloudera's a shining example of how a few employees can really enact a lot of change. We went from grassroots, just a few employees, to a global program pretty quickly, so. >> And it's organically grown, which is the formula for success versus some sort of structured company program (laughing). >> Exactly, so we definitely gone from soup kitchen to strategic partnerships, and being able to donate our own time, our engineers' times, and obviously our software, so. >> Thanks for taking the time to come on our Cube. It's getting crowded in here. It's rocking the house, the house is rocking here at the Intel AI Lounge. If you're watching, check out the hashtag #IntelAI or South by Southwest. I'm John Furrie. I'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: The Cube, covering SAPPHIRE NOW. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console, Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay, welcome back. We are here live in Orlando winding down day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, of live coverage of SAPPHIRE NOW. This is The Cube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract and sift through the noise. I want to give a shout-out to our sponsors who allow us to get here and do all this massive programming, SAP HANA Cloud platform, Console, Inc., Capgemini, and EMC. Thanks to our sponsors, we really appreciate it. Our next guest is Roger Quinlan, Senior Vice-President, global head of the partner-managed cloud at SAP Thanks for joining us, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me, this is great. >> We love it, so explain what is the partner, partner managed cloud, just to kind of make sure we get the definition out there because you get the partner ecosystem, but this is the managed cloud, the partner managed cloud. >> Right. >> John: Explain what that is. >> So basically it allows, it allows our partners to create cloud offerings, private cloud offerings that they can offer to their clients as software as a service. And obviously SAP technology enables the inside of that, the guts of it. And we typically structure the agreements in, you know, anywhere from two to seven year. Most of them are five year agreements so it's a long-term agreement, good for the partners, helps our clients get into the cloud quickly and easily. >> Explain who those partners are and give an example of how that works because SAP, you had partners, many, many years delivering the apps. But now this platform game with the cloud changes the business models. Who are some of the people that are implementing this? >> Yes, so Capgemini is a great example of one, NTT, Accenture, you know the players that you might think of right there. And there's even some smaller ones, some smaller SIs that are maybe not household names but are doing very good work. >> Specialty boutique kind of, domain expertise. >> Yeah, and even some that are fairly large but are not maybe household names in the US but are big names in Europe, like T-Systems as an example. >> Great, and the vision around this was just to get simplified on the delivery cycle, so with cloud, the goodness of SAP now can be tailored for the end client 'cause these guys are smart, they have data scientists, they have a lot of programming capabilities, they have a cloud knowledge. But they have to deliver a solution to the customers 'cause they are a trusted advisor to your customers. Is that the main reason? What's the push behind all this? >> Yeah, their main reason for us is really to allow us to get into market niches that we don't serve today. So if you think, I'll give you a great example. There was a niche with hospitals, smaller hospitals in southern Africa. And they needed infrastructure to manage the operations of a hospital. They wanted to modernize. They wanted to do the digital transformation, to use the modern buzz-word. And so one of our partners had a very good relationship with a couple of these hospitals and went out and said, hey, you know, if we built a solution, would you use it? And they said sure, so they went out and built it, and you know they started off with one, two, by the time they had it all built they had three. Quickly, they had seven. They're now up to 16 hospitals. It allows us to provide great technology to these hospitals. They can provide better healthcare to their constituents in a market that we otherwise would not be able to serve. So that's one good example of accessing a market that maybe SAP would not have access to. But the integrator, which was T-Systems in this case, that, you know, has great relationships in that community, so it really is leveraging a relationship they already have. >> So I can see the benefits to the customers and the partners 'cause it's clear. Partners can make more money, can have great differentiation to their customers. What's the impact of the SAP sales force? Do they get comped on it? Is there a channel conflict? Because that's going to probably come up. >> It's funny, so you know our market space well enough to know if that's an issue now, right? And it always is, right? So what we've decided to do is, basically the sales organization that has the end customer, they get, basically they get compensated on it. >> So they're incented to play ball. >> Absolutely, there's no disincentive. It's kind of the same if they sold it directly themselves. >> How does the partner managed cloud support the new S/4HANA 'cause that's the big story here. You're talking about ERP, modernized up. It's a big, all the discussions around that, everyone's jazzed up about it. All the hardcore SAP customers are all like, okay, wow. How does that impact this? >> Yeah, so S/4 becomes the technology that most of our partner-managed cloud offerings are utilizing. So what we find a lot is customers out there want, they want to do something new. Maybe they're a Hybris customer today, or they're an Ariba customer today, but now they need to modernize their core. They need to do an ERP. Maybe they didn't have one, or maybe they had an old one and they want to modernize it. S/4 is a perfect way to go deliver that in the cloud to the end client. And so I would say you know maybe a third or 40% of the transactions that we're doin' in the partner-managed cloud space are S/4. >> A lot of your partners, especially some of these big guys, are trying to evolve their business models away from ours-- >> Roger: Yes. >> To IP, so I presume a big part of this is to try to get them to build that IP, proximate to the SAP platform. >> Roger: Yes >> How are you encouraging them to do that? Are you underwriting? Are you financing it in any way? Are you sharing it? How are you getting them, other than just the raw business opportunity, what kind of new business models are you putting in place so the value accretes to your platform from these guys faster? >> Yeah, we're really focusing on verticals and on geographies, so that we don't have overlap. That way it creates a unique differentiator for that particular systems integrator. I talked about the example in southern Africa, but another example would be in Japan in the real estate market. We did a similar thing with a totally different systems integrator, and that allows them to have a unique approach to the real estate market inside of, primarily inside of Tokyo. So what we try and do is try and make sure that we don't have a lot of overlap in geographies and overlap in solution areas, so they get some sort of a competitive advantage and get some runway to run with this for awhile. >> And at what point in time do you find yourself, John asked the question about at least channel conflict with your sales guys but the goal is to have the entire ecosystem work really well together without being encumbered with enormous transaction costs of how these different parts come together. At what point in time does SAP start to have a direct relationship with some of these folks? For example, are you taking responsibility for sending down updates? Are you working to bring new extended or extending the ecosystem into a customer? Or is all that going through the partners that you're working with. >> So I'll answer that in a couple of different ways. So first of all the primary relationship is really between the partner and the end-client. It is their kind of SaaS offering to the client. We provide the technology underneath. So that's one way we do it. The other part of it that kind of keeps this close to SAP is the backend, the maintenance and support. Level one, Level two is still handled by the partner, but we handle level three. So there's still a relationship, when they get stuck and things go wrong or something needs to be fixed, we end up getting involved. But the primary support happens between, with the partner and most of them are very well skilled at being able to handle that level of support. >> But are you also then bringing your ecosystem and your set of partners to them as well? >> Absolutely, yeah, so it's not just the SI world right? So some of these partners really want to be in this game, but they don't have hosting capabilities so we'll do Azure or we'll bring in AWS, and that's a mechanism that's already in a good place for us. >> Well and also, they have a multi-vendor view anyways so they're going to broker the different clouds and intercloud them together. I think, to your point there, I think it's worth double-down on because that was important. Virtustream came out of that concept, so when Virtustream was sold to EMC for billions of dollars, a billion dollars, that ultimately filled the same gap that you guys are doing with this program. They essentially did SAP Cloud and did some tooling up. Now, you're offering, essentially, SAP tech to everybody. Okay, that's cool, so that's just for the folks out there just want to make sure they catch it 'cause that's how big it is in my opinion. >> Can I follow up with one quick point though, John? So let's say the extension, the partner extension programs that you guys have that allow your sales force to sell third-party software from the SAP ecosystem into customers. If a large customer, or if a large partner is a partner of yours and you're standing them up, are they also able to piggyback in those arrangements and start bringing, or do they all have to have separate business arrangements with everybody in the ecosystem, or is there kind of a master agreement that you're bringing to bear so that everybody plays better together because you're kind of overriding the whole thing? >> Yeah, so we like to make this as easy as possible, so we take into the 4,000 items or whatever on our price list, we enable that through this partner managed cloud, that way they don't have to go get individual agreements if they want to, maybe they want to do OpenText or something like that. >> So you're bringing the whole portfolio to their cloud? >> Roger: Yes. >> Tell how the IoT, how this plays in 'cause that's a real sexy market everybody's going after. We heard that's going to be on the second-half of the year. You mentioned some things around that. That's a big focus and a lot of people are using the, I say hype cycle now, which it's legitimate hype, but the apps are coming on a couple of years down the road so the architecture's going on now so people are setting the table for IoT today. Does that fit into this? >> Absolutely, it does, and you heard a little bit about when you talked to Mark right before I came on. He talked a lot about the platform, on a cloud platform that his group is responsible for and really that becomes a leverage point. So on a cloud platform can be a part of this, and oftentimes they want to do the enablement on top of that kind of cloud platform because they want to be able to extend. The great part about S/4 is that it's standard, and it's industry specific, and it's simple to operate. But that also means that some companies have a lot of customizations that need to be part of their solution to their end-clients. And so how do you do that? You do that with HANA cloud platform, and sometimes that becomes an IoT play as well. >> Yeah, that enable them to at least have some headroom. >> Yes. >> (laughs) Future proofing, whatever term they want to use. Okay, tell about the vision of digital transformation because this really becomes an interesting business model question. How does a digital transformation vision that SAP as a company is going down relate specifically to your area, and how does that relate to the business model of the customers? What are you guys doing? Is there any kind of new things? Is it an incentive comp, obviously the sales gets comped but options to the customer? Where's the margins? Is it a discounted sliding scale? All of these are the questions that are popping through my head right now. I'm the partner, what's in it for me? I got to make some cash so-- >> Yeah, so what's in it for the partner is they get a long-term relationship with the end-client, and oftentimes they bring a relationship with that client already, and now they're extending it, and it's a very sticky relationship because when you start on an SAP program, that's not something you switch in and out every couple of years. So that's one of the benefits to the partner. And I will say the part about digital transformation, everyone wants to transform their business. Not everyone is able to, but most companies want to do that. This becomes the digital core, right? You use S/4 as the digital core, and you can get into it quickly. And if it's an industry based solution that this partner is now providing to multiple clients, they can implement it quicker. >> They can standardize on it. >> Yeah, they can standardize on it, and then they can do hospital one, hospital two, all the way to hospital 16 a lot quicker, right? One or two maybe take you some time, but by the time you get to the 16th or 17th, it's going really fast, so it enables a faster time to market for the end-client, and you know that digital is all about speed. >> Yeah, if they're building Lego blocks, and they build their own, they cast it out and they build more of them and just ship them out. >> You mentioned another item. You know there are some customers that have been using SAP Solutions for a long time, and maybe they're not using all of them any more or maybe they've gone off maintenance, that's a topic. We've been able to use this tool as a way to bring the customers back. So maybe they ran ERP way back when it was release four or 4.5 back, you know, back in the 90's. They got away from it for whatever reason, but now they're really excited about S/4 and they want to come back. This is a mechanism to allow us to do it and do it quickly. >> And also they get basically rebooted or reset on the new platform. >> Yep. >> But also you get net new customers out of this. >> Absolutely. >> So it's not like you're recycling the same SAP customers, certainly the churn might be helped a little bit. Now, that's the thing that I'm going to look at is those new customers, and I think they're going to be attracted to things like the Apple announcements. How does that impact you? Are you affected by that? Certainly the glowing afterglow of the announcement will be good. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? >> John: But does it directly affect your business? >> It will absolutely affect it because the whole concept about that agreement is to develop applications that enhance the user experience and to the extent that we can leverage all of that better user experience, in a faster time to market, get to the cloud quicker, that's all good news for the end client. >> We're finally going to have a remote desktop on the phones that actually works, seamlessly. >> Yeah, real rendering, as opposed to shadow rendering. >> All right, final question, what's your take on SAP this year, thoughts share with the audience who couldn't make it. They might be watching this live or on-demand. What's 2016 SAPPHIRE NOW all about? >> Well 2016 SAPPHIRE NOW, in a lot of the keynotes, was really about kind of exposing a more, you know, a more honest, a more upfront conversation. We saw it in they keynotes. You know, Bill McDermott, our CEO, put his e-mail address out on a keynote with 30,000 people in the crowd and then you know a 100,000 or so watching, right? That's a pretty bold thing to do. And so I think you're trying to see, you're seeing SAP trying to become more human, trying to have more empathy. You know, we're a big company. We do some very cool things. We run a serious business, right? But being able to do that in a very human way is what I'm seeing here on the show floor. >> Final question, final, final question 'cause that was the second final question, what KPIs are you going to look at on the scoreboard to benchmark your success where you say, hey, we hit a grand slam? You know, is it the number of partners? What are the simple metrics that give you an indicator that you're winning, you're achieving your objectives? What are some of the things you look at to kind of get a feel for if it's working or not? >> Yeah, I want to see multi-client agreements that we put together where they have more than one client, where we've established what the multi-client agreement is going to be and we actually are executing against that. That's one. Two, I want to see customers going live and getting productive results out of it. And revenue growth is obviously always something we watch, but that's kind of tertiary to the first two. And if we do the first two, the partners are going to be successful. They'll get sticky with their clients. The clients will be happy because they get a faster time to market and that's how this grows. >> So it's really who stands up what solutions is really going to be the benchmark. >> And focus on, it is all new markets for us I think. >> John: Roger Quinlan, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate the insight. You got a big job, exciting. I think it's going to be a greenfield opportunity with your existing clients in a new way, a new business model innovation, congratulations. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> Okay, we're in The Cube here. You're watching day two coverage of SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. I'm John Furrie with Peter Burris. Thanks for watching. >> Voiceover: They'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness. Nobody wants to age in a way that we're bound to a chair or a bed.