from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello everyone welcome to the space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together i'm john furrier your host with thecube here in california i want to welcome our featured guest lieutenant general john f thompson with the united states space force approach to cyber security that's the topic of this session and of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in los angeles air force base also heading up space force general thank you for coming on really appreciate you kicking this off welcome to the symposium hey so uh thank you very much john for that very kind introduction also uh very much thank you to cal poly uh for this opportunity to speak to this audience today also a special shout out to one of the organizers uh dustin brun for all of his work uh helping uh get us uh to this point uh ladies and gentlemen as uh as uh john mentioned uh i'm jt thompson uh i lead the 6 000 men and women of the united states space forces space and missile system center which is headquartered here at los angeles air force base in el segundo if you're not quite sure where that's at it's about a mile and a half from lax this is our main operating location but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country with about 500 people at kirtland air force base in albuquerque new mexico uh and about another 500 people on the front range of the rockies uh between colorado springs and uh and denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide uh we're responsible for uh acquiring developing and sustaining the united states space force's critical space assets that includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites and we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the u.s space force and a number of our critical mission partners across the uh department of defense and the intelligence community um just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustained the 31 satellite gps constellation that satellite constellation while originally intended to help with global navigation those gps signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy uh over the past three decades i mean gps is everywhere i think everybody realizes that agriculture banking the stock market the airline industry uh separate and distinct navigation systems it's really pervasive across both the capabilities for our department of defense and capabilities for our economy and and individuals billions of individuals across our country and the planet some of the other work we do for instance in the communications sector uh secure communications satellites that we design and build that link america's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real-time support and comms for our deployed forces and those of our allies we also acquire uh infrared missile warning satellites uh that monitor the planet for missile launches and provide advanced warning uh to the u.s homeland and to our allies uh in case some of those missile launches are uh nefarious um on a note that's probably a lot closer to home maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of california in 2018 smc jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy uh to partner with the u.s forest service during the two of the largest wildfires in the state's history the camp and woolsey fires in northern california as those fires spread out of control we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet and we collaborated with the us forest service so that firefighters on the ground uh could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading thereby saving lives and and property by identifying hot spots and flare-ups for firefighters that data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the u.s forest service and authorities here in california was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters it was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread we've continued uh that involvement in recent years using multiple systems to support firefighters across the western u.s this fall as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue working together with the u.s forest service and with other partners uh we like to make uh we like to think that we made a difference here but there's still a lot more work to go and i think that we should always be asking ourselves uh what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to uh stakeholders so that they can use it for for purposes of good if you will how else can we protect our nation how else can we protect our friends and allies um i think a major component of the of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly um just over the past few years uh john and i were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have uh space programs 80 nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet um if you just look at one mission area that uh the department of defense is interested in and that's small launch there are currently over a hundred different small launch companies uh within the u.s industrial base vying for commercial dod and civil uh payload capabilities uh mostly to low earth orbit it's it's just truly a remarkable time if you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning um where we're revolutionary revolutionizing really uh the ways that we generate process and use data i mean it's really remarkable in 2016 so if you think about this four years ago uh nasa estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day and that was four years ago um uh obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience of this congress or in this conference uh we need to work with big thinkers like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data we need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge edge theories of data mining cyber behaviorism and internet of things 2.0 it's just truly a remarkable time uh to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the states of the space business are truly truly daunting and important to uh to all of us um integrating cyber security into our space systems both commercial and government is a mandate um it's no longer just a nice to have as the us space force and department of the air force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years space is becoming congested and contested and that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security uh in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on uh cyber security day in and day out the value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer from the ground control segments associated with it and this value is not just military it's also economic and it's not just american it's also a value for the entire world particularly particularly our allies as we all depend upon space and space systems your neighbors and friends here in california that are employed at the space and missile system center uh work with network defenders we work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers um our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global commons of space free and open for exploration and for commerce um as john and i were talking earlier before we came online there's an aspect of cyber security for space systems especially for some of our legacy systems that's more how do we bolt this on because we fielded those space systems a number of years ago and the the challenges of cyber security in the space domain have grown so we have a part that we have to worry about bolting it on but then we have to worry about building it in as we as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that that realizes that the cyber threat or the cyber security landscape will evolve over time it's not just going to be stagnant there will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we always have to look at look uh as secretary barrett who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning the american way of life really depends on space and as part of the united states space force we work with defense leaders our congress joint and international military teammates and industry to ensure american leadership in space i really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today john and thanks so much to cal poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event i really look forward to this for uh several months and so with that i look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here general thank you very much for the awesome uh introductory statement uh for the folks watching on the stream brigadier general carthan is going to be in the chat answering any questions feel free to chat away he's the vice commander of space and missile systems center he'll be available um a couple comments from your keynote before i get to my questions because it just jumped in my head you mentioned the benefits of say space but the fires in california we're living that here that's really real time that's a benefit you also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space and i only imagine moore's law smaller faster cheaper applies to rockets too so i'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned so you know is it going to be more rules around that i mean this is an interesting question because it's exciting space force but for all the good there is potentially bad out there yeah so i i john i think the uh i think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space what kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps deorbit themselves what kind of basic protections does do all satellites should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space i think those are all fantastic questions and i know that u.s and many uh allied policy makers are looking very very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we uh you know how how we field and field is the military term but you know how we uh populate uh using civil or uh commercial terms uh that space layer at different altitudes uh low earth orbit mid mid-earth orbit geosynchronous earth orbit different kinds of orbits uh what the kind of mission areas we accomplish from space that's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as uh as the place gets a little bit not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out well i'm super excited for space force i know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging changing great space the focus here at this conference is space and cyber security intersection i'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that space force is taking to cyber security and how it impacts our national goals here in the united states yeah yeah so that's a that's a great question john let me let me talk about in two uh two basic ways but number one is and and i know um some people in the audience this might make them a little bit uncomfortable but i have to talk about the threat right um and then relative to that threat i really have to talk about the importance of uh of cyber and specifically cyber security as it relates to that threat um the threats that we face um really represent a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber uh we've seen a lot of action in recent months uh from certain countries notably china and russia uh that have threatened what i referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space for example uh it through many unclassified sources and media sources everybody should understand that um uh the russians have been testing on orbit uh anti-satellite capabilities it's been very clear if you were following just the week before last the department of defense released its uh 2020 military and security developments involving the people's republic of china um uh and uh it was very clear that china is developing asats electronic jammers directed energy weapons and most relevant to today's discussion offensive cyber uh capabilities there are kinetic threats uh that are very very easy to see but a cyber attack against a critical uh command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of gps and important to note that that gps system also impacts many civilians who are dependent upon those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to a system to mislead operators so that they send emergency services personnel to the to the wrong address right attacks on spacecraft on orbit whether directly via a network of intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the systems production uh while we're building the satellite can [ __ ] or corrupt the data denial of service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control i mean if gps went down i you know i hesitate to say it this way because we might elicit some screams from the audience but if gps went down a starbucks wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you and domino's certainly certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less right so with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there from a military operations perspective it's dead serious um uh we have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like lance ransomware and malware and those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems however what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled if you will to use against our national security space systems uh day in and day out um as i said during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity if commanders in the field uh firefighters in california or baristas in in starbucks can't trust the data they see they're receiving then that really harms their decision-making capabilities one of the big trends we've recently seen is the mood move towards proliferated leo uh uh constellations obviously uh spacex's uh starlink uh on the commercial side and on the military side the work that darpa and my organization smc are doing on blackjack and casino as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionize how we plan and field warfighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems but they're also heavily reliant on cyber security uh we've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage uh loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from uh you know satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning on board spacecraft or at the edge our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector they're basically flying boxes full of software right and we need to ensure the data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms govern governing the right actions and that those uh that those systems are impervious to the extent possible uh to nefarious uh modifications so in summation a cyber security is vital element of everything in our national security space goals and i would argue for our national uh goals uh writ large including uh economic and information uh uh dimensions uh the space force leadership at all levels uh from uh some of the brand new second lieutenants that general raymond uh swore into the space force this morning uh ceremonially from the uh air force association's air space and cyberspace conference uh to the various highest levels general raymond uh general d t thompson myself and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise we've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems because it they absolutely depend on it you know you mentioned uh hardware software threats opportunities challenges i want to ask you because you you got me thinking of the minute there around infrastructure i mean we've heard critical infrastructure you know grids here on on earth you're talking about critical infrastructure a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is an extension of what we have so i'd love to get your thoughts about space force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors because you know the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyber space oh yeah threat vectors they're always increasing the surface area well if the surface area is from space it's an unlimited surface area so you got different vectors so you got new critical infrastructure developing real time really fast and you got an expanded threat vector landscape putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues how would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things well so i tell you um i just like um uh just like uh i'm sure people in the security side or the cyber security side of the business in the banking industry feel they feel like it's uh all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system to the financial sector on the department of defense side we've got to have sort of the same mindset um that threat vector from to and through space against critical space systems ground segments the launch enterprise or transportation uh to orbit and the various different uh domains within uh within space itself like i mentioned before uh leo mio and geo-based satellites with different orbits all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that i mentioned earlier some that i didn't mention like weather tactical or wide band communications uh various new features of space control all of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security uh threat perspective and it's a it's a daunting challenge right now right yeah it's awesome and one of the things we've been following on the hardware side here in the on the ground is the supply chain we've seen you know malware being you know really put into really obscure hardware who manufactures it as being outsourced obviously government has restrictions but with the private sector uh you mentioned china and and the us kind of working together across these these peaceful areas but you got to look at the supply chain how does the supply chain the security aspect impact the mission of the u.s space force yeah yeah so so um how about another um just in terms of an example another kind of california-based historical example right um the very first u.s satellite uh explorer one was built by uh the jet propulsion uh laboratory folks uh not far from here in el segundo up in uh up in pasadena um that satellite when it was first built in the late 50s uh weighed a little bit over 30 pounds and i'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by u.s companies fast forward to today the global supply chain is so tightly coupled and frankly many industries are so specialized almost specialized regionally around the planet we focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the the heritage if you will of some of the parts that are used the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized right the space industry especially uh national security space sector um uh is relatively small compared to other commercial industries and we're moving to towards using more and more parts uh from non-us companies uh cyber security and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily um understand 100 percent like an explorer one uh the the lineage of that particular part the environmental difficulties in space are well known the radiation environment the temperature extremes the vacuum those require specialized component and the us military is not the only uh customer in that space in fact we're definitely not the dominant customer uh in space anymore all those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains from a quality perspective a security perspective and availability um there's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from um many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of uh you know compromised patches if you will and our adversaries are aware of these techniques as i mentioned earlier with other forms of attack considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries so we have to uh take that threat seriously um between the government and industry sectors here in the u.s we're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities last fall we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at space and missile system center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio and it sounds really kind of you know businessy geeky if you will you know hey we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cyber security as dynamically as we possibly could and so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts to require system developers to implement some more advanced uh protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment so that data handling and supply chain perspective uh protections um from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account uh cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now it's as important as the the mission performance of the system it's as important as cost it's as important as schedule because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost uh it can perform that missile warning or that communications mis mission perfectly but it's not cyber secure if it doesn't have cyber protections built into it or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber uh threats then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the k the the war fighter or the nation uh any good um supply chain risk management is a is a major challenge for us uh we're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners uh we're all facing it head on uh to try and build secure and trusted components uh that keep our confidence as leaders firefighters and baristas uh as the case may be uh but it is a challenge and we're trying to rise to that challenge you know this so exciting this new area because it really touches everything you know talk about geeking out on on the tech the hardware the systems but also you put your kind of mba hat on you go what's the roi of the extra development and how you how things get built because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like you're building cool stuff people love it's it's exciting but you still have to build and cyber security has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture so you're still building things which means you've got to acquire things you got to acquire parts you got to acquire build software and and sustain it how is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space yeah from initial development uh through planning for the acquisition design development fielding or production fielding and sustainment it impacts all aspects of of the life cycle john uh we simply especially from the concept of baking in cyber security uh we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure so we've moved way further uh towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cyber security from the very beginning of a system's development cyber security and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute as i mentioned earlier equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance we like to talk in uh in the space world about uh mission assurance and mission assurance has always you know sort of taken us as we as we technically geek out right mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space right can it work in a vacuum can it work in you know as it as it uh you know transfers through uh the van allen radiation belt or through the the um the southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly right will it work out in space and now from a resiliency perspective yeah it has to work in space it's got to be functional in space but it's also got to be resistant to these cyber security threats it's it's not just i think uh general dt thompson quoted this term it's not just widget assurance anymore it's mission assurance um uh how does that satellite uh operator that ground control segment operate while under attack so let me break your question a little bit uh just for purposes of discussion into into really two parts uh cyber uh for cyber security for systems that are new and cyber security uh for systems that are in sustainment or kind of old and legacy um obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threaten both and we really have to employ different strategies for for defense of of each one for new systems uh we're desperately trying to implement across the department of defense in particular in the space world a kind of a devsecops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems here at smc we have a program called enterprise ground services which is a tool kit basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems egs as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of of bad behavior malicious behavior if you will um uh it's rudimentary at this point but because we're using devsecops and that incremental development approach as we scale it it just becomes more and more capable you know every every product increment that we field here at uh at uh la air force base uh uh we have the united space space forces west coast software factory which we've dubbed kobayashi maru they're using those agile devops uh software development practices uh to deliver uh space awareness software uh to the combined space operations center uh affectionately called the csp that c-spock is just down the road uh from cal poly uh there in san luis obispo at vandenberg air force base they've securely linked the c-spock with other space operation centers around the planet our allies australia canada and the uk uh we're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations so lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development uh capabilities for our our space systems but as i mentioned earlier we've got large constellations on satellite of satellites on orbit right now some of them are well in excess of a decade or more old on orbit and so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old and so but we still have to worry about them because they're critical to our space capabilities um we've been working with an air force materiel command organization uh called crows which stands for the cyber resiliency office for uh weapon systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to to live through this increasingly cyber security uh concerned era that we currently live in our industry partners have been critical to to both of those different avenues both new systems and legacy systems we're working closely with them to defend and upgrade uh national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with uh with new national assets coming online the vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threaten the way we've done business in the past both militarily and in the case of gps economically the impacts of that cyber security risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes but i've got to tell you it that as the threat vectors change as the vulnerabilities change we've got to be nimble enough agile enough to be able to bounce back and forth we can't just say uh many people in the audience are probably familiar with the rmf or the risk management framework approach to um to reviewing uh the cyber security of a system we can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an rmf on a system and then hey high five we're all good uh it's a journey not a destination that's cyber security and it's a constant battle rhythm throughout a weapon systems life cycle not just a single event i want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question but before i go there you mentioned the agile and i see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles you've got to be faster and we saw this in the computer industry mainframes mini computers and then when you started getting beyond me when the internet hit and pcs came out you saw the big enterprises the banks and and government start to work with startups it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that you know there's no way if you're a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise now that used to be for public sector and certainly uh for you guys so as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved i'm sure would love to love to have a contract with space force there's an roi calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view edit software you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you uh whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile but they might not be that big company we are john that's a fantastic question we are desperately trying to reach out to to those new space advocates to those startups to those um what we sometimes refer to within the department of defense those non-traditional uh defense contractors a couple of things just for uh thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight um uh three years ago we created here at uh space and missile system center uh the space enterprise consortium uh to provide a platform uh a contractual vehicle really to enable us to rapidly prototype uh development of space systems and to collaborate uh between the u.s space force uh traditional defense contractors non-traditional vendors like startups and even some academic institutions uh spec as we call it space enterprise consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts uh awarded quickly many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements and that's what spec is based on and so far in just three years spec has awarded 75 different uh prototyping contracts worth over 800 million dollars with a 36 reduction in time to award and because it's a consortium based competition for um for these kinds of prototyping efforts the barrier to entry for small and non-traditional for startups even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototypings is really lowered right um uh these types of partnerships uh that we've been working through on spec uh have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security uh for their systems both their developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build we want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together and support um uh kind of mutually beneficial uh relationships between all um recently uh at the annual air force association uh conference that i mentioned earlier i moderated a panel with several space industry leaders uh all from big traditional defense contractors by the way and they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships uh between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrants uh and that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those uh larger contractors uh that we rely on day in and day out advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that i think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations as i mentioned earlier the spec has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values and it's just going to get better right there's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium 80 of them are non-traditional kinds of vendors and we just love working with them another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators uh if you will and innovators that include uh cyber security experts is our space pitch day events right so we held our first event last november in san francisco uh where we awarded over a two-day period about 46 million dollars to 30 different companies um that had potentially game-changing ideas these were phase two small business innovative research efforts uh that we awarded with cash on the spot uh we're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. uh we're planning on doing it right here in los angeles uh covent 19 environment permitting um and we think that these are you know fantastic uh uh venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups startups and small businesses who are interested in uh really truly partnering with the us air force it's a as i said before it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business uh and working with the innovation economy uh is something that the department of defense uh really needs to do in that um the innovation that we used to think was ours you know that 80 percent of the industrial-based innovation that came from the department of defense uh the the script has been flipped there and so now more than 70 percent uh particularly in space innovation uh comes from the commercial sector not from uh not from the defense business itself and so um that's a tsunami of uh investment and a tsunami of uh capability and i need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it you know what i mean yeah i mean it's one of those things where the flip the script has been flipped but it's exciting because it's impacting everything are you talking about systems architecture you're talking about software you're talking about a business model you talk about devsecops from a technical perspective but now you have a business model innovation all the theaters of uh are exploding in innovation technical business personnel this brings up the workforce challenge you've got the cyber needs for the u.s space force there's probably a great roi model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts that's a entrepreneurial innovation you got the the business model theater you've got the personnel how does the industry adopt and change you guys are clearly driving this how does the industry adjust to you yeah so um i think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the u.s space force from a from an acquisition perspective and in this particular case from a from a cyber security perspective as i mentioned earlier it's the most exciting time to be in space programs uh really since the days of apollo um uh you know just to put it in terms that you know maybe have an impact with the audience uh from 1957 until today approximately 9 000 satellites uh have been launched from the various space faring countries around the planet uh less than two thousand of those nine thousand are still up on orbit and operational and yet in the new space regime um players like spacex have plans to launch you know 12 000 satellites for some of their constellations alone it really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities whether they're commercial civil or defense are going to require appropriate cyber security uh protections it's just a really exciting time uh to be working in stuff like this and so uh folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cyber security are just the kind of people that we want to work with because we need to make sure our systems are are secure and resilient we need folks that have technical and computing expertise engineering skills to be able to design cybersecure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks uh but we also as you alluded to we need people that have that business and um you know business acumen human networking background so that we can launch the startups and work with the non-traditional businesses uh help to bring them on board help to secure both their data and our data and uh and and make sure our processes and systems are are free as much as possible from uh uh from attack um for preparation for for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this uh trade space um you gotta be smart on digital networking uh you gotta understand basic internet protocols concepts uh programming languages uh database design uh learn what you can from penetration or vulnerability testing and and uh risk assessment i will tell you this and i don't think he will i know he will not mind me telling you this but you've got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago i'm at home one evening and i get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss the commander of air force space command uh general j raymond who is now currently the chief of space operations and he is on temporary duty flying overseas he lands where he's going and he first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes jt um while i was traveling um i noticed that there were e-books available on the commercial airliner i was traveling on and there was an e-book on something called scrumming and agile devsecops and i read it have you read it um and i said no sir but if you tell me what the title of the book is i will read it and so i got to go to my staff meeting um you know the very next week the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the stab meeting hey if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming then i'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our gs13s all of our government employees can get smart on uh the scrumming development process and interestingly as another side i had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays where he was trying to take some leave and i said sir what are you up to today are you are you you know making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever and the chief of space operations told me no i'm trying to teach myself python i'm at lesson two and it's not going so well but i'm i'm gonna figure this out and so that kind of thing if the chief of staff or the you know the the the chief of space operations can prioritize scrumming and python language and innovation in his daily schedule then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that and we'll just say lower levels of rank uh throughout our entire space force enterprise um look i i we don't need to need people that can code a satellite from scratch but we need to know we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cyber security requirements and that can turn those things into into meaningful actions obviously in the space domain things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important uh space is not an intuitive uh domain so under understanding how things survive uh on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions and you know i know there's probably a lot because of this conference i know there's a probably a whole lot of high-speed cyber security experts out in the audience and i need those people in the u.s space force the the country is counting on it but i wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy right i have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers and they don't have to be high-end cyber security experts but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections um into our space system so the skill set is is really really broad um our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into uh define designing uh and fielding offensive and destructive space cyber security weapons right they've repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit and the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that as i mentioned before peaceful uh global commons of space we really need all hands on deck if you're interested in helping in uniform if you're interested in helping uh not in uniform uh but as a government employee a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important uh or more cape more able to be developed for our space systems then we'd really love to uh to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems lieutenant general john thompson great insight thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too and motivation for the young next generation the united states space force approach of cyber security really amazing talk thank you for your time final parting question is as you look out and you had your magic wand what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish it's a super exciting time what do you hope for so um um first of all john thanks to you and and thanks to cal poly uh for the invitation and and thanks to everybody for uh for their interest in cyber security especially as it relates to space systems that's here at the conference um uh there's a quote and i'll read it here uh from uh bernard schriever who was the uh the founder if you will uh a legend in uh dod space the founder of the western development division which was a predecessor organization to space and missile systems center general shrever i think captures the essence of what how we see the next couple of years the world has an ample supply of people who can always come up with a dozen good reasons why new ideas will not work and should not be tried but the people who produce progress are breed apart they have the imagination the courage and the persistence to find solutions and so i think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cyber security innovation are going to be a pony ride at the county fair then perhaps you should look for another line of work because i think the next few years in space and cyber security innovation are going to be more like a rodeo um and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes it is a an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem it's really an honor for me to um to be able to play some small role uh in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it uh while i'm trying to improve the chances of uh of the united states of america in a uh in a space war fighting uh uh environment um and so i thank all of you for uh participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you thank you sir thank you for your leadership and thank you for the for the time for this awesome event space and cyber security symposium 2020 i'm john furrier on behalf of cal poly thanks for watching [Music]

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering space in cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 hosted by Cal Poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE here in California. I want to welcome our featured guest, Lieutenant General, John F. Thompson with the United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. That's the topic of this session. And of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in Los Angeles Air Force Base. Also heading up Space Force. General, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate to you kicking this off. Welcome to the symposium. >> Hey, so thank you very much, John, for that very kind introduction. Also very much thank you to Cal Poly for this opportunity to speak to this audience today. Also a special shout out to one of the organizers, Dustin Debrun, for all of his work, helping get us to this point. Ladies and gentlemen as a John mentioned, I'm JT Thompson. I lead the 6,000 men and women of the United States Space Force's Space and Missile System Center, which is headquartered here at Los Angeles Air Force Base and El Segundo. If you're not quite sure where that's at, it's about a mile and a half from LAX. This is our main operating location, but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country. We're about 500 people at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an about another 500 people on the front range of the Rockies between Colorado Springs and Denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide. We're responsible for acquiring, developing and sustaining the United States Space Force's, critical space assets. That includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites. And we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the US Space Force and a number of our critical mission partners across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do, if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustain the 31 satellite GPS constellation that satellite constellation, while originally intended to help with global navigation, those GPS signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy over the past three decades. GPS is everywhere. I think everybody realizes that. Agriculture, banking, the stock market, the airline industry, separate and distinct navigation systems. It's really pervasive across both capabilities for our Department of Defense and capabilities for our economy and individuals, billions of individuals across our country and the planet. Some of the other work we do for instance, in the communications sector, secure communications satellites that we designed and build that link America's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real time support and comms for our deployed forces. And those of our allies. We also acquire infrared missile warning satellites that monitor the planet for missile launches that provide advanced warning to the US Homeland and to our allies in case some of those missile launches are nefarious. On a note, that's probably a lot closer to home, maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of California. In 2018, SMC jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy to partner with the US Forest Service during two of the largest wildfires in the state's history, the Camp and Woolsey fires in Northern California. As those fires spread out of control, we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites. Those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet. And we collaborated with the US Forest Service so that firefighters on the ground could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading, thereby saving lives and property by identifying hotspots and flareups for firefighters. That data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the US Forest Service and authorities here in California, was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders, the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters. It was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread. We've continued that involvement in recent years, using multiple systems to support firefighters across the Western US this fall, as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue. Working together with the US Forest Service and with other partners we'd like to think that we've made a difference here, but there's still a lot more work to go. And I think that we should always be asking ourselves what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to stakeholders so that they can use it for purposes of good, if you will. How else can we protect our nation? How else can we protect our friends and allies? I think a major component of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly. Just over the past few years, John and I were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have space programs. Nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet. If you just look at one mission area that the Department of Defense is interested in, and that's small launch, there are currently over 100 different small launch companies within the US industrial base vying for commercial DoD and civil payload capabilities, mostly to lower earth orbit. It's truly a remarkable time. If you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, where we're revolutionizing really, the ways that we generate process and use data. It's really remarkable. In 2016, so if you think about this four years ago, NASA estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day. And that was four years ago. Obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience in this conference, we need to work with big thinkers, like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data. We need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge theories of data mining, cyber behaviorism, and Internet of Things 2.0, it's just truly a remarkable time to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the space business are truly, truly daunting and important to all of us. Integrating cyber security into our space systems, both commercial and government is a mandate. it's no longer just a nice to have as the US Space Force and Department of the Air Force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years, space is becoming congested and contested. And that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on cybersecurity day in and day out. The value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer, from the ground control segments associated with it. And this value is not just military, it's also economic and it's not just American, it's also a value for the entire world, particularly our allies, as we all depend upon space and space systems. Your neighbors and friends here in California that are employed at the space and missile system center work with network defenders. We work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers, our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global comments of space free and open for exploration and for commerce as John and I were talking earlier, before we came online, there's an aspect of cybersecurity for space systems, especially for some of our legacy systems, that's more, how do we bolt this on? Cause we fielded those space systems a number of years ago, and the challenges of cybersecurity in the space domain have grown. So we have a part that we have to worry about, bolting it on, but then we have to worry about building it in as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that realizes that the cyber threat or the cybersecurity landscape will evolve over time. It's not just going to be stagnant. There will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we all have to look at. Look, as Secretary Barrett, who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most Americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning. The American way of life really depends on space. And as part of the United States Space Force, we work with defense leaders, our Congress joint, and international military teammates and industry to ensure American leadership in space. I really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today, John, and thanks so much to Cal Poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event. I've really looked forward to this for several months. And so with that, I look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here. >> General, thank you very much for those awesome introductory statement. For the folks watching on the stream, Brigadier General Carthan's going to be in the chat, answering any questions, feel free to chat away. He's the vice commander of Space and Missile System Center, he'll be available. A couple of comments from your keynote before I get to my questions. Cause it just jumped into my head. You mentioned the benefits of say space with the fires in California. We're living that here. That's really realtime. That's a benefit. You also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space. I'm only imagined Moore's law smaller, faster, cheaper applies to rockets too. So I'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned. So is it going to be more rules around that? This is an interesting question cause it's exciting Space Force, but for all the good there is potentially bad out there. >> Yeah. So John, I think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested, is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space? What kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps de orbit themselves? What kind of basic protections should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space? I think those are all fantastic questions. And I know that US and many allied policy makers are looking very, very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we field, and field as the military term. But how we populate using civil or commercial terms that space layer at different altitudes, lower earth orbit, mid earth orbit, geosynchronous earth orbit, different kinds of orbits, what the kind of mission areas we accomplished from space. That's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as the place gets a little bit, not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out. >> I'm super excited for Space Force. I know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging, changing great space. The focus here at this conference is space and cybersecurity, the intersection. I'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that a space force is taking to cybersecurity and how it impacts our national goals here in the United States. >> Yeah. So that's a great question John, let me talk about it in two basic ways. At number one is an and I know some people in the audience, this might make them a little bit uncomfortable, but I have to talk about the threat. And then relative to that threat, I really have to talk about the importance of cyber and specifically cyber security, as it relates to that threat. The threats that we face really represented a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber. We've seen a lot of action in recent months from certain countries, notably China and Russia that have threatened what I referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space. For example, it threw many unclassified sources and media sources. Everybody should understand that the Russians have been testing on orbit anti-satellite capabilities. It's been very clear if you were following just the week before last, the Department of Defense released its 2020 military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. And it was very clear that China is developing ASATs, electronic jammers, directed energy weapons, and most relevant to today's discussion, offensive cyber capabilities. There are kinetic threats that are very, very easy to see, but a cyber attack against a critical command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of GPS and important to note that that GPS system also impacts many civilians who are dependent on those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services, a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to assist them to mislead operators so that they sent emergency services personnel to the wrong address. Attacks on spacecraft on orbit, whether directly via a network intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the system's production while we're building the satellite can cripple or corrupt the data. Denial-of-service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control. If GPS went down, I hesitate to say it this way, cause we might elicit some screams from the audience. But if GPS went down a Starbucks, wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order, Uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you. And Domino's certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek there from a military operations perspective, it's dead serious. We have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like ransomware and malware. And those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems. However, what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled, if you will, to use against our national security space systems day in and day out. As I said, during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber, the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity. If commanders in the field, firefighters in California or baristas in Starbucks, can't trust the data they're receiving, then that really harms their decision making capabilities. One of the big trends we've recently seen is the move towards proliferated LEO constellations, obviously Space X's Starlink on the commercial side and on the military side, the work that DARPA and my organization SMC are doing on Blackjack and Casino, as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really, really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionaries how we plan and field war fighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems. But they're also heavily reliant on cybersecurity. We've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage. Loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from a satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective. Another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, onboard spacecraft are at the edge. Our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector, they're basically flying boxes full of software. And we need to ensure that data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms, governing the right actions and that those systems are impervious to the extent possible to nefarious modifications. So in summation, cybersecurity is a vital element of everything in our national security space goals. And I would argue for our national goals, writ large, including economic and information dimensions, the Space Force leadership at all levels from some of the brand new second lieutenants that general Raymond swore in to the space force this morning, ceremonially from the air force associations, airspace and cyberspace conference to the various highest levels, General Raymond, General DT Thompson, myself, and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise. We've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems cause they absolutely depend on it. >> You mentioned hardware, software threats, opportunities, challenges. I want to ask you because you got me thinking of the minute they're around infrastructure. We've heard critical infrastructure, grids here on earth. You're talking about critical infrastructure, a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is, an extension of what we have. So I'd love to get your thoughts about Space Force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors, because the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyberspace. Oh you have threat vectors. They're always increasing the surface area. If the surface area is from space, it's an unlimited service area. So you got different vectors. So you've got new critical infrastructure developing real time, really fast. And you got an expanded threat vector landscape. Putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues. How would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things? >> So I tell you, just like, I'm sure people in the security side or the cybersecurity side of the business in the banking industry feel, they feel like it's all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system, to the financial sector. On the Department of Defense side, we've got to have sort of the same mindset. That threat vector from, to, and through space against critical space systems, ground segments, the launch enterprise, or transportation to orbit and the various different domains within space itself. Like I mentioned before, LEO, MEO and GEO based satellites with different orbits, all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that I mentioned earlier, some that I did mention like a weather tactical or wide band communications, various new features of space control. All of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security threat perspective. And it's a daunting challenge right now. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things we've been falling on the hardware side on the ground is the supply chain. We've seen, malware being, really put in a really obscure hardware. Who manufactures it? Is it being outsourced? Obviously government has restrictions, but with the private sector, you mentioned China and the US kind of working together across these peaceful areas. But you got to look at the supply chain. How does the supply chain in the security aspect impact the mission of the US space Force? >> Yeah. Yeah. So how about another, just in terms of an example, another kind of California based historical example. The very first US Satellite, Explorer 1, was built by the jet propulsion laboratory folks, not far from here in El Segundo, up in Pasadena, that satellite, when it was first built in the late 50s weighing a little bit, over 30 pounds. And I'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by US companies. Fast forward to today. The global supply chain is so tightly coupled, and frankly many industries are so specialized, almost specialized regionally around the planet. We focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them, but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the heritage, if you will, of some of the parts that are used, the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized. The space industry, especially national security space sector is relatively small compared to other commercial industries. And we're moving towards using more and more parts from non US companies. Cybersecurity and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily understand 100% like an Explorer one, the lineage of that particular part. The environmental difficulties in space are well known. The radiation environment, the temperature extremes, the vacuum, those require specialized component. And the US military is not the only customer in that space. In fact, we're definitely not the dominant customer in space anymore. All those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains, from a quality perspective, a security perspective and availability. There's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of compromised patches, if you will. And our adversaries are aware of these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, with other forms of attack, considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries. So we have to take that threat seriously. Between the government and industry sectors here in the US. We're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities. Last fall, we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at Space and Missile System Center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio. And it sounds really kind of businessy geeky, if you will. Hey, we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cybersecurity as dynamically as we possibly could. And so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts, to require system developers, to implement some more advanced protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment. So that data handling and supply chain protections from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account. Cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now. Performance of the system, It's as important as cost, it's as important as schedule, because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost, it can perform that missile warning or that communications mission perfectly, but it's not cyber secure. If it's doesn't have cyber protections built into it, or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber threats, then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the CA the war fighter or the nation any good. Supply chain risk management is a major challenge for us. We're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners. We're all facing it head on to try and build secure and trusted components that keep our confidence as leaders, firefighters, and baristas as the case may be. But it is a challenge. And we're trying to rise to that challenge. >> This is so exciting this new area, because it really touches everything. Talk about geeking out on the tech, the hardware, the systems but also you put your kind of MBA hat on you go, what's the ROI of extra development and how things get built. Because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like, if you're building cool stuff, it's exciting, but you still have to build. And cybersecurity has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture. So you're still building things, which means you got to acquire things, you got to acquire parts, you got acquire build software and sustain it. How is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space? >> Yeah. From initial development, through planning for the acquisition, design, development, our production fielding and sustainment, it impacts all aspects of the life cycle, John. We simply, especially from the concept of baking in cybersecurity, we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure. So we've moved way further towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cybersecurity from the very beginning of a systems development, cyber security, and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute. As I mentioned earlier, equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance. We like to talk in the space world about mission assurance and mission assurance has always sort of taken us as we technically geek out. Mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space. Can it work in a vacuum? Can it work in as it transfers through the Van Allen radiation belt or through the Southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly? Will it work out in space? And now from a resiliency perspective, yeah, it has to work in space. It's got to be functional in space, but it's also got to be resistant to these cybersecurity threats. It's not just, I think a General D.T Thompson quoted this term. It's not just widget assurance anymore. It's mission assurance. How does that satellite operator that ground control segment operate while under attack? So let me break your question a little bit, just for purposes of discussion into really two parts, cybersecurity, for systems that are new and cybersecurity for systems that are in sustainment are kind of old and legacy. Obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threatened both, and we really have to employ different strategies for defensive of each one. For new systems. We're desperately trying to implement across the Department of Defense and particularly in the space world, a kind of a dev sec ops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems. Here at SMC, we have a program called enterprise ground services, which is a toolkit, basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems, EGS as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities. Network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of a bad behavior, malicious behavior, if you will, it's rudimentary at this point, but because we're using DevSecOps and that incremental development approach, as we scale it, it just becomes more and more capable. Every product increment that we feel. Here at LA Air Force Base, we have the United Space Force's West Coast Software Factory, which we've dubbed the Kobayashi Maru. They're using those agile DevOps software development practices to deliver a space awareness software to the combined space operations center. Affectionately called the CSpock that CSpock is just on the road from Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They've so securely linked the sea Spock with other space operation centers around the planet, our allies, Australia, Canada, and the UK. We're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations. So lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development capabilities for our space systems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've got large constellations of satellites on orbit right now. Some of them are well in excess of a decade or more or old on orbit. And so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old. But we still have to worry about them cause they're critical to our space capabilities. We've been working with an air force material command organization called CROWS, which stands for the Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapon Systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to live through this increasingly cybersecurity concerned era that we currently live in. Our industry partners have been critical to both of those different avenues. Both new systems and legacy systems. We're working closely with them to defend and upgrade national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with new national assets coming online. The vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threatened the way we've done business in the past, both militarily and in the case of GPS economically. The impacts of that cybersecurity risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes, but I've got to tell you, as the threat vectors change, as the vulnerabilities change, we've got to be nimble enough, agile enough, to be able to bounce back and forth. We can't just say, many people in the audience are probably familiar with the RMF or the Risk Management Framework approach to reviewing the cyber security of a system. We can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an RMF on a system. And then, hey, high five, we're all good. It's a journey, not a destination, that's cybersecurity. And it's a constant battle rhythm through our weapon systems lifecycle, not just a single event. >> I want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question. But before I go there, you mentioned agile. And I see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles, you've got to be faster. And we saw this in the computer industry, mainframes, mini computers, and then we started getting beyond maybe when the internet hit and PCs came out, you saw the big enterprises, the banks and government start to work with startups. And it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that, there's no way if you are a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise. Now that used to be for public sector and certainly for you guys. So as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved, I'm sure would love to have a contract with Space Force. There's an ROI calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view and it's software, you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups. Could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you, whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile, but they might not be that big company. >> John, that's a fantastic question. We're desperately trying to reach out to those new space advocates, to those startups, to those what we sometimes refer to, within the Department of Defense, those non traditional defense contractors. A couple of things just for thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight. Three years ago, we created here at Space and Missile System Center, the Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a platform, a contractual vehicle, really to enable us to rapidly prototype, development of space systems and to collaborate between the US Space Force, traditional defense contractors, non traditional vendors like startups, and even some academic institutions. SPEC, as we call it, Space Enterprise Consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts awarded quickly. Many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements. And that's what SPEC is based on. And so far in just three years, SPEC has awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $800 million with a 36% reduction in time to award. And because it's a consortium based competition for these kinds of prototyping efforts, the barrier to entry for small and nontraditional, for startups, even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototyping has really lowered. These types of partnerships that we've been working through on spec have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security for their systems, both our developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build. We want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together in support kind of mutually beneficial relationships between all. Recently at the Annual Air Force Association conference that I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel with several space industry leaders, all from big traditional defense contractors, by the way. And they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrance. And that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups, as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those larger contractors that we rely on day in and day out. Advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that I think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations. As I mentioned earlier, the SPEC has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values. And it's just going to get better. There's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium, 80% of them are non traditional kinds of vendors. And we just love working with them. Another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators, if you will, and innovators that include cyber security experts is our space pitch day events. So we held our first event last November in San Francisco, where we awarded over a two day period about $46 million to 30 different companies that had potentially game changing ideas. These were phase two small business innovative research efforts that we awarded with cash on the spot. We're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. We're planning on doing it right here in Los Angeles, COVID-19 environment permitting. And we think that these are fantastic venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups, and small businesses who are interested in really, truly partnering with the US Air Force. It's, as I said before, it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business. And working with the innovation economy is something that the Department of Defense really needs to do in that the innovation that we used to think was ours. That 80% of the industrial base innovation that came from the Department of Defense, the script has been flipped there. And so now more than 70%, particularly in space innovation comes from the commercial sector, not from the defense business itself. And so that's a tsunami of investment and a tsunami of a capability. And I need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it, you know what I mean? >> Yeah, It's one of those things where the script has been flipped, but it's exciting because it's impacting everything. When you're talking about systems architecture? You're talking about software, you're talking about a business model. You're talking about dev sec opsx from a technical perspective, but now you have a business model innovation. All the theaters are exploding in innovation, technical, business, personnel. This brings up the workforce challenge. You've got the cyber needs for the US Space Force, It's probably great ROI model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts. That's a entrepreneurial innovation, you've got the business model theater, you've got the personnel. How does the industry adopt and change? You guys are clearly driving this. How does the industry adjust to you? >> Yeah. So I think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the US Space Force from an acquisition perspective, and in this particular case from a cybersecurity perspective. As I mentioned earlier, it's the most exciting time to be in space programs, really since the days of Apollo. Just to put it in terms that maybe have an impact with the audience. From 1957 until today, approximately 9,000 satellites have been launched from the various space varying countries around the planet. Less than 2000 of those 9,000 are still up on orbit and operational. And yet in the new space regime players like Space X have plans to launch, 12,000 satellites for some of their constellations alone. It really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities, whether they're commercial, civil, or defense are going to require appropriate cybersecurity protections. It's just a really exciting time to be working in stuff like this. And so folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cybersecurity are just the kind of people that we want to work with. Cause we need to make sure our systems are secure and resilient. We need folks that have technical and computing expertise, engineering skills to be able to design cyber secure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks. But we also, as you alluded to, we need people that have that business and business acumen, human networking background, so that we can launch the startups and work with the non traditional businesses. Help to bring them on board help, to secure both their data and our data and make sure our processes and systems are free as much as possible from attack. For preparation, for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this trade space, you got to be smart on digital networking. You got to understand basic internet protocols, concepts, programming languages, database design. Learn what you can for penetration or vulnerability testing and a risk assessment. I will tell you this, and I don't think he will, I know he will not mind me telling you this, but you got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago, I'm at home evening and I get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss, the commander of Air Force Space command, General, J. Raymond, who is now currently the Chief of Space Operations. And he is on temporary duty, flying overseas. He lands where he's going and first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes JT, while I was traveling, I noticed that there were eBooks available on the commercial airliner I was traveling on and there was an ebook on something called scrumming and agile DevSecOps. And I read it, have you read it? And I said, no, sir. But if you tell me what the title of the book is, I will read it. And so I got to go to my staff meeting, the very next week, the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the staff meeting, hey, if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming, then I'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our GS13s, All of our government employees can get smart on the scrumming development process. And interestingly as another side, I had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays, where he was trying to take some leave. And I said, sir, what are you up to today? Are you making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever. And the Chief of Space Operations told me no, I'm trying to teach myself Python. I'm at lesson two, and it's not going so well, but I'm going to figure this out. And so that kind of thing, if the chief of staff or the Chief of Space Operations can prioritize scrumming and Python language and innovation in his daily schedule, then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that. And we'll just say, lower levels of rank throughout our entire space force enterprise. Look, we don't need people that can code a satellite from scratch, but we need to know, we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cybersecurity requirements. And that can turn those things into meaningful actions, obviously in the space domain, things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important spaces, not an intuitive domain. So under understanding how things survive on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions. And I know there's probably a lot, because of this conference. I know there's probably a whole lot of high speed cybersecurity experts out in the audience. And I need those people in the US Space Force. The country is counting on it, but I wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy. I have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers, and they don't have to be high end cybersecurity experts, but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections into our space systems. So the skill set is really, really broad. Our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into designing and fielding offensive and destructive space, cybersecurity weapons. They repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit. And the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that. As I mentioned before, peaceful global comments of space, we really need all hands on deck. If you're interested in helping in uniform, if you're interested in helping, not in uniform, but as a government employee, a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important or more able to be developed for our space systems. And we'd really love to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems. >> Lieutenant General John Thompson, great insight. Thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too, and motivation for the young next generation. The United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. Really amazing talk, thank you for your time. Final parting question is, as you look out and you have your magic wand, what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish? It's a super exciting time. What do you hope for? >> So first of all, John, thanks to you and thanks to Cal Poly for the invitation and thanks to everybody for their interest in cybersecurity, especially as it relates to space systems, that's here at the conference. There's a quote, and I'll read it here from Bernard Schriever, who was the founder, if you will, a legend in a DoD space, the founder of the Western development division, which was a predecessor organization to Space and Missile System Center, General Schriever, I think captures the essence of how we see the next couple of years. "The world has an ample supply of people "who can always come up with a dozen good reasons "why new ideas will not work and should not be tried, "but the people who produce progress are breed apart. "They have the imagination, "the courage and the persistence to find solutions." And so I think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cybersecurity innovation are going to be upon a pony ride at the County fair, then perhaps you should look for another line of work, because I think the next few years in space and cybersecurity innovation are going to be more like a rodeo and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes. It is an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem. It's really an honor for me to be able to play some small role in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it while I'm trying to improve the chances of the United States of America in a space war fighting environment. And so I thank all of you for participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you. Thank you. >> Sir, thank you for your leadership and thank you for the time for this awesome event, Space and Cyber Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, I'm John Furrier on behalf of Cal Poly, thanks for watching. (mellow music)

(upbeat music) >> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back here Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Chuchill's, it's the 9th annual award celebration put on by the Churchill club and the theme is all about leadership this year. We're really excited to have a very special guest John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, he's been around a long time. He's known and talks to a lot of leaders. So john, great to have you on. >> Nice to be here, thank you very much for having me. >> So leadership is such an interesting topic right? You go everything from, um, West point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to a start up that starts as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. Ya know, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley is going through some hiccups right now and when you look, >> [John W. Thompson] We are? >> Just a couple little ones. >> I did recognize any of those. >> Well maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing is coming back down. But you know when you think about leaders, what are somethings people maybe don't think about and really more interestingly how should people grow or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? >> Well I think leadership is is as much about your personality and the business that use chose to go run is anything else. And the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a, pick a business, a business the size of Microsoft are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical independent of the size of the company or organization you're on. First of which is, integrity, second of which is focus, third of which is follow through and execution. There is lots of things that fundamental do and do well. And those who don't do well, don't become or stay leaders very long, that's for sure. >> It's interesting to look at Microsoft cause, ya know, three big personalities. Obviously Bill got it started as a young kid, I mean he was literally a kid in college. Um, then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personalities and ya know, interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns and then ya know, some tough times at Microsoft little bit stagnant and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them, that make them so successful? >> Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry. That had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so, Bills role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the anti-trust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says tag you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focus on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company preformed, its revenue grew from roughly ten, fifteen billion to almost eighty billion dollars during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. So people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough Satya come in, Satya had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. So he had a very fundamental view about of what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues, issues number one was strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile first, cloud first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue, for the company, was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the, candidly, on the cultural front. >> Right. So on the cultural front that is, are you a harder thing to impact especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world, so what are the secrets that change culture like that? >> Its fundamental, it's about openness and honesty and candor. Um, one of the things that happens here in the valley, often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft office. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees with what's going on. My gosh! That's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very very consistent and predictable in his execution of what openness, listening rather than talking, all of the things that good leaders are able to do. >> Right, its funny the one word you haven't said since we have been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love focus execute and delight the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. you said vision, but not strategy. Its interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, its just work, you just got to execute. >> Its one thing to have a strategy, but if you can't execute the strategy, of what value is it? So I have always had a view in my roles as leader that it's about focus and executing. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes you have to create ideas that employees, and partners, and customers can become excited about. But ultimately it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days of the years, not 365. >> Alright, final question I know you've got a busy night. As you look as some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with, but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? >> Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman of IBM, who I was the chief of staff to many many many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time, but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels up and down the line. And a company of IBM's size back in those days, it was two, three hundred thousand people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been, a guy who created Akamai. He's on the board of Oracle and he's an awesome awesome friend of mine. He was the guy that ran the America's and gave me my first really really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that, was a pretty important move. George Conrades is his name by the way. And so those two people were very very influential as leaders. As I would look at them and try to determine whether or not can I, can I pattern myself after that? Or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership. >> Right so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from, and to take care of ya and help you along the way. >> [John W. Thompson] I agree >> John, thanks for spending some time it's always great to sit down with you >> Nice to see you as well. >> And continue success. We'll hopefully see you next time not to long from now. >> Lets hope not. >> Alright, he's John W. Thompson and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube, were at the Churchill's in Santa Clara California. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering E M C. World 2015. Brought to you by E. M. C Brocade and D. C. >> You're watching E m C World Live here on the Q. Looking Angles Flagship program. We go out to the event they start the season noise. I'm John Kerry of my coast Dude. Minutemen. Our next guest is a cube. Alumni have been on a cute many times before and back again. 2011 John Thompson is the CEO of Virtual Instruments and also the chairman of a company called Microsoft. Um, welcome back to the cubes. Nice to be about Great to see you in the A M World week didn't interview on Virtual Instruments with CEO, and we were really riffing on this whole idea of data instrumentation. And we it was really free Internet of things. So give us the update. What's going on with virtue Instruments here? I see Microsoft has a conference going on ignite. Even though you're chairman. The board. You're also the CEO of Virgin Instruments and you're gonna do some business here. What's going on? What business are you doing? Well, this is an important conference for virtual instruments. DMC is one of our strongest go to market partners, and candidly, many of their customers are virtual instruments customers. And so it's an opportunity for me to be here to spend time with our partners and our customers in one venue. Our business is doing quite well. We just had a very, very strong March quarter, which is always a little bit of a down quarter for most tech companies. But we were up 27 28% year over year for the calendar. Q. One so we feel pretty good about that. This is the most important quarter of the year, though, which is always the case in Texas. So we're hoping that we can knock the ball out of the park again this quarter. We launched our virtual wisdom for platform in the spring of last year, and it is gaining tremendous traction, certainly in the U. S. And around the globe. It is all about health utilization in performance of the infrastructure, and we've defined a model where you can look at an application inside that infrastructure, monitor its performance and its availability, and that idea is so critical in a world where everything will someday live in the cloud and will you will want to assure a level of performance and, quite frankly, a level of responsiveness to customers as they come on says it's a reset to share the folks out. This is not a new concept for you guys. We talked about this years ago. It's not like you woke up one boys. Hey, things is trendy. This data center in fermentation takes us quickly back. Where did it come from? Was an itch to scratch. What original product as you have and how does that morph into today's crazy, data driven world, where dash boring riel time is actually competitive advantage and now table stakes? Well, if you were to go back to the genesis of virtual instruments, we started as a small technology investment inside a larger company called Venice are that was trying to solve the inevitable performance problem in the fibre channel world. And as the market crashed in 7 4008 the team at Venice or had to decide, how are we gonna clean up our portfolio? And the result waas. They sold off the assets? Were we, in fact, created virtual instruments. So a small group of investors, led by Jim Davidson from Silver Lake and Michael Marks from Riverwood, helped to fund the original investment and virtual instruments. We've been at it now for about seven years. We have clearly evolved the product quite a bit since then, and we've captured a number of very, very strong venture capital investment so long away as we made the choice. That said, we need the shift from being a fiber channel company to be in an infrastructure performance management company because the inevitable movement to the cloud will drive an opportunity for us. Yeah, and you're a senior executive private equity. I mean, this is pretty much a big bet. There's a lot of money involved with private equity. So it wasn't like you're, like, throw in the Silicon Valley startup together. It was really like, Okay, there's big money behind it. Well, you guys, did you see it turning out this way? What? What was learning that have been magnified from that trajectory? Well, I think in the early days we thought the path was a little different than what we've actually followed. We thought the path waas that the fibre channel World was so big and it needed better visibility. This would in fact give the world better visibility in the fibre channel space. What we have observed, however, is that the entire infrastructure has become Maur and more opaque, and therefore you need to not just drive visibility in the storage layer, but across the entire converge staff. And so the platform that we have evolved is all about supporting this converged platform not just fibre Channel, but filed a storage not just VM where, but all virtualized server environments. And we believe that's, ah, multibillion dollar market. And that's why we were able to attract both private equity initially and venture capital later as we built out of product. It's interesting. You see some of these ideas come a come around full circle. I'm curious. Just in industry trend. Your your opinion on Veritas, you know, being spun out. It's it's It's both sad for me personally, but I think it speaks to how difficult the cultural integration might have been between the two companies. While I really had a vision back in the old four or five days of security and backup coming together, I think It was a really, really difficult thing to make happen in the context of what has evolved at Samantha, so the fact that they've chosen to spend it out, it's perhaps a little disappointing for me personally, but not a surprise. So what is your vision of security today? My understanding, You advise, even sit on the board of ah Lumia company. We've way we've talked to the company really, what's happening in security. So if you think about how security has evolved once upon a time, it was about protecting the device candidly and a cloud based world. It's going to be more about protecting the workloads as they move around. And that's one of the elements of what a lumia does, in fact, provide. Furthermore, I have believed for a very, very long time that as time goes on, security will have to get closer and closer to that which is deemed to be most critical. In other words, you can't protect all of the data. You can't protect all of the instances that air on the Web, but you can identify those that are most critical and therefore need a level of protection beyond what the standard would be. And so my belief is that companies like a Loom EO and others that will evolve will get closer to the workload, and we'll get closer to the data that's most critical. And so data classification and things of that nature will become much, much more important than they have. You're an investor in aluminum. You on the board are okay, so you're on the board of director and investor. We covered their launch. Great company. The cracking is low slides, as as Alan Cohen would say, they phenomenal funding round gone from stealth two years and now the big $100,000,000 really funding round massive guerrilla marketing. Still going on at the air say, was kind of clever. The perimeter lists cloud is a factor. And what tech enabled? Do you see the key thing? Alan Cohen described it as 1000 foot shoulds soldiers protecting assets because there's no more perimeter that no front door any more. What is the technology driver for that? Well, the whole idea behind the loom Eo, is to have a what I would call a portable policy enforcement engine that can move as the workload moves around the cloud. So policy management, security policy management has been a very, very difficult task for most large enterprises. So if I can define security policies for every server of where workloads can go to and from on that server and make sure that nothing violates that policy, hence I enforce it routinely. Oh, I can change. The dynamic of House security gets delivered in a cloud based world because no workload is gonna run in any single place on a cloud world. That workload is gonna move to where there is capacity to handle. I gotta ask you because we have a lot of people out there that follow tech business test tech athletes that you are. But also, you're a senior executive who has a lot of experience, and we could be presenting to Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School. I want to get your kind of business mind out to the audience. And that is, is that as an executive who's seen the big, big companies, the big battleships, the big aircraft carriers, from the IBM days to the M in a world of the nineties and the transformation of the Internet now in a complete shift, an inflection point with things like a Loom, Eo and Cloud and and Virtual instruments and the new Microsoft and the Silicon Angles and the crowd shots out there, What do you advise managers out there to operate from a management perspective. I mean, there's a classic business school numbers quarter on the challenges of going public, managing enormous dynamic technology change. So every theater is kind of exploding the technology theater, the business theater, the social theater as an executive. How would you advise someone as a CEO are rising growing startup how they should stitch themselves together? If you can draw in from previous experiences? Or is there a pattern recognition you can share? Well, it's It's never simply about the numbers, while the numbers air always important and the numbers will always be the underpinning of evaluation or whatever. In reality, it's about having a team that is able to rally around a leader with vision that says, Here's how we're gonna change the world. Here's how we're going to make an impact as this industry goes through, the natural inflection points that it always does. And if you look at what has occurred in this industry about every 8 to 10 years, something significant changes. And so a company that may have missed an opportunity six or eight years ago has another shot at it six or eight years later because of the inflection points that we go through. So it's important for the leader of a company toe. Believe that I can change the world based upon the industry that I'm a part of and have a compelling point of view about what changing the world means for that company and that team. And if you could get the team together around that idea, what about cloud and big data and mobile thes dynamics that you would? If someone just wants a roadmap for navigation or what decked me to go after, What would you say? What do you say? You know, get it all in the cloud or go poke at a duel are indeed new, agile management. Things were happening like, Well, I think it starts with what are the court confidence is that you have as a team or company, so you can't say g I'm gonna go and do cloud and oh, by the way, I have no confidence in the management infrastructure for large enterprises or I'm gonna go do mobile and I really have no experience in the mobile space whatsoever. So core competencies matter and leveraging the core strengths of the company matters now. Oftentimes, what companies will do its supplement their core strengths through M, and we'll go out and acquire something and bolted on the hard part of M and A, which is what we were referencing early around. Veritas is Can you integrate it? Can you really make it work after you bought it? Buying it is the easy part. Generating it and making it work is the really, really tough part. And arguably we didn't do is good a job as I would have liked with Samantha. And so basically you're saying is if you as an executive, you want to look at the winds of change for hand, get the sails up, if you will, to confuse the metaphor and get into that slipstream so you can actually drive and you can't. Being an amateur, you gotta actually have some competency. You have a leverage point. Look, one of the great things about this industry is it doesn't take some brilliant business leader to create a new idea. I mean, no one ever would have viewed Zucker Bird as a business leader or some of the young, really, really powerful CEO built phenomenal, phenomenal companies in this industry. But they had an idea, and they were able to create a team around that idea and go change the world. And that's what's so powerful about this industry that I've had the pleasure to be a part of for 40 some years. Yes. Speaking about CEOs that changed the industry, John Chambers announced that he's stepping aside from the CEO role this morning. So you know when you look back, you know John was one of the four horsemen of the Internet era and 20 years there. Chuck Robbins is coming in. He's been there since C. I think 97. What do you think of that move? And you know what's happening with Cisco in leadership for the big companies? Well, John's a really, really good friend, and I admire him for all of what he's done and Cisco and I wish him well as he makes this transition. Interestingly enough, the transition is to executive chairman, with the new CEO stepping in so What that says is that John plans that have a little more involvement, perhaps in what goes on in the company. Then I do it. Microsoft. My title is not executive chairman of Microsoft. Thank goodness I wouldn't want it to. But it also speaks to the fact that John spend the CEO. It just goes since 1995 like that. So he has an enormous amount of knowledge and insight about the company industry, its customers, partners, culture, all of those culture. And so all of those things will be valuable and important to the new CEO. And I think him stepping into that role is trying to leverage that. Cenedella came in and made his voice heard really instantly. And Microsoft has been a great company to watch, you know, since Auntie's came on board, you know, just Cisco need to make some bold moves or are they pretty stable where they are is kind of the dominant? That's a better question for John and CEO. I think what is clear is that all all companies, at some point after find a way to redefine and Sasha's role at Microsoft. He has redefined Microsoft as a cloud first mobile first, and that's all about recognizing. Were acts are gonna run on what devices and what kind of service is. And that redefinition, I think, is important for any industry leader, regardless of how long you just brought us to the tagline of this show, M C World is redefined. So any comments, How's the emcee doing it? Redefining themselves, I think the emcees a terrific company. Joe's a longtime friend of mine. I mean, I know Joe forever on. It's been amazing to see how it's gone from being a storage company to this federation of companies that have capabilities that are so broad and so diverse. I hope they don't get pushed to do something that isn't in the best interest of customers, but maybe enamored by some investors. The angel of the activist pressure. Yeah, that's always and that that's unfortunate, but I think they have a nice balance now. They have a huge installed base and this competitive pressure so they gotta push that. But I have to. I have to ask, is that? You know, I was getting some tweets earlier about Microsoft, and I know you, you know, you're only chairman of the board executive chairman. But you were involved in a very historic where you were on the executive search committee for the CEO replacement for Steve Balmer, of which they chose sake. Nutella Cube alumni We interviewed at the XL Partners Innovation Summit in Stanford that that's about culture. That's about transitions, about inflection points. And Sister used to mention Cisco. Not similar situation. But Microsoft is the legend company. I think the computer industry like an apple. Microsoft was their big part of the computer revolution. Big seismic changing. You were right there. Just share some color on what that whole experience like for you personally. And if you can share any insights to the audience, I know it's a sense might be sensitive topic. But what's that like? And, you know, the outcomes. Looking good. As he says, he's doing great. What? What can you share? Well, I think it would be fair to say that it was a more consuming process than I ever thought it would be. I went from being a new board member of Microsoft in the spring of 2012 to be in the lead independent director in the fall of 2012 to leading the search starting in the summer of 2013. I mean, I never could have imagine my involvement there changing that dramatically, Nor would I have imagined that searching for a CEO of a company would consume 80% of my time when I was also running a company. So for a period of about six months, it's like athlete right there. I had two full time jobs where I was on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for the eye and on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for Microsoft as well. It was, I would also have to say and incredibly incredibly exhilarating experience. I talked to some phenomenal leaders from around the world way had hard, long look anywhere we wanted at any CEO or candidate that we wanted, and we settled on someone who was a Tech athlete. We believe that the company was at a really, really important inflection point where over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, we're gonna have to make some really, really important technology decisions that would set the course from Microsoft for many, many years to come. And so, while there was much speculation in the press about this person or that person, and what a great business leader, that person waas What we, as a board concluded, was that what our company needed at that moment in time was a true technology visionary who could drive the strategy of the company because it had assets. I mean, they had a whole search thing that they quote missed on paper. But they had, like you said, they could come back at it again with being the subtle art of assets. Here, Cloud was built out. Everything was kind of like in place for that tech athlete on. And I think soccer has done an amazing job. I'm quite proud of them. I'm happy toe say I have some small part in that, but I'm or happy for the way he has executed in the job. I mean, he steps into the job with a level of humility but confidence that is so important for the CEO of a company of that size, and to maintain that cultural DNA because you have one of most competitive companies on the planet. A question to the point where they had to be almost broken up by the DOJ from the Bill Gates kind of DNA and bomber to continued, be competitive, live in this new era. Really tough challenge. Well, he's he's a bright guy. He, as I said, has great humility and has the respect of the team. And it's been interesting to see the internal shift behavior and attitude with a guy who I jokingly say he has two ears and one mouth and he uses them proportionately. And that's a very important lesson for someone trying to transform a company. You must listen more than you talk, and I think he does a great job. We try to do that. The Cuban we talk all day long way do interviews, but I gotta ask you back to virtual instruments. Okay, gets a good business going on with the emcee Goto partner about the anywhere in the federation of a partner with you as well, say, Is it all Federation? It's mostly through E M. C. And while the em wears of small V I customer, we don't do much with them on the go to market side on the go to market side. We rely more heavily, if you will. On AMC, that partnership has evolved. I mean, from the early days it was viewed as G. We're not sure who you are and what you do and whether or not you're competitive with us today, we have very, very common go to market processes around the globe. I'd love to see them stronger. I just left to cheese office in San GI Joe. We could doom. Or but when it's when it's all said and gone, this is one of the strongest go to market partners we have that's also shared the folks out there what they might not know about insurance, that you could share their hearing this now for the first time and working on the radar future of your business, your division product, extensive bility. Future of Internet of everything. Future Internet of things, whatever you want to put on a big data and the data center now, and the migration of cloud is all here. So at our core, we believe that every large enterprise will inevitably have some, if not all, of their work in the class. So the question is, how do you help them manage that inevitable migration to the cloud by de risking the migration and ensuring appropriate infrastructure performance management. Once you arrive there, we focus on the largest enterprises in the world. So unlike many tech startups, that will start with a midsize or small company and work their way up well, the largest banks in the universe, the largest insurance companies in the universe, the largest of every sector in the universe is a customer of the eye or will be someday. And that notion of solving very, very complex problems is something that our team has great pride in our ability to do that I want to get philosophical with you. You can for second kind of sit back and, you know, have a glass of wine and kind of talk to the younger generation out there with all your history on experience. How great of an opportunity for the young entrepreneurs and CEOs out there right now. Given the the confluence of the shift and inflection points, can you compare this to an error? We on the Cubes say It's like the PC revolution bundled in with the clients, terrorists and the Internet. All kind of at once do you agree? And would you say it? Guys, you have an amazing opportunity. Well, I think example of just how crazy it is. I I was driving to the airport this morning, and what I thought would be our long drive took two hours. Because there's so many people on the road in the Valley going to work. There's just so much going on in Silicon Valley right now. It is amazing. And for anyone who has a really, really great idea, the thing that's equally amazing is there's lots of capital out there to support those ideas. And so I would encourage any young entrepreneur who has a thought socialize your thought, Get it out so people can learn about it and then go get money to support and back that though. There's lots of money out there for good ideas. Lots of money. \ewelry officially taking the time coming out. Your busy schedule. CEO Virtual Instruments, chairman of Microsoft Here inside the Cube tech athletes is a big deal. You are one of the great great. Always have a conversation with you, sharing your thanks so much. Just the Cuban. Be right back with more insights and the signal from the noise at this short break

(radio calls) >> Announcer: From around the globe, its theCUBE covering Space & Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal poly. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage with Cal Poly for the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium, a day four and the wrap up session, keynote session with the Lieutenant Governor of California, Eleni Kounalakis. She's here to deliver her keynote speech on the topic of California's role in supporting America's Cybersecurity future. Eleni, take it away. >> Thank you, John, for the introduction. I am Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis. It is an honor to be part of Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. As I speak kind of Pierre with the governor's office of business and economic development is available on the chat, too ready to answer any questions you might have. California and indeed the world are facing significant challenges right now. Every day we are faced with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn that is ensued. We have flattened the curve in California and are moving in the right direction but it is clear that we're not out of the woods yet. It is also impossible right now to escape the reality of climate change from the fire sparked by exceptionally rare, dry lightening events to extreme heat waves threatening public health and putting a strain on our electricity grid. We see that climate change is here now. And of course we've been recently confronted with a series of brutal examples of institutionalized racism that have created an awakening among people of all walks of life and compelled us into the streets to march and protest. In the context of all this, we cannot forget that we continue to be faced with other less visible but still very serious challenges. Cybersecurity threats are one of these. We have seen cities, companies and individuals paralyzed by attacks costing time and money and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity. Our state agencies, local governments, police departments, utilities, news outlets and private companies from all industries are target. The threats around cybersecurity are serious but not unlike all the challenges we face in California. We have the tools and fortitude to address them. That is why this symposium is so important. Thank you, Cal Poly and all the participants for being here and for the important contributions you bring to this conference. I'd like to also say a few words about California's role in America's future in space. California has been at the forefront of the aerospace industry for more than a century through all the major innovations in aerospace from wooden aircraft, to World War II Bombers, to rockets and Mars rovers. California has played a pivotal role. Today, California is the number one state in total defense spending, defense contract spending and total number of personnel. It is estimated the Aerospace and Defense Industry, provides $168 billion in economic impact to our state. And America's best trained and most experienced aerospace and technology workforce lives here in California. The fact that the aerospace and defense sector, has had a strong history in California is no accident. California has always had strong innovation ecosystem and robust infrastructure that puts many sectors in a position to thrive. Of course, a big part of that infrastructure is a skilled workforce. And at the foundation of a skilled workforce is education. California has the strongest system of public higher education in the world. We're home to 10 university of California campuses, 23 California State university campuses and 116 California Community Colleges. All told nearly 3 million students are enrolled in public higher education. We also have world renowned private universities including the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University numbers one and three in the country for aerospace engineering. California also has four national laboratories and several NASA facilities. California possesses a strong spirit of innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship. Half of all venture capital funding in the United States, goes to companies here in California. Lastly, but certainly no less critical to our success, California is a diverse state. 27% of all Californians are foreign born, 27% more than one in four of our population of 40 million people are immigrants from another country, Europe central and South America, India, Asia, everywhere. Our rich cultural diversity is our strength and helps drive our economy. As I look to the future of industries like cybersecurity and the growing commercial space industry, I know our state will need to work with those industries to make sure we continue to train our workforce for the demands of an evolving industry. The office of the lieutenant governor has a unique perspective on higher education and workforce development. I'm on the UC Board of Regents, the CSU Board of Trustees. And as of about two weeks ago, the Community Colleges Board of Governors. The office of the lieutenant governor is now the only office that is a member of every governing board, overseeing our public higher education system. Earlier in the symposium, we heard a rich discussion with Undersecretary Stewart Knox from the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency about what the state is doing to meet the needs of space and cybersecurity industries. As he mentioned, there are over 37,000 job vacancies in cybersecurity in our state. We need to address that gap. To do so, I see an important role for public private partnerships. We need input from industry and curriculum development. Some companies like Lockheed Martin, have very productive partnerships with universities and community colleges that train students with skills they need to enter aerospace and cyber industries. That type of collaboration will be key. We also need help from the industry to make sure students know that fields like cybersecurity even exist. People's early career interests are so often shaped by the jobs that members of their family have or what they see in popular culture. With such a young and evolving field like cybersecurity, many students are unaware of the job opportunities. I know for my visits to university campuses that students are hungry for STEM career paths where they see opportunities for good paying jobs. When I spoke with students at UC Merced, many of them were first generation college students who went through community college system before enrolling in a UC and they gravitated to STEM majors. With so many job opportunities available to STEM students, cybersecurity ought to be one that they are aware of and consider. Since this symposium is being hosted by Cal Poly, I wanted to highlight the tremendous work they're doing as leaders in the space and cybersecurity industry. Cal Poly California Cybersecurity Institute, does incredible work bringing together academia, industry and government training the next generation of cyber experts and researching emerging cybersecurity issues. As we heard from the President of Cal Poly, Jeff Armstrong the university is in the perfect location to contribute to a thriving space industry. It's close to Vandenberg Air Force Base and UC Santa Barbara and could be home to the future permanent headquarters of US Space Command. The state is also committed to supporting this space industry in the Central Coast. In July, the State of California, Cal poly US-based force and the others signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a commercial space port at Vandenberg Air Force Base and to develop a master plan to grow the commercial space industry in the region. Governor Newsom has made a commitment to lift up all regions of the state. And this strategy will position the Central Coast to be a global leader in the future of the space industry. I'd like to leave you with a few final thoughts, with everything we're facing. Fires, climate change, pandemic. It is easy to feel overwhelmed but I remain optimistic because I know that the people of the State of California are resilient, persistent, and determined to address our challenges and show a path toward a better future for ourselves and our families. The growth of the space industry and the economic development potential of projects like the Spaceport at Vandenberg Air Force Base, our great example of what we can look forward to. The potential for the commercial space industry to become a $3 trillion industry by mid century, as many experts predict is another. There are so many opportunities, new companies are going to emerge doing things we never could have dreamed of today. As Lieutenant General John Thompson said in the first session, the next few years of space and cyber innovation are not going to be a pony ride at the state fair, they're going to be a rodeo. We should all saddle up. Thank you. >> Okay, thank you very much, Eleni. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your participation and all your support to you and your staff. You guys doing a lot of work, a lot going on in California but cybersecurity and space as it comes together, California's playing a pivotal role in leading the world and the community. Thank you very much for your time. >> Okay, this session is going to continue with Bill Britton. Who's the vice president of technology and CIO at Cal Poly but more importantly, he's the director of the cyber institute located at Cal Poly. It's a global organization looking at the intersection of space and cybersecurity. Bill, let's wrap this up. Eleni had a great talk, talking about the future of cybersecurity in America and its future. The role California is playing, Cal Poly is right in the Central Coast. You're in the epicenter of it. We've had a great lineup here. Thanks for coming on. Let's put a capstone on this event. >> Thank you, John. But most importantly, thanks for being a great partner helping us get this to move forward and really changing the dynamic of this conversation. What an amazing time we're at, we had quite an unusual group but it's really kind of the focus and we've moved a lot of space around ourselves. And we've gone from Lieutenant General Thompson and the discussion of the opposition and space force and what things are going on in the future, the importance of cyber in space. And then we went on and moved on to the operations. And we had a private company who builds, we had the DOD, Department Of Defense and their context and NASA and theirs. And then we talked about public private partnerships from President Armstrong, Mr. Bhangu Mahad from the DOD and Mr. Steve Jacques from the National Security Space Association. It's been an amazing conference for one thing, I've heard repeatedly over and over and over, the reference to digital, the reference to cloud, the reference to the need for cybersecurity to be involved and really how important that is to start earlier than just at the employment level. To really go down into the system, the K through 12 and start there. And what an amazing time to be able to start there because we're returning to space in a larger capacity and it's now all around us. And the lieutenant governor really highlighted for us that California is intimately involved and we have to find a way to get our students involved at that same level. >> I want to ask you about this inflection point that was a big theme of this conference and symposium. It was throughout the interviews and throughout the conversations, both on the chat and also kind of on Twitter as well in the social web. Is that this new generation, it wasn't just space and government DOD, all the normal stuff you see, you saw JPL, the Hewlett Foundation, the Defense Innovation Unit, Amazon Web Services, NASA. Then you saw entrepreneurs come in, who were doing some stuff. And so you had this confluence of community. Of course, Cal Poly had participated in space. You guys does some great job, but it's not just the physical face-to-face show up, gets to hear some academic papers. This was a virtual event. We had over 300 organizations attend, different organizations around the world. Being a virtual event you had more range to get more people. This isn't digital. This symposium isn't about Central California anymore. It's global. >> No, it really has gone. >> What really happened to that? >> It's really kind of interesting because at first all of this was word of mouth for this symposium to take place. And it just started growing and growing and the more that we talk to organizations for support, the more we found how interconnected they were on an international scale. So much so that we've decided to take our cyber competition next year and take it globally as well. So if in fact as Major General Shaw said, this is about a multinational support force. Maybe it's time our students started interacting on that level to start with and not have to grow into it as they get older, but do it now and around space and around cybersecurity and around that digital environment and really kind of reduce the digital dividing space. >> Yeah, General Thompson mentioned this, 80 countries with programs. This is like the Olympics for space and we want to have these competitions. So I got great vision and I love that vision, but I know you have the number... Not number, the scores and from the competition this year that happened earlier in the week. Could you share the results of that challenge? >> Yeah, absolutely. We had 83 teams participate this year in the California Cyber Innovation Challenge. And again, it was based around a spacecraft scenario where a spacecraft, a commercial spacecraft was hacked and returned to earth. And the students had to do the forensics on the payload. And then they had to do downstream network analysis, using things like Wireshark and autopsy and other systems. It was a really tough competition. The students had to work hard and we had middle school and high school students participate. We had an intermediate league, new schools who had never done it before or even some who didn't even have STEM programs but were just signing up to really get involved in the experience. And we had our ultimate division which was those who had competed in several times before. And the winner of that competition was North Hollywood. They've been the winning team for four years in a row. Now it's a phenomenal program, they have their hats off to them for competing and winning again. Now what's really cool is not only did they have to show their technical prowess in the game but they also have to then brief and out-brief what they've learned to a panel of judges. And these are not pushovers. These are experts in the field of cybersecurity in space. We even had a couple of goons participating from DefCon and the teams present their findings. So not only are we talking technical, we're talking about presentation skills. The ability to speak and understand. And let me tell you, after reading all of their texts to each other over the weekend adds a whole new language they're using to interact with each other. It's amazing. And they are so more advanced and ready to understand space problems and virtual problems than we are. We have to challenge them even more. >> Well, it sounds like North Hollywood got the franchise. It's likethe Patriots, the Lakers, they've got a dynasty developing down there in North Hollywood. >> Well, what happens when there's a dynasty you have to look for other talent. So next year we're going global and we're going to have multiple states involved in the challenge and we're going to go international. So if North Hollywood pulls it off again next year, it's going to be because they've met the best in the world than defeated >> Okay, the gauntlet has been thrown down, got to take down North Hollywood from winning again next year. We'll be following that. Bill, great to get those results on the cyber challenge we'll keep track and we'll put a plug for it on our site. So we got to get some press on that. My question to you is now as we're going digital, other theme was that they want to hire digital natives into the space force. Okay, the DOD is looking at new skills. This was a big theme throughout the conference not just the commercial partnerships with government which I believe they had kind of put more research and personally, that's my personal opinion. They should be putting in way more research into academic and these environments to get more creative. But the skill sets was a big theme. What's your thoughts on how you saw some of the highlight moments there around skill sets? >> John, it's really interesting 'cause what we've noticed is in the past, everybody thinks skill sets for the engineering students. And it's way beyond that. It's all the students, it's all of them understanding what we call cyber cognizance. Understanding how cybersecurity works whatever career field they choose to be in. Space, there is no facet of supporting space that doesn't need that cyber cognizance. If you're in the back room doing the operations, you're doing the billing, you're doing the contracting. Those are still avenues by which cybersecurity attacks can be successful and disrupt your space mission. The fact that it's international, the connectivities, all of those things means that everyone in that system digitally has to be aware of what's going on around them. That's a whole new thought process. It's a whole new way of addressing a problem and dealing with space. And again it's virtual to everyone. >> That's awesome. Bill, great to have you on. Thank you for including theCUBE virtual, our CUBE event software platform that we're rolling out. We've been using it for the event and thank you for your partnership in this co-creation opening up your community, your symposium to the world, and we're so glad to be part of it. I want to thank you and Dustin and the team and the President of Cal Poly for including us. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, John. It's been an amazing partnership. We look forward to it in the future. >> Okay, that's it. That concludes the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, your host with Cal Poly, who put on an amazing virtual presentation, brought all the guests together. And again, shout out to Bill Britton and Dustin DeBrum who did a great job as well as the President of Cal poly who endorsed and let them do it all. Great event. See you soon. (flash light sound)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube >>with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the VM World 2020 Virtual coverage with the Cube Virtual I'm John for day. Volonte your hosts our 11th year covering VM. We'll get a great guest Greg Lavender, SBP and the CTO of VM. Where, uh, welcome to the Cube. Virtual for VM World 2020 Virtual Great. Thanks for coming on. >>Privileged to be here. Thank you. >>Um, really. You know, one of the things Dave and I were commenting with Pat on just in general start 11th year covering VM world. Uh, a little difference not face to face. But it's always been a technical conference. Always a lot of technical innovation. Project Monterey's out there. It's pretty nerdy, but it's a it's called the catnip of the future. Right? People get excited by it, right? So there's really ah lot of awareness to it because it kinda it smells like a systems overhaul. It smells like an operating system. Feels like a, you know, a lot of moving parts that are, quite frankly, what distributed computing geeks and software geeks love to hear about and to end distributed software intelligence with new kinds of hardware innovations from and video and whatnot. Where's that innovation coming from? Can you share your thoughts on this direction? >>Yeah, I think first I should say this isn't like, you know, something that just, you know, we decided to do, you know, six months ago, actually, in the office of C T 04 years ago, we actually had a project. Um, you know, future looking project to get our core hyper visor technology running on arm processors and that incubated in the office of the CTO for three years. And then last December, move the engineering team that had done that research and advanced development work in the office of the CTO over to our cloud platforms business unit, you know, and smart Knicks, you know, kind of converged with that. And so we were already, you know, well along the innovation path there, and it's really now about building the partnerships we have with smart nick vendors and driving this technology out to the benefit of our customers who don't want to leverage it. >>You get >>Greg, I want if you could clarify something for me on that. So Pat talked about Monterey, a complete re architect ing of the i o Stack. And he talked about it affecting in video. Uh, intel, melon, ox and Sandoz part of that when he talks about the Iot stack, you know, specifically what are we talking about there? >>So you know any any computing server in the data center, you know, in a cola facility or even even in the cloud, you know? Ah, large portion of the, you know CPU resource is, and even some memory resource is can get consumed by just processing. You know, the high volumes of Iot that's going out, you know, storage devices, you know, communicating between the different parts of multi tiered applications. And so there's there's a there's an overhead that that gets consumed in the course server CPU, even if its multi core multi socket. And so by offloading that a lot of that I owe work onto the arm core and taking advantage of the of the hardware offloads there in the smart Knicks, you can You can offload that processing and free up even as much as 30% of the CPU of a server, multi socket, multicourse server, and give that back to the application so that the application gets the benefit of that extra compute and memory resource is >>So what about a single sort of low cost flash tear to avoid the complexities of tearing? Is that part of the equation? >>Well, you know, you can you can, um you know, much storage now is network attached. And so you could if it's all flash storage, you know, using something like envy me fabric over over Ethernet, you can essentially build large scale storage networks more efficiently, you know more cheaply and take advantage of that offload processing, uh, to begin to reduce the Iot Leighton. See, that's required taxes. That network attached storage and not just storage. But, you know, other devices, you know, that you can use you could better network attached. So disaggregated architectures is term. >>Uh, is that a yes? Or is that a stay tuned? >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. I mean the storage. You know, more efficient use of different classes of storage and storage. Tearing is definitely a prime use case there. >>Yeah, great. Thank you. Thanks for that. John, >>How could people think about the edge now? Because one of the things that's in this end to end is the edge. Pat brought it up multi cloud and edge or two areas that are extending off cloud and hybrid. What should people think about the innovation equation around those things? Is that these offload techniques? What specifically in the systems architecture? Er, do you guys see as the key keys there? >>So so, you know, edges very diversified, heterogeneous place, Uh, in the architectures of multi cloud services. So one thing we do know is, you know, workload. I would like to say workload follows data, and a lot of the data will be analyzed, the process at the edge. So the more that you can accelerate that data processing at the edge and apply some machine learning referencing at the edge were almost certainly gonna have kubernetes everywhere, including the edge. So I think you're seeing a convergence of the hardware architectures er the kubernetes control plane and services and machine learning workloads. You know, traveling to the edge where the where the data is going to be processed and actions could be taken autonomously at the edge. So I think we're in this convergence point in the industry where all that comes together. >>How important do you >>do you see that? Okay, John, >>how important is the intelligence piece? Because again, the potatoes at the edge. How do you guys see the data architecture being built out there? >>Um, well, again, it's depending on the other. The thick edge of the thin edge. You know, you're gonna have different, different types of data, and and again, a lot of the the inference thing that could happen at the edges. Going to, I think, for mawr, you know, again to take action at the edges, opposed to calling home to a cloud, you know, to decide what to do. So, depending on, you know, the computational power and the problem with its video processing or monitoring, you know, sensors, Aaron, oil. Well, the kind of interesting that will happen at the edge will will be dependent on that data type and what kind of decisions you want to make. So I think data will be moving, you know, from the edge to the cloud for historical analytics and maybe transitional training mechanisms. But, you know, the five G is gonna play heavily into this is well right for the network connectivity. So we read This unique point is often occurs in the industry every few years of all these technology innovations converging to open up an entirely new platform in a new way of computing that happens at the edge, not just in your data center at the cloud. >>So, Greg, you did a fairly major stint at a large bank. What would something you mentioned? You know, like an oil rig. But what would something like these changes mean for a new industry like banking or financial? Uh, will it have an impact there and put on your customer hat for a minute and take us through that >>e? You know, eight machines, you know, branches, chaos. You know, there's all make banks always been a very distributed computing platform. And so, you know, people want to deliver mawr user experience, services, more video services. You know all these things at the edge to interact positively with the customer without using the people in the loop. And so the banking industry has already gone through the SD when, and I want transformation to deliver the bandwidth more capably to the edge. And I just think that they'll just now be able to deliver Mawr Edge services that happened can happen more autonomously at the edge is opposed that having the hairpin home run everything back to the data center. >>Awesome. Well, Pat talks about the modern platform, the modern companies. Greg, I wanna ask you because we're seeing with Kovar, there's to use cases, you know, the people who don't have a tailwind, Um, companies that are, you know, not doing well because there's no business that you have there modernizing their business while they have some downtime. Other ones have a tailwind. They have a modern app that that takes advantage, this covert situation. So that brings up this idea of what is a modern app look like? Because now, if you're talking about a distributed architecture, some of things you're mentioning around inference, data edge. People are starting to think about these modern naps, and they are changing the game for the business. Now you have vertical industries. You mentioned oil and gas, you got financial services. It used to be you had industry solution. It worked like that and was siloed. Now you have a little bit of a different architectures. If we believe that we're looking up, not down. Does it matter by industry? How should people think about a modern application, how they move faster? Can you share your insights into into some of this conceptual? What is a modern approach and does it doesn't matter by vertical or industry. >>Yes, I mean, certainly over the course of my career, I mean, there's there's a massive diversity of applications. And of course, you know, the explosion of mobile and edge computing is just another sort of sort of use cases that will put demands on the infrastructure in the architecture and the networking. So a modern, a modern app I mean, we historically built sort of these monolithic app. So we sort of built these sort of three tier apse with, you know, sort of the client side, the middleware side. The database back in is the system of record. I mean, this is even being more disaggregated in terms of, you know, the the consumer edges both not just web here, but mobile tear. And, you know, we'll see what emerges out of that. The one thing for sure that is that, um they're becoming less monolithic and mawr a conglomeration of sass and other services that are being brought together, whether it's from the cloud services or whether it's s, you know, SBS delivering, you know, bring your own software. Um, and they're becoming more distributed because people need operated higher degrees of scale. There's a limit to Virgil vertical scaling, so you have to go to horizontal scaling, which is what the cloud is really good at. So I think all these things were driving a whole new set of technologies like next generation AP gateways. Message Busses, service mesh. We're announcing Tanzi's service message being world. Um, you know, this is just allowing allowing that application to be disaggregated and then integrated with other APS assassin services that allow you to get faster time to market. So speed of delivery is everything. So modern C I. C d. Modern software, technology and ability to deploy and run that workload anywhere at the edge of the core in the data center in the cloud. >>So when you do in your re architecture like this, Greg, I mean you've seen over the course of history in our industry you've seen so many companies have hit a wall and in VM, whereas it's just amazing engineering culture. How are you able toe, you know, change the engine mid flight here and avoid like, serious technical debt. And I mean, it took, you know, you said started four years ago, but can you give us a peek inside? You know, that sort of transformation and how you're pulling that off? >>Well, I mean, we're providing were delivered the platform and, you know, spring Buddhas a key, you know, technology that's used widely across the industry already, which is what we've got is part of our pivotal acquisition. And so what we're just trying to do is just keep keep delivering the technology and the platform that allows people to go faster with quality security and safety and resiliency. That's what we do really well at VM ware. So I think you're seeing more people building these APS Cloud native is opposed to, you know, taking an existing legacy app In trying to re factor it, they might do what it called e think somebody's called two speed architectures. Take the user front, end the consumer front in, and put that cloud native in the cloud. But the back end system of record still runs in the private cloud in a highly resilient you know, backed up disaster recovered way. So you're having, I think, brand new cloud native APS we're seeing. And then you're seeing people very carefully because there's a cost to it of looking at How do I basically modernized the front end but maintain the reliability of the scalability of security and the reliability of that sort of system of record back in? So either way, it's it's winning for the companies because they could do faster delivery to their businesses and their clients and their partners. But you have to have the resiliency and reliability that were known for for running those mission critical workloads, >>right? So the scenario is that back end stays on premise on the last earnings call, I think, Pat said, or somebody said that, that I think I just they said on Prem or maybe the man hybrid 30 to 40% cheaper, then doing it in the cloud. I presume they were talking about those kind of back end systems that you know you don't wanna migrate. Can you add some color that again from your customer perspective That the economics? >>Yeah. You know, um, somebody asked me one time what's really a cloud. Greg and I said, automation, automation, automation you can take you can take You can take your current environments and highly automate the release. Lifecycle management develop more agile software delivery methods. And so therefore, you could you could get sort of cloud benefits, you know, from your existing applications by just highly optimizing them and, you know, on the cost of goods and services. And then again, the hybrid cloud model just gives customers more choice, which is okay. I want to reduce the number of data centers I have, but I need to maintain reliability, scalability, etcetera. Take advantage of, you know, the hybrid cloud that we offer. But you'll still run things. Cloud natives. I think you're seeing this true multi cloud technology and paradigm, you know, grow out as people have these choices. And then the question is okay. If you have those choices, how do you maintain security? How do you maintain reliability? How do you maintain up time yet be able to move quickly. And so I think there's different speeds in which those platforms will evolve. And our goal is to give you the ability to basically make those choices and and optimize for economics as well as technical. You know, capability. >>Great. I want to ask you a question with Cove it we're seeing and we've been reporting the Cube virtual evolve because we used to be it at events, but we're not there anymore. But the as everyone has realized with cove it it's exposed some projects that you might not want to double down on or highlighted some gaps in architecture. Er, I mean, certainly who would have forecast of the disruption of 100% work from home VP and provisioning to access and access management security, and it really is exposed. What kind of who's where in the journey, Right in digital transformation. So I gotta ask you, what's the most important story or thing to pay attention, Thio as the smart money and smart customers go, Hey, you know what? I'm gonna double down on that. I'm gonna kill that project or sunset. That or I'm not gonna re factor that I'm gonna contain Arise it and there's probably there's a lot of that going on. In our conversations with customers, they're like it's pretty obvious. It's critical path. It's like we stay in business. We build a modern app, but I'm doubling down. I'm transitioning. It's a whole nother ballgame. What >>is >>the most important thing that you see that people should pay attention to around maintaining an innovation and coming out on the other side? >>Yeah, well, I think I think it just generally goes to the whole thesis of software defined. I mean, you know the idea of taking an appliance physical, You know, you have to order the hardware, get it on your loading dock, install in your data center. You know, go configure it, mapping into the rest of your environment. You know, whereas or you could just spend up new, softer instances of load balancers, firewalls, etcetera. So I think you know what's What's really helped in the covert era is the maturity of software to find everything. Compute storage, networking. Lan really allowed customers and many of our customers toe, you know, rapidly make that pivot. And so you know what? It's the you know, the workspace, the remote workspace. You gotta secure it. That's a key part of it, and you've got to give it. You know, you gotta have the scalability back in your data centers or, if you don't have it, be able to run those virtual desktops you know, in the cloud. And I think so. This ability again to take your current environment and, more importantly, your operating model, which, you know the technology could be agile and fast. But if you're operating models not agile, you know you can't executed Well, One of the best comments I heard from a customer CEO was, you know, for six months we debated, you know, the virtual networking architecture and how to deploy the virtual network. And, you know, when covet hit. We made the decision that did it all in one week. So the question the CEO asked now is like Well, why do we Why do we have to operate in that six month model going forward? Let's operate in the one week model going forward. E. I think that that z yeah, that's e think that's the big That's a big inflection point is the operating model has to be agile. We got all kinds of agile technology and choices I mentioned it's like, How do you make your organization agile to take advantage of those technological offerings? That's really what I've been doing the last six months, helping our customers achieve. >>I think that's a key point worth calling out and doubling down on day because, you know, whether you talk about our q Q virtual, our operating model has changed and we're doing new things. But it's not bad. It's actually beneficial. We could talk to more people. This idea of virtual ization. I mean pun intended virtual izing workforces face to face interactions air now remote. This is a software defined operating business. This is the rial innovation. I think this is the exposure. As companies wake up and going. Why didn't we do that before? Reminds me of the old mainframe days. Days? You know, why do we have that mainframe? Because they're still clutching and grabbing onto it. They got a transition. So this is the new the new reality. >>We were joking earlier that you know it ain't broke, don't fix it. And all of a sudden Covic broke everything. And so you know, virtualization becomes a fundamental component of of of how you respond. But and I wonder if Greg you could talk about the security. Peace? How how that fits in. You know everybody you know, the bromide, of course, is security can't be a bolt on. It's gotta be designed in from the start, Pat Gelsinger said years ago in the Cube. Security is a do over. You guys have purchased many different security components you've built in. Security comes. So how should we think about? And how are you thinking about designing insecurity across that entire stack without really bolting in, You know, pieces, whether it's carbon, carbon, black or other acquisitions that you've made? >>Yeah, I mean, I think that's that's the key. Inflection point we're in is an industry. I mean, getting back to my banking experience, I was responsible for cybersecurity, engineering the platforms that we engineered and deployed across the bank globally. And the challenge, the challenge. You know, that's I had, you know, 150 plus security products, and you go to bed at night wondering what? Which one did I forget to deploy or what did I get that gap? Do you think you think you're safe by the sheer number, but when you really boil down to it is like, you know, because you have to sort of like both all this stuff together to create a secure environment, you know, on a global level. And so really, our philosophy of VM where is Okay? Well, let's kind of break that model. That's what we call it intrinsic security, which is just, you know, we have the hyper visor. If you're running, the hyper visor is running on most of the service in your data center. If we have your if you have our network virtualization, we see all the traffic going between all those hyper visors and out to the cloud as well hybrid cloud or public cloud with our NSX technology. And then, you know, then you sort of bring into that the load balancers and the software to find firewalls. And pretty soon you have realized Okay, look, we have we have most of the estate. Therefore we could see everything and bring some intelligent machine learning to that and get proactive as opposed to reactive. Because our whole model now is we. All this technology and some alert pops and we get reactive. How about proactively telling me that something nasty is going on. >>I need to ask you a >>question. May be remediated. Sorry, John. It may be remediated at some point anyway. Bring in some machine intelligence tow. So instead of like you said, getting an alert actually tells me what what happened and how it was fixed, you know? Or at least recommending what I should dio, right? >>Yeah. I mean, part of the problem in the historic architectures is it was all these little silos. You know, every business unit had its own sort of technology. And Aziz, you make things virtualized. You you sort of do the virtual networking. The virtual stories of virtual compute all the software. You know, all of a sudden you have you have a different platform, you have lots of standardization. Therefore you don't have your operating model simplifies right and amount of and then it's about just collecting all the data and then making sense of the data. So you're not overwhelming the human's capacity to respond to it. And so I think that's really the fundamental thing we're all trying to get to. But the surface area is enlarged outside the data centers we've discussed out to the edge, whatever the edges, you know, into the cloud hybrid or public. So now you've got this big surface area where you've gotta have all that telemetry and all that visibility again, Back to getting proactive. So you got to do it in Band is opposed out of band. >>Great. I want to ask you a question on cyber security. We have an event on October 4th, the virtual event that Cuba is hosting with Cal Poly around this space and cybersecurity, symposiums, intersection of space and cyber. I noticed VM Ware recently announced last month that the United States Space Force has committed to the Tan Xue platform for for Continuous Dev ops operation for agility. I interviewed Lieutenant General John Thompson, Space Force, and we talked about that. He said quote, it's hard to do break fix in space. Uh, illustrating, really? Just can't send someone to swap out something in space. Not yet, at least. So they're looking at software defined as a key operating reality. Okay, so again, talk about the edge of space Isas edges. You're gonna get it. Need to be completely mad and talk about payloads and data. This >>is kind >>of interesting data point because you have security issues because space is gonna be contested and congested as an edge device. So it's actually the government's interested in that. But fundamentally, the death hops problem that you're you guys are involved in This >>is a >>reality. It's kind of connects this reality idea of operating models based in reality have to be software. What's >>your name? Yeah. I mean, I think the term we use now is def sec ops because you can't just do Dev ops. You have to have the security component in there, So, uh, yeah, the interesting. You know, like, there's a lot of interesting things happen just in fundamental networking, right? I mean, you know, the StarLink, you know, satellites at Testa. His launched Elon musk has launched and, you know, bringing sort of, you know, higher band with laurel agency to those. Yeah, we'll call it near space the and then again, just opens up all new opportunities for what we can dio. And so, Yeah, I think that's the software that the whole the whole saw for development ecosystem again, back to this idea. I think of three things. You gotta have speed. You gotta have scale and you gotta have security. And so that's really the emerging platform, whether it's a terrestrial or in near space, Uh, that's giving us the opportunity, Thio Do new architectures create service measures of services, some terrestrial, some some you know, far remote. And as you bring these new application architectures and system platform architectures together with all the underlying hardware and networking innovations that are occurring, you mentioned flash. But even getting into pmm persistent memory, right? So this this is so much happening that is converging. What's exciting to me about being a TV? Where is the CTO and we partner with all the hardware vendors? We partner with all the system providers, like in video and others. You know, the smart nick vendors. And then we get to come up with software architectures that sort of bring that together holistically and give people a platform. We can run your workloads to get work done wherever you need to land those workloads. And that's really the excitement about >>the candy store. And yet you've got problems hard problems to work on to solve. I mean, this really brings the whole project moderate, full circle because we think about space and networks and all these things you're talking about, You need to have smart everything. I mean, isn't that software? It's a complete tie into the Monterey. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, Exactly. You're right. It's not just it's not just connecting everything and pushing data around its than having the intelligence to do it efficiently, economically, insecurely. And that's you know. So I see that you don't want to over hype machine learning. I did not to use the term AI, but use the machine learning technologies, you know, properly trained with the proper data sets, you know, and then the proper algorithms. You know that you can then a employee, you know, at the edge small edge, thick edge, you know, in the data center at the cloud is really Then you give the visibility so that we get to that proactive world I was talking about. >>Yeah, great stuff, Greg. Great insight, great conversation. Looking forward to talking mawr Tech with you. Obviously you are in the right spot was in the center of all the action across the board final point. If you could just close it out for us. What is the most important story at VM World 2020 this year. >>Um, well, I think you know, I like to say that I have the best job. I think you know that I've had in my career. I've had some great ones is you know, we get to be disruptive innovators, and we have a culture of perpetual innovation and really being world for us, Aly employees and all the people that work together to put it together is we get to showcase. You know, some of that obviously have more up our sleeves for the future. But, you know, being world is are, you know, coming coming out out show of the latest set of innovations and technologies. So there's going to be so much I have, ah, vision and innovation. Keynote kickoff, right. Do some lightning demos. And actually, I talk about work we're doing in sustainability, and we're putting a micro grid on our campus in Palo Alto and partnership with City of Palo Alto so that when the wildfires come through or there is power outages, you know we're in oasis of power generating capacity with our solar in our batteries. And so the city of Palo Alto could take their emergency command vehicles and plug into our batteries when the power is out in Palo Alto and operate city services and city emergency services. So we're not just innovating, you know, in cortex we're innovating to become a more, you know, sustainable company and provide sustainable, you know, carbon neutral technology for our customers to adopt. And I think that's an area we wanna talk about me. We talk about it next time, but I think you know our innovations. We're gonna basically help change the world with regard to climate as well. >>Let's definitely do that. Let's follow up for another in depth conversation on the societal impact. Of course, VM Ware VM Ware's VM World's 2020 is virtual is a ton of sessions. There's a Cloud City portion. Check out the 60 solution demos. Of course, they ask the expert, Greg, you're in there with Joe Beta Raghu, all the experts, um, engage and check it out. Thank you so much for the insight here on the Cube. Virtual. Thanks for coming on. >>Appreciate the opportunity. Great conversation and good questions. >>Great stuff. Thank you very much. Innovation that vm where it's the heart of their missions always has been, but they're doing well on the business side, Dave. Okay. The cube coverage. They're not there in person. Virtual. I'm John for day. Volonte. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering the Churchills 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the ninth annual Churchills. It's an awards banquet put on by the Churchill Club and this year's theme is all about leadership and we're excited to have with us today the MC, he's Rich Karlgaard, the co-founder of the Churchill Club and also a publisher at Forbes. Rich, thanks for stopping by. >> Oh, it's an honor to be here, Jeff. >> So, busy night tonight. The theme is leadership, but we've been suffering a little bit of a black eye on leadership lately in the tech scene in Silicon Valley. >> Well, I really think we have. I travel the world a lot and around the United States and I have to say that large parts of the world and the United States are falling out of love with Silicon Valley. And I think that's directly attributable to some of the companies and some of the leaders who are maybe moving so fast that they're forgetting to do the right things for customers, for employees, and for their community at large. >> Yeah, I'm wondering, get your take, a lot of these guys and gals become successful for a whole bunch of reasons, right? and they happen to be at the top of a company. I'll just pick on Zuckerberg 'cause he's easy to pick on. But you know, he had an application, it was about getting people together, and suddenly these platforms get so big and so ubiquitous, you know, is he the right guy? He never signed up to be the leader of the platform world, and yet he's kind of put in that position. We see that kind of with YouTube, because again, the platform is so big and I think it almost feels like it grows beyond the tentacles of the control. >> Well, it remains to be seen if Mark Zuckerberg is the right guy. I think of somebody from more my era, Bill Gates. And Bill Gates was a fabulous leader of Microsoft, but they ran too fast, they ran too hard, they got in trouble with the U.S. Department of Justice, and Bill Gates ended up resigning from Microsoft. And he served as a great board member of Microsoft ever since, was instrumental, along with John Thompson, the board chairman who will be honored tonight, in bringing in the person I think is the best CEO in the world today, Satya Nadella of Microsoft. Sometimes you have to hand the baton. >> Right, right. But are there some lessons that people should be thinking about when they're maybe thrust into this position that they weren't necessarily ready for? I mean, one thing about Gates is he gave up his CEO job pretty early to Ballmer, arguably whether that was super successful or not. But some of them kind of get out of the way and some of them don't. And they don't necessarily have the skills to take on some of these huge kind of geopolitical, socioeconomic issues. >> Well I think that's right. Another example, Larry Ellison led the brilliant early days of Oracle but when he got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he had to really make way for a strong number two, Ray Lane, and that turned out to be the perfect complement, you see. You had Ellison's vision and drive but you had Lane's ability to run really good operations. Steve Jobs never got into trouble but having a really solid number two like Tim Cook was very valuable. So some of these brilliant entrepreneurs need solid number two's, so I think they have lieutenants but I don't think they have really solid number two's. >> So what are you excited about tonight? We got some really great people, you already mentioned John W. Thompson, we've had him on a ton of times, great leader. Who are some of the people you're excited to see tonight? >> Well, we have three great companies, we have Slack, Zoom, and my personal favorite, Peloton. I'm kind of lusting for a Peloton bike in my garage. I hope it arrives under the Christmas tree this year. >> (laughs) All right, Rich. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes and good luck tonight on the MC duties. >> Yeah, well, thank you Jeff. >> All right, he's Rich, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Churchills, the ninth annual awards banquet here with the Churchill Club. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Welcome to this cube competition here at the Palo Alto Cube Studios. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Were here a special guests to keep alumni investor An entrepreneur who do Sudhakar, would you Good to see you again, John. Always a pleasure. You've been on as an entrepreneur, founder. As an investor, you're always out. Scour in the Valley was a great conversation. I want to get your thoughts as kind of a guest analyst on this segment around the state of the Union for Enterprise Tech. As you know, we covering the price tag. We got all the top enterprise B to B events. The world has changed and get reinvent coming up. We got VM World before that. The two big shows, too to cap out this year got sprung a variety of other events as well. So a lot of action cloud now is pretty much a done deal. Everyone's validating it. Micro cells gaining share a lot of growth areas around cloud that's been enable I want to get your thoughts first. Question is what are the top growth sectors in the enterprise that you're seeing >> papers. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure talking to you over the years. You and me have done this so many times. I'm learning a lot from you. So thank you. You are so yeah, I think Let's dig into the cloud side and in general market. So I think that there are 34 areas that I see a lot that's happening a lot. Cloud is still growing, a lot 100% are more growth and cloud and dog breeders. And what is the second? I see, a lot of I T services are close services. This includes service management. The areas that service now isn't They're >> still my ops was Maybe >> they opt in that category. E I said With management, the gutter is coming with the new canticle a service management. So they're replacing idea some with a different. So that's growing 800% as a category tourist. RP according to again, the industry analysts have seen that it's going at 65 to 70% so these three areas are going a lot in the last one that I see a lot of user experience. Can you build? It's like it's a 20,000,000,000 market cap, something. So if you let it out, it's a cloud service Management services RP user experience cos these are the four areas I see a lot dating all the oxygen rest. Everybody is like the bread crumbs. >> Okay, and why do you think the growth in our P A. So how's the hype? Is it really what? What is going on in our pee, In your opinion, >> on the rumors I'm hearing or there is some companies are already 1,000,000,000 revenue run great wise. That's a lot in our piece. So it's not really a hype that really so that if you look and below that, what's happening is I'd be a Companies are automating automation. The key for here is if I can improve the user experience and also automate things. RPS started doing screen scraping right in their leaders, looking at any reservations supply chain any workflow automation. So every company is so complex. Now somebody has to automate the workflow. How can you do this with less number of people, less number, resources, and improve the productivity >> coming? R P A. Is you know, robotic process automation is what it stands for, but ultimately it's software automation. I mean, it's software meets cloud meets automation. It seems to be the big thing. That's also where a I can play a part. Your take on the A I market right now. Obviously, Cloud and A I are probably the two biggest I think category people tend to talk about cloud and a eyes kind of a big kind of territories. RPG could fall under a little bit of bulls, but what you take on a guy, >> Yeah, so I think if you look at our pier, I actually call the traditional appears to be historical legacy. Wonders and R P companies are doing a good job to transform themselves to the next level, right? But our pianist Rocky I score. It's no longer the screen skipping tradition, making the workflow understanding. So there are new technology called conversational Rp. There's actually a separate market. Guys been critical conversation within a Can I talk to in a dialogue manner like what you experienced Instagram are what using what's up our dialogue flow? How can I make it? A conversational RPS is a new secretary is evolving it, but our becomes have done a good job. They leave all their going out. A >> lot has been has great success. We've been covering them like a blanket on a single cube. Um, I got it. I got to get your take on how this all comes into the next generation modern era because, um, you know, we're both been around the block. We've seen the waves of innovation. The modern error of clouds certainly cloud one Dato Amazon. Now Microsoft has your phone. Google anywhere else really goes. Dev Ops, The devil's movement cloud native amazing, create a lot of value continues to do well, but now there's a big culture on cloud 2.0, what is your definition of cloud two point? Oh, how do you see Cloud 2.0, evolving. But >> I like the name close to party. I think it's your third. It is going to continue as a trained. So look, throw two point with eyes. I don't know what it will be, but I can tell you what it should be and what it can have. Some other things that should do in the cloud is cloud is still very much gun to human beings. Lot of develops people. Lot of human being The next addition to a daughter should have things done programmatically I don't need tens of thousands off Assad ease and develops people. So back to your air, upside and everything. Some of those things should become close to become proactive. I don't want to wait until Amazon. Easter too is done. If I'm paying him is on this money. Amazon should be notifying me when my service is going to be done. The subsidy eaters They operated Chlo Trail Cloudwatch Exeter. But they need to take it to a notch level. But Amazon Azure. >> So making the experience of deploying, running and building APS scalable. Actually, that's scales with Clavet. Programmable kind of brings in the RPI a mean making a boat through automation edge of the network is also interesting. Comes up a lot like Okay, how do you deal with networking? Amazons Done computing storage and meet amazing. Well, cloud and networking has been built in, I guess to me, the trend of networking kicks in big because now it's like, OK, if you have no perimeter, you have a service area with I o t. >> There's nothing that >> cloud to point. It has to address riel time programming ability. Things like kubernetes continues to rise. You're gonna need to have service has taken up and down automatically know humans. So this >> is about people keep on fur cloak. What should be done before the human in the to rate still done. It develops. People are still using terror from lot of scripting. Lot of manual. Can you automata? That's one angle The second angle I see in cloud 2.0 is if you step back and say What, exactly? The intrinsic properties of Claude Majors. It's the work floor. It's automation, but it's also able to do it. Pro, actually. So what I don't have to raise if I'm playing club renders this much money. Tell me what outrageous are happening. Don't wait until outage happens. Can you predict voted? Yes, they have the capability to women. It should be Probably steal it. No, not 100%. So I want to know what age prediction. I wonder what service are going down. Are notified the user's that will become a a common denominator and solutions will be start providing, even though you see small startups doing this. Eventually they become features all these companies, and they'll get absorbed by the I called his aircraft carriers. You have Masson agile DCP. They're going to absorb all this, a ups to the point that provide that as the functionality. >> Yeah, let's get the consolidation in second. I want to get your thoughts on the cloud to point because we really getting at is that there's a lot of white space opportunity coming in. So I gotta ask you to start up. Question as you look at your investor, prolific investor in start ups. Also, you're an entrepreneur yourself. What >> is? >> They have opportunities out there because we'll get into the big the big whales Amazon, who were building and winning at scale. So embarrassed entry or higher every day, even though it's open sources, They're Amazons, betting on open source. Big time. We had John Thompson talk about that. That was excessive. Something Nutella. And so what? What if I was a printer out there? Would what do I do? I mean, is there Is there any real territory that I could create a base camp on and make money? >> That's plenty. So there's plenty of white faces to create. Look, first of all your look at what's catering, look at what's happening. IBM is auto business in service management, CSL itself to Broadcom. BMC is sold twice to private companies. Even the CEO got has left our war It is. Then you have to be soldiers of the Micro Focus. The only company that's left is so it's not so in that area, you can create plenty of good opportunities. That's a big weight. >> Sensors now just had a bad quarter. So actually, clarity will >> eventually they're gonna enough companies to go in that space. That play that's based can support 23 opportunities so I can see a publicly traded company in service. No space in next five years. My production is they'll be under company will go a p o in the service management space. Same things would happen. Rp, Rp vendors won't get acquired A little cleared enough work for automation. They become the next day because of the good. I can see a next publicly traded company. What happened in the 80 operations? Patriotism Probably. Computer company Pedro is doing really well. Watch it later. Don't. They're going to go public next. So that area also, you see plenty of open record companies in a UPS. >> So this is again back to the growth areas. Cloud hard to compete on Public Cloud. Yes, the big guys are out there. There's a cloud enablers, the people who don't have the clouds. So h p tried to do a cloud hp They had to come out, they'll try to cloud couldn't do It s a P technically is out there with a cloud. They're trying to be multi cloud. So you have a series of people who made it an oracle still on the fence. They still technically got a cloud, but it's really more Oracle and Oracle. So they're kind of stuck in the middle between the cloud and able nervous. The Cloud player. If you're not a cloud player large enterprise, what is the strategy? Because you got HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell. >> So I don't know. You didn't include its sales force in that If I'm Salesforce, I want sales force to get in. They have a sales cloud marketing cloud commerce code. Mark is not doing anything in the area of fighting clothes. They cannot go from 100,000,000,000 toe, half a trillion trillion market cap. Told I D. They have to embrace that and that's 100% growth area. You know, people get into this game at some point. It'll be is already hard and 50,000,000,000 market cap. Then that leaves. What is this going to do? Cisco has been buying more security software assets, but they don't wanna be a public company, their hybrid club. But they have to figure out How can they become an arms dealer in escape and by ruining different properties off close services? And that's gonna happen. And I've been really good job by acquiring Red Heart. So I think some place really figuring out this what is happening. But they have to get in the gaming club they have to do. Other service management have begun and are here. They have to get experience. None of these guys have experienced in this day and age that you killed and who are joining the workforce. They care for Airbnb naked for we work. They care for uber. They care for Netflix. It is not betting unders. So if I'm on the border, Francisco, I'm not talking about experience That's a problem to me. Hey, tree boredom is not talking about that. That's what if I'm I know Mark is on the board. Paramount reason. But Mark is investing in all the slack. Cos then why is it we are doing it either hit special? Get a separate board member. They should get somebody else. >> Why? He wouldn't tell. You have to move. Maybe. I don't know. We don't talk about injuries about that. But I want to get back to this experience thing because experience has become the new expectation. Yes, that's been kind of a design principle kind of ethos. Okay, so let's take that. The next little younger generation, they're consuming Airbnb. They're using the serious like their news and little chunks be built a video service for that. So things are changing. What is? I tease virgin as the consumption is a product issue. So how does I t cater to these new experience? What are some of those experiences? I >> think all of them. But I think I d for Social Kedrick, every property, every product should figure out how to offer to the young dreamers how they were contributed offer to the businesses on the B two baby to see. So the eye has to think every product or not. Should I start thinking about how my user should consume this and how should out for new experiences and how they want to see this in a new way, right? It's not in the same the same computer networking. How can a deluded proactively How can a dealer to a point where people can consume it and make other medications so darn edition making? That's where the air comes in. Don't wait for me toe. Ask the question. Suggest it's like Gmail auto complete. Every future should be thinking through problem. Still, what can I do to improve the experience that changes the product? Management's on? And that's what I'm looking at, companies who are thinking like that connection and see Adam Connection security. But that has to happen in the product. >> I was mentioning the people who didn't have clouds HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell you through sales force in there, I kind of would think sales were six, which is technically a cloud. They were cloud before cloud was even cloud. They built basically oracle for the cloud that became sales force. But you mentioned service now. Sales force. You got adobe, You got work day. These are application clouds. So they're not public clouds per se they get Amazon Web service is, you know, at Adobe runs on AWS, right? A lot of other people do. Microsoft has their own cloud, but they also have applications as well. Office 3 65 So what if some of these niche cloud these application clouds have to do differently? Because if you think about sales force, you mentioned a good point. Why isn't sales were doing more? People generally don't like Salesforce. You think that it's more of a lock inspect lesson with a wow. They've done really innovative things. I mean, I don't People don't really tend to talk about sales force in the same breath as innovation. They talk about Well, we run sales for us. We hate it or we use it and they never really break into these other markets. What's your take on them? >> I think Mark has done a good job to order. Yes, acquiring very cos it has to start from the top and at the market. His management team should say, I want to get in a new space. He got in tow. Commerce. Claudia got into marketing. He has to know, decide to get into idea or not. Once he comes out, he's really taken because today, science. What is below the market cap? Com Part of it'll be all right. If I am sales force, I need to go back down. Should I go after service? No. Industry should go after entire 80 services industry. Yes or no, But they have to make a suggestion. Something with Toby Toby is not gonna be any slower. They will get into. I decide. They're already doing the eyesight and experience. They're king of experience. Their king off what they're doing. Marketing site. They will expand. Writing. >> What does something We'll just launched a platform. Yes, that's right. The former executive from IBM. That's an interesting direction. They all have these platforms. Okay, so I got together to the Microsoft Amazon, Um, Google, the big clouds and then everybody else. A lot of discussion around consolidation. A lot of people say that the recession's coming next year. I doubt that. No, nos. The consolidation continues to happen. You can almost predict that. But where do you see the consolidation of you got some growth areas as you laid out cloud I t service is our p a experience based off where looks like where's the consolidation happening? If growth is happening, they're words to tell. >> It was happening. Really Like I see a lot in cyber security. I'm in Costa Rica, live in public. You have the scaler, the whole bunch of companies. So the next level of cos you always saw Sisko Bart, do your security followed has been buying aggressively companies. So secret is already going to a lot of consolidation. You're not seeing other people taking it, but in the I T services industry, you'll start seeing that you're already seeing that in the community space. That game is pretty much over right. Even the ember barred companies, even Net are barred companies and the currency. So I think console is always going to happen. People are picking up the right time. It's happening across the board. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur creator value. They come this public. So it's like I think it's cannot anymore very time. Look to your point where the decision happens or not. Nobody can predict. But if a chance now, it's best time to raise money. Build a company. >> Well, we do. I think the analysis, at least from my perspective, is looking at all the events we go to is the same theme comes up over and over. And Andy Jassy this heat of a tigress always talks about Old Garden new Guard. I think there's two sides of the streets developing old way in a new way, and I think the modern architect of the modern era of computer industry is coming, and it looks a lot different than it. Waas. So I think the consolidate is happening on those companies that didn't make the right bets, either technically or business model wise, for they took on too much technical debt and could not convert over to the cloud world or these really robust software environment. So I think consolidations from just just the passing of holder >> seems pretty set up for a member of the first men. First Main Computing was called mainframe Era, then, with clients Herrera and Kim, the club sodas 6 2009 13 years old, the new Errol called. Whatever the name, it will be something with a n mission in India that things would be so automated. That's what we have new area of computing, So that's I would like to see. So that's a new trick, this vendetta near turn. So even though we go through this >> chance all software software sales data 11. Yeah, it's interesting. And I think the opportunity, for starters is to build a new brands. His new branch would come out. Let's take an example of a company that but after our old incumbent space dying market share not not very attractive from a VC standpoint. From market space standpoint, Zoom Zoom went after Web conferencing, and they took on WebEx and portability. And they did it with a very simple formula. Be fast, be cloud native and go after that big market and just beat them on speed and simple >> experience. They give your greatest experience just on the Web, conferencing it and better than sky better than their backs better than anybody else in that market. Paid them with reward. Thanks, Vic. He had a good >> guy and he's very focused. He used clouds. Scale took the value proposition of WebEx. Get rid of all the other stuff brought its simple to video conference. And Dr Mantra is one >> happening. The A applying to air for 87 management. A ops A customer surveys. >> So this is what our Spurs could do. They can target big markets debt and go directly at either a specific differentiation. Whether it's experience or just a better mouse trap in this case could win, >> right? And one more thing we didn't talk about is where their underpants go after is the area number. Many of these abs are still enterprise abs. Nobody really focused on moving this enterprise after the club. Hollis Clubbers are still struggling with the thing. How can I move my workload number 10%. We're closing the club 90% still on track. So somebody needs to figure out how to migrate these clouds to the cloud really seamlessly. The Alps are gonna be born in the cloud club near the apse. So how do you address truckload in here? So there's enough opportunity to go after enterprise applications clouded your application. Yeah, >> I mean, I do buy the argument that they will still be on premises activity, but to your point will be stealing massive migration to the cloud either sunsetting absent being born the cloud or moving them over on Prem All in >> all the desert I keep telling the entree and follow the money. When there is a thing you look for it Is there a big market? Are people catering there? If people are dying and the old guard is there to your point and is that the new are you? God will happen. And if you can bet on the new guard in your experience, market will reward you. >> Where is the money? Follow the money. Worse. What do we follow? Show me where it is. Tell me where it is >> That all of the clothes, What is the big I mean, if you're not >> making money in the club for the cloud, you are a fool right now. If there any company on making out making in the club as a CEO, a board member, you need to think through it. Second automation whether you go r p a IittIe automation here to make money on, said his management. Whether it's from customer service to support the operation, you got to take the car. Start off it if you are Jesse ever today and you're not making birds that cementing. I see it mostly is that still don't want to take it back. They want to build empires. The message to see what's right, Nice. Either you do it or get out. Get the job to somebody that >> I hold a lot of sea cells and prayer. Preparing for reinforce Amazon's new security cloud security conference and overwhelmingly response from the sea. So's chief security officer is we are building stacks internally. When I asked him about multi cloud, you know what they said? Multi cloud is B s. I said, Why? Because Well, we have a secondary cloud, but I don't want to fork my development team. I want to keep my people focused on one cloud. It's Amazon. Go Amazon. It's azure. We stay with Azure. I don't wanna have three development teams. So this a trend to keep the stack building internally. That means they're investing in building their own text. Axe your thoughts on that >> look, I mean, that's again. There's no one size fits all. There will be some CEOs who want to have three different silos. Some people have a hard, gentle stack like I've seen companies. Right now. They write, the court wants it, compiles, and it's got an altar cloth. That's a new irritability you're not. We locate a stack for each of them. You're right. The court order to users and NATO service is but using the same court base. That's the whole The new startups are building it. If somebody's writing it like this, that's all we have. Thing is the CEO. So there's that. The news he always have to think through. How can you do? One court works on our clothes? >> Great. You do. Thank you for coming on again. Always great to get your commentary. I learned a lot from you as well. Appreciate it. I gotta ask the final question as you go around the VC circles. You don't need to mention any names you can if you want, but I want to get a taste of the market size of rounds, Seed Round A and B. What are hot rounds? What sizes of Siri's am seeing? Maur? No. 10,000,000? 15,000,000? Siri's >> A. >> Um >> Siri's bees are always harder to get than Siri's. A seeds. I always kind of easier. What's your take on the hot rounds that are hot right now. And what's the sizes of the >> very good question? So I'm in the series the most easy one, right? Your concept. But the seed sizes went up from 200 K to know mostly drones are 1,000,000 2 1,000,000 Most city says no oneto $10,000,000. So if you're a citizen calmly, you're not getting 10 to 15. Something's wrong because that become the norm because there's more easy money. It also helps entrepreneurs. You don't have to look for money. See, this beast are becoming $2025 $5,000,000 pounds, Siri sees. If you don't raise a $50,000,000 then that means you're in good company. So the minimum amount of dries 50,000,000 and CDC Then after that, you're really looking for expansions. $100,000,000 except >> you have private equity or secondary mortgage >> keys, market valuations, all the rent. So I tell entrepreneurs when there is an opportunity, if you have something, you can command the price. So if you're doing a serious be a $20,000,000 you should be commanding $100,000,000.150,000,000 dollars, 2,000,000 evaluations right if you're not other guys are getting that you're giving too much of your company, so you need to think through all of that. >> So serious bees at 100,000,000 >> good companies are much higher than that. That'll be 1 52 100 And again, this is a buyer's market. The underpinnings market. So he says, more money in the cash. Good players they're putting. Whether you have 1,000,000 revenue of 5,000,000 revenue, 10,000,000 series is the most hardest, but its commanding good premium >> good time to be in our prayers were with bubble. Always burst when it's a bite, mark it on the >> big money. Always start a company >> when the market busts. That's always my philosophy. Voodoo. Thanks for coming. I appreciate your insight. Always as usual. Great stuff way Do Sudhakar here on the Q investor friend of the Cube Entrepreneur, I'm John for your Thanks >> for watching. Thank you.

(uplifting music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto at theCUBE studios for a special conversation with Tarun Thaker, general manager of Datos IO, part of Rubrik. Last time I interviewed you, you were the CEO. You guys got acquired, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you, John. Very happy to be here. >> How'd that go? How'd the acquisition go? >> Excellent, excellent. I Met Bipul about August of last year and it was sort of perfect marriage waiting to happen. We were both going after the broader irresistible opportunity of data management. >> I've enjoyed our previous conversations because you guys were a hot, growing start up and then you look at Rubrik, if you look at the success that they've been having, just the growth in data protection, the growth in cloud, you guys were on with from the beginning with Datos. Now you got a management team, you got all this growth, it is pretty fun to watch and I'll see you locally in Palo Alto so it's been interesting to see you guys. Huge growth opportunity. Cloud people are realizing that this is not a side decision. >> No. >> It's got to be done centrally. The customers are re architecting to be cloud native. The on premises, we saw big industry movements happening with Amazon at VMworld announcing RDS on VMware on premises. >> Correct. >> Which validates that the enterprises want to have a cloud operation, both on premise. >> Yes. >> And in cloud. How has this shaped you guys? You have big news, but this is a big trend. >> No, absolutely. John, I think you rightly said, the pace of innovation at Rubrik and the pace of market adoption is beyond everybody's imagination, right? When I said that it was sort of a marriage waiting to be happened, is if you look at the data management tam it's close to 50 billion dollars, right? And you need to build a portfolio of products, right? You need to sort of think about the classical data center applications because on prem is still there and on premises is still a big part of spending. But if you look at where enterprises are racing to the cloud. They're racing given digital transformation. They're racing customer 360 experience. Every organization, whether it be financials, maybe healthcare, maybe commerce, wants to get closer to the end customers, right? And if you look underneath that macro trend, it's all this cloud native space. Whether it be Kubernetes and Docker based containers or it could be RDS which is natively built in the cloud or it could be, hey I want to now run Oracle in the cloud, right? Once you start thinking of this re architecting stack being built in the cloud, enterprises will not leap and spend those top dollars that they spend on prem if they don't get a true, durable data management stack. >> And one of the things I really was impressed when you Datos, now it's part of Rubrik, is you were cloud up and down the stack. You were early on cloud, you guys thought like cloud native. Your operations was very agile. >> Thank you. >> Everything about you, beyond the product, was cloud. This is a critical success now for companies. They have to not just do cloud with product. >> Correct. >> Their operational impact has to be adjusted, how they do business, the supply chains, the value chains. These things are changing. >> The licensing, the pricing. >> This is the new model. >> Yes. >> This is where the data comes in. This is where the support comes in. You guys have some hard news, Datos IO 3.0. What's the big news? >> John, as you said, we've been very squarely focused on what we called the NoSQL big data market, right? We, if you look at, you know you talked about Amazon RDS, if you go to the Amazon business, Amazon database business is about four billon dollars today, right? Just think about that. If you take a guess on number one data base in Amazon native, it's not Oracle, it's MySQL. Number two, it's not SQL Server, it's Mongo DB. So if you look at the cloud native stack, we made this observation four years ago, as you said, that underneath this was all NoSQL. We really found that blue ocean, as we call it, the green field opportunity and go build the next Veritas for that space. You know, with 3.0, Bipul likes to call it in accordance to his leadership, consolidate your gains. Once you find an island full of gold coins, you don't leave that island. (laughing) You go double down, triple down, right? You don't want to distract your focus so 3.0 is all about us focusing. Really sort of the announcements are rooted around three vectors, as we call it. Number one, if you look at why Rubrik was so successful, you know you went into a pretty gorilla market of backup but why Rubrik has been successful at the heart is this ease of use and simplicity. And we wanted to bring that culture into, not only Datos team, but also into our product, right? So that was simplicity. Large scale distributive systems are difficult to deploy and manage so that was the first part. Second part was all about, you know, if you look at Mongo. Mongo has gone from zero to four billion dollars in less than 10 years. Every Fortune 2000, 500, Global 2000 customer is using Mongo in some critical way. >> Why is that? I mean people were always, personally we love Mongo DB, but people were predicting their demise every year. "Oh, it's never going to scale," I've heard people say and again, this is the competition. >> Correct. >> We know who they are. But why is the success there? Obviously NoSQL and unstructured data's big tsunami and there's more data coming in than ever before. Why are they successful? >> Excellent. That's why I enjoy being here, you go to the why not the what and the how. And the why is rooted for why Mongo DB's so successful, is application developers. We've all read this book, developers are the king makers of the IT, not your IT and storage admins? And Mongo found that niche, that if I can go build a database which is easier for an application developer, I will build a company. And that was the trend they built the company around. Fast forward, it's stock that is trading at $80 a piece. >> Yeah. >> To four billion plus in market. >> Yeah and I think the other thing I would just add, just riffing on that, is that cloud helps. Because where Mongo DB horizontally scales-- >> Elastic. >> The old critics were saying, thinking vertical scale. >> Correct. >> Cloud really helps that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Cloud is our elastic resources, right? You turn it out and you turn it down. What we found in the first, as you know in the last two to three years journey of 1.0, 2.0, that we were having a great reception with Mongo DB deployments and again, consolidate your gains towards Mongo so that was the second vector, making Datos get scale out for Mongo DB deployments. Number three, which is really my most favorite was really around multi cloud is here, right? No enterprise is going to really, bet only on one form of Amazon or one form of Google Cloud, they're going to bet it across these multiple clouds, right? We were always on Amazon, Google. We now announced Datos natively available on Amazon, so now if you have enterprise customers doing NoSQL applications in Amazon, you can protect that data natively to the cloud, being the Azure cloud. >> So which clouds are you guys supporting now with 3.0? Can you just give the list? >> Yep, yep. We supported Amazon from very early days, AWS. Majority of customers are on Amazon. Number two is Google Cloud, we have a great relationship with Google Cloud team, very entrepreneurial people also. And number three's Azure. The fourth, which is sort of a hidden Trojan horse is Oracle Cloud. We also announced Datos on Oracle Cloud. Why, you may ask? Because if you look at, again, NoSQL and data stacks in Cassandra, we saw a very healthy ecosystem building for Cassandra and Oracle Cloud, for obvious reasons. It was very good for us to follow that tailwind. >> Interestingly I was just at Oracle yesterday for a briefing, and I'm not going to reveal any confidential information, because it's all on the record. They're heavily getting to cloud native. They have to. >> They have to. There's no choice. They cannot be like tiptoeing, they have to go all in. >> And microservices are a big thing. This is something that you guys now have focus on. Talk about the microservices. How does that fit in? Because you look at Kubernetes, Kubernetes is becoming that kind of TCPIP moment for the cloud world or TCPIP powered networked and created inter working. The inter cloud or the multi cloud relationship? >> Correct, all the cloud native. >> Kubernetes is becoming that core catalyst. Got containers on one side, service meshes on the other. This brings in the data equation, stateful applications, stateless applications, this is going to change the game for developers. >> Absolutely. >> Actually now you have a backup equation, how do you know what to back up? >> Correct. >> What's the data? >> Correct. >> What's the impact? >> Yeah. So the announcement that we announced, just to cover that quickly, is we were seeing that trend. If you look at these developers or these DBAs or data base admins who are going to the cloud and racing to the cloud? They're not deploying OVA files. They're not deploying, as you said, IP network files, right? They want to deploy these as containerized applications. So running Mongo as a Docker container or Cassandra as a Docker container or Couch as a Docker container and you cannot go to them as a data management product as an age old mechanism of various bits and bytes. So we announced two things, Datos is now available as a Docker container, so you can just get a Docker file and run your way. And number two is we can also protect your NoSQL applications that are Dockerized or that are containerized, right? And that's really our first step into what you're seeing with Amazon EKS, right? Elastic Kubernetes Service. If you saw NetApp announced yesterday the acquisition of Kubernetes as a service, right? And so our next step, now that we've enabled Docker container of Datos, is to how do we bring Kubernetes as a service on top of Docker because Docker to deploy, orchestrate, manage that by itself is really still a challenge. >> Yeah containers is the stepping stone to orchestration. >> Correct, correct. >> You need Kubernetes to orchestrate the containers. >> That is correct, that is correct. >> Alright so summarize the announcements. If you had to boil this down, what's the 3.0? >> So if I were to sort come back and give you sort of the headline message, it is really our release to go crack open into the Fortune 500, Global 2000 enterprises. So if you remember, 60% of our customers are already what we call it internally, R2K, global 2000 customers so Datos, 60% of our customers who are large Fortune 500 customers. >> They're running mission critical? >> They're mission critical, no support applications. >> So you're supporting mission critical applications? >> Absolutely, some of our biggest customers, ACL Worldwide, one of the largest financial leading organization. Home Depot, that we have talked about in the past, right? Palo Alto Networks, the worlds largest cloud security networking company, right? If you look at these organizations they are running cloud native applications today. And so this release is really our double down into cracking open the Global 2000 enterprises and really staying focused at that market. >> And multi cloud is critical for you guys? >> Oh, absolutely. Any enterprise software company without, especially a data company, right? At the end of the day, it's all about data. >> Tarun, talk about why multi cloud, at some point. I'd love to get your expert opinion on this because you know Kubernetes, you see what's coming around the corner with service meshes and all this cool stuff because it impacts the infrastructure. With multi cloud, certainly what everyone's asking about, hybrid and multi cloud. Why is multi cloud important? What's the impact of multi cloud? >> Great question, John. You know, I think it's rooted in sort of three key reasons, right? Number one, if you look at what enterprises did back in the day, right history repeats itself, right? They never betted only on IBM servers. They bought Dell servers, they bought HP servers. Never anybody betted only on ESX as the virtual hypervisor platform. They betted on KBM and others, right? Similarly if you look at these enterprises, the ones that we talked about, Palo Alto Networks, they're going to run some of the applications natively on Amazon but they want DR in Google Cloud so think about a business use case being across clouds. So that's the one, right? I want to run some applications in Amazon because of elasticity, ease of use, orchestration but I want to keep my DR in a different site but I don't want to a colo, right? I want to do another cloud, so that's one. Number two is some of your application developers are, you know, in different regions, right? You want to enable sort of different cloud sites for them, right? So it's just locality, would be more of a reason and number three which is actually, probably I think the most important, is if you look at Amazon and what they have done with the book business, what they've done with others, e-commerce organizations like eBay, like Home Depot, like Foot Locker, they're very wary of betting the farm on a retail organization. Fundamentally Amazon is a retail organization, right? So they will go back, their use cases on Google cloud, they'll go back their use cases on Azure cloud so it's like vertical. Which vertical is prone or more applicable to a particular cloud, if that make sense? >> And so having multi vendors been around for a while in the enterprise, so multi vendor just translates to multi cloud? >> There you go, yes, yes. >> How about what's goin' on with you guys? Next week is Microsoft Ignite, their big cloud show from Microsoft. You guys have a relationship with them. In November you announced a partnership. >> Correct. >> Rubrik and you guys are doing that, so what's going on with them? You're co-selling together? Are they joint developing? What's the update? >> Ignite, so Microsoft, I'll give an update on Microsoft and then Ignite. As you know, John Thompson is on our board and you know fundamentally the product that we have built, Azure team, working with them, we have come to realize that it's a great product to bring data to the cloud. >> Right. >> And we have a very good, strong product relationship with Microsoft, we have a co-sell meaning their reps can sell Rubrik and get quota retirement, that's massive, right? Think for both the companies, right? And companies don't make those decisions, John, lightly. Those decisions are made very strictly. >> Quota relief is great. >> It's huge. >> It's a sales force for you guys. >> Exactly, yep. For us, specifically on Ignite, with this release we announced Azure. We worked very closely with the Azure storage division. When we pitched them, hey we are now, Datos is available on Azure, the respect that we got was amazing. We had a Microsoft quote in our press release. At Ignite next week we have dedicated sessions talking about NoSQL back ups on Microsoft, natively being protected on Azure Cloud. It's good for them, good for us, huge announcement next week. >> That's good. You guys have done the work in the cloud and it's interesting, early cloud adopters get some dividends on that. Just to summarize the chat here, if you had to talk to customer who's watching or interested and sees all this competition out there, a lot of noise in the industry, how would you summarize your value proposition? What's the value that you're bringing to the table? How do you guys compete on that value? Why Datos? >> Perfect, thank you. It's, again, simple order in one to three. Number one, we're helping you accelerate journey to the cloud. Right, you want to go the cloud, we understand Fortune 500 enterprises want to race to the cloud. You don't want to race without protection, without data management. It's your data, it needs to be in your control so that's one. We're helping you race to the cloud, yet keeping your data in your hands. Number two, you are buying a truly cloud native software not a software that was built 20 years ago and shrink wrapped into cloud. This is a product built into technologies which are cloud native, right? Elasticity, you can scale up Datos, you can scale down Datos, just like Amazon resources so you're truly buying an elastic technologies rooted data management product. And number three, you know if you really look at cloud, cloud to you as a customer is all about, hey can I build, not lift and shift, cloud native. And you're adopting these new technologies, you don't want to not think about protection, management, DR, those critical business use cases. >> And thinking differently about cloud operations is critical. Great to see you Tarun. Thanks for coming on and sharing the news on Datos 3.0, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto Studios with the general manager of Datos IO, now part of Rubrik, formerly the CEO of Datos, Tarun Thaker, thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching theCUBE. (uplifting music)

>> Hello everyone, welcome to a special CUBE conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE and we're here with Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO of Rubrik, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. Great to have you here in the cube. Thank you so much for this opportunity. So thanks for coming in. You guys have $292 million in funding led the Series A with Lightspeed, Series B with Greylock Series C with Khosla, Series D with IVP. You've got celebrities like Kevin Durant, Frank Slootman, rockstar investors. Great momentum. John Thompson. Just join your board recently. He's on the board of Microsoft as well.  All since 2014, like short time. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. And we have been very fortunate to have the market traction and demand for Rubrik's for what is now cloud data management product. When we started the company we saw a market need around simplification, cloud enablement and really automating, orchestrating, backup recovery, recovery archive and DR across on-premises and the cloud. >> You guys. Had it been pretty good run here. You've got a new CFO. Talk about that. News, I want to get that out. There was the new CFO, we have >> Our new CFO is Murray Demo. We hired him out of Atlassian where he, he joined the company and took the company public and then the company next two years become like a very fast growing, very successful public company. Our goal is to build Rubrik into the next 30-, 40-years iconic company and we're building a management team that, that will have the firepower and the and the talent to take this company to really become the standard for data management. >> Yeah. I want to get to that. That's I think the big story for you guys is that you've now come out of nowhere, but it's just, you know, the classic startup story, great investors, but you know, we'd go to all the events. We see you guys out there just all of a sudden, just a massive runs. You put the foundation together. Um, you've publicly said you, you're on a $300 million run rate. Great numbers. So great growth. What's take us inside Rubrik. I mean, how is this all working when you guys got good funding? You've got a great management team. What's the core strategy? How it. Why is it working for you guys? >> The core of Rubrik is our culture because technology evolves product. What is invariant is Rubrik's, culture, our culture of transparency, the culture of velocity. The culture of relentlessness is actually drives Rubrik. When we bring new employees into Rubrik, we tell them that it's not about what makes your boss happy or what makes the CEO of this company happy. What moves the agenda of this company? Always think about how do we make or give Rubrik the best opportunity that company can get and we'd drive on that basis so there is no ego, there is no superiority that sales is better than or engineering is a 'know-it-all' and Gods. It's all about how do we collectively build the foundation of a long lasting large public company. >> So that early DNA about that DNA. Where's that come from? The come from the product side engineering side. What? Where's that core DNA of that teamwork come from. >> The core DNA of the team is Google, Facebook, Oracle software. Essentially folks who built the largest scale distributed system, very strong industrial strength enterprise product that powers most of the large enterprises in the world, so we took these two thoughts, of Oracle-like industrial product and Google, Facebook, Amazon- like a scale-out distributed infrastructure and brought together in a single product. >> It's interesting. Lightspeed does it. A lot of interesting deals that were once poo-pooed by many in the industry. Nutanix was one and you mentioned Facebook, Google, these are not, I won't say cloud native. They basically built the cloud. They had to build their own hyperscale or they build their own infrastructure all on open source so you have that generational DNA with it from the tech standpoint and and market standpoint. And Nutanix is a great example because they, you know, they brought all this together. This is a new new kind of view. This is a modern perspective that you guys are taking. I want to ask you as you look at the cloud, and a lot of people were poo-pooing Amazon in the early days and look at them, they've run the table, the number one by miles and public cloud. No one's even close in my opinion, but you know, this is a whole new seat change, so you've got Facebook, you've got the Google's got the Nutanixs is of the world out there who were doing things different. Now are the standard. What are you guys doing that someone might say, I don't really get that yet. Or poo-pooing it that you think is a modern approach and that's different. >> See, the issue really is that how do enterprises take advantage of public cloud simplicity, agility, scale, without being bothered by it because the word, because the cloud is a programmatic paradigm, enterprise previously has been a declarative paradigm. How do you bring these two worlds together and really create a seamless platform where enterprises can automate, orchestrate and secure their data, and that has been the vision of Rubrik. The vision of Rubrik is simplicity at the scale with cloud-enabled a single software fabric across on premises and public cloud. That has been the vision of the company and we have been delivering our product from the very beginning. On this vision, we are just adding one blade after the next, after the next blade to really go be a single software platform across multiple clouds and data centers. >> That's great. Again, sounds like data's at the center of the value proposition from your. From your good discussion. Clearly Facebook status center, their value proposition, although under a lot of criticism today, Google as a data company, as companies realize that data is critical for their business, how do they transform it from what used to be because the old way was fenced-off data warehouse or some sort of batch siloed software stack and now that with all kinds of new things like GDPR for instance, and it's coming around the corner, all these headaches are emerging where it's like, wow, this is really painful, but they want to get to a seamless way, so what's going on there? Can you explain in simple way that that transition from the old data modeling where you had siloed stacks or you know, old fenced out data warehouses to something that's really agile somewhere data's a part of the intellectual property, part of the software fabric. >> This is a really insightful question because you have a dichotomy here. The dichotomy is on one side, data is the biggest strengths and biggest asset for all enterprises. On the other side there is a. there is a risk of a bad uses of that data and and and companies private or people's private information getting out. So how do enterprises or businesses create a platform where they can secure their data, they can provide access to the data, to the relevant people or applications in a very controlled and secure way and at the same time protect this strategy asset from tech, from ransomware, from just proliferating or losing, so, so the traditional industry focused on really building a storage platforms for it, but our view is that the storage platform is just the keeper of the data, but the real issue is that how do you automate, orchestrate and secure access to the data because data can be on premises, data can be public clouds, but really this data control plane that actually manages and secures and provides access to this data is the critical piece and that's the Rubrik's focus. >> All right, let's get into. I want to get into the new product announcement before we get there. I want to get your thoughts on architecture because a lot of people have been enamored and using successfully Amazon web services and some are saying that, oh, Amazon is the roach motel. Why don't you check in, you can check out with respect to your data center saying data portability is coming around the corner, but to move data around the cloud is not that easy. Um, so customers are building on Amazon but they also might have azure. So multi-cloud is out there and you can also. Google's got some great stuff going on with Tensorflow and other things that they'd got rolling out, but there's not a one cloud fits all for all workloads. Certainly in the enterprise. And then you've got the on premise, a dynamic. How do, how do you view that? Because now that's an opportunity for you guys, but also a challenge for the customers where they start using the public cloud for business benefits and then realize, well we got a lot of data in there and then it becomes a data opportunity and problem. What's your view of that landscape? >> So the VC, the whole data management, it is Rubrik is creating a whole new better diamond platform because architects really. We thought about this as something where you combine the data and metadata together so that you data becomes self describing. This is a very architectural thing that Rubrik debt because when data understand where it came from and who he he or she is, then you can take this data from on premises to the cloud and powered it on or go from cloud to cloud and power it on some other place, so this core fundamental vision and architecture of data plus deeply connected together and mobile is what really powers Rubrik and that is the fundamental platform and fundamental architecture of Rubrik and that is our view in the future. Saying that once you create the self describing data and this will see a data from the underlying infrastructure, then you give the true power of the data back to the customer because data knows where it came from, which application it is associated with, who has access to it and who can use it. That's where you see the real power of multi-cloud, multi data center, independence of data and application from the infrastructure. >> So you believe data should be friction-less with respect to where it should go at any given time. >> Absolutely. I mean that's where the power, the enterprises and businesses can realize from their data because they can actually collaborate, they can give more access to their data, to their own users without worrying about the wrong data falling into the wrong hands. Can they actually transcreate transport of the data? Can they not stuck in one infrastructure versus take the data wherever they find data to be most applicable, easiest to use and more secure. >> That's great. So we don't want to jump into a new announcement. Before we get there. I want you to just take a minute to explain, um, Rubriks, target customer that you guys are serving today. You get 900 employees, you've got over $300 million run rate in business. Who's buying the product? Why was it a physician? Who's the buyer? What's the value proposition of the offering? >> So we sell into a enterprises. So we are not an SMB product. We sell into the enterprise, I would buy it as our cloud architects, our buyers, our infrastructure architects are buyers are virtualizing architects, uh, folks who are thinking about automation, orchestration, security of the data, recoverability of the data, protection from ransomware, things like that. And that's our core technical and economic buyers and, uh, and, and the core businesses or people who have, um, who have employees more than. So, cloud transformation is classic. Absolutely functional guys are involved in. That's the big driver for Rubrik. Rubin's growth is indexed on the cloud, about has it on their agenda. >> All right, so let's get into the hard news. You guys are launching Rubrik's Polaris, the industry's first SaaS platform for data management applications. I'm smiling because whenever I see first I want to know what that means. I've seen data application platforms out there. I've seen SaaS. So SaaS is not new. What makes you guys first talk about this dynamic, about polaris? What, what is it? Why is it first? >> So the way we see our customers use multiple clouds and multiple data centers is they have some applications running on premises. Some applications running in the cloud, they're building a lot of new applications in the cloud, so essentially cloud is is fragmenting their data and applications and we have Rubrik core product or cloud data management product, wherever they run their application, so Rubrik product runs on premises. Rubrik product runs in the cloud to protect the application. >> Was that the first dynamic that it's on-prem? It's oncloud, >> Yeah, that's our first product and then what we will working with our customers was that once we have this setup, how do you bring all of your applications and all of your data under the single system of record and that is the Rubrik Polaris Platform which is complimentary to our first hybrid cloud product were to the single system of record, which is a global catalog of all the applicants and data content as well as workflows as well as security as well as orchestration, and we expose this to open apis for Rubrik as well as other third party vendors to really build applications no matter where application runs. >> So these applications, the data management application that people or Rubrik will build on top of politics is for compliance, for governance, for auditing, for search across all the infrastructure. So you guys are offering also an ecosystem play with the Polaris. You're enabling others to build on top of it. Absolutely. This is kind of like force.com platform for all your data management. >> So we started salesforce, a Mulesoft had an announcement and that got a lot of attraction. What does that mean to you guys? Because that's. You see sap, salesforce has been very successful for a SaaS platform as well as Mulesoft. What does that acquisition mean to the marketplace and how do you guys fit into that dynamic vis-a-vis that trend? >> Salesforce did a great strategic acquisition or Mulesoft because they realize that if they combine applications on premises as well as in the cloud, then they create a single platform for all the structure data applications, but our view is that this is just half of the problem are that half of the problem is on a structured data across many applications and all the Meta data Rubrik. Polaris is our SaaS platform across on-premise cloud. A single system of record with Apis were Rubrik will deliver data management applications for control, for governance, for compliance, for security across all applications that enterprises are managing, whether they're. Are these applications run on premises or in the cloud, >> And the unstructured data too is that metadata you're talking about, it's critical data. >> It's metadata is application data is is all your unstructured data, >> So bottom line is announced that why would you put this in a single sound byte for customers? What does it mean for me if I'm a customer? For you guys, what's the value proposition of this new product? >> If you want to manage your business with compliance, with governance, with security and access Rubrik delivers a single platform for all your data management needs, >> Platform Polaris from Rubrik enabling an ecosystem first time, bringing all that data together from the data center people. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to see you. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you so much for the opportunity and thanks for stopping by. I'm job here for cube conversation. Exclusive News here with Rubrik at theCUBE in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.