>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's The CUBE. On the ground with Accenture Labs 30th Anniversary Celebration. (techy music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE coverage of Accenture Labs 30th years of celebration here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with The CUBE. Our next guest is John Walsh who is the Northern California Office Managing Director as well as the General Manager of the P&L of Telecom, High Tech, and Media Entertainment. Three big P&Ls, plus running the whole territory. You got a big celebration here, thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for coming, John. It's great to have you. >> So first of all, Northern California, you got The Warriors in the backyard. I'm sure Accenture's got a box, schmoozing customers, you guys working with them at all? >> Well, ya know, it's funny you bring that up, John. We are working, we're pretty close with The Warriors as it turns out. As you know, The Warriors are building out their new stadium, right down at the Dogpatch in San Francisco, and so we've been working with them to really design the fan experience. Before, during, and after the game, what that experience is going to look like. Being here in Northern California, you can imagine that's going to be a very, very tech forward experience. Hopefully it's going to kind of define the state of the industry. We're proud to be a partner of The Warriors, and part of that design. >> What better topic to kind of, as a backdrop to the Labs, Accenture Labs, 30 years here, looking forward to the next 30 years. I mean, The Warriors are the poster child, kind of like The Patriots are in football, with respect to a culture, but they're innovative, tech geeks too. They understand how to use technology for an outcome, not trying to get an outcome out of their technology. They really understand that, and that's really kind of the ethos, of the Labs. >> I think that's exactly right, and obviously, ya know, we can talk about The Warriors as much as you want (John Furrier laughs) I'm a huge fan, but ya know, the way they've thought about actually changing the game through technology, and embedding it in part of the way they actually build that experience out, is one of the reasons why we partner well with them. Obviously, we'll leverage our Labs' capabilities and a lot of our Lab practitioners in order to actually co-innovate with The Warriors. I think all of us here in the Bay Area, are going to be able to appreciate that in the coming years. >> Well, when the NDAs are expired, or maybe even sooner, we'll have to come up to your office and get a deeper dive on The Warriors situation. >> Let's do a double click on that. >> It's worth a bigger feature. But here at the Labs and Computer History Museum, better place to kind of talk about where the industry's come from, where Accenture Labs has come from, and where it's going. So I got to ask you, Arthur Anderson back at a big six accounting firm 30 plus years ago, to Anderson Consulting to Accenture, really kind of was the ways of innovation that everyone talks about. Now, the next 30 years, we're looking down the throat of AI, blockchain, internet of things, using data at scale, cloud computing, quantum computing, really changing how companies are executing their business architecture, not just IT. >> For sure. >> I mean, it's a complete transformation, disruption. >> For sure. >> Well, I mean, Accenture, you went through the history. I actually joined Arthur Anderson, ya know, 30 some years ago. I think we've always prided ourselves on being on that leading edge, and sort of our objective was to actually incorporate those new technologies, apply them to our enterprise client base. Be able to do that, ya know kind of be there, and then be gone before our competitors get there. I think you'll see some of that tonight as we're sort of walking around the showcase here. You've heard this a hundred times, John. There's never been a better time to be in the tech world. To be able to actually look at the breadth of technology opportunity that's here. How to apply that to our global enterprise base to create advantage differentiation and change. Change is what drives our business model. >> Yeah, we were just talking with Mark, one of the Senior Directors of the Labs. Ya know, talking about accounting firms and those kinds of, way back in the day, they would instrument business. Now, as you guys are now in more, 30 years, plus years later, the instrumentation's all in the data. So literally, for the first time in the history of the world of business, you might not need accounting with blockchain, and everything's instrumented. So there's no more questions that can't be answered, some level! So this is going to be like a complete new generation. Next 30 years, pretty significant. Everything's instrumented, and all kind of disruptions around how a company organizes themselves. What is Accenture's vision? How do you guys talk to customers? Not only is it mind blowing, it also is fear. >> Yeah >> If I don't adapt and move on, I can't get there. >> Yeah, well I mean, and again that is, that's the nature of competition. That's always been the nature of technology. Right now, I think it's a combination of, the digital natives have been the ones that have kind of been pushing the envelope and putting pressure on every industry, every business model, and I think that they've been out in front. We're seeing, ya know, sort of our whole global client base adapt and respond and start to incorporate all of these, and re-engineer their processes with benefit of digital at every one of those layers. You mentioned it, analytics, sort of end data, is at the core of, I think, what will define success in the future for every enterprise, in every industry. That's really where we're spending our time with our customers. It's like, how do you take advantage of the data and the insight and the knowledge that you have, to run your business more efficiently and better serve customers? By empowering your employees to serve customers, and to allow customers to better serve themselves, with all these tools? >> We're here at the Computer History Museum, in your backyard, your territory, so you're obviously going to crash the party, but I find that really compelling, and rightfully so, to be in Silicon Valley. But the world's changing, and they're going to come up with the next 30 years, it's going to match your show here. So I got to ask you, someone who leads the business, who have been through the organization, how do you hire the next generation talent? You got to build out, you got to innovate. What's the profile, is there an algorithm? Is there a formula that you have as you build out and continue to scale out your people? Got the innovation DNA and the culture-- >> We do. >> We see that. We got the Labs pumping on all cylinders, we see that. What's the people strategy? Diversity's key, you're seeing more women coming into the workforce. Certainly in Silicon Valley, our territory, has been great news lately for women. >> Right. >> What are you guys doing? >> So, let me start last first, with the diversity comment. I think we've been pretty public in terms of communicating sort of, what the profile of our employee base looks like. All the statistics, top to bottom, from diversity, ethnic diversity and gender diversity. Our CEO has recently made a commitment to be at 50/50 gender diversity by 2025. I don't think there's any other company-- >> That's amazing-- >> of our size and scale, that's made that level of commitment >> That's a moon shot. That's a moon shot level, Mars shot, what do you want to call it. >> It's a moon shot, for sure, but the way we're looking at it, it's 50 percent of the IQ actually, ya know, is there, and we need to be able to be tapping into all of that. For those folks, they're in the marketplace, they're just not at Accenture, and we want to create an environment that actually brings all those folks in. Other than that, it's just, ya know, it's based-- >> More data scientists. >> More data scientists. >> More engineering. >> More engineers, more computer science, and more people that are good at problem solving, and naturally curious. We have a pretty rigorous recruiting process, and we also have a brand that I think, attracts talent. We build deep relationships with universities, which helps, kind of gives us early access. I was talking to a couple of our interns who are here tonight, like wow, this is awesome. That's always been the recipe for Accenture. >> What do you say to the young college grads that are graduating, undergraduate or Masters degree, man, I'm going to land a job at Accenture! It's a dream job at some level. What do you say to them? What do you look for? I'm looking for, fill in the blank. When you say, answer that question. >> For me, I'm looking for people that love problem solving, right. That are naturally curious. Working at Accenture's hard, right. So having that work ethic, that ability to be persistent. >> You got to be skilled, you got to be skilled. >> Well, you got to be skilled. You don't even get the interview if you don't have (John Furrier laughs) at least that much on your resume. But beyond that, ya know, it's how they interact. We're a client focused business as well, so having people that are actually able to to work as part of a team, and work with clients, is pretty critical. >> John, congratulations, and the event's starting. Thanks from all at the CUBE, we really appreciate it. John Walsh, who runs the California, Northern California Managing Director, as well as the P&L responsibility for Telecom, High Tech, and Media Entertainment. Here at the CUBE coverage of Accenture Labs 30 year celebration at the Computer History Museum. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE, thanks for watching. (techy music)

>>from >>around the globe, >>it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM >>Well, good to have you here on the cube. We continue our conversations here as part of the IBM think initiative. I'm john Walsh your host here on the cube, joined today by Marco Novakovich, who is the co founder and Ceo of an stana, which is an IBM company they specialize in enterprise observe ability for cloud native applications. And Merkel joins us all the way from Germany near cologne Germany. Merkel good to see you today. How are you doing >>and good. Hi john nice to be here, >>you bet, thank you for taking the time today. Well, first off, let's just let's just give some definitions here. Enterprise observe ability. Um what is that? What are we talking about here? >>Yes. So observe ability is basically the next generation of monitoring, which means it provides data from a system from an application to the outside so that people from the outside can basically judge what's happening inside of an application. So think about your a big e commerce provider and you are, you have your shop application and it doesn't work, observe ability, gives you the ability to really deep dive and see all the relevant metrics, logs, uh, and, and application flows to understand why something is not working as you would expect. >>So if I'm just listening to this, I think, okay, I'm I'm monitoring my applications already right. I've got a PM and force and, and I kind of know what things are going on, what's happening, where the hiccups are all that, how, what is the enhancement here than in terms of observe ability taking it sounds like you're kind of taking a P. M. To a much higher level. >>Absolutely. I mean that's essentially how you can think about it and, and, and we see three things that really make us and stana and enterprise observe ability different. And number one is automation. So the way we gather this information is fully automated, so you don't have to configure anything. We get inside of your code, we analyze the flow up the application, we get the errors, the logs and the metrics fully automatic. And the second is getting context. One of the problems with monitoring is that you have all these monitoring data silos. So you have metrics on the one side locks in a different tool. What we build is a real context. So we tie those data automatically together so that you get real information out of all the data. And and and the third is that we provide actions. So basically use ai to figure out what the problem is and then automate things. Is it a problem resolution restarting a container or resizing your cloud? That's what we suggest automatically out of all the contacts and data that we've gathered. >>So you talk about automation context intelligence, you combine all that in one big bundle here, then basically um that's a big bundle, right? I'm not a giant vacuum if you will. You're ingesting all this information, you're looking for performance metrics. So you're trying to find problems um what's the complexity of tying all that together instead of keeping those functions separate? Um you know what or and what's the benefit to having all that kind of under one roof then? >>Yeah. So from the complexity point of view for the end customer, it's really easy because we do it automated for us as a vendor building this, it's super complex but we wanted to make it very easy for the user and I would say the benefit is that you get, we call it the mean time to repair, like the time from a problem to resolve the problem gets significantly reduced because normally you have to do that correlation of data manually and now with that context you get this automated by a machine and we even suggest you these intelligent actions to fix the problem. >>So so I'm sorry go ahead. >>Yeah. And by the way, one of the things why IBM acquired us and why we are so excited working together with IBM is the combination of that functionality with something like what's in a I ops because as I said, we are suggesting an action and the next step is really fully automating uh this action with something like what's new Ai Ops and the automation functionality that IBM has so that the end users are not only gets the information what to do the machine even does and fix the problem automatically. >>Mm Well, I'm wondering to just about about the kind of the volume that we're dealing with these days in terms of software capabilities and data, uh you've got obviously a lot more inputs, right, a lot more interaction going on, a lot more capabilities. Uh You've got apps uh they're kind of broken down the microservices now, so I mean you've got you got a lot more action basically, right, You've got a lot more going on and and um and what's the challenge to not only keeping up with that, but also building for the future for building for different kinds of capabilities and different kinds of interactions that maybe we can't even predict right now. >>Absolutely, yeah. So uh I'm 20 years in that space. And when I started, as you said, it was a very simple system. Right? You had an application server like web sphere, maybe a DB two database. So that was your applications like today. Applications are broken down and hundreds of little services that communicate with each other. And you can imagine if, if something breaks down in a system where you have two or three components, it's maybe not easy, but it's handled by a human to figure out what the problem is, if you have 1000 pieces that are somehow interconnected and something is broken. It is really hard to figure that out. And that's essentially the problem uh that we have to solve with the contacts with the automation, with ai to figure out how all these things are tied together and then analyze automatically for the user where issues are happening. And and and by the way, that's that's also when you look into the future, I think things will get more and more complicated. You can see now that people break down from micro service into functions. We get more serverless. We got to get more into a hybrid cloud environment where you operate on premise and in multiple clouds. So things get more complex, not less complex. From an architectural perspective, >>you bring up clouds to is this diagnostic I mean or do you work with a an exclusive cloud provider or you open for business? Basically >>we are open for business but but we have to support the different cloud technologies. So we support all the big public cloud vendors from, from IBM to amazon google Microsoft. But on the other hand, we see with enterprises Maybe there is 10 20 of the workload in the public cloud, but the rest is still on premises. And there's also a lot of legacy. So you have to bring all this together in one view and in one context. And that's one of the things we do. We not only support the modern cloud native applications, we also support the legacy on premise world, so that we can bring that together and that helps customer to migrate. Right? Because if they understand the workload in the on premise world, it's easier to transform that into a cloud native world. But it also gives an end to end view from the end user to we we always say from mobile to mainframe, right from a mobile app down to the mainframe application. We can give you an end to end view. >>Yeah, you talk about legacy uh in this case it may be cloud services that people use but there but you know, a lot of these legacy applications right to that are running that that are, they're still very useful and still highly functional, but at some point they're not going to be so would it be easier for you or what do you do in terms of talking with your clients in terms of what do they leave behind? What do they bring with them? How what kind of transition time frames should they be thinking about? Because I don't think you want to be supporting forever. Right. I mean, you you want to be evolving into newer, more efficient services and solutions and so you've got to bring them along too. I would think. Right. >>Yeah. But to be really honest, I think there are two ways of thinking. One is as as a vendor, you would love to support only the new technologies and don't have to support all the legacy technologies. But on the other hand, the reality is especially in bigger enterprises, you will find everything in every word. Right? And so if you want to give a holistic D view into the application stacks, you have to support also the older legacy parts because they are part of the business critical systems of the customer. And yes, we suggest to upgrade and go into a cloud native world. But being realistic, I think for the next decade We will have to live with a world where you have legacy and new things working together. I think that's just the reality. And in 10 years, what is new today is legacy then? Right. So we'll always, we will always live in a kind of hybrid world between legacy and and new things. >>Yeah, you got this technological continuum going on right. That you know that you know what's new and shiny today is going to be, you know, old hat in five years. But that's the beauty of it all. Obviously you talked about Ai Ops. Um, I mean let's go into that relationship a little bit if you would. I mean eventually what is observe ability set you up to do in terms of uh your artificial intelligence operations and what are the capabilities now that you're providing in terms of the observe ability solutions that Ai Ops can benefit from? >>So the way I think about these two categories is that observe abilities, the system of record. That's where all the data is collected and and put into context. So that's what we do as in stana is we take all the data metrics, locks, traces, profiles and put it into a system of record by the way in in in very high granularity. It's very important. So we, we do not sample. We have second granularity metrics. So very high quality data in that system of record where Ai ops is the system of action. This is a system where it takes the data that we have applies machine learning, statistical analytics etcetera on it to figure out for example root cause of problems or even predict problems in the future and then suggests actions. Right? What the next thing that AI does is it suggests or automates an action that you need to do to for example scale up the system, scale down the system scaling down because you want to safe cost for example these are all things that are happening in the system of action which is the IOP space >>when I think about what you're talking about in terms of observe ability. I think well who needs it? Everybody is probably the answer to that. Um Can you give us maybe just a couple of examples of some clients that you've worked with in terms of of particular needs that they had and then how you applied your observe ability platform to provide them with these kinds of solutions? >>Yeah I I remember a big e commerce vendor in the U. S. Approaching us. Uh last october they were approaching the black friday right where where they sell a lot of goods and and they had performance issues but they only had issues with certain types of customers and with their existing APM solution. They couldn't figure out where the problem is because existing solutions sample, which means if you have 1000 customers you only see one of them as an example because the other 999 are not in your in your sample. And so they used us because we don't sample with us. If you have they have more than a billion requests today. You see every of the one billion requests and offer a few days they had all the problems figure out. And that's what that was. One of the things that we really do differently is providing all the needed data, not sampling and then giving the context around the problem so that you can solve issues like performance issues on your e commerce system easily. So they switched and you can imagine switching the system before black friday, you only do that if it's really needed. So they were really under pressure and so they switched their A P. M. Tool to in stana to be able to to fulfill the big demand they have on these black friday days. >>All right. So uh I I before I let you go you were just saying they had a high degree of confidence. How are you sweating? That went out because that was not a small thing at all. I would I >>assume. Uh Yes, it's not a small thing. And to be honest also it's very hard to predict the traffic on black Fridays. Right? Uh And and in this case I remember our SRE team, they had almost 20 times the traffic of the normal day during that black friday. And we because we don't sample, we need to make sure that we can handle and process all these traces. But we did, we did pretty well. So I have high confidence in our platform that we can really handle big amounts of data. We have >>one >>of the biggest companies in the world, the biggest companies in these worlds. They use our tool to monitor billions of requests. So I think we have proven that it works. >>You know, I say you're smiling to about it. So I think it obviously it did work. It >>did work. But yeah, I'm sweating still. Yeah. >>Never let them see you sweat merkel. I think you're very good at that and obviously very good at enterprise observe ability. It's an interesting concept, certainly putting it well under practice and thanks for the time today to talk about it here as part of IBM think to, to share your company's success story. Thank you. Marco. >>Thanks for having me, john >>All right. We're talking about enterprise observe ability here. I P. M. Thank the initiative continues here on the cube. I'm john Walton. Thank you for joining us. >>Yeah. Mhm. >>Yeah.

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM >>Well welcome everyone is the cube continues or IBM Thanks series. It's a pleasure to have you with us here on the cube. I'm john walls and we're joined today by brian loves who is the director of offering management for customer and employee care applications in the at IBM in the data and AI division. So brian, thanks for joining us from Ottawa Canada, good to see you today. >>Yeah, great to be here john I'm looking forward to the session today >>which by the way I've learned Ottawa is the home of the world's largest ice skating rink. I doubt we'll get into that today, but it is interesting food for thought. Uh so brian first off, let's just talk about um the Ai landscape right now. I know IBM obviously very heavily invested in that uh just in terms of how you see this currently as in terms of enterprise adoption, what people are doing with it and and just how you would talk about the state of the industry right now, >>you know, it's a really interesting one, right? I think if you look at it, you know different companies, different industries frankly are at different stages of their Ai journey, right? Um I think for me personally what was really interesting was, and we're all going through the pandemic right now, but last year with covid 19 in the March timeframe, it was really interesting to see the impact, frankly in the space that I played predominantly in around customer care, right? When the pandemic hit immediately call centers, contact centres got flooded with calls, right? And so it created a lot of problems for organizations. But it was interesting to me is it accelerated a lot of adoption of ai to organizations that typically lag and technology. Right? So if you think about public sector, right, that was one area that got hit very, very hard with questions and those types of things and trying to communicate and communicate out information. So it was really interesting to see those organizations frankly accelerate really, really quickly, right? And if you actually talk to those organizations now, I think one of the most interesting things to me and thinking about it and talking to them now is like, hey, you know, we can do this right, AI is really not that complicated, it can be simplified, we can take advantage of it and all of those types of things. Right? So I think for me, you know, I kind of see different industries that sort of different levels, but I think with Covid in particularly, you know, and frankly not just Covid, but even digital transformation alongside Covid is really driving a lot of ai in an accelerated manner. The other thing I'll kind of I'll kind of talk to a little bit here is I still think we're very much in the early innings of this, right, there is a tremendous opportunity innovating in the space and I think we all know that you know data is continually being created every single day and as more people become even more digitalized, there's more and more data being created. Like how do you start to harness that data more effectively, right in your business every day? And frankly I think we're just scratching scratching the surface on it and I think tremendous amount of opportunity as we move forward. >>Yeah, he really is really raised an interesting point which I hadn't thought about in terms of, we think about disruptors, we think about technology being a disrupter, right? But in this case it was purely really, largely environment that was driving this disruption, right, forcing people to to make these adoption moves and transitions maybe a little quicker than they expected. So because of that, because maybe somebody had to speed up their timetable for deployments and what have you what what kind of challenges have they run into them? Where because, as you describe it, it's not been the more organic kind of decision making that might be made, sometimes situation dictated it. So what have you seen in terms of challenges, barriers or just a little more complexity perhaps for some people who are just not getting into the space because of the environment you were talking about? >>I think a lot of this is like people don't know where to get started, right, a lot of the time or how ai can be applied. So a lot of this is going to be a bad education in terms of what it can and cannot do, and then it all depends on the use cases you're talking about, right? So if I think about, you know, building a machine learning models and those types of things right? You know, this set of challenges that people will typically face in these types of things are, you know, how do I collect all the data that I need to go build these models? Right? How do I organize that data? Um you know, how do I get the skill sets needed to ultimately, you know, take advantage of all that data to actually then apply to where I needed in my business? Right, So a lot of this is, you know, people need to understand, you know, those concepts are those pieces um to ultimately be successful with AI and you know what IBM is doing right here and I'll kind of this will be a key theme through this conversation today, is how do you sort of lower the time to value, to get there across that spectrum, but also, you know, frankly the skills >>required along the way as >>well, but a lot of it is like people don't know what they don't know at the end of the day. Mhm. >>Well, let me ask you about about your AI play then, a lot of people involved in this space, as you well know, you know, competitions pretty fierce and pretty widespread, there's a deep bench here um in terms of IBM know, what do you see is kind of your market different differentiator then, you know, what what do you think set you apart in terms of what you're offering in terms of AI deployments and solutions? >>No, that's a great question. I think it's a multifaceted answer, frankly. Um the first thing I'll kind of talk through a little bit right, is really around our platform and our our framework, right? We could refer to as our air ladder, um but it's really an integrated, you know, sort of cohesive platform for companies around the journey to AI, right? So kind of what I was mentioning earlier, right? If you think about, you know, AI is really about supplying the right data into A I. And then being able to infuse it to where you needed to go. Right? So to do that, you need a lot of the underlying information architecture to do that, Right? So you need the ability to collect the data, you need the ability to organize the data, you need the ability to to build out these models, right? Or analyze the data and then of course you need to be able to infuse that ai wherever you need it to be. Right. And so we have a really nice integrated platform that frankly can be deployed on any cloud. Right? So we got the flexibility that deployment model with that in greater platform. And you think about it? We also have built right, you know, sort of these industry leading Ai applications that sit on top of that platform and that underlying infrastructure. Right? So Watson assistant, Right. Our conversational AI, which we'll talk probably a little bit more on this conversation. Right, Watson discovery focus on, you know, intelligent document processing, right. AI search type applications. We've got these sort of market leading applications that sit on top, but there's also other things, right? Like we have a very, very strong research arm right, that continues to invest and funnel innovations into our product platform and into our product portfolio. Right? I think many people are aware of project debater, we took on some of the top debaters in the world, right? But research ultimately is very much tied, right? And even some of the teams that I work with on the ground, we've got them tied directly into the squads that build these products, Right? So we have this really big strong research arm that continues to bring innovation around AI and around other aspects into that product portfolio. But it's not just go ahead, >>Please go ahead. three. No, no. You know, I interrupted you. Go ahead. >>No, I was just gonna say that the other two things, I'll say it like, you know, I'm saying this right, but we've got a lot of sort of proof points and around it. Right? So, if you talk about the scale right? The number of customers, the number of case studies, a number of references across the board, right? In around AI AT IBM It is significant, Right? Um, and not only that, but we've got a lot of sort of, I'll say industry and third party industry recognition. Right? So think about most people are aware of sort of Gartner magic quadrants, right? And we're the leader almost across the board, Right? Or a leader across the board. So cloudy I developer service inside engines, machine learning go down the line. So, you know, if you don't trust me, there's certainly a lot of third party validation around that as well. That makes sense. >>Yeah, it sure does. You know, we're hearing a lot about conversational AI and, you know, with online chat bots and voice assistance and a myriad applications in that respect. Let's talk about conversational right now. Some people think it's little narrow, but, but yet there appears to be a pretty broad opportunity at the same time. So let's talk about that conversational AI um, uh, element um, to what you're talking about at IBM and how that is coming into play and, and perhaps is a pretty big growth sector in this space. >>Yeah, I think again, I talked about scratching the surface early innings. You'll see that theme a lot too. And I think this is another area around that. So listen, let's talk about the broader side. Let's first talk about where conversation always typically applied. Right? So you see it in customer service, that's the obvious place we're seeing the most appointments in. But if you think about, it's not just really around customer service, right? There's use cases around sales and marketing. If you think about, you know, lead qualification, for example, right? How can, you know, I'm on a website, how can I get information about a product or service? How can I automate some of that information collection, answering questions? How can I schedule console? All those things can be automated using great conversationally. I, the organizations don't want these sort of point solutions across the customer journey. What we're ultimately looking for is a single assistant to kind of, you know, front right, that particular customer. So what if I do come on from a legal perspective, but really I'm not here for legal. I'm actually a customer and I want to get a question answered, right? You don't want to have these awkward starts and stops with organizations, Right? So on the customer side where we see the conversation like, hey, I going and it's really kind of covering that full gambit in terms of that customer journey, right? And it's not just the customer journey, but you also want to be across channels, right? So you can imagine right now, not just, you know, the website and the chat on the website, but also right across their messaging channels, right across your phone. Right. And not just that, but you also want to be a really nice experience around, hey, maybe I'm on a phone call with some automation, but I need to be able to hand them off to a digital play. Right? Maybe that's easier to sign up for a particular offer or do some authentication or whatever might be, right. So to sort of be able to sort of switch between the channels, it's really, really going to become more important in this sort of sort of seamless experience as you just kind of go through it. Right? >>So you're coming by customers. Yeah. >>You talked about customers a little bit and you mentioned case studies, but can we get, I hope we can get into some specifics. You can give us some examples about people, companies with whom you've worked and and some success that you've had that respect. And I think maybe the usual suspects come to mind about finance. I might health care, but you said anybody with customer call issues, service centers, that kind of thing would certainly come into play. But can you give us an idea or some examples of deployments and how this is actually working today? >>Oh, absolutely. Right. So I think you kind of mentioned you become sort of industries that are relevant. Right? So, you know, the ones that I think are most relevant that we've seen are the ones with the biggest sort of consumer sort of side to it. Right? So clearly in financial services, banks, insurance, and clearly obvious ones telecommunications, retail, healthcare, these are all sort of big industries with a lot of sort of customers coming in. Right? So you'll see different use cases in those industries as well. Right. So the obvious one, we've got a really good client, Royal Bank of Scotland, they've now changed their name to natwest Open Scotland. Um So they started out with customer service. Right? So dealing with personal banking questions through their website, what's interesting and you'll see this with a lot of these use cases is they will start small, right with a single use case that they'll start to expand from there. So, for example, >>natwest right there, starting with they started with personal banking, but they're not expanding to other areas of the business across that customer journey. Right. So it's a great example of where we've seen it. Cardinal Health Right. We're not dealing with customers in terms of external customers but dealing with internal customers right from the help that standpoint. So it's not always external customers. Oftentimes frankly it can be employees. Right? So they are using it right through an I. V. R. System. Right? So through over the phone. Right. So I can call instead of getting that 1 800 number. I'm going to get a nice natural language experience over the phone to help employees with common problems that they have with their health does so. And they started really, really small, right? They started with simple things like password resets but that represented a tremendous amount of volume but ultimately headed their cost cost centers. So not West is a great example. C I B C. Another bank in Canada Toronto is a great example and the nice thing about what CNBC is doing and there are big, you know, we have four big banks here in Canada, what have you seen do is really focusing a lot on the transactional side. So making it really easy to do interact transfers or send money or over those types of things or check your balance or whatever it might be. So putting a nice simple interface on some of those common transactional things that you >>would do with the bank as well, >>you know, before I let you go, uh I'd like to hit this of buzz where we hear a lot of these days natural language processing. NLP Alright, so, so NLP define that in terms of how you see it and and how is it being applied today? Why why does NLP matter? And what kind of difference is it making? >>Wow, that's a loaded natural language processing. There's a loaded term in a buzzword. I completely agree. I mean listen, at the 50,000 ft level, natural language processing is really about understanding length, Right? So what do I mean by that? So let's use the simple conversational example. We just talked about if somebody is asking about, I'd like to reset my password right? You have to be able to understand what is the intent behind what that user is trying to do right there? Trying to reset a password, right? So being able to understand that inquiry that the user has that's coming in and being able to understand what the intent is behind it. >>That's sort of one, you know, aspect of natural language processing, right? What is the intent or the topic around that paragraph or whatever it might be. The other sort of key thing around natural language processing the importance, extracting certain things that you need to know. And again using the conversational ai side, just for a minute to give a simple example if I said you know what I need to reset my password, I know what the intent is. I want to reset a password but Right I don't know which password I'm trying to reset. Right? So this is where you have to be able to extract objects and we call them entities a lot of time in sort of the ice bake or lingo but you've got to be able to extract those elements. So you know I want to reset my A. T. M. Password. Great. Right so I know what they're trying to do but I also need to extract that it's the A. T. M. Password that I'm trying to do. So that's one sort of key angle of natural language processing and there's a lot of different techniques to be able to do those types of things. I'll also tell you though there's a lot around the content side of the fence as well, right? So you can imagine having a contract, right? And there are thousands of these contracts and some of your terms may change. How do you know, out of those thousands of contracts where the problems are, where I need to start looking, Right? So another sort of keep key area of natural language processing is looking at the content itself. Can I look at these contracts and automatically understand that this is an indemnity clause, Right? And this is an obligation, right? Or those types of things, right? And be able to sort of pick pick those things out so that I can help deal with those sort of contract processing things. That's sort of a second dimension. The third dimensional kind of kind of give around this is really around. You can think about extracting things like sentiment, right? So we talked about, you know, extracting objects and downs and those types of things. But maybe I want to know and analytics use case with customers. Um you know, what is the sentiment and you know, analyzing social media posts or whatever it might be. What's the sentiment that people have around my product or service? So naturally this process, if you think about it, the real high level is really about how do I understand language? But there's a variety of sort of ways to do that if that makes sense? >>Yeah, sure. And I think there's a lot of people out there saying, yeah, the sooner we can identify exasperation, the better off we're going to be right and handling the problems. But it's hard work but it's to make our lives easier and congratulations for your fine work in that space. And thanks for joining us here on the cube. We appreciate the time. Today, brian, >>thank very much. >>You bet BRian Levine is talking to us from IBM talking about conversational Ai and what it can do for you. I'm john Walsh, thanks for joining us here on the cube. Mhm. >>Mhm.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE, our live coverage continues here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands Exposition Center. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walsh. Glad to have you here with us on day one of our three days of coverage here. We're now joined by David Shacochis, who is the Vice President of Product IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink, and Jim Aluotto. Did I get it right, Jim? >> Jim Aluotto. >> Aluotto. We practiced this many times. Who is the Director of Cloud Provider Business, Americas, at VMware. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you both for being with us. >> Jim: Thank you. >> We certainly appreciate your time. So talking software-defined data centers. First off, let's step really high level here, and just talk about main attributes, qualities. How would you, if your elevator speech would be about what the SDDC would be, how would you describe it, and what are the features? >> Sure, well I'll jump in front of the company that sort of coined the term, and get my answer first, and then let Jim expound from there. Really, I think we can sort of sum up the software-defined data center in a lot of what we've learned in creating a Managed Private Cloud, based on what you would call a software-defined data center platform, in that it minimizes the number of moving parts. We've been doing Managed Private Cloud for as long as Managed Private Cloud has been a thing. And what that used to mean, five, six, years ago, was provision to the network, provision to security devices, maybe it's a converge device, maybe it isn't, maybe it's two different vendors. Sure, you've got vSphere in the middle of it all, but now you're talkin' of different storage tiers. If you want different flavors of storage, you're talkin' to multiple vendors back there. Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talkin' to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks. And so software-defined data center, where the rubber hits the road, and sort of, from the cold face, means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. >> Jim: Nicely done. >> Okay, well, you go do the bookish version. >> Well really, in its most simplistic form, spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets. And lately we've gone to market with VMware Cloud Foundation, that CenturyLink is now spinning up as the root of their service that they're going to market with. And so we've gone through an evolutionary process over the years, where we've proven to the world the advantages of virtualization, virtualize and compute. VMware, in its Act II, is now virtualizing the network. We're virtualizing storage now with VSAN taking off like wildfire. But now we're stitching it all together, in the form of a complete, end to end, automated and provisioned, encapsulated, virtualized data center. >> And that's the big efficiency here, right? It's one-stop shop, basically. You don't have to go out and as you said, look for a number of different avenues, or different pieces of this puzzle. >> So it does, it drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it. And one of the things that we've been seeing, and it's sort of foundational to our managed services practice, is that the software-defined data center actually drives software-defined managed services. You have to change the way you do managed services to take advantage of all that capability. We have a service we call Cloud Application Manager, which is really our tool that we use to model applications, deploy managed tooling to that application for 24/7 monitoring and management, and uptime and stability support, and then do analytics on that application, to be able to show cost-savings opportunities, best-practice opportunities, in more of an aggregated, reported way. So Cloud Application Manager is a much more automated version of managed services. It's not ITIL from 10 years ago, right? It's not up/down, just base-level ticketing. You need to be able to change the way you do managed services, and you can only do that if you have a reliable underpinning platform. So less moving parts, a software-defined data center lets you change that, let's you change the way you deliver managed services. >> So the CenturyLink has incredible technical chops. There's always a point where you have to decide, build versus buy. CenturyLink, you can choose to build all of this. You can take parts from the open source community, build extremely custom solutions. Why VMware? When you guys have the technical ability to build it, make a differentiating offering, why start with VMware as the base? >> Yeah, I think you go back to what VMware's been in the market doing, and I even sort of talked past it a second ago. The vSphere's foundation is really solid, right? The device, the flexibility you have with the hardware layer, the flexibility you have at the real core or nucleus of your compute and memory virtualization stack is super important. And then really the idea of building out into the software-defined very common ownership stack, and why VMware was great to partner with, with regards to building out our next-gen Managed Private Cloud offering, is because they've wired everything to work together. And you said there are things you could go and try to build on your own? I think it's interesting. What we're starting to see is that, just to use somethin' like OpenStack, as an example, building a private cloud out of OpenStack is certainly possible, but there's no one company owning it all end to end. And if you're a service provider, it's up to you to go figure it all out. Or you can go and work with maybe one integrator partner, but they're making their own set of choices, and now you're basically locked in to that particular deployment model. So I think working with VMware, what we found is, first off, they've accelerated our time to market, and our time to value around a Managed Private Cloud offering. There's a lot of interoperability in there. There's a lot we're able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside VCF is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment, to one of the Managed Private Clouds that we've been running for five or six years, where there's just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability. >> And really it's all about the market opportunity that VMware brings to the table. Our cloud strategy is incredibly simplistic, but yet it has such a compelling business and value proposition, not only to our mutual customers that we're going to market in joint pursuit with, but also to our cloud providers, 500,000 plus enterprise customers using VMware. As we take them along the journey, building out their private clouds, that represents over 60 million workloads, with the inevitability of them moving out to the cloud. So what we've teed up is a cloud provider community with our most strategic partner, like CenturyLink, to increase the odds of that, capturing those workloads onto a VMware platform. The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets. They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets, all the reliability, compatibility, security, that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider, like CenturyLink. >> Well David, let's talk about the interface into CenturyLink. One of the things that customers are startin' to realize is that they have to differentiate, based on just internal IP. So there's the API to everything, now. What's, if you could describe, well, maybe there is. What's the API to CenturyLink, as I'm consuming this software-defined data center that you guys provide? >> Okay, so sure, so that's actually a really exciting opportunity for us, and it's one that we've been sort of pivoting. If you sort of look at the history of CenturyLink, there was a, and this sort of goes back 10 years, but there was a huge spike of CenturyLink's entry into the business to business market. Acquiring quests, getting the business that basically announced their entrance into the B2B marketplace. Then there was a number of more technology oriented and virtualization management oriented acquisitions, because it recognized two things: one, we needed to be in IT solutions, in cloud, in data center, but also that the network was heading towards a highly virtualized, highly orchestrated, highly software-defined model. The network of the 21st century was not going to be about buying a ton of big iron and putting it into pops anymore, it was going to be increasingly around managing x86 virtualization. So that set off a period of time within CenturyLink where we were acquiring managed services companies, IT solution companies, virtualization companies, that were helping really to increase two things: our ability to virtualize and manage virtualization, and then, secondly, develop software in new ways, and become much more familiar at the application layer. We spent about five or six years with companies like SAVAS, and Tier3, and Cognilytics, really adding to the company in terms of brain power, and know how, and workload fluency. And then now we've just recently closed on the merger and acquisition with Level 3. So now we're very much on a network scale ascendency. The interface into CenturyLink is really taking a lot of those assets that we've built up, and moving them together into more of a platform topology, which is re-architecting the way that we work. We've bought cloud companies, and we invested in virtualization to help us reorganize exactly what you're talking about, which is the way of interfacing with CenturyLink, driving customer experience, being able to have a common user experience, whether you're interacting with it at a CLI, or via an API call, or with a tutorial that you're following via an online interface, and having a common look and feel across those services. So it's a journey. We're still on our way there, but we have the very beginnings of a lot of commonality that's starting to occur, whereby if you log in to our public cloud management service, Cloud Application Manager, or if you log in to our network interconnect service, Network Exchange and Cloud Connect Solutions, or if you log in to our public and private cloud offerings, very common look and feel across the piece, where it's one identity, one billing collection, but then we allow each of those individual services to go and innovate on their own. And that's the key thing. You can go drive common user experience. That's super, but if you're waiting on a portal team to go design your UI for you, you're slowing down. And so we're really bein' able to design a framework whereby there's one common UI, but it's more design patterns that every internal team picks up and works with, and then integrates into their release. >> And it's very important for VMware as well, as we develop our IP that's relevant for cloud provider use cases, is to open up those APIs to do just that, give you the opportunity to own that customer experience and differentiate yourself within the marketplace. >> I think we talked about this last time, too, where VMware's entree into the service provider world really taught them some lessons, and they started adding things to their product that make it easier to be a service provider. And some of the things, like with vCloud Director, and some of the ways that you can now work with that at an HTML5 layer, and sort of create your own version around it, almost interact with vCloud Director at an API level, allows us to factor it in to that mentality of design pattern, thinking in a common UI across all of our services. Right now we're working with a lot of those features on vCloud Director to enable our Managed Private Cloud service. >> So what if the conversation is being then able to show it's all about making it real? What have the real conversations been? >> Yeah, so the real conversations with our customers that we're starting to have are really, and just to tie it a little bit back to this idea of a software-defined data center, I think they're excited by the possibilities. They're certainly looking to really drive instrumentation at more places than they ever were able to drive instrumentation before. And there's the obvious industry examples of IoT, and sensors, and things like that, but even things like business process, and being able to theoretically just rework the way a particular system works, turn it into a micro service, or an application that they can factor in to their overall IT strategy, but then have that start to feed in to a broader data lake that they can then start making business analytical decisions from. That's one of the big patterns that we see, whether it's occurring with a lot of our customers that we work with in the built environment, but in working with the customers that work with CenturyLink, in some of the most deep and influential ways, are the ones that are out there sort of "in space". And I don't mean in space, I mean out there in a geographic spread, like retail solutions, and physical facilities, and things like that, where you have people coming to your location, and you're tryin' to gather all that data back into more of a centralizing motion. That's where we're having some of our most interesting conversations, with those retail brands, with bigger facilities that we want to be able to bring on net, and basically have them turn into data sources for their data lake, that they can then start moving forward and analyzing with some either professional services or tooling, to go and start looking for where those insights lie. >> So for me this is music. What I'm seeing, customers want to wane off of IT functions altogether. They want to invest their resources around their core business. >> John: Their business, right. >> Yeah, exactly. So what they're doin' is, they're relying on the subject matter experts now. The whole notion of being concerned about security, and reliability out in the cloud, that's long gone. They recognize that folks like CenturyLink can deliver at greater economies of scale, more secure, highly available. >> Yeah, and one of the things, one of the best ways we can facilitate those conversations is to share a little bit of our own journey. And it's not because we want to stare at our own product catalog, and walk through it page by page, but to share some of our own journey with the perspective of realizing a long time ago that in our managed security business, it was a big data problem. It's not an implementation and controls problem. And so we've been driving a whole lot more of our story, and some of our service strategy is, not only is it, we feel a lot of these are very valuable services in their own right, but they show off a pattern of: instrument it, drive it back to a data lake, and then take more of an analytical approach to it to add value, as opposed to just being very transactional. >> We talked about the journey. It's been a good one, right? And continued success with that. >> Indeed. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, and we appreciate the time. >> Okay. >> Good, thank you very much Dave and Jim. Back with more. You're watching theCUBE. We are live, here at Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. (percussive music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (upbeat music) >> Well, welcome back. We are live, here on theCUBE, which, of course, is a flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE. And we're really a media, and we're very glad to have here with us for the second of our three days of coverage here at re:Invent, AWS, throwing quite a bash, here at The Sands in Las Vegas. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walsh, and we're joined now by Manan Shah, who is the director of product management, at, or a director of product management, I'd say, at Cisco Systems. Are you used to hearing that yet, at Cisco Systems? >> We are getting close to it. >> Primarily at Viptela, acquisitioned just three months ago, so things are going well for ya. >> Things are going great. We are really excited to take the journey forward. It's been less than 90 days since we got acquired. We had a great ride at Viptela, As Steven told me, we were the market leaders with the largest traction in the fortune finders space. And Cisco was a natural fit. And now we are very excited to take this journey forward with Cisco's broader partner ecosystem and the customer base. >> So what's that all about? What brought the two of you together, in your opinion? >> Manan: That's a very interesting question. >> Stu: You mean other than money, right? (laughing) >> Always the big driver. >> Absolutely. >> But when it comes down to doing business, what was it? >> So, if you look at Cisco and how they're transitioning. I'll talk about business and technology together. If you talk about business, Cisco as a company is all moving toward a subscription-based business model. A large portion of Cisco's business today is very CapEx-heavy. And Viptela was all about subscription business model. And so that was very attractive to Cisco. The other piece was, we went head to head against Cisco in a lot of different fortune finder account. And we had a lot of success. So they saw the solution that we brought to the table and they saw the benefits of keeping it simple, yet sophisticated. That was a strand of Viptela solution. And that was very, very enticing to Cisco. The other piece was that this large deployment, a lot of customers are moving toward a cloud-first model. And one of the key value provs of Viptela was everything was cloud first and 90% of our customers, we were hosting their control plan and management plan in the cloud. And so as customers moved toward this cloud journey, they wanted to consume it as a service. And that was very attractive to Cisco, also. So all of these together made it very attractive for Cisco to look at us as not just a competition but something they can build on, build a business. >> John: Complement, right? >> Yeah >> So, the ST-WAN's been a hot space and, you know, been a couple of acquisitions that happened. Cisco had, you know, one or two solutions already before the acquisition, depending on who you talk to. Talked about that fit. Can you walk us through a little bit, kinda, you know, I'm sure you have to go through the portfolio stuff, how you position it, things like that, you think about the customers. But yeah, walk us through the -- >> So, Cisco had I-WAN solution, which was the legacy ST-WAN that Cisco had. Cisco also has Meraki ST-WAN solution. And now with acquisitions, Cisco has Viptela biz ST-WAN. So, the way we looked at it is the way Viptela, the ST-WAN solution was built, is all of the intelligence was in the fabric. And the end nodes were, what we call the edge routers were connecting into the fabric and building the leveraging the intelligence that was there. Now, the end nodes could be residing in a branch, be residing in a data center, or in a cloud location like AWS. And so the way we are approaching is, the intelligence will all remain in the fabric and rather than just having Viptela's routers as the end node, we will leverage the Cisco's broader portfolio as end nodes into that fabric. So, if you look at Viptela's, it was all internet-based products. Now, if you wanted a T1E1 interface, if you wanted a DSL interface, we, Viptela, did not have it. Cisco already has it. So it naturally made sense to leverage all of the breadth of portfolio that Cisco had and build that into the fabric. And that is what we are moving towards. In the next few months we will have a new software which will leverage all of those capabilities and have the full breadth of portfolio connecting to that ST-WAN fabric. >> All right, can you connect the dots with us now, being here at AWS, how's that fit in, you know, networking, of course, critical component for cloud, but yeah. >> Absolutely, and this is the best time. If you look at what AWS did over the last few months, they actually had a third party evaluate a lot of different ST-WAN vendors and they published a paper that talked about in toto ST-WAN. Listed all of the vendors and the capabilities. So they are acknowledging ST-WAN as a big movement going forward, and a big market, and they want to be part of it. We have seen a lot of customers, as they move their workloads into cloud, and into AWS, they want to extend the network fabric, continue to use the same tools that they will be using, and automate the capability of extending the fabric into the cloud. So, segmentation, so security, visibility, automation. Those are some of the key value prop or key data points that customers are asking us, saying, we want a single tool that will do that. And that is what we have done with the automation that we have built. >> I've seen over the last, this is my fifth year at the show. About two years ago, networking seemed to really kinda pick up. If I'm correct, I saw more than one Cisco booth, even. 'Cause I think there was another acquisition -- >> Manan: That's right. >> Cisco have. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of kind of Cisco in the public cloud these days? >> Yeah, so Cisco has always embraced cloud. And Cisco's overall strategy has been, we will enable customers to take their workloads wherever they want to be. So whether it's the traditional data centers, or AWS, or any other cloud, Cisco always has this multi-cloud strategy. And helping customers to build this fabric that would extend not only from branch to data centers, but branch to cloud, branch to data center, data center to cloud, no matter where the applications are, no matter where the users are. It's all about connecting users to the application, wherever they decide. >> So what's affected that, in terms of multi-cloud and my decision about where I'm gonna put whatever workload? I mean, different capabilities, right? I've got different considerations. So what do you think is motivating people now, or what's instigating people to make these decisions about what they're gonna do where? >> So, there's various evaluation criteria on how you adopt a cloud. So a lot of customers start with one cloud, get familiar with it, run some, develop applications, then run some production application. Once they get comfortable with it, then they want to expand to multi-cloud and less reliant on one particular cloud. But essentially leverage the best of what each cloud provider has to offer. And that is what we want to enable all customers to do, connect applications wherever, whichever cloud they decide, and connect users to those applications. >> Yeah. When I think back, I've worked with Cisco for a lot of my career. You know, branch was something that was critically important. How much has changed, moving to cloud? How much is the same, kind of extending from branch to cloud? >> Yeah, that's a great point. If you look at how the branch and the WAN has not evolved for the last 20 years, it was all about MPLS and the connectivity and getting service from the providers. Well, with the applications moving outside of data centers into cloud, historically, you would take all of your branch staffing into your data center, get it serviced by the applications that are in the data center, and only about 5% would go out to the internet. But if the applications are in the cloud, why do I need to take all the traffic from branch to the data center? Why can't I just go from branch to the cloud? Or data center to the cloud? Or campus to cloud? So, the fundamental design principals have changed. And as a result, you have to evolve in terms of how you design the WAN, how you deploy it, and how you evolve the thought process around consumption model. The other aspect that has changed is, because of internet and cellular, and customers want to build a ST-WAN fabric that is transport agnostic. You can leverage MPLS, you can leverage internet, you can leverage cellular. Why do I care about what connected? I tie my applications to a certain SLA. As long as any part that meets that SLA, I'm okay as the solution takes it, as long as it's secure. And that is what customers are looking for. The last piece that customers are looking for is the change in the consumption model. A lot of customers want to consume it as a service. Historically, they would get everything from a MSP or a service provider. Now they are looking at, okay, how do I, instead of having everything in my plan, consume it as a service. And that's where we saw, in the early days of Viptela, 90% of our customers consuming control plan and management plan from our hosted locations. >> Great. Wanna understand, you know, it's been three months since the acquisitions. I'd expect, being part of Cisco, you get access to a lot more customers. What else has changed? What is it like, coming to an event like this, under the Cisco umbrella mean? >> Yeah, so, there are a few other things that have changed. The first and foremost, as you rightfully said, is access to a lot of Cisco customers. Cisco is a great brand. And going against them, I always faced that. And now, being part of Cisco, I am leveraging that. Cisco has a great brand and what customers want is that, the product from Cisco that is solid and that works for years to come. The other aspect that has changed is, with us being part of Cisco, we are not only leveraging the customer and the partner ecosystem, we are integrating with the broader product portfolio that Cisco has. I give you the example of the routing portfolio that we are integrating in. In addition to that, Cisco has a great product portfolio in the security side. So we are leverage, we are integrating in the Cisco security portfolio, as well, to provide this end-to-end customer solution that leverages security, networking and a whole bunch more. >> So, I don't know if it's a friction point, but you did things a certain way. >> Absolutely. >> Right? You were a competitor. >> Yes. >> Cisco does things a certain way. They were a competitor. So, I mean, how do you make that work? Because ultimately, there's gotta be, I just assume, some difference of approach. >> Manen: And I would, I would be very honest -- >> It's inevitable, right? >> Yeah, it's inevitable, and it's there. The way, the pace at which we were delivering, right? We want to continue to deliver at the same pace. We want to continue to renew it at the pace that we were delivering as a startup. And that is one of the promises that Cisco has done. Cisco leadership has been very up front about, tell us what worked as a startup, and we want to incorporate that. And that has been one of the surprising things that, walking in, I was always cautious that, hey, would we be able to execute at the rate we want to execute. And that is one of the leadership promises that we have got is, we are behind you, we fully trust the capabilities that you have. Go run with it. And we are, we see that day in and day out, across the entire leadership team. >> John: It's a great stamp to have, right? >> It is a great stamp to have. And now, when we were as a startup, a lot of customers, when we are trying to close a business, they will say, do I really wanna do business with a startup? And there was always that financial and other conveniences that would come into play. Well, all of those is off table now. Now that we are part of Cisco, we have the Cisco brand that's backing us. And that's been a huge advantage and it has increased our sales byplan significantly. >> Your world's gone to this. >> Exactly. >> Right, right. Well, good for you. >> Manan: Thank you. Congratulations on the acquisition. And look forward to maintaining the surveillance on the progress, here. >> Absolutely, we are very excited. >> John: Thank you, Manan. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Manan Shah from Cisco Systems. Back with more, Stu and I will be, here from re:Invent. We're at AWS here in Las Vegas, and back in a bit. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas. It's the Cube, covering AWS re: Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Oh, well welcome to the Cube. John Walsh, here, with Keith Townsend, talking about re: Invent, the big AWS show going on here at the Sands Expo Center and talking about 40,000 plus people. I don't know how many hundred thousand square feet of booth space we're talking about here, but this show has grown exponentially from last year to this year, and we're looking forward to being with you here for the next three days. Again, I'm John Walsh, with Keith Townsend. Keith, always a pleasure to see you sir, how ya been? >> I've been really well, I'm navigating the four hotels this conference is spanning. The last number I heard, almost 50,000 people. >> Is that right? >> Yeah, it's 48,000, 45,000, a huge conference. >> Well and quite often, for those of you who come out to Las Vegas a lot for shows, you realize that there are certain anchor centers, but as Keith pointed out, we're talking about four hotels, and even some spillover into a fifth as well. The sessions are packed, the exhibits are certainly dynamic, already attracting a lot of attention behind us and we're glad to be with you, here on the Cube. It's a pleasure now to introduce Eric Thomas, who's the Director of Cloud Products at ExtraHop and good to see you sir. Thanks for being with us. >> Thanks very much. >> Breaking your maiden on the Cube, is that correct? >> Absolutely, first time, hopefully not the last. >> We'll go easy on ya. >> Oh, thank you so much, appreciate that. >> ExtraHop, based out of Seattle. Tell us a little bit, first off, about core competencies, what you guys do, and then we'll drill down a little bit to just why you're here at AWS. >> Absolutely, so we're a platform for what we call wire data analytics. Essentially what we do is, we use the network as a data source for application intelligence, performance, security, forensics, you know whether that's sort of public or private Cloud, on-prem, hybrid set ups. We sort of sit on the network, virtual or physical network, listen to all the traffic, and then we analyze it, sort of at an application layer. So we speak web, and database, and storage, active directory, single signon, all these sort of services and protocols. Then we apply machine learning to that to surface insights to IT professionals and app developers. >> So I mean, are you looking for whether it's code issues, or maybe infiltration, or maybe performance, I mean, or everything? >> All of the above, all of the above. >> Oh, alright. >> So we sort of started off talking about IT operations, performance management, availability, downtime, and our customers then said to us, you know, once you have full visibility across the entire app delivery chain, there's real implications for security there, you know, finding intrusions, anomalies and things of that nature. And so, over the last few years, we've gotten more and more into that business. You know, as far as AWS is concerned, kind of the Cloud operations, we've been supporting AWS since 2013. That was our first product offering. And we allow our customers to maintain their visibility as they shift their workloads to AWS. And sort of the value prop here is kind of a shared responsibility model, whether you're talking about security or infrastructure. At the end of the day, the business and the customer still responsible for the application. >> So help us understand why are data in the Cloud? I mean, I'm used to taking a network analyzer and puttin' it on my wire in the data center and I can get the really smart people to look at that data and extrapolate and find really great patterns. Do I really get wire data in the Cloud? How do you guys work in AWS? >> Yeah, so the virtual wire is still a virtual network, still, you know, the same TCP connection, the same packets going across the virtual wire. So we capture that virtual network traffic, marry it with physical network traffic from the data center or on-prem, put it all together in one package. >> So across customers, you guys have to have a lot of great insights. Do you have a service where you anomolize that data and then provide that insight back to your customer base? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we sort of turn that you know, investigative workflow on its head, where we do analysis and find the interesting stuff up front so that you know, the smart people don't have to go digging through packets and network analyzers. We surface our machine learning insights by looking at behavioral anomalies. We can kinda separate those into operational versus security anomalies to kinda improve the signal to noise ratio for both IT Ops teams and security teams as well. >> But to deal with the security stuff, then, on that level then, interesting point, Keith, that you bring up. The fact that you can learn from the greater community, and apply it to specific examples. What are some of these high level findings? I don't want, don't get into specifics, or you know, too specific. But what are you finding out in terms of security concerns, and how people are best addressing and best practices to addressing this? >> So we just announced, yesterday, a new rev of ExtraHop for AWS, which enables a lot of new types of use cases or outcomes from those types of security anomalies. It's a great example. You know, you're still responsible for securing all of your storage, all of your web applications. It's easy to configure your AWS setup to let anybody in the front door of S3. >> We've see that a lot, yep. >> Right, pretty embarrassing when it happens. But ExtraHop and ExtraHop for AWS, that's an anomaly, it's a couple a clicks to find out where it's goin' on and to fix it. >> So is this more prescriptive or descriptive? Are we doin' this pre an event, or post discovery of some type of intrusion? >> So we're doing it as it happens. We talk about real time analytics and when we say real time, we mean within one second of it happening, we see it in ExtraHop. Some vendors say real time to mean 15 or 10 minutes. Not really enough, if you know, trying to find a ransomware infection and stop it, for example. With machine learning, we'll provide suggested root causes. We'll say, this looks like a security anomaly. It looks like you've opened your S3 bucket. Here's how you go fix it. >> Let's talk a little bit about ecosystem. Security, especially in the Cloud, is a really big topic. There's challenges with SSL, encryption, decryption. ExtraHop can't do it all by themselves. Are you guys partnering with other security firms to bring insights? >> Yeah, we partner with a lot of different firms. Splunk comes to mind as sort of you know, a log, analytics and aggregation vendor. A lot of sort of byte code instrumentation on the sort of performance analytics side. And if you think about it architecturally, you've got the inside out view from logs and byte code, which is great. Find out what's going on in the brains of the computer as it's self-reporting as a virtual machine or an application. We take the outside-in view. We're sort of looking at it from the outside to get more definitive about literally every single transaction and the impact of everything, from active, all the things you can't measure or instrument using classical agents and that sort of thing. So we've had those firms come to us and say, we'd like to partner with you on this ecosystem approach. >> So AWS, big conference. One of the things I've talked to a lot of folks in the community for the past coupla days. For me, this is a very different community. We have anywhere from infrastructure architects from the Big Fortune 500s, to people who've been more traditional AWS customers and are not used to going through IT and consuming these services. How does a, that ladder customer surface up at ExtraHop. >> So having been at this show since 2013, I've seen more and more enterprise customers at these shows as these, you know, sort of Cloud strategies have finally come to pass. Been talking about public Cloud since 2008 or so from a strategic perspective in the enterprise. Now, it's becoming real. Those are our customers, full-stop. The CIOs, the CSOs, the VPs of App Dev, Product Management et cetera. It's great to see them moving their workloads to the Cloud. It's also great to see that they're, you know, modernizing some of the services, while choosing to leave some of their other legacy services for later. We can monitor all of that, sort of maintain visibility, performance assurance and security, as they're moving those workloads. >> So can you talk about how you ease the pain between those two worlds, the public Cloud which is a very different operating model than what we can do in a data center. We have complete control of the infrastructure in a data center. The Cloud is abstracted away. How do you get guys help even that out and make operations simple? >> So one thing that we're seeing, sort of from a megatrend perspective with CIOs. They really want to make as many options available to their app teams, their infrastructure teams, their dev teams as possible, because the CIO's saying, I don't know what's gonna stick from a technology perspective. I'm not the one to make those decisions, I'm the one to support them. And so, I'm gonna open the floodgates. You know, you're allowed to do whatever you want with public Cloud, virtual private Cloud, I'm gonna give you all these options. Meanwhile the CSO is saying, I really wish you'd standardize. It's gettin' hard to track all these assets, all these different, you know, middleware components that you're putting out there. They need a way to audit and assess what's really going on, you know, in both the public virtual private Cloud and on-prem and that's sort of where we come in. >> So just in general, Cloud migration, you were just saying how, '08, '09, this has been eight, nine years in the making. Is it finally been kinda demystified, do ya think, to a certain degree? Or people, there's been enough trial and error that there's more confidence for those who haven't made that leap yet that okay, there's a more defined path that I'm more comfortable with it now. >> I think it's gotten more realistic in terms of the assumptions around cost savings. When people started talking about this originally, it was like, oh, great, we're gonna completely map our consumption of resources to what we really need. We're gonna save all this money, and yeah, that's true, to a degree. I think those expectations have been tempered a little bit, as you figure out, you know, where you can track that sort of performance in your capacity, or you just wanna let people run wild. So that's a tempering of expectations. There have also been these unexpected benefits around next gen application architectures, microservices, continuous integration, even continuous delivery. The Cloud enables all of that, you know, it sort inspires a level of agility in historically less agile businesses. >> And then, you mentioned the, kind of these microservices. How do you guys support microservices? We're used to the VM centric view of the Cloud, when you're talking about services that are abstracted away from the VM. How does ExtraHop play in those realms? >> So, you know, this is sort of the next iteration of the services oriented architecture, as people have realized, you know, that the sort of the best practices and sort of code patterns for developing these services. For us, you know, we auto discover systems and services running across virtual or physical networks, which means you don't have to configure things ahead of time and we can scale to elasticity very easily. We see services spin up, spin down, move from one place to another, move across availability zones, and we just track all that as it happens. >> Well Eric, we certainly appreciate the time. And we wanna know, how was the first Cube experience? You alright with it? >> So far, so good, what do you think, you tell me, you're the experts. >> We didn't beat him up enough. >> We didn't, I gotta come with tougher questions next time. >> Next time. >> There you go. >> Eric Thomas, ExtraHop, glad to have you with us here on the Cube. >> Thank you so much, 'preciate it. >> Back with more here from re: Invent. We're in Las Vegas, be here all week, back with more on the Cube, right after this. (electronic music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon web services and it's partner, Ecosystem. >> And welcome to our nation's capitol. Here we are in Washington, D.C. TheCUBE coming live from the Walter Washington Convention Center, here for AWS Private Sector Summit. It's our maiden voyage with the Public Sector so looking forward to this. John Walsh and John Furrier, glad to have you along for the ride, John, this is going to be a good week. >> Hey, it'll be fun. >> A good couple of days. John Galvin joins us. He is the Vice President and General Manager of the Public Sector Intel. John, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE; glad to have you. >> It's a pleasure to be here, thank you. >> Tell us a little bit first off, about your portfolio. >> Sure. >> I understand you cover not only United States, but you have a global footprint as well. Touch base a little bit with our audience with what you're up to. >> Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I have to put it in perspective for everyone. People know us as a micro-processor company. They don't always attribute us to going out and calling on government, or education decision makers. So we really act as a trusted advisor. We don't sell directly to government or to education entities, and I have sales people, or account exec's, around the world who are going in and meeting with ministers of education or ministers of ICT. Sometimes it's a school superintendent or a district superintendent, but, overall, what we're talking about is digital transformation and how technology can be used to advance government or advance education. And sometimes at a national level, could be at a state level, could be at a district level. >> Well, John and I were talking in our open segment just a little bit ago, about maybe a glacial pace isn't fair to say about how government had that reputation, obviously, for many years about being, maybe, reluctant. >> Right. >> To embrace change. What do you see now in that space? Is there this shift going on, that there's more of an embracing of technology? And of more entrepreneurial kind of spirit within the operation of government? >> Yeah, absolutely. It is happening so quickly. The categorization of government moving slowly is absolutely true. Education the same. But now wherever I go around the world, everyone is talking about transformation and they're starting to launch projects that might be a pilot or a proof of concept, but they're getting started. The challenge is when you talk about digital transformation it is so big so it becomes difficult for governments to really get their hands around it, and what are they going to do to improve citizens quality of life. Is that going to be a healthcare initiative? Is it going to be a transportation initiative? Sometimes it's an education initiative; and we're seeing them all. I think what is causing it to advance now is they see proof-points that it works. That by making those investments it really is changing the quality of life for people. And in emerging markets they don't have existing infrastructure that they have to tear out and replace. And some of the mature markets, it's how do you actually breakdown those silos. >> Well, John, I'm really glad you came on. Intel, in my opinion, I've been following Intel for many years, recently, has been pretty amazing. But you guys have always been a bellwether for trends, I'd say, five to 10 years out. I mean, look at everything that Intel's done with technology You have that five to 10 year stair instantly in what you're proposing. We've been seeing a lot of the AI commercials with Intel, what is the Public Sector trends that intersect with the vision of Intel? >> Well, you're absolutely right. If you look at what Intel does we're similar to the auto industry. It takes us five to six years to produce our next processor, and so we have to be looking that far out of what are the use cases, and really, what are those technological boundaries that we're going to either cross or break? And AI is absolutely the conversation today. It's sort of around artificial intelligence and it's no longer science fiction. We're not talking about it in the future; we're now talking about how can we use it today? Machine learning big, big topic, and not just the role that Intel plays, but companies like AWS; big players, in terms of how that actually comes to life in your home. It's not just how it's going to come to life in a big government institution or a big enterprise. >> And the Public Sector landscape, for the folks that are watching some know the Public Sector, what is the Public Sector? Because it's not the government. There's education, there's health, so what's the layout. How do you categorically look at it? How should people think about Public Sector? Not just GovCloud because there's a GovCloud, but is there a Public Sector cloud? I mean, how should people think about it? >> Yeah, great question. I work as part of a group at Intel that are all verticals. There's a healthcare team, there's a transportation team, there's an energy team. Public Sector is completely different because we're all of those things. We're working on transportation projects, we're working big healthcare projects, and so Public Sector you have to look at in the biggest sense where it's not just a federal presence but it is a state presence, it's a city presence or a county presence. And so our opportunity is to be able to connect all of those things, and that is what I think is so exciting about the transformation that is taking place right now is for that vision to be realized those silos really need to be broken. You know, you're going to hear comments over the next couple of days about forming a data lake. Which is bringing in all of those data streams into a single spot so that you can apply analytics and be able to get to insights that we've never been able to get to before. >> So how do you do that if you talk about municipality levels, state levels, federal levels, different operating systems, different processes, different procedures? And all great resources, how do you pull all that together and make that an asset instead of a morass? >> Well, in that question you just captured how big this opportunity is, and the way that we do it is we work with our ecosystem partners. The strength that Intel has when we enter into those conversations is we work with everyone. We work with the big cloud providers, we work with all the different operating system providers. We're not only with the computer companies that are our partners and our customers, but we're working now with internet and think companies, and so we have the ability to now work across that ecosystem to start pulling all of those pieces together. The heart of your question though is that those are all different systems that have been built over time. And if you look at what's been happening in enterprise over the past 10 years is CIO's and CTO's at the enterprise levels have been breaking down those silos and moving more to single systems and big data streams. And now that's what's happening with in the Public Sector is that data has to come together. >> John, talk about the collaboration between Intel and AWS and what is going on with you guys, how you guys are working together, and what's the impact in serving Public Sector customers? >> Well, we have had a great partnership with AWS from the beginning. (audio cuts out) (audio cuts out) That's going to take on this bigger vision is going to have a cloud discussion. There will still be things that they're going to be doing on premise, but it's most likely going to be a hybrid environment. And so with AWS we really have the opportunity to have a bigger discussion, where they can really have that cloud discussion and even some of the analytics layer. They're also doing more at an IOT perspective; we're able to join that conversation in terms of how our technology really plays into it. But I think the other thing we're able to do with AWS is really look for innovators. We're able to identify either those small companies, or even some of the cities are doing some really great things. And then because of their global footprint and our global footprint we can share that pretty broadly. >> And ecosystem's critical. You guys, Intel's always been ecosystem friendly company. With that in mind I got to ask you the question that everyone's talking about, and certainly, we're covering Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona. And you couldn't go anywhere without hearing 5G and these new phones that are coming out. And then under the hood network transformation, you're hearing about software to find networking, machine learning, AI a lot of things that you guys are talking about. So the question for you is Smart Cities. It is a really, really hot opportunity just to even think about the concept of what a Smart City entails. I mean, here in D.C., like other cities, they have bicycles people can take out and ride around. That's a smart city, that's a cool service. But now you bring digital all to it. Imagine, Air B&B, you've got Uber, you've got Lift you've got all kinds of digital services, digital experiences. This is a government, this is a Public Sector issue. This is an interesting one. How is Intel's view on Smart Cities, how do you see that rolling out? >> First of all, we're very excited about what's happening within Smart Cities, and to the beginning of your question we think 5G is going to be an accelerant. It's going to cause it to happen even faster than it's happening now. What's interesting about Smart City is that it really does take a lot of different formats. And so we see cities who are really focused on public security and safety. We have examples whether it's Singapore, London of how they're now capturing new data with the cameras that they put up, and can do real-time analytics on it using AI and machine learning. So it's not that they just have all of these data streams, but they're doing real-time analysis of the data stream to be able to identify potential threats. But we also have examples where we're seeing cities invest in new technology to, essentially, replace what are the old ways of us being able to communicate and engage with the government. And that could be as simple as there's new information that's available to us. Or as they're collecting all these data streams they're making that data public and available for innovation, and so entrepreneurs now have the ability to also build solutions on those data streams. It's an incredibly exciting time. >> I mean, it's mind boggling to just think about how we live our lives in our cities. I can call the police department, the fire department, call for services in the analog world. Imagine video chat. Is that going to go to the certain departments? So how people engage, which side of the street do the cars drive on, who decides all that? And this is kind of how big this is. It's mind blowing. >> Well, it is big, and I'm going to answer that in two ways. Yes, the way that we did things before is changing and it's changing rapidly. To your 911 reference, I don't know, does it have to be a video engagement? Or through video are we actually capturing real-time that there's an incident that the fire department or an ambulance or police need to be dispatched. Where no phone call actually needs to be made. >> Real-time analytics. >> Yeah. >> Predicted, prescriptive analytics could come to the table. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so we're already seeing examples of that, where that's happening today. What we're not seeing happening at scale, but I think we will see it happening at scale, all of those early adopters they had to figure it out on their own. But now we have blueprints, we have frameworks that we can share with other cities where they will be able to do it much more quickly. >> All right, what project really stands out for you, in all the things you're looking at, in the Public Sector because there's so much going on that you guys are doing I mean, props to Intel love what they're doing. The AI mission really puts a vision in place but also it's reality now with machine learning. What projects stand out for you that you see as real innovative, collaborative between Intel and AWS? >> Yeah, so we did a project with AWS where we, essentially, created a competition for new ideas to be able to come forward, and out of that what we've seen is some cities really doing some innovative things, just taking those first steps. What that does for us is it gives us a broader view than we would be able to get on our own. But some of that's basic. Say exciting stuff, we have exciting examples, the kiosks on the street corners in New York are an exciting example. What we see some of the universities doing, I think, is really exciting. Universities around the world have an issue with student retention. Where they just experience high drop out rates at the end of the freshman year and the end of the sophomore year. The challenge is how do you identify a student at risk? Well, automate attendance and you can now see are students actually attending classes. Or are they skipping class? Start using sensors and beacons on the campus and you can actually detect what those student patterns are and you just might need to have a counselor step in or a professor step in and really sit down with them and walk them through it. >> Use the IOT example, humans are things too, right? I mean, wearables, they got all kinds of sensors that could be even on-person device too. Absolutely, we have been working with the University of Texas Arlington, exactly, on that project. Through a sensor you can actually capture the emotional state of student. Are they highly stressed? And should that be, again, an environment where-- >> Explain how. How does that work? >> Through body temperature and -- >> So biometrics being measured. >> Yeah. >> Body temperature, respiration rates, all those kinds of things. >> Mental health is a huge issue in colleges and universities around the pressure. >> You can see that idea from a health perspective, strep throat, right? >> Sure. >> It's like the freshman plague. Every freshman gets strep throat. But if you could identify anxiety as it's being formulated before it manifests itself in academic performance, you could treat that. >> Sure, and now you combine that with capturing data from the student cafeteria or dorms of what are they're eating patterns, what are they're sleeping patterns? Are they actually getting enough sleep? So you get a much more holistic view of the student. And we have to be careful here, right, because-- >> There's privacy concerns. >> Right, there's absolutely privacy and security concerns. And anyone who engages in these projects, heightened awareness of that. So it really is about quality of life and how do you create a better educational experience, not create anything that's threatening, but it becomes a much more personalized learning experience. >> The convergence and the conflicts between IOT and cloud and processing power and software, it's interesting, I was looking on prior to the show coming in I saw on your website at Intel Farmers in America. And then on Amazon's site there's a City on the Cloud. Can you take a minute and explain those projects. I think they're both Intel and AWS collaborations. Can you just take a minute to explain the City on the Cloud and the Farmers of America, what's the big aha there? >> So it's a three year project that we've been working on in collaboration with AWS, and the whole idea was for us to be able to identify some innovative ideas within the space because it is still a new area. How do we, essentially, give some of these entrepreneurs and innovative people a chance to be able to bring their idea into fruition? And so agriculture and Farmers America's a great example because that data is being collected in terms of weather patterns and how they can now, essentially, access that data to be able to plan differently what they're doing as well as better enable them to share with others what they're finding as they're making changes too. >> The farm tech has been hot on the D.C. community, certainly, in the Silicon Valley seeing people doing farm tech. Farm tech is one of those things, agriculture's a huge area that health implications too. People are interested in automating a lot of things and bringing tech there. And then also healthcare is a factor too. One of the areas is education but healthcare is another one that you guys are, what's the new thing in there that you guys are doing in healthcare? >> Yeah, we're doing quite a bit in healthcare around the world, and if you really think about it the challenge with healthcare is that your records are typically with your doctor or with your hospital. They're not always shared and they don't move with you when you travel. And so the first opportunity is how does that data actually become standardized so that it can actually be shared. But the other opportunity in healthcare is for those CTO's and CIO's to start using data very differently, to understand the patterns of what's happening within their hospitals. And you're earlier reference, John, to strep throat within a campus, how do you, essentially, start tracking that there's a trend and that there's something that you could potentially deal with much more quickly once you have the insights to it. >> All right, so take a minute as end this segment here, I want to get your thoughts on, give us a taste and showcase some of the Intel speeds and feeds, some of the tech, what's under the hood, what's coming out of Intel that's powering all of this because remember we're all driving the self-driving digital tooling out there. It's all powered by the Zeons, all kinds of cool stuff. What's the latest state-of-the-art that you got from Intel that you guys are bringing to the market in the Public Sector? >> Yeah, well, thank you for that question. I don't normally get it. >> John loves it. He's a speed and feed guy. >> To get too much feedback. Too geeky. >> Well, your earlier question was around AI and machine learning and for us that's the zonify. And if you look at the power of zonify it's, essentially, three times the teraflops of the largest super computer that existed 20 years ago, in a single processor. And so for us it's an opportunity to then really be able to advance and accelerate what's happening with artificial intelligence as well as machine learning. >> Well, it's an exciting new world. Obviously with a realm that goes healthcare to ag, to education, to government with Intel very much at the center of that. John, thanks for being with us. >> It was great to be here. >> We appreciate the time on theCUBE. We look forward to having you back. We'll continue our coverage live here from the AWS Public Sector Summit here on theCUBE. Back with more in just a bit. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington DC, it's theCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner Ecosystem. >> Welcome back here to Washington, D.C. You're watching Cube Live here at Silicon Angle T.V. The flagship broadcast of Silicon Angle. We are at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017 wrapping up day one coverage here in the Walter Washington Convention Center. Along with John Furrier, we are now joined by our esteemed colleague Jeff Frick who's been alongside all day handling all the machinations behind the scenes. >> Behind the scenes, John. >> John: Doing an admirable job of that, Jeff. >> So what do you think, our first ever visit to your town. >> John: I love it, I love it. >> I sense something tableau at the Opry. The Opry's the other big convention center, here, or Graceland. >> International Harbor. >> It's the same company. >> National harbor, MGM. >> You're a D.C. guy. >> Gaylord. >> Gaylord, thank you. >> What's the connection? So we going to get some tickets for the Nationals game? >> We got Nats game tonight, Strasburg pitched last night, did not pitch well, but who knows? Maybe we'll get Gio tonight. >> Well the action certainly Amazon Web Services >> Yeah let's talk about what we have going on here today, Jeff. >> Well, I mean, we interviewed, you and I did some great interviews. Intel came on, which is obviously Bellwether in the tech business. Jeff, former Intel employee knows what it's like to march to the cadence of Moore's law and Intel is continuing to do well in platinum sponsor or diamond sponsor here at the event. Look it, the chips are getting smarter and smarter, security at the Silicon, powering 5G, a networks transmission, a lot of the plumbing that's going on in cloud and in cars and devices and companies, it's going to all be connected. So it's a connected world we're living in and Intel's going to be a key part of that so they're highly interested and motivated by all the people that are popping up in the cloud. >> We were just talking and Jeff, I know, you're able to listen on the last interview that we did, but a point that you made, that, you know, a point that you raised, about four years ago, when the CIA deal came down and AWS is ON one side and IBM's on the other, and AWS wins that battle. You called it the shot heard round the cloud. And that, now four years later, has turned out to be a hugely pivotal moment. >> Yeah, I mean this is like moments in time history here, again, documenting it on the Cube for the first time. I don't think anything was written about this I'll say it since we're going to be analyzing it. The shot heard around the cloud was 2013 when AWS public sector under Teresa Carlton's team and her leadership, beat IBM for the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, contract. Guaranteed lots of spec for IBM. Amazon comes out of the woodwork and wins it. And they won it because essentially the sales motion and the power of IBM had this thing lopped in. But at that time the marketplace was booming with what we call Shadow IT, where you could put your credit card down and go into Amazon cloud and get some instants. What happened was someone actually cut a little prototype, showed their boss, and they said, "I like that better than that, let's do a bake-off." So what happened was at the last minute, new opportunity comes in and then they do what they call a bake-off. Bake-offs and RAPs come in and they won. Went to court and the judge in the ruling actually said Amazon has a better product. So they ruled in favor of Amazon Web Services. That was what I called the shot heard around the cloud. Since that point on, the cloud has become more legitimate every single day for not only startups, enterprises, as well as now public sector. So shot heard around the cloud fast forward to today, this show's on a trajectory to take on the pace of re:Invent, which as their core Amazon Web Services show, then of course which is why we're here chronicalizing this moment in history. This is where we believe, Jeff you and I talked about this, and Dave Alante and I talked about the research team, this is where the influction point kicks up. This is a new growth pillar unpredicted by Wall Street, new growth predictor for revenue for Amazon, they're already a cash machine. They're already looking like a hockey stick this way. You add on public sector, it's going to be phenomenal. So, a lot of people are seeing it but this is just growing like a weed. >> Jeff, follow up on that. >> I was going to say, the two mega trends, John, that we've talked about time and time again, and Teresa Carlson and team have done a terrific job here in the public sector, but I always go back to the James, Tuesday night in the James Hamilton at re:Invent, and if you've never gone you got to go, and he talks about just all these big iron infrastructure investments that Amazon continues to make because they have such scale behind them. Whether it's in chips, whether it's in networking, whether it's in new fibers that they're running across the oceans. They can invest so much money to the benefit of their customers, whether it be security, you know, in all the areas of compute, that is fascinating to me. The other thing we always hear about, about cloud, right, is at some point, it's cheaper to own rather than rent. We just keep coming back to Netflix, like at nighttime, I think Netflix owns whatever the number, 45 percent of all internet traffic in the evening is Netflix, whatever the number is. They're still on Amazon. So, it's not necessarily better to rent than buy. You have to know what you're doing and we were at another show the other day, it was Gannet, the newspaper company. When they're using a lot of servers, they use hundreds, but he said there are sometimes, using AWS, that they actually turn all the servers off. You cannot do that in a standard infrastructure world. You can't turn everything off and then on. Which again, you got to manage it. You don't want the expensive bill. But to me, being able to leverage such scale to the benefit of every customer whether it's Netflix or a startup, it's pretty tough. >> And this is the secret, and this is something again, shared with the Cube audience, here, is not new to us, but we're going to re-amplify it because the people make a mistake with the cloud, it's in one area, they don't match the business model to their variable cost expenses. If you get into the cloud business, and you can actually ratchet your revenue coming in and then manage that cost delta redline, blackline, know where those lines are, as long as you're in the black, and revenue, and you then have the cost variable step up with your revenue, that is the magical formula. It's not that hard, it's back of an envelope. >> Right, right. >> Red line cost, black line revenue. >> The other great story, it was from summit, actually, in San Francisco earlier this year, at they keynote, they had Nextdoor, everybody knows Nextdoor it's the social media for your mom, my mom. They love it, right, people are losing dogs, and looking for a plumber, but the guy talked from about Nextdoor. >> John: Don't knock Nextdoor. >> I don't knock Nextdoor, the Nextdoor CEO gets up and he said, well, I laugh because the Nextdoor guy's mom didn't know what he did until he did Nextdoor. Anyway, he said, you know, we have the entire production system for Nextdoor. And then we would build production plus one on a completely separate group of hardwares inside of Amazon. When that was tested out and ready to run, guess what, we just turn off the first one. You can't, you can't, you can't do that in an owned infrastructure world. You can't build N and N plus one and N plus two and turn off N, you just can't do that. >> Well, the Fugue CEO, Josh, everyone should check out on Youtube.com/siliconangle, he was awesome. He basically saw a throwaway infrastructure mindset to your point about Nextdoor. You build it up and then you bring your new stuff in, you digitally throw it away. >> Right, right. >> That's the future. And this is the business model aspect. And public sector, we were joking, look it, let's just be honest with ourselves, it is a glacier antiquated old systems, people trying hard, you know, government servants, you know, that, employees of the government, not appointees, they don't have a lot of budget and they're always under scrutiny for cost. So the cost benefits always there and they have old systems. So they want new systems. So the demand is there. The question is, can they pull it off. >> So, talk about the government mindset or the shift. We've heard a little bit about that today. About how, to the point that you just made there, John, that you know, very reluctant, some foot-dragging going on, that's historical, that's what happens. But now, maybe the CIA deal, whatever it was, we hit that tipping point, and all the sudden, the minds are opening, and some people are embracing, or being more engaging, with new mousetraps, with better ways to do things. >> We've got the speakers coming on here, so we should wrap it up real quick. Final thoughts, from Day One. >> I was just going to say that the other thing is that before there was so much fat, in not only government in general, but in infrastructure purchasing, 'cause you had to, you better not run out of hardware at Q3 when you're running the numbers. So everything was so over provision, so much expense and over provisioning. With Amazon you don't need to over provision. You can tap it when you need it and turn it off so there's a huge amount of budget that should actually be released. >> I want to ask you guys, we'll wrap up here, final, since you're emceeing, final thoughts. What is your impression of day one? I'll start here and you guys can have time to think of an answer. My takeaway for public sector is Teresa Carlson has risen up as a prime executive for Amazon Web Services. She went from knocking doors eight years ago to full on blown growth strategy for Amazon. And it's very clear, they're not there yet. They only have 10,000 people here, so the conference isn't that massive. But it's on its way to becoming massive. Here's their issue. They have to start getting the cadence of re:Invent launches into the public sector. And that's the big story here. They are quickly shortening the cycles between what they launch at Amazon re:Invent and what they roll out of the public sector. The question is how fast can they do that? And that's what we're going to be watching. And then the customer behaviors starting to procure. So greenlight for Amazon. But they got to get those release cycles. Stuff gets released at Amazon re:Invent, they got to roll them with government, shorten that down to almost zero, they'll win. >> Yeah, my just quick impression is, I like to look at the booth action, because we've all had booth duty, right. What's going on in the booths? Did the people that paid for a booth here feel like they got their money's worth? And the traffic in the booths has been good, they've been three deep, four deep. So the people that are here are curious they're interested, they're spending time going booth to booth to booth, and that's a very good sign. >> This is a learning conference. Alright your thoughts. >> I would say, the only thing that is, I wouldn't say it's a red light by any means, but it's like a caution light, it's about budgets, you know, when you run government, you're always, you are vulnerable to somebody else's budget decision. I'm, you know, whether it's Congress, whether it's a city council, whether it's a state legislation, whatever it is, that's always just kind of a, a little hangup you have to deal with because you might have the best mousetrap in the world, but if somebody says nah, you can't write that check this year, maybe next year. We're going to put our money somewhere else. That's the only thing. >> I got my Trump joke in, I don't know if you heard that, but my Trump joke is, I'll say it at the end, there's a lot of data lakes in D.C., and they've turned into data swamps. So Amazon's here to drain the data swamp. >> Jeff: He got it in. He's been practicing that all week. >> I've heard it three times, are you kidding? Funny every time. >> Well you know our Cube, you know we talk about data swamps. I hate the word data lake, as everyone knows, I just hate that word, it's just not. >> Well, there is value in that swamp. >> Hated the word data lake. >> For Jeff Rick, John Furrier, I'm John Walsh. Thank you for joining us here at the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Back tomorrow with more coverage, live here on the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner, Ecosystem. >> Welcome back to our nation's capitol where we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Some 10,000 strong in attendance this week here in the Walter Washington Convention Center. It's just about a mile from the U.S. Capitol. John Walsh, this is John Furrier. John, do you feel the energy of the centerpiece of the political universe. >> It's hot here in D.C. >> It is hot. >> It's a pressure cooker, the humidity. >> But, it's not global warming we know that because, ya know, climate change is >> Climate change is not real. That's from what I heard. >> That's what we've been told. >> The problem with D.C. is it's a data lake that's turned into a data swamp. So, someone really needs to drain that data swamp. >> Well, ya know, to help us do that. You know who's going to help us do that? >> Amazon Web Services. >> Marlin McFate's going to help us do that. He is the technical leader of the Advanced Technology Group in the office of the CTO and Riverbed. And Marlin, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE. Your first time, I believe. >> Yes, it is my first time on theCUBE. >> So, you're a Cube rookie? >> Yes, Cube rookie. >> Good to have you aboard. >> I appreciate it, thanks. >> Tell us a little bit first about Riverbed, about what you do there specifically, what you do there and what the company's mission is overall. >> Absolutely, so I work for the Advanced Technology Group, the Advanced Technology Group works underneath the office of the CTO. There's actually two groups that work under the office of the CTO, my group, the Advanced Technology Group and another one called the Strategic Technology Group. The ATT Group, the one that I belong to, we focus on being the subject matter experts of our products. I think there's about nine of us now and we all focus on different products. Riverbed's grown from a company of being just the WAN Optimization Company to really being the performance company, right, whether that be visibility, whether it be optimization, whether it be network optimization. Each one of us focuses on a different piece. I, predominantly focus on our WAN optimization, our SteelConnect product and at times our SteelFusion project, which is the combined Edge product. >> SteelConnect, yeah, tell us what that's all about. >> SteelConnect, SteelConnect is not actually our most recent product to come to market. We have a couple of visibility products that have come out recently, but SteelConnect addresses the idea that we have been doing networking for the same way say, you know, 1993 beyond, right. We are still doing it the same way. Everything within our industry, whether you take a look at virtualization, whether you take a look at Cloud, whether or not you take a look at storage, everything has changed substantially in how we do it and this brings that change to networking. The idea is that when you think about servers you say, I no longer want to think about you know, hardware. I never want to think about that. I never want to think about resources. Maybe I don't even want to worry about operating systems. I only want to worry about containers, right. Now, when it comes to networking I don't necessarily want to have to worry about each individual piece within my network. I want it to be orchestrated and controlled centrally and what I tell it to do, I want it to do. I shouldn't have to do that. >> You missed a challenged. We heard Vernon Vogel on stage here at Amazon a couple of seconds ago say, I'm here in D.C. say hey, it's a new normal. We had another entrepreneur on just before you from FUGE who said, hey, it's inevitably the world of the future and it's inherently different, or intrinsically different in Cloud than it is on premise with enterprises, so the question for you is, what is the use case that you guys are winning at because the Cloud is impacting federal government and public sector, but a lot of times they have old, antiquated systems like back in 1993, '94. So, they're moving fast to commercialize, to modernize, that's the focus. How do you guys help them? What's the big lynch pen for you guys and that goal mission to the customer? >> Alright, so you're absolutely right. The government has been here, or the government or public sector as a whole has been moving to the Cloud quite quickly here recently, right. We've seen this move more on the commercial side first, obviously, and now in the public sector. One of the very large use cases that we address is the ability to provision for your applications, right. Some of the characteristics that you find in commercial world, such as, I want to use internet as transport. You don't see as much in public sector. But, you do see, I can spin up an application in the Cloud. If you go to your Cloud person and say, how would it take me to get application B, they could possibly come back to you and say, well, would this afternoon be okay, right. Can you provision in hours like that? Can you get the policy in place for users? Could you get the connectivity? Could you get any of that in place in the same amount of time? That is a use case that SD WAN addresses without having to rip up, take out the network that you already have, which is the physical network, or what we refer to as the underlay. Being able to give you that flexibility on top of that network. >> The big thing that customers have a challenge on is that other focus it's DebOps trend programmable infrastructure is another one, so that they want to make it programmable. >> Right. >> So, how do you guys fit into that? Because one of the things that we hear is, could I have develop 'cause all I want to do is have infrastructure just works as code. That's all I need for whatever use case. >> Yeah, we usually see that DebOps is actually one that'll probably be the first movers to the Cloud for the public sector, right. With our, really it's every single one of our products, whether or not we're talking about SteelConnect, SteelHead, SteelEssential, any one of them, there's a RESTful API for every single one of them. So, you can actually go in and utilizing a very easy scripting a RESTful API directly itself and spin up whole environments and then spin them down if you wanted to do that. So, it fits very, very nicely into that DebOps world. >> Do you have SteelEdge yet? >> SteelEdge? >> Copyright on theCUBE. >> It might be a razor company that might have that. I don't know. >> Well, the Edge in the network is huge and this is where we're talking about as you guys do it, you know SD WAN, I mean, come on, why the area networks? You don't beat, you can't get any more edgier than that. You guys have a core competency in this. How do you guys look at the Edge and IOT and all these use cases popping around? >> Well, we do actually have a product that has Edge in it, it was SteelFusion Edge. We could address that in a couple of different ways. I want to make sure that I understood your question, though. Your question was around IOT, specifically? >> Well, how do you guys look at the Edge? The trends right now are super hyped up right now, Intelligent Edge is a big message we're hearing from others. IOT is an Edge application with its Industrial Edge with Genery Censor networks, help with safety, surveillance, all this is Edge devices. >> It still ends up in the end being you know, and that has, we've heard the change from people calling it Branch to calling it Edge, which is probably pretty appropo, right. But, really in the end, what it comes down to is connectivity, right. So, if I have IOT sensors in a warehouse, whether or not I have an application, whether or not I have a group of users, whether or not I have mobile users, in the end what it really comes down to is connectivity. And, we all especially with our cell phones, right, we have come pretty much to the point where we expect our data and our connectivity to be there at all times, right. That's one of the things SD WAN addresses. Whether it be our direct, our SD WAN products, SteelConnect, or whether or not it has works with some of the pieces that move further into the LAN architectural, like our wireless access points, our switching, right. So, you can imagine here, right, I can provide policy for my IOT devices. I can provide that policy one time at an organizational or agency level. I can have that policy filter down, all the way down to the axis point and now the axis point might be my axis point to my IOT or to my user. So, in the end, it still comes to connectivity. >> Marlin, what's some of the use cases or scenarios you've been involved with customers where it's been super exciting from an architectural standpoint, where you guys are doing some cutting edge things. Like, is it more the network size? Is it software? Is it Edge. I mean, I'm tryin' to get a sense of, could you share a personal perspective? >> Absolutely so. One of the ones that we're working on right now I think is probably the most exciting. It is combining some aspects, you could call it an FE. You could call it SD WAN. You could call it Grey Box. What I like to call it is just a combined Edge piece, right, which encompasses both the SteelConnect piece which handles your firewall characteristics, your identity management characteristics, built into that some switching, virtualization, so you can run other products on there. What the customer really wanted to end up doing was they had school systems that, a school system that was in a very far away place and that school system, they were putting in a router, a switch, an access point, you know, all these different little pieces and devices, right. What we did was we were able to take that design and crunch it down into basically one box, right. They have enough switchboards. They have the ability to run virtual machines 'cause they said that they had a server here or there. They have their virtualized SteelConnect gateway which gives them the firewall capability, gives them the routing capability and this is all combined in a box that already has the WAN Optimization built in. So, they get everything that they would have had onsite in one box. >> Is there something to working, you bring up education as an example, but in that space overall in the .gov, the .edu space that's separate and aside from commercial partners or commercial relationships like different concerns, different priorities and yet they're using the same technologies. >> Most certainly. The only thing that I could really say from a using technology, right, I mean there are some pockets where different technology, far off weird technologies is utilized. But, I would say that they are the public sector, schools, federal government, intel, they're all using a lot of the same technology, right. It's when they adopt it. When did they bring it into their environment? And then, what are the special characteristics of their environment? So for example, what I said earlier, right, your commercial customers are looking at utilizing SD WAN to move maybe completely off of MPLS. It's probably not something that we're going to see within the public sector, right. They're want to still use some sort of private networking. I do have some customers that are utilizing public internet, but then, they are tunneling an overlay back to an MPLS entry point to get back into their Cloud. We just have interesting requirements. Whether that be a trusted internet connection, whether or not that'd be JRSS, we have different security requirements in the public sector. >> Well, I love some of what you're doin'. Did you get all of that MPLS stuff there? >> Yeah, I got the first four. >> I want to jump in and double down on that. This is interesting conversation because the whole trend right now is hybrid Cloud on the Enterprise side which is a leading indicator to the government, a little bit lagging on that, so whatever that translates to in terms of Hybrid or Legacy, it's going to be somewhat similar, I believe. But, really multi-Cloud is a trend that people are talking about. It's super hyped up but it's not yet real. The thing that's holding multi-Cloud back not multi-Cloud in the sense I got to workload over hear and a workload over there, I'm talking about moving resources around the network, data, compute, what not, is latency, huge problem. You mentioned MPLS and all this tunneling, there's still the latency problem of how do you get the laws of physics down to the point where you can actually have those kinds of latencies? What is Riverbed doing? Can you share some insights to that direction 'cause that's the holy grail right now. That's the last hurdle. Then, well getting all the silicons is still the final hurdle, but latency's critical. >> So, problem number one there, right. Even if it is Cloud to Cloud in that example, right, is first how do I get a WAN Optimization device, something that can optimize that traffic for me. Something that can affect my latency for me into that environment. Riverbed has worked tirelessly to get that in there right. But, to your point, you can't change how an electron flies, right. The speed of light is the speed of light. You're not going to get an electron to move any faster. So, what Riverbed developed that's still very relevant today is the ability to, instead of change your latency, mitigate the negative affects of your latency, right. So, if I. >> Or work around it. >> Absolutely, and you can do that at the application level, absolutely, program around it, but there are a lot of protocols out there that aren't necessarily optimized for that longer latency environment, right. So, what we do is, or the adage is, the trip never taken, right, the shortest trip. So, if I have to, not to get into the weeds or anything like that, but if I have to make a thousand round trips to accomplish something, right, and I could put something in there that understands what I was getting, right, that data that I was getting each one of those times and I can take less trips, well then, that just made that faster. So, if I have a thousand round trips and it takes a minute to do, and now I can do ten round trips and it only took ten seconds, or six seconds if we're doing the math right. >> It's kind of like here in D.C., you're local. I noticed that coming from Dulles Airport they have Sirius pricing on the toll roads. That's basically private networking right there. >> That's right. >> These cost path routing opposed to the other side. I was in the, you know. >> Marlin was more describing my trips to the hardware store on the weekends, a thousand round trips, be a lot more economical. But you're right, it is private networking. >> If you're off the road, you're off the packets aren't on the network it saves some room for someone else. >> More traffic, you hear more traffic at the higher speeds. >> You actually could. So, you get two benefits. One is the increase of speed, but the other is the perceived capacity increase of your network. And, we accomplish these things through compression which is really, really simple. I think compression is a must, right. But, through our data duplication. Data duplication is I've seen these patterns before and it's a byte level. We're not talking about an object. I haven't seen a file. No, I've seen these byte level patterns before, I don't need to resend them. And, in traditional network or traditional applications you see pretty much in any organization, right, you typically can get somewhere between 50 and 80, if not sometimes 90% reduction total in traffic. >> My final question before we wrap up this segment here is, Share with the folks, take a minute to talk to the audience about what you're doing with Riverbed at the show and what they should know about the current Riverbed. I know you've guys trying a transformation of yourselves, give a quick plug. Go ahead. >> Absolutely. So, what we're specifically doing here or one of the pieces that is a differentiator for us and our SD WAN is, we went ahead and we thought why couldn't we make that an AWSPPC or a Cloud instance one of my Edge sites, right, connecting into the Cloud, there's many different ways to do it, but why couldn't we make a very simple way of doing that? Why couldn't I take the technology that I'm already putting in place at my data centers, I'm already putting in place at my branch offices, why can't I utilize that to create a secure connection into my BBCs. And, to your point, actually earlier one of the things that's also interesting was Cloud to Cloud. Why couldn't I take that same technology and connect multiple Clouds? Whether they be private Cloud or two public Clouds or connect them all together and take the best of all worlds, right, the best from each and make the best infrastructure that I possibly can. So, what we're showing off here from a SteelConnect perspective is our ability to do that. I can take an AWSVPC, actually I can take all, I think there's 16 regions within AWS and I can interconnect them in less than 10 minutes with the click of a button. And, then back into my infrastructure. So, that and then we also have brought Eternity, which is one of our visibility products that is basically rounded out on our visibility play within the market. We have the network. We have the app. We have the database. Now, we have the end users computer. >> Alright, well, if you could interconnect me to my home in 10 minutes I'm a client. I'd be sold, I'd be all over it. >> I'm going to be in the same traffic as you later. >> I'm not that far from here, but it might as well be another day. Marlin, thanks for the time. >> Absolutely, my pleasure. >> Good to have you on theCUBE, alright. >> Thanks, hope we get to do it again. >> Riverbed has joined us here on theCUBE. We'll be live with more from Washington D.C. right after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon web services and it's partner, Ecosystem. >> And welcome to our nation's capitol. Here we are in Washington, D.C. TheCUBE coming live from the Walter Washington Convention Center, here for AWS Private Sector Summit. It's our maiden voyage with the Public Sector so looking forward to this. John Walsh and John Furrier, glad to have you along for the ride, John, this is going to be a good week. >> Hey, it'll be fun. >> A good couple of days. John Galvin joins us. He is the Vice President and General Manager of the Public Sector Intel. John, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE; glad to have you. >> It's a pleasure to be here, thank you. >> Tell us a little bit first off, about your portfolio. >> J.Galvin: Sure. >> I understand you cover not only United States, but you have a global footprint as well. Touch base a little bit with our audience with what you're up to. >> Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I have to put it in perspective for everyone. People know us as a micro-processor company. They don't always attribute us to going out and calling on government, or education decision makers. So we really act as a trusted advisor. We don't sell directly to government or to education entities, and I have sales people, or account exec's, around the world who are going in and meeting with ministers of education or ministers of ICT. Sometimes it's a school superintendent or a district superintendent, but, overall, what we're talking about is digital transformation and how technology can be used to advance government or advance education. And sometimes at a national level, could be at a state level, could be at a district level. >> Well, John and I were talking in our open segment just a little bit ago, about maybe a glacial pace isn't fair to say about how government had that reputation, obviously, for many years about being, maybe, reluctant. >> Right. >> To embrace change. What do you see now in that space? Is there this shift going on, that there's more of an embracing of technology? And of more entrepreneurial kind of spirit within the operation of government? >> Yeah, absolutely. It is happening so quickly. The categorization of government moving slowly is absolutely true. Education the same. But now wherever I go around the world, everyone is talking about transformation and they're starting to launch projects that might be a pilot or a proof of concept, but they're getting started. The challenge is when you talk about digital transformation it is so big so it becomes difficult for governments to really get their hands around it, and what are they going to do to improve citizens quality of life. Is that going to be a healthcare initiative? Is it going to be a transportation initiative? Sometimes it's an education initiative; and we're seeing them all. I think what is causing it to advance now is they see proof-points that it works. That by making those investments it really is changing the quality of life for people. And in emerging markets they don't have existing infrastructure that they have to tear out and replace. And some of the mature markets, it's how do you actually breakdown those silos. >> Well, John, I'm really glad you came on. Intel, in my opinion, I've been following Intel for many years, recently, has been pretty amazing. But you guys have always been a bellwether for trends, I'd say, five to 10 years out. I mean, look at everything that Intel's done with technology You have that five to 10 year stair instantly in what you're proposing. We've been seeing a lot of the AI commercials with Intel, what is the Public Sector trends that intersect with the vision of Intel? >> Well, you're absolutely right. If you look at what Intel does we're similar to the auto industry. It takes us five to six years to produce our next processor, and so we have to be looking that far out of what are the use cases, and really, what are those technological boundaries that we're going to either cross or break? And AI is absolutely the conversation today. It's sort of around artificial intelligence and it's no longer science fiction. We're not talking about it in the future; we're now talking about how can we use it today? Machine learning big, big topic, and not just the role that Intel plays, but companies like AWS; big players, in terms of how that actually comes to life in your home. It's not just how it's going to come to life in a big government institution or a big enterprise. >> And the Public Sector landscape, for the folks that are watching some know the Public Sector, what is the Public Sector? Because it's not the government. There's education, there's health, so what's the layout. How do you categorically look at it? How should people think about Public Sector? Not just GovCloud because there's a GovCloud, but is there a Public Sector cloud? I mean, how should people think about it? >> Yeah, great question. I work as part of a group at Intel that are all verticals. There's a healthcare team, there's a transportation team, there's an energy team. Public Sector is completely different because we're all of those things. We're working on transportation projects, we're working big healthcare projects, and so Public Sector you have to look at in the biggest sense where it's not just a federal presence but it is a state presence, it's a city presence or a county presence. And so our opportunity is to be able to connect all of those things, and that is what I think is so exciting about the transformation that is taking place right now is for that vision to be realized those silos really need to be broken. You know, you're going to hear comments over the next couple of days about forming a data lake. Which is bringing in all of those data streams into a single spot so that you can apply analytics and be able to get to insights that we've never been able to get to before. >> So how do you do that if you talk about municipality levels, state levels, federal levels, different operating systems, different processes, different procedures? And all great resources, how do you pull all that together and make that an asset instead of a morass? >> Well, in that question you just captured how big this opportunity is, and the way that we do it is we work with our ecosystem partners. The strength that Intel has when we enter into those conversations is we work with everyone. We work with the big cloud providers, we work with all the different operating system providers. We're not only with the computer companies that are our partners and our customers, but we're working now with internet and think companies, and so we have the ability to now work across that ecosystem to start pulling all of those pieces together. The heart of your question though is that those are all different systems that have been built over time. And if you look at what's been happening in enterprise over the past 10 years is CIO's and CTO's at the enterprise levels have been breaking down those silos and moving more to single systems and big data streams. And now that's what's happening with in the Public Sector is that data has to come together. >> John, talk about the collaboration between Intel and AWS and what is going on with you guys, how you guys are working together, and what's the impact in serving Public Sector customers? >> Well, we have had a great partnership with AWS from the beginning. (audio cuts out) (audio cuts out) That's going to take on this bigger vision is going to have a cloud discussion. There will still be things that they're going to be doing on premise, but it's most likely going to be a hybrid environment. And so with AWS we really have the opportunity to have a bigger discussion, where they can really have that cloud discussion and even some of the analytics layer. They're also doing more at an IOT perspective; we're able to join that conversation in terms of how our technology really plays into it. But I think the other thing we're able to do with AWS is really look for innovators. We're able to identify either those small companies, or even some of the cities are doing some really great things. And then because of their global footprint and our global footprint we can share that pretty broadly. >> And ecosystem's critical. You guys, Intel's always been ecosystem friendly company. With that in mind I got to ask you the question that everyone's talking about, and certainly, we're covering Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona. And you couldn't go anywhere without hearing 5G and these new phones that are coming out. And then under the hood network transformation, you're hearing about software to find networking, machine learning, AI a lot of things that you guys are talking about. So the question for you is Smart Cities. It is a really, really hot opportunity just to even think about the concept of what a Smart City entails. I mean, here in D.C., like other cities, they have bicycles people can take out and ride around. That's a smart city, that's a cool service. But now you bring digital all to it. Imagine, Air B&B, you've got Uber, you've got Lift you've got all kinds of digital services, digital experiences. This is a government, this is a Public Sector issue. This is an interesting one. How is Intel's view on Smart Cities, how do you see that rolling out? >> First of all, we're very excited about what's happening within Smart Cities, and to the beginning of your question we think 5G is going to be an accelerant. It's going to cause it to happen even faster than it's happening now. What's interesting about Smart City is that it really does take a lot of different formats. And so we see cities who are really focused on public security and safety. We have examples whether it's Singapore, London of how they're now capturing new data with the cameras that they put up, and can do real-time analytics on it using AI and machine learning. So it's not that they just have all of these data streams, but they're doing real-time analysis of the data stream to be able to identify potential threats. But we also have examples where we're seeing cities invest in new technology to, essentially, replace what are the old ways of us being able to communicate and engage with the government. And that could be as simple as there's new information that's available to us. Or as they're collecting all these data streams they're making that data public and available for innovation, and so entrepreneurs now have the ability to also build solutions on those data streams. It's an incredibly exciting time. >> I mean, it's mind boggling to just think about how we live our lives in our cities. I can call the police department, the fire department, call for services in the analog world. Imagine video chat. Is that going to go to the certain departments? So how people engage, which side of the street do the cars drive on, who decides all that? And this is kind of how big this is. It's mind blowing. >> Well, it is big, and I'm going to answer that in two ways. Yes, the way that we did things before is changing and it's changing rapidly. To your 911 reference, I don't know, does it have to be a video engagement? Or through video are we actually capturing real-time that there's an incident that the fire department or an ambulance or police need to be dispatched. Where no phone call actually needs to be made. >> J.Furrier: Real-time analytics. >> Yeah. >> Predicted, prescriptive analytics could come to the table. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so we're already seeing examples of that, where that's happening today. What we're not seeing happening at scale, but I think we will see it happening at scale, all of those early adopters they had to figure it out on their own. But now we have blueprints, we have frameworks that we can share with other cities where they will be able to do it much more quickly. >> All right, what project really stands out for you, in all the things you're looking at, in the Public Sector because there's so much going on that you guys are doing I mean, props to Intel love what they're doing. The AI mission really puts a vision in place but also it's reality now with machine learning. What projects stand out for you that you see as real innovative, collaborative between Intel and AWS? >> Yeah, so we did a project with AWS where we, essentially, created a competition for new ideas to be able to come forward, and out of that what we've seen is some cities really doing some innovative things, just taking those first steps. What that does for us is it gives us a broader view than we would be able to get on our own. But some of that's basic. Say exciting stuff, we have exciting examples, the kiosks on the street corners in New York are an exciting example. What we see some of the universities doing, I think, is really exciting. Universities around the world have an issue with student retention. Where they just experience high drop out rates at the end of the freshman year and the end of the sophomore year. The challenge is how do you identify a student at risk? Well, automate attendance and you can now see are students actually attending classes. Or are they skipping class? Start using sensors and beacons on the campus and you can actually detect what those student patterns are and you just might need to have a counselor step in or a professor step in and really sit down with them and walk them through it. >> Use the IOT example, humans are things too, right? I mean, wearables, they got all kinds of sensors that could be even on-person device too. Absolutely, we have been working with the University of Texas Arlington, exactly, on that project. Through a sensor you can actually capture the emotional state of student. Are they highly stressed? And should that be, again, an environment where-- >> Explain how. How does that work? >> Through body temperature and -- >> So biometrics being measured. >> Yeah. >> Body temperature, respiration rates, all those kinds of things. >> Mental health is a huge issue in colleges and universities around the pressure. >> You can see that idea from a health perspective, strep throat, right? >> Sure. >> It's like the freshman plague. Every freshman gets strep throat. But if you could identify anxiety as it's being formulated before it manifests itself in academic performance, you could treat that. >> Sure, and now you combine that with capturing data from the student cafeteria or dorms of what are they're eating patterns, what are they're sleeping patterns? Are they actually getting enough sleep? So you get a much more holistic view of the student. And we have to be careful here, right, because-- >> Host: There's privacy concerns. >> Right, there's absolutely privacy and security concerns. And anyone who engages in these projects, heightened awareness of that. So it really is about quality of life and how do you create a better educational experience, not create anything that's threatening, but it becomes a much more personalized learning experience. >> The convergence and the conflicts between IOT and cloud and processing power and software, it's interesting, I was looking on prior to the show coming in I saw on your website at Intel Farmers in America. And then on Amazon's site there's a City on the Cloud. Can you take a minute and explain those projects. I think they're both Intel and AWS collaborations. Can you just take a minute to explain the City on the Cloud and the Farmers of America, what's the big aha there? >> So it's a three year project that we've been working on in collaboration with AWS, and the whole idea was for us to be able to identify some innovative ideas within the space because it is still a new area. How do we, essentially, give some of these entrepreneurs and innovative people a chance to be able to bring their idea into fruition? And so agriculture and Farmers America's a great example because that data is being collected in terms of weather patterns and how they can now, essentially, access that data to be able to plan differently what they're doing as well as better enable them to share with others what they're finding as they're making changes too. >> The farm tech has been hot on the D.C. community, certainly, in the Silicon Valley seeing people doing farm tech. Farm tech is one of those things, agriculture's a huge area that health implications too. People are interested in automating a lot of things and bringing tech there. And then also healthcare is a factor too. One of the areas is education but healthcare is another one that you guys are, what's the new thing in there that you guys are doing in healthcare? >> Yeah, we're doing quite a bit in healthcare around the world, and if you really think about it the challenge with healthcare is that your records are typically with your doctor or with your hospital. They're not always shared and they don't move with you when you travel. And so the first opportunity is how does that data actually become standardized so that it can actually be shared. But the other opportunity in healthcare is for those CTO's and CIO's to start using data very differently, to understand the patterns of what's happening within their hospitals. And you're earlier reference, John, to strep throat within a campus, how do you, essentially, start tracking that there's a trend and that there's something that you could potentially deal with much more quickly once you have the insights to it. >> All right, so take a minute as end this segment here, I want to get your thoughts on, give us a taste and showcase some of the Intel speeds and feeds, some of the tech, what's under the hood, what's coming out of Intel that's powering all of this because remember we're all driving the self-driving digital tooling out there. It's all powered by the Zeons, all kinds of cool stuff. What's the latest state-of-the-art that you got from Intel that you guys are bringing to the market in the Public Sector? >> Yeah, well, thank you for that question. I don't normally get it. >> Host: John loves it. He's a speed and feed guy. >> To get too much feedback. Too geeky. >> Well, your earlier question was around AI and machine learning and for us that's the zonify. And if you look at the power of zonify it's, essentially, three times the teraflops of the largest super computer that existed 20 years ago, in a single processor. And so for us it's an opportunity to then really be able to advance and accelerate what's happening with artificial intelligence as well as machine learning. >> Well, it's an exciting new world. Obviously with a realm that goes healthcare to ag, to education, to government with Intel very much at the center of that. John, thanks for being with us. >> It was great to be here. >> We appreciate the time on theCUBE. We look forward to having you back. We'll continue our coverage live here from the AWS Public Sector Summit here on theCUBE. Back with more in just a bit. (upbeat music)