(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Despite its 70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town, everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are a hundred people, and 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, Moshe Yanai. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service, and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently, in early this year, appointed industry vet, Phil Bullinger, as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury, to run EMEA, and APJ Go-To-Market. And just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Hertzog to be CMO. Hertzog has worked at numerous companies, ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, and is SVP of product marketing and management at Storage Powerhouse, EMC, among others. Hertzog has been named CMO of the year as an OnCon Icon, and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud, along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today, is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr.Eric Hertzog. Good to see you, Eric, thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE, and I am of course sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. >> Dude, no Hawaiian shirt, okay. That's a pretty buttoned up company. >> Well, next time, I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. >> Okay, so give us the backstory, how did this all come about? you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but, how did it come about? Tell us that story. >> So, I have known Phil since the late 90s, when he was a VP at LSA of Engineering, and he had... I was working at a company called Milax, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP, and he was providing the subsystem, and we were providing the fiber to fiber, and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Isilon team. And then he became the general manager. So, while I didn't work for him, I worked with him, A, at LSA, and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won, and he said "Hey Herzog, "we should talk, I have a CMO opening". So literally happened over LinkedIn discussion, where I reached out to him, and congratulate him, he said "Hey, I need a CMO, let's talk". So, the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exec staff. >> That's awesome, that's right, he was running the Isilon division for awhile at the EMC. >> Right. >> You guys were there, and of course, you talk about Milax, LSA, there was a period of time where, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So, you sort of saw the whole landscape. So, you got some serious storage history and chops. So, I want to ask you what attracted you to Infinidat. I mean, obviously they're a leader in the magic quadrant. We know about InfiniBox, and the petabyte scale, and the low latency, what are the... When you look at the market, you obviously you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? >> Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage, other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinidat message of optimizing applications, workloads, and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that, and overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is, when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do, because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor, and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have, you actually... I found out when I got here, they took out a hundred arrays from EMC Hitachi. And that company now has 20 InfiniBoxes, and InfiniBox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So, that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OPEX angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So, lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if you will, amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the InfiniBox SSA, the InfiniGuard product, which is really optimized, not only as the PBA for backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also, has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping, and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault, so that you can then recover their review for malware ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So, between the relationship with Phil, and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket. In fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. >> Wow, okay, so yeah, I think it was Duplessy called them the best kept secret, he's not the only one. And so that brings us to you, and your mission because it's true, it is the best kept secret. You're a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner magic quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops and block storage. You talked about the consolidation story, and I've talked to many folks in Infinidat about that. Ken Steinhardt rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend, about, you know... So, that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion, and Infinidat has proven that it can operate at very very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? >> Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel as you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN, and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers, and there's been a lot of conflict. So, we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business within general globally. So, we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting, personally, next week with five different CEOs of channel partners. Of which, only one of them is doing business with Infinidat now. So, we want to expand our channel, and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area. The work we do with all the industry analysts, not just in North America, but in Europe as well, and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort, both of us, of course, having been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple of years. So, we're going to open that up. And then, obviously, increase our demand generation activities as well. So, we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do, and deliver that message to the world. Deliver it to the partner base, so the partners can take advantage, and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OPEX. So, the partner wins, and the end user wins. And that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. >> So you're not only just the marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So, you could... You're like a walking spec sheet, John Farrier says you could just rattle it off. Already impressed that how much you know about Infinidat, but when you joined EMC, it was almost like, there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products. And you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidat? >> Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technologies that happens run on a hybrid array, an all flash array, has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So, with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the InfiniBox, you can easily use an InfiniGuard. You got an InfiniGuard, you can easily use an InfiniBox SSA. So the capability of doing that, helps reduce operational manpower and hence, of course, OPEX. So the story is strong technically, the story has a strong business tie in. So part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days. Yeah, we both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS, and latency, and bandwidth. And if the people didn't... If the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud, virtual environments and containers, which Infinidat can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer, and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions. Yet, with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CapEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me. And we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that... My job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value, that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CSO, by the VP of software development, who then says to VP of industry, that Infinidat stuff, we actually need that for our SAP workload, or wow, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CSO says, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidat guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job, and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. >> So the other thing, the interesting thing about Infinidat. This was always a source of spirited discussions over the years with business friends from Infinidat was the company figured out a way, it was formed in 2011, and at the time the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to flash, of course, floyers work a big flash, all flash data center, etc, etc. But Infinidat with its memory cache and its architecture, and its algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance in an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is I think unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting, but at the time it made sense, to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach, I might try to build, a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe go into that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud, what's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that? >> Sure, so the cloud strategy, is first of all, seamless integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support Outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend, either for their primary storage, or for their secondary storage. So, we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the Telcos has 150 Infiniboxes, InfiniBox SSAS and InfiniGuards. 150 running one of the largest Telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure, why don't you use us the giant Telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup is our servers, or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infiniboxes or InfiniBox SSA. So, the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium, and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right outside SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about InfiniGuard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery, but at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City, or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability, which InfiniGuard can do. Which of course, is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. So, we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play. And again we have a number of public references in the cloud, US signal and others, where they talk about why they use the InfiniBox, and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. >> Okay, so I got to ask you, so you've mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters is in Waltham, we're going to pry you out of the Golden State? >> Let's see, I was born at Stanford hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere, but here. And of course, remember when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week, and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving, I'm a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, the Silicon Valley Guy from the old days, that's me. >> Yeah, the hotels in Waltham are a little better, but... So, what's your priority? Last question. What's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? >> Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinidat, which is a little unusual, is there sometimes are silos and having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or a small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness, So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful, even with the silos, imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so, we're going to do that, and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple awards recently, we're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC Awards, and one of the channel publications is going to give us an award next week. So yeah, we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend. Both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So, those are the things we're going to do first, and yeah, we're going to be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing, as I mentioned, I'm meeting, five partners, CEOs, and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we want to get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff, going "We are going with Infinidat "as one of our strong storage providers". So, we're doing all that upfront work in the first 100 days, so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. >> Love the channel story, and you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos, correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinidat does a lot of business in overseas. A lot of business in Europe, obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel, but that's by its very nature, stovepipe. Most startups start in the US, big market NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. It's almost like Infinidat sort of simultaneously grew it's overseas business, and it's US business. >> Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India, and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. In fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today, and one of the comments that was made for someone who's going to give us a PO. So, the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter, and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up a storage company these days, but the CIO called him and said "I can't believe the work you did. We're going to buy some more stuff this quarter". So that white glove service, our technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service is pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service, when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company, and will continue to be so. >> Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do, and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinidat since, sort of day zero and I really wish you the best. >> Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE. And trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. >> Ah, I can't wait. All right, thanks to Eric, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of splunk.com 2021 virtual. We're here live in the Splunk studios. We're all here gettin all the action, all the stories. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer at Splunk is here with me. CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Last time I saw you, we were at AWS now here at Splunk. Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. Great to see you again. >> Great keynote and great team. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you. It's a lot of fun. >> So let's get into the keynote a little bit on the product. You're the Chief Product Officer. We interviewed Shawn Bice, who's also working with you as well. He's your boss. Talk about the, the next level, cause you're seeing some new enhancements. Let's get to the news first. Talk about the new enhancements. >> Yeah, this was actually a really fun keynote for me. So I think there was a lot of great stuff that came out of the rest of it. But I had the honor to actually showcase a lot of the product innovation, you know, since we did .conf last year, we've actually closed four different acquisitions. We shipped 43 major releases and we've done hundreds of small enhancements, like we're shipping code in the cloud every six weeks and we're shipping new versions twice a year for our Splunk Enterprise customers. And so this was kind of like if you've seen that movie Sophie's Choice, you know, where you have to pick one of your children, like this was a really hard, hard thing to pick. Cause we only had about 25 minutes, but we did like four demos that I think landed really well. The first was what we call ingest actions and you know, there's customers that are using, they start small with gigabytes and they go to terabytes and up to petabytes of data per day. And so they wanted tools that allow them to kind of modify filter and then route data to different sort of parts of their infrastructure. So that was the first demo. We did another demo on our, our visual playbook editor for SOAR, which has improved quite a bit. You know, a lot of the analysts that are in the, in the, in the SOC trying to figure out how to automate responses and reduce sort of time to resolution, like they're not Python experts. And so having a visual playbook editor that lets them drag and drop and sort of with a few simple gestures create complex playbooks was pretty cool. We showed some new capabilities in our APM tool. Last year, we announced we acquired a company called Plumbr, which has expertise in basically like code level analysis and, and we're calling it "Always On" profiling. So we, we did that demo and gosh, we did one more, four, but four total demos. I think, you know, people were really happy to see, you know, the thing that we really tried to do was ground all of our sort of like tech talk and stuff that was like real and today, like this is not some futuristic vision. I mean, Shawn did lay out some, some great visions, visionary kind of pillars. But, what we showed in the keynote was I it's all shipping code. >> I mean, there's plenty of head room in this market when it comes to data as value and data in motion, all these things. But we were talking before you came on camera earlier in the morning about actually how good Splunk product and broad and deep the product portfolio as well. >> Garth: Yeah. >> I mean, it's, I mean, it's not a utility and a tooling, it's a platform with tools and utilities. >> Garth: Yeah >> It's a fully blown out platform. >> Yeah. Yeah. It is a platform and, and, you know, it's, it's one that's quite interesting. I've had the pleasure to meet a couple of big customers and it's kind of amazing, like what they do with Splunk. Like I was meeting with a large telco on the east coast and you know, they actually, for their set top boxes, they actually have to figure out in real time, which ads to display and the only tool they could find to process 15 million events in real time, to decide what ad to display, was Splunk. So that was, that was like really cool to hear. Like we never set out to be like an ad tech kind of platform and yet we're the only tool that operates at that level of scale and that kind of data. >> You know, it's funny, Doug Merritt mentioned this in my interview with him earlier today about, you know, and he wasn't shy about it, which was great. He was like, we're an enabling platform. We don't have to be experts in all these vertical industries >> Garth: Yep >> because AI takes care of that. That's where the machine learning >> Garth: Yeah >> and the applications get built. So others are trying to build fully vertically integrated stacks into these verticals when in reality they don't have to, if they don't want it. >> Yeah, and Splunk's kind of, it's quite interesting when you look across our top 100 customers, you know, Doug talks about like the, you know, 92 of the fortune 100 are kind of using Splunk today, but the diversity across industries and, you know, we have government agencies, we have, you know, you name the retail or the vertical, you know, we've got really big customers, they're using Splunk. And the other thing that I kind of, I was excited about, we announced the last demo I forgot was TruSTAR integration with Enterprise Security. That's pretty cool. We're calling that Splunk Threat Intelligence. And so That was really fun and we only acquired, we closed the acquisition to TruSTAR in May, but the good news is they've been a partner with us like for 18 months before we actually bought em. And so they'd already done a lot of the work to integrate. And so they had a running start in that regard, But other, one other one that was kind of a, it was a small thing. I didn't get to demo it, but we talked about the, the content pack for application performance monitoring. And so, you know, in some ways we compete in the APM level, but in many ways there's a ton of great APM vendors out there that customers are using. But what they wanted us to do was like, hey, if I'm using APM for that one app, I still want to get data out of that and into Splunk because Splunk ends up being like the core repository for observability, security, IT ops, Dev Sec Ops, et cetera. It's kind of like where the truth, the operational truth of how your systems works, lives in Splunk. >> It's so funny. The Splunk business model has actually been replicated. They call it data lake, whatever you want to call it. People are bringing up all these different metaphors. But at the end of the day, if you guys can create a value proposition where you can have data just be, you know, stored and dumped and dumped into whatever they call it stored in a way >> Garth: We call it ingest >> Ingested, ingested. >> Garth: Not dumped. >> Data dump. >> Garth: It's ingested. >> Well, I mean, well you given me a plan, but you don't have to do a lot of work to store just, okay, we can only get to it later, >> Garth: Yep. >> But let the machines take over >> Garth: Yep. >> With the machine learning. I totally get that. Now, as a pro, as a product leader, I have to ask you your, your mindset around optimization. What do you optimize for? Because a lot of times these use cases are emerging. They just pop out of nowhere. It's a net new use case that you want to operationalize. So balancing the headroom >> Yep. >> Or not to foreclose those new opportunities for customers. How are customers deciding what's important to them? How do you, because you're trying to read the tea leaves for the future >> Garth: A little bit, yeah. >> and then go, okay, what do our customers need, but you don't want to foreclose anything. How do you think about product strategy around that? >> There's a ton of opportunity to interact with customers. We have this thing called the Customer Advisory Board. We run, I think, four of them and we run a monthly. And so we got an opportunity to kind of get that anecdotal data and the direct contact. We also have a portal called ideas.splunk.com where customers can come tell us what they want us to build next. And we look at that every month, you know, and there's no way that we could ever build everything that they're asking us to, but we look at that monthly and we use it in sort of our sprint planning to decide where we're going to prioritize engineering resources. And it's just, it's kind of like customers say the darndest things, right? Sometimes they ask us for stuff and we never imagined building it in a million years, >> John: Yeah. >> Like that use case around ads on the set top box, but it's, it's kind of a fun place to be like, we, we just, before this event, we kind of laid out internally what, you know, Shawn and I kind of put together this doc, actually Shawn wrote the bulk of it, but it was about sort of what do we think? Where, where can we take Splunk to the next three to five years? And we talked about these, we referred to them as waves of innovation. Cause you know, like when you think about waves, there's multiple waves that are heading towards the beach >> John: Yeah. >> in parallel, right? It's not like a series of phases that are going to be serialized. It's about making a set of investments. that'll kind of land over time. And, and the first wave is really about, you know, what I would say is sort of, you know, really delivering on the promise of Splunk and some of that's around integration, single sign-on things about like making all of the Splunk Splunk products work together more easily. We've talked a lot in the Q and a about like edge and hybrid. And that's really where our customers are. If you watch the Koby Avital's sort of customer keynote, you know, Walmart by necessity, given their geographic breadth and the customers they serve has to have their own infrastructure. They use Google, they use Azure and they have this abstraction layer that Koby's team has built on top. And they use Splunk to manage kind of, operate basically all of their infrastructure across those three clouds. So that's the hybrid edge scenario. We were thinking a lot about, you mentioned data lakes. You know, if you go back to 2002, when Splunk was founded, you know, the thing we were trying to do is help people make sense of log files. But now if you talk to customers that are moving to cloud, everybody's building a data lake and there's like billions of objects flowing into millions of these S3 buckets all over the place. And we're kind of trying to think about, hey, is there an opportunity for us to point our indexing and analytics capability against structured and unstructured data and those data lakes. So that that'll be something we're going to >> Yeah. >> at least start prototyping pretty soon. And then lastly, machine learning, you know, I'd say, you know, to use a baseball metaphor, like in terms of like how we apply machine learning, we're like in the bottom of the second inning, >> Yeah. >> you know, we've been doing it for a number of years, but there's so much more. >> There's so, I mean, machine learning is only as good as the data you put into the machine learning. >> Exactly, exactly. >> And so if you have, if you have gap in the data, the machine learning is going to have gaps in it. >> Yeah. And we have, we announced a feature today called auto detect. And I won't go into the gory details, but effectively what it does is it runs a real-time analytics job over whatever metrics you want to look at and you can do what I would consider more statistics versus machine learning. You can say, hey, if in a 10 minute period, like, you know, we see more errors than we see on average over the last week, throw an alert so I can go investigate and take a look. Imagine if you didn't have to figure out what the right thresholds were, if we could just watch those metrics for you and automatically understand the seasonality, the timing, is it a weekly thing? Is it a monthly thing? And then like tell you like use machine learning to do the anomaly detection, but do it in a way that's more intelligent than just the static threshold. >> Yeah. >> And so I think you'll see things like auto detect, which we announced this week will evolve to take advantage of machine learning kind of under the covers, if you will. >> Yeah. It was interesting with cloud scale and the data velocity, automations become super important. >> Oh yeah. >> You don't have a lot of new disciplines emerge, like explainable AI is hot right now. So you got, the puck is coming. You can see where the puck is going. >> Yeah >> And that is automation at the app edge or the application layer where the data has got to be free-flowing or addressable. >> Garth: Yeah. >> This is something that is being talked about. And we talked about data divide with, with Chris earlier about the policy side of things. And now data is part of everything. It's part of the apps. >> Garth: Yeah. >> It's not just stored stuff. So it's always in flight. It should be addressable. This is what people want. What do you think about all of that? >> No, I think it's great. I actually just can I, I'll quote from Steve Schmidt in, in sort of the keynote, he said, look like security at the end of the day is a human problem, but it kind of manifests itself through data. And so being able to understand what's happening in the data will tell you, like, is there a bad actor, like wreaking havoc inside of my systems? And like, you can use that, the data trail if you will, of the bad actor to chase them down and sort of isolate em. >> The digital footprints, if you will, looking at a trail. >> Yeah. >> All right, what's the coolest thing that you like right now, when you look at the treasure trove of, of a value, as you look at it, and this is a range of value, Splunk, Splunk has had customers come in with, with the early product, but they keep the customers and they always do new things and they operationalize it >> Garth: Yep. >> and another new thing comes, they operationalize it. What's the next new thing that's coming, that's the next big thing. >> Dude that is like asking me which one of my daughters do I love the most, like that is so unfair. (laughing) I'm not going to answer that one. Next question please. >> Okay. All right. Okay. What's your goals for the next year or two? >> Yeah, so I just kind of finished roughly my first 100 days and it's been great to, you know, I had a whole plan, 30, 60, 90, and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do. Like I'm really hoping, sort of, we get past this current kind of COVID scare and we get to back to normal. Cause I'm really looking forward to getting back on the road and sort of meeting with customers, you know, you can meet over Zoom and that's great, but what I've learned over time, you know, I used to go, I'd fly to Wichita, Kansas and actually go sit down with the operators like at their desk and watch how they use my tools. And that actually teaches you. Like you, you come up with things when you see, you know, your product in the hands of your customer, that you don't get from like a CAB meeting or from a Zoom call, you know? >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so being able to visit customers where they live, where they work and kind of like understand what we can do to make their lives better. Like that's going to, I'm actually really excited to gettin back to travel. >> If you could give advice to CTO, CISO, or CIO or a practitioner out there who are, who is who's sitting at their virtual desk or their physical desk thinking, okay, the pandemic, were coming through the pandemic. I want to come out with a growth strategy, with a plan that's going to be expansive, not restrictive. The pandemic has shown what's what works, what doesn't work. >> Garth: Sure. >> So it's going to be some projects that might not get renewed, but there's doubling down on, certainly with cloud scale. What would advice would you give that person when they start thinking about, okay, I got to get my architecture right. >> Yeah. >> I got to get my playbooks in place. I got to get my people aligned. >> Yeah >> What's what do you see as a best practice for kind of the mindset to actual implementation of data, managing the data? >> Yeah, and again, I'm, I'm, this is not an original Garth thought. It actually came from one of our customers. You know, the, I think we all, like you think back to March and April of 2020 as this thing was really getting real. Everybody moved as fast as they could to either scale up or scale scaled on operations. If you were in travel and hospitality, you know, that was, you know, you had to figure how to scale down quickly and like what you could shut down safely. If you were like in the food delivery business, you had to figure out how you could scale up, like Chipotle hit two, what is it? $2 billion run rate on delivery last year. And so people scrambled as fast as they could to sort of adapt to this new world. And I think we're all coming to the realization that as we sort of exit and get back to some sense of new normal, there's a lot of what we're doing today that's going to persist. Like, I think we're going to have like flexible rules. I don't think everybody's going to want to come back into the office. And so I think, I think the thing to do is you think about returning to whatever this new normal looks like is like, what did we learn that was good. And like the pandemic had a silver lining for folks in many ways. And it sucked for a lot. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but you know, there were things that we did to adapt that I think actually made like the workplace, like stronger and better. And, and sort of. >> It showed that data's important, internet is important. Didn't break, the internet didn't break. >> Garth: Correct. >> Zoom was amazing. And the teleconferencing with other tools. >> But that's kind of, just to sort of like, what did you learn over the last 18 months that you're going to take for it into the next 18 years? You know what I mean? Cause there was a lot of good and I think people were creative and they figured out like how to adapt super quickly and take the best of the pandemic and turn it into like a better place to work. >> Hybrid, hybrid events, hybrid workforce, hybrid workflows. What's what's your vision on Splunk as a tier one enterprise? Because a lot of the news that I'm seeing that's, that's the tell sign to me in terms of this next growth wave is big SI deals, Accenture and others are yours working with and you still got the other Partnerverse going. You have the ecosystems emerging. >> Garth: Yep. >> That's a good, that means your product's enabling people to make money. >> Garth: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And that's a good thing. >> Yeah, BlueVoyant was a great example in the keynote yesterday and they, you know, they've really, they've kind of figured out how, you know, most of their customers, they serve customers in heavily regulated industries kind of, and you know, those customers actually want their data in a Splunk tenant that they own and control and they want to have that secure boundary around that. But BlueVoyant's figured out how they can come in and say, hey, I'm going to take care of the heavy lifting of the day-to-day operations, the monitoring of that environment with the security. So, so BlueVoyant has done a great job sort of pivoting and figuring out how they can add value to customers and do, you know, because they they're managing not just one Splunk instance, but they're managing 100s of Splunk cloud instances. And so they've got best practices and automation that they can play across their entire client base. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And, and Teresa's just, Teresa is just, she loves Partners, absolutely loves Partners. And that was just obvious. You could, you could hear it in her voice. You could see it in her body language, you know, when she talked about Partnerverse. So I think you'll see us start to really get a lot more serious. Cause as big as Splunk is like our pro serve and support teams are not going to scale for the next 10,000, 100,000 Splunk customers. And we really need to like really think about how we use Partners. >> There's a real growth wave. And I, and I love the multiples wave in parallel because I think that's what everyone's consensus on. So I have to ask you as a final question, what's your takeaway? Obviously, there's been a virtual studio here where all the Splunk executives and, and, and customers and partners are here. TheCUBE's here doing all the presentations, live by the way. It was awesome. What would you say the takeaway is for this .conf, for the people watching and consuming all the content online? A lot of asynchronous consumption would be happening. >> Sure. >> What's your takeaway from this year's Splunk .conf? >> You know, I, it's hard cause you know, you get so close to it and we've rehearsed this thing so many times, you know, the feedback that I got and if you look at Twitter and you look at my Slack and everything else, like this felt like a conf that was like kind of like a really genuine, almost like a Splunk two dot O. But it's sort of true to the roots of what Splunk was true to the product reality. I mean, you know, I was really careful with my team and to avoid any whiff of vaporware, like what were, what we wanted to show was like, look, this is Splunk, we're acquiring companies, you know, 43 major releases, you know, 100s of small ones. Like we're continuing to innovate on your behalf as fast as we can. And hopefully this is the last virtual conf. But even when we go back, like there was so much good about the way we did this this week, that, you know, when we, when we broke yesterday on the keynote and we were sitting around with the crew and it kind of looking at that stage and everything, we were like, wow, there is a lot of this that we want to bring to an in-person event as well. Cause so for those that want to travel and come sit in the room with us, we're super excited to do that as soon as we can. But, but then, you know, there may be 25, 50, 100,000 that don't want to travel, but can access us via this virtual event. >> It's like a time. It's a moment in time that becomes a timeless moment. That could be, >> Wow, did you make that up right now? >> that could be an NFT. >> Yeah >> We can make a global cryptocurrency. Garth, great to see you. Of course I made it up right then. So, great to see you. >> Air bump, air bump? Okay, good. >> Okay. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer. In theCUBE here, we're live on site at Splunk Studio for the .conf virtual event. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. >> All right. Thank you guys. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm still minimum and this is the Cubes coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year doing the Cube. First year. We're doing it, of course, virtually globally. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Shannon Champion, and she is the director of product marketing with Dell Technologies. Shannon, Nice to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. >>Alright, So big thing, of course, at VM World, talking about building off of what was Project Pacific at last year's show? Talking about how kubernetes all the wonderful cloud native pieces go in. So let's let's talk about application modernization. Shannon, you know, with a theme I've talked about for a number of years, is you know, we need to modernize the platform, and then we can modernize the applications on top of those. So tell us what you're hearing from your customers and how Delon vm, where then, are bringing the solutions to help customers really along that journey. >>Yeah, I'd love Thio. It's fun stuff. So, um, enterprises are telling us that especially now more than ever, they're really looking for how they must digitally transform. And they need to do that so they can drive innovation and get a competitive advantage on one way. That they're able to do that is by finding ways to flexibly and rapidly move work loads to where they make sense, whether that's on premises or in the public cloud. And the new standard for doing this is becoming cloud native applications. There was a recent I. D. C. Future Escape that predicted that by 2025 2 3rd of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code being deployed on a daily basis, and over 90% of applications at that time will be delivered with cognitive approaches. So it's just kind of crazy to think, and what's really impressive to is that the sheer volume of applications that are anticipated to be produced with these cloud native approaches Ah, it's expected to be over 500 million new APS created with cognitive approaches by 2024 just kind of putting that into perspective 500 million. APS is the same number that's been created over the last 40 years. So it's a fun, fun trend to be part of. >>Yeah, it's really amazing. When I talked to customers, there's some It's like, Oh, let me show you how Maney APs I've done and created in the last 18 months. It was like, Great. How does that compare before? And they're like, we weren't creating APS. We were buying APS. We were buying software. We had outsourced some of those pieces. So you know that that that trend we've been talking about for a number of years is kind of everyone's a software company, Um, does not mean that, you know, we're getting rid of the old business models. But Shannon, there are challenges there either expanding and moving faster or, you know, making sure that I have the talent in house. So bring us inside. What if some of the big things that your customers are telling you, uh, maybe that's holding them back from unlocking that central? >>Yeah, totally. You hit on a couple of them, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in adoption of kubernetes and clearly VM Ware is leading the way with Changzhou. But we're also hearing that they're underestimating the challenges on how toe quote unquote get to kubernetes. Right? How do you stand up that full cloud native staff and particularly at scale Thio? How do you manage the ongoing operations and maintain that infrastructure? How do you support the various stakeholders? How do you bring I t operators and developers together? Eso There's really a wide range of challenges that, um businesses air facing. And the other thing is that you hit on, you know, they're going to be producing mawr and Mawr cloud native applications, but they still need to maintain legacy applications, many of which are driving business, critical applications and workloads. So they're going to need to look for solutions that help them manage both and allow them to re factor or retire those legacy ones at their own pace so they can maintain business continuity. >>Yeah, and of course, Shannon, we know as infrastructure people, our job was always toe, you know, give the environment to allow the applications to run in virtualization. For years, it was Well, I knew if I virtualized something, I could leave it there and it wasn't going to. It didn't have to worry about the underlying hardware changes. Help us understand How does kubernetes fit into this environment? Because, as I said that people don't want to even worry about it. And the infrastructure people now need to be able to change, expand and, you know, respond to the business so much faster than we might have in times past. >>Yeah, so from an infrastructure perspective, working with VM ware based on tons of really the essence of that is to bring I t operators and developers together. The infrastructure has a common set of management that, you know, each the developer and the I t operators can work in the language there most familiar with. And, you know, the communication of the translation all happens within Tan Xue so that they're more speaking the same, um, language when it comes Thio, you know, managing the infrastructure in particular with VM ware tansy on VX rail. We are delivering kind of a range of infrastructure options because we know people are still trying to figure out you know, where they are in their kubernetes readiness path. Some people have really developed mature capabilities in house for who were Netease for software defined networking. And for those customers, they still may want Thio. You know, use a reference architecture er and build on top of the ex rail for, you know, a custom cloud native specific application. What we're finding is more and more customers, though, don't have that level of kubernetes expertise, especially at scale. And so VM ware v sphere with Tan Xue on VX rail as well as via more cloud foundation on VX rail are ways Thio get a fast start on kubernetes with directly on these fair or kind of go with the full Monty of VM or Cloud Foundation on VX rail. >>Well, we're bringing up VX rail. Of course. The whole wave of h C I was How do we enable simplicity? We don't wanna have to think about these. We wanna, uh, just make it so that customers can just buy a solution. Of course. VX rail joint solution, you know, heavily partnership with VM ware. So, Shannon, there's a few options. VM has been moving very fast toe expand out that the into portfolio, uh, back at the beginning of the year when the sphere seven came out. You needed the BMR Cloud Foundation. Which, of course, what was an option for for for the VX rail. So help us understand you laid out a little bit some of those options there. But what should I know as Adele customer, Uh, you know what my options are? How the fault Kansas Wheat fits into it. >>Yeah, eso We like to call it kubernetes your way with the ex rail. So we have a range of options to fit your operational or kubernetes scale requirements or your level of expertise. So the three options, our first for customers that are looking for that tested, validated, multi configuration reference architectures er that will deliver platform as a service or containers is a service. We've got Tom to architecture for VX rail, which is a new name for what was known as pivot already architecture er and then for customers that may have minimum scaling requirements. They may have some of that expertise in house to manage at scale. The fastest path to get started with kubernetes is the new VM ware V sphere with Changzhou on VX rail. And then last I mentioned kind of that full highly automated turnkey on promises Cloud platform. That's the VM, or Cloud Foundation, on VX rail, which is also known as Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. And that option supports Tan Xue with software defined networking and security built in with that automated lifecycle management across the full stack. So there's really three paths to it from a reference architecture approach to a fast path on the actual clusters all the way to the full Deltek Cloud platform. And Dell Technologies is the first and only really offering this breath of tans. You infrastructure deployment options. Eso customers can really, uh, choose the best path for them. >>Yeah, So, Shannon, if if I If I think back to what we saw in the keynote, you know, VM Ware lays out there, they're hybrid and multi cloud solution. So of course they're they're public cloud the VM ware cloud on a W s. They have that solution. They have extended extended partnerships. Now, with azure uh, the the the offering with Oracle. Uh, that's coming, and I guess I could think to just think of the delta cloud on VX rail as just one of those other clouds in that hybrid and multi cloud solutions. Do I have that right? Same stack. Same management. If I'm if I'm living in that VM world world. >>Yeah. So the Deltek Cloud platform is an on premises hybrid cloud. So, you know, ah, lot of customers were looking to reduce complexity really quickly especially, you know, with some of the work from home initiatives that were sprung upon us and trying to pivot, um to respond to that. And, you know, the answer to solving some of that complexity is to jump into public cloud. What we found is a lot of customers actually are driving a hybrid cloud strategy and approach. And we know many customers sort of have that executive mandate. There's value in, um, driving that are on prem hybrid cloud approach. And that's what Dell Technologies Cloud platform is. So you get the consistent operations in the consistent infrastructure and more of the public cloud like consumption experience while having the infrastructure on Prem for security data locality. Other, um, you know, cost reasons like that. Eso That's really where VM or Cloud Foundation on VF Trail comes into play eso leveraging the VM ware technologies you have on Prem Hybrid cloud. It can connect all those public cloud providers that you talked about. So you have, you know, core to cloud on Dwan. Of the new capabilities that VM or Cloud Foundation, is announced support for is remote clusters. So that takes us kind of from cloud all the way toe edge because you now have the same VCF operational capabilities and operational efficiency with centralized management for remote locations. >>Wonderful. I'm glad you brought up the edge piece. Of course, you talk to the emerging space vm ware talking about ai talking about EJ, so help us understand. How much is it? The similar operational model? Is it even eyes that part of the VX rail family? What's the What's the state of the state in 2020 when it comes to how edge fits into that cloud core edge discussion that you just raised? >>Yeah, when you look at trends, especially for hyper converged edge and cloud native are kind of taking up a lot of the airwaves right now. Eso hyper converge is gonna play a big role in Theodore option of both cloud native Band Edge. And I think the intersection of those two comes into play with things like the remote cluster support for VM Ware Cloud Foundation on VX rail, where you can run cloud, you know, cloud native based modern applications with Tan Xue alongside traditional workloads at the edge, which traditionally have more stringent requirements. Less resource is maybe they need a more hardened environment, power and cooling, you know, um, constraints. So with VCF on VX rail, you have all the operational goodness that comes from the partnership in the levels of integration that we have with VM Ware. And customers can sort of realize that promise of full workload management mobility in a true hybrid cloud environment. >>Shannon I'm wondering what general feedback you're getting from your customers is as they look at a zoo, said these cloud native solutions. You know what's what's the big take away? Is this a continuation of the HD I wave that you've seen? Do they just pull this into their hybrid environments? Um, I'm wondering if you have any either any specific examples that you've been anonymized or just the general gestalt that you're getting from your customers. Is that how they're doing expanding, uh, into these, you know, new environments that kind of stretch them in different ways. >>Yeah, it's interesting because you know, there's there's customers that run the gamut when we look at those that are sort of the farther down their digital transformation journey. Those are the ones that were already planning for cloud native applications or had some in development. Uh, there's also some trends that we're seeing based on, you know, the the size of cluster deployments and the range of, you know, various configurations that are an indicator of those customers that are more modernized in terms of their approach to cloud native. And what we find from those customers, especially over the last six months, is that they're more prepared to respond to the unknown on bond. That was a big lesson for some of the other customers that you know, had new. The digital transformation was the way of the future, but hadn't yet sort of come up with a strategy on how to get there themselves were finding those customers are inhibiting their investments to areas that can help them be more ready for the unknown in the future. In Cloud native is top of that list. >>Absolutely. Shannon Day Volante showed a few times There's the people in the office, you know, with their white board doing everything. And there's the wrecking ball of covert 19. Kind of like Well, if you weren't ready and you weren't already down this path, you better move fast. Wonderful. All right, Shannon. So we know, uh, from past years, you know, VX rail. Usually it's all over the show. So in the digital world, what do you want to he takeaways. What are some of the key? You know, hands on demos, sessions that that people should check out. >>Thank you. Yeah. So hopefully your take away is that the X ray is a great infrastructure to support modern applications. First and foremost, we have, you know, a jointly engineered system built with VM ware, four VM ware environments to enhance fam. Where, and we do that with our the extra LHC I system software, which I didn't give a shout out to yet, which extends that native capabilities and really is the secret behind how we do seamless automated operational experience with the ex rail. And that's the case, whether it's traditional or modern applications. So that's my little commercial for VX rail at the show. Please tune into our VM World session on this topic. We also have hands on labs. We are launching a fun augmented reality game. Eso Please check that out on. We have a new Web page as well that you could get access to all the latest assets and guides that help you, you know, navigate your journey for cloud native. And that's at dell technologies dot com slash Hangzhou. >>Wonderful. Well, Shannon Champion, thanks so much. Great to see you again. And be short. Uh, we look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks to >>stay with us. Lots more coverage from VM World 2020. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the Cube.

>> From the Cube studios in Palo, Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm Paul Gillin, Enterprise Editor at SiliconAngle. We've been talking a lot about cloud native on SiliconAngle lately, and my guest is someone who had a seminal role in defining the the principal architecture, some of the foundational technologies for cloud native applications. Ben Golub is the CEO of Storj, a company that has a really interesting new approach to storage management that we'll talk about in just a bit. Ben is probably best known to many people as the former CEO of Docker, which pioneered software containers and was one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley, he's great. Ben, thanks for joining us, feel appreciated you being here today. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So, let's get into the question of cloud native is a theme that we're focusing on right now. How important is it for organizations you believe that are moving to the cloud to choose to re architect around cloud native principles? >> Well, I think it's, I mean, two points. First of all, I think that the cloud native is sort of a spectrum. And for many people, there is a point along the spectrum that makes sense. At the far end of the spectrum is applications that are deployed on a massive scale. They're components to thousands of microservices, heavily orchestrated with things like Kubernetes, scaling up scaling down, and for many organizations, they don't need to go all the way there to get real benefits. And maybe the related thing is that I think, for organizations, there's absolutely, for most organizations, there's value in moving along that spectrum, but they should be thoughtful about where it is that they're going, and why they're going there. >> Either or thing and they applications can live along the spectrum. you submitted some comments recently for an article we did on this topic and among them you said that some applications may make sense being containerized or Dockerized but not being orchestrator with Kubernetes. Can you give an example of something that meets that criteria? >> Sure, well, I can I think that almost all applications can benefit from running on more cloud like infrastructure. There's certainly value in having infrastructure that that scales up, or that scales out there, where people are able to sort of dynamically use resources and not have it have to rely on big iron. But in terms of the applications themselves traditional applications can run well in cloud environments provided that some steps are taken. And often for many organizations, the first step with a traditional application is simply to containerize your Docker engine. That gives a lot of benefits including, ease of migration, greater ease of adopting things like CICD, and you don't necessarily have to take all of your traditional applications, break them into lots of micro services, start orchestrating them with Kubernetes on day one, for some reasons, case may never make sense because they're not going to be run at massive scale. >> Many people assume that containers and cloud native architecture are inextricably linked. Is that your opinion? >> Well, so I think that cloudy infrastructure tends to benefit from from containerization. But really, it's more of an application question. If you are breaking your application or you're writing applications that are composed of lots of different services, almost inevitably, you want to have those services in containers so that they have clean interfaces between them. And so, that you can do the things people want to do with cloud native, which is, make changes to your microservice A with a small team and do so rapidly without unintentionally screwing up microservice, B, C, D, et cetera. And Dockers in a containerization, among other things, provides that nice clean interface. >> All right, how have you seen I mean, since you left Docker three years ago, how have you seen the container technology evolve? What do you think are some of the most important evolutions we've seen in container technology since then? >> Yeah, so I think, what has been really important for us to see that the community continues to grow. So, once the Docker community continues to grow, there are now lots of other communities around it the cloud native computing Foundation, Kubernetes. And I think what you're seeing is really the maturing of this technology. So that applications can be written in a cloud native way much more more easily. The barriers to making an application cloud native really come down, but also the potential for running applications and really massive scale have have have increased and there are certainly a number of interesting things that have happened in the storage space in terms of persistent volumes. things that have happened in terms of service technology service measures, like STO these are all really great examples of how the community is filling in around containers. >> We've heard a lot about the benefits of portability that come from using containers. But being portable can involve some trade offs, because you have to give up some of the native functionality of branded cloud platforms. Do you think the goal of multi cloud is overblown? >> I think there is real value in being multi cloud. And I think that while you know, the larger stock traders have provided great services, it is in their names, of course, we're trying to get have all of the workloads run within their four walls. And I think for most organizations, locking is a bad idea, regardless, right? We're in a distributed world, most people want to be able to run their applications at scale in a distributed way and they want to be able to take advantage of spare cycles and the most efficient way and concise way of doing so. And so, having locking, I think is a bad idea. And for most organizations, the investment to become portable, while not trivial pays off in the long run. >> How about of the cultural issues is something that you also mentioned in the comments you contributed to us earlier, we hear often that the biggest impediments are not technical or even skills but actually changing the culture to adapt to a cloud native way of building applications. How should organizations prepare for that shift? >> Well, I mean, I think they should recognize what those differences are going to be. And if you're writing, the traditional method was you write a large monolithic application, because it's so big and complicated. Generally speaking, people follow sort of a waterfall procedure. They have large teams working on it, and you update the application once or twice a year. The cloud native approach is let's write applications that are composed of lots of smaller services produced by smaller teams that move very rapidly. And a lot of the testing and the deployment happens in a very automated way. And the cultural barriers are pretty large. I think most people are happy at the end of the journey. But there's a period in between where things are difficult that you're, you're breaking glass as it were. So, I think for a lot of large organizations, the approach that often works best is to have a few sort of isolated, Greenfield application approaches, where you have a small team that is sort of proving out and becoming good ambassadors for doing things in cloud native way. But there's also a an evolutionary way to bring the older applications along there for many organizations is really helpful. That doesn't have any running head on it. Other cultural issues with the traditional application. >> So, break them up into teams and have different teams at different stages of evolution. >> Right, and so, I think you can have a small advanced team that is working on new applications at Greenfield, cloud native way. But then the transition path for the teams that are working on the older application, traditional applications that were not initially architected in a cloud native way is to break them down in an evolutionary way, first dockerize, containerize, the traditional applications, then maybe break them down from a monolith into, say, three tiers, each of those tiers being containerized. And then potentially pull out one of those services if it's a common service across all the applications and start using that and the process. I think we find organizations get the sort of muscle memory around doing things in a more continuous way in a more agile way. And they get experienced with tools like CICD, Docker, Kubernetes te cetera in a more organic way. >> Do you find that people who come from the traditional waterfall development background eventually can't make that shift? >> I think some can, there are pluses and minuses. But I think that most organizations find that as they get more agile things that used to be very difficult become a lot easier, right? So, rather than having big masses of code that needs to be rewritten and changed, you change something in one area and it breaks things and unexpected way in another area. Right, then you're trying to get large teams of people to sort of agree on things which we know is not the way the world works. When you get to smaller teams working on more atomic pieces of the code with clean interfaces between them, and can iterate more rapidly without having unintended consequences. For most organizations that not only makes them faster, but it gives higher quote, quality, safer et cetera. >> Another topic we hear a lot about today is application modernization, what does that mean to you? >> So, I think for me application modernization means that you're re architect, you're making the application itself more cloud like, which doesn't mean that you made it full scale cloud native on day one, right? But that you, for example, taking a traditional application and Docker rising, or containerizing it, just containers in the monolith actually gives some real advantages. And that then sets people off to say, let's not only take the advantages that we now have in terms of portability, but let's start exploring the advantages that we can get from having more frequent deployments or more automated testing. And so, really it's modernizing the application but also modernizing the environment around it and in the culture for how you build and deploy applications. >> Let's turn to your current venture Storj. You've been CEO there for about two and a half years now. Very interesting decentralized approach to storj using blockchain. Just tell us quickly how you're re imagining Storj? >> Sure, sure, well I mean for, for of course, most of computing history storage was done, like people buying their own disk drives and then storing data on it. And if they failed or got lost as a problem, or if they had to buy too much, I was expensive. Then we move to centralized clouds where you were storing data on drives that one organization was running, we started taking it a step further, where we built a storage service. But we don't run your own any disk drives. We're sort of like ABNB, for restaurants, right? But we've gotten 10s of thousand people around the globe. Generally, data centers who have spare capacity enabled them to rent out that spare capacity. And we're offering our customers a way to do storage that is much safer, much more private, faster and far less expensive, than with the traditional cloud. >> Certainly intuitively, it would be less expensive. How is it faster? Well, it's faster for a lot of the same reason the the internet, if you will is faster than the traditional approach was landlines, right? We were able to take advantage of parallelism, right? So, we break every file up into a large number of pieces, which are then distributed across the network. And so, first of all, we don't get slowed down. If some of the drives are slow, or they happen to be in an area where there's network congestion. It doesn't slow down. We also end up having, generally speaking, have our data much closer to the edge. So, if you're in Kenya, and you're viewing a video that sort of serve from our network, chances are the data is getting served from graduate cluster view rather than driving or in Kansas. >> It sounds like there are some sort of cloud native aspects to what you're doing. In fact, are you adopting some cloud native principle on-- >> Well, so kind of we put our service in the cloud native way. But it really takes the cloud native notion of distribution and takes it even a step further, which is that things are highly decentralized. And so, we built our service in a very particular way because we are not directly controlling the disk drives, so, we basically use algorithms and math to make sure that we're resilient against any failure. and things are done in a highly automated and scalable way so that there's really no single points of failure. And there's infinite scalability, which is which is really the goal of cloud native, but we take it a step further. >> And blockchain is what knits us all together, right? Well, it tracks the location of all the all the data. >> I don't know, cause actually none of us 'cause we use blockchain for certain purposes, namely, compensating the people who are running the drives. So, they do cryptographic proofs to prove that the data they have, they shouldn't have to get compensated for running it. But then we've tried to use a large range of different kinds of peer to peer technologies. And even frankly, some very cool very old technology like racial coding which is on the on the Voyager spacecraft to make sure that it all fits together in a way that's safe, secure, private and super fast. >> All right, there other applications of this technology have developed be on Storj? >> Well, so we are working on decentralized storage. Other people are out there working on decentralized computing, where the application can be written and run on. Sorry, can be run on using CPUs that are all around the globe, we happen to think storage is probably the most important problem to solve first. Because, death, taxes and data are things that never go away. And the world's creating more and more every year, it would actually, the data created this year would have filled a stack of CD ROMs to orbit of Mars and back. It's going to grow from there. >> I love those analogies. >> Yeah, some of that's cat videos, but a lot of it is really super critical data on finding, therapeutics for COVID are the cure for cancer or new forms of energy. And so, find a way to use to give people the ability to store their data in a highly secure, highly efficient and very cost effective way we think is really important. >> And what should we be looking for from Storj for the next year, >> Let's say Storj is in production. We are adding end users. We're starting to see some larger users, which is a very 10 for us, today, we're used primarily for sort of second tier storage, but we expect to be moving into sort of primary storage and even CDN down the road. It turns out that what we built is a really great way to distribute large files, including video and photos and x-rays and satellite images and things like that. >> Well, Ben, thanks for joining us today. I know you're a Cube alum you've been many times on the Cube. I think this is the first time we've done it virtually though. >> I know, I do miss being in the same room as you and you're colleagues but this is a very nice thing too. >> So, do we believe me? Ben Golub, CEO of Storj. Thanks for taking time for being with us today. This has been a Cube conversation. I'm Paul Gillin. Thank you for joining us, be well. (bright upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Everyone welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of Amazon Web services. Public sector Summit Online Virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube here in our Palo Alto studios were quarantined with our crew here. We're talking to all the guests, getting all the content I'm excited of. Sandy Carter Cube alumni's also the VP vice president. Worldwide public sector partners and programs. Sandy. Great to see you virtually. You look >>great virtually too. It's great to see everybody virtually. >>I love the sign behind you. Powered by AWS. I'm excited to have you on, but I really wanted to get jump right in because this is really an important conversation. Public sector is seeing a lot of activity around what's going on with covert 19 especially with all the public services that are needed. And people are now remote workers, remote consumers, public service and still needs to be delivered just like business. So it's a really had a big impact of the entire world. We're all seeing it. We're feeling it's not just tech thing. How are you seeing your community respond? Your partners are responding to covert. 19. Can you share what's happening? >>Yes, John, I have to say, I am so incredibly proud of the partners that we support and how they've stepped up in this time. That has no blueprint, right? It's brand new for everybody, whether we're talking about virtual call centers. We had so many states that said they had people waiting for hours waiting for calls to be answered about Covance for Take. For instance, West Virginia, West Virginia had collars waiting for hours 77,000 calls a day. They worked with one of our partners, Smartronix, and they got this new solution a ream or remote virtual call center, up in 72 hours. 72 hours later, Average wait. Time was 60 seconds. Amazing job by Smartronix or one of our other partners, Elektronik Caregiver who's based out of New Mexico, where my husband's from a great partner who's been looking at, um, telemedicine, how they can help those at risk in hospitals and rehabs, even just at their homes. Or another startup that's a partner of ours called Hello, Alice, that integrated with our AI and ML to create a small business platform to help those small businesses get access to funding. Answer questions During this really hard time and the last example, I'll give you his Inter vision, one of our newest premier partners, who had a customer that came to them and said, Look, I need to get a remote work solution up workspaces identity manager help desk And they thought it would take months and Inter Vision was able to do it in week. So I am so proud and so thankful of our partners and what they've done to really impact the world, not just for their own profit, but for purpose helping out states, governments and citizens >>and congratulations. And it's well needed. People are feeling the pain. One area I want to get your thoughts on is the agencies we talked to the Department of Defense general manager earlier today. Um, all of the agencies in in public sector are shifting, and obviously, with the limitations, they got a shift to the remote workforce. They got to be faster. They got to be agile. I know they've been trying to, but they can't just wait any longer. They're forced to. How are your public sector partners helping the agencies? >>Yeah, this is another just terrific story. I cannot brag about our partners enough with our agency work. So if you looked at all of the agencies, kind of had a tight title wave of this digital transformation, things that we're gonna take them years ended up taking them weeks and months. So whether it's Kansas with the Department of Labor, they had 8800 and 77,000 calls a day. 21 staff couldn't do. It worked with our partners to get a call center up and going or in New Mexico again with Accenture, they used Amazon Connect, which is one of my new favorite products from Amazon. It's a call center that leverages machine learning and AI. They were able to work with the New Mexico Human Services and get that up and going in two days, Um, or even in Montana, a great story with Deloitte, where they built a custom chat box in seven days, custom chat box and seven days to answer questions about food and medicine and even how to get cash. If you needed to get cash, our partners really stepped up with the agencies, and they did so much compelling work so quickly. I think speed was such a great component here, John. The speed of deployment, the speed of help. You know, working 24 by seven to deliver these solutions. Our partners really did an amazing job. >>Yeah, and it's really hard with virtual. I got, I got I wish I was in person with everyone because coming to the public sector summits, one of my favorite events reinvent in public sector. Some of the two big shows, I really think encapsulate all the activity because it's virtual. People might miss some news. What else is going on in the world of public sector partners? You? Can you elaborate more on what's going on around the edges? What's on the bleeding? Cutting edge? What's the pioneer and what are some of the blocking and tackling that you're doing? Share some of the news. What else is going on? >>Yeah. Thank you, John. There's so much going on. First of all, we just introduced a new partner solution portal. So all of these code that 19 solutions are featured there. We will provide a URL for any customer looking for a great solution by our partners. We also really honed in and helped our partners during this time around. Said Ramp. And you know that fed ramp is so crucial. Security cybersecurity Incredibly essential. During this time I know you talked to my good friend Casey from Salesforce. They were able to achieve their fed ramp I and we offer a lot of help to our partners to help them to achieve not just fed ramp, but GDP are as well as HIPPA too. Some other news on migrations. We've got a competency around migrations. We've got some new funding for our partners around map and we're seeing our migration's really accelerate, you know, once these agencies, once he states see the power of the cloud, they're like, give me more, I want to put more and so we're seeing migrations accelerate. I know that you saw the Navy speak about what they're doing with s AP and as to another one of my favorite partners 72,000 users now running in his two on AWS. Six different commands pretty powerful. And I would say last but not least, is PTP our program transformation program for our partners, which really is like 100 and 10 day session to help the partners become a cloud business themselves. So they're kind of drinking their own champagne before they go out and help others. They become a cloud business. It's really powerful. This program has helped to generate twice the revenue of a typical a PM program. >>You mentioned the Navy always having interesting chat about that. Migration was less than 10 months. >>Yes, again. Speed, speed, speed, right, John. I mean, it's incredible >>years, two months, and the other thing that you probably find interesting and this is something that's kind of not talked about. But it's felt just the basic stuff, like getting paperwork in some of these processes, like you mentioned Fed Ramp. There's a lot of things that go on around public sector. You just got to get done. You got a slog through it, if you will. You guys have have responded well there, and this is the benefit of the cloud. Having the streamlined processes elaborate more on that, because I think that's important. Benefit not only just started in the critical infrastructure, like call centers and things of that nature, but getting business done. That's a big thing. >>Yeah, And I would say, you know, if you look at it, we helped over 20 states with their insurance processes. I mean, it seems like a minor thing, but a lot of these things were manual before, Um, we've helped many states with unemployment, you know, very critical at this time, taking a manual process and getting it into the cloud. There's so many of these that we can go on and on about How do you get medical supplies? One of our partners cohesive down in Latin America has been helping around some of the supply chain issues that that we deal with there some of the things that we take for granted when you're in person now that your virtual, you really need to think them through in the cloud. So again, you know, our partners responded with speed. They responded with heart to John one of the other things, you know, hashtag tech for good. They responded with heart as well as they were looking at these projects and ensuring that states and agencies and governments around the world could take care of their citizens, which is all of us. >>You know, existing. We've talked in the past. We've talked on camera and off camera around our shared passion around tech for good. I've been a big proponent of as well as us of right of other folks. But with the crisis, the word impact means something. And social impact is actually social impact. Getting your unemployment check or, you know, this this is highlights the critical nature of why these services exist. I think it's a real testament. I think people should step back and saying why we should never go back to the old antiquated ways because this is now the new reality. These services can be agile, they can be faster. It takes a crisis, unfortunately, and I guess that could be the silver lining in all this. So props to you guys on giving the partnership there with the partners >>and to the governments and states, John, who have now, like they moved rapidly, right? All these states, all these agencies, all these governments move quickly to digital transformation. Now they've gotten a taste of it, and they're like, give me more. And so the great thing to me is that this wasn't a one time event or one time crisis driven movement. Now that they see the power of it much like what you're saying with your business, they're doing more and and that's what I really applaud for all of them. And the way that they're transforming the business is now longer term. >>I'm optimistic, and I hope when we come out of this when everyone gets settled and they re imagine and reinvent, there's a growth strategy and expansion could be for positive change. So you've >>got >>stuff. We're all for that, and we'll be watching that reporting on it. I >>want to >>ask you something. I've heard that you guys will be soon expanding your public safety and disaster response partner. Competency. Can you tell me more about that? >>Yeah, So we announced the This is a hard one is disaster response in public safety competency at re invent for our consulting partners? And that went over amazingly well. I mean, take, for instance, Max are who is probably the best at believing delivering data both pre and post data to a disaster. They helped Noah, for instance, where data was taking 100 minutes to get that data down. Not good enough in a disaster. They were able to achieve a 58% faster download of data so you can do something with that Use that data to make good decisions. So these consulting partners have really embraced are our disaster recovery and public safety response competency. And now what we want to do is introduce this for our technology partners. So we're announcing the coming of this program for our technology partners. Now who is a technology partner? Well, think about an AI is the or a SAS provider these type of partners who have great solutions that target this particular area, think about public safety right now and how important that is, or even disaster response. You know, we have cove it, but right after that, we have all these hurricanes and earthquakes and other things that are happening around the world. Killer hornets. Um and so we've got some great technology partners that have solutions here, and we'll be welcoming them into this confidence. He fold as well. >>Well, this brings up something I've been commenting on. I want to get your reaction is because you know, when you have that flywheel pattern, infrastructures of service platforms of service and sass that build cloud when we've seen the benefits over a decade. Plus, when you bring the business model, you start to see the same thing. Some foundational things like infrastructure as service would be like compliance. Instant auditing that the Navy seeing, for instance, I heard earlier and then that platform pieces to allow these new workloads. So these new applications are going to be coming on. Creative surge of application developers, new kinds of workloads, new kinds of workforces and and work work flows. So you're gonna start to see these new APS. That means you guys will probably be inundated with new things. How do people get involved? Do they join a PN? What are some of the benefits? What should someone do? I want to be a partner of AWS because I see a solution. I create something that may be unique and specialize in niche. But it solves a really important problem. I want to bring it to Amazon. How do I do that? >>And we want you as a partner to John. Um, so yes. I mean, if you're a partner, the very first place to start is to join our A p m r Amazon Partner Network. If you're a startup or an I s d a distributor or reseller consulting partner, any of those that would be the first place to start, And then based on what you're interested in, you would then select the types of help that you might get. So, for example, if you're a start up, we helped start ups with credits because a lot of startups need free credits as they're starting their businesses or even technologies. So if you think about Hello, Alice, uh, you know, really using tagging for her small business site during Cove it we were able to provide some technology expertise to get her moving and grooving. Um, other great programs that we have out there are things like 80 0 the authority to operate. And this is really important, John, because a lot of our our customers require fed ramp and fed ramp is very costly and not only costly, but takes a lot of time so we can dramatically reduce your time to market with fed ramp really help you through with all those best practices. In fact, today we have 110 fed ramp solution that have gone through our 80 or authority to hire authority to operate process. And that's four X. Our top two competitors combined four x the number of partners that have gotten through because of the amount of time that is reduced through this process as well as the best practices that we bring. We've done a slim down version, so if you're a start up and you're interested in it like we partner with the Joshua down at Capital Factory and they've got the Army future command, we got a lot of startups. You want it? We've also got a slim down version for for them as well. >>It's been a >>very powerful program, >>and being in the cloud you can fast track and learn from others. This >>is the >>whole point of cloud. >>Absolutely, And learning from others is, you know, one of the great things that we love to do. In fact, until I we're going to do a big partner meeting, you know, here at the summit we'll have partners that participate in the virtual online summit. We're going to do a separate meeting just for our partners in July as well to share with them some of the things that are important to them around programs and some of these AP and benefits and some of the changes that we've made to help support them during the Cove it crisis. >>And I think you know the partners or the channel or how you look at it. They're adding value and a great partner for Amazon. For you guys, It's a great city. >>Yeah, I mean, are we could not. We at Amazon could not do the business We do without our partners. They bring their expertise, their best practices, the skills and the relationships they have, the contracts they bring to the table. So we're so grateful for the partners that we have in our public sector partner program. It's one of the reasons I loved my job. Every day I get to talk to a new partner on a new technology area that they're working on. It could be, you know, spatial computing, or AI, and they're helping not just move for a business, but they're helping on a purposeful mission project usually which are so powerful in today's world, especially with all the different crisis, is that we've seen, >>you know, One thing I want to get just share with you is that I talk to a lot of partners, certainly on the Cube and in person. One of the things that resonates with partners is not only the optimism of Amazon and programs you run, but it's enablement. You guys really enable the partners to be successful on your behalf and you on their behalf. But ultimately the customer and I think, and there's money to be made so lucrative and profitable, and they could impact change. So this enabling capability is really the magic. And so I want to ask you on your final question. Here in the talk is what's the vibe now? Because also, we know it's pretty depressing with Cove it, um and we're gonna get through this, but so there will be a day we get through. This will be growth and strategies around. It will never be the same. Certainly, I believe the hybrid world. What's >>the >>vibe inside the Amazon Web services public sector partner team, the community, the ecosystem? Could you just give some insight into how people are doing? And what's the vibe? >>Yeah, I would say the vibe is hopeful um, we all see the difference and the impact that we're making on a daily basis. And because of that, um, we continue to stretch forward and really move mountains for our customers to help them deliver better services. Um, you know, our partners are jumping in and all kinds of areas. First of all, for example, they are jumping in on doing hackathons to help with covet 19. So, John, you know, girls and tech. We've got our partners and us as AWS jumping into happy on different solutions for some of these challenges that are facing there. That's all about hope. I hope that we can make a difference. We are jumping in and assisting on remote work and unemployment, um, to provide hope to the teams and the community. So I would say, you know, it's tough for all. In fact, one of my friends describes, this is a crisis cake, not one level of a crisis, but multiple levels of the crisis. And I have never been with a with a more optimistic and positive team in my whole life, one who's willing to do what it takes. And when I see team, I mean not just my AWS partner team, which is the best of the world, but our world class partner team as well, who is willing to jump in there and do what it takes to help our customers. Even this weekend, I had a part of my partner team and my partners working to solve a problem for an agency that was, you know, um, critical. And they jumped in on the weekend to make that happen. So I would say, if I could say one word, I would say My partner's are hopeful they are. They're learning. They're curious. They're stepping out into new areas like connect and remote work and remote learning. And they're doing things that they never thought was possible based on what's happening today. >>Critical infrastructure, critical software, services and processes gotta be maintained and this opportunity. So I think it's, you know, heads down with hope and growth, always great to chat with you. And of course, we'll be following and covering your event next month. So looking forward to it, exciting times. Sandy Carter, Thank you for joining me today for coverage. >>Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to be here on the Cube Thank you guys for watching as well. >>Sandy Carter, vice president, worldwide public sector partners in program. Distinguished Cube Alumni. A tough job, great job at same time. A lot of opportunities and hope. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. You're watching our coverage. Cube Virtual of Amazon public sector Online summit. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(gentle electronic music) >> Hello, everybody, welcome back to the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital coverage. This is the Virtual BDC, as I said, theCUBE has covered every Big Data Conference from the inception, and we're pleased to be a part of this, even though it's challenging times. I'm here with Dan Woicke, the senior director of CernerWorks Engineering. Dan, good to see ya, how are things where you are in the middle of the country? >> Good morning, challenging times, as usual. We're trying to adapt to having the kids at home, out of school, trying to figure out how they're supposed to get on their laptop and do virtual learning. We all have to adapt to it and figure out how to get by. >> Well, it sure would've been my pleasure to meet you face to face in Boston at the Encore Casino, hopefully next year we'll be able to make that happen. But let's talk about Cerner and CernerWorks Engineering, what is that all about? >> So, CernerWorks Engineering, we used to be part of what's called IP, or Intellectual Property, which is basically the organization at Cerner that does all of our software development. But what we did was we made a decision about five years ago to organize my team with CernerWorks which is the hosting side of Cerner. So, about 80% of our clients choose to have their domains hosted within one of the two Kansas City data centers. We have one in Lee's Summit, in south Kansas City, and then we have one on our main campus that's a brand new one in downtown, north Kansas City. About 80, so we have about 27,000 environments that we manage in the Kansas City data centers. So, what my team does is we develop software in order to make it easier for us to monitor, manage, and keep those clients healthy within our data centers. >> Got it. I mean, I think of Cerner as a real advanced health tech company. It's the combination of healthcare and technology, the collision of those two. But maybe describe a little bit more about Cerner's business. >> So we have, like I said, 27,000 facilities across the world. Growing each day, thank goodness. And, our goal is to ensure that we reduce errors and we digitize the entire medical records for all of our clients. And we do that by having a consulting practice, we do that by having engineering, and then we do that with my team, which manages those particular clients. And that's how we got introduced to the Vertica side as well, when we introduced them about seven years ago. We were actually able to take a tremendous leap forward in how we manage our clients. And I'd be more than happy to talk deeper about how we do that. >> Yeah, and as we get into it, I want to understand, healthcare is all about outcomes, about patient outcomes and you work back from there. IT, for years, has obviously been a contributor but removed, and somewhat indirect from those outcomes. But, in this day and age, especially in an organization like yours, it really starts with the outcomes. I wonder if you could ratify that and talk about what that means for Cerner. >> Sorry, are you talking about medical outcomes? >> Yeah, outcomes of your business. >> So, there's two different sides to Cerner, right? There's the medical side, the clinical side, which is obviously our main practice, and then there's the side that I manage, which is more of the operational side. Both are very important, but they go hand in hand together. On the operational side, the goal is to ensure that our clinicians are on the system, and they don't know they're on the system, right? Things are progressing, doctors don't want to be on the system, trust me. My job is to ensure they're having the most seamless experience possible while they're on the EMR and have it just be one of their side jobs as opposed to taking their attention away from the patients. That make sense? >> Yeah it does, I mean, EMR and meaningful use, around the Affordable Care Act, really dramatically changed the unit. I mean, people had to demonstrate in order to get paid, and so that became sort of an unfunded mandate for folks and you really had to respond to that, didn't you? >> We did, we did that about three to four years ago. And we had to help our clients get through what's called meaningful use, there was different stages of meaningful use. And what we did, is we have the website called the Lights On Network which is free to all of our clients. Once you get onto the website the Lights On Network, you can actually show how you're measured and whether or not you're actually completing the different necessary tasks in order to get those payments for meaningful use. And it also allows you to see what your performance is on your domain, how the clinicians are doing on the system, how many hours they're spending on the system, how many orders they're executing. All of that is completely free and visible to our clients on the Lights On Network. And that's actually backed by some of the Vertica software that we've invested in. >> Yeah, so before we get into that, it sounds like your mission, really, is just great user experiences for the people that are on the network. Full stop. >> We do. So, one of the things that we invented about 10 years ago is called RTMS Timers. They're called Response Time Measurement System. And it started off as a way of us proving that clients are actually using the system, and now it's turned into more of a user outcomes. What we do is we collect 2.5 billion timers per day across all of our clients across the world. And every single one of those records goes to the Vertica platform. And then we've also developed a system on that which allows us in real time to go and see whether or not they're deviating from their normal. So we do baselines every hour of the week and then if they're deviating from those baselines, we can immediately call a service center and have them engage the client before they call in. >> So, Dan, I wonder if you could paint a picture. By the way, that's awesome. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your analytics environment. What does it look like? Maybe give us a sense of the scale. >> Okay. So, I've been describing how we operate, our remote hosted clients in the two Kansas City data centers, but all the software that we write, we also help our client hosted agents as well. Not only do we take care of what's going on at the Kansas City data center, but we do write software to ensure that all of clients are treated the same and we provide the same level of care and performance management across all those clients. So what we do is we have 90,000 agents that we have split across all these clients across the world. And every single hour, we're committing a billion rows to Vertica of operational data. So I talked a little bit about the RTMS timers, but we do things just like everyone else does for CPU, memory, Java Heap Stack. We can tell you how many concurrent users are on the system, I can tell you if there's an application that goes down unexpected, like a crash. I can tell you the response time from the network as most of us use Citrix at Cerner. And so what we do is we measure the amount of time it takes from the client side to PCs, it's sitting in the virtual data centers, sorry, in the hospitals, and then round trip to the Citrix servers that are sitting in the Kansas City data center. That's called the RTT, our round trip transactions. And what we've done is, over the last couple of years, what we've done is we've switched from just summarizing CPU and memory and all that high-level stuff, in order to go down to a user level. So, what are you doing, Dr. Smith, today? How many hours are you using the EMR? Have you experienced any slowness? Have you experienced any hourglass holding within your application? Have you experienced, unfortunately, maybe a crash? Have you experienced any slowness compared to your normal use case? And that's the step we've taken over the last few years, to go from summarization of high-level CPU memory, over to outcome metrics, which are what is really happening with a particular user. >> So, really granular views of how the system is being used and deep analytics on that. I wonder, go ahead, please. >> And, we weren't able to do that by summarizing things in traditional databases. You have to actually have the individual rows and you can't summarize information, you have to have individual metrics that point to exactly what's going on with a particular clinician. >> So, okay, the MPP architecture, the columnar store, the scalability of Vertica, that's what's key. That was my next question, let me take us back to the days of traditional RDBMS and then you brought in Vertica. Maybe you could give us a sense as to why, what that did for you, the before and after. >> Right. So, I'd been painting a picture going forward here about how traditionally, eight years ago, all we could do was summarize information. If CPU was going to go and jump up 8%, I could alarm the data center and say, hey, listen, CPU looks like it's higher, maybe an application's hanging more than it has been in the past. Things are a little slower, but I wouldn't be able to tell you who's affected. And that's where the whole thing has changed, when we brought Vertica in six years ago is that, we're able to take those 90,000 agents and commit a billion rows per hour operational data, and I can tell you exactly what's going on with each of our clinicians. Because you know, it's important for an entire domain to be healthy. But what about the 10 doctors that are experiencing frustration right now? If you're going to summarize that information and roll it up, you'll never know what those 10 doctors are experiencing and then guess what happens? They call the data center and complain, right? The squeaky wheels? We don't want that, we want to be able to show exactly who's experiencing a bad performance right now and be able to reach out to them before they call the help desk. >> So you're able to be proactive there, so you've gone from, Houston, we have a problem, we really can't tell you what it is, go figure it out, to, we see that there's an issue with these docs, or these users, and go figure that out and focus narrowly on where the problem is as opposed to trying to whack-a-mole. >> Exactly. And the other big thing that we've been able to do is corelation. So, we operate two gigantic data centers. And there's things that are shared, switches, network, shared storage, those things are shared. So if there is an issue that goes on with one of those pieces of equipment, it could affect multiple clients. Now that we have every row in Vertica, we have a new program in place called performance abnormality flags. And what we're able to do is provide a website in real time that goes through the entire stack from Citrix to network to database to back-end tier, all the way to the end-user desktop. And so if something was going to be related because we have a network switch going out of the data center or something's backing up slow, you can actually see which clients are on that switch, and, what we did five years ago before this, is we would deploy out five different teams to troubleshoot, right? Because five clients would call in, and they would all have the same problem. So, here you are having to spare teams trying to investigate why the same problem is happening. And now that we have all of the data within Vertica, we're able to show that in a real time fashion, through a very transparent dashboard. >> And so operational metrics throughout the stack, right? A game changer. >> It's very compact, right? I just label five different things, the stack from your end-user device all the way through the back-end to your database and all the way back. All that has to work properly, right? Including the network. >> How big is this, what are we talking about? However you measure it, terabytes, clusters. What can you share there? >> Sorry, you mean, the amount of data that we process within our data centers? >> Give us a fun fact. >> Absolute petabytes, yeah, for sure. And in Vertica right now we have two petabytes of data, and I purge it out every year, one year's worth of data within two different clusters. So we have to two different data centers I've been describing, what we've done is we've set Vertica up to be in both data centers, to be highly redundant, and then one of those is configured to do real-time analysis and corelation research, and then the other one is to provide service towards what I described earlier as our Lights On Network, so it's a very dedicated hardened cluster in one of our data centers to allow the Lights On Network to provide the transparency directly to our clients. So we want that one to be pristine, fast, and nobody touch it. As opposed to the other one, where, people are doing real-time, ad hoc queries, which sometimes aren't the best thing in the world. No matter what kind of database or how fast it is, people do bad things in databases and we just don't want that to affect what we show our clients in a transparent fashion. >> Yeah, I mean, for our audience, Vertica has always been aimed at these big, hairy, analytic problems, it's not for a tiny little data mart in a department, it's really the big scale problems. I wonder if I could ask you, so you guys, obviously, healthcare, with HIPAA and privacy, are you doing anything in the cloud, or is it all on-prem today? >> So, in the operational space that I manage, it's all on-premises, and that is changing. As I was describing earlier, we have an initiative to go to AWS and provide levels of service to countries like Sweden which does not want any operational data to leave that country's walls, whether it be operational data or whether it be PHI. And so, we have to be able to adapt into Vertia Eon Mode in order to provide the same services within Sweden. So obviously, Cerner's not going to go up and build a data center in every single country that requires us, so we're going to leverage our partnership with AWS to make this happen. >> Okay, so, I was going to ask you, so you're not running Eon Mode today, it's something that you're obviously interested in. AWS will allow you to keep the data locally in that region. In talking to a lot of practitioners, they're intrigued by this notion of being able to scale independently, storage from compute. They've said they wished that's a much more efficient way, I don't have to buy in chunks, if I'm out of storage, I don't have to buy compute, and vice-versa. So, maybe you could share with us what you're thinking, I know it's early days, but what's the logic behind the business case there? >> I think you're 100% correct in your assessment of taking compute away from storage. And, we do exactly what you say, we buy a server. And it has so much compute on it, and so much storage. And obviously, it's not scaled properly, right? Either storage runs out first or compute runs out first, but you're still paying big bucks for the entire server itself. So that's exactly why we're doing the POC right now for Eon Mode. And I sit on Vertica's TAB, the advisory board, and they've been doing a really good job of taking our requirements and listening to us, as to what we need. And that was probably number one or two on everybody's lists, was to separate storage from compute. And that's exactly what we're trying to do right now. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I've talked to some other customers that are on the customer advisory board. And Vertica is one of these companies that're pretty transparent about what goes on there. And I think that for the early adopters of Eon Mode there were some challenges with getting data into the new system, I know Vertica has been working on that very hard but you guys push Vertica pretty hard and from what I can tell, they listen. Your thoughts. >> They do listen, they do a great job. And even though the Big Data Conference is canceled, they're committed to having us go virtually to the CAD meeting on Monday, so I'm looking forward to that. They do listen to our requirements and they've been very very responsive. >> Nice. So, I wonder if you could give us some final thoughts as to where you want to take this thing. If you look down the road a year or two, what does success look like, Dan? >> That's a good question. Success means that we're a little bit more nimble as far as the different regions across the world that we can provide our services to. I want to do more corelation. I want to gather more information about what users are actually experiencing. I want to be able to have our phone never ring in our data center, I know that's a grand thought there. But I want to be able to look forward to measuring the data internally and reaching out to our clients when they have issues and then doing the proper corelation so that I can understand how things are intertwining if multiple clients are having an issue. That's the goal going forward. >> Well, in these trying times, during this crisis, it's critical that your operations are running smoothly. The last thing that organizations need right now, especially in healthcare, is disruption. So thank you for all the hard work that you and your teams are doing. I wish you and your family all the best. Stay safe, stay healthy, and thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> I really appreciate it, thanks for the opportunity. >> You're very welcome, and thank you, everybody, for watching, keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Covering Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>> From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in Austin, Texas for Pure Accelerate '19. And we're excited to be talking with another one of Pure's happy successful customers. We've got Scott Pedram, the storage architect from One Gas. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So One Gas. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what One Gas is, what regions you serve, and then dig into your role as a storage architect. >> Of course. So One Gas, we're a natural gas utility company. So we're the downstream, the inline. So we actually deliver the natural gas to our customers, residential and commercial. We operate across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and various regions including Austin. In my role as storage architect, I help, I mean, basically a one-man show. So design the storage, implement the storage, run the storage. And I also help out in other areas such as the servers, the DBAs, networking, kind of a little bit of everything. >> So you've been a Pure customer for about three years. We were talking before we went live. Give us an overview of your storage infrastructure, your IT environment three years ago, and what the impetus was to evaluate Pure. >> Sure. So we were previously an IBM storage shop. I had IBM SAN volume controller backed by DS 8000, FlashSystem 820s, Storwize V7000s, so different tiers of storage all being managed by VSPC. As is common, the warranty runs out on the DS 8000. So it's time to look at a forklift upgrade or whatever the case may be. I had a plan all in place to replace it with IBM, but we are a fully regulated utility company. So I did my due diligence and brought in some competitors. EMT and Pure Storage. Heard Pure's story, especially the Evergreen storage model, and the five and six year total cost of ownership was actually pretty close, but once you went beyond that, there was no contest. Pure won hands down. And again, as a utility company, we like predictable, flat costs. So the fact that we could do that and not have to have this multi-million dollar expense again in just another three or four years. >> So I got to ask you, so TCO, done a lot of TCO studies, and the biggest component of total cost of ownership is labor, humans. So presumably, you did a full TCO, you looked at it. I'm surprised to hear you say that the five-year TCO was about comparable because Pure is, the Kool-Aid injection says it's simpler. It's more modern. Wouldn't that save head count or at least FTE? >> It could if we were a more complex environment, but as it stood, there's me and one other guy kind of as my backup. So, you still have to have somebody to run it, right? >> So that's what I asked so sometimes CFO's will go, Wait a minute. If we're not going to reduce head count, I'm not going to accept that as part of the cost reduction. Is that what's going on here? Because we're going to shift labor to more high value activity so, oftentimes the CFO doesn't count that in his or her business case. Was that the case or did you find that because you're so small it really didn't matter in terms of the management complexity? I'm interested in your thoughts on that. >> We didn't background management complexity when we were calculating TCO. It was purely the cost to acquire the storage and then the maintenance. >> Oh, so there was no management cost? No human capital, okay. >> No. >> And so it's you and somebody else. >> Scott: Correct. >> Have you now spent less time managing the Pure than you did previously with the IBM? >> Oh, for sure. >> Okay. >> And when I first got it I was afraid, am I going to work myself out of a job? >> The Pure? >> 'Cause it was so easy. >> Okay, so, you had two FTE's managing storage. >> Scott: Yeah. >> What percent of your time, prior to Pure, did you spend managing storage versus doing other stuff? (Scott sighs) I mean a rough ballpark. >> Yeah, rough ballpark. >> Dave: Was it 50/50? >> I would say, I was maybe doing 60 to 70% doing just Pure storage before. And now it's 20? >> So you've gone from 60 to 70, let's call it 65% of your time was spent managing storage tuning, troubleshooting, provisioning LANs, provisioning more capacity, planning, all those things that, we love it. Down to 20%. >> Probably. >> Roughly. I'm not going to hold you to it, but. Well I guess we're live TV, so I will hold you to it. (Scott laughing) But that's a significant savings. You can calculate that over five years, right? Take your fully loaded costs and boom, that adds up. What have you done with that time? What are you now doing? I presume you're not just hanging out. >> No, my boss is watching. >> Publicly traded, regulated utility, somebody's watching right? >> No, of course not. No I've been able to be a lot more proactive. So helping out, like I said, with the server teams, the inward teams. Consulting them on looking further. What is our longterm goal or strategy? What's the five year plan, type of thing. Instead of just fighting fires all day. Or, you know, next week we have to deal with this performance issue that's going to be coming up. >> Dave: So you've been able to be more strategic. >> For sure. >> And one more question on this whole, there's intangibles there that everybody always overlooks, but actually when you live them they make a big difference. Has there been a quality effect? In other words, instead of putting out fires you're doing thing that are more strategic. Do you feel like you have better quality infrastructure? And does that affect your business? >> I would say better quality in the fact that it's more consistent. So we ended up sweeping the entire floor with all Pure Storage. So all of production and non-production, in our case, is all on Pure. So the consistency of the latency and the response times and the performance that you get out of the storage. There is no more performance problems. It doesn't exist. >> And in terms of workloads, I know you're running Splunk on FlashArray. Give us some picture of that infrastructure, the workloads that you're running on it. And the stakeholders I can imagine them in different departments and different functions within One Gas that are using this system and not even realizing it because it's just available, it's there. >> Before Splunk, real quick, we had one application, we went to Flash. They thought their processing was broken because it completed so quickly. (Lisa laughing) >> That's a good thought to have. >> Yeah. So they finished so fast they came back to us, it's broken, I'm like, no it's not. (he laughs) >> What's your use case with Splunk? >> With Splunk it started out as cybersecurity and that's kind of what brought it in, but it has since expanded to monitoring, analytics. We actually use it when we roll out our trucks to the field to ensure that we're meeting the SLAs. There's so many different areas where we use Splunk, I'd have to refer to my notes. >> So infrastructure ops has become this big thing, right? And automation and things of that nature? Or not quite there? >> Not so much automation yet. But we do have a plan, a project to start doing more automation. >> And other analytics, I presume? I mean, they're all about analytics, right? >> A lot of our application teams, like our web development team, they use Splunk a lot for their application monitoring and trying to be proactive on that. >> Thinking about the security use case. Security practitioners often tell us, well, we get inundated with incidents. We don't have the time to sort through them all. Does having Splunk on an all FlashArray, high performance all FlashArray, does it affect the response of the security team? Or how does it affect the business, the security side of the business? >> I'm not able to answer that directly, but I can say that I have seen them do a lot of select all type queries, where they're just searching for a needle in a haystack, type of thing. And previously when we had multi-tiered storage those queries took forever, but now that it's all Flash, it's really quick. >> So they spent more time waiting than they do now. I mean that could be a two edge sword. Maybe they more stuff to sift through now. (he laughs) That's somebody else's problem. >> Well the data security is critical because your dealing with customers' data, right? And almost every month we hear about data breaches in the public. Whether it's a bank, or it's a social media platform. Unfortunately they're becoming quite common. But when you're dealing with personal customer data that's a big concern. Some of the things we're hearing Pure talk about is what they're doing with data protection and data security. And also kind of this sift from not looking at data protection as an insurance policy as much as it's an asset because you have so much information, you're storing it for longer, more and more customers, more data. How is that that being reflected up the chain, even up your chain of command and to the executive folks in terms of being confident that what they have your customers data running on in those three states that you talked about, is on a very solid secure platform? >> Well, security, it requires multiple layers. So Pure having always-on encryption is a big help. So if we do have, you know, a failed module that has to be replaced. I don't have to worry about making sure that it's securely erased, destroyed, and all that. 'Cause without the encryption key it's virtually crypto erased. And then of course we have all the security agents on the servers and the applications and our security cyber team managers, all of that. >> And what about cloud? What do you do in cloud? What's the strategy? >> We do cloud where it makes sense. For instance ServiceNow and O365 we're customers to both of those. >> Dave: So SaaS stuff. >> And mostly SaaS. In my opinion doing cloud is doing a lift and shift. And using cloud as infrastructure as a service doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For us anyway. As a utility company we're very pro-capital. So if we just shift that to another provider that's all operational. >> Whereas, take ServiceNow for example and change the operational model. Right? And you had a clear business impact where it wasn't a lift an shift. It was a transformation really. >> Exactly. >> Where do you want to go with Pure and storage infrastructure? It's just like, I just want it to work. I want it to be rock solid, dirt cheap, highly available, you know, high performance, or are there things that you would like to see Pure do that can help drive your business? >> Well I think the announcement today of the FlashArray//C is what I'm probably most exited about, in that I've already asked my business partners to get me some pricing, some quotes on, can I use that for my backups as a back up target? Instead of, you know, the underlying SaaS datadisks. So that's exciting for me. The fact that it's going to be the same software that I'm used to, that's all a plus. >> How are you protecting your Flash arrays today? >> We're implementing Commvault right now So we do leverage Commvault. It's called IntelliSnap. So basically it does a Pure level snapshot and then we can mount that on our media agents. >> Okay, so, using FlashArray//C, that's the right model number, I think. So obviously you want to use Flash, if it's cost effective, for everything. If it's cheaper than spinning Disk why not use it? Do you see any advantage, in theory, for recovery speed? For sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you need to do a fast recovery, I mean, it's on Flash. But with what I'm looking most forward to though is even the ingest of the data, the initial backups. If there's a lot of, you know querying and trying to figure out what's changed and what's not, that can be a lot of disk thrashing on traditional spindle drives. >> So let's look into the future a little bit before we wrap here. You've been a Pure customer for three years now. Presuming you've done some upgrades and swap outs of controllers in that time? >> Not quite yet. In the coming months we will have our first ever green controller swap. I've actually had a failed controller. So effectively the same process. Where one controller's down and didn't have any issues with performance or, >> No downtime, no disruption. >> No downtime. Absolutely not. Even upgrades where they, you know, take one controller down and upgrade it. I'll do those during business hours. >> Are you comfortable with the, go ahead, sorry. >> Just because there's no performance degradation whatsoever. >> So you're obviously comfortable with the architecture. You seem like a pretty happy customer. Some of the critics will say, it's a duel controller architecture, that doesn't bother you? >> No, not at all. (he laughs) >> I had to ask with a straight face. What would you like to see Pure do? If Charlie G. and Carl are sitting right here, what's the one thing that I could do to make your life easier, what would it be? Besides cutting price, you can't say cut price. >> Yeah. You know what, that's a great question. I think what I would have been asking for, top of mind, would have been the lower tier, what they came out with today, the C. >> You know, another criticism from some of the competitors is they don't have tiering. And when you talk to Pure about it they go, oh, we don't need tiering, we don't believe in tiering. What are your thoughts as a practitioner? Would you want to have a tiered array, like high performance Flash, lower in the same array? Or is this not something that is necessary? >> I don't think so. I go back to the consistency. You know we have all of production on Flash now and it's, I don't have to worry about performance. Whereas before I was constantly having to monitor and manage you know, is all the right stuff on the right tier, and it was a headache. >> So automated tiering wasn't so automated? Is that a fair statement? >> It worked fairly well, but there were some cases where it didn't. >> Yeah. So you're better just throwing it at Flash and it'll take care of itself. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Cool. >> So you've got a foundation now that's going to allow One Gas to evolve continually and we look forward to hearing in the next year or so when you go through that first big evergreen upgrade, how that goes. But it sounds like you've made the right choice and the foundation that you've got is pretty strong. And so many other layers of the business are benefiting and they don't even know it. Because as you said before, on of the constituents thought something was broken, it was that fast. >> Correct. >> So well done on your decision. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Scott, for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what One Gas has been doing how you're succeeding and we look forward to hearing more of your success. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you, thanks. >> Scott: Appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Pure Accelerate '19. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront in Seattle, Washington, it's absolutely gorgeous here the last couple of days. We're here for the AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the education event, now they have a whole separate track for nonprofits, and what's really cool about nonprofits is these people, these companies are attacking very, very big, ugly problems. It's not advertising, it's not click here and get something, these are big things, and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. You probably hear a lot about it, it's way bigger than I ever thought it was, and we're really excited to have an expert in the field that, again, is using the power of AWS technology as well as their organization to help fight this cause. And we're excited to have Brad Myles, he is the CEO of Polaris and just coming off a keynote, we're hearing all about your keynote. So Brad, first off, welcome. >> Yeah, well thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so Polaris, give us a little bit about kind of what's the mission for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so Polaris, we are a nonprofit that works full-time on this issue. We both combat the issue and try to get to long-term solutions, and respond to the issue and restore freedom to survivors by operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the United States, so, it's part kind of big data and long-term solutions, and it's part responding to day-to-day cases that break across the country every day. >> Right, in preparing for this interview and spending some time on the site there was just some amazing things that just jump right off the page. 24.9 million people are involved in this. Is that just domestically here in the States, or is that globally? >> That's a global number. So when you're thinking about human trafficking, think about three buckets. The first bucket is any child, 17 or younger, being exploited in the commercial sex trade. The second bucket is any adult, 18 or over, who's in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion. And the third bucket is anyone forced to work in some sort of other labor or service industry by force, fraud, or coercion. So you've got the child sex trafficking bucket, you've got the adult sex trafficking bucket, and then you've got all the labor trafficking bucket, right? You add up those three buckets globally, that's the number that the International Labour Organization came out and said 25 million around the world are those three buckets in a given year. >> Right, and I think again, going through the website, some of the just crazy discoveries, it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand that that's part of the problem, the adult sex trafficking. But you had like 25 different human trafficking business models, I forget the term that was used, for a whole host of things well beyond just the sex trade. It's a very big and unfortunately mature industry. >> Totally, yeah, so we, so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for is operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The National Human Trafficking Hotline leads to having a giant data set on trafficking, it's 50,000 cases of trafficking that we've worked on. So then we analyzed that data set and came to the breakthrough conclusion that there are these 25 major forms, and almost any single call that we get in to the National Hotline is going to be one of those 25 types. And once you know that then the problem doesn't seem so overwhelming, it's not, you know, thousands of different types, it's these 25 things, so, it's 18 labor trafficking types and seven sex trafficking types. And it enables a little bit more granular analysis than just saying sex trafficking or labor trafficking which is kind of too broad and general. Let's get really specific about it, we're talking about these late night janitors, or we're talking about these people in agriculture, or we're talking about these women in illicit massage businesses. It enables the conversation to get more focused. >> Right, it's so interesting right, that's such a big piece of the big data trend that we see all over the place, right? It used to be, you know, you had old data, a sample of old data that you took an aggregate of and worked off the averages. And now, because of big data, and the other tools that we have today, now actually you can work on individual cases. So as you look at it from a kind of a big data point of view, what are some of the things that you're able to do? And that lead directly to, everyone's talking about the presentation that you just got off of, in terms of training people to look for specific behaviors that fit the patterns, so you can start to break some of these cases. >> Exactly, so, I think that the human trafficking field risks being too generic. So if you're just saying to the populace, "Look for trafficking, look for someone who's scared." People are like, that's not enough, that's too vague, it's kind of slipping through my fingers. But if you say, "In this particular type of trafficking, "with traveling magazine sales crews, "if someone comes to your door "trying to sell you a magazine with these specific signs." So now instead of talking about general red flag indicators across all 25 types, we're coming up with red flag indicators for each of the 25 types. So instead of speaking in aggregate we're getting really specific, it's almost like specific gene therapy. And the data analysis on our data set is enabling that to happen, which makes the trafficking field smarter, we could get smarter about where victims are recruited from, we could get smarter about intervention points, and we could get smarter about where survivors might have a moment to kind of get help and get out. >> Right, so I got to dig into the magazine salesperson, 'cause I think we've all had the kid-- >> Brad: Have you had a kid come to you yet? >> Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' but their papers are kind of torn up, and they've got their little certificate, certification. How does that business model work? >> Yeah, so that's one of the 25 types, they're called mag crews. There was a New York Times article written by a journalist named Ian Urbina who really studied this and it came out a number of years ago. Then they made a movie about it called "American Honey," if you watch with a number of stars. But essentially this is a very long-standing business model, it goes back 30 or 40 years of like the door-to-door salesperson, and like trying to win sympathy from people going to door-to-door sales. And then these kind of predatory groups decided to prey on disaffected U.S. citizen youth that are kind of bored, or are kind of working a low-wage job. And so they go up to these kids and they say, "Tired of working at the Waffle House? "Well why don't you join our crew and travel the country, "and party every night, and you'll be outdoors every day, "and it's coed, you get to hang out with girls, "you get to hang out with guys, "we'll drink every night and all you have to do "is sell magazines during the day." And it's kind of this alluring pitch, and then the crews turn violent, and there's sometimes quotas on the crew, there's sometimes coercion on the crew. We get a lot of calls from kids who are abandoned by the crew. Where the crew says, "If you act up "or if you don't adhere to our rules, "we'll just drive away and leave you in this city." >> Wherever. >> Is the crews are very mobile they have this whole language, they call it kind of jumping territory. So they'll drive from like Kansas City to a nearby state, and we'll get this call from this kid, they're like, "I'm totally homeless, my crew just left me behind "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." So a lot of people, when they think of human trafficking they're not thinking of like U.S. citizen kids knocking on your door. And we're not saying that every single magazine crew is human trafficking, but we are saying that if there's force, and coercion, and fraud, and lies, and people feel like they can't leave, and people feel like they're being coerced to work, this is actually a form of human trafficking of U.S. citizen youth which is not very well-known but we hear about it on the Hotline quite a lot. >> Right, so then I wonder if you could tell us more about the Delta story 'cause most of the people that are going to be watching this interview weren't here today to hear your keynote. So I wonder if you can explain kind of that whole process where you identified a specific situation, you train people that are in a position to make a difference and in fact they're making a big difference. >> Yeah. So the first big report that we released based on the Hotline data was the 25 types, right? We decided to do a followup to that called Intersections, where we reached out to survivors of trafficking and we said, "Can you tell us about "the legitimate businesses that your trafficker used "while you were being trafficked?" And all these survivors were like, "Yeah, sure, "we'll tell you about social media, "we'll tell you about transportation, "we'll tell you about banks, "we'll tell you about hotels." And so we then identified these six major industries that traffickers use that are using legitimate companies, like rental car companies, and airlines, and ridesharing companies. So then we reached out to a number of those corporate partners and said, "You don't want this stuff on your services, right?" And Delta really just jumped at this, they were just like, "We take this incredibly seriously. "We want our whole workforce trained. "We don't want any trafficker to feel like "they can kind of get away with it on our flights. "We want to be a leader in transportation." And then they began taking all these steps. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, took it very seriously. They launched a whole corporate-wide taskforce across departments, they hosted listening sessions with survivor leaders so survivors could coach them, and then they started launching this whole strategy around training their flight attendants, and then training their whole workforce, and then supporting the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they made some monetary donations to Polaris. We get situations on the Hotline where someone is in a dangerous situation and needs to be flown across the country, like an escape flight almost, and Delta donated SkyMiles for us to give to survivors who are trying to flee a situation, who needs a flight. They can go to an airport and get on a flight for free that will fly them across the country. So it's almost like a modern day Underground Railroad, kind of flying people on planes. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they've just been an amazing partner, and they even then took the bold step of saying, "Well let's air a PSA on our flights "so the customer base can see this." So when you're on a Delta flight you'll see this PSA about human trafficking. And it just kept going and going and going. So it's now been about a five-year partnership and lots of great work together. >> And catching bad guys. >> Yeah, I mean, their publicity of the National Human Trafficking Hotline has led to a major increase in calls. Airport signage, more employees looking for it, and I actually do believe that the notion of flying, if you're going to be a trafficker, flying on a Delta flight is now a much more harrowing experience because everyone's kind of trained, and eyes and ears are looking. So you're going to pivot towards another airline that hasn't done that training yet, which now speaks to the need that once one member of an industry steps up, all different members of the industry need to follow suit. So we're encouraging a lot of the other airlines to do similar training and we're seeing some others do that, which is great. >> Yeah, and how much of it was from the CEO, or did he kind of come on after the fact, or was there kind of a champion catalyst that was pushing this through the organization, or is that often the case, or what do you find in terms of adoption of a company to help you on your mission? >> That's a great question. I mean, the bigger picture here is trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? A group of small nonprofits and cops are not going to solve it on their own. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, because the big businesses have the resources, they have the brand, they have the customer base, they have the scale to make it a fair fight, right? So in the past few years we're seeing big businesses really enter the fight against trafficking, whether or not that's big data companies like AWS, whether or not that's social media companies, Facebook, whether or not that's hotel companies, like Wyndham and Marriott, airlines like Delta. And that's great because now the big hitters are joining the trafficking fight, and it happens in different ways, sometimes it's CEO-led, I think in the case of Delta, Ed Bastian really does take this issue very seriously, he was hosting events on this at his home, he's hosted roundtables of other CEOs in the Atlanta area like UPS, and Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot, and Coca-Cola, all those Atlanta-based CEOs know each other well, he'll host roundtables about that, and I think it was kind of CEO-led. But in other corporations it's one die hard champion who might be like a mid-level employee, or a director, who just says, "We really got to do this," and then they drive more CEO attention. So we've seen it happen both ways, whether or not it's top-down, or kind of middle-driven-up. But the big picture is if we could get some of the biggest corporations in the world to take this issue seriously, to ask questions about who they contract with, to ask questions about what's in their supply chain, to educate their workforce, to talk about this in front of their millions of customers, it just puts the fight against trafficking on steroids than a group of nonprofits would be able to do alone. So I think we're in a whole different realm of the fight now that business is at the table. >> And is that pretty much your strategy in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? Is to execute via a lot of these well-resourced companies that are at this intersection point, I think that's a really interesting way to address the problem. >> Yeah, well, it's back to the 25 types, right? So the strategies depend on type. Like, I don't think big businesses being at the table are necessarily going to solve magazine sales crews, right? They're not necessarily going to solve begging on the street. But they can solve late night janitors that sometimes are trafficked, where lots of big companies are contracting with late night janitorial crews, and they come at 2:00 a.m., and they buff the floors, and they kind of change out the trash, and no one's there in the office building to see those workers, right? And so asking different questions of who you procure contracts with, to say, "Hey, before we contract with you guys, "we're going to need to ask you a couple questions "about where these workers got here, "and what these workers thought they were coming to do, "and we need to ID these workers." The person holding the purse strings, who's buying that contract, has the power to demand the conditions of that contract. Especially in agriculture and large retail buyers. So I think that big corporations, it's definitely part of the strategy for certain types, it's not going to solve other types of trafficking. But let's say banks and financial institutions, if they start asking different questions of who's banking with them, just like they've done with terrorism financing they could wipe out trafficking financing, could actually play a gigantic role in changing the course of how that type of trafficking exists. >> So we could talk all day, I'm sure, but we don't have time, but I'm just curious, what should people do, A, if they just see something suspicious, you know, reach out to one of these kids selling magazines, or begging on the street, or looking suspicious at an airport, so, A, that's the question. And then two, if people want to get involved more generically, whether in their company, or personally, how do they get involved? >> Yeah, so there are thousands of nonprofit groups across the country, Polaris is in touch with 3,000 of them. We're one of thousands. I would say find an organization in your area that you care about and volunteer, get involved, donate, figure out what they need. Our website is polarisproject.org, we have a national Referral Directory of organizations across the country, and so that's one way. The other way is the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the number, 1-888-373-7888. The Hotline depends on either survivors calling in directly as a lifeline, or community members calling in who saw something suspicious. So we get lots of calls from people who were getting their nails done, and the woman was crying and talking about how she's not being paid, or people who are out to eat as a family and they see something in the restaurant, or people who are traveling and they see something that doesn't make, kind of, quite sense in a hotel or an airport. So we need an army of eyes and ears calling tips into the National Human Trafficking Hotline and identifying these cases, and we need survivors to know the number themselves too so that they can call in on their own behalf. We need to respond to the problem in the short-term, help get these people connected to help, and then we need to do the long-term solutions which involves data, and business, and changing business practice, and all of that. But I do think that if people want to kind of educate themselves, polarisproject.org, there are some kind of meta-organizations, there's a group called Freedom United that's kind of starting a grassroots movement against trafficking, freedomunited.org. So lots of great organizations to look into, and this is a bipartisan issue, this is an issue that most people care about, it's one of the top headlines in the newspapers every day these days. And it's something that I think people in this country naturally care about because it references kind of the history of chattel slavery, and some of those forms of slavery that morphed but never really went away, and we're still fighting that same fight today. >> In terms of, you know, we're here at AWS IMAGINE, and they're obviously putting a lot of resources behind this, Teresa Carlson and the team. How are you using them, have you always been on AWS? Has that platform enabled you to accomplish your mission better? >> Yeah, oh for sure, I mean, Polaris crunches over 60 terabytes of data per day, of just like the computing that we're doing, right? >> Jeff: And what types of data are you crunching? >> It's the data associated with Hotline calls, we collect up to 150 variables on each Hotline call. The Hotline calls come in, we have this data set of 50,000 cases of trafficking with very sensitive data, and the protections of that data, the cybersecurity associated with that data, the storage of that data. So since 2017, Polaris has been in existence since 2002, so we're in our 17th year now, but starting three years ago in 2017 we started really partnering with AWS, where we're migrating more of our data onto AWS, building some AI tools with AWS to help us process Hotline calls more efficiently. And then talking about potentially moving our, all of our data storage onto AWS so that we don't have our own server racks in our office, we still need to go through a number of steps to get there. But having AWS at the table, and then talking about the Impact Computing team and this, like, real big data crunching of like millions of trafficking cases globally, we haven't even started talking about that yet but I think that's like a next stage. So for now, it's getting our data stronger, more secure, building some of those AI bots to help us with our work, and then potentially considering us moving completely serverless, and all of those things are conversations we're having with AWS, and thrilled that AWS is making this an issue to the point that it was prioritized and featured at this conference, which was a big deal, to get in front of the whole audience and do a keynote, and we're very, very grateful for that. >> And you mentioned there's so many organizations involved, are you guys doing data aggregation, data consolidation, sharing, I mean there must be with so many organizations, that adds a lot of complexity, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. Are you working towards some kind of unification around that, or how does that look in the future? >> We would love to get to the point where different organizations are sharing their data set. We'd love to get to the point where different organizations are using, like, a shared case management tool, and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. There are different organizations, like, Thorn is doing some amazing big data-- >> Jeff: Right, we've had Thorn on a couple of times. >> How do we merge Polaris's data set with Thorn's data set? We're not doing that yet, right? I think we're only doing baby steps. But I think the AWS platform could enable potentially a merger of Thorn's data with Polaris's data in some sort of data lake, right? So that's a great idea, we would love to get to that. I think the field isn't there yet. The field has kind of been, like, tech-starved for a number of years, but in the past five years has made a lot of progress. The field is mostly kind of small shelters and groups responding to survivors, and so this notion of like infusing the trafficking field with data is somewhat of a new concept, but it's enabling us to think much bigger about what's possible. >> Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, really thankful for what you're doing for a whole lot of people that we don't see, or maybe we see and we're not noticing, so thank you for that, and uh. >> Absolutely. >> Look forward to catching up when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, my pleasure. He's Brad, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS IMAGINE Nonprofits, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019 brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise, and we're here at the MIT CDOIQ Conference, Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference. It is the 13th year here at the Tang building. We've outgrown this building and have to move next year. It's fire marshal full. Gokula Mishra is here. He is the Senior Director of Global Data and Analytics and Supply Chain-- >> Formerly. Former, former Senior Director. >> Former! I'm sorry. It's former Senior Director of Global Data Analytics and Supply Chain at McDonald's. Oh, I didn't know that. I apologize my friend. Well, welcome back to theCUBE. We met when you were at Oracle doing data. So you've left that, you're on to your next big thing. >> Yes, thinking through it. >> Fantastic, now let's start with your career. You've had, so you just recently left McDonald's. I met you when you were at Oracle, so you cut over to the dark side for a while, and then before that, I mean, you've been a practitioner all your life, so take us through sort of your background. >> Yeah, I mean my beginning was really with a company called Tata Burroughs. Those days we did not have a lot of work getting done in India. We used to send people to U.S. so I was one of the pioneers of the whole industry, coming here and working on very interesting projects. But I was lucky to be working on mostly data analytics related work, joined a great company called CS Associates. I did my Master's at Northwestern. In fact, my thesis was intelligent databases. So, building AI into the databases and from there on I have been with Booz Allen, Oracle, HP, TransUnion, I also run my own company, and Sierra Atlantic, which is part of Hitachi, and McDonald's. >> Awesome, so let's talk about use of data. It's evolved dramatically as we know. One of the themes in this conference over the years has been sort of, I said yesterday, the Chief Data Officer role emerged from the ashes of sort of governance, kind of back office information quality compliance, and then ascended with the tailwind of the Big Data meme, and it's kind of come full circle. People are realizing actually to get value out of data, you have to have information quality. So those two worlds have collided together, and you've also seen the ascendancy of the Chief Digital Officer who has really taken a front and center role in some of the more strategic and revenue generating initiatives, and in some ways the Chief Data Officer has been a supporting role to that, providing the quality, providing the compliance, the governance, and the data modeling and analytics, and a component of it. First of all, is that a fair assessment? How do you see the way in which the use of data has evolved over the last 10 years? >> So to me, primarily, the use of data was, in my mind, mostly around financial reporting. So, anything that companies needed to run their company, any metrics they needed, any data they needed. So, if you look at all the reporting that used to happen it's primarily around metrics that are financials, whether it's around finances around operations, finances around marketing effort, finances around reporting if it's a public company reporting to the market. That's where the focus was, and so therefore a lot of the data that was not needed for financial reporting was what we call nowadays dark data. This is data we collect but don't do anything with it. Then, as the capability of the computing, and the storage, and new technologies, and new techniques evolve, and are able to handle more variety and more volume of data, then people quickly realize how much potential they have in the other data outside of the financial reporting data that they can utilize too. So, some of the pioneers leverage that and actually improved a lot in their efficiency of operations, came out with innovation. You know, GE comes to mind as one of the companies that actually leverage data early on, and number of other companies. Obviously, you look at today data has been, it's defining some of the multi-billion dollar company and all they have is data. >> Well, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. >> Exactly. >> Apple, I mean Apple obviously makes stuff, but those other companies, they're data companies. I mean largely, and those five companies have the highest market value on the U.S. stock exchange. They've surpassed all the other big leaders, even Berkshire Hathaway. >> So now, what is happening is because the market changes, the forces that are changing the behavior of our consumers and customers, which I talked about which is everyone now is digitally engaging with each other. What that does is all the experiences now are being captured digitally, all the services are being captured digitally, all the products are creating a lot of digital exhaust of data and so now companies have to pay attention to engage with their customers and partners digitally. Therefore, they have to make sure that they're leveraging data and analytics in doing so. The other thing that has changed is the time to decision to the time to act on the data inside that you get is shrinking, and shrinking, and shrinking, so a lot more decision-making is now going real time. Therefore, you have a situation now, you have the capability, you have the technology, you have the data now, you have to make sure that you convert that in what I call programmatic kind of data decision-making. Obviously, there are people involved in more strategic decision-making. So, that's more manual, but at the operational level, it's going more programmatic decision-making. >> Okay, I want to talk, By the way, I've seen a stat, I don't know if you can confirm this, that 80% of the data that's out there today is dark data or it's data that's behind a firewall or not searchable, not open to Google's crawlers. So, there's a lot of value there-- >> So, I would say that percent is declining over time as companies have realized the value of data. So, more and more companies are removing the silos, bringing those dark data out. I think the key to that is companies being able to value their data, and as soon as they are able to value their data, they are able to leverage a lot of the data. I still believe there's a large percent still not used or accessed in companies. >> Well, and of course you talked a lot about data monetization. Doug Laney, who's an expert in that topic, we had Doug on a couple years ago when he, just after, he wrote Infonomics. He was on yesterday. He's got a very detailed prescription as to, he makes strong cases as to why data should be valued like an asset. I don't think anybody really disagrees with that, but then he gave kind of a how-to-do-it, which will, somewhat, make your eyes bleed, but it was really well thought out, as you know. But you talked a lot about data monetization, you talked about a number of ways in which data can contribute to monetization. Revenue, cost reduction, efficiency, risk, and innovation. Revenue and cost is obvious. I mean, that's where the starting point is. Efficiency is interesting. I look at efficiency as kind of a doing more with less but it's sort of a cost reduction, but explain why it's not in the cost bucket, it's different. >> So, it is first starts with doing what we do today cheaper, better, faster, and doing more comes after that because if you don't understand, and data is the way to understand how your current processes work, you will not take the first step. So, to take the first step is to understand how can I do this process faster, and then you focus on cheaper, and then you focus on better. Of course, faster is because of some of the market forces and customer behavior that's driving you to do that process faster. >> Okay, and then the other one was risk reduction. I think that makes a lot of sense here. Actually, let me go back. So, one of the key pieces of it, of efficiency is time to value. So, if you can compress the time, or accelerate the time and you get the value that means more cash in house faster, whether it's cost reduction or-- >> And the other aspect you look at is, can you automate more of the processes, and in that way it can be faster. >> And that hits the income statement as well because you're reducing headcount cost of your, maybe not reducing headcount cost, but you're getting more out of different, out ahead you're reallocating them to more strategic initiatives. Everybody says that but the reality is you hire less people because you just automated. And then, risk reduction, so the degree to which you can lower your expected loss. That's just instead thinking in insurance terms, that's tangible value so certainly to large corporations, but even midsize and small corporations. Innovation, I thought was a good one, but maybe you could use an example of, give us an example of how in your career you've seen data contribute to innovation. >> So, I'll give an example of oil and gas industry. If you look at speed of innovation in the oil and gas industry, they were all paper-based. I don't know how much you know about drilling. A lot of the assets that goes into figuring out where to drill, how to drill, and actually drilling and then taking the oil or gas out, and of course selling it to make money. All of those processes were paper based. So, if you can imagine trying to optimize a paper-based innovation, it's very hard. Not only that, it's very, very by itself because it's on paper, it's in someone's drawer or file. So, it's siloed by design and so one thing that the industry has gone through, they recognize that they have to optimize the processes to be better, to innovate, to find, for example, shale gas was a result output of digitizing the processes because otherwise you can't drill faster, cheaper, better to leverage the shale gas drilling that they did. So, the industry went through actually digitizing a lot of the paper assets. So, they went from not having data to knowingly creating the data that they can use to optimize the process and then in the process they're innovating new ways to drill the oil well cheaper, better, faster. >> In the early days of oil exploration in the U.S. go back to the Osage Indian tribe in northern Oklahoma, and they brilliantly, when they got shuttled around, they pushed him out of Kansas and they negotiated with the U.S. government that they maintain the mineral rights and so they became very, very wealthy. In fact, at one point they were the wealthiest per capita individuals in the entire world, and they used to hold auctions for various drilling rights. So, it was all gut feel, all the oil barons would train in, and they would have an auction, and it was, again, it was gut feel as to which areas were the best, and then of course they evolved, you remember it used to be you drill a little hole, no oil, drill a hole, no oil, drill a hole. >> You know how much that cost? >> Yeah, the expense is enormous right? >> It can vary from 10 to 20 million dollars. >> Just a giant expense. So, now today fast-forward to this century, and you're seeing much more sophisticated-- >> Yeah, I can give you another example in pharmaceutical. They develop new drugs, it's a long process. So, one of the initial process is to figure out what molecules this would be exploring in the next step, and you could have thousand different combination of molecules that could treat a particular condition, and now they with digitization and data analytics, they're able to do this in a virtual world, kind of creating a virtual lab where they can test out thousands of molecules. And then, once they can bring it down to a fewer, then the physical aspect of that starts. Think about innovation really shrinking their processes. >> All right, well I want to say this about clouds. You made the statement in your keynote that how many people out there think cloud is cheaper, or maybe you even said cheap, but cheaper I inferred cheaper than an on-prem, and so it was a loaded question so nobody put their hand up they're afraid, but I put my hand up because we don't have any IT. We used to have IT. It was a nightmare. So, for us it's better but in your experience, I think I'm inferring correctly that you had meant cheaper than on-prem, and certainly we talked to many practitioners who have large systems that when they lift and shift to the cloud, they don't change their operating model, they don't really change anything, they get a bill at the end of the month, and they go "What did this really do for us?" And I think that's what you mean-- >> So what I mean, let me make it clear, is that there are certain use cases that cloud is and, as you saw, that people did raise their hand saying "Yeah, I have use cases where cloud is cheaper." I think you need to look at the whole thing. Cost is one aspect. The flexibility and agility of being able to do things is another aspect. For example, if you have a situation where your stakeholder want to do something for three weeks, and they need five times the computing power, and the data that they are buying from outside to do that experiment. Now, imagine doing that in a physical war. It's going to take a long time just to procure and get the physical boxes, and then you'll be able to do it. In cloud, you can enable that, you can get GPUs depending on what problem we are trying to solve. That's another benefit. You can get the fit for purpose computing environment to that and so there are a lot of flexibility, agility all of that. It's a new way of managing it so people need to pay attention to the cost because it will add to the cost. The other thing I will point out is that if you go to the public cloud, because they make it cheaper, because they have hundreds and thousands of this canned CPU. This much computing power, this much memory, this much disk, this much connectivity, and they build thousands of them, and that's why it's cheaper. Well, if your need is something that's very unique and they don't have it, that's when it becomes a problem. Either you need more of those and the cost will be higher. So, now we are getting to the IOT war. The volume of data is growing so much, and the type of processing that you need to do is becoming more real-time, and you can't just move all this bulk of data, and then bring it back, and move the data back and forth. You need a special type of computing, which is at the, what Amazon calls it, adds computing. And the industry is kind of trying to design it. So, that is an example of hybrid computing evolving out of a cloud or out of the necessity that you need special purpose computing environment to deal with new situations, and all of it can't be in the cloud. >> I mean, I would argue, well I guess Microsoft with Azure Stack was kind of the first, although not really. Now, they're there but I would say Oracle, your former company, was the first one to say "Okay, we're going to put the exact same infrastructure on prem as we have in the public cloud." Oracle, I would say, was the first to truly do that-- >> They were doing hybrid computing. >> You now see Amazon with outposts has done the same, Google kind of has similar approach as Azure, and so it's clear that hybrid is here to stay, at least for some period of time. I think the cloud guys probably believe that ultimately it's all going to go to the cloud. We'll see it's going to be a long, long time before that happens. Okay! I'll give you last thoughts on this conference. You've been here before? Or is this your first one? >> This is my first one. >> Okay, so your takeaways, your thoughts, things you might-- >> I am very impressed. I'm a practitioner and finding so many practitioners coming from so many different backgrounds and industries. It's very, very enlightening to listen to their journey, their story, their learnings in terms of what works and what doesn't work. It is really invaluable. >> Yeah, I tell you this, it's always a highlight of our season and Gokula, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, Dave Vellante. Paul Gillin is in the house. You're watching theCUBE from MIT. Be right back! (upbeat techno music)

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M. I. T. Chief Data officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M. I. T. In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody You're watching The Cube, the Leader and Live Tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, and it's my pleasure to introduce Matt Kobe, who's the vice president of business strategy Analytics of Chicago Bulls. We love talking sports. We love talking data. Matt. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem getting a date. So talk about >> your role. Is the head of analytics for the Bulls? >> Sure. So I work exclusively on the business side of the operation. So we have a separate team that those the basketball side, which is kind of your players stuff. But on the business side, um, what we're focused on is really two things. One is being essentially internal consultants for the rest of the customer facing functions. So we work a lot with ticketing, allow its sponsorship, um, marketing digital, all of those folks that engage with our customer base and then on the backside back end of it, we're building out the technical infrastructure for the organization right. So everything from data warehouse to C. R M to email marketing All of that sits with my team. And so we were a lot of hats, which is exciting. But at the end of the day, we're trying to use data to enhance the customer and fan experience. Um and that's our aim. And that's what we're driving towards >> success in sports. In a larger respect. It's come down to don't be offended by this. Who's got the best geeks? So now your side of the house is not about like you say, player performance about the business performances. But that's it. That's a big part of getting the best players. I mean, if it's successful and all the nuances of the N B, A salary cap and everything else, but I think there is one, and so that makes it even more important. But you're helping fund. You know that in various ways, but so are the other two teams that completely separate. Is there a Chinese wall between them? Are you part of the sort of same group? >> Um, we're pretty separate. So the basketball folks do their thing. The business folks do their thing from an analytic standpoint. We meet and we collaborate on tools and other methods of actually doing the analysis. But in terms of, um, the analysis itself, there is a little bit of separation there, and mainly that is from priority standpoint. Obviously, the basketball stuff is the most important stuff. And so if we're working on both sides that we'd always be doing the basketball stuff and the business stuff needs to get done, >> drag you into exactly okay. But which came first? The chicken or the egg was It was the sort of post Moneyball activity applied to the N B. A. And I want to ask you a question about that. And then somebody said, Hey, we should do this for the business side. Or was the business side of sort of always there? >> I think I think, the business side and probably the last 5 to 7 years you've really seen it grown. So if you look at the N. B. A. I've been with the Bulls for five years. If you look at the N. B. A. 78 years ago, there was a handful of Business analytics teams and those those teams had one or two people at him. Now every single team in the NBA has some sort of business analytics team, and the average staff is seven. So my staff is six full time folks pushed myself, so we'll write it right at the average. And I think what you've seen is everything has become more complex in sports. Right? If you look at ticketing, you've got all the secondary markets. You have all this data flowing in, and they need someone to make sense of all that data. If you look at sponsorship sponsorship, his transition from selling a sign that sits on the side of the court for these truly integrated partnerships, where our partners are coming to us and saying, What do we get out of? This was our return. And so you're seeing a lot more part lot more collaboration between analytics and sponsorship to go back to those partners and say, Hey, here's what we delivered And so I think you it started on the basketball side, certainly because that's that's where the, you know that is the most important piece. But it quickly followed on the business side because they saw the value that that type of thinking can bring in the business. >> So I know this is not, you know, your swim lane, but But, you know, the lore of Billy Beane and Moneyball and all that, a sort of the starting point for sports analytics. Is that Is that Is that a fair characterization? Yeah. I mean, was that Was that really the main spring? >> I think it It probably started even before that. I think if you have got to see Billy being at the M I t Sports Analytics conference and him thought he always references kind of Bill James is first, and so I think it started. Baseball was I wouldn't say the easiest place to start, But it was. It's a one versus one, right? It's pitcher versus batter. In a lot of cases, basketball is a little bit more fluid. It's a team. Sport is a little harder, but I think as technology has advanced, there's been more and more opportunities to do the analytics on the basketball side and on the business side. I think what you're seeing is this huge. What we've heard the first day and 1/2 here, this huge influx of data, not nearly to the levels of the MasterCard's and others of the world. But as more and more things moved to the mobile phone, I think you're going to see this huge influx of data on the business side, and you're going to need the same systems in the same sort of approach to tackle it. >> S O. Bill James is the ultimate sports geek, and he's responsible for all these stats that, no, none of us understand. He's why we don't pay attention to batting average anymore. Of course, I still do. So let's talk about the business side of things. If you think about the business of baseball, you know it's all about maximizing the gate. Yeah, there's there's some revenue, a lot of revenue course from TV. But it's not like football, which is dominated by the by the TV. Basketball, I think, is probably a mix right. You got 80 whatever 82 game season, so filling up the stadium is important. Obviously, N v A has done a great job of of really getting it right. Free agency is like, fascinating. Now >> it's 12 months a year >> scored way. Talk about the NBA all the time and of course, you know, people like celebrities like LeBron have certainly helped, and now a whole batch of others. But what's the money side of the n ba look like? Where's the money coming from? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you certainly have broadcast right, but in many ways, like national broadcast sort of takes care of it itself. In some ways, from the standpoint of my team, doesn't have a lot of control over national broadcast money. That's a league level thing. And so the things that we have control over the two big buckets are ticketing and sponsorship. Those those are the two big buckets of revenue that my team spends a lot of time on. Ticketing is, is one that is important from the standpoint, as you say, which is like, How do we fill the building right? We've got 41 home game, supposed three preseason games. We got 44 events a year. Our goal is to fill the building for all 44 of those events. We do a pretty good job of doing it, but that has cascading effects into other revenue streams. Right, As you think about concessions and merchandise and sponsorship, it's a lot easier to spell spot cell of sponsorship when you're building is full, then if you're building isn't full. And so our focus is on. How do we? How do we fill the building in the most efficient way possible? And as you have things like the secondary market and people have access to tickets in different ways than they did 10 to 15 years ago, I think that becomes increasingly complex. Um, but that's the fun area that's like, That's where we spend a lot of time. There's the pricing, There's inventory management. It's a lot of, you know, is you look a traditional cpg. There's there's some of those same principles being applied, which is how do you are you looking airline right there? They're selling a plane. It's an asset you have to fill. We have ah, building. That's an asset we have to fill, and how do we fill it in the most optimal way? >> So the idea of surge pricing demand supply, But so several years ago, the Red Sox went to a tiered pricing. You guys do the same If the Sox are playing Kansas City Royals tickets way cheaper than if they're playing the Yankees. You guys do a similar. So >> we do it for single game tickets. So far are season ticket holders. It's the same price for every game, but on the price for primary tickets for single games, right? So if we're playing, you know this year will be the Clippers and the Lakers. That price is going to be much more expensive, so we dynamically price on a game to game basis. But our season ticket holders pay this. >> Why don't you do it for the season ticket holders? Um, just haven't gone there yet. >> Yeah, I mean, there's some teams have, right, so there's a few different approaches you convey. Lovely price. Those tickets, I think, for for us, the there's in years past. In the last few years, in particular, there's been a couple of flagship games, and then every other game feels similar. I think this will be the first year where you have 8 to 10 teams that really have a shot at winning the title, and so I think you'll see a more balanced schedule. Um, and so we've We've talked about it a lot. We just haven't gone to that made that move yet? >> Well, a season ticket holder that shares his tickets with seven other guys with red sauce. You could buy a BMW. You share the tickets, so but But I would love it if they didn't do the tiered. Pricing is a season ticket holder, so hope you hold off a while, but I don't know. It could maximize revenues if the Red Sox that was probably not a stupid thing is they're smart people. What about the sponsorships? Is fascinating about the partners looking for our ally. How are you measuring that? You're building your forging a tighter relationship, obviously, with the sponsors in these partners. Yeah, what's that are? Why look like it's >> measured? A variety of relies, largely based on the assets that they deliver. But I think every single partner we talk to these days, I also leave the sponsorship team. So I oversee. It's It's rare in sports, but I stayed over business strategy and Alex and sponsorship team. Um, it's not my title, but in practice, that's what I do. And I think everyone we talked to wants digital right? They want we've got over 25,000,000 social media followers with the Bulls, right? We've got 19,000,000 on Facebook alone. And so sponsors see those numbers and they know that we can deliver impression. They know we can deliver engagement and they want access to those channels. And so, from a return on, I always call a return on objectives, right? Return on investment is a little bit tricky, but return on objectives is if we're trying to reel brand awareness, we're gonna go back to them and say, Here's how many people came to our arena and saw your logo and saw the feature that you had on the scoreboard. If you're on our social media channels or a website, here's the number of impressions you got. Here is the number of engagements you got. I think where we're at now is Maura's Bad Morris. Still better, right? Everyone wants the big numbers. I think where you're starting to see it move, though, is that more isn't always better. We want the right folks engaging with our brands, and that's really what we're starting to think about is if you get 10,000,000 impressions, but they're 10,000,000 impressions to the wrong group of potential customers, that's not terribly helpful. for a brand. We're trying to work with our brands to reach the right demographics that they want to reach in order to actually build that brand awareness they want to build. >> What, What? Your primary social channels. Twitter, Obviously. >> So every platform has a different purpose way. Have Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Snapchat. We're in a week. We bow in in China and you know, every platform has a different function. Twitter's obviously more real time news. Um, you know the timeline stuff, it falls off really quick. Instagram is really the artistic piece of it on, and then Facebook is a blend of both, and so that's kind of how we deploy our channels. We have a whole social team that generates content and pushes that content out. But those are the channels we use and those air incredibly valuable. Now what you're starting to see is those channels are changing very rapidly, based on their own set of algorithms, of how they deliver content of fans. And so we're having to continue to adapt to those changing environments in those social >> show impressions. In the term, impressions varies by various platforms. So so I know. I know I'm more familiar with Twitter impressions. They have the definition. It's not just somebody who might have seen it. It's somebody that they believe actually spent a few seconds looking at. They have some algorithm to figure that out. Yeah. Is that a metric that you finding your brands are are buying into, for example? >> Yeah. I mean, I think certainly there they view it's kind of the old, you know, when you bought TV ads, it's how many households. So my commercial right, it's It's a similar type of metric of how many eyeballs saw a piece of content that we put out. I think we're the metrics. More people are starting to care about his engagements, which is how many of you actually engaged with that piece of content, whether it's a like a common a share, because then that's actual. Yeah, you might have seen it for three seconds, but we know how things work. You're scrolling pretty fast, But if you actually stopped to engage it with something, that's where I think brands are starting to see value. And as we think about our content, we have ah framework that our digital team uses. But one of the pillars of that is thumb stopping. We want to create content that is some stopping that people actually engage with. And that's been a big focus of ours. Last couple years, >> I presume. Using video, huge >> video We've got a whole graphics team that does custom graphics for whether it's stats or for history, historical anniversaries. We have a hole in house production team that does higher end, and then our digital team does more kind of straight from the phone raw footage. So we're using a variety of different mediums toe reach our fans >> that What's your background? How'd you get into all of this? >> I spent seven years in consulting, so I worked for Deloitte on their strategy group out of Chicago, And I worked for CPG companies like at the intersection of Retailer and CPG. So a lot of in store promotional work helping brands think through just General Revenue management, pricing strategy, promotional strategy and, um stumbled upon greatness with the Bulls job. A friend gave me the heads up that they were looking to fill this type of role and I was able to get my resume in the mix and I was lucky enough to get get the job, and it's been when I started. We're single, single, single, so it's a team of one. Five years later, we're a team of six, and we'll probably keep growing. So it's been an exciting ride and >> your background is >> maths. That's eyes business. Undergrad. And then I got a went Indian undergrad business and then went to Kellogg. Northwestern got an MBA on strategy, so that's my background. But it's, you know, I've dabbled in sports. I worked for the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid back in the day when I was at Deloitte. Um, and so it's been It's always been a dream of mine. I just never knew how I get there like I was wanted to work in sports. They just don't know the path. And I'm lucky enough to find the path a lot earlier than I thought. >> How about this conference? I know you have been the other M I T. Event. How about this one? How we found some of the key takeaways. Think you >> think it's been great because a lot of the conferences we go to our really sports focus? So you've got the M. I T Sports Analytics conference. You have seat. You have n b a type, um, programming that they put on. But it's nice to get out of sports and sort of see how other bigger industries are thinking about some of the problems specifically around data management and the influx of data and how they're thinking about it. It's always nice to kind of elevated. Just have some room to breathe and think and meet people that are not in sports and start to build those, you know, relationships and with thought leaders and things like that. So it's been great. It's my first time here. What are probably back >> good that Well, hopefully get to see a game, even though that stocks are playing that well. Thanks so much for coming in Cuba. No problems here on your own. You have me. It was great to have you. All right. Keep right, everybody. I'll be back with our next guest with Paul Gill on day Volante here in the house. You're watching the cue from M I T CEO. I cube. Right back