(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show floor in Las Vegas Snowflake Summit 22 with 7,000 plus folks here, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Great to be back in person. We're excited to welcome a couple of guests that join us next. Persona Christian is here. The director of product for collaboration and Snowflake marketplace. Katie Laughlin joins us as well. The Global Head Offerings, Human Data Science Cloud at Customer IQVIA. Ladies, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Dave: All right. Thanks for coming on. >> Katie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of IQVIA. What you guys do, your mission, what you deliver? >> Yeah, sure. So, IQVIA is a healthcare focused data analytics and clinical research organization. We have 82,000 employees. We operate in a hundred countries and we have tens of thousands of data deliverables that we curate for our customers and deliver to them on a monthly basis. So, we're 100% healthcare focused, whether it's clinical research, helping our customers support their clinical trials, real world evidence, how are medicines operating in the market or commercial aspects. You know, how is your company performing overall in the market? >> How long have you been a customer of Snowflake's? >> A few years. Yeah. >> A few years, okay. Persona, tremendous growth going on right now. There's a rocket ship. You could even feel kind of like the whiplash from the keynote and all the announcements going on, but looking at the first quarter 23, fiscal 23 results, product revenue, 384 million, 85% growth tremendous momentum going on, big growth in customers. Talk to us about IQVIA, its partnership with Snowflake and the data driver award program. They, they just won. >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with a little bit about the Snowflake collaboration capabilities, which enable these thousands of customers to really collaborate on the data cloud to be able to break down silos between data and drive business decisions based on data and applications that live outside your own four walls as well. And this is where IQVIA, as a leader in healthcare data, bringing together data to enable healthcare organizations to be more data driven and to really drive insights. One, the data for good award, which we are really excited with for the partnership and really excited to have IQVIA be the winner of the award. >> And what does that mean? The data for good. We always love talking about that, Katie. >> Katie: Sure. What does that mean? How is that embodied at IQVIA? >> Can you say the last part? >> Yeah. How is that embodied at IQVIA? >> That's a great question. I think everyone that works at IQVIA believes in the mission, which is really to drive healthcare forward. We're really proud of a lot of the things that we do. So, with the advent of COVID, for example, we really had to pivot and help our customers. How do we keep executing on clinical trials? We supported a lot of the COVID trials that came forward and helped our customers understand how is this affecting patients in the real world? And how is it affecting your commercial operations? So, being in Vegas with tens of thousands of people around and almost nobody wearing masks, I think to myself, I'm part of the organization an organization that helped make that possible. >> So Frank Slootman today, Katie talked about compress. He talked about one pharmaceutical compressing from nine years to seven years, you guys have done a lot of obviously contract research over the years. So, what has that Snowflake journey been like? What's been the business impact of of working with that and the collaboration? >> Yeah. So my focus is really around our data as a service offering, which is where we're enabling our customers to ingest their data in modern ways. So if you imagine, you know, we've done everything from paper to big tapes of data for over 60 years of of our company being in business, now to VPN, SFTP, making multiple hops of data from one end to the other. I was just learning about one of our use cases where we're able to cut down processing time for our customers for two weeks. They data share some data with us. We do some additional processing on that. We serve it back to them and we're saving them two weeks of time to gain time to insights. >> Right. And Prasanna, collaboration transcends data sharing, right? It's almost like it's, that's, that's sort of the the first, the core of the concentric circle, right? >> Prasanna: Yeah. >> Talk about what else is embodied in collaboration. >> Yeah, that's a great question. So the first problem that we solved was getting access to data through our core sharing technology. And as you were talking about Katie, replacing FTPs and having to build APIs, which were cumbersome, and instead being able to access data on the data cloud without having to copy or move anything. That was the core sharing technology. But that solves the first problem, which is the access problem. The second problem is how do I discover what what's out there? How do I better understand it? How do I evaluate it? How do I try it and buy it? And those are all the problems that we're solving with the marketplace, which is now home to both data and applications that you can discover, try, and buy. >> Katie, talk to us about what IQVIA was doing before Snowflake? What was that life like before? How were you enabling customers to leverage data to make data driven decisions? >> Yeah, so we, as I said, we're a data and analytics company. So we provide some native analytics capabilities to our customers, but most customers, most of the large customers I would say, they're building their own data lakes. They have their own ecosystems. Some of them are adopting Snowflake and we really needed to partner with them on being able to get the data to them as quickly as possible. So like, I, I was just describing a minute ago we would have multiple hops where we deliver to a location, customer ingests it, customer does their QC. Then they process it and then it appears in their data warehouse. And now we're able to adopt their QC protocols within our own platform and deliver the data to them much more quickly. >> And what does that enable to your business from an outcomes perspective? If you look at overall Snowflake as an engine what is it enabling and empowering IQVIA to accomplish? >> So it helps us partner with our customers in modern ways. So I'm saying we've been in the data business for 60 years. So it's sometimes it's a legacy behemoth that you need to bring along to modern times. And I think for us, the shift has been night and day in terms of Snowflake's capabilities. >> So you will build data based apps in the Snowflake data cloud? Is that, is that where you're headed? >> Yes. So we have several applications that we built natively on Snowflake that we offer to our customers. >> And what will that bring you that you kind of couldn't do before? >> That we couldn't do before? I think the the ability to, we talk a lot about how you spend 80% of your time cooking the data, right? Getting it ready for insights and only 20% of your time being able to to bring those insights forward and Snowflake, it really helps us flip that ratio so that we don't have to worry so much about the scaling and the infrastructure and the data sourcing. We can focus more on driving those insights and innovations. >> So Prasanna, we talk a lot about, you have this application stack over here and it sends a database over here and then you have an analytics stack. It seems like you're enabling those worlds to come together. Is that, is that by design? Is that more organic? Can you talk about that? >> Yeah. I mean, that is essential to our our mission and our value prop is to bring it together. It's one product, it's seamless and lets you do more with your data. Benoit talked today in the opening keynote about running multiple workloads on your data and the way you do that is by having one product that allows you to to run your data, data queries but also build applications that can run against that data. >> Katie, can you share a little bit about the partnership? We'll say collaboration that IQVIA has with Snowflake in terms of your ability to influence the roadmap in the direction. We heard a lot of customer stories in the keynote and they talked a lot about Frank Slootman did, Benoit, Christian. We are listening to our customers. Do you feel that as a, a customer for the last few years? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have a really broad partnership with Snowflake. We're a customer. We have OEM licensing where we're building applications on top of Snowflake. We're an SI partner where we're marrying our data healthcare expertise along with Snowflake technology expertise and helping customers build and utilize the data internally and as well as just, if nothing else, the Snowflake data share in order to deliver the data into their environment. >> Prasanna, what do you look for in a data driver winner? Like what stood out about IQVIA and others that aspire to that, what should they be focused on? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, we ultimately think that in every business you have business needs that you're trying to solve and business is inherently collaborative. You never solve problems with just what you have within your own four walls. And IQVIA is an example of someone that's really enabling outcomes for healthcare companies to be much faster through live access to data. Which is what we want to accomplish for the data cloud, help our company, help our customers solve business needs. >> Every company has to be a data company these days, right? There's no, you have no choice. We talked about, you know, software eating the world a few years. Now we're talking about data eating the world. For organizations, it's in any any vertical healthcare, life sciences, retail, finance. It's essential to not just have data, live data access to it, to be able to extract insights from it that you can act on. Talk about what you are doing at Snowflake as a differentiator? Is that goal of becoming the defacto standard data platform and what that enables partners like IQVIA to accomplish? >> Yeah. It starts with our fundamental architecture, which allows you to collaborate and access data without creating copies of it or sending around copies and built on top of that now, the ability to build applications and to monetize them really enables our customers to do more with their data and to monetize it and to be able to distribute it without having to deal with all the plumbing. >> That's nice. That saves you a lot of time. What do you think when you, Katie, if you talk to people that are your peers in either healthcare or other industries, what are like the top couple of recommendations that you would have for them? We have a data problem. It's all a data problem. How do we actually leverage value from this fast so we can be competitive? >> Yeah. So I think if I were to advise someone who is thinking about commercializing their data set, when if they haven't before, you know, you have to think about good data governance protocols, good data cataloging. Make sure you're, you know, conforming to all of the privacy rules that you need to and overseeing the management of that data, any changes in the data, you know, delivering that both to internal and external customers. But I think, just a quick plug for Snowflake, what I would say on a personal level is that their partner first mentality really is a pleasure, makes it a pleasure to work with them and makes it really easy for us to enable our services through, through Snowflake. >> Frank Slootman talked about mission alignment this morning, kind of a mission I thought of, of aligning on with the missions of their customers and partners. It sounds like that's what Katie's talking about from a cultural perspective. You've got that alignment here? >> Yes, absolutely. You know, we work with our partners to enable our customers to drive business value and solve the needs of their industry. >> What are some of the things that you are excited about? Fourth Annual Summit. We, I, I said 7,000 plus people we'll get numbers kind of later on. What are you excited about finally being back in person? >> Yes, of course. >> Being able to access this hugely growing population of customers and partners, what excites you about this Summit 22? >> What excites me most is the fact that we are now enabling our customers to do more, to build applications which has been a big theme at Summit, but also to be able to distribute and monetize this. So as Frank talked about this morning, helping customers drive value and more value from, from their data. >> Critical. Katie, last question for you. If we look at all the,it was a very technical keynote this morning. You talked about the great partnership, the synergies the alignment that IQVIA has with Snowflake. What are you excited about in terms of hearing and seeing and feeling and touching this week at Summit? >> Well, yesterday we won an award for Data Marketplace. Marketplace Partner of the year for healthcare and life sciences. That was really exciting for us. It was great recognition for us in terms of how we've been able to modernize on the cloud. But I'm really excited to see how much the Snowflake business has grown as well. Our General Manager for information management was telling me, he said, when I come to this conference a couple of years ago it was only a few thousand people and now it's really, it's really grown and really taken off. And it's really exciting to see how many of the different partnerships are interacting and and that we're able to take advantage of as well. >> Yeah, I think we heard earlier this morning that the first summit four years ago was a couple thousand people. Now here we are eight, eight to ten. We've also seen, Persona, I mentioned some of the product revenue numbers for fiscal 23 Q1. I also noticed that in the last four years, the number percentage of customers with a million plus ARR is grown over 1200%. Number of customers is growing, the high value customers are growing. It seems like you're on a rocket ship here with Snowflake. Would you agree? >> Yeah. We're excited with all the value that we're bringing to our customers and the growth we're seeing. >> Dave: Yeah. Way to amp it up. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Excellent. Ladies, thank you so much for joining us talking about the partnership with IQVIA and Snowflake. Congratulations again. >> Katie: Thank you. >> Katie, on IQVIA winning the data driver award, Data for good >> Great to hear what you're doing together and how you're enabling organizations in the healthcare industry to maximize the value of data. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Thank you guys. >> Thanks. >> For our guests, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's live coverage from Las Vegas of Snowflake Summit 22. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

(soft upbeat music) (crowd chattering) >> Over the past 18 to 24 months, chief information security officers have dramatically changed their priorities. They had to, to support the remote work trend. So things like endpoint security, cloud security, and in particular identity and access management became top of mind. And a whole shift occurred. And we're going to talk about that today. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here at AWS re:Invent 2021. Katie Curtin-Mestre is here. She's the vice president of marketing at CyberArk and Bar Lavie senior product manager at Cloud Identity and Security. Bar, sorry for botching your name, but folks welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Glad to be here. >> Great to hear. >> So Katie, upfront I talked about some of those trends. It's been a hugely dramatic shift away from this kind of traditional approaches to cyber. What are some of the trends that CyberArk has seen? >> Well, Bar is going to take the first part of this. >> Great, just go on. (Bar laughing) >> Yeah, so one trait that we are seeing is that cloud migration projects accelerate as organization turbocharged digital transformation. Is they're a looking to take advantage off the agility and operational efficiency of the cloud providers. Some of the concerns that I can think about one of those is the reducing the potential loss of data that is caused due to the excessive access to resources. And the other one is provision secure and scalable access to resources. And the third one would be implementing least privilege for all type of identity whether if it's a human identity or non-human identity. >> And on that end Dave, we recently commissioned a survey with the Cloud Security Alliance. We co-sponsored a survey and found that 94% of respondents said that securing human permissions was a top security challenge and machine identities weren't far behind at 77%. Another challenge that we're hearing from our customers is the need to secure the secrets used by applications. So we're really excited by today's news from AWS. They announced some new capabilities with a code guru called Secret Detector that helps to find unsecured secrets in applications. And the other concern that we're hearing from our customers is the need to monitor and audit the activity of all of their cloud identities. This is really important to help their security operation teams with their investigations and also to meet audit and compliance requirements. >> So the definition of identity is now more encompassing and includes like you say machines, right? It's not just people anymore. Of course we've seen, you know, phishing has always been problematic. It's escalated daily, right? We get phished. I mean, are we going to see the day where we finally get rid of passwords? Is that even possible? But maybe we could talk a little bit about sort of identity, how identity is evolving, this notion of zero trust. Zero trust used to be a Password. So, maybe Bar you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of identity access management. Maybe privileged access management are those things coming together? How does CyberArk think about those things? >> You going to take this one Katie >> Well, what CyberArk sees is we definitely see a trend where access management and privileged access management are coming together. Security teams are struggling too many security tools and they're really looking to standardize on a small handful of vendors and get more bank for their buck from their security investment. So we're definitely seeing that trends of unified platforms across access and privileged access management to secure any identity, whether human or machine from kind of like your standard workforce identity, to those who have highly privileged access. >> I don't know if you've ever, ever seen that chart. I think Optiv puts it out. It's consultancy. And it's this eye chart. It's a taxonomy of all the different security I have published at a number of times. it's mind boggling. So CSOs, SecOps teams they have to manage all this complexity, all these different tools and you ask CSOs what's your biggest challenge? They'll tell you lack of skills. We just can't find people. We can't train them fast enough. So what's CyberArk working on? What are some of the key initiatives that you guys are focused on that people should know about? >> Well, one of the things that we're working on is actually, and we see a greater adoption of it is something that was actually started as an initiative within our innovation lab. It's a CyberArk Clouding Titles Manager, which help to detect and remediate excessive permissions to cloud resources for any type of identity. I mentioned before the both human and non-human. Which are the something that you were looking to to secure. Another solution that we see a great adoption is our circuit ranger which helps organization to re remove the necessity of having a hard-coded credentials within application. It can be either traditional applications for their own premise or even cloud native applications. And peg this also into your CI CD pipeline. And we are actually innovating in these type of area with AWS as well. So this is one of the great things that we were doing. Also we're investing on a new solution for just-in-time access for cloud VMs and cloud consoles. And all of these solutions that I've mentioned and more to that are part of our identity security platform which came to provide you with the suite of solution to apply least privilege and secure access to any type of resource from any device for any type of identity. >> So is that best practice? I mean, if you had to, you know, advise a customer on best practice in identity, how should they think about that? Where should they start? >> Well, on the best practices front we recently published an ebook with AWS. And it's focused on the shared responsibility model and foundational best practices for securing cloud access. And it's all part of an initiative that CyberArk has, which is our identity security blueprint. Which guides customers on how best to move forward with their identity security initiatives. >> So where do they start? First of all how do they get that is it a security website or? >> It's available on our website and we detailed some of the steps that that customers can take. For example, one of the steps that we recommend to our customers is to limit the use of the root account and also to very much lock down the root account to use federated identities whenever possible. And Bar already alluded to some of the other best practices that we recommend. Such as removing hard-coded credentials from secrets. Another best practice that we really recommend to our customers is to have a consistent set of controls across their entire estate. Both from on-premises to the cloud. And this really helps to reduce complexity by having a unified and consistent set of security controls. And in fact one of our customers who is one of the world's largest convenience chains. They're using CyberArk to secure the credentials both for their on-premise servers and their AWS EC2 instances. And they're also using us as well to secure the credentials used by applications in the CI CD pipeline. So getting to those consistent controls is another best practice we highly recommend. >> So, consistent identity across your state, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. And then also you've referenced CI CD a couple of times. So it's it's developer friendly? Are you're designing security in as opposed to a bolt on after the fact? And then you mentioned root accounts access. Is that where privilege access management comes in? Are we going to treat everybody as privileged access? Or how do you deal with machines? You mentioned hard-coded? Like some machines are hard-coded. Like I would imagine a lot of these internet cameras are exposures. How do you deal with all that? I mean, do you just have to cycle through and modernize your fleet of machines? Are there ways in which CyberArk can help sort of anticipate that or defend against that? >> Well, CyberArk can help on, on multiple fronts. Of course you need to secure the root account but that's just only one example of needing to secure a privilege access. And one thing that customers need to understand is that now going forward, any identity can have privilege access at any point in time, because at any point and time, you yourself could have access to a highly sensitive system or have access to highly sensitive data. So with CyberArk we help our customers understand which of their applications and infrastructure have the most sensitive data and then work with them to secure the access to that data whether that access be a human access or machine or programmatic access. >> So what are the customer implications of all this? I mean pre pandemic, you know, this whole zero trust thing with password. Now it's like fundamental premise. You don't trust to verify. What are the customer implications as we enter this new era ransomware through the roof, the adversaries are well funded highly capable. They're living off the land, they're island hopping. They're, doing self forming malware. It's a new world, right? So what are the customer implications? What should they be thinking about? You know, they don't have unlimited budget. So what's the advice? >> Well, eventually at the end of the day, there are all kinds of best practices of how to applies security. I think that both AWS have their own best practices and CyberArk has also our own best practices calling the blueprint which help organization to focus on to crown jewel on the most important stuff. And then going deeper and lower within each and every initiative. And on each and every level, try to investigate what you're trying to protect and what kind of security mechanisms can be applied in order to protect both access and maintaining that no one whether if it's internal or external attacker can gain access to it. >> Yup, I think the other implication for customers and you already alluded to it is really to continue to move forward with their zero trust initiatives. I think that that is a foundational going forward. Now that remote work is kind of the defacto norm and we can no longer rely on the traditional network perimeter. And so in this new environment securing your identities is the new perimeter. So that's an important implication for customers. And then another one that I would mention is that security teams need to work more closely with their dev and dev ops counterparts to bacon security earlier. It really can't be that security is brought in after the fact. Security very much needs to shift left and be included in the very early stages of application development before an application comes to production. >> I mean, I think it's that last point but all good points. The last point was a huge theme at CubeCon this year. That notion of shift left developers, you've mentioned the CI CD pipeline several times. I mean I think that is, you know, especially when you think about machines and the edge and IoT. I used to say all the time, you know that you used to put a moat around the castle, build a wall, protect the queen. Well, the queen has left the castle. But now with the pandemic, we've seen the effects of that. And as I say, the adversaries are seeing huge opportunities. Well-funded super sophisticated. It's like it makes Stuxnet look like a kindergarten. I know that was still >> That's scary. still pretty sophisticated. But I mean, look at what we saw with the government hack and solar winds, you know huge huge. But if we can talk to CSOs about that, they're like, you know, that's, we have to move fast. But they don't have unlimited budget, right? Cybersecurity is their number one initiative in terms of priorities. But then they have all these other things to fund. They have to fund a forced march to digital transformation, machine learning and AI, they're migrating to the cloud. They're driving automation. They're modernizing their application portfolio. So, security is still number one, isn't it? So it's a good business that you're in. >> Yes, and we really want to work with our CSOs so they can get the most investment out of what they're putting into CyberArk and the rest of their strategic security vendors. Because as you mentioned there's a talent shortage. So anything that we can do as vendors to make it easier for them to use our products and get more value from our solutions, is something that's really important. >> And automation is part of the answer but it's not the only answer, right? You got to follow the NIST framework and follow these best practices and keep fighting the fight. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. I'd love to have you back. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right. Our pleasure. All right, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. You're watching our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of Splunk dot com virtual. I'm john Kerry host of the cube we are here in the Splunk studios in Silicon Valley where all the execs are here, it's basically a spunk studio. It's everyone's here telling the stories. We also got some remote guests coming in, customers partners and other Splunk execs. We've got Katie bianchi senior vice president of customer success. Welcome back to the cube. Thank great to see you. >>Thanks john Great to be here. >>Yeah, I love the customer success stories because at the end of the day customers vote with their wallet and when basically like solutions, they'll this customer examples and customer testimonials. There's one thing I've learned covering Splunk over the past decade and done in many dot coms. It's you guys have very happy customers and over the years have continuing to have great customer success organically now have to high end on the enterprise now with cloud scale lots changing, lots growing the world that's going completely cloud. Um, and again, data is at the center of the value proposition as it always was more important than ever. So what's new with the customers? What are some of the successful is that you're seeing what's new in your world? >>Yeah, Thanks for thanks for asking, john I think, You know, we've been talking about how things have been changing over the past 18 months. And if I over simplify our customer obsession means that everything we do is designed to make sure we're helping customers get the most out of their investment was flunk every single day. So we do this across our global team and our partner ecosystem who are providing both the right adoption and technical services and were architected and deploying thousands of Splunk environments to help our customers get to ongoing value. But in the world that we're living with today, I talked to so many customers who are doing amazing things with Splunk but dealing with really tough challenges right? So through the pandemic, everyone is dealing with more complexity, more change in the velocity that we have never seen before. And on top of all this, shifting to a fully digital business model, there's whole new challenges to effectively monitoring infrastructure and applications and maintaining security posture with this to customers that I'm talking to are also having to figure out ways to do a lot more with less. I think we all know it's an incredibly competitive talent market out there. So our customers are relying on Splunk and customer success more and more to make it easier and faster to get to value, to investigate, to monitor, to detect and to remediate. So that pace and all that change of what's happening means that we have to continually check ourselves to be that right strategic partners that can move at the pace of our customers because customers are counting on us to provide right services at the right time for every stage of their journey with us. >>Great point, great insight there. I want to ask you because Splunk has always had this kind of in their D. N. A. Because when Splunk started was always something new and it wasn't a new thing. That new thing never seen before. Now as the world can you guys continue to do that? You bring something new to the market, you operationalize, you bring value to customers then it happens again and again and again. But now more than ever the data rolls of cloud and and customer applications is new for customers. So you have a diverse customer base. I know you're obsessed with customer service but how do you how do you have a customer success? How do you deal with the fact that sometimes things are so new and there may or may not be a benchmark there and you can't go with the proven former. Sometimes you can sometimes you can't how do you solve? It's new to me problem that customers want this new thing. >>Yeah, I think you know a lot of what we see today is that the power as long as a data platform to bring in complex data allows customers to do many different things. Whether it's infrastructure monitoring, whether it's security, use cases or whether its application performance monitoring and all of that is new for our customers. So oftentimes like you said we grew up having customers use us for single use case when we're bringing this much data into the platform and they see what can be unlocked through the value of Splunk, what we have to make sure that they can do is most seamlessly move from use case and value point. So that means from a C. S. Perspective we have to continually make sure that we're doing what customers are asking us to do which is having the right services that deliver the right outcomes that are as prescriptive as possible and that we're doing that across the domain of all of our empire portfolio. So we spend a lot of time making sure that our technical services are scaling to the needs of customers but also everything that we do around success planning and adoption and use case guidance and best practices as well as our education and enablement are as prescriptive as possible for customers whether they are new to Splunk or whether they are scaling Splunk across multiple use cases and multiple areas of their business. >>Certainly a lot of not of multi vendor, multi vendor activities. Modern application development, security is a big part of it. So I have to ask you given all that, what are the top things, top three things for instance that your customers are asking from you guys from C. S perspective customer success >>perspective great question. So I think over, I think what we hear the most frequently is give me a more seamless buying experience with services that are really easy to consume and speed my time to value second and I just mentioned this is I need services that aren't task, just task based to work. I need services that deliver the outcome that I need for the business problem or business opportunity that I am trying to solve for. So make sure that your portfolio lines up with our outcomes And I think 3rd is all about more prescriptive guidance. The world is hard, the world is complex, data is only getting more complex while the opportunity is big, our role is all about prescription and making it as easy as possible. >>So I have to ask you the question that I'm observing, many people are in the industry as well is that Splunk is changing as a company. Um everyone knows the vibe of Splunk is very cool, very chill, very organic, big community vibe, good customer success, everything's going great. You continue to knock it out of the park over the years, but now you're mature company now, Scale is coming in, your customers are getting bigger and bigger. You have existing customers getting new customers, you have new offerings. There's a whole another Splunk coming another level. >>Yeah. How do you, how >>do you view that from a custom respect and you can, you share your reaction to that? >>Yeah, I, you know, I think it's an honor to be part of a company that has such a strong culture and has such great partnership with our customers and it really is all because of who our customers are and I think who are people are internally. But I think growing and scaling and making sure that we are able to deliver the right services at scale is a critical component of what we have to do to help customers along this journey. So the role of you keep saying this, but the role of customer success is to make the complex easy and we do that by making sure that we as an organization have the right data, the right prescription, the right way to serve our customers and the right coverage model no matter where customers are on the journey or who they are and getting and getting the most prescription to them at the right time. And that's that's quite frankly how we scale. But also what our customers asked for. They're asking for more module arised content and they're asking us for more ways that they can drive best practices and use case guidance from right within the product. And those are things that we are working on to help continue to scale out what we're able to do. >>That's a great point. Taking the complexity, make it simple and enable them to be successful. I think data does that you guys are offering that platform which is a great business model by the way, if you can provide those kind of value that's always a winning formula, Make things easy, reduce the steps it takes to do things and make it fast and simple. Uh I have to ask because you mentioned earlier, the top of this interview about digital business, we're here Splunk canceled the conference now is virtual. Were coming in remotely here on site at the studio. They they have a virtual student there now in the media business, which is a data business. You know, you guys are now doing tv with CUBA's here. Um everyone is realizing the pandemic. That digital business now is standard. You're seeing the impact of the instrumentation you mentioned. So as the digital business transformation is accelerated here and this time, not for everybody, it's going to change how customers are behaving. What have you what have you observed at the pandemic? Because it's kind of panel has cleared the runway a little bit for people to to do this properly because you can see what's not working. So what's your thoughts on this whole digital business? Everyone's connected and data is at the center of it. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, absolutely. I I look, I think, you know what we have seen over the last 12-18 months with this acceleration to a digital business model, is that things and the other dynamics going on or that things are only getting more complex. Right? So strong customers can come to Splunk cloud because we know it reduces complete with complexity in their moves because we are that data platform that allows them to search, investigate and monitor across cloud across multi cloud and across hybrid environments but that's complex. Over the last year we've seen customers get too much quicker value um, in in Splunk cloud right there going through large complex transformation. One of the easiest things you can do is shed the amount of time and money you're spending, managing, monitoring your infrastructure. So coming to Splunk cloud helps accelerate time to value for them in that way. But let's make no mistake, that is really complex. And so part of what we are doing is ramping up our level of focus on those modernization services for customers. So customers who are choosing to come to Splunk cloud for those benefits. We are there from planning and cut over and beyond with more prescriptive tools, more automation and how we move data, more resources and more experts to get customers to Splunk cloud more seamlessly. And that for us from a modernization perspective is one thing that we are hearing clearly customers asking asking for specific in the space so they can take more advantage and move more quickly. >>One of the trends that we're reporting on and I'll get to the headline in silicon angle in a minute, what's reporting on this event is there's more, more surface area, there's more data, there's more tools and tools are important for helping people automate but at the same time if you have more tools you have more blind spots or silos. So when you get into this world of architecture, customers are struggling that we talked to around trying to find the ideal equation of okay balancing architecture platform and tools that's equilibrium if you will by getting access to the data. What's your reaction to that? Because this becomes one of those decisions. I think Splunk shines where you can kind of have the best of a platform at the same time use tooling where relevant to accelerate whether it's automation or other other jobs versus buying tools for everything. >>Yeah and I and so I think part of the part of the thing that we continue to see is with the proliferation of data and data sources and a different degree of complexity in tooling the decisions around what's important and what's not important become much more much more complex for customers and much more difficult for customers to make. So we're changing a lot on the product and pricing side to sort of facilitate that piece. But I think when you're talking about how do I get the most value immediately, what we do across our go to market organization is make sure that we're partnering with customers to say what are the outcomes that you want from you want a need as a priority from a monument infrastructure monitoring for an application performance security perspective and then how do we make sure that we're prioritizing your maturity journey very prescriptively to say here the use cases that are most material here are the data sources that are most material and here's a success plan that helps you get deployed to your priorities so you can start the journey with us and build on that as we go. So again, it's really about how do we make the complex really easy through higher degrees of prescription but really making sure that we're doing our job and tying the prescription to what our customers need most when they need it. >>That's a great segment of my next question. In fact, my final question because because you know the headline on silicon angle dot com that we're reporting for this event is I'll read it to you. Splunk doubles downs on multi cloud data access, observe ability and security at its annual summit. Okay, so balancing the shiny new toy in the North Star Direction vision to practical prescriptive customer journeys is always a balance because you want to talk to customers about the future. Multi cloud, obviously observe ability super important. And honestly if security gonna be built in, okay, we all know that back to the mainstream customer, you're in the customer success. So you want to show them the North Star, show them the headroom, whatever metaphor you want to use at the same time they're dealing with problems and things that they're trying to solve right now. What's your what's your thoughts on on customer success knowing that there's a lot of cool new things coming. >>Yeah, I think our job like I excited, I'll start and in the same sort of started in the same way. Um our job at the end of the day is to help customers get the most out of their current investment was blank and that does and that is all about working on what that maturity journey looks like, prioritizing outcomes that our customers care about and starting and starting that journey. So there's foundational work that needs to be done aligned to priorities. That's where we start and then if we're doing what we need to be doing, creating those prescriptive plans and those success plans, then all of how we deliver to that value is prioritized through what customers need the most when they need it and that is our role and then we believe that by doing that and moving as quickly as we can with customers to get to that value, then we're enabling them to continue on that journey for all the new stuff that's out there that they can explore and get more value from. >>Its always good to have that North star and that china new toy, new technology. So, I have to ask your final final question because I have you here, what have you learned during the pandemic that you could share with other practitioners that are watching or maybe watching this as they look at the best practice because we've seen a lot of evidence where some people have fallen to the side or failed. Didn't weren't prepared. People who were in the cloud experimenting got that tailwind and survived and thrived somewhere re factoring new business were emerging. So you kind of see a pattern, is there anything that you've noticed on your end um that you can share with, you know how to lean into something new? So you don't be left out in the cold if uh the wave comes, a new trend comes that they need to take advantage of like date at the edge or cloud scale. What are some of the things you've you've observed and learned? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So I think, you know, I think for me, my personal learning through the pandemic has been like, we always need to be looking around corners and planning specifically to for our customers and thinking for them in terms of what problems that they will have and we have to anticipate that so that we can pivot and create the right services that help them leverage to do what they need. So very early on. Um even very early on in the pandemic, our professional services team flipped within a two week period doing fully remote and virtual deployments because we knew we couldn't stop time to value given the shift to remote work, our customers were relying on us to deploy so that they could monitor infrastructure um and monitor work from home usage. And I think along with that as we started to see in through the back half digital transformations really pick up and customers move to cloud. We've been working across across the last really 12 to 15 months to really start to plan around what does it take to create the right services and the right capability, not just within Splunk but within our partner ecosystem to effectively move customers to Splunk cloud and help them navigate uh hybrid, multi cloud world with much more speed. And so for me, those are the two things that we really leaned into hard because we were always looking around corners and saying what's next for our customers based on what we're seeing happened in the external environment. >>Great insight, Katie, thank you for coming on the cube. That's awesome. And I think, you know, customers are seeing success formulas and the new ones are emerging and you guys are going the next level is always fun to talk about the future and today at the same time so great to have you on. And certainly at the end of the day the customers, the ones who are deploying and create the innovation with software and data. So thanks for sharing. >>Yeah. Thanks john um really, really happy to spend the time. There's nothing I like to do more than talk about our customers and to all of our customers, huge thank you to you for your partnership and all you're doing to continue to power the world with data. >>It's always good to have a lot of customers to tell the story for you, but I appreciate you. Coming on, congratulations on your success. It's the cube we are here live in the studio of Splunk Studios for their virtual event uh with the remote interview. We're talking all the people in the, in the industry. We can, we're bringing it in. We're going, we're doing the interviews here in person as well as a hybrid event. I'm john for the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm >>mm. Mhm.

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube with coverage of Kublai khan and cloud Native >>Con, Europe 2021 Virtual >>brought to you by >>red hat, cloud >>Native Computing foundation >>and ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of coupon 21 cloud native con 21 part of the C N C s annual event this year. It's Virtual. Again, I'm john Kerry host of the cube and we have two great guests from the C N C. F. Cheryl Hung VP of ecosystems and Katie Manji who's the ecosystem advocate for C N C F. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. I wish we were in person soon, maybe in the fall. Cheryl Katie, thanks for coming on. >>Um, definitely hoping to be back in person again soon, but john great to see you and great to be back on the >>cube. You know, I have to say one of the things that really surprised me is the resilience of the community around what's been happening with the virtual in the covid. Actually, a lot of people have been, um, you know, disrupted by this, but you know, the consensus is that developers have used to been working remotely and virtually in a home and so not too much disruption, but a hell of a lot of productivity. You're seeing a lot more cloud native, um, projects, you're seeing a lot more mainstreaming and the enterprise, you're starting to see cloud growth, just a really kind of nice growth. And we've been saying for years, rising tide floats, all boats, Cheryl, but this year you're starting to see real mainstream adoption with cloud native and this has really been part of the work of the community you guys have done. So what's your take on this? Because we're going to be coming out of this Covid pretty soon. There's a post covid light at the end of the tunnel. What's your view? >>Yeah, definitely, fingers crossed on that. I mean, I would love Katie to give her view on this. In fact, because she came from Conde Nast and American Express, both huge companies that were adopting have adopted cloud Native successfully. And then in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of Covid, she joined CN CF. So Katie really has a view from the trenches and Katie would love to hear your thoughts. >>Yeah, absolutely. Uh, definitely cloud native adoption when it comes to the tooling has been more permanent in the enterprises. And that has been confirmed of my role at American Express. That is the role I moved from towards C N C F. But the more surprising thing is that we see big companies, we see banks and financial organization that are looking to adopt open source. But more importantly, they're looking for ways to either contribute or actually to direct it more into these areas. So from that perspective, I've been pretty much at the nucleus of enterprise of the adoption of cloud Native is definitely moving, it's slow paced, but it's definitely forward moving as well. Um and now I think while I'm in the role with C N C F as an ecosystem advocate and leading the end user community, there has been definitely uh the community is growing um always intrigued to find out more about the cloud Native usage is one of the things that I find quite intriguing is the fact that not one cloud native usage, like usage of covering just one platform, which is going to be called, the face is going to be the same. So it's always intriguing to find new use cases, find those extremist cases as well, that it really pushes the community forward. >>I want to do is unpack. The end user aspect of this has been a hallmark of the CNC F for years, always been a staple of the organization. But this year, more than ever it's been, seems to be prominent as people are integrating in what about the growth? I mean from last year this year and the use and user ecosystem, how have you guys seen the growth? Is there any highlights because have any stats and or observations around how the ecosystem is growing around the end user piece? >>Sure, absolutely. I mean, I can talk directly about C N C F and the C N C F. End user community, much like everything else, you know, covid kind of slowed things down, so we're kind of not entirely surprised by that, But we're still going over 2020 and in fact just in the last few months have brought in some really, really big names like Peloton, Airbnb, Citibank, um, just some incredible organizations who are, who have really adopted card native, who have seen the success and the benefits of it. And now we're looking to give back to the community, as Katie said, get involved with open source and be more than just a passive consumer of the technologies, but actually become leaders in their own right, >>Katie talk about the dynamic of developers that end user organizations. I mean, you have been there, you're now you've been on both sides of the table if you will not to the sides of the table, it's more like a round table if you will, but community driven. But traditional, uh, end user organizations, not the early adopters, not the hyper scale is, but the ones now are really embedding hybrid, um, are changing how I t to how modern applications being built. That's a big theme in these mainstream organizations. What's the dynamic going on? What's your view? >>I think for any organization, the kind of the core, what moves the organization towards cloud Native is um pretty much being ahead of your competitors. And now we have this mass of different organization of the cloud native and that's why we see more kind of ice towards this area. So um definitely in this perspective when it comes to the technology aspect, companies are looking to deploy complex application in an easier manner, especially when it comes to pushing them to production system securely faster. Um and continuously as well. They're looking to have this competitive edge when it comes to how can they quickly respond to customer feedback? And as well they're looking for this um hybrid element that has been, has been talked about. Again, we're talking about enterprise is not just about public cloud, it's about how can we run the application security and getting both an element of data centers or private cloud as well. And now we see a lot of projects which are balancing around that age but more importantly there is adoption and where there's adoption, there is a feedback loop and that's how which represents the organic growth. >>That's awesome. Cheryl like you to define what you mean when you say end user driven open source, what does that mean? >>Mm This is a really interesting dynamic that I've seen over the last couple of years. So what we see is that more and more of the open source project, our end users who who are solving their own problems and creating their own projects and donating these back to the community. An early example of this was Envoy and lift and Yeager from Uber but Spotify also recently donated backstage, which is a developer portal which has really taken off. We've also got examples from Intuit Donating Argo. Um I'm sure there are some others that I've just forgotten. But the really interesting thing I see about this is that class classically right. Maybe a few years ago, if you were an end user organization, you get involved through a vendor, you'd go to a red hat or something and say, hey, you fix this on my behalf because you know that's what I'm paying you to do. Whereas what I see now is and user saying we want to keep this expertise in house and we want to be owners of our own kind of direction and our own fate when it comes to these open source projects. And that's been a big driver for this trend of open source and user driven, open source. >>It's really the open model is just such a great thing. And I think one of the interesting thing is that fits in with a lot of people who want to work from mission driven companies, but here there's actually a business benefit as you pointed out as in terms of the dynamic of bringing stuff to the community. This is interesting. I'm sure that the ability to do more collaboration, um, either hiring or contributing kind of increases when you have this end user dynamic because that's a pretty big decision to donate and bring something into the open source. What's the playbook though? If I'm sitting in an end user organization like american express Katie or a big company, say, hey, you know, we really developed this really killer use cases niche to us, but we want to bring it to the community. What do they do? Is there like a, like a manager? Do they knock on someone's door? Zara repo is, I mean, how does someone, I mean, how does an end user get this done? >>Mm. Um, I think one of the best resources out there is called the to do group, which is a organization underneath the Linux foundation. So it's kind of a sister group to C N C F, which is about open source program offices. And how do you formalize such an open source program? Because it's pretty easy to say, oh well just put something on get hub. But that's not the end of the story, right? Um, if you want to actually build a community, if you want other people to contribute, then you do actually have to do more than just drop it and get up and walk away. So I would say that if you are an end user company and you have created something which scratches your own itch and you think other people could benefit from it then definitely come. And like you could email me, you could email Chris and chick who is the ceo of C N C F and just get in touch and sort of ask around about what are the things that you could do in terms of what you have to think about the licensing, How do you develop a community governance program, um, trademark issues, all of these things. >>It's interesting how open source is growing so much now, chris has got so much action going on. New verticals are opening up, you know, so, so much action Cheryl you had posted on the internet predictions for cloud native, which I found interesting because there's so much action going on, you have to break things out into pillars, tech devops and ecosystem, each one kind of with a slew event of key trends. So take us through the mindset, why break it out like that? You got tech devops and ecosystem tradition that was all kind of bundled in one. Why? Why the pillars? And is it because there's so much action, what's, what's the basis behind the prediction? >>Um so originally this was just a giant list of things I had seen from talking to people and reading around and seeing what people are talking about on social media. Um And when, once I invested at these 10, I thought about what, what does this actually mean for the people who are going to look at this list and what should they care about? So I see tech trends as things related to tools, frameworks. Um, perhaps architects I see develops as people who are more as a combination of process, things that a combination of process and people and culture best practices and then ecosystem was kind of anything else broader than that. Things that happened across organizations. So you can definitely go to my twitter, you can go to at boy Chevelle, O I C H E R Y L and take a look at this and This is my list of 10. I would love to hear from you whether you agree with it, whether you think there are other things that I've missed or what would your >>table. I love. I love the top. Well, first of all I think this is very relevant. The one that I would ask you on is more rust and cloud native. That's the number one item. Um, I think cross cloud is definitely totally happening, I think people are really starting to think about that and so I'd love to get your comments on that. But I think the thing that jumped out at me was the devops piece because this is a trend that I've been seeing a lot more certainly even in academic institutions, for folks in school, right? Um going to college for computer science and engineering. This idea of, sorry, large scale, cloud is not so much an IT practice, it's much more of a cloud native mindset. So I think this idea of of ops so much more about scale. I use SRE only because I can't think of a better word around it and certainly the edge pieces with kubernetes, I think this is the, I think the biggest story to me that's where all the action seems to be when I talk to people around what they're working on in terms of training new people on boarding and what not Katie, you're shaking your head, you're like Yeah, what's your thoughts? Yeah, >>I have definitely been uh through all of these stages from having a team where the develops, I think it's more of a culture of like a pattern to adopt within an organization more than anything. So I've been pre develops within develops and actually during the evolution of it where we actually added an s every team as well. Um I think having these cultural changes with an organization, they are necessary, especially they want to iterate iterate quicker and actually deliver value to the customers with minimal agency because what it actually does there is the collaboration between teams which were initially segregated. And that's why I think there is a paradigm nowadays which is called deficit ops, which actually moves security more to its left. This has been very popular, especially in the, in the latest a couple of months. Lots of talks around it and even there is like a security co located event of Yukon just going to focus on that mainly. Um, but as well within the Devil's area, um, one of the models that has been quite permanent has been get ups as well, which pretty much uses the power of gIT repositories to describe the state of the applications, how it actually should be within the production system and within the cloud native ecosystem. There are two main tools that pretty much leave this area and there's going to be Argo City which has been donated by, into it, which is our end user And we have flux as well, which has been donated by we've works and both of these projects currently are within the incubation stage, which pretty much by default um showcases there is a lot of adoption from the organizations um more than 100 of for for some of them. So there is a wider adoption um, and everything I would like to mention is the get ups working group which has emerged I think between que con europe and north America last year and that again is more to define a manifest of how exactly get expert and should be adopted within organizations. So there is a lot of, I would say initiatives and this is further out they confirmed with the tooling that we have within the ecosystem. >>That's really awesome insight. I want to just, if you don't mind follow up on that, why is getups so important right now, Is it because the emphasis of security is that the emphasis of more scale, Is it just because it's pretty much kid was okay just because storing it over there, Is it because there's so much more inspections are going on around it? I mean code reviews have been going on for a long time. What's what's the big deal? Why is it so hot right now? In your opinion? >>I think there is definitely a couple of aspects that are quite important. You mentioned security, that's definitely one of them with the get ups battery. And there is a pool model rather than a push model. So you have the actual tool, for example, our great city of flux watching for repository and if any changes are identified is going to pull those changes automatically. So the first thing that we actually can see from this model is that we always will have a delta between what's within our depositors and the production system. Usually if you have a pool model, you can pull it uh can push the changes towards death staging environment but not always the production because you have the change window sometimes with the get ups model, you'll always be aware of what's the Dell. Can you have quite a nice way to visualize that especially for your city, which has the UI as well as well with the get ups pattern, there is less necessity to share the credentials with the actual pipeline tool. All of because Argo flux there are natively build around communities, all the secrets are going to be residing within the cluster. There is no need to share any extra credentials or an extra permissions with external tools as well. There are scale, there is again with kids who have historical data points which allows us to easily revert um to stable points of the applications in the past. So multiple, multiple benefits I would say, but definitely secured. I think it's one of the main one and it has been talked about quite a lot as well. >>A lot of these end user stories revolve around these dynamics and the ones you guys are promoting and from your members as well as in the community at large is I hate to use the word day two operations, but that really is the issue like okay, we're up and running. I want more automation. This is again tops kind of vibe here where it's like okay we gotta go troubleshoot all this, but it should be working as more stuff comes in. This becomes more and more the dynamic is that is that because of just more edges, more things, more devices, what's what's the what's the push behind all these stories around this automation and day to operation things? What do you guys think? >>I think, I think the expectations are getting higher and higher to be honest, a few years ago it was enough to use containers and start using the barest minimum, you know, to orchestrate those containers. But now what we see is that, you know, it's easy to choose the technology, it's easy to install it and even configure it. But as you said, john those data operations are really, really hard. For example, one of the ones that we've seen up and coming and we care about from CNCF is kubernetes on the edge. And we see this as enabling telco use cases and 5G and IOT and really, really broad, difficult use cases that just a few years ago would have been nice on impossible, Katie, your zone, Katie Katie, you also talk about edge. Right? >>Absolutely. I think I I really like to watch some of the talks that keep going, especially given by the big organizations that have to manage thousands or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers. And they have to deliver a cluster to these to these teams. Now, from their point of view, they pretty much have to manage clusters at scale. There is definitely the edge out there and they really kind of pushing the technology towards how can we get closer to the physical devices within the customers? Kind of uh, let's say bubble or area in surface. So age has been definitely something which has been moving a lot when it comes to the cloud native ecosystem. We've had a lot of projects moving to towards the incubation stage, carefree as has been there, um, for for a while and again, has a lot of adoption is known for its stability. But another thing that I would like to mention is that now currently we have a lot of projects that are age focus but within some box, so there is again, a lot of potential if there's gonna be a higher demand for this, I would expect this tools move from sandbox to incubation and even graduation. So that's definitely something which, uh, it's moving and there is dynamism around it. >>Well, Cheryl kid, you guys are awesome, love the work you're doing. I gotta ask the final question since you brought it up about the expectations. Cheryl, if you guys could both end the segment with the comment around expectations as the industry and companies and developers and participants continue to grow. What, what's changed with C N C F koo Kahne cloud, native khan as the expectation has been growing and the stakes are higher too, frankly, I mean you've got security, you mentioned these things edge get up, so you start to see the maturation of this ecosystem, what's new and what's expected of you guys, What do you see and how are you guys organizing? >>I think we can definitely say the ecosystem has matured a lot compared to a few years ago. Same with CNTF, same with Cuba con, I think the very first cubic on I went to was Berlin, which was about 1800 people. Um, the kind of mind boggling to see how much, how much it's grown since then. I mean one of the things that we try and do is to expand the number of people who can reach the community. So for example, we launched kubernetes community days and we launched, that means community organized events in africa, for example, for people who couldn't come to large events in north America or europe, um we also launching things to help students. I actually love talking to students because quite often now you talk to them and they say, oh, I've never run software in anything other than a container. You're like, yeah, well this was a new thing, this is brand new a few years ago and now you can be 18 and have never tried anything else. So it's pretty amazing. But yeah, there's definitely, there's always space to go to the community. >>Yeah, once you go cloud native, it's like, you know, like you've never load Lennox on them server before. I mean, what, what's going on? Get your thoughts as expectations go higher And certainly there's more in migration, not only for young folks because they're jumping into this was that engineering meets computer science is now cross discipline. You're seeing scale, you mentioned scaling up those are huge factors, you've got younger, you got cross training, you got cybersecurity and you've got Fin tech ops that's chris is working on so much is happening. What, what, what you guys keep up with your, how you gonna raise the ball? >>Absolutely. I think there's definitely technology moving forward, but I think nowadays there is a more need for actual end user stories while at the beginning of cube cons there is a lot of focus on the technical aspects. How can you fix this particular problem of deploying between two clusters are deploying at scale. There is like a lot of technical aspects nowadays they're looking for the stories because as I mentioned before, not one platform is gonna be the same when it comes to cloud native and I think there's still, the community is still trying to look for some patterns or some standards and we actually can see like especially when it comes to the open standards, we can see this moving within um the observe abilities like that application delivery will have for example cross plane and Que Bella we have open metrics and open tracing as well, which focuses on observe ability and all of the interfaces that we had around um, Cuban directory service men and so forth. All of these pretty much try to bring a benchmark, making it easier to integrate these special use cases um when it comes to actual extreme technology kind of solutions that you need to provide and um, I was mentioning the end user stories that are there more in demand nowadays mainly because these are very, very necessary from the community like for example the six or the project maintainers, they require feedback to actually move forward. And as part of that, I would like to mention that we've recently soft launched the injuries lounge, which really focuses on this particular aspect of end user stories. We try to pretty much question our end users and really understand what really moved them to adopt, coordinative, what keeps them on this path and what like future challenges they would like to um to tackle or are they facing the moment I would like to solve in the future. So we're trying to create the speed back home between the inducers and the projects out there. So I think this is something which needs to be a bit more closely together these two spheres, which currently are segregated, but we're trying to just solve that. >>Also you guys do great work, great job. Cheryl wrap us up real, take a minute to put a plug in for the C. N. C. F. In the ecosystem. What's the fashion this year? What's hot? What's the trend? What are you guys doing? Share some quick update on what's going on the ecosystem from your perspective? >>Yeah, I mean the ecosystem, even though I just said that we're maturing, you know, the growth has not stopped now, what we're seeing is these as Casey was saying, you know, more specific use cases, even bigger, even more demanding environments, even more kind of crazy use cases. I mean I love the story from the U. S. Department of Defense about putting kubernetes on their fighter jets and putting ston fighter jets, you know, it's just absurd to think about it, but I would say definitely come and be part of the community, share your stories, share what you know, help other people um if you are end user of these technologies then go to see NCF dot io slash and user and just come and be part of our community, you know, meet your peers and hear what everybody else is doing >>well. Having kubernetes and stu on jets, that's the Air Force, I would call that technical edge Katie to you know, bring, bring back the edge carol kitty, thank you so much for sharing the inside ecosystem is robust. Rising tide is floating all the boats as we always say here in the cube, it's been great to watch and continue to watch the rise. I think it's just the beginning, we're starting to see post pandemic visibility cloud native, more standards, more visibility into the economics and value and great to see the ecosystem rising up with the end users as well. So congratulations and thanks for coming up. >>Thank you so much, john it's a pleasure, appreciate >>it. Thank you for having us, john >>Great to have you on. I'm john for with the cube here for Coop Con Cloud, Native Con 21 virtual soon we'll be back in real life. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With coverage of KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, the European show, which of course for 2020 is virtual. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners, as well as many of them heavily involved in what happens at the CNCF, you know, all these open source communities. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest Katie Gamanji. She is a Cloud Platform Engineer with American Express, and she's also a member of the CNCF's TOC, which is the technical oversight committee. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me today. I'm quite excited to be here. >> Excellent. Well, you are, as I mentioned, you're part of the TOC. You also present at the show last year. You presented at one of the KubeCon shows this year. As I mentioned, you were with American Express now. I believe it was Conde Nast, You shared some of the journey along those lines. Maybe for our audience, give us a little bit about, you know, your background, and what's got you involved in, you know, some of these projects in communities. >> Absolutely. Oh, such a good question. I can talk forever about that. My passion about Cloud Native. So, my name is Katie Gamanji, and I am one of the Cloud Platform Engineer for American Express. I joined American Express around five months ago, and I am part of the team that aims to transform the current platform, by embracing the Cloud Native principles, and making the best use of the open source tools. As mentioned previously, I've been working for Conde Nast. I've been in that role for almost two years. And as part of that role, we aim to create a centralized globally distributed platform that had Kubernetes as a central piece. And that was the role which actually got me involved more into the Cloud Native tooling, and I've been exploring them quite heavily since then. And that's why I wanted to get more in terms more contribution to the community. I've been doing that previously for different talks, and actually writing blog posts on different, giving different guides on how to start using some of the tooling. However, this year I decided to apply for TOC. And I've been elected as a TOC from the end user perspective, so I'm representing pretty much the overview of what end users think that the next direction should be within the Cloud Native landscape. And for the last, actually for the past five months, I've been on the TOC, with the CNCF, and it's only 11 of us. And we are in charge to make sure that we can guide, and set this technical vision for this year for the CNCF landscape. >> Yeah. Katie, I definitely want to talk about the TOC piece, but I want to back up a little bit. And you talked about some of the tooling, you talked about the community. Help me understand a little bit, you know, from a business standpoint, why you know, Conde Nast, American Express, looking towards using, Kubernetes and all of these open tours toolings. What was the charter, the challenge put before them, that felt that doing things this new way would help them. >> I think this actually goes a couple of years back. In my previous role before Conde Nast, I was in a team which aimed to provision infrastructure, but it was in a more, how can I say old fashioned manner? We had to configure our data centers manually, configure the VMs and processes. We had (indistinct) of automation. But at the time, this was maybe three years ago. I started to look into Kubertetes, and it was still baby steps, like, there was interest from the community, and I really wanted to, kind of get my hands on it more. And when I was looking for a role, which was at Conde Nast, I was looking for something which aimed to introduce containers in the entire infrastructure. And I think Conde Nast actually was very appealing as a role because not many expect for a media company to invest in technology, and actually the underlined infrastructure. So, from that perspective, I thought it's actually quite a good use case to change this perspective in the community. As well, with Conde Nast, it was a very international company. We had different business units around the world. All of them had different tech stacks. So, the challenge itself, how do we unify that? How do we centralize the deployment process of the application and serving our requests? But at the same time, have these individualized layer for every single market to still personalize their content. So, it was a very good project, I think, for me to further go into the Cloud Native to link, and actually definitely proved to be the right role for that. And currently I am in a different role. It's actually a financial company. But I think this is my personal challenge. I think there is a perception of financial companies moving towards modernization of their infrastructure, but it's still going quite slowly. And I think my personal challenge in this perspective is to make sure that actually FinTech is a thing, but FinTech in Cloud Native, actually using open source tooling is possible. Obviously, we can transition that to some of the secondary base, maybe not the core base of the business, but this transition, actually getting the change going is the most important bit. Once actual goes, it's just a boulder like, downhill, which is going to take everything around, and refactoring bit by bit. >> Yeah. Katie, you brought up a really important point. You know, in today's world, especially, you know, this year 2020 with the global pandemic going on, being able to react fast is so important regardless of what industry you're in. You talked about in your previous role, you had a global rollout to work across a lot of environments. Help us understand a little bit underneath the covers. You know, using this tool set, how does this help you move faster? How does it, you know, in some ways unify teams, regardless of what challenges they have? >> I think for us at least at Conde Nast, it was quite important to have one platform, so actually centralized all of our required, actually gather all our requirements, and translate them in within the platform. So, what we actually wanted, was to us to have Kubernetes as the gravitational point. Now, with Kubernetes, we'd have some of the main functionalities such as portability or flexibility. We'd be able to scale to very easily without, actually with minimal effort, but more importantly, we'll be able to transport our platform to different regions. So, to actually replicate the entire tech stat. So once we have these centralized platform, it was very easy for us to distribute them. For example, in regions across the US. And that time I was working there at least. There was an intentional strategy to replicate the tech stack in China. And that'll be very easy because with Kubernetes you just have this lifting shift capabilities. As long as you have BMs, you'll be able or compute, you'll be able to run the entire Conde Nast tech stack. So that was a very kind of big point for us to move to Kubernetes. Whilst I think in American Express, the strategy is completely different. It's still a lot of heritage infrastructure we have at the moment, actually we are running on Kubernetes. There is but the provider itself is Open shave This proving to be showcasing some of the issues for us moving forward, and we'd like to transition to a more neater way to run Kubernetes. And this potentially means, we haven't finalized the decision yet but it might we'd be using probably a cloud provider, or it might be the case of actually running Kubernetes self service. So we've actually got to maintain our clusters. This is not defined, but the underlying idea is that we want to be more kind of modern version of Kubernetes or managing Kubernetes moving forward. So this is one of the strategies. But I think within American express, the main underlying idea is that we really want to inner source most of the configuration. Historically we had different contractors and vendors working on our bits and pieces, we'd like to actually get all of these in house and have a centralized way to manage our infrastructure. So this is the underlying project which I think is going to take a while, but again there is an intention to include Cloud Native to link and technologies, and I think it's a very healthy thinking in terms of technology. >> Well Katie, you highlighted two really important topics that we've seen out there. Number one is exactly where my infrastructure is, it's going to change and I don't need to think about it. So you talked about public cloud, data centers, it might change in the future. And number two, making sure that you have the skill set in house. Something we definitely learnt from the outsourcing trends of the past was, when things need to be changed, if I had to rely on someone else it became very difficult. So if you're leveraging Kubernetes and you have the developer chops to be able to respond to the business in an agile way, you're going to be much more ready to be able to handle whatever happens in the future. >> Exactly >> So important. >> I want to switch and talk a little bit about your TOC work, presenting at the show. It's great to see companies enabling their employees to participate in this sort of thing. Help me understand how for you personally and what is the support that you get from your last job, your current job to participate in these open source projects in communities. >> Right. I think both of the companies, Conde Nast and American express, they're quite interested in been part of the Cloud Native community. With Conde Nast, they actually a part of end users. With American Express I think there is a thinking to actually join the end user community. So this might be something which will happen in future. I cannot guarantee but I'm hoping. This is going to be again one of my personal challenges, making sure we get in the community and share some of our used cases. But for now I think both of the companies actually understand the value of been part of actually using Open Source, but more importantly, understanding how other companies use that. Not one use case, especially when it come to Kubernetes, not one Kubernetes platform is going to be the same. There's always going to be different underlying technologies that plug in into it. There's always going to be different ways to use different tooling. And having these concentrated community and source of information, I think the companies actually understand the value in that and contributing to that. So I think, this is something which I've been quite passionate about to actually understand some of the strengths, to understand how some of the tooling are used, and if there is an actual hope for a project, or it's something which actually specialize into a very minimal kind of niche problem, and is going to be useful for maybe one or two big companies, it depends. So I think this is something I've been passionate about and I've actually had a support throughout. In my previous company and my current company I have very strong support from my higher ups to actually contribute more and be part of the end users community, and as such being a TOC as well. Which comes with a bunch of responsibilities as well. But I think in terms of either support, definitely I had the necessary support all the way through which I'm quite thankful. >> Katie, you mentioned some of your passions, I know from what I've read online that you're passionate about some of the tooling there, and that's some of what you're sharing through your presentations. So, I'd love if you could share a little bit about what we're going to be talking about at the Europe show right now and any other kind of tools that are getting your time and attention these days. >> So I think lately, I've been exploring Cluster API the new release. I've been waiting for new release. Actually everyone has been waiting for the new release for a couple of months. Now we actually have v1L for three end points with some of the cool features such as, manage control place for Cluster. And the second tool or set of toolings I'm working lately are the ones which concentrate on the Gitops model. So during the session at Kubecon in Europe this year, I will be presenting Cluster API, a guide on how to get started. So an overview of all the components necessary to create your own Clusters. In different cloud providers as well. But I will crown that presentation by delivering a demo of how can you provision your Custer with Gitops. And I'm going to use Argo CD at the moment. And the end result is going to be provisioning your Cluster in AWS by having maybe one click, and you have a Cluster refill masters, maybe five nodes and you just wait. Pretty much you can have a coffee while your Cluster is provisioning. But more importantly with Cluster API, again we have usable manifest which will allow us to have this one interface to integrate with different cloud providers. So we actually have this interoperobility Of manifest across different cloud providers. So look forward to that. >> Excellent. Katie, last question I have for you, what advice would you give your peers? Where do you see need for more participation, as people that are getting into this environment. Where do you think they can help? >> Oh such a good question. I think contribution is necessary in most of the sags In the Kubernetes community. So, I think it depends on the passion everyone has, if they're quite passionate about the networking, or storage or even service, there is going to be a group of people that have the same passion and interest with you. So please reach out and contribute. I think I never think I'll like to mention, you done necessarily need to be an active coder to be part of the sags or to be part of the Cloud Native. Because being in technology of course is an advantage, however, most of the ideas in actually making sure that we cover used cases for different tooling, comes from a diverse user base as well. So if you have an interest I think that's going to be very good engine for to further enable different ideas within the sags. So I wouldn't be able to recommend a particular project, I think this is very specific to everyone's daily role (indistinct) But yeah I think within the CNCF, we have a collection of sags for which you pretty much would find a place for yourself and your skills. >> Well Katie thank you so much for sharing your journey and participating so actively in the community. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me today. >> All right stay tuned much more coverage from Kubecon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual edition, I'm Stuartt Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS reinforce Amazon web services. First inaugural conference around Cloud Security. I'm John for your Michael's Day. Volante, our next Katie Jenkins s V P. C. Vice President. See? So, Chief Information Security officer with Liberty Mutual Big Company, Lot of activity insurance. Lot of probably a lot of action on your side. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. So you've been in this job for about a year. Tell us about what's going on in Libya. Means you guys have a large company. 100 plus years old. You're see. So you're in charge. You're running everything. We're gonna security conference. Tell us the reality. What's going on in the real world? >> Yeah, well, this is super exciting. That reinforce, of course, is in Boston. This is Liberty Mutual's hometown assed. You mentioned 107 year old security, not security company >> insurance company. But we're >> doing really cool things in technology and security. Specifically, um, I would say to kind of bring this gathering together. We have a really rich pool of security talent of security and innovators. It really matches up with what what we're doing. So Liberty Mutual has made a very significant commitment to moving to the public cloud for our technology and computing needs. We're in about your three of that journey, maybe 25% of our workload in the public cloud. It's really been a catalyst for not just transforming our technology organisation but transforming the way security does its work in the way security engages with our development community. >> While you're the head honchos, they say there's a C so but you had 20 plus years in cyber security. This is now kind of a new category with reinforced being a branded show over AWS. I see this deserves its own conversation, and industry is a lot of action going on. What is cloud security mean to you? Because this is the focus of this show. It's not just pure clouds, a lot on premise and on cloud interactions with hybrid etcetera. You guys have been doing tons of I t over the generations with Liberty Mutual, but cloud security is the focus. What does that mean? Thio to? You guys have a cyber security standpoint? >> Yeah, um, in a word. Enablement, um, I think that the public cloud offers us, um, really interesting opportunity to reinvent security. Right? So if you think about all of the technologies and processes and many of which were manual over the years, I think we have an opportunity to leverage automation to make our work easier in some ways to to, um, avoid the situation where we have air oversight. Gosh, we encrypted everything, but you know, this set of assets over here, So through using automation and enforcement, it's a new, exciting opportunity to further develop our security capabilities. But also, you know, cloud security at cloud in general has bred a transformation of the way that are practitioners do work through agile. And it means that security has toe no work with our technologists in a different way. >> So you've had a really interesting background. Um you work for a company that does audits. I can infer from that. You've worked for service is company. You work for a technology vendor. You worked as a practitioner. So you've seen it all sides and you know Amazon. It made some comments yesterday that said, Look, the narrative in the security industry has always been fear, fear, fear. And we'd like to put forth forth the narrative. That is about Listen, the state of security is really good and strong. The union is strong and we're gonna work together in a positive message. So my question is, are you an optimist? >> Ah, a reluctant activist. Um, I think the days of having security be something that's fearful, uh are just not not doing us any any any justice in that area. I mean, security is an area of partnership. There's very little of what we do. Insecurity. It's just done by security practitioners. We need asset managers. We need compliance people. We need the privacy team. We need our auditors way. Need procurement. I mean, there's just so many different parties involved in security that if we're just instilling fear and everyone, I think it'll be difficult for us tow. Get that partnership and we need Thio. Empower people, right. We need Thio. Both empower our developers to do their work in a secure manner and we have to empower our whole workforce and our trusted third parties to make good decisions. We're educating them on how to prevent phishing attacks were doing all sorts of kind of culture based initiatives, recognizing that if it's just the security folks doing security, we're gonna have a big gap. >> One of the things that we were discussing a lot of other C. So So we've been talking privately. Off the record in the hallways and private briefings is the common theme of integration as a big part of dealing with ecosystem, either suppliers and or different teams within their different pillars of how they're organized internally and externally, and then also reducing the number of security vendors that they've been buying products from to get some also in house coding, teams working more closely on the use cases that matter. So this has become kind of ah, see, So a conversation where what? What is that criteria? How do you figure out who to have a suppliers who's gonna be around for the long haul? We're gonna be that a partnership for the enablement. So rather than having hundreds of vendors, we want to get him down to a handful. Is that something that you think about or is it a trend that you see it's happening now? >> Uh, it is a trend. I think it starts at how we even procure in select our suppliers. I mean, we're really giving a lot of thought to the area of third party risk management. And do we understand not just the elements of cyber risk and engaging with 1/3 party? But but privacy and continuity kind of risk, too. So it starts there. I don't have a sort of fabricated number in terms of I'm trying to go from X number of vendors down toe Why? But I think that there's a very purposeful thought process that we're undergoing to say, Yeah, we recognize and for certain technologies, we want to have different providers to provide some of that redundancy. Let's be smart about them. Let's make sure we really understand where those overlapping capabilities are because we don't want to be wasteful either. Right >> on the span, the question comes up to around Devil's because what we're seeing is the devil ops and security paradigms kind of coming together in terms of the concepts agility. You could do some prototyping, a hackathon do some things and then ultimately trying to get into production or two different animals. So that enablement of doing innovative things, his agility, that that's been a key theme, a positive theme. And the question is, is there a funding model? Doesn't automatically get security funding. And where's the spin that you're spending going up? So all the monetary spend questions come up. >> How do you >> deal with that ballistically? And how do you think about, you know, spend conversation? >> Yeah, um, >> it's a really interesting one, because, of course, expense >> pressures. I'm not immune to those. But I >> also think that we're in a position where, um, our executive leadership team understands the value of the work that we're doing understands the important to our policy holders. So it's less often a need to justify why we need more spend. It's a demonstration of using that spend responsibly and understanding where we might have an uplift from something that we automated to say. Well, now we have these resource is that could be doing something else. >> There's >> always something else and security, right? So if we're committed to re Skilling and making sure that people are evolving the work that they do in the talents that they have to adjust a different kind of >> no rule of thumb per se. It's more of your management recognizes the criticality of it. Therefore, you could make those calls on your own building built in building, >> project tough questions and making >> responsible decisions. But I think it comes down and knowing your technology, >> so the skills gap, obviously a huge challenge in your industry would talk to somebody else, they said. We just can't find people, so we have to bring him in and train them ourselves. We have the homegrown and take the long view. Amazon talks about the shared responsibility model, and a lot of small companies don't really understand that things misunderstood. Obviously, Liberty Mutual gets it. My question is, as you see Amazon focusing on compute in the storage and data base layer, and you guys have the opportunity to focus on other areas that are your responsibility that shared responsibility model. Have you been able to shift? Resource is how have you handled that you retrain people? Has it freed up, not freed up time to do some of those more strategic things that you want to do maybe respond more quickly. Prioritized, better automate, etcetera, etcetera. Can you talk about that from your perspective? >> Yeah. So the shared responsibility model is, uh, you know, I think that's video unimportant speaking point of this whole ecosystem. At the end of the day, Liberty Mutual. Our duty is to protect policyholder data. It doesn't matter. It's in the cloud. If it's in our data, Southers, we have that duty. It's >> on you. >> So I think a lot about the skills that we will need in the future. So I've referenced sort of vaguely that yet. Compliance area is a particularly interesting area where we have opportunities to able to more easily Bingley produced artifacts on our auditors need to really bring automation to a process that just has a very steep history and being manual in nature. So, yeah, I understand that tomorrow we're not gonna ask everyone to make a big switch and I'll become developers. But way do you know plenty of people to this conference and they are participating in the tracks on how to bring of automation to compliance. And I think that's pretty heavily in training opportunities for people. >> How do you look about the vendor lock in conversation because of cloud. The value proposition certainly shifts in the old model was, Oh, you by event supplier and you're in, You're locked in with database or whatever with Cloud. There's a lot of switching costs, opportunities to move around. But people generally settling in on one main cloud and having this may be a hybrid backup cloud or the cloud is the secondary is the focus of the team's How do you view, um, lock And when you deal with suppliers because you don't want to be stuck with once a fire? If you have the need to be agile, you want to have options. How do you guys think about that? Because being in agility is key for you guys to be successful. Not someone's just dealing with the vendors. >> Um, >> it does come down to balance. We do leverage multiple cloud providers, right? I think that, um, if we're too focused on making sure that we have that portability, and we could quickly move from one to another than we miss an opportunity to kind of deeply leverage. Some of the service is, for example, that the eight of us provides, but we also, you know, you've been around the block of >> your first rodeo. Exactly. >> And I think that it's important to have that perspective and prepare for the future. >> Do you, um, attend board meetings regularly? >> I do. I do for sent out to our board of directors. >> Is that a sort of frequent thing? And once a year, once 1/4 of interested in what the board conversation is like with >> it happens in a couple different context, whether it's specific to sort of an audit readout or sort of a general state of State of Security type A report out. But yeah, we have a really engaged board that asked great questions about our partners, right about things that are more culture base in terms of how we're doing with our anti phishing protection. And we talk about technology architectures, too, in the work that we're doing to make sure that we're being more fine grain in the way that we're authenticating users and devices, no matter where they work in a more secure way. They're they're interested in that. So I feel pretty lucky. Thio both have the opportunity and get deeply. Would >> you say the conversation is more of a strategic nature with the board. Is it more tactic? You just mentioned some tactical items. Is it more metrics driven or a sort of a combination of all three? >> It's a It's a combination right? I think they want to see demonstrated progress against areas that we have self identified Azarias that we'd like to prove improve. But they're also looking to see that I have a vision for where we're going to fully cognizant of the work that we've done in the public cloud and want to understand that the level of trust and they had in their security programme on premise will perpetuate and advance into the cloud. So >> when you look at clouds, security and now security, you guys have you had a perspective on full sides and clouds certainly accelerating involving fast when you find a legacy app that you're working with. We've heard other seasons. We've talked us who have had frank conversations, that look, we're deciding whether we lift and shifted more rebuild on. So there's been some visibility into when it's great to have lifted shifts and when it's great to rebuild. So that's been a conversation that I don't think been fully baked out yet. In the full narrative in the industry, it's one people are talking about. What's your view on when you have a legacy app, you want a lift and shifted or rebuild it? What goes through your mind? What's a conversation like? >> It's a conversation that we have. We have legacy. I won't hide behind behind that. But it's not a conversation in a decision that's just made by technologists, right? I think we have to articulate what the options are, and that has to be a joint decision with our business partners. I think generally I'm not preferring a lift and shift because I think that we are may be overlooking some of the opportunities to make similar security improvements that I see. But when we can get an application that's using our software development pipelines that we have embedded security controls, we have better visibility. We have better enforcement, ensuring what we know that we know what's going into. The cloud has met, you know, a number of our security standards, so to speak, that's a much better position. >> So the destruction of multiple clouds I'm interested in how you handle that you take separate teams is the same team, sort of handling everything, and it's sort of a follow up on that is I'm interested in your relationship with AWS and how that's affected your business. >> Yeah, so the security team does not. Oh, the cloud environment, so to speak. That's that's, Ah Secure Dev Ops team within our infrastructure organization. And they're very close partner of ours, right? So, yes, I do have a resource. Is that our specialist in AWS versus other clouds and others that are identity and access management specialists are able to work on the development of those patterns across different cloud environments. Right. You know, I there's nothing bad that I could say about the relationship with our AWS partners that we felt very supported and understanding what we're trying to do introduce us to new service is and introduced it probably most importantly, introducing us to other customers that have but you know, are a little bit ahead of us in their journey. So weaken, hopefully not repeat, >> not helping you with security pieces. Well, I'm that's something that they with shared responsibility there are there working with you on this securing those workloads as you move. Glad >> be Definitely leverage their expertise. >> And you mentioned that you guys kind of made a decision a few years ago. Toe go all in on the cloud. How has that affected your business? What kind of results have you seen? A zit met expectations. Is it exceeded? You know, I >> mean, is I mentioned we do still have, Ah, a lot of a lot of our technology on premise, but for the use cases that have really seen that rapid acceleration of agile practices allowed teams to develop code so much more quickly. I think the business is generally delighted that their needs are being far more quickly met. Then >> I could ask you, there's a perpetual line in the men's room. It's quite long. So what's it like to be long? And the lady I was going to say? I don't think it is because I would say the proportion of women here is actually lower than even the industry and most conferences that we attend. So what's it like being a woman in this male dominated security business? >> I been in it so on, but I certainly have. You're in a little bit of custom toe, but not so accustomed that I'm not motivated on a daily basis to bring more women in. I think that security just has tremendous opportunities and, you know, certainly the marketing of security professionals is hoody wearing white male kind of persona. Just >> their opportunity. What some of those opportunities for women who are stem science, they might your daughters all stem love public policy, the sociology impact side. The impact that's here is a lot of range of skills. What are some of those that you would inspire someone >> I studied? Math is an undergrad. We didn't have security >> back then and since got a Masters >> degree in cyber security. So that's cool. But, you know, I think a great security professional is a great communicator, a great collaborator. I need technologists. I need developers. I need process experts. I need people that think you know very deeply about assurance type control so way have tried to attract people out of other technology round. >> And it's just not just math and computer science is creativity involved. There's a lot of things that that blend sells all kinds of diversity. >> There is, you know, you think about human psychology, right? We just totally transformed one of the systems that we use for approving for managers to approve the access of their people. Right Past system was ugly. People didn't know how to interact with it. I mean, that user experience expertise that over laid and how we developed our new platform just makes all the difference to make sure that it's actually invaluable process. Now, like I'm so frustrated. I'm just gonna sign off on this because I I give up >> really interesting because you spend a lot of time and effort and money on things that drive revenue. But this drives so much productivity in business value that, you know he's not maybe direct dollars, but clearly there. I have a question. When you recruit people, presumably you tap your network. And it's not just the good old boys network your women. Are you able to successfully find women or young women in particular that you can attract and recruit into your business as security practitioners? They had much success there. >> Yeah, so we definitely are outpacing industry numbers in terms of women and security. We have a long way to go, you know, historically excluded people right? Not just women people of color. I mean, we just have a long ways to go, right. And I think it takes more than sitting back and waiting for a recruiter to bring recruiter to bring me a slate of candidates to say no. I know people. I know people that know people. And I really have toe invest myself and make sure that my leaders know that that's my expectation of them, right? I mean, I think that way feel that diversity of thought, no matter how that diversity is expressed, is really important doing the work. >> Let us know how we could help in Silicon Valley days here in Boston as well. Love help get the word out. So anything you need for muscle now. Okay. Thanks so much for his great insights. Love to have you on the cube again sometime. Thanks. Coming on S V p. C. So at Liberty Mutual here in the cube, extracting the signal, sharing the reality of what's going on in the security equation for cloud security. I'm John for Dave. A lot. Right back after this short break

(upbeat music) >> Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier and we are on a rainy San Francisco day. Day three of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019 here to talk shopping. One of my favorite topics. We have Katie Dunlap VP of Global Unified rather Commerce and Marketing for Bluewolf part of IBM. Katie welcome to theCUBE. >> Welcome, thank you. >> And from Salesforce we have Ben Cesare Senior Director of Global Industry Retail Solutions. Ben it's great to have you on our program. >> How are you? >> Excellent. >> Good. >> Even though we are at the rejuvenated Moscone Center which is fantastic and I think all of the hybrid multi cloud have opened upon San Francisco. >> Right. >> It's a very soggy day. So Katie IBM announced a partnership with Salesforce a couple of years ago. >> Right. >> Just yesterday John and I were chatting. We heard Ginni Rometty your CEO talk about IBM is number one implementer of Salesforce. Talk to us a little bit about the partnership before we get into some specific examples with that. >> So we know that part of that partnership it's really to leverage the best of the technology from Salesforce as well as IBM and ways that we together married together create opportunities for the industry and specifically here today we're talking about retail. >> So on the retail side Salesforce as a great SAS company they keep on blowing the records on the numbers performance wise. SAS business has proven it's a cloud business but retails is a data business. >> Yes. >> So how does IBM look at that? What's the relationship with retail? What's the solution? >> Yeah. >> And what are people looking at Salesforce for retail. >> Yeah, I think it's really important to understand where our strengths are and I think when you talk about Salesforce you talk about Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud. We call that the engagement layer. That's how we can really interact with our consumers with our shoppers. But at the same time to really have a great connection with consumers you need to have great data. You need have great insights. You need to understand what's happening with all the information that drives choices for retailers and that's why the relationship with IBM is absolutely so strong and it is a data driven relationship. Together I guess you can see the customers in the middle. So we have our engagement layer and a data layer. Together we satisfy the customer. >> Lisa what's the solution specifically because obviously you guys going to market together to explain the tactical relationship. You guys join sale, is it an integration? >> Sure. So what we have done given the disruption that's happening right now in the retail space and with the customer at the center of that conversation we've been looking at ways that what the native functionality for Salesforce is Einstein as an intelligent layer and for IBM it's Watson. So where do they complement one another? And so looking at retail with commerce and marketing and service as the center of that conversation and engagement layer. How are we activating and working with a customer from a collection of data information standpoint and activating that data all through supply chain. So the experience is not just the front experience that you and I have when we go to a site it's actually how and when is that delivered to me. If I have an issue how am I going to return that. So we've looked at the entire customer journey and looked at ways that we can support and engage along the way. So for us, we're looking at as you see retail and the way it's evolving is that we're no longer just talking about that one experience where you're actually adding to your cart and your buying. It goes all the way through servicing that customer returning and making sure that information that's specific to me. And if I can choose how I'm going to have that inventory sent to me and those products sent to me. That's exactly what we're looking to do. >> So then the retailer like a big clothing store is much more empowered than they've ever been. Probably really demanded by us consumers who want to be able to do any transaction anywhere started on my phone finish on a tablet, etc. So I can imagine maybe Ben is this like a Watson and Einstein working together to say take external data. Maybe it's weather data for example and combine those external data sources with what a retailer has within their customer database and Salesforce to create very personalized experiences for us shoppers as consumers. >> Right, and where retailers really can grow in terms of the future is really accessing all that data. I think if you look at some of the statistics retailers have up to 29 different systems of records and that's why some of our experiences are very good some of our experiences are not very good. So together if we can collapse that data in a uniform way that really drives personalization, contextual selling so you can actually see what you're buying why you're buying it, why it's just for me. That's the next level and I must say with all the changes in the industry there's some things that will never change and that is consumers want the right product, the right price, the right place and the right time. All enveloped in a great customer experience. That will never change but today we have data that can inform that strategy and when I was a senior merchant at Macy's years ago, I had no data. I had to do a lot of guessing and when mistakes are made that's when retailers have a problem. So if retailers are using data to it's benefit it just make sure that the customer experiences exceptional. And that's what we strive to do together. >> And I can build on that if we're thinking like specifically how we're engaged from a technology perspective. If I'm a merchandiser and I decide I want to run a promotion for New York and I want to make sure before I run that promotion that I have the right inventory and that I not only I'm I creating the right message but I have the information that I need in order to make that successful. One of the things that we partner with Salesforce on is the engagement layer being Salesforce. But in the back end we have access to something called Watson Embedded Business Agent and that business agent actually goes out and talks to all the disparate systems. So it doesn't have to be solutions that are necessarily a homegrown by IBM or Salesforce Watson could actually integrate directly with them and sits on top. So as a merchandiser I can ask the question and receive information back from supply chain. Yes there's enough product in New York for you to run this promotion. It can go out and check to see if there's any disruption that's expected and check in with weather so that as on the back end from an operation standpoint I'm empowered or the right data in order to run those promotions and be successful. >> It's interesting one of the things that comes up with her this expression from IBM. There's no AI without IA information architecture. You talk about systems of record all this silo databases. There's low latency you need to be real time in retail. So this is a data problem, right? So this is where AI really could fit in. I see that happening. The question that I have as a consumer is what's in it for me? Right? So Ben, tell us about the changes in retail because certainly online buying mobile is happening. But what are some of the new experiences that end users and consumers are seeing that are becoming new expectations? What's the big trend in retail? >> Well there's two paths they're your expectations as a consumer, then there's the retailer path and how they can meet your expectations. So let's talk about you first. So what you always want is a great customer experience. That's what you want. And what defines that is are they serving me the products I want when I want them? Are they delivering them on time? Do the products work? If I have a problem, how am I treated? How am I served? And these are all the things that we address with the Salesforce solutions. Now let's talk about the retailer. What's important to the retailer is next retailer myself. It was important that I understood what is my right assortment? And that's hard because you have a broad audience of consumers, you have regional or local requirements. So you want to understand what's the right assortment and working with IBM with their (mumbles) optimizer that helps us out in terms how we promote through our engagement later. That's number one. Number two, how about managing markdowns. This year there were over $300 billion in markdown through retailers. Half of those markdowns 150 billion were unplanned markdowns and that goes right to your P&L. So we want to make sure that the things we do satisfy the consumer but not at the expense of the retailer. The retailer has to succeed. So by using IBM supply chain data information we can properly service you. >> It's interesting we see the trend in retail I mean financial services for early on. >> Yeah. >> High-frequency trading, use of data. That kind of mindset is coming to retail where if you're not a data driven or data architecturally thinking about it. >> Yeah. >> The profit will drop. >> Yeah. >> Unplanned markdowns and other things and inventory variety of things. This is a critical new way to really reimagine retail. >> Yeah retail has become such a ubiquitous term there's retail banking, there's retail in every parts of our life. It's not just the store or online but it's retail everywhere and someone is selling their services to you. So I think the holy grail is really understanding you specifically. And it's not just about historical transact which you bought but behavioral data. What interests you. What are the trends and data has become a much broader term. It's just not numbers. Data is what are your trends? What are you saying on social media? What are you tweeting out? What are you reading.? What videos are you viewing? All that together really gives a retailer information to better serve you. So data is really become exponential in it's use and in it's form. >> So I'm curious what you guys see this retails it's very robust retail use case as driving in the future. We just heard yesterday one of the announcements Watson anywhere. I'm curious leveraging retail as an example and the consumerization of almost any industry because we expect to have things so readily and as you both point out data is commerce. Where do you think this will go from here with Watson Einstein and some of the other technologies? What's the next prime industry that really can benefit from what you're doing in retail? >> I think that I'll start and probably you can add that in as well. But I think that it's going to bleed into everything. So health and life sciences, consumer goods, product goods. We've talked about retail being all different kinds of things right now. Well CPG organizations are actually looking at ways to engage the customer directly and so having access utilizing Watson as a way of engaging and activating data to create insights that you've never thought of before. And so being able to stay a step ahead anticipate the needs stay on the bleeding edge of that interaction so that you're engaging customers in a whole new way is what we see and it's going to be proliferated into all kinds of different industries. >> Yes, every merchant every buyer wants to be able to predict. I mean won't that be incredible be able to see around the corner a bit and and while technologies don't give you the entire answer they can sure get you along the way to make better decisions. And I think with Watson and Einstein it does exactly that. It allows you to really predict what the customers want and that's very powerful. >> I want to get you guys perspective on some trend that we're seeing. We hear Ginni Rometty talk about chapter two of the cloud, you almost say there's a chapter two in retail, if you look at the certainly progressive way out front, doing all the new things. People doing the basics, getting an online presence, doing some basic things with mobile kind of setting the table a foundations, but they stare at the data problem. They almost like so it's a big problem. I know all this systems of record. How do I integrate it all in? So take us through a use case of how someone would attack that problem. Talking about an example a customer or a situation or use case that says okay guys help me. I'm staring at this data problem, I got the foundation set, I want to be a retail have to be efficient and innovative in retail, what do I do? Do I call IBM up, do I call Salesforce? How does that work? Take us through an example. >> So I think the first example that comes to mind is I think about Sally Beauty and how they're trying to approach the market and looking at who they are and many retailers right now because there's such a desire to understand data. Make sure that your cap. Everyone has enough data. But what is the right data to activate and use in that experience. So they came to us to kind of look at are we in the right space because right now everyone's trying to be everything to all people. So how do I pick the right place that I should be and am I in the right place with hair care and hair color? And the answer came back yes. You are in the right space. You need to just dive deeper into that and make sure that that experience online so they used a lot of information from their research on users to understand who their customers are, what they're expecting. And since they sell haircare product that is professional grade. How do I make sure that the customers are getting using it in the proper way. So they've actually created an entire infused way of deciding what exactly hair color you need and for me as a consumer, am I actually buying the right grade level from me and am I using that appropriately. And that data all came from doing the research because they are about to expand out and add in all kinds of things like (mumbles) where you're going into the makeup area but really helping them stay laser focused on what they need to do in order to be successful. >> Because you guys come and do like an audit engage with them on a professional service level. >> Yes, we went end-to-end >> And the buying SAS AI and then they plug in Salesforce. >> Yes, so they actually already had Salesforce. So they had the commerce solution marketing and service. They were fairly siloed so we go back to that whole conversation around data being held individually but not leveraging that as a unit in order to activate that experience for the consumer. What they have decided as a result of our work with them. So we came in and did a digital strategy. We're been involved as an agency of record to support them and how that entire brand strategy should be from an omnichannel perspective in the store, as well as that digital experience and then they actually just decided to go with IBM (mumbles) and use that as a way of activating from an omnichannel order orchestration standpoint. So all the way through that lifecycle we've been engaging them and supporting them and Watson obviously native to Salesforce's Einstein and they're leveraging that but they will be infusing Watson as part of their experience. >> So another benefit that Sally Beauty and imagine other retailers and other companies and other industries, we get is optimizing the use of Salesforce. It's a very ubiquitous tool but you mentioned, I think you mentioned Ben that in the previous days of many, many, many systems of records. So I imagine for Sally Beauty also not just to be able to deliver that personalized customer experience, track inventory but it's also optimizing their internal workforce productivity. But I'm curious-- >> Yes. >> For an organization of that size. What's the time to impact? They come in you guys do the joint implementation, go to market, the consulting, identify the phases of the project, how quickly did Sally Beauty start to see a positive impact on their business? >> I think they... Well there's immediate benefits, right? Because they are already Salesforce clients and so our team our IBM team was able to come in and infuse some best practices and their current existing site. So they've been able to leverage that and see that benefit through all the way through Black Friday and last holiday season. And now what they're seeing is they're on the verge of launching and relaunching their site in the next month and then implementing (mumbles) is a part of that. So they're still on the path in the journey to that success but they've already seen success based on the support that we've provided them. >> And what are some of the learnings you guys have seen with this? Obviously you got existing accounts. They take advantage of this, what are some of the learnings around this new engagement layer and with the data intelligence around AI? What's the learnings have you guys seen? >> Yeah I think the leading thing that I've learned is the power of personalization. It's incredibly powerful. And a good example is one of my favorite grocers and that's Kroger. If we really understand what Kroger has done, I'll talk about their business a bit. I'll talk about what they've been able to do. If you look at someone's shopper basket there's an amazing amount of things you can learn about that. You can learn if they're trying to be fit if they're on a diet. You can learn if their birthdays coming. You can learn if they just had a baby. You can learn so many different things. So with shopper basket analysis, you can understand exactly what coupons you send them. So when I get coupons digital or in my home they're all exactly what I buy. But to do that for 25-30 million top customers is a very difficult thing to do. So the ability to analyze the data, segment it and personalize it to you is extremely powerful and I think that's something that retailers and CPG organizations how they continue to try to do. We're not all the way there. Were probably 30% there I would say but personalization it's going to drive customer for life. That's what it's going to do and that's a massive learning for us. >> And the other thing too Ginni mentioned it in her keynote is the reasoning around the data. So it's knowing that the interest and around the personas, etc. But it's also those surprises. Knowing kind of in advance, maybe what someone might like given their situation-- >> Anticipating. >> And we were talking about this morning. Actually, we're talking about behavioral data and data has taken a different term. >> Data is again what are you doing online what are you talking about, what did you view. What video did you look at. For organizations that have access to that data tells me so much more about your interest right now today. And it's not just about a product but it's about a lifestyle. And if retails could understand your lifestyle that opens the door to so many products and services. So I think that's really what retailers are really into. >> My final question for you guys both of you get the answer. Answer will be great is what's the biggest thing that is going to happen in retail that people may not see coming that's going to be empowering and changing people's lives? What do you guys see as a trend that's knocking on the door or soon to be here and changing lives and empowering people and making them better in life. >> Yeah, I'll jump in on one real quick and I think it's already started but it's really phenomenon of commerce anywhere. Commerce used to be a very linear thing. You'd see an ad some would reach out to you and you buy something. The commerce now is happening wherever you are. You could be tweeting something on Instagram, you could be walking in an airport. You could be anywhere and you can actually execute a transaction. So I think the distance between media and commerce has totally collapsed. It's become real time and traditional media TV, print and radio is still a big part of media. A big part but there's distance. So I think it's the immediacy of media and a transaction. That's really going to take retailers and CPG customers by surprise. >> It changes the direct-to-consumer equation. >> It changes it. It does. >> And I think I would just build on that to say that people have relationships with their brands and the way that you can extend that in this and commerce anywhere is that people don't necessarily need to know they're in that commerce experience. They're actually having a relationship with that individual brand. They're seen for who they are as an individual not a segment. I don't fall into a segment that I'm kind of like this but I'm actually who I am and they're engaging. So the way that I think we're going to see things go as people thinking at more and more out of the box about how to make it more convenient for me and to not hide that it's a commerce experience but to make that more of an engagement conversation that-- >> People centric not person in a database. >> Exactly. >> That's right. >> Moving away from marketing from segmentation and more to individual conversations. >> Yeah I think you said it Ben it's the power of personalization. >> Power of personalization. >> Katie, Ben thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you. >> Talking about what you guys IBM and Salesforce are doing together and we're excited to see where that continues to go. >> Great. >> Thanks so much. >> Our pleasure, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE live from IBM Think 19 I'm Lisa Martin for John Furrier stick around on Express. We'll be joining us shortly. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE! Covering E3, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff right here at theCUBE. We're at the L.A. Convention Center in E3. It's our first time coming to this convention. It's 68,000 people and every single hall and outside, inside hotels. It's pretty crazy--pretty crazy scene. We're happy to be here. Well, we've got our next guest. She's been coming for a while. It's Katie Stone Perez. She's the director of Mixer Interactive. From Mixer, Katie, great to see you. >> Thanks so much for having me! >> Absolutely. So before we jump into it, I'd love to get your perspective. You've been in this industry for-- >> 17 years. >> 17 years. I wasn't going to say that. I was going to say close to two decades. >> (Laughing) >> So as you've been in and watched this thing develop, what are your impressions today in 2018 and how it's transformed?-- >> Of the show? You know, the whole game industry has so fundamentally transformed over the last 17 years, right? I mean, at that point in time, we didn't even have services like Xbox Live where people were connecting and playing online together. Everything was really sold as a disc-based media. So you walked into a store to purchase your disk. Now we have so many digital purchases happening online. We had no player data. We had no way to actually know how far in the game our players were getting and all of this kind of stuff-- >> [Jeff] That's right. You just shipped the disc out, right? You didn't know. >> And now we have all of this telemetry, right? We have all of these experiences. You have the, you know, free-to-play has made a huge rise. We have mobile, right? Mobile gaming within the space. So the show has so transformed both from the people who are playing within the space, the technologies that people are using, and the growth. I mean, we can also just see-- years ago, it was really much more about a trade show so that the big people who are going to buy the disc can actually come to E3-- >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> Check out our games and place their disc orders. And now it's really much more of a consumer phenomenon as well. >> [Jeff] So I'm curious, we covered a ton of tech shows. Just I've been here before and data and the use of data is a huge part of the digital transformation story. >> Yeah. >> So I'm curious from your point of view from a game developer point of view, how did that change? Because you guys are a little bit ahead of the curve in getting the usage data, getting the tracking data. How did that impact the industry in the way you developed and shipped games? >> It's phenomenal. You know, all of a sudden, you can start to understand who your players are and so if you're gonna do an upsell offer, you know, you can understand, like, "Oh, this person has actually already purchased this type of material." So I'm gonna give him this type of upsell vs this type of upsell. Or, You know, "I see all of my players are really struggling on level three and no one is making it through. What's wrong with level three?" Let's look at changing that up a bit. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So data has actually really informed us in so many ways to re-look at our basic gameplay loops. Our retention mechanics and all of that kind of stuff and, you know, most game companies now have teams of data analysts who are just specifically focusing on those KPIs and just analyzing the data and learning. >> [Jeff] Right. >> But with that too, we've also then had to get more agile in our development and publishing processes because, you know, when you ship a disc and you just let it go, you can get data but then what are you gonna do about it, right? >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> Your next sequel is a couple of years out and so now, too, with the ability to push updates over the air and all of this kind of stuff, It changes it so we can actually take that information, have an immediate impact, and sometimes you can get that data within one or two days. Actually have an impact, you know? >> [Jeff] Right. >> So I actually work on mixer which is a game broadcasting platform so we have a live service. So we can just constantly update and make these changes. >> [Jeff] I'm gonna ask you a philosophical question that I'm always thinking about. In terms of difficulty and the right amount of difficulty, and just kind of generically but engage specifically-- >> Right. >> You want to be difficult enough so people feel challenged and want to continue the journey. >> Yeah. >> But obviously you can't make it so difficult that they just couldn't get through. So I just wondered if you had some-- >> Yeah! >> If there's some best practice or philosophy about what's the right level to the degree of difficulty? >> Yeah, you know funny enough, I gave a talk at GDC in, like, 2005 and it was called Let Me Win and so my background is actually in psychology and it was really as someone who has a psychology background who loves to play games. My issues of playing through so many games in our media because we're a very defeatist mentality. If you think about it, we started as an industry as this coin-op industry where we had to kill you off because we needed you to put another quarter in the machine. But now we carry that trope with us even though we have people put 60 quarters-- $60 worth of quarters in the machine in advance >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> But we're still killing you off in the same way. And so it's kind of crazy to me. And so we really as an industry, I do think, need to think about that more. Now there's certain games like Cuphead is one of my favorite games but it's really brutally hard but that was very much the intention, you know? >> [Jeff] Right. >> These dark souls and the cupheads in those games. Their genre is that they are super hard-- >> [Jeff] Right. >> So people kind of know that going into them. But I do think across our broader audience, we need to think about how we're being more inclusive in our design And that's everything from, you know, still giving people that harder experience but also an educational principal called scaffolding. So, you know, just like when you're teaching a kid to do something, you're not gonna say "Okay, do this and this and this and this and this." Because that's not fun. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> So instead, if you can be, like, "Here's what the goal is. Here's your tools." And then within the game, we want to help do that. Now with data, actually, we can help scaffold better. Cause we can actually see "Oh, these players didn't do this" Or "This age group of players didn't do this." Or "This type of thing didn't do this." So we can actually use that to inform our decisions and actually do better scaffolding within the game. >> [Jeff] Okay, so before we get to mixer and streaming which is like the latest thing, I want to get to this middle step which was the Cloud. And really opening up the ability to do multi-player games, opening up the ability to go from just that consul out into the universe and play lots of other people. Again, how did that really transform the way you guys thought about designing and delivering games? >> I mean, fundamentally, you know, Xbox Live was a apart of our program. Very early on, Live came into the Xbox business and I think it was actually great because we had that as a Microsoft asset and strength that we can bring over that type of infrastructure. And we've seen it really just connect and bring people together in form community, right? And it's so much fun. There's some element that you get when you're sitting next to someone and playing but not everyone in the world has someone sitting next to them. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So we're doing that over Live by bringing people together and through different platforms and services like Mixer as well where we can bring these communities together. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So it's really, I really think about creating that essence of community. It just makes everything more fun. >> [Jeff] Right. So now we're in 2018 and actually, it's been going on for a little while which is a whole different level of community and that's streaming where someone's playing a game for those that aren't familiar and other people are invited to participate with them. >> Yeah. >> Again, another huge shift in the way that people interacting with the game. And more importantly, kind of the social aspects around their playing with the game. >> Yeah and that's what's so cool. So in traditional game streaming platforms too, there's quite a bit of latency so what the gamer-- the streamer's actually doing at the time, you know, by the time the viewers end up seeing it on a platform, and then, you know, they can comment on it and then the streamer kind of sees it. There's a lot of latency there. So Mixer was actually created by two young kids who actually were huge in the Minecraft community. They had already created a million dollar business actually hosting Minecraft servers and they had all these streamer friends that were Minecraft streamers and they were talking about how frustrating it was because they were streaming and people were like "Put the block over here, put the block over there." But by the time they saw that feedback from their fans, they had already moved on. They had already done something different. So Mixer created low latency streaming. So what we called our faster-than-light technology where we have sub-second latency. So exactly what's happening in the game, that's what people on Mixer are seeing. And then they can comment and the streamer immediately sees those comments and that then paved the way for this richer conversation. And from there, we had interactivity come about. So we have all of our new Mixplay experiences where people can actually come on to Mixer and not just watch. Now they are playing themselves. So you can actually be playing one of our games like Next Up Hero and I can actually choose to help heal you or I can choose to help throw in enemies. Then you'll see my gamer text "Sweets" go right across the screen, right? You can actually see as a gamer who's then broadcasting, you can see what I'm doing on Mixer and how that's having an impact within your game. >> Didn't the streamer kind of like the latency so that they had time to kind of split their attention between playing the game and interacting with the community? >> No because it's all->> streamers for them, It's all about community. Now there are certain competitive sports events and things like that that we do within the e-sports space, and so there might be certain instances in which you don't want to have low latency engaged. But for the most part, streamers want to be having that conversation and are faster- >> than-light technology on Mixer really enables that for them. >> [Jeff] Right. And it just seems like it's almost gonna come full circle so if I'm engaging with the streamer and I'm participating in the game to some degree, at some point, do I just step in and we're playing the game together? >> Yeah. I mean, really now, you can play on Mixer. That's really what we're talking about with our new Mixplay experiences. So we even have games that are playable only on Mixers so these games aren't even-- we were talking about distribution, right? These games aren't even shipping. There's no disc. They're not even shipping on any of these other platforms. They're playable only on Mixer and so you can actually go to mixer.com today and check out several of these game experiences and you can actually look for Mixplay experiences. We have filters and so you can actually find all of that content. >> [Jeff] Alright. So to get your perspective before we let you->> you've been at this for a while. So as storage and compute and networking, it gets infinite in scale and asymptotically approaches zero in cost. As you look forward, where do you see leveraging some of this new horsepower? >> Well, I think again, you know, Microsoft actually just had this amazing acquisition of PlayFab technology and I love seeing what they're doing within this space and bringing that into our portfolio of content as well. Because again, it's about having this data and being able to really respond and change your game instantly to really make sure that you're doing the best things for your business. And so it really just makes developers be informed and be able to be much more agile in their approach. And it's also democratizing that opportunity. Previously years ago, to get some of these insights, you would have had to be one of the largest game companies on the planet. And now with the democratization of these different game engines, and then then the democratization of this type of tooling and online services that are available, with things like Azure and things like PlayFab, it really creates an amazing opportunity for all developers everywhere. >> [Jeff] And to me, the democratization, the thing where you're over and over-- >> Yeah. >> More of data, more of the tools, and more of the ability to do something about it is distributed to a broader audience. Alright Katie, well thank you for-- >> We get more voices with that, right? >> Right, right. >> You get a much broader set of content that ends up like the content that you see here today is much more diverse and much broader. You know, we still have a long way to go as an industry but it's very different than my first E3 17 years ago. >> [Jeff] 17 years ago. Alright Katie, well thanks for taking-- >> Thank you! >> a few minutes out of your day and congrats on all the success. >> Thanks! >> Alright, this is Katie and I'm Jeff. You're watch theCUBE from E3, L.A. Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat, techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We've got two guests for this panel. We have Katie Benedict who is director advisory people in change at KPMG and Michelle Esposito who is the AVP technology planning for JM Family Enterprises. Welcome Katie and Michelle. >> Thank you for having us. >> So I want to start out with you Michelle, explain to our viewers what JM Family Enterprises is. >> Sure, JM Family's, we're a privately held company located in south Florida. We have about 4,200 associates across the country and I describe us as a diversified automotive company. So we started 50 years ago, it's actually our 50th anniversary. Distributing Toyotas in the U.S. We were the first distributor and we still distribute to the five south eastern states but since then we've grown and expanded into other sectors of the automotive industry. Including auto finance and warranty and insurance products. >> Okay so diversified portfolio of services. >> Yes. >> So recently you had a situation, an implementation situation. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about it and then I want you to chime in Katie with how you worked on it too. >> Sure. So we were an existing ServiceNow customer. We implemented the product back in 2011 and at the time we really just tried to make it look like our old product. We wanted to minimize the disruption to the organization so we said let's just make it look and behave like the old product did. Seemed like a good idea at the time but with that and with the change that happened over time it became very complex to use and it really just wasn't meeting our needs. So, after much consultation with a lot of experts in the field we decided to re-implement ServiceNow. We believed in the platform, we believed in its capabilities and what it could do for us but we needed to start over. So with that comes a lot of change for our organization. People re used to doing things a certain way, they're used to the processes that we already had in place. So trying to get them on board and understand the why to what we were doing was really important. >> And Katie that's where you fit in. So tell us a little bit about KPMG's approach to making this easier, because as Michelle said. We are human nature, we're just resistant to change and sort of we like it the old way. This is hard. So how, what, can you tell us a little bit about your approach. >> Exactly. We were thrilled that JM Family chose KPMG as their implementation partner and really some of things we brought specifically to the table for this re-implementation. Was some of our accelerators. Our process packs to really optimize the new processes that JM Family was using but then also our organizational change management and learning and development capabilities. We specialize in IT transformation from a people perspective and group of a specialized in ServiceNow. We've done, well over 50 implementations of ServiceNow. So we wanted to look from that people perspective, how do we get the right level of buy in. How do we make sure that people understand why we're doing the change. Get that early, quick adoption. A continuous feedback loop we implement a change agent network. Which I've found was one of the most effective things we could have done especially at JM Family given the nature of their organization and given some of the cultural considerations there and it was a tremendous success there I feel. I mean the people there, the associates there were so involved in the initiative and really partnered with our team. As a single team, it wasn't JM Family and KPMG it was one implementation team working together in tandem to make this change happen. >> So what did you learn in the sense of what were people's, what were the sticking points? And then how did you overcome them? >> Yeah. Sure I can take that. As much as people were supportive of the re-implementation and really knew we needed to do it we found that they were still very much embedded with the way we did it today. So even going into this knowing what a huge change management effort it was I was still surprised at how much effort we had to put into it. So it took a lot of communication, a lot of different methods of communication and engagement to get people to really understand what we were doing and why we were doing it. Repetition really explaining it, the change agent network was huge for us and what we did there was. We pulled in some of our bigger supporters and some of our detractors and they were able to kind of permeate the organization in the different departments within IT to really help sell what we were doing. To bring back questions and concerns. So that was really key. >> What was that like bringing in the people who were really butting heads? I mean and how do you navigate between those two factions? >> Honestly I think it was great because I'd rather get that feedback while we're going through the process than hear about it later and hear the implementation not be successful. So in some cases when people brought that feedback that maybe wasn't so positive it was just a matter of more communication, more training but in other times it was you know we really scratched our head and said maybe we really need the rethink about this. Maybe they've got something here and we may need to tweak our approach or do something a little differently. But it was as Katie mentioned, the engagement level was phenomenal. So the positive and the negative we really had a very engaged team. >> So coming out of this Katie, what would you say are sort of the best practices for other leaders that are doing implementation, re-implementations and maybe dealing with some resistance? >> I would say definitely whether it's the implementation or a re-implementation. Don't forget about your people. The technology, especially ServiceNow is fabulous and your processes are generally are standard. You can align to idle processes but getting the adoption is really key and so remembering that this is a transformation. It's not just an implementation of the technology. Paying attention to the people, making sure that they're on board. They know what you're doing, why you're doing it and really what's in it for them is vital to making this a successful project. >> As you're looking at the ServiceNow platform and what you do for JM Family Enterprises what do you see looking ahead as sort of ways you can augment and enhance? >> Oh they have a lot of ideas going forward right now which is very exciting. >> It is, you know we focused in, we're in a second phase implementation. Our first phase really focused on the core ITSM functions and now we're dipping our toe into some other areas. The PPM suite, vendor management, performance analytics. So we're really continuing to mature our use of the product and even looking beyond that. You know we have interest in some of the security operations and even further than that into some of the financial management capabilities. So we definitely plan to continue invest in the platform and see what it can do for us. >> You're evolving just as ServiceNow is evolving too. >> Yes we are. >> Well Michelle and Katie thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have much more of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Hashtag no 18 just after this.

>>Live from the Mandalay convention center in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's not cue at IBM insight 2014 >>you're all your hosts. John furrier and Dave Volante.. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. We're here live inside the cube at IBM insight. I'm Sean with Dave Volante. We go after the events, extract the signal and noise. We go wall to wall covers what we do here. I don't, of course we're excited to have awesome gas. We talked to the executives, entrepreneurs, but we get the media stars in here. Uh, Katie Lyndon doll. Welcome to the cube. You are with CNN, the today show. You're the tech correspondent and you get a lot of energy. I could just tell this is going to be fun. It's been fun to hear the last few days. So I mean, Watson is the geeky story of any what, what are you seeing? Let me get the wife in a second. But outside of Watson, what's the coolest thing you've seen? >>I'm constantly on the hunt for the latest innovations in technology and I think that's probably the best part about my job. And always chasing down high level stories. I recently just came back for a dive with NASA. I learned that NASA astronauts actually train underwater to simulate microgravity and I'm like, Oh my gosh, no way. And they're like, do you want to come down to the world's only Marine underwater habitat? I was like, yes, please. So went down to the Florida keys, it's an hour off the coast and was diving literally with NASA European space agency and the Canadian space agency underwater. And again, it's the world's only underwater Marine habitat and seeing how they train in everything from asteroid mining to um, underwater surgery to actually seeing how the body responds to exercise. I guess water simulates one sixth of gravity. So it was a pretty dynamic shoot. >>I was doing that for NBC news and it's just I, those are the types of stories. I, I am a diver. I actually was doing a story on big data last year and it required me to get my dive certs and the Island of Bermuda feel very bad. It was a presentation that I was speaking on here at insight a, there was all this crowdsourced information about how the lion fish, if you've ever heard of the lion fish has been, it's an invasion in the Atlantic ocean. I took all of this information and metrics and made a story for CNN and it required me to get my advanced dive certs. So now I'm getting all these dive stories cause there's not a lot of us dive reporters. So the lion fish story for CNN too. Another good example of a piece that I go after. >>So you, you bring a lot of energy. What do you see here? I mean you see a lot of stories and you get pitched stories. I can imagine that your email box flux, I mean it's like, Oh >>I have 78,000 unread emails right now. I'm not proud of that. But yes, constantly being pitched. >>I had 40,000 I'm a little bit blind. I'm going to give that to you in the today show. Not too shabby. But what do you do? You get pitched all the time and so you got the vet stories. What's your formula for vetting stories? I mean, what gets your attention and how do you go outside your comfort zone to select good stories? What your attention. It's funny, >>you know, so I've been in television for the last 10 years and I feel like now I have this internal barometer and knowing when something's very good and the scope of the things that I cover from, you know, in the past month alone when I was talking about the NASA piece and then I'll flip the next day and do top Halloween gadgets on today's show. So it's, it's very vast, but I can instantly tell and it's, it's come through experience and being in a background in technology and knowing what's gonna work for the consumer and knowing a hot product. When I see it and I I T I gotten pretty good I think at it spotting a product that a consumer is going to love but also finding a story that is, maybe it's super nerdy, but my job is to take it and to bring it down to a level that's entertaining for any kind of audience, whether it be CNN or whether it be today. >>So it says your Guinness book of world record holder, share that in little nugget with the folks in. Yes, that is a true story. I have a Guinness world record holder in the most high fives and one minute. Okay, so this probably solicit some like how the heck did that happen? I've always been fascinated with Guinness world records and I always wanted one and I've always been obsessed with a high five like I am paranoid of huggers, there's nothing that scares me more or good high five just go for the five. I don't want to bring it in and okay, it's a little OCD. I will completely aware. So anyways, I found that this Guinness world record was held by a clown in England for the most high fives and one minute. So I convinced I was hosting a show on spike TV and I convinced them to allow me to break this record. >>So we had all these people line up in the MTV cafeteria and you have a Guinness world record adjudicator come onsite, you get two tries and if you win you get a plaque in a formal ceremony. The cube before we should do the most consecutive interviews to having a drink of water. We want to just come here and we could break something able to break something or like you said, it's his official. Yeah, we started to get like real nervous and like hot and yeah, so I had two tribes. Oh I was, I was giving him a big ass big fitness person. So I was like ready. And if clown beats me at this point, it's over your careers. division. You'll never work again because I beat it on the first try and then I advanced it on a single hand or you go, there's a whole process as you can imagine with the adjudicator's she's like real intense. >>She's like counting with her clicker on the high five so I go down this line of people and it has to be over there can't be like a mailed in like you know like a high five you go for the five names and then I got a couple that were disqualified, you know like a couple didn't count because it wasn't like a full on five four so like a film replay. Super slow motion. I like argued a few. I was like no, I was for sure up on that one. The flag, it was sponsored by PRL. It wasn't but it should have been but it was fun. So I have a plaque how many? 107 heard rumors that it's been broken but I didn't care as long as I've got a plan to that plan at one point. Okay. Let's cut to about IBM because Watson is the coolest thing I'll say is pretty mainstream. >>It hits your wheelhouse. I'll see for the day I've seen jeopardy. Absolutely. Now how does that translate into a story for sure. Stuff going on here. What do you, so what's very cool about Watson? I called my boyfriend because I've had a relationship with him now over the last few years, a few years ago on CVS. I actually got to challenge Watson on a full game of jeopardy and I think that was of course the most, the most memorable part of Watson when he took on the two, you know, jeopardy champions. But so this is like a lifetime moment for me. I got a full game of jeopardy, me Watson and another individual smoked me and actually I was doing okay and then it was like tennis vocab. I was like, Oh, I got this. You know, like I've been in sports my whole life. I've been worked at ESPN for seven years. >>I got this in the bag, I was doing good. And then they were like, Oh, we had them on the low setting. I was like, all right, really? Like really? Like I was just feeling good about myself. I finished with $2, two bucks. Um, and I thought it was so cool how gimmicky it was, you know, in a healthy beach in the tennis category. Oh, you smoking, you never in the low setting for sure. I got a few of those, a few. I actually got set in Tennessee vocab. You're going to have it right. Even watching tennis your whole life. Right. ESPN is embarrassing and disappointing. And then I weighed you too much and then the double jeopardy. Anyways, I digress. So how cool is it that I got to play Watson but then now years later seeing the power in it in many different developments and most notably I work over at as a volunteer at Sloan Memorial Kettering cancer center for a small group called Candlelighters that works with individuals that come in from around the world for cancer treatments. >>Now Sloan is one of those powerful cancer centers in the world is actually using it as predictive analysis. So here and I work with these kids and I, it's very complex. When they go in for a diagnosis, there's lots of different problems that they have and really it's, it's, it's, it's, it's guesswork for a doctor now. They can put all of these things that are happening with it, with a child into a machine, and they can pump out a hypotheses. Of course, you're going to have to have the human interaction tailored with that to have the emotional side, but I had been fascinated, especially on the medical side, watching your boyfriend at this point. That's interesting. We'll get that to the world of Facebook. It's complicated. I heard rumors that he's talks back and we'll listen to this a true statement. He's a lot smarter than I am. >>I'm intimidated by that, but what's the coolest demo with Watson that you've seen besides jeopardy? Yeah, that would have, well I actually learned something new from a few developers that I met yesterday about the new chef app. So being able to go into your pantry and to do some recipe from what you have, the ingredients you have insider, I think that's a little more consumer friendly. So I was kind of like, um, I'm excited to check that one out. Looking at the tech landscape, what are you most excited about? I mean, what's the coolest kind of consumer meats like gadget, short door, tech cloud. If you could pull a few favorites at what's, what's drawing your attention? Uh, one that we actually had here that's probably popped into mind. There's so many to choose from, but in the world of Oculus rift, and the reason I say that is not for the gaming aspect, but more for the potential in the landscape of physical therapy. >>The first time I got on Oculus raft, I was actually training on a Navy boat and I was doing a segment where all my camera men were all around me. I lost track of reality and I got so immersed into virtual reality and being there and even as a huge diver, I get very motion sick and I got motion sick on the boat. Being in this physical, this augmented reality world, we're actually shooting this at the birthplace of Oculus rift. So we really diving behind the scenes into the actual, uh, software and hardware and it was such a cool, immersive experience and realize that what this could do for physical therapy or even at the dentist at a lower end, I think the capabilities for augmented reality and taking yourself out of that moment are huge. So I think that's very exciting. How about drones? >>Oh my gosh. So yes, let's talk to, and my nephew the other day and he said, do you want to see the drone that I built? And I said, yeah, it's got this four or five quadcopter. It's a quadcopter. Yup. I said, where'd you get the software for? He goes, I'll download it. It's all open source. I hacked it a little bit. I actually have several drones. Okay. Nominal. Because this blew me away. I probably have what I consider is the best prosumer drone. It's a DGI Phantom, a DJI Phantom two and I have got some incredible aerial footage over the mountains of Montana and also over a Bermuda, the Island of Bermuda. I sent it up, put it over a shipwreck, gorgeous. And for me as a flake, being in photo and video and going out and getting my own video and not having to rely on a cop, a copter for, you know, that would be thousands of dollars worth of footage or relying on a cameraman. >>I just sent that baby up. I'm like, please don't hit anybody. It's a little hard to operate when you get the one, the higher end models. I have a couple of the parents too. There are a lot easier to operate and do it right from my iPhone, but I am just like, I'm so into it now. I think it's a little gimmicky when we talk about Amazon and pizza deliveries and taco deliveries and beer deliveries with a drone shooting surprises. Texas man, what am, I don't know about that. But uh, I think it's fascinating. I think it's a really cool technology. And again, I've personally saved tens and thousands of dollars using my drones. So you, when you flew over these sites yet proximate, so you had visual concepts. So the Phantom Jerome that I have, that's my favorite one. I actually attach a GoPro to it so I can send it up and I use the gyroscope or just kind of move my GoPro around in mid air. It goes hundreds of feet high. I mean, you've really got to get a grasp on it and know what you're doing. I had it out in a field well before I took it out to an Island on a beach. But I'm not, a drive is not something you really, it's not a remote control car. Now did you build it? Oh no. Goodness. Aww, that's totally on the market. Yeah, I got it at B and H photo >>sending them out. So in San Francisco off their balconies and then they're going out to, you know, angel Island, Alcatraz, and literally they're flying out then unregulated. It's like someday there'll be drone collisions, let's say this is unregulated. This is a huge, people are geeking out with the drones. It's super exciting. Dave camera's shooting down him sending him into football venues or you know, the world series delivering packages. But mom's a streaker. I mean Amazon. I like that. Okay. So what else is new for you? Tell us more about some, some cool behind the scenes at a today's show. Any sad night live, uh, opportunities for you next been >>to Saturday night live. Oh my gosh. By the way, that's like the hottest ticket in New York to get. I've had the opportunity to go to two shows cause my friend's a cameraman over there. The rehearsal for it is like amazing. I know that's a huge digression, but talking about something to see in person, that's one of my bucket lists. Phenomenal. Yeah. Phenomenal. What else is new in New York and the scene there? Uh, Oh, we constantly covering a lot of different pieces. Uh, one, I just came back from Africa a little bit ago. I was doing a number of pieces over there from an elephant orphanage to one of my favorite pieces that we'll be rolling out soon. I did it for cnn.com and also working on a video piece of it. I went in embedded myself in the second poorest part of the entire world in the slums of Kibera, Kenya, and it was amazing to see that in these very poor areas, 70 to 80% cell penetration. A lot of people don't think that a smartphone would be prevalent. It sure is. And these kids, yeah, absolutely. There's cell towers everywhere. These kids were, you know, they don't have much, but they have e-reader devices and they can have thousands of books when they're walking 10 miles to school. You walk into the school that doesn't have any electricity, it's a hundred degrees, but they all have e-readers, Kindles right on their desk. I was blown away. I went to several different schools around Eastern Kenya. Fascinating story to be able to cover. So >>yeah, that's a really good point. In mobile penetration. If I was talking to this startup that where their business plan is to build, sell a solar battery recharging stations because they have the exact points, like they have all these devices but it's not, they don't have the traditional electricity and the parks >>one outlet in the entire school. So fortunately for, you know, with wifi off it's about a week charge on a Kindle. So it is, >>yeah, I think, I think that's a great market opportunity. Certainly in emerging countries, the mobile penetration, I'm so suites about the IBM show here. Is this your first time here or, >>I have had the luxury and the opportunity to be a part of several IBM events and everyone is so uniquely different. And this one all about developers obviously. So something I get to nerd out in myself in that is an it girl and also a developer. It's fun to be able to learn. I picked up so much new information so I just kind of like, they're like, you can, you're done with, I'm like, I'm going to hang out for a little bit longer. >>You know, you know you're a, you know, you're a geek when you're geeking out, when you're off the clock, you know Steve and I the same way. We're like we should stop rookies now let's keep going. So CES, UFC, yes, >>yes, every year for sure. And for anyone that hasn't been to CF, it's kind of on the bucket list for anybody that's attending technology, 35 football fields full of gadgets. Amazing. Yeah, it's always one of my biggest times of the year. So we'll be back here. >>now do you enjoy CES or is it a hard slog for you because you must have to really get down and dirty for CS, I mean a lot of stuff to cover. >>I did and I tried to make it to like the most random boosts. I find someone of my best technology products and like the ma and PA type shops that don't have the million dollar booth and like you know that are really back in a corner and I'm like zero in, >>you go on to cover, by the way, do you go into cover? You kind of sneak in there and you go into the camera guys. No, I go for it. You go for it. Okay. Time. Okay. All right guys. Um, that's awesome. Well can. Thanks for coming on the cube. We really appreciate spending the time. We'd love the personality. I love the energy. I mean Dave and I think you know, we're, first of all we're huge fans of your work. Especially the ESPN part. No, we're, we're big sports fans. In fact we call this the ESPN of tech cause it's our kind of version of like trying to be like ESPN. But we think technology is going mainstream. People at this new generation are geeks and even too, you alluded to ESPN, even sports and technology, I can't tell you how many pieces I've covered in pro athletes and how tech is entering in that space. Everywhere. Disruption in the data, the social media, you know, limiting have agents that go direct to the audience. Just super exciting. I mean I'm real big fan of media, tech, sports and entertainment. Thanks for coming on the cube. We appreciate it. We'll be right back with this after the short break here inside the cube live in Las Vegas. I'm John and Dave. We write back.