>>Hi everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently, our cost, the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi vent has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexity is of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi. How does this fit into the overall sheet for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we are not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners, that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we've allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that hit Tashi van is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value based and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scaled it all the way through to our midsize enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagements, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi Valar is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>So lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time. I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they pre-approved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customers needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that that Hitachi Van Tara has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how is that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time up front planning with them. What is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at, your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Ventura's as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them, with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us. And understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users. >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pike? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority, right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what Hitachi van is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in it for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE. Discover 22 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Velante of a couple of guests from red hat. You may have seen some news yesterday. We're gonna be talking about that. Please. Welcome Ryan King, the senior director of hardware partner ecosystem, and Lori Fontine joins us as well. The senior director of global commercial partner ecosystem. Welcome to the program guys. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, >>Thank you so great to be back in person and nobody word has summit was just last month or so. That's right. Ryan. Talk about hybrid cloud. It's all the buzz. We've been talking a lot about it in the last hour and a half alone. What are some of the trends that, that red hat is seen with respect to hybrid cloud? >>Well, I, I mean, hybrid cloud of red hat has been a trend for quite some time. In fact, we were very early in setting our course towards hybrid cloud with our products and platforms. And that's been a key part of our strategy in terms of the number of transformations have been happening in the enterprise. And with HPE, we're super excited about, you know, we're hitting our stride with OpenShift. I've been working with OpenShift for the better part of my 10 years here at 12 years at red hat, 10 years with OpenShift. And we're very excited about seeing the pattern of going where customers want to build their cloud. It's very important that where, where the market is going. So we're seeing trends from the public cloud now go into edge and telco and 5g and really exceed, see them expanding their infrastructure footprint out to those use cases. And again, we see REL everywhere. So re has continued to expand as well. And then Ansible automation platform has also been a great means of kind of bringing together community for that last mile of automating your entire infrastructure. >>Well, the Lin, the functionality of Linux continues to improve OpenShift is everywhere. I mean, I remember at the red hat summit, I mean, well, we, we, we coined this term super cloud, which is this layer that floats, you know, on-prem took across clouds out to the edge we had Verizon on. They were talking about, you know, 5g developers and how they're developing using, you know, a combination of, of, of OpenShift. So guys have been really crushing it with, with OpenShift. I remember, gosh, I mean, we've been covering, you know, red hat summits for a long time now. And just to see that evolution is actually quite amazing. >>Yeah. It's actually really neat to see our CEOs align too. Right. So the messaging that we've had around hybrid cloud from red hat, like you said, we were kind of the pioneers, honestly, this we've been talking about hybrid cloud from the very beginning. We always knew that it wasn't gonna be public cloud or private cloud. We had to have, you know, hybrid. And, and it's interesting to see that Antonio, you know, took that on and wanted to say, we're gonna do everything as a service right. A few years ago. And, and the whole theme was around hybrid cloud and giving customers that choice. Right? So it's exciting for us to see all of that come together. And I actually worked for HP for like 17 and a half years. So it's really fun for me to be on this side now with red hat and see the messaging come together, the vision come together and just really being able to align and move forward on >>This tremendous amount of transformation in the last few years >>Alone. Oh my gosh, we >>Talk about, you know, customers need choice. They want choice, but you also talked about, we have to meet customers where they are. That seems the last few years to have accelerated, there is no more option for companies. You've gotta meet the customers where they are. >>Exactly. Yeah. And it's all about choice, like you said, and it, everybody's got, you know, their own way to do everything as far as consumption goes and we have to be available and spot on with it, you know, and be able to move quickly with these trends that we're seeing. And so it's great to be aligned. And >>From a partnership standpoint, I mean, you, you mentioned H HP 17 years. I mean, it was, it was a hard to follow company. You had, you had PCs over here, you had services, the kind of the old EDS business. Now there's such a focus absolutely. On this mission, absolutely. Of as a service. And, you know, obviously a key part of that is having optionality and bringing open source tooling into that. I mean, we heard about this in, in spades, at, at red hat summit, which is really interesting this year. It was a smaller VIP event in Boston. And I, and I loved it, you know, cuz it was really manageable. We had all the execs on and customers and partners. It was awesome. What's new since red hat summit. >>Well, I mean, I would say that obviously GreenLake and what we've announced this week is a big new thing for us, but really like we're just continuing on our pattern. We are. Now, if you look at the Q1 report from IBM, you'll see that the growth of the customer base for OpenShift that they reported just continues to go up into the right. You'll see that now, like AMIA is saying that we're like 47.8% of the containers market for the enterprise. You'll see that like we're now in 65% of the fortune 500 with OpenShift, 90% with red hat in general. So we've established our footprint. And when you establish your footprint and customers start taking you out to the edge, we're going into these 5g use cases, we're, we've got an incredible amount happening in the AI space, all these emerging areas of where people are building their cloud, like we're now going to that next level of saying, how do they want to consume it? >>So what's really important to me about that is, is so Omni data around 50% of the market is, is open shift. A people may not realize a lot of people use, you know, do Kubernetes for free, you know, Hey, we're doing Kubernetes, but they don't have that application development framework and all the recovery and all the, the tooling around it. And the reason why I think that's so important, Laurie is ecosystems wanna monetize. So people are paying for things that becomes more interesting and it actually starts to attract people just naturally. >>Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of ecosystem, I mean, that's the beauty of what we're doing with GreenLake too. We're taking on a building block approach. So we're really, it's kind of ISV as a service if you will. And you know, personally, I, this was my baby for the past couple years, trying to make sure that we took into consideration every partner use case, every customer use case. So we created an agreement that would make sense to be able to scale, but also to meet all the demands of our customers. And so the, the what's really exciting about this is now we have a chance to take this building block approach, scale it out to all types of partner types, right throughout the entire ecosystem and build offerings together. That is really exciting for us. And that's where we see the real potential here with GreenLake and with red hat, >>What's actually available inside a GreenLake. >>So we are starting with OpenShift. So OpenShift will be available in Q3 that will follow in Q4 with re and then after that Ansible. So we're, we're moving very quickly to bring our platforms into it and it's really our strategic platforms, but it's all based on customer demand. We know we're seeing amazing transformation of customers moving to Kubernetes. You said, you know, OpenShift is Kubernetes with useful additions to it and an ecosystem around it, right? So that transformation is also happening at the bare metal layer. So we're seeing people move into Kubernetes bare metal, which is an amazing growth market for us. >>Explain those useful additions if you would. So why shouldn't I just go out and, and get the free version of Kubernete? Why should I engage red hat and, and OpenShift? What do I get? >>So you get all the day, two management stuff, you get, we have a whole set of additional stuff you can purchase around it, OpenShift platform. Plus you can get our ACM, our advanced cluster management. So you wanna manage multiple clusters, right? You get the ACS, the security side of it. You can also get ODF. So you get storage built into it as well. And we've done all these integrations. You can manage the whole thing as a cluster or as multiple clusters with the whole enterprise support and the long term support that we provide for these things up to 10 years. So >>When you look at the early days lease of, of Kubernetes, it was really, the focus was on simplicity. You had other platforms that were actually doing more sophisticated cluster management. And the, the committers that in Kubernetes said, you know, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna keep it simple. And so that leave some holes and gaps and you know, they're starting to fill those, but what if, if correct me if I'm wrong, but what red hat has done is said, okay, we're gonna accelerate, you know, the, the, the closing of those gaps and stay ahead and actually offer incremental value. And that's why you're winning in the marketplace. >>Well, we're an open company, so we're still doing everything upstream and open source as we do, of course, sticking with, you know, the APIs and APIs to make this all work, both, you know, in terms of what the community's trying to drive, what we're trying to drive for our customers on their behalf. And then just where things are going from a technology basis, make it a lot of investment, >>But you have to, you have to make a red hat, has to make a choice as to where it puts its commitments. You can't spread yourself too thin, so you gotta pick your spots. And you've, you've proven that you're pretty adept at doing that. >>That just comes back to customer centricity, right. And just knowing where our customers need to take the platform. That's, >>That's easy to say, but it's, it's an art form. And a little bit of science. >>Remember these customers have experts that are deep in this space. So it's like, you know, those experts trust us with where they needed to go. And they trust us to help shepherd that and deliver that as a platform to them. So it's not like anybody tell us what you want, right? Like it's really about like, knowing what's the best way to do it. And working with the people that can help you understand how to apply that to their use case >>And within the customer environment, who are you working with? Who is that key constituent or constituents that are guiding red hat in this direction? >>Well, it's certainly infrastructure folks. So it's your, it's your standard folks that are looking at the, how do we lay down our infrastructure? How do we manage it? How do we grow it? It goes out to the application developers. They're trying to deliver this in a cloud native way. And we have new personas, you know, coming in with the AI practitioners, right? So we've announced at before summit at Invidia's event, their new offering called Invidia AI enterprise. And so that's them bringing in enterprise support for GPU, for Kuda and for a software stack above that to start offering some more support there. So they're certifying OpenShift, we're both certifying the servers that run underneath it, and then they're offering support for their stuff on top of it. And that's a whole new use case for us. >>And, you know, I should also mention that even though this paper use with the GreenLake is new for us, and we just had this big announcement, we have done GreenLake deals though. We've done numerous GreenLake deals with our annual subs, right? So I, so even though this is new to us, as far as, you know, monthly utilization and being able to do this cloud consumption this isn't new to us as two companies coming together, we've been doing GreenLake deals for the past couple years. It's just, now we have this cloud consumption availability, which is really gonna make this thing launch. So, >>So what have been some of the customer benefits so far, you've been doing it for a couple years. The announcement was yesterday, but there's obviously feed on the street going on. What are some of the, the big outcomes that you're seeing customers actually bring to reality? >>I think speed and agility, right? That's the biggest thing with, with our products, being able to have it everything predictable and being able to have it consumed one way, instead of having this fragmented customer experience, which is, you know, what we've seen in the past. So I think that's the biggest thing is speed agility and just, you know, a really good customer experience at this point. >>Go get it, please. >>I would say the customer experience is critical. Yes. That's one of the things that we know that in terms of, of patients wearing thin the last couple of years, people expect to have a really strong consumer experience regardless of what you're doing, regardless of what industry and so attention and mind on that is a differentiator in my opinion. >>Absolutely. Yeah. And we've gotta constantly keep our eye on that. I mean, that's, that's our north star, if you will. Right. So, and Lori, >>I know you've saying you're, you've done GreenLake deals in the past, but what feels different to me now in that it's actually coalescing some of the things that Alma Russo announced this morning, the platform on which, you know, ISV is a service. I think you, you called it. Yeah. You, it, it now seems like, you know, look a couple years ago, HP said, okay, this is the direction that we're going. Yeah. They weren't there at that time. And they're still not there. There's a lot of work to be, to be done. But now it's starting to form. You're seeing, you know, the pieces come together, the puzzle pieces that sort of substrate being laid out. And now you're hoping that we see the steep part of the S-curve and that's what customers I think are expecting. >>Right. And it's bringing that operating model to move to a monthly model so they can do pay as you go. Right. And that pairs up nicely with like the cloud native capabilities we're bringing to OpenShift and hybrid cloud in general. So it's, it just shows like we're already getting demand from customers. It's saying like, this is part of our model. Like we know a certain amount of infrastructure we wanna own, and we just wanna own it outright, but there's a lot that they want to have flexibility on. And so being able to add that portion to it is just, you know, gonna help us both. >>And you think about the critical aspects of, of the cloud operating model. It's obviously pay as you go it's, you know, massive scale it's ecosystem enablement, and also automation. I mean, that is, that is a key, what's your point of view on that? You guys with Ansible, you, you, you know, you go back to a couple years ago and it was, you know, there was this, there were a lot of other tooling, but now, I mean, Ansible is really taken off. Yeah. >>It's just, you know, Cinderella story, right? Like it really an amazing community driven thing where we just knew, we all know this, right. You have, when you get to the very last mile of doing infrastructure management, there's a variety of devices, there's variety, a variety of vendors. And then you have like the variety of skills of the people that have to figure out how to do automate all of this. And what Ansible did is it provided a common language across all of that. And so what we do with automation, our, an ible automation platform is we make it. So now teams can manage all of this together and they can share their playbooks and they can host that privately for all their enterprise stuff that they need to do. So it's just, you know, it fits our DNA so well to have something so community driven now with a really nice enterprise message wrapped around it. And it's playing out very well for where, you know, hybrid cloud. Right. Cause there's some more additional variety. You need to be able to manage, you know, across all of your different footprints, because really it's like, it's not just about flexibility and scale up scale down it's where do you need it to run at what time? Right. And that, that last leg Ansible plays a key role in that. >>And we actually, Ansible will be coming further down the, you know, the patch. I know we're gonna talk a little bit about what's available today versus what's available down the road, but yeah, we have that on the radar. So right outta the gate, we're working on OpenShift, obviously bare metal. And we see that happening in Q3 and then behind that as well in Q4 and then Ansible is gonna be right behind that. So that's kind of the order that, and there's other pieces, right? So our whole portfolio is basically available to HP right now. It's just making sure that we can operationalize everything and have the best experience >>All inside of GreenLake, >>All inside a GreenLake. Yeah. Pretty neat. Lori >>Question for you. You've been, you were with HP for a very long time. This is obviously the first discover in three years in person. Exactly. You know, three years ago, Antonio near stood on stage and said, we are going to buy 20, 22. And here we are deliver everything as a service, as a partner and as a former HP, what are you seeing at this discover 22? >>It's it's so interesting. I it's such a sea change if you will. Right. And having come from HPE, I actually led the software as a service organization for a while on the software side of things. And we thought that was like state of the art and cutting edge that was 10, 11, 12 years ago. Right. So to actually see this come to life, because we were all thinking really, everything is a service. How are you gonna do that? Like your entire portfolio is gonna be available. Like that is lofty. Right. And having worked at HP, I thought, wow, I don't, you know, I know things take time. And, but actually just even being around the showcase here and watching everything come to life is amazing. Cause I, I, you know, I, I was very positive about it, but at the same time, it's like that, that was a big goal three years. Right. And it's, I'm seeing it happen >>A big goal in two of those years during a pandemic. Right. So right. Talk about lofty. Oh my gosh. Quite a bit of accomplishments guys. Thank you so much for joining David me on the program talking about actually guys, this is great. What red hat and HPE are doing your power partnership, power ship. Is that a word? It is now your power. >>I like >>That with GreenLake. We appreciate that. We'll look forward to having you guys back on. >>Thank you so much, guys. >>All right. For our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave ante. We are at HPE discover 22 live from the show floor in Las Vegas. This is just day one of our cupboards stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020 Brought to You by vertical. >>Welcome back, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching the Cube's coverage of the verdict of Virtual Big Data conference. The Cube has been at every BTC, and it's our pleasure in these difficult times to be covering BBC as a virtual event. This digital program really excited to have Joy King joining us. Joy is the vice president of product and go to market strategy in particular. And if that weren't enough, he also runs marketing and education curve for him. So, Joe, you're a multi tool players. You've got the technical side and the marketing gene, So welcome to the Cube. You're always a great guest. Love to have you on. >>Thank you so much, David. The pleasure, it really is. >>So I want to get in. You know, we'll have some time. We've been talking about the conference and the virtual event, but I really want to dig in to the product stuff. It's a big day for you guys. You announced 10.0. But before we get into the announcements, step back a little bit you know, you guys are riding the waves. I've said to ah, number of our guests that that brick has always been good. It riding the wave not only the initial MPP, but you you embraced, embraced HD fs. You embrace data science and analytics and in the cloud. So one of the trends that you see the big waves that you're writing >>Well, you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, what what I think is most interesting and important is because verdict is, at its core a true engineering culture founded by, well, a pretty famous guy, right, Dr Stone Breaker, who embedded that very technical vertical engineering culture. It means that we don't pretend to know everything that's coming, but we are committed to embracing the tech. An ology trends, the innovations, things like that. We don't pretend to know it all. We just do it all. So right now, I think I see three big imminent trends that we are addressing. And matters had we have been for a while, but that are particularly relevant right now. The first is a combination of, I guess, a disappointment in what Hadoop was able to deliver. I always feel a little guilty because she's a very reasonably capable elephant. She was designed to be HD fs highly distributed file store, but she cant be an entire zoo, so there's a lot of disappointment in the market, but a lot of data. In HD FM, you combine that with some of the well, not some the explosion of cloud object storage. You're talking about even more data, but even more data silos. So data growth and and data silos is Trend one. Then what I would say Trend, too, is the cloud Reality Cloud brings so many events. There are so many opportunities that public cloud computing delivers. But I think we've learned enough now to know that there's also some reality. The cloud providers themselves. Dave. Don't talk about it well, because not, is it more agile? Can you do things without having to manage your own data center? Of course you can. That the reality is it's a little more pricey than we expected. There are some security and privacy concerns. There's some workloads that can go to the cloud, so hybrid and also multi cloud deployments are the next trend that are mandatory. And then maybe the one that is the most exciting in terms of changing the world we could use. A little change right now is operationalize in machine learning. There's so much potential in the technology, but it's somehow has been stuck for the most part in science projects and data science lab, and the time is now to operationalize it. Those are the three big trends that vertical is focusing on right now. >>That's great. I wonder if I could ask you a couple questions about that. I mean, I like you have a soft spot in my heart for the and the thing about the Hadoop that that was, I think, profound was it got people thinking about, you know, bringing compute to the data and leaving data in place, and it really got people thinking about data driven cultures. It didn't solve all the problems, but it collected a lot of data that we can now take your third trend and apply machine intelligence on top of that data. And then the cloud is really the ability to scale, and it gives you that agility and that it's not really that cloud experience. It's not not just the cloud itself, it's bringing the cloud experience to wherever the data lives. And I think that's what I'm hearing from you. Those are the three big super powers of innovation today. >>That's exactly right. So, you know, I have to say I think we all know that Data Analytics machine learning none of that delivers real value unless the volume of data is there to be able to truly predict and influence the future. So the last 7 to 10 years has been correctly about collecting the data, getting the data into a common location, and H DFS was well designed for that. But we live in a capitalist world, and some companies stepped in and tried to make HD Fs and the broader Hadoop ecosystem be the single solution to big data. It's not true. So now that the key is, how do we take advantage of all of that data? And now that's exactly what verdict is focusing on. So as you know, we began our journey with vertical back in the day in 2007 with our first release, and we saw the growth of the dupe. So we announced many years ago verdict a sequel on that. The idea to be able to deploy vertical on Hadoop nodes and query the data in Hadoop. We wanted to help. Now with Verdict A 10. We are also introducing vertical in eon mode, and we can talk more about that. But Verdict and Ian Mode for HDs, This is a way to apply it and see sequel database management platform to H DFS infrastructure and data in each DFS file storage. And that is a great way to leverage the investment that so many companies have made in HD Fs. And I think it's fair to the elephant to treat >>her well. Okay, let's get into the hard news and auto. Um, she's got, but you got a mature stack, but one of the highlights of append auto. And then we can drill into some of the technologies >>Absolutely so in well in 2018 vertical announced vertical in Deon mode is the separation of compute from storage. Now this is a great example of vertical embracing innovation. Vertical was designed for on premises, data centers and bare metal servers, tightly coupled storage de l three eighties from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell, etcetera. But we saw that cloud computing was changing fundamentally data center architectures, and it made sense to separate compute from storage. So you add compute when you need compute. You add storage when you need storage. That's exactly what the cloud's introduced, but it was only available on the club. So first thing we did was architect vertical and EON mode, which is not a new product. Eight. This is really important. It's a deployment option. And in 2018 our customers had the opportunity to deploy their vertical licenses in EON mode on AWS in September of 2019. We then broke an important record. We brought cloud architecture down to earth and we announced vertical in eon mode so vertical with communal or shared storage, leveraging pure storage flash blade that gave us all the advantages of separating compute from storage. All of the workload, isolation, the scale up scale down the ability to manage clusters. And we did that with on Premise Data Center. And now, with vertical 10 we are announcing verdict in eon mode on HD fs and vertically on mode on Google Cloud. So what we've got here, in summary, is vertical Andy on mode, multi cloud and multiple on premise data that storage, and that gives us the opportunity to help our customers both with the hybrid and multi cloud strategies they have and unifying their data silos. But America 10 goes farther. >>Well, let me stop you there, because I just wanna I want to mention So we talked to Joe Gonzalez and past Mutual, who essentially, he was brought in. And one of this task was the lead into eon mode. Why? Because I'm asking. You still had three separate data silos and they wanted to bring those together. They're investing heavily in technology. Joe is an expert, though that really put data at their core and beyond Mode was a key part of that because they're using S three and s o. So that was Ah, very important step for those guys carry on. What else do we need to know about? >>So one of the reasons, for example, that Mass Mutual is so excited about John Mode is because of the operational advantages. You think about exactly what Joe told you about multiple clusters serving must multiple use cases and maybe multiple divisions. And look, let's be clear. Marketing doesn't always get along with finance and finance doesn't necessarily get along with up, and I t is often caught the middle. Erica and Dion mode allows workload, isolation, meaning allocating the compute resource is that different use cases need without allowing them to interfere with other use cases and allowing everybody to access the data. So it's a great way to bring the corporate world together but still protect them from each other. And that's one of the things that Mass Mutual is going to benefit from, as well, so many of >>our other customers I also want to mention. So when I saw you, ah, last last year at the Pure Storage Accelerate conference just today we are the only company that separates you from storage that that runs on Prem and in the cloud. And I was like I had to think about it. I've researched. I still can't find anybody anybody else who doesn't know. I want to mention you beat actually a number of the cloud players with that capability. So good job and I think is a differentiator, assuming that you're giving me that cloud experience and the licensing and the pricing capability. So I want to talk about that a little >>bit. Well, you're absolutely right. So let's be clear. There is no question that the public cloud public clouds introduced the separation of compute storage and these advantages that they do not have the ability or the interest to replicate that on premise for vertical. We were born to be software only. We make no money on underlying infrastructure. We don't charge as a package for the hardware underneath, so we are totally motivated to be independent of that and also to continuously optimize the software to be as efficient as possible. And we do the exact same thing to your question about life. Cloud providers charge for note indignance. That's how they charge for their underlying infrastructure. Well, in some cases, if you're being, if you're talking about a use case where you have a whole lot of data, but you don't necessarily have a lot of compute for that workload, it may make sense to pay her note. Then it's unlimited data. But what if you have a huge compute need on a relatively small data set that's not so good? Vertical offers per node and four terabyte for our customers, depending on their use case, we also offer perpetual licenses for customers who want capital. But we also offer subscription for companies that they Nope, I have to have opt in. And while this can certainly cause some complexity for our field organization, we know that it's all about choice, that everybody in today's world wants it personalized just for me. And that's exactly what we're doing with our pricing in life. >>So just to clarify, you're saying I can pay by the drink if I want to. You're not going to force me necessarily into a term or Aiken choose to have, you know, more predictable pricing. Is that, Is that correct? >>Well, so it's partially correct. The first verdict, a subscription licensing is a fixed amount for the period of the subscription. We do that so many of our customers cannot, and I'm one of them, by the way, cannot tell finance what the budgets forecast is going to be for the quarter after I spent you say what it's gonna be before, So our subscription facing is a fixed amount for a period of time. However, we do respect the fact that some companies do want usage based pricing. So on AWS, you can use verdict up by the hour and you pay by the hour. We are about to launch the very same thing on Google Cloud. So for us, it's about what do you need? And we make it happen natively directly with us or through AWS and Google Cloud. >>So I want to send so the the fixed isn't some floor. And then if you want a surge above that, you can allow usage pricing. If you're on the cloud, correct. >>Well, you actually license your cluster vertical by the hour on AWS and you run your cluster there. Or you can buy a license from vertical or a fixed capacity or a fixed number of nodes and deploy it on the cloud. And then, if you want to add more nodes or add more capacity, you can. It's not usage based for the license that you bring to the cloud. But if you purchase through the cloud provider, it is usage. >>Yeah, okay. And you guys are in the marketplace. Is that right? So, again, if I want up X, I can do that. I can choose to do that. >>That's awesome. Next usage through the AWS marketplace or yeah, directly from vertical >>because every small business who then goes to a salesforce management system knows this. Okay, great. I can pay by the month. Well, yeah, Well, not really. Here's our three year term in it, right? And it's very frustrating. >>Well, and even in the public cloud you can pay for by the hour by the minute or whatever, but it becomes pretty obvious that you're better off if you have reserved instance types or committed amounts in that by vertical offers subscription. That says, Hey, you want to have 100 terabytes for the next year? Here's what it will cost you. We do interval billing. You want to do monthly orderly bi annual will do that. But we won't charge you for usage that you didn't even know you were using until after you get the bill. And frankly, that's something my finance team does not like. >>Yeah, I think you know, I know this is kind of a wonky discussion, but so many people gloss over the licensing and the pricing, and I think my take away here is Optionality. You know, pricing your way of That's great. Thank you for that clarification. Okay, so you got Google Cloud? I want to talk about storage. Optionality. If I found him up, I got history. I got I'm presuming Google now of you you're pure >>is an s three compatible storage yet So your story >>Google object store >>like Google object store Amazon s three object store HD fs pure storage flash blade, which is an object store on prim. And we are continuing on this theft because ultimately we know that our customers need the option of having next generation data center architecture, which is sort of shared or communal storage. So all the data is in one place. Workloads can be managed independently on that data, and that's exactly what we're doing. But what we already have in two public clouds and to on premise deployment options today. And as you said, I did challenge you back when we saw each other at the conference. Today, vertical is the only analytic data warehouse platform that offers that option on premise and in multiple public clouds. >>Okay, let's talk about the ah, go back through the innovation cocktail. I'll call it So it's It's the data applying machine intelligence to that data. And we've talked about scaling at Cloud and some of the other advantages of Let's Talk About the Machine Intelligence, the machine learning piece of it. What's your story there? Give us any updates on your embracing of tooling and and the like. >>Well, quite a few years ago, we began building some in database native in database machine learning algorithms into vertical, and the reason we did that was we knew that the architecture of MPP Columbia execution would dramatically improve performance. We also knew that a lot of people speak sequel, but at the time, not so many people spoke R or even Python. And so what if we could give act us to machine learning in the database via sequel and deliver that kind of performance? So that's the journey we started out. And then we realized that actually, machine learning is a lot more as everybody knows and just algorithms. So we then built in the full end to end machine learning functions from data preparation to model training, model scoring and evaluation all the way through to fold the point and all of this again sequel accessible. You speak sequel. You speak to the data and the other advantage of this approach was we realized that accuracy was compromised if you down sample. If you moved a portion of the data from a database to a specialty machine learning platform, you you were challenged by accuracy and also what the industry is calling replica ability. And that means if a model makes a decision like, let's say, credit scoring and that decision isn't anyway challenged, well, you have to be able to replicate it to prove that you made the decision correctly. And there was a bit of, ah, you know, blow up in the media not too long ago about a credit scoring decision that appeared to be gender bias. But unfortunately, because the model could not be replicated, there was no way to this Prove that, and that was not a good thing. So all of this is built in a vertical, and with vertical 10. We've taken the next step, just like with with Hadoop. We know that innovation happens within vertical, but also outside of vertical. We saw that data scientists really love their preferred language. Like python, they love their tools and platforms like tensor flow with vertical 10. We now integrate even more with python, which we have for a while, but we also integrate with tensorflow integration and PM ML. What does that mean? It means that if you build and train a model external to vertical, using the machine learning platform that you like, you can import that model into a vertical and run it on the full end to end process. But run it on all the data. No more accuracy challenges MPP Kilometer execution. So it's blazing fast. And if somebody wants to know why a model made a decision, you can replicate that model, and you can explain why those are very powerful. And it's also another cultural unification. Dave. It unifies the business analyst community who speak sequel with the data scientist community who love their tools like Tensorflow and Python. >>Well, I think joy. That's important because so much of machine intelligence and ai there's a black box problem. You can't replicate the model. Then you do run into a potential gender bias. In the example that you're talking about there in their many you know, let's say an individual is very wealthy. He goes for a mortgage and his wife goes for some credit she gets rejected. He gets accepted this to say it's the same household, but the bias in the model that may be gender bias that could be race bias. And so being able to replicate that in and open up and make the the machine intelligence transparent is very, very important, >>It really is. And that replica ability as well as accuracy. It's critical because if you're down sampling and you're running models on different sets of data, things can get confusing. And yet you don't really have a choice. Because if you're talking about petabytes of data and you need to export that data to a machine learning platform and then try to put it back and get the next at the next day, you're looking at way too much time doing it in the database or training the model and then importing it into the database for production. That's what vertical allows, and our customers are. So it right they reopens. Of course, you know, they are the ones that are sort of the Trailblazers they've always been, and ah, this is the next step. In blazing the ML >>thrill joint customers want analytics. They want functional analytics full function. Analytics. What are they pushing you for now? What are you delivering? What's your thought on that? >>Well, I would say the number one thing that our customers are demanding right now is deployment. Flexibility. What? What the what the CEO or the CFO mandated six months ago? Now shout Whatever that thou shalt is is different. And they would, I tell them is it is impossible. No, what you're going to be commanded to do or what options you might have in the future. The key is not having to choose, and they are very, very committed to that. We have a large telco customer who is multi cloud as their commit. Why multi cloud? Well, because they see innovation available in different public clouds. They want to take advantage of all of them. They also, admittedly, the that there's the risk of lock it right. Like any vendor, they don't want that either, so they want multi cloud. We have other customers who say we have some workloads that make sense for the cloud and some that we absolutely cannot in the cloud. But we want a unified analytics strategy, so they are adamant in focusing on deployment flexibility. That's what I'd say is 1st 2nd I would say that the interest in operationalize in machine learning but not necessarily forcing the analytics team to hammer the data science team about which tools or the best tools. That's the probably number two. And then I'd say Number three. And it's because when you look at companies like Uber or the Trade Desk or A T and T or Cerner performance at scale, when they say milliseconds, they think that flow. When they say petabytes, they're like, Yeah, that was yesterday. So performance at scale good enough for vertical is never good enough. And it's why we're constantly building at the core the next generation execution engine, database designer, optimization engine, all that stuff >>I wanna also ask you. When I first started following vertical, we covered the cube covering the BBC. One of things I noticed was in talking to customers and people in the community is that you have a community edition, uh, free addition, and it's not neutered ais that have you maintain that that ethos, you know, through the transitions into into micro focus. And can you talk about that a little bit >>absolutely vertical community edition is vertical. It's all of the verdict of functionality geospatial time series, pattern matching, machine learning, all of the verdict, vertical neon mode, vertical and enterprise mode. All vertical is the community edition. The only limitation is one terabyte of data and three notes, and it's free now. If you want commercial support, where you can file a support ticket and and things like that, you do have to buy the life. But it's free, and we people say, Well, free for how long? Like our field? I've asked that and I say forever and what he said, What do you mean forever? Because we want people to use vertical for use cases that are small. They want to learn that they want to try, and we see no reason to limit that. And what we look for is when they're ready to grow when they need the next set of data that goes beyond a terabyte or they need more compute than three notes, then we're here for them, and it also brings up an important thing that I should remind you or tell you about Davis. You haven't heard it, and that's about the Vertical Academy Academy that vertical dot com well, what is that? That is, well, self paced on demand as well as vertical essential certification. Training and certification means you have seven days with your hands on a vertical cluster hosted in the cloud to go through all the certification. And guess what? All of that is free. Why why would you give it for free? Because for us empowering the market, giving the market the expert East, the learning they need to take advantage of vertical, just like with Community Edition is fundamental to our mission because we see the advantage that vertical can bring. And we want to make it possible for every company all around the world that take advantage >>of it. I love that ethos of vertical. I mean, obviously great product. But it's not just the product. It's the business practices and really progressive progressive pricing and embracing of all these trends and not running away from the waves but really leaning in joy. Thanks so much. Great interview really appreciate it. And, ah, I wished we could have been faced face in Boston, but I think it's prudent thing to do, >>I promise you, Dave we will, because the verdict of BTC and 2021 is already booked. So I will see you there. >>Haas enjoyed King. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. And thank you for watching. Remember, the Cube is running this program in conjunction with the virtual vertical BDC goto vertical dot com slash BBC 2020 for all the coverage and keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube. We'll be right back. >>Yeah, >>yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Virtual Vertica BDC, Big Data Conference. It was, of course, going to be in Boston, but now we're covering it online. It's really our pleasure to invite back Joy King, she's the vice president of product and go-to-market strategy at Vertica. She also manages marketing and education programs. Joy, great to see you. >> It's great to be back, as always, Dave, thank you. >> Let's talk about BDC, Virtual BDC. We took a break. theCUBE has been at every Big Data Conference. I love that show, great customers, awesome buzz, great outside speakers. I actually had the pleasure of being up on stage with some database experts, of which I'm not, but I'm a (laughs) inch deep and a mile wide. >> I remember that! (laughs) >> And it was a lot of fun going head to head with some of the folks, and just really a great vibe over that conference. But, so, now, you had to make the decision, because of the coronavirus, to go digital. You didn't delay, and I love the fact that you guys leaned right in, you've got all this content. So talk about what we can expect at BDC. >> Well, you know, Dave, the BDC is really special, and I have to give Colin Mahoney, our GM, the credit for the idea. Sometimes his ideas are really good, and the execution can be, well, challenging. But when we started the BDC, he had an idea. He said, "You know, we have such a passionate "community, we need to get them together. "We need, like, a user group." Well, that user group, for the first BDC, was the first and only event I have ever been responsible for where, yes, it's true, we exceeded the fire code of the venue, and we had more people that registered than we were allowed to accept. That's never happened before. It's because the passion was so real. We made a commitment. We said the only people that could speak at the BDC were engineers who architected and write the code, and customers who've used the code. We were determined to keep the technical credibility, the value of best practices, the sharing among the community. Marketing was responsible for appropriate amounts of coffee and alcohol at the appropriate times, (Dave laughs) but today, that is still why the BDC is so special. Now, I have to tell you, we have been somewhat limited in our ability to confirm coffee, alcohol, et cetera in the Virtual BDC, but we are still true to our mission. The people that will be speaking during the sessions that we have, and for all of the recordings that we will do in addition after we complete the live BDC, are engineers and architects who design and write the code, hands on the keyboard, and customers who use Vertica to power their businesses every day. That's the rule. Some people don't like it, but that's how we play. >> Well, and to your point, and we've interviewed a number of your customers, and I can second that. The database engineers are proud to put Vertica in their title. >> Yes. >> They embrace it, they love to train people and get adoption going, so that's awesome. Let's talk about some of the logistics of the BDC, the Virtual BDC. Tuesday, March 31st, and then the next day, April 1st, you've got keynotes, you've got breakouts, and of course, we've got theCUBE. After the keynotes, we'll be doing CUBE coverage for two days, wall-to-wall coverage of Virtual BDC. And to your point, and I think this is a nuance that I think people are going to learn with digital, is there's a post-event that really is going to continue that engagement with your community. >> That's right. As much as everybody knows there's nothing that replaces face-to-face interaction, there are advantages to the virtual world. First of all, people are getting pretty creative, I've got to say, and second, it gives global reach to people who would have loved to come to the BDC but couldn't. They couldn't travel, there were restrictions, they were busy with other things. So, yes, all day Tuesday and all day Wednesday. After the keynote on Tuesday will be two parallel tracks, and this is East Coast time, from U.S. East Coast time, on Tuesday afternoon, and then two parallel tracks all day Wednesday. And then on Thursday, in addition to all of those webinars, all of those sessions being available on demand, we are also, right now, recording additional sessions because we just didn't have enough slots, but we had more speakers, both customers and engineers, that wanted to, and all of that will be available on the BDC website on Thursday and beyond. And we're going to continue with two webinar series that we're very proud of. One is called "Under the Hood," which is technical webinars, and the other is called "Data Disruptors," and those are the customers that love to tell their stories. And that, in parallel with ongoing CUBE interviews, will keep the energy all the way up until late March of 2021, when we have already confirmed the next live BDC. >> Awesome, so go to vertica.com/bdc2020, register, you got to register, to see the keynotes. It's lightweight registration, it's not a hundred fields, we want you to come in. And then, of course, theCUBE.net is going to be covering, theCUBE interviews, and SiliconANGLE.com will have editorial. Joy, looking forward to it. Thanks so much for giving us the update, and we'll see you online. >> It will be a pleasure, see ya, bye. >> And we'll see you. Thank you, everybody, and go, like I said, go register, again, it's vertica.com/bdc2020. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE, and we'll see you at the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. (upbeat music)

(upbeat funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier. Co-host of the Cube. We got two special expert guests here talking multi-cloud, Jonathan King, Vice President of Strategy, Data Center, and Cloud for WWT. And Fabio Gori, Senior Director Cloud Solution and Marketing at Cisco. Multi-cloud is the topic. Guys are in the throes of it. Jonathan, you're in the front wave of a massive shift. Cisco powers networks for all companies these days, so guys multi-cloud is a reality. It's here. I want to get your thoughts on that, have a conversation. Thanks for joining us. >> Great, glad to be here. >> So multi-cloud is not really been debated. I mean people generally now step back and say multi-cloud is a reality. It's here, people have multiple clouds. Should only have data center on premise. But this idea of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are somewhat getting mixed up, but multi-cloud is certainly more realistic in the reality sense than anything else. What's your take on multi-cloud, Jonathan? >> So I think we're at a point where there's a growing acceptance of multi-cloud as the architecture of the future. And when you arrive at that point it also means that multi-cloud is the architecture for today. Because if you see your competitors, you see new entrants in your space, moving in a rapid digital pace to meet their business needs, and you're not on the same kind of architecture. The same footing. Then you're going to be left behind. So, used to debate private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The way we see it is that we're in this multi-cloud world. And multi-cloud embraces an end-to-end imperative. How am I getting my apps and my development teams building those apps closer to my business and meeting my needs more rapidly? And then how am I connecting my entire business, my data, my network, all of it, to meet that needs. So multi-cloud architecture's really an imperative. It doesn't mean it's the only thing. There's other elements in terms of having a clear digital strategy. Thinking about how you're going to modernize your infrastructure. Of course, thinking about how you're transforming your security. All four of those elements really comprise a enterprise architecture. Multi-cloud being a core part of it. >> Fabio, Cisco, you guys have seen the waves of innovation, internet, connecting companies together through networking etc. Multi-cloud's a big part of your focus. Certainly at Cisco Live we covered that. What's the definition of multi-cloud now, because I've heard, it's been debunked, but I've heard people say, oh multi-cloud's an application workload moving across multiple clouds. Some say, no, it just means I have two clouds. So what is the definition? Baseline us here. >> So it's interesting because you can go Wikipedia and actually read the definition of multi-cloud, but what I'm really interested in is exactly what Jonathan was saying a moment ago. This is one of those rare cases where what you hear architecture is actually a technology architecture and the business architecture really coincide. People want to use innovation wherever it comes from. And because you can't allow yourself to be just restricted your choice, people want to have choice. Multiple choices. And that's why we're seeing adoption of multiple cloud services. Multiple SaaS solutioning for structure service solutions and the likes. So this is really what multi-cloud means. You're satisfying a business need. And while cloud computing was born, as we know, around 10 years ago, and it probably started with a kind of cost connotation, the speed and agility that you can get out of it now overwhelm the other parameters. And people are ready to spend anything it takes to become faster than their competitor, because that ultimately will really determines your destiny in the marketplace. >> And I want to drill into the tech side and have some specific pointed questions I'd love to ask you. Jonathan, first, talk about the relationship that WWT, World Wide Technology, has with Cisco, and your credibility in multi-cloud. You guys have a unique view First of all you work with Cisco, you guys partner together. A big part of your business. But you guys are in the middle of a lot of the action. Talk about the company. What kind of deals you guys are doing? What visibility do you guys have? Is it a landscape? Give an example of some of the work that you guys do, and then talk about the relationship with Cisco. >> Yeah so, the Cisco is a very strategic partner of ours. They have been for a long time. And we have the benefit of being at scale with Cisco. For repeatable waves of technology roll outs. In repeatable domains of technologies. So, customers come to us and look for our help as a trusted advisor to help them with their architectural decisions. And to help them often with knowledge gaps. So, architecture is a challenge. Especially when you're dealing with rapid change. So you have a pace of change externally. You cover this space. I mean every day, right? We were sitting here there's some kind of new thing going on. And, that change, I mean even companies who know what they're doing, and have deep benches of talent, have architectural challenges. But you take it to an enterprise or a government agency. How are they going to keep up? Well that's really our job and the value we bring is. We are constantly watching, talking to partners, talking to customers. And there's almost no one we're that as closely with as we are with Cisco, in terms of how we're watching trends, looking what's happening. And from a multi-cloud standpoint, in answer to your question there, it's a bit of a thought experiment. So if you define multi-cloud as really just, oh it's just between Amazon, Azure, Google. Multi-cloud is just multi public cloud. We do not see it that way, our clients don't see it that way. Our clients see it as a bigger domain. That multi-cloud includes how you're connecting to SaaS. How you're, there's multiple public clouds, a bigger definition there. But then it's also the edge, the cloud edge, the different edges that are out there are are being deployed in a cloud architecture. Your core data center has a private cloud. All of that we see as multi-cloud. And when you define it that way, you start to look at it. Companies are saying who do I turn to to help me with a multi-cloud architecture? Do I turn to someone that was born in the cloud. Who just really knows AWS. They know it really well. But that's what they know. Or a similar consulting company who's over here. The credibility that we have, we have those capabilities. But we also have depth and breadth, and history, and knowledge, and contracts and relationships. An incredible ecosystem. And important with Cisco, it's not just a one-way relationship. We have an ecosystem around us, collectively, that Cisco benefits because we have that ecosystem. And that's really what companies look for. It puts us in a very unique position because we see this AND world. It's not an OR world. And I think even the investments and movements that the public clouds have made recently. The hybrid offerings that they're bringing, and where Kubernetes is going to enable portability. All these things really are about a multi-cloud world, and we're just excited about where we are. >> It's interesting, there's the first wave, Amazon, I call it the Amazon wave because they really did take out the beach. And then public cloud. It kind of showed the way, the economics and the value creation piece. And you mentioned a few things that point at this next wave. That next big wave I see it is about people and technology. This holistic view around multiple architectures is a systems concept so it's not unproven. And Fabio we've seen this movie before in systems. Operating systems. You need networking. You got to connect things together. So this next wave of thinking about workloads and applications in context to an architecture see to the next narrative that people are starting to talk about. Versus. >> Absolutely >> Public cloud, because the people equation, who's going to run it, who's going to service it, who's the coders, what tools and APIs do I use. People behave in certain ways, and they like their favorite cloud, so it's a whole different ball game. You're thoughts. What's driving all this? >> I would say, look, we could talk about this forever. But I think we're seeing a pretty dramatic shift into an architectural model, right? I mean, if you remember a few years ago, we had networking specialists in the data center, storage specialists and compu-specialists, well guess what, people moved to full-stack type of expertise, right? And now we even have systems that are completely converged. Or hybrid converged. Well, we're seeing the same movie in the cloud. Where we're seeing the rise of cloud architectures, enterprise architectures, which become really determinable of the business. And these people, especially in the companies that are ahead of the game, in terms of cloud adoption and expertise. These guys are issuing the new guidance and guardrails for the entire organization in terms of what governance role you need to take, right? And the other groups actually execute this kind of strategy. This is, some people say this is finally SOA coming alive. The SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. That's exactly what it is without probably some of the kind of propriety underpinnings, or driven by certain market players in the past. This is a true, so if you think about microservices in containers, that's exactly what it is. And also we're seeing a lot of companies that are starting getting even organized by microservices. Which is the ultimate demonstration that the technology architecture and the business architecture are really converged. It's a fairly complicated concept, but in the end it's about really connecting the business to the underlying technology. >> And it's a shift that's happening in front of our eyes. And we're covering a lot of the news. Some notable news that we've been covering lately, the Department of Defense JEDI contract. That's in the public sector and military. CNCF, Amazon re:Invent. Google Nexus coming out. You're starting to see the formation where it's not about the cloud vendor or the cloud supplier anymore, as much as it is about the workload. So, there's been a debate of sole sourcing the cloud, that's certainly, we're seeing that on the DOD side 'cause it's more a military procurement thing. But that's not the right answer anymore, we're seeing that whole, spread the multi-vendor love around. It's not so much like it used to be. It's different now, there's new architecture. So, Jonathan, I want to go back to your multi-cloud architecture because I think the strategic question that I'd like to get to is. It might not be a bad thing to pick a cloud, a sole cloud for workload. But that's not meaning you're going to not use other clouds. This is a whole different thinking. So I can pick Amazon for this workload or pick Azure for that workload and Google for that workload. And holistically connect them all together. Seamlessly, this is not a bad thing. Your thoughts. >> There's a somewhat of a paradox when you talk about multi-cloud architecture and then you talk about moments in time where it makes architectural sense to pick one cloud, right? That particular decision there's issues around people and training and technology, and time to market, and API coverage. So there's all these things that you're trying to get a job done or a mission done and the amount of time that you have to achieve that job or that mission. What path am I going to choose? What engine am I going to put on the plane to get me there? Now that doesn't mean that that's the only engine you're going to put on your fleet. It just means that particular plane is going to have that kind of engine. And then the next time, you got another engine, you got a different kind of plane. You're thinking about how you're doing these things in waves and modules, and you're trying to build your aggregate velocity, 'cause really if you strip it all down. You know earlier we were talking about multi-cloud and people and talent, we're in a distributed computing land rush. And businesses of all sizes, government agencies, companies are trying to figure out how do we, you know. Electricity came along, now cloud has come along, right over the horizon cognification's coming along. How am I as an enterprise getting digitally ready, and getting on a footing to be able to do what I need to do in that domain? And really, it's about velocity and movement, so. Now that means that, that's why architecture is so important, because you have to make, you want a, people talk about one-way doors and two-way doors. So you want stop and think about, am I going through a one-way door or am I going through a two-way door? Meaning, do I have a way to come back? Is this a decision that I'm going to live with? If so how long? Is this a decision I can go through and I can come back? These kinds of approaches let you look across it. So an example would be networking. So networking is a foundation to every multi-cloud strategy. So you have to think, today my network in many enterprises is still a campus branch architecture. Well traffic patterns have changed. Even if you've just done nothing your customers have moved. Like all of a sudden, you know we talk to customers. We work with retailers, we work with all kinds of people, and it is like Global Climate Change. It's like global network change. The scale at which the clouds have arrived have changed the network patterns. So, if you start to look at it, you're saying, well what is a multi-cloud networking strategy? How do I need to rethink, well, guess what, the campus, my headquarters, is no longer the hub it used to be. The hub is now at the cloud edge, where all the other clouds are geographically aggregated. I need to move my network closer to that location. So we do a lot of work with Equinix in that context, right? So they have and have built a business around >> Sort of re-architecture's happening, and it's being driven by value creation, value shifting. >> Yes. >> Moving everything around. >> And that's where from a cloud networking standpoint, you look at that's a discussion where Cisco's so uniquely situated, because they are the networking company. They've been through the generations and they've been through different changes of generations. You know Wi-Fi, didn't used to be Wi-Fi. Now it is, right, it's here. And now we're in this next paradigm, where cloud networking didn't used to be here. Now it is, so. >> What's the new thought process for cloud networking. Because it makes a lot of sense, you have to connect clouds, obviously networking latency, SLAs around moving things around from point a to point b, storing stuff as well. Fabio, what's the equation look like? What's changed? Where do your customers go in this new architecture? >> Well, just building on top of what Jonathan was saying before, first of all the way we architect the networks, enterprise networks were networks in the past. Of course this is coming to an end. We need to rethink them, right? The fact that users now are going to use an enormous amount of software as a service applications that don't sit in your data center, means that constricting all the software in a single place doesn't make any more sense. But there's not just the traffic element. Think about all the intrusion detection and prevention, firewalling capabilities. Because you're moving away from that model, you need to start visualizing also those security functions and distributing them all the way to the edge of the network. In some cases, you need to have them in the cloud as well. We believe that the best way is a fully distributed model. Where you have a choice. Whether you keep it in your data center, or you put into the cloud, or even the to edge of the network. Again, you got to be ready for any kind of scenario. It's interesting how, you know, we're going to distributed computing as you said. But everything else is getting distributed as well. >> Oh yeah. >> Your entire infrastructure needs to follow your application and data. Wherever they go. And that's actually something unprecedented that we're seeing right now. >> And you brought up cloud architecture earlier, Jonathan. You mentioned it briefly. And this comes back to some of that this nuanced point around cloud architecture. The procurement standards aren't driving what you buy, its architectural workload dynamics are now telling procurement how we're buying. So the world shifting from, oh, I'm going to buy these servers. I'm going to buy this gear, the approved vendors. When you think about architecture the way you pointed it out, it's a completely different decision making process. So what's happening is old ways of procuring and buying and consuming technology are now shifting to. Still not going to stand up a cloud with a credit card if I'm doing dev ops, but now you start thinking holistically. The decision making on what that will look like has changed. This is probably impacting the cultural people side as well. What's your thoughts on this dynamic between cloud selection, security, architecture, and procurement? >> The example I normally give is, it's changing but it's also evolving, right? Because you're dealing with patterns that are there, and they're not going to go away, right? Money still has to be paid. Processes have to be followed and respected. The examples that I give would be, I've run large clouds in my past. Different platforms. And one thing you always watch out for when you're running a cloud is capacity. How much money do I have in the bank, so to speak, right? Am I going to have a run on the bank? So if you're running that cloud, either, and this is true if you're a service provider or you have your own private cloud. You're very concerned about you don't want to run out of capacity. Because bad things happen. Even unrecoverable bad things happen. Well in the public cloud, hey, I'm free and clear, I no longer have a capacity management team, I don't need to worry about them anymore. No, no, no no. 'Cause, you know, we just saw some press recently of a company that had a big overage. In cloud, what used to be capacity management is now cost optimization. 'Cause if you don't have it, you're going to have a similarly bad outcome. It's those kinds of things, right? How do you go, and it's those things, right? >> Once a benefit, now it's a challenge. So this could back down to the billion dollar question on the table in the industry is, how do I manage all this? I know how to connect it. Cisco could help me there. I understand multi-cloud, I totally buy into the architecture. I think this is clearly the direction. The management piece is kind of a fuzzy area. Can you guys help unpack cloud management? What are the table stakes? How should people be thinking about it? Because you mentioned security and intrusion detection. Not just moving packets around. We were talking before you came on about Kubernetes. There's all new sets of services moving up the stack, inside this dynamic. How do I manage it all? What single pane of glass is going to do it for me? >> Well, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned there. We've talked a lot about almost like an East West type shift you can think of where, multi-cloud is this thing that goes this way. Well, there's an equally crazy paradigm that's happening in a very fast period of time where it's almost like a North South North shift. Which is, Kubernetes, containers, service meshes. These architectures that are abstracting and lifting everything up. And in some ways, coming underneath as well, at the same time. Because now you've got a return of bare metal. You have these concepts architecturally where the VM is here to stay, it ain't going anywhere. It's still, the tooling around is insanely valuable. But you have now another benefit layer at a container orchestration layer, where there's portability, speed. There's all these benefits that come. And you just look at the stats of how fast containers are growing as a share. You're approaching a billion containers out there right now. And therein lies the challenge. Is that it'd be enough of a difficulty if you were saying I need to go from managing my private cloud, the stuff I have at a cloud edge, edge location, and the stuff I have in multiple public clouds. That's not all we're saying. We're saying also, you have a new tooling and a new set, and it's all software defined, and there's security, network, there's data. It just it's -- >> Complex. >> Exploding, it's complex. So the area that we're working on and want to hear more from Fabio is were innovating with Cisco on, we have great offerings and capabilities around cross cloud and VM orchestration. We're also looking now at that Kubernetes layer. >> Absolutely. >> What's real on that, the complexity he just pointed out is an opportunity at the same time because it just validates the shift that's going on. >> Absolutely. >> Management is an opportunity. >> Jonathan almost went through the entire set of needs. And what you take away from this is that fundamentally you have to instrument this incredibly distributed environment multiple sources and sourcing of this. In fact I love the analogy that you did with the planes, because there's a lot of kind of similarities to a supply chain management kind of business model, right? Where you want to supply different services. But a bottom line is that you're now moving away from what you have. It's a journey. And so this instrumentation, whether it's networking, security, analytics, management, these are actually the four pillars of our company multi-cloud strategy. They need to work across the old and the new. You can't afford to build another silo and maybe leveraging a bunch of open stores like-- >> So a data plane strategy is critical. >> It's, yeah, and it has to-- >> Across the hybrid and multi-cloud. >> East West, North South, and across the old and the new. It sounds very complex, but in reality the-- >> But you could build a taxonomy around this. And we've seen some research come out certainly from Wikiban and others. If it fits into the architecture that seems to be the question. So Jonathan, where does that fit in to the multi-cloud architecture in your opinion? >> So we, there's, you get into different terminology. We think about every company needs a cloud services strategy. So there's a taxonomy of services that we've developed. Where companies have to think about their application services strategy. Their operation strategy, governance strategy, foundation strategy. And this is, it's sort of coming what I teased upon earlier about moving from capacity planning when you own the cloud to cost optimization when you're running the cloud, right? It's the same, but different. And a lot of that difference gets down to services. I am going from a model of running my own product in an information technology modality to now I'm consuming services. So, I used to architect, and design, and build. Now I have to architect and really understand those differences. And so that's our cloud services strategy portfolio. And what we often see is we also have a dev ops portfolio. And we short-hand it, you could call it cloud native, right? Where we're looking at solutions around infrastructures code, around CICD pipelines, around cloud foundation capabilities that connect back-- >> Are they best practices or actually implementation? >> So both, we have content and workshops that we've developed, and then we have. Helping clients on projects very actively. And, you know, that's where it gets back to that architectural gap and knowledge gap. Is companies are looking for, hey, what's the pattern, what are the best practices. And then they don't expect, 'cause there's so many elements that change for a given company. And that change in the market, that there's a shelf-life to this. And it's like fresh produce. >> I love your example of engine in a plane. Do you have it for a single plane or fleet of planes? Does your company have two three big planes. It depends really, I mean, beauty's in the eye of the beholder, here, right? How you build and architect cloud, there's no boilerplate. It really is comes down to figuring it out. >> Where you are. >> So, with that, I want to go to my final point I want to dig into on the people side. So technology shift, business shift, check. You guys did a great job there. Great insight. Comes up every time I have to go to a Cube event and talk about cloud, is the cultural people skills gap problem. One, our company doesn't have the culture and/or we don't have the skill and we don't have the people to run it. So, automation certainly can help there but at the end of the day, if you don't have the people to do this. How do you solve the people problem? How are you guys helping companies? What is some of the state-of-the-art techniques? What's out there? >> So, I'll say a little. I appreciate Fabio's perspective, too. I think for us, really, you know, the old saying, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture's more important than ever. Because really, you're now moving to a mode where siloed organizations implementing siloed technology is enormously challenging. You have to move, and that's where dev ops and other patterns come in, where the people who build the app are doing the operations. Storage and networking and compute and apps and the business, they're all talking to each other. So culture really is foundational so that a culture where you're not making boundaries more rigid, you have to get to a point, and there's different ways to do this. I already recommend if people haven't already read the Phoenix Project. Hard to believe but it's an excellent book. And it's a fictional work about tech. It's like a novel about tech. >> I haven't read it yet, I'm going to get that. >> It's awesome. And it really gets you in the mindset of an organization going through change with the net. And it really, I mean I'm a geek, so I like it, but I've had other non-Geeks read it and they like it. But that's the key, it's a-- >> So you really got to set the table and invest in culture, making sure it's >> Culture's foundational. >> appropriately aligned. >> Culture's foundational. And then there's other best practices that always apply, right? So, what is your business vision? What is your mission? What are your values? What are the objectives you're trying to achieve in this space and time relationship? How are you prioritizing? These are all things because then if you have the right build around all that. Then what you drive to is an outcome at a certain point of time. And time's critical. We're in a market that's competing on time. So if you are not hyper aware of time. And what you're doing in a set point of time. And the trade-offs in making changes if your assumptions are wrong. These are all things that are foundational. >> Fabio, I want to get your thoughts. Chuck Robbins talks about solving the tech problems just because a tech company can solve tech problems all day long. He's also behind the people skillset. I've heard him publicly talk about it. But you guys at Cisco have actually had a great transformation with the DevNet Create community, where you harness the culture, and everyone's engaged around cloud, cloud native, and you have a kind of cloud DNA developing out of the core network. Your thoughts and Cisco's view on culture and people solving the problem. Because we need an army of cloud architects out there. There's not enough people. >> So that's true, but we carry an enormous responsibility in the marketplace as a vendor. We have to make things simple, right? There's still, you know, most of the IT infrastructure's still very complex to program and automate and the likes. That's why we're putting an enormous amount of RnD efforts, right? DevNet is like the tip of the spear. It's showing fundamentally our very loyal CCIEs and everybody else there's a better way to do things, right? Where you can actually really automate things together. You can get access to the APIs and simplify your life. You can simplify your life and the life of the business 'cause you can get faster. So making things simple, automating them, I don't know, if you think about, for instance, our cloud management orchestration philosophy. With the cloud center, we have a patent where we can actually model the application at once. And deploying it to wherever you want. We can deploy that application on-prem, on a VM, or like viralize kind of infrastructure. You can put it into AWS, you can put it into Azure, whatever you want. Kubernetes is kind of target on-prem. That is simplicity, right? We have to drive simplicity. And for me, it's all about automation, and sometimes you hear things like, in 10-base architecture and infrastructure all of that means simplicity and security. And that's the complexity of the whole thing for us is trading off, of course some of the complexity, richness, and flexibility. But it's got to be simple. If we don't make it simple, we are actually failing our goals. And that's where we're putting an enormous amount of RnD effort. >> And Jonathan, you guys at WWT have a unique aperture, view of the marketplace. You see a lot of the landscape, knowing what you guys do. Every vendor says they it, but you're really customer focused, so you're in you're digging in with the customers, it's a real value added service. I got to ask you the question with multi-cloud it sounds easy just to connect them all, right? It's like a subnet plug it in the coax, put a hub there. Put some adapter cards on a PC. The old days of connecting things. It just metaphorically seems easy What's the opportunity for connecting multi-cloud? So, as people realize when they wake up tomorrow or today. And they go, hey, you know what, I got lot of multi-cloud around. How do I connect them together? What's the opportunity, what's the opportunity for Cisco. 'Cause that seems to be the first order of business. I can connect things together in the architecture. And then what happens next? What's the opportunity to connect these clouds. >> The opportunity is gigantic. If you look at just the growth of the public clouds themselves. The CAGRs that they're representing. They're growing the rate their growing on very big numbers already. And it often gets overlooked, but Gartner will tell you also that the co-location, that cloud edge space, is also growing at a good CAGR. So you have just more and more going there. All of that needs to be connected. All of it needs to be protected. So networking is not just networking. Networking is security. A critical pillar of any security practice is really understanding and knowing in-depth your network. The introspection of it all. And at the same time, we're moving from a physical world. And we've moved and virtualized, but now the virtualization of the network now with SD-WAN coming, you're moving to a programmable model, where everything needs to be programmed. So it's not humans. So it's almost like every arc. Just in terms of the amount of data, the amount of traffic, that's all growing. Now, it's not just humans, it's machines doing things. And then also it's not just physical connections. It's software. So it's a three dimensional plot and it's growing on every axis. >> It just not in every device, it's software as a device. Software device connections. Service connections. What's Cisco's opportunity? How positioned are they that can do this? Because there's a lot of conversation around edge. Now you just mentioned a few of them, 5G. What's Cisco's opportunity in all this? >> Well I mean I think Cisco's shown recently and then through generations that they have a unique ability to lead and move with the market. And they're demonstrating that now. So, I think the importance of where the network sits, and not just the network, but again there's an adjacency of security. There's an adjacency of orchestration and management. Their global presence, their global operation. The sophistication of their channel business. All those things put them in a really strong place, we feel. >> You mentioned SD-WAN in a previous comment around talking about edge and stuff. If you think about Office 365, when companies roll that out. That basically takes SD-WAN from a little niche industry to all the internet. SD-WAN is basically the internet now. Your old grandfather's SD-WAN was over here, now everything's SD-WAN. That's basically the internet. So talk about the SD-WAN impact in this because with edge, that's super important too. Your thoughts. >> Well, it was back when we were talking about that traffic patterns are changing. So you're moving to no longer really this campus branch closed network. There's still an important need for that, of course. But now you're doing your business where your customers are. On their phone, in their car. Which means you're having to traverse and work and scale in a very different way. It's part where you have to put the network. And then, it's how you have to run and connect the network in your retail store or in these other things. Part of it is doing what we've always done in a better way. And then probably every day, more of it is about doing things in a new way that you couldn't do in the past to achieve a new business objective. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming on theCUBE conversation. I'd love to have you back on. Great insight. We could also do remotes. So when you go back to the home branch in St. Louis we can bring you in. >> Tells you Silicon Valley and St. Louis, man. Silicon angle, Silicon Valley, St. Louis. >> Let's do it. And I'll say congratulations on your success with Cisco. Fabio, it's been great to see you. Final word, Fabio, just bring it all together. Multi-cloud, it's here, kind of that's the reality. >> Yeah, I want to go back really to where we started the conversation, right? We can't forget the multicloud is still like a mean to and end. The end is, companies want to become and need to become innovative and fast. And that's actually why all this interest in multicloud. It's a business engine. That's why we're all so excited. Because it's a business issue. It's not so much a brand new technology that probably in two years is going to be out of fashion. My personal prediction, we're going to be talking about multicloud for several years. On the contrary of other trends. >> And just to real quickly bring in what we talked about before we came on camera. This is a CEO issue of companies, not CIO. >> Absolutely. >> This is showing the culture and the urgency, really, in all this. >> That's right. >> Absolutely. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Great insight. Multi-cloud conversation, fantastic. Jonathan King, Vice President of Strategy, Data Center, and Cloud for WWT. Also Fabio Gori, friend of theCUBE, Senior Director Cloud Solution and Marketing at Cisco. Thanks for coming on. This theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat funky music)

(uplifting orchestral music) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Palo Alto studios, having theCUBE Conversation, a little break in the action of the conference season before things heat up, before we kind of come to the close of 2018. It's been quite a year. But it's nice to be back in the studio. Things are a little bit less crazy, and we're excited to talk about one of the really hot topics right now, which is edge computing, fog computing, cloud computing. What do all these things mean, how do they all intersect, and we've got with us today David King. He's the CEO of FogHorn Systems. David, first off, welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> So, FogHorn Systems, I guess by the fog, you guys are all about the fog, and for those that don't know, fog is kind of this intersection between cloud, and on prem, and... So first off, give us a little bit of the background of the company and then let's jump into what this fog thing is all about. >> Sure, actually, it all dovetails together. So yeah, you're right, FogHorn, the name itself, came from Cisco's invented term, called fog computing, from almost a decade ago, and it connoted this idea of computing at the edge, but didn't really have a lot of definition early on. And so, FogHorn was started actually by a Palo Alto Incubator, just nearby here, that had the idea that hey, we got to put some real meaning and some real meat on the bones here, with fog computing. And what we think FogHorn has become over the last three and a half years, since we took it out of the incubator, since I joined, was to put some real purpose, meaning, and value in that term. And so, it's more than just edge computing. Edge computing is a related term. In the industrial world, people would say, hey, I've had edge computing for three, 40, 50 years with my production line control and also my distributed control systems. I've got hard wired compute. I run, they call them, industrial PCs in the factory. That's edge compute. The IT roles come along and said, no, no, no, fog compute is a more advanced form of it. Well, the real purpose of fog computing and edge computing, in our view, in the modern world, is to apply what has traditionally been thought of as cloud computing functions, big, big data, but running in an industrial environment, or running on a machine. And so, we call it as really big data operating in the world's smallest footprint, okay, and the real point of this for industrial customers, which is our primary focus, industrial IoT, is to deliver as much analytic machine learning, deep learning AI capability on live-streaming sensor data, okay, and what that means is rather than persisting a lot of data either on prem, and then sending it to the cloud, or trying to stream all this to the cloud to make sense of terabytes or petabytes a day, per machine sometimes, right, think about a jet engine, a petabyte every flight. You want to do the compute as close to the source as possible, and if possible, on the live streaming data, not after you've persisted it on a big storage system. So that's the idea. >> So you touch on all kinds of stuff there. So we'll break it down. >> Unpack it, yeah. >> Unpack it. So first off, just kind of the OT/IT thing, and I think that's really important, and we talked before turning the cameras on about Dr. Tom from HP, he loves to make a big symbolic handshake of the operations technology, >> One of our partners. >> Right, and IT, and the marriage of these two things, where before, as you said, the OT guys, the guys that have been running factories, you know, they've been doing this for a long time, and now suddenly, the IT folks are butting in and want to get access to that data to provide more control. So, you know, as you see the marriage of those two things coming together, what are the biggest points of friction, and really, what's the biggest opportunity? >> Great set of questions. So, quite right, the OT folks are inherently suspicious of IT, right? I mean, if you don't know the history, 40 plus years ago, there was a fork in the road, where in factory operations, were they going to embrace things like ethernet, the internet, connected systems? In fact, they purposely air gapped an island of those systems 'cause they was all about machine control, real-time, for safety, productivity, and uptime of the machine. They don't want any, you can't use kind of standard ethernet, it has to be industrial ethernet, right? It has to have time bound and deterministic. It can't be a retry kind of a system, right? So different MAC layer for a reason, for example. What did the physical wiring look like? It's also different cabling, because you can't have cuts, jumps in the cable, right? So it's a different environment entirely that OT grew up in, and so, FogHorn is trying to really bring the value of what people are delivering for AI, essentially, into that environment in a way that's non-threatening to, it's supplemental to, and adds value in the OT world. So Dr. Tom is right, this idea of bringing IT and OT together is inherently challenging, because these were kind of fork in the road, island-ed in the networks, if you will, different systems, different nomenclature, different protocols, and so, there's a real education curve that IT companies are going through, and the idea of taking all this OT data that's already been produced in tremendous volumes already before you add new kinds of sensing, and sending it across a LAN which it's never talked to before, then across a WAN to go to a cloud, to get some insight doesn't make any sense, right? So you want to leverage the cloud, you want to leverage data centers, you want to leverage the LAN, you want to leverage 5G, you want to leverage all the new IT technologies, but you have to do it in a way that makes sense for it and adds value in the OT context. >> I'm just curious, you talked about the air gapping, the two systems, which means they are not connected, right? >> No, they're connected with a duct, they're connected to themselves, in the industrial-- >> Right, right, but before, the OT system was air gapped from the IT system, so thinking about security and those types of threats, now, if those things are connected, that security measure has gone away, so what is the excitement, adoption scare when now, suddenly, these things that were separate, especially in the age of breaches that we know happen all the time as you bring those things together? >> Well, in fact, there have been cyber breaches in the OT context. Think about Stuxnet, think about things that have happened, think about the utilities back keys that were found to have malwares implanted in them. And so, this idea of industrial IoT is very exciting, the ability to get real-time kind of game changing insights about your production. A huge amount of economic activity in the world could be dramatically improved. You can talk about trillions of dollars of value which the McKenzie, and BCG, and Bain talk about, right, by bringing kind of AI, ML into the plant environment. But the inherent problem is that by connecting the systems, you introduce security problems. You're talking about a huge amount of cost to move this data around, persist it then add value, and it's not real-time, right? So, it's not that cloud is not relevant, it's not that it's not used, it's that you want to do the compute where it makes sense, and for industrial, the more industrialized the environment, the more high frequency, high volume data, the closer to the system that you can do the compute, the better, and again, it's multi-layer of compute. You probably have something on the machine, something in the plant, and something in the cloud, right? But rather than send raw OT data to the cloud, you're going to send processed intelligent metadata insights that have already been derived at the edge, update what they call the fleet-wide digital twin, right? The digital twin for that whole fleet of assets should sit in the cloud, but the digital twin of the specific asset should probably be on the asset. >> So let's break that down a little bit. There's so much good stuff here. So, we talked about OT/IT and that marriage. Next, I just want to touch on cloud, 'cause a lot of people know cloud, it's very hot right now, and the ultimate promise of cloud, right, is you have infinite capacity >> Right, infinite compute. >> Available on demand, and you have infinite compute, and hopefully you have some big fat pipes to get your stuff in and out. But the OT challenge is, and as you said, the device challenge is very, very different. They've got proprietary operating systems, they've been running for a very, very long time. As you said, they put off boatloads, and boatloads, and boatloads of data that was never really designed to feed necessarily a machine learning algorithm, or an artificial intelligence algorithm when these things were designed. It wasn't really part of the equation. And we talk all the time about you know, do you move the compute to the data, you move the data to the compute, and really, what you're talking about in this fog computing world is kind of a hybrid, if you will, of trying to figure out which data you want to process locally, and then which data you have time, relevance, and other factors that just go ahead and pump it upstream. >> Right, that's a great way to describe it. Actually, we're trying to move as much of the compute as possible to the data. That's really the point of, that's why we say fog computing is a nebulous term about edge compute. It doesn't have any value until you actually decide what you're trying to do with it, and what we're trying to do is to take as much of the harder compute challenges, like analytics, machine learning, deep learning, AI, and bring it down to the source, as close to the source as you can, because you can essentially streamline or make more efficient every layer of the stack. Your models will get much better, right? You might have built them in the cloud initially, think about a deep learning model, but it may only be 60, 70% accurate. How do you do the improvement of the model to get it closer to perfect? I can't go send all the data up to keep trying to improve it. Well, typically, what happens is I down sample the data, I average it and I send it up, and I don't see any changes in the average data. Guess what? We should do is inference all the time and all the data, run it in our stack, and then send the metadata up, and then have the cloud look across all the assets of a similar type, and say, oh, the global fleet-wide model needs to be updated, and then to push it down. So, with Google just about a month ago, in Barcelona, at the IoT show, what we demonstrated was the world's first instance of AI for industrial, which is closed loop machine learning. We were taking a model, a TensorFlow model, trained in the cloud in the data center, brought into our stack and referring 100% inference-ing in all the live data, pushing the insights back up into Google Cloud, and then automatically updating the model without a human or data scientist having to look at it. Because essentially, it's ML on ML. And that to us, ML on ML is the foundation of AI for industrial. >> I just love that something comes up all the time, right? We used to make decisions based on the sampling of historical data after the fact. >> That's right, that's how we've all been doing it. >> Now, right, right now, the promise of streaming is you can make it based on all the data, >> All the time. >> All the time in real time. >> Permanently. >> This is a very different thing. So, but as you talked about, you know, running some complex models, and running ML, and retraining these things. You know, when you think of edge, you think of some little hockey puck that's out on the edge of a field, with limited power, limited connectivity, so you know, what's the reality of, how much power do you have at some of these more remote edges, or we always talk about the field of turbines, oil platforms, and how much power do you need, and how much compute that it actually starts to be meaningful in terms of the platform for the software? >> Right, there's definitely use cases, like you think about the smart meters, right, in the home. The older generation of those meters may have had very limited compute, right, like you know, talking about single megabyte of memory maybe, or less, right, kilobytes of memory. Very hard to run a stack on that kind of footprint. The latest generation of smart meters have about 250 megabytes of memory. A Raspberry Pi today is anywhere from a half a gig to a gig of memory, and we're fundamentally memory-bound, and obviously, CPU if it's trying to really fast compute, like vibration analysis, or acoustic, or video. But if you're just trying to take digital sensing data, like temperature, pressure, velocity, torque, we can take humidity, we can take all of that, believe it or not, run literally dozens and dozens of models, even train the models in something as small as a Raspberry Pi, or a low end x86. So our stack can run in any hardware, we're completely OS independent. It's a full up software layer. But the whole stack is about 100 megabytes of memory, with all the components, including Docker containerization, right, which compares to about 10 gigs of running a stream processing stack like Spark in the Cloud. So it's that order of magnitude of footprint reduction and speed of execution improvement. So as I said, world's smallest fastest compute engine. You need to do that if you're going to talk about, like a wind turbine, it's generating data, right, every millisecond, right. So you have high frequency data, like turbine pitch, and you have other conceptual data you're trying to bring in, like wind conditions, reference information about how the turbine is supposed to operate. You're bringing in a torrential amount of data to do this computation on the fly. And so, the challenge for a lot of the companies that have really started to move into the space, the cloud companies, like our partners, Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft, is they have great cloud capabilities for AI, ML. They're trying to move down to the edge by just transporting the whole stack to there. So in a plant environment, okay, that might work if you have massive data centers that can run it. Now I still got to stream all my assets, all the data from all of my assets to that central point. What we're trying to do is come out the opposite way, which is by having the world's smallest, fastest engine, we can run it in a small compute, very limited compute on the asset, or near the asset, or you can run this in a big compute and we can take on lots and lots of use cases for models simultaneously. >> I'm just curious on the small compute case, and again, you want all the data-- >> You want to inference another thing, right? >> Does it eventually go back, or is there a lot of cases where you can get the information you need off the stream and you don't necessarily have to save or send that upstream? >> So fundamentally today, in the OT world, the data usually gets, if the PLC, the production line controller, that has simple KPIs, if temperature goes to X or pressure goes to Y, do this. Those simple KPIs, if nothing is executed, it gets dumped into a local protocol server, and then about every 30, 60, 90 days, it gets written over. Nobody ever looks at it, right? That's why I say, 99% of the brown field data in OT has never really been-- >> Almost like a security-- >> Has never been mined for insight. Right, it just gets-- >> It runs, and runs, and runs, and every so often-- >> Exactly, and so, if you're doing inference-ing, and doing real time decision making, real time actual with our stack, what you would then persist is metadata insights, right? Here is an event, or here is an outcome, and oh, by the way, if you're doing deep learning or machine learning, and you're seeing deviation or drift from the model's prediction, you probably want to keep that and some of the raw data packets from that moment in time, and send that to the cloud or data center to say, oh, our fleet-wide model may not be accurate, or may be drifting, right? And so, what you want to do, again, different horses for different courses. Use our stack to do the lion's share of the heavy duty real time compute, produce metadata that you can send to either a data center or a cloud environment for further learning. >> Right, so your piece is really the gathering and the ML, and then if it needs to go back out for more heavy lifting, you'll send it back up, or do you have the cloud application as well that connects if you need? >> Yeah, so we build connectors to you know, Google Cloud Platform, Google IoT Core, to AWS S3, to Microsoft Azure, virtually any, Kafka, Hadoop. We can send the data wherever you want, either on plant, right back into the existing control systems, we can send it to OSIsoft PI, which is a great time series database that a lot of process industries use. You could of course send it to any public cloud or a Hadoop data lake private cloud. You can send the data wherever you want. Now, we also have, one of our components is a time series database. You can also persist it in memory in our stack, just for buffering, or if you have high value data that you want to take a measurement, a value from a previous calculation and bring it into another calculation during later, right, so, it's a very flexible system. >> Yeah, we were at OSIsoft PI World earlier this year. Some fascinating stories that came out of-- >> 30 year company. >> The building maintenance, and all kinds of stuff. So I'm just curious, some of the easy to understand applications that you've seen in the field, and maybe some of the ones that were a surprise on the OT side. I mean, obviously, preventative maintenance is always towards the top of the list. >> Yeah, I call it the layer cake, right? Especially when you get to remote assets that are either not monitored or lightly monitored. They call it drive-by monitoring. Somebody shows up and listens or looks at a valve or gauge and leaves. Condition-based monitoring, right? That is actually a big breakthrough for some, you know, think about fracking sites, or remote oil fields, or mining sites. The second layer is predictive maintenance, which the next generation is kind of predictive, prescriptive, even preventive maintenance, right? You're making predictions or you're helping to avoid downtime. The third layer, which is really where our stack is sort of unique today in delivering is asset performance optimization. How do I increase throughput, how do I reduce scrap, how do I improve worker safety, how do I get better processing of the data that my PLC can't give me, so I can actually improve the performance of the machine? Now, ultimately, what we're finding is a couple of things. One is, you can look at individual asset optimization, process optimization, but there's another layer. So often, we're deployed to two layers on premise. There's also the plant-wide optimization. We talked about wind farm before, off camera. So you've got the wind turbine. You can do a lot of things about turbine health, the blade pitch and condition of the blade, you can do things on the battery, all the systems on the turbine, but you also need a stack running, like ours, at that concentration point where there's 200 plus turbines that come together, 'cause the optimization of the whole farm, every turbine affects the other turbine, so a single turbine can't tell you speed, rotation, things that need to change, if you want to adjust the speed of one turbine, versus the one next to it. So there's also kind of a plant-wide optimization. Talking about time that's driving, there's going to be five layers of compute, right? You're going to have the, almost what I call the ECU level, the individual sub-system in the car that, the engine, how it's performing. You're going to have the gateway in the car to talk about things that are happening across systems in the car. You're going to have the peer to peer connection over 5G to talk about optimization right between vehicles. You're going to have the base station algorithms looking at a micro soil or macro soil within a geographic area, and of course, you'll have the ultimate cloud, 'cause you want to have the data on all the assets, right, but you don't want to send all that data to the cloud, you want to send the right metadata to the cloud. >> That's why there are big trucks full of compute now. >> By the way, you mentioned one thing that I should really touch on, which is, we've talked a lot about what I call traditional brown field automation and control type analytics and machine learning, and that's kind of where we started in discrete manufacturing a few years ago. What we found is that in that domain, and in oil and gas, and in mining, and in agriculture, transportation, in all those places, the most exciting new development this year is the movement towards video, 3D imaging and audio sensing, 'cause those sensors are now becoming very economical, and people have never thought about, well, if I put a camera and apply it to a certain application, what can I learn, what can I do that I never did before? And often, they even have cameras today, they haven't made use of any of the data. So there's a very large customer of ours who has literally video inspection data every product they produce everyday around the world, and this is in hundreds of plants. And that data never gets looked at, right, other than training operators like, hey, you missed the defects this day. The system, as you said, they just write over that data after 30 days. Well, guess what, you can apply deep learning tensor flow algorithms to build a convolutional neural network model and essentially do the human visioning, rather than an operator staring at a camera, or trying to look at training tapes. 30 days later, I'm doing inference-ing of the video image on the fly. >> So, do your systems close loop back to the control systems now, or is it more of a tuning mechanism for someone to go back and do it later? >> Great question, I just got asked that this morning by a large oil and gas super major that Intel just introduced us to. The short answer is, our stack can absolutely go right back into the control loop. In fact, one of our investors and partners, I should mention, our investors for series A was GE, Bosch, Yokogawa, Dell EMC, and our series debuted a year ago was Intel, Saudi Aramco, and Honeywell. So we have one foot in tech, one foot in industrial, and really, what we're really trying to bring is, you said, IT, OT together. The short answer is, you can do that, but typically in the industrial environment, there's a conservatism about, hey, I don't want to touch, you know, affect the machine until I've proven it out. So initially, people tend to start with alerting, so we send an automatic alert back into the control system to say, hey, the machine needs to be re-tuned. Very quickly, though, certainly for things that are not so time-sensitive, they will just have us, now, Yokogawa, one of our investors, I pointed out our investors, actually is putting us in PLCs. So rather than sending the data off the PLC to another gateway running our stack, like an x86 or ARM gateway, we're actually, those PLCs now have Raspberry Pi plus capabilities. A lot of them are-- >> To what types of mechanism? >> Well, right now, they're doing the IO and the control of the machine, but they have enough compute now that you can run us in a separate module, like the little brain sitting right next to the control room, and then do the AI on the fly, and there, you actually don't even need to send the data off the PLC. We just re-program the actuator. So that's where it's heading. It's eventually, and it could take years before people get comfortable doing this automatically, but what you'll see is that what AI represents in industrial is the self-healing machine, the self-improving process, and this is where it starts. >> Well, the other thing I think is so interesting is what are you optimizing for, and there is no right answer, right? It could be you're optimizing for, like you said, a machine. You could be optimizing for the field. You could be optimizing for maintenance, but if there is a spike in pricing, you may say, eh, we're not optimizing now for maintenance, we're actually optimizing for output, because we have this temporary condition and it's worth the trade-off. So I mean, there's so many ways that you can skin the cat when you have a lot more information and a lot more data. >> No, that's right, and I think what we typically like to do is start out with what's the business value, right? We don't want to go do a science project. Oh, I can make that machine work 50% better, but if it doesn't make any difference to your business operations, so what? So we always start the investigation with what is a high value business problem where you have sufficient data where applying this kind of AI and the edge concept will actually make a difference? And that's the kind of proof of concept we like to start with. >> So again, just to come full circle, what's the craziest thing an OT guy said, oh my goodness, you IT guys actually brought some value here that I didn't know. >> Well, I touched on video, right, so without going into the whole details of the story, one of our big investors, a very large oil and gas company, we said, look, you guys have done some great work with I call it software defined SCADA, which is a term, SCADA is the network environment for OT, right, and so, SCADA is what the PLCs and DCSes connect over these SCADA networks. That's the control automation role. And this investor said, look, you can come in, you've already shown us, that's why they invested, that you've gone into brown field SCADA environments, done deep mining of the existing data and shown value by reducing scrap and improving output, improving worker safety, all the great business outcomes for industrial. If you come into our operation, our plant people are going to say, no, you're not touching my PLC. You're not touching my SCADA network. So come in and do something that's non-invasive to that world, and so that's where we actually got started with video about 18 months ago. They said, hey, we've got all these video cameras, and we're not doing anything. We just have human operators writing down, oh, I had a bad event. It's a totally non-automated system. So we went in and did a video use case around, we call it, flare monitoring. You know, hundreds of stacks of burning of oil and gas in a production plant. 24 by seven team of operators just staring at it, writing down, oh, I think I had a bad flare. I mean, it's a very interesting old world process. So by automating that and giving them an AI dashboard essentially. Oh, I've got a permanent record of exactly how high the flare was, how smoky was it, what was the angle, and then you can then fuse that data back into plant data, what caused that, and also OSIsoft data, what was the gas composition? Was it in fact a safety violation? Was it in fact an environmental violation? So, by starting with video, and doing that use case, we've now got dozens of use cases all around video. Oh, I could put a camera on this. I could put a camera on a rig. I could've put a camera down the hole. I could put the camera on the pipeline, on a drone. There's just a million places that video can show up, or audio sensing, right, acoustic. So, video is great if you can see the event, like I'm flying over the pipe, I can see corrosion, right, but sometimes, like you know, a burner or an oven, I can't look inside the oven with a camera. There's no camera that could survive 600 degrees. So what do you do? Well, that's probably, you can do something like either vibration or acoustic. Like, inside the pipe, you got to go with sound. Outside the pipe, you go video. But these are the kind of things that people, traditionally, how did they inspect pipe? Drive by. >> Yes, fascinating story. Even again, I think at the end of the day, it's again, you can make real decisions based on all the data in real time, versus some of the data after the fact. All right, well, great conversation, and look forward to watching the continued success of FogHorn. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> He's David King, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation at our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (uplifting symphonic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Ken King is here; he's the general manager of OpenPOWER from IBM, and Sumit Gupta, PhD, who is the VP, HPC, AI, ML for IBM Cognitive. Gentleman, welcome to the Cube >> Sumit: Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, really, guys, a pleasure. We had dinner last night, talked about Picciano who runs the OpenPOWER business, appreciate you guys comin' on, but, I got to ask you, Sumit, I'll start with you. OpenPOWER, Cognitive systems, a lot of people say, "Well, that's just the power system. "This is the old AIX business, it's just renaming it. "It's a branding thing.", what do you say? >> I think we had a fundamental strategy shift where we realized that AI was going to be the dominant workload moving into the future, and the systems that have been designed today or in the past are not the right systems for the AI future. So, we also believe that it's not just about silicon and even a single server. It's about the software, it's about thinking at the react level and the data center level. So, fundamentally, Cognitive Systems is about co-designing hardware and software with an open ecosystem of partners who are innovating to maximize the data and AI support at a react level. >> Somebody was talkin' to Steve Mills, probably about 10 years ago, and he said, "Listen, if you're going to compete with Intel, "you can copy them, that's not what we're going to do." You know, he didn't like the spark strategy. "We have a better strategy.", is what he said, and "Oh, strategies, we're going to open it up, "we're going to try to get 10% of the market. "You know, we'll see if we can get there.", but, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of talk about, just from a high level, the strategy and maybe go into the segments. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah, you're absolutely right on the strategy. You know, we have completely opened up the architecture. Our focus on growth is around having an ecosystem and an open architecture so everybody can innovate on top of it effectively and everybody in the ecosystem can profit from it and gains good margins. So, that's the strategy, that's how we design the OpenPOWER ecosystem, but, you know, our segments, our core segments, AIX in Unix is still a core, very big core segment of ours. Unix itself is flat to declining, but AIX is continuing to take share in that segment through all the new innovations we're delivering. The other segments are all growth segments, high growth segments, whether it's SAP HANA, our cognitive infrastructure in modern day to platform, or even what we're doing in the HyperScale data centers. Those are all significant growth opportunities for us, and those are all Linux based, and, so, that is really where a lot of the OpenPOWER initiatives are driving growth for us and leveraging the fact that, through that ecosystem, we're getting a lot of incremental innovation that's occurring and it's delivering competitive differentiation for our platform. I say for our platform, but that doesn't mean just for IBM, but for all the ecosystem partners as well, and a lot of that was on display on Monday when we had our OpenPOWER summit. >> So, to talk about more about the OpenPOWER summit, what was that all about, who was there? Give us some stats on OpenPOWER and ecosystem. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, it was a good day, we're up to well over 300 members. We have over 50 different systems that are coming out in the market from IBM or our partners. Over 20 different manufacturers out there actually developing OpenPOWER systems. A lot of announcements or a lot of statements that were made at the summit that we thought were extremely valuable, first of all, we got the number one server vendor in Europe, Atos, designing and developing P9, the number on in Japan, Hitachi, the number one in China, Inspur. We got top ODMs like Super Micro, Wistron, and others that are also developing their power nine. We have a lot of different component providers on the new PCIe gen four, on the open cabinet capabilities, a lot of announcements made by a number of component partners and accelerator partners at the summit as well. The other thing I'm excited about is we have over 70 ISVs now on the platform, and a number of statements were made and announcements on Monday from people like MapD, Anaconda, H2O, Conetica and others who are leveraging those innovations bought on the platform like NVLink and the coherency between GPU and CPU to do accelerated analytics and accelerated GPU database kind of capabilities, but the thing that had me the most excited on Monday were the end users. I've always said, and the analysts always ask me the questions of when are you going to start penetration in the market? When are you going to show that you've got a lot of end users deploying this? And there were a lot of statements by a lot of big players on Monday. Google was on stage and publicly said the IO was amazing, the memory bandwidth is amazing. We are deploying Zaius, which is the power nine server, in our data centers and we're ready for scale, and it's now Google strong which is basically saying that this thing is hardened and ready for production, but we also (laughs) had a number of other significant ones, Tencent talkin' about deploying OpenPOWER, 30% better efficiency, 30% less server resources required, the cloud armor of Alibaba talkin' about how they're putting on their on their X-Dragon, they have it in a piler program, they're asking everybody to use it now so they can figure out how do they go into production. PayPal made statements about how they're using it, but the machine learning and deep learning to do fraud detection, and we even had Limelight, who is not as big a name, but >> CDN, yeah. >> They're a CDN tool provider to people like Netflix and others. We're talkin' about the great capability with the IO and the ability to reduce the buffering and improve the streaming for all these CDN providers out there. So, we were really excited about all those end users and all the things they're saying. That demonstrates the power of this ecosystem. >> Alright, so just to comment on the architecture and then, I want to get into the Cognitive piece. I mean, you guys did, years ago, little Indians, recognizing you got to get software based to be compatible. You mentioned, Ken, bandwidth, IO bandwidth, CAPI stuff that you've done. So, there's a lot of incentives, especially for the big hyperscale guys, to be able to do more with less, but, to me, let's get into the AI, the Cognitive piece. Bob Picciano comes over from running a $15 billion analytics business, so, obviously, he's got some knowledge. He's bringin' in people like you with all these cool buzzwords in your title. So, talk a little bit about infrastructure for AI and why power is the right platform. >> Sure, so, I think we all recognize that the performance advantages and even power advantages that we were getting from Dennard scaling, also known as Moore's law, is over, right. So, people talk about the end of Moore's Law, and that's really the end of gaining processor performance with Dennard scaling and the Moore's Law. What we believe is that to continue to meet the performance needs of all of these new AI and data workloads, you need accelerators, and not just computer accelerators, you actually need accelerated networking. You need accelerated storage, you need high-density memory sitting very close to the compute power, and, if you really think about it, what's happened is, again, system view, right, we're not silicon view, we're looking at the system. The minute you start looking at the silicon you realize you want to get the data to where the computer is, or the computer where the data is. So, it all becomes about creating bigger pipelines, factor of pipelines, to move data around to get to the right compute piece. For example, we put much more emphasis on a much faster memory system to make sure we are getting data from the system memory to the CPU. >> Coherently. >> Coherently, that's the main memory. We put interfaces on power nine including NVLink, OpenCAPI, and PCIe gen four, and that enabled us to get that data either from the network to the system memory, or out back to the network, or to storage, or to accelerators like GPUs. We built and embedded these high-speed interconnects into power nine, into the processor. Nvidia put NVLink into their GPU, and we've been working with marketers like Xilinx and Mellanox on getting OpenCAPI onto their components. >> And we're seeing up to 10x for both memory bandwidth and IO over x86 which is significant. You should talk about how we're seeing up to 4x improvement in training of MLDL algorithms over x86 which is dramatic in how quickly you can get from data to insight, right? You could take training and turn it from weeks to days, or days to hours, or even hours to minutes, and that makes a huge difference in what you can do in any industry as far as getting insight out of your data which is the competitive differentiator in today's environment. >> Let's talk about this notion of architecture, or systems especially. The basic platform for how we've been building systems has been relatively consistent for a long time. The basic approach to how we think about building systems has been relatively consistent. You start with the database manager, you run it on an Intel processor, you build your application, you scale it up based on SMP needs. There's been some variations; we're going into clustering, because we do some other things, but you guys are talking about something fundamentally different, and flash memory, the ability to do flash storage, which dramatically changes the relationship between the processor and the data, means that we're not going to see all of the organization of the workloads around the server, see how much we can do in it. It's really going to be much more of a balanced approach. How is power going to provide that more balanced systems approach across as we distribute data, as we distribute processing, as we create a cloud experience that isn't in one place, but is in more places. >> Well, this ties exactly to the point I made around it's not just accelerated compute, which we've all talked about a lot over the years, it's also about accelerated storage, accelerated networking, and accelerated memories, right. This is really, the point being, that the compute, if you don't have a fast pipeline into the processor from all of this wonderful storage and flash technology, there's going to be a choke point in the network, or they'll be a choke point once the data gets to the server, you're choked then. So, a lot of our focus has been, first of all, partnering with a company like Mellanox which builds extremely high bandwidth, high-speed >> And EOF. >> Right, right, and I'm using one as an example right. >> Sure. >> I'm using one as an example and that's where the large partnerships, we have like 300 partnerships, as Ken talked about in the OpenPOWER foundation. Those partnerships is because we brought together all of these technology providers. We believe that no one company can own the agenda of technology. No one company can invest enough to continue to give us the performance we need to meet the needs of the AI workloads, and that's why we want to partner with all these technology vendors who've all invested billions of dollars to provide the best systems and software for AI and data. >> But fundamentally, >> It's the whole construct of data centric systems, right? >> Right. >> I mean, sometimes you got to process the data in the network, right? Sometimes you got to process the data in the storage. It's not just at the CPU, the GPUs a huge place for processing that data. >> Sure. >> How do you do that all coherently and how do things work together in a system environment is crucial versus a vertically integrated capability where the CPU provider continues to put more and more into the processor and disenfranchise the rest of the ecosystem. >> Well, that was the counter building strategies that we want to talk about. You have Intel who wants to put as much on the die as possible. It's worked quite well for Intel over the years. You had to take a different strategy. If you tried to take Intel on with that strategy, you would have failed. So, talk about the different philosophies, but really I'm interested in what it means for things like alternative processing and your relationship in your ecosystem. >> This is not about company strategies, right. I mean, Intel is a semiconductor company and they think like a semiconductor company. We're a systems and software company, we think like that, but this is not about company strategy. This is about what the market needs, what client workloads need, and if you start there, you start with a data centric strategy. You start with data centric systems. You think about moving data around and making sure there is heritage in this computer, there is accelerated computer, you have very fast networks. So, we just built the US's fastest supercomputer. We're currently building the US's fastest supercomputer which is the project name is Coral, but there are two supercomputers, one at Oak Ridge National Labs and one at Lawrence Livermore. These are the ultimate HPC and AI machines, right. Its computer's a very important part of them, but networking and storage is just as important. The file system is just as important. The cluster management software is just as important, right, because if you are serving data scientists and a biologist, they don't want to deal with, "How many servers do I need to launch this job on? "How do I manage the jobs, how do I manage the server?" You want them to just scale, right. So, we do a lot of work on our scalability. We do a lot of work in using Apache Spark to enable cluster virtualization and user virtualization. >> Well, if we think about, I don't like the term data gravity, it's wrong a lot of different perspectives, but if we think about it, you guys are trying to build systems in a world that's centered on data, as opposed to a world that's centered on the server. >> That's exactly right. >> That's right. >> You got that, right? >> That's exactly right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Alright, you guys got to go, we got to wrap, but I just want to close with, I mean, always says infrastructure matters. You got Z growing, you got power growing, you got storage growing, it's given a good tailwind to IBM, so, guys, great work. Congratulations, got a lot more to do, I know, but thanks for >> It's going to be a fun year. comin' on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate you having us. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (techno beat)

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

>> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS startup showcase. This is season two, episode three of our ongoing series featuring AWS and its big ecosystem of partners. This particular season is focused on MarTech, emerging cloud scale customer experiences. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by James Fang, the VP of product marketing at mparticle. James, welcome to the program. Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Tell us a little bit about mparticle, what is it that you guys do? >> Sure, so we're mparticle, we were founded in 2013, and essentially we are a customer data platform. What we do is we help brands collect and organize their data. And their data could be coming from web apps, mobile apps, existing data sources like data warehouses, data lakes, et cetera. And we help them help them organize it in a way where they're able to activate that data, whether it's to analyze it further, to gather insights or to target them with relevant messaging, relevant offers. >> What were some of the gaps in the market back then as you mentioned 2013, or even now, that mparticle is really resolving so that customers can really maximize the value of their customer's data. >> Yeah. So the idea of data has actually been around for a while, and you may have heard the buzzword 360 degree view of the customer. The problem is no one has really been actually been able to, to achieve it. And it's actually, some of the leading analysts have called it a myth. Like it's a forever ending kind of cycle. But where we've kind of gone is, first of all customer expectations have really just inflated over the years, right? And part of that was accelerated due to COVID, and the transformation we saw in the last two years, right. Everyone used to, you know, have maybe a digital footprint, as complimentary perhaps to their physical footprint. Nowadays brands are thinking digital first, for obvious reasons. And the data landscape has gotten a lot more complex, right? Brands have multiple experiences, on different screens, right? And, but from the consumer perspective, they want a complete end to end experience, no matter how you're engaging with the brand. And in order to, for a brand to deliver that experience they have to know, how the customers interacted before in each of those channels, and be able to respond in as real time as possible, to those experiences. >> So I can start an interaction on my iPad, maybe carry it through or continue it on my laptop, go to my phone. And you're right, as a, as a consumer, I want the experience across all of those different media to be seamless, to be the same, to be relevant. You talk about the customer 360, as a marketer I know that term well. It's something that so many companies use, interesting that you point out that it's really been, largely until companies like mparticle, a myth. It's one of those things though, that everybody wants to achieve. Whether we're talking about healthcare organization, a retailer, to be able to know everything about a customer so that they can deliver what's increasingly demanded that personalized, relevant experience. How does mparticle fill some of the gaps that have been there in customer 360? And do you say, Hey, we actually deliver a customer 360. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, so the reason it's been a myth is for the most part, data has been- exists either in silos, or it's kind of locked behind this black box that the central data engineering team or sometimes traditionally referred to as IT, has control over, right? So brands are collecting all sorts of data. They have really smart people working on and analyzing it. You know, being able to run data science models, predictive models on it, but the, the marketers and the people who want to draw insights on it are asking how do I get it in, in my hands? So I can use that data for relevant targeting messaging. And that's exactly what mparticle does. We democratize access to that data, by making it accessible in the very tools that the actual business users are are working in. And we do that in real time, you don't have to wait for days to get access to data. And the marketers can even self-service, they're able to for example, build audiences or build computed insights, such as, you know, average order value of a customer within the tool themselves. The other main, the other main thing that mparticle does, is we ensure the quality of that data. We know that activation is only as as good, when you can trust that data, right? When there's no mismatching, you know, first name last names, identities that are duplicated. And so we put a lot of effort, not only in the identity resolution component of our product but also being able to ensure that the consistency of that data when it's being collected meets the standard that you need. >> So give us a, a picture, kind of a topology of a, of a customer data platform. And what are some of the key components that it contains, then I kind of want to get into some of the use cases. >> Yeah. So at, at a core, a lot of customer data platforms look similar. They're responsible first of all for the collection of data, right? And again, that could be from web mobile sources, as well as existing data sources, as well as third party apps, right? For example, you may have e-commerce data in a Shopify, right. Or you may have, you know, a computer model from a, from a warehouse. And then the next thing is to kind of organize it somehow, right? And the most common way to do that is to unify it, using identity resolution into this idea of customer profiles, right. So I can look up everything that Lisa or James has done, their whole historical record. And then the third thing is to be able to kind of be able to draw some insights from that, whether to be able to build an audience membership on top of that, build a predictive model, such as the churn risk model or lifetime value of that customer. And finally is being able to activate that data, so you'll be able to push that data again, to those relevant downstream systems where the business users are actually using that data to, to do their targeting, or to do more interesting things with it. >> So for example, if I go to the next Warrior's game, which I predict they're going to win, and I have like a mobile app of the stadium or the team, how, and I and I'm a season ticket holder, how can a customer data platform give me that personalized experience and help to, yeah, I'd love to kind of get it in that perspective. >> Yeah. So first of all, again, in this modern day and age consumers are engaging with brands from multiple devices, and their attention span, frankly, isn't that long. So I may start off my day, you know, downloading the official warriors app, right. And I may be, you know browsing from my mobile phone, but I could get distracted. I've got to go join a meeting at work, drop off my kids or whatever, right? But later in the day I had in my mind, I may be interested in purchasing tickets or buying that warriors Jersey. So I may return to the website, or even the physical store, right. If, if I happen to be in the area and what the customer data platform is doing in the background, is associating and connecting all those online and offline touchpoints, to that user profile. And then now, I have a mar- so let's say I'm a marker for the golden state warriors. And I see that, you know, this particular user has looked at my website even added to their cart, you know, warriors Jersey. I'm now able to say, Hey, here's a $5 promotional coupon. Also, here's a special, limited edition. We just won, you know, the, the Western conference finals. And you can pre-book, you know, the, you know the warriors championships Jersey, cross your fingers, and target that particular user with that promotion. And it's much more likely because we have that contextual data that that user's going to convert, than just blasting them on a Facebook or something like that. >> Right. Which all of us these days are getting less and less patient with, Is those, those broad blasts through social media and things like that. That was, I love that example. That was a great example. You talked about timing. One of the things I think that we've learned that's in very short supply, in the last couple of years is people's patience and tolerance. We now want things in nanoseconds. So, the ability to glean insights from data and act on it in real time is no longer really a nice to have that's really table stakes for any type of organization. Talk to us about how mparticle facilitates that real time data, from an insights perspective and from an activation standpoint. >> Yeah. You bring up a good point. And this is actually one of the core differentiators of mparticle compared to the other CDPs is that, our architecture from the ground up is built for real time. And the way we do that is, we use essentially a real time streaming architecture backend. Essentially all the data points that we collect and send to those downstream destinations, that happens in milliseconds, right? So the moment that that user, again, like clicks a button or adds something to their shopping cart, or even abandons that shopping cart, that downstream tool, whether it's a marketer, whether it's a business analyst looking at that data for intelligence, they get that data within milliseconds. And our audience computations also happens within seconds. So again, if you're, if you have a targeted list for a targeted campaign, those updates happen in real time. >> You gave an- you ran with the Warrior's example that I threw at you, which I love, absolutely. Talk to me. You must have though, a favorite cu- real world customer example of mparticle's that you think really articulates the value to organizations, whether it's to marketers operators and has some nice, tangible business outcomes. Share with me if you will, a favorite customer story. >> Yeah, definitely one of mine and probably one of the- our most well known's is we were actually behind the scenes of the Whopper jr campaign. So a couple of years ago, Burger King ran this really creative ad where the, effectively their goal was to get their mobile app out, as well as to train, you know, all of us back before COVID days, how to order on our mobile devices and to do things like curbside checkout. None of us really knew how to do that, right. And there was a challenge of course that, no one wants to download another app, right? And most apps get downloaded and get deleted right out away. So they ran this really creative promotion where, if you drove towards a McDonald's, they would actually fire off a text message saying, Hey, how about a Whopper for 99 cents instead? And you would, you would, you would receive a text message personalized just for you. And you'd be able to redeem that at any burger king location. So we were kind of the core infrastructure plumbing the geofencing location data, to partner of ours called radar, which handles you geofencing, and then send it back to a marketing orchestration vendor to be able to fire that targeted message. >> Very cool. I, I, now I'm hungry. You, but there's a fine line there between knowing that, okay, Lisa's driving towards McDonald's let's, you know, target her with an ad for a whopper, in privacy. How do you guys help organizations in any industry balance that? Cause we're seeing more and more privacy regulations popping up all over the world, trying to give consumers the ability to protect either the right to forget about me or don't use my data. >> Yeah. Great question. So the first way I want to respond to that is, mparticle's really at the core of helping brands build their own first party data foundation. And what we mean by that is traditionally, the way that brands have approached marketing is reliant very heavily on second and third party data, right? And most that second-third party data is from the large walled gardens, such as like a Facebook or a TikTok or a Snapchat, right? They're they're literally just saying, Hey find someone that is going to, you know fit our target profile. And that data is from people, all their activity on those apps. But with the first party data strategy, because the brand owns that data, we- we can guarantee that or the brands can guarantee to their customers it's ethically sourced, meaning it's from their consent. And we also help brands have governance policies. So for example, if the user has said, Hey you're allowed to collect my data, because obviously you want to run your business better, but I don't want any my information sold, right? That's something that California recently passed, with CPRA. Then brands can use mparticle data privacy controls to say, Hey, you can pass this data on to their warehouses and analytics platforms, but don't pass it to a platform like Facebook, which potentially could resell that data. >> Got it, Okay. So you really help put sort of the, the reigns on and allow those customers to make those decisions, which I know the mass community appreciates. I do want to talk about data quality. You talked about that a little bit, you know, and and data is the lifeblood of an organization, if it can really extract value from it and act on it. But how do you help organizations maintain the quality of data so that what they can do, is actually deliver what the end user customer, whether it's a somebody buying something on a, on a eCommerce site or or, a patient at a hospital, get what they need. >> Yeah. So on the data quality front, first of all I want to highlight kind of our strengths and differentiation in identity resolution. So we, we run a completely deterministic algorithm, but it's actually fully customizable by the customer depending on their needs. So for a lot of other customer data providers, platform providers out there, they do offer identity resolution, but it's almost like a black box. You don't know what happens. And they could be doing a lot of fuzzy matching, right. Which is, you know, probabilistic or predictive. And the problem with that is, let's say, you know, Lisa your email changed over the years and CDP platform may match you with someone that's completely not you. And now all of a sudden you're getting ads that completely don't fit you, or worse yet that brand is violating privacy laws, because your personal data is is being used to target another user, which which obviously should not, should not happen, right? So because we're giving our customers complete control, it's not a black box, it's transparent. And they have the ability to customize it, such as they can specify what identifiers matter more to them, whether they want to match on email address first. They might've drawn on a more high confidence identifier like a, a hash credit card number or even a customer ID. They have that choice. The second part about ensuring data quality is we act actually built in schema management. So as those events are being collected you could say that, for example, when when it's a add to cart event, I require the item color. I require the size. Let's say it's a fashion apparel. I require the size of it and the type of apparel, right? And if, if data comes in with missing fields, or perhaps with fields that don't match the expectation, let's say you're expecting small, medium, large and you get a Q, you know Q is meaningless data, right? We can then enforce that and flag that as a data quality violation and brands can complete correct that mistake to make sure again, all the data that's flowing through is, is of value to them. >> That's the most important part is, is to make sure that the data has value to the organization, and of course value to whoever it is on the other side, the, the end user side. Where should customers start, in terms of working with you guys, do you recommend customers buy an all in one marketing suite? The best, you know, build a tech stack of best of breed? What are some of those things that you recommend for folks who are going, all right, We, maybe we have a CDP it's been under delivering. We can't really deliver that customer 360, mparticle, help us out. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, the best part about mparticle is you can kind of deploy it in phases, right. So if you're coming from a world where you've deployed a, all in one marketing suite, like a sales force in Adobe, but you're looking to maybe modernize pieces of a platform mparticle can absolutely help with that initial step. So let again, let's say all you want to do is modernize your event collection. Well, we can absolutely, as a first step, for example, you can instrument us. You can collect all your data from your web and mobile apps in real time, and we can pipe to your existing, you know Adobe campaign manager, Salesforce, marketing cloud. And later down the line, let's say, you say I want to, you know, modernize my analytics platform. I'm tired of using Adobe analytics. You can swap that out, right again with an mparticle place, a marketer can or essentially any business user can flip the switch. And within the mparticle interface, simply disconnect their existing tool and connect a new tool with a couple of button clicks and bam, the data's now flowing into the new tool. So it mparticle really, because we kind of sit in the middle of all these tools and we have over 300 productized prebuilt integrations allows you to move away from kind of a locked in, you know a strategy where you're committed to a vendor a hundred percent to more of a best of breed, agile strategy. >> And where can customers that are interested, go what's your good and market strategy? How does that involve AWS? Where can folks go and actually get and test out this technology? >> Yeah. So first of all, we are we are AWS, a preferred partner. and we have a couple of productized integrations with AWS. The most obvious one is for example, being able to just export data to AWS, whether it's Redshift or an S3 or a kinesis stream, but we also have productized integrations with AWS, personalized. For example, you can take events, feed em to personalize and personalize will come up with the next best kind of content recommendation or the next best offer available for the customer. And mparticle can ingest that data back and you can use that for personalized targeting. In fact, Amazon personalize is what amazon.com themselves use to populate the recommended for use section on their page. So brands could essentially do the same. They could have a recommended for you carousel using Amazon technology but using mparticle to move the data back and forth to, to populate that. And then on top of that very, very soon we'll be also launching a marketplace kind of entry. So if you are a AWS customer and you have credits left over or you just want to transact through AWS, then you'll have that option available as well. >> Coming soon to the AWS marketplace. James, thank you so much for joining me talking about mparticle, how you guys are really revolutionizing the customer data platform and allowing organizations and many industries to really extract value from customer data and use it wisely. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa >> For James Fang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube's coverage of the AWS startup showcase season three, season two episode three, leave it right here for more great coverage on theCube, the leader in live tech coverage.

>>Hello, and welcome to the cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John furier host of the cube. We got a great guest, a chief information security officer CISO, Alex Shukman who's with Colgate Paul mall of company, Alex. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. >>Thanks for having me, >>John. So fresh off the heels of RSA in San Francisco was quite the spectacle people back in person. Um, a lot of great conversations, kind of the old conversations, moving to the new, uh, really good to see, but CISO, the CISO agenda was clear on everyone's mind, more attacks, no surface area. Perimeter's dead. You got cloud native shift left, SBOs open sourced, supply chain and technology. Uh, software's now open source. How do you deal with that? A lot of complicated issues all through the prism of constantly being hacked with ransomware, everything else going on, you're in the middle of it. You gotta protect manufacturing assets, people, assets, intellectual property, you're in the middle of it. What's, what's the view. What's your current scope, the problem that you're dealing with every day. >>Yeah, it's really interesting world we live in today. Um, and, and definitely, uh, you know, the key topics were jumping around in RSA. Um, you know, everyone seems to be really trying to understand the, the environment better. And, you know, I, I think in the past we saw a lot of attacks against financial sector, a a lot of, of tax against critical infrastructure, but now many of us in the private sector, uh, especially in the non-critical manufacturing areas, you know, we're seeing the same thing that those industries have seen for many years. And so the criminals are getting, you know, less picky about their targets and, and they're targeting, uh, publicly traded companies, as much as they're targeting critical infrastructure. They're not as, uh, picky as they used to be. >>Yeah. You know, you see healthcare, financial services, uh, manufacturing, um, all there, intellectual, property's a big one, but you have, you know, now as you guys have your business, you're dealing with a global, um, borderless environment. You know, that's a big thing. You also have service providers probably work with. So you gotta have the business operations run modern in a modern way at the same time, protect in the modern way. What is the top agenda item for you in your sector, in, in manufacturing, in this area? What's the main high level, um, important task that you usually face every day? >>Yeah. When we talk to a lot of our, our peer companies or peers in the security industry, uh, especially in, in, at RSA, you know, a lot of 'em are very focused on their, their us business, a as well as you know, how to protect themselves. You know, I think one of the things that's really interesting about FGI Pala is that we are a global company and we really do have operations everywhere, uh, both from an, an office presence, a business presence, as well as manufacturing. So, you know, everything that, that those companies have to deal with who are primarily us based, and maybe they're aligning with some us intelligence, uh, we have to, to really incorporate global threats into our security program. Uh, and, and I think that's one of the really interesting things about Colgate, especially for people, uh, maybe who are familiar with our products, cuz they grew up using them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, you know, we have products, uh, all over the world and depending on which area you're in, you know, we are the one security team who's responsible for protecting the entire Colgate world. >>How has the pandemic pulled forward issues or highlighted more necessity around certain areas? Obviously the work from home thing is pretty obvious for many people and who would've thought you'd have to provision a hundred percent VPNs or whatever endpoint protection. Um, what, how has that affected you, your, your area, your company and your sector, um, how has the pandemic impacted your security? >>Yeah, and I think this is a really interesting topic. You've I I've heard many other people, uh, talk about their response to the COVID 19 pandemic over the last few years. Um, you know, I, I think the, the, the best way to answer it from, from my personal perspective is if, if you were prepared for remote work or you were prepared for a partially remote workforce, then you really could have been very prepared for the pandemic. So even prior to the pandemic, you had people traveling on business and you needed to provide system access, but in a secure way, you had people doing short term assignments, you had a remote sales force and you had a number of different, especially being a global company, uh, people working out of an office, that's not their traditional office. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. If, if you look at all the security prepared, preparedness that you need to do to enable all that, it's not that much different than the pandemic, except that it's really on steroids and it's gone a hundred times further. >>It makes everyone work harder. Yeah. You have to prepare for the a hundred percent scenario, not, you know, not some, uh, um, estimate, um, good, good call out. And the other thing too, is that there's also these, these markets where it gets pulled forward, but then pulls back when the pandemic is over. Have you seen any of that as we kind of come into our third year of, I guess, hybrid being steady state, what has kind of gone away, fell off the plate? What's been, what's the steady state. How do you, have you seen anything kind of go back? >>Yeah, I, I think one of the things that kind of seems to ping pong back and forth is, is our ability to really rely on suppliers to, to deliver it equipment. So, you know, being a, a global company we're, we have employees all over the world, we have it infrastructure that we're supporting across the globe. And, and as you see, different countries go into lockdowns, as you see different suppliers faced with, with different pressures, you know, that seems to be something that kind of ebbs and flows over the last few years, uh, being able to get laptops, being able to get multiple devices, being able to get communications equipment. So, um, you know, I think some of those industries are still trying to evolve, uh, post pandemic. Right. >>You know, I always, I always like to ask the question privately, but I won't do it on camera, how much budget you have and how much you spend on cyber. Um, but you know, generally speaking, I think it's pretty safe to say the number's going up and up, um, cuz of the threats and you got more vectors coming in, but on the question of what tools and platforms work best for you, what are you looking for? What works best from your perspective, as you evaluate new things, right? You gotta look at the new, then you gotta keep up with the state of the art to, to be ahead of the bad guys and obvious you take risk management very seriously, as well as prepare. Right. So what are some of the tools that work for you? What do you see out there that that's getting your attention? >>Yeah, you know, I, I look at a lot of different vendor solutions. I think, uh, that's pretty prevalent in our industry. I look for solutions from large names, suppliers that have been around for a number of years, but I also like to, to look at startup companies who are really trying to innovate and, and make a solution, that number one is easy to implement. And number two is, is easy to keep working. If, if we're spending more time keeping a solution working than we are using the solution. I think that's one of the pain points that than other security, uh, programs are, are fighting with. You know, we try to really avoid those types of solutions, put something in, make sure that it works well so that we can really focus on getting the value out of the solution versus trying to keep it running. >>You know, the old SAS equation, helping the enterprise get better at the old enterprise playbook, which was how do you solve complexity by adding more complexity and, you know, lock in or, you know, <laugh> more costs, hidden costs under the water, so to speak or the shark fan or the iceberg, uh, cost of ownership. I mean, so it's a time to value shift, um, cuz your time's valuable and you've got staff and the hiring's not easy. This is a huge point. >>Yeah. We're a manufacturing organization. Obviously our, our goal as a company is to produce, to sell to consumers. You know, it is a cost center. We're trying to be as efficient as possible yet still support our business and keep it safe. So, uh, if we're investing in a security solution or if we're investing in, in a, a vendor solution that that does provide some layer of protection, you know, we wanna make sure that that's efficient as possible for us and, and that we get value out of it immediately. Uh, you know, that's always the, the hardest thing to try to find a solution that, that fits your business, but also delivers value to your organization. >>You know, it's interesting, you mention it as a cost center and you're talking about cyber security, which is the, the jewels of the company. You're talking about the criticality of the business model. One hat could really take down companies. So you, you it's really offense you're it's profit center in inherently. If you look at it that way. Um, and a lot of people are looking at this this way because you're a private company, you're not a government, you don't have a militia, you got cyber protection issues. So there's a real trend for CISOs to come together. And we're seeing this, uh, about sharing for instance, you know, sharing a threat information. So there's been a big movement in the CISO community. Uh, and I'm curious to get your reaction to this and what your conversations are, where sharing is really about collective intelligence and winning and ex and helping each other. And there's this, it's a, it's a, it's an enable user enablement, a CISO enablement kind of vibe. How do you have those conversations? What is, uh, when you huddle with your CISO buddies and friends and colleagues, what's the conversations like, is this sharing thing real is how do you do it effectively? Is it data rooms? Is it, how do you protect the information? Can you share your perspective on that? Cause this is a kind of a real cutting edge area right now. >>Yeah, I think in the, in the public sector, especially in, in, uh, in the government side, as well as critical manufacturing, critical infrastructure, you know, they really do it best in class and have done it for years out, out of necessity. Uh, what's really nice to see, especially on CS a and some of the latest initiatives like shields up is, is a lot more public private sharing going on. There's a lot more information available to us as a private company. Who's not part of, of the DIB or any of the intelligence community, but at the same time, we need to protect ourselves from the bad guys as much as they do. So, you know, I like the fact that that we're seeing CS a do more and more outreach to connect public and private sector, plus there's more and more sharing initiatives going on in the ISAC communities and making sure that barrier is low and, and they're, they're sharing, uh, threat Intel IOCs, but in a safe way among a, a community of security practitioners, security practitioners are, are great at sharing. They just need the permission to do so. >>Exactly. And then getting that, getting that mindset of, we're not just a cost setter, we're a critical division or group that protects the assets. And I think that's where I seen security elevate from the it world where yeah, King's born in it, cuz that's where that, where everything is, assets are all there. And then as assets change it, you guys have a lot of operational technology called OT on your manufacturing. You gotta deal with that. Now that's usually locked down. Pretty good. Right. <laugh> so as you bring OT and it together, you guys are in the middle of that industrial I OT world. >>Yeah. What's really interesting about my, uh, career at Colgate. I I've been here for, for 25 years and uh, actually the majority of my career has been in it supporting business applications, uh, either for our sales force or our manufacturing organization, our finance and HR teams. So I really got a, a good partnership with our business teams and really understood what they were trying to deliver. Then in the last few years, when I shifted over security, it really helped me bridge that gap and understand, you know, what the business systems are doing, what the OT systems are doing and then how to best secure them. >>Yeah, it's interesting. It's it kind of goes away. It's everything now it's digital, right? Digital digitization, digital transformation. This is what what's awesome. And this is what I love about the cloud scale and it's about bringing the two worlds together and the hybrid is a steady state. Now, both workforce and environment, Alex. Great to get your perspective. Um, thanks for sharing, um, insight here on the cube. Final question, give a plug for what you're working on. What's the cool projects you got going. If you can share a little bit without getting confidential information out there, what's going on at Colgate? Uh what's on your plate. What are you excited about? Put a plug. Are you looking for hiring, give a quick plug for what you got working on? >>I mean, we have a great team. Uh, we've been growing the team steadily, uh, building out our, our security program. Uh, you know, we're always looking to hire new talent, uh, from different industries. Uh, we've been very focused on making sure that that we're building a diverse talent group inside my security program. So I'm not just looking for, uh, security practitioners. Who've been doing this for 25 years, but I've been hiring from various places like, uh, infrastructure service provider consultants, pen testers, and really trying to build, uh, uh, the best team possible. >>Yeah, just as a side to real quick note is I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day were old, old Foggie. Um, the young guns have never racked gear before. Right. They don't, they've never loaded Linux on a box. So, you know, as you start hiring some of the young talent, what's it like, what are they coming in? Obviously they probably probably have a broader CS perspective. Maybe they're probably more familiar, but you know, some of the different really rack gear all. So what is it like, what, what are some of the new, new, new young folks looking at right now? What's the, what's the skill. >>Yeah, they they're, they're used to cloud consoles and right clicking to, uh, to spin up a computer. And in an our day we unboxed the computer, put racks on, you know, had to plug in power and network and figure out, uh, you know, the right way to, to, to hook everything up and even load an OS. I mean, uh, you know, you're right out of, uh, university today, you, you probably right. Click spin up a, uh, an image in, in one of the public clouds and the OS boom comes up automatically for you, like imagine. So they >>Probably are like fish to water on the, on the dashboards and the, on some of the security challenges I can imagine they have a nice fit there, >>But at the same time, uh, you know, they have a great understanding of, uh, containers. They have a great understanding of server list. So you can really, uh, kind of marry the, the old school technology with some of the new ways of working. >>Yeah. Great stuff. Great. We'll have to do a segment on, uh, on talent and what the new roles are. A lot of openings, a lot of new opportunities. It really is a great time to be in this new digital, I don't know what the call it's nearly not it anymore. It's just digital transformation. Uh, it's just, it's just the way it is. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it, Alex. Thanks for your time. >>Thanks a lot, John. Okay. Take >>Care. Just a cube conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John fur host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE studios of Palo Alto California for RSA conference keynote coverage and conference coverage. I'm Sean for your host of theCUBE. We're breaking down the keynote of RSA day one kickoff. We had Mark Nunnikhoven, who's the distinguished cloud strategist at Lacework. Mark former cube alumni and expert and security has been on many times before, Mark great to see you. Thanks for coming on and helping me break down RSA conference 2021 virtual this year. Thanks for joining. >> Happy to be here. Thanks for having me John. >> You know, one of the things Mark about these security conferences is that interesting, RSA was the last conference we actually did interviews physically face to face and then the pandemic went down and it was a huge shutdown. So we're still virtual coming back to real life. So and they're virtual this year, so kind of a turn of events, but that was kind of the theme this year in the keynote. Changing the game on security, the script has been flipped, connectivity everywhere, security from day one being reinvented. Some people were holding onto the old way some people trying to get on there, on the future wave. Clearly you got the laggards and you've got the innovators all trying to kind of, you know, find their position. This has been obvious in this keynote. What's your take? >> Yeah and that was exactly it. They use that situation of being that last physical security conference, somewhat to their advantage to weave this theme of resiliency. And it's a message that we heard throughout the keynote. It's a message we're going to hear throughout the week. There's a number of talks that are tying back to this and it really hits at the core of what security aims to do. And I think aims is really the right word for it because we're not quite there yet. But it's about making sure that our technology is flexible that it expands and adapts to the situations because as we all know this year, you know basically upended everything we assumed about how our businesses were running, how our communities and society was running and we've all had to adapt. And that's what we saw at the keynote today was they acknowledged that and then woven into the message to drive that home for security providers. >> Yeah and to me one of the most notable backdrops to the entire thing was the fact that the RSA continues to operate from the sell out when Dell sold them for alright $2 billion to a consortium, private privately private equity company, Symphony Technology Group. So there they're operating now on their own. They're out in the wild, as you said, cybersecurity threats are ever increasing, the surface area has changed with cloud native. Basically RSA is a 3000 person startup basically now. So they've got secure ID, the old token business we all have anyone's had those IDs you know it's pretty solid, but now they've got to kind of put this event back together and mobile world Congress is right around the corner. They're going to try to actually have a physical event. So you have this pandemic problem of trying to get the word out and it's weird. It's kind of, I found it. It's hard to get your hands around all the news. >> It is. And it's, you know, we're definitely missing that element. You know, we've seen that throughout the year people have tried to adapt these events into a virtual format. We're missing those elements of those sorts of happenstance run-ins I know we've run into each other at a number of events just sort of in the hall, you get to catch up, but you know as part of those interactions, they're not just social but you also get a little more insight into the conference. Hey, you know, did you catch this great talk or are you going to go catch this thing later? And we're definitely missing that. And I don't think anyone's really nailed this virtual format yet. It's very difficult to wrap your head around like you said, I saw a tweet online from one InfoSec analyst today. It was pointed out, you know, there were 17 talks happening at the same time, which you know, in a physical thing you'd pick one and go to it in a virtual there's that temptation to kind of click across the channels. So even if you know what's going on it's hard to focus in these events. >> Yeah the one conference has got a really good I think virtual platform is Docker con, they have 48 panels, a lot of great stuff there. So that's one of more watching closest coming up on May 27. Check that one out. Let's get into this, let's get into the analysis. I really want to get your thoughts on this because you know, I thought the keynote was very upbeat. Clearly the realities are presenting it. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco there and you had a bunch of industry legends in there. So let's start with, let's start with what you thought of Rowan's keynote and then we'll jump into what Chuck Robbins was saying. >> Sure yeah. And I thought, Rohit, you know, at first I questioned cause he brought up and he said, I'm going to talk about tigers, airplanes and sewing machines. And you know, as a speaker myself, I said, okay, this is either really going to work out well or it's not going to work out at all. Unfortunately, you know, Rohit head is a professional he's a great speaker and it worked out. And so he tied these three examples. So it was tiger king for Netflix, at World War II, analyzing airplane damage and a great organization in India that pivoted from sewing into creating masks and other supplies for the pandemic. He wove those three examples through with resiliency and showed adaptation. And I thought it was really really well done first of all. But as a cloud guy, I was really excited as well that that first example was Netflix. And he was referencing a chaos monkey, which is a chaos engineering tool, which I don't think a lot of security people are exposed to. So we use it very often in cloud building where essentially this tool will purposely blow up things in your environment. So it will down services. It will cut your communications off because the idea is you need to figure out how to react to these things before they happen for real. And so getting keynote time for a tool like that a very modern cloud tool, I thought was absolutely fantastic. Even if that's, you know, not so well known or not a secret in the cloud world anymore, it's very commonly understood, but getting a security audience exposure to that was great. And so you know, Rohit is a pro and it was a good kickoff and yeah, very upbeat, a lot of high energy which was great for virtual keynote. Cause sometimes that's what's really missing is that energy. >> Yeah, we like Rohit too. He's got some, he's got charisma. He also has his hand on the pulse. I think the chaos monkey point you're making is as a great call out because it's been around the DevOps community. But what that really shows I think and puts an exclamation point around this industry right now is that DevSecOps is here and it's never going away and cloud native and certainly the pandemic has shown that cloud scale speed data and now distributed computing with the edge, 5G has been mentioned, as you said, this is a real deal. So this is DevOps. This is infrastructure as code and security is being reinvented in it. This is a killer theme and it's kind of a wake-up call. What's your reaction to that? what's your take? >> Yeah, it absolutely is a wake-up call and it actually blended really well into a Rohit second point, which was around using data. And I think, you know, having these messages put out to the, you know, what is the security conference for the year always, is really important because the rest of the business has moved forward and security teams have been a little hesitant there, we're a little behind the times compared to the rest of the business who are taking advantage of these cloud services, taking advantage of data being everywhere. So for security professionals to realize like hey there are tools that can make us better at our jobs and make us, you know, keep or help us keep pace with the business is absolutely critical because like you said, as much as you know I always cringe when I hear the term DevSecOps, it's important because security needs to be there. The reason I cringe is because I think security should be built into everything. But the challenge we have is that security teams are still a lot of us are still stuck in the past to sort of put our arms around something. And you know, if it's in that box, I'm good with it. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. We have better tools, we have better data. And that was really Rohit's key message was those tools and that data can help you be resilient, can help your organization be resilient and whether that's the situation like a pandemic or a major cyber attack, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to bounce back. >> You know, when we actually have infrastructure as code and no one ever talks about DevOps or DevSecOps you know, we've, it's over, it's in the right place, but I want to get your thoughts and seeing if you heard anything about automation because one of the things that you bring up about not liking the word DevSecOps is really around, having this new team formation, how people are organizing their developers and their operations teams. And it really is becoming programmable and that's kind of the word, but automation scales it. So that's been a big theme this year. What are you hearing? What did you hear on the keynote? Any signs of reality around automation, machine learning you mentioned data, did they dig into automation? >> Automation was on the periphery. So a lot of what they're talking about only works with automation. So, you know, the Netflix shout out for chaos monkey absolutely as an automated tool to take advantage of this data, you absolutely need to be automated but the keynote mainly focused on sort of the connectivity and the differences in how we view an organization over the last year versus moving forward. And I think that was actually a bit of a miss because as you rightfully point out, John, you need automation. The thing that baffles me as a builder, as a security guy, is that cyber criminals have been automated for years. That's how they scale. That's how they make their money. Yet we still primarily defend manually. And I don't know if you've ever tried to beat, you know the robots that are everything or really complicated video games. We don't tend to win well when we're fighting automation. So security absolutely needs to step up. The good news is looking at the agenda for the week, taking in some talks today, while it was a bit of a miss and the keynote, there is a good theme of automation throughout some of the deeper dive sessions. So it is a topic that people are aware of and moving forward. But again, I always want to see us move fast. >> Was there a reason Chuck Robbins headlines or is that simply because there are a big 800 pound gorilla in the networking space? You know, why Cisco? Are they relevant security? Is that signaling that networking is more important? As of 5G at the edge, but is Cisco the player? >> Obviously Cisco has a massive business and they are a huge player in the security industry but I think they're also representative of, you know and this was definitely Chuck's message. They were representative of this idea that security needs to be built in at every layer. So even though, you know I live on primarily the cloud technologies dealing with organizations that are built in the cloud, there is, you know, the reality of that we are all connected through a multitude of networks. And we've seen that with work from home which is a huge theme this year at the conference and the improvements in mobility with 5G and other connectivity areas like Edge and WiFi six. So having a big network player and security player like Cisco in the keynote I think is important just because their message was not just about inclusion and diversity for skills which was a theme we saw repeated in the keynote actually but it was about building security in from the start to the finish throughout. And I think that's a really important message. We can't just pick one place and say this is where we're going to build security. It needs to be built throughout all of our systems. >> If you were a Cicso listening today what was your take on that? Were you impressed? Were you blown away? Did you fall out of your chair or was it just right down the middle? >> I mean, you might fall out of your chair just cause you're sitting in it for so long taken in a virtual event. And I mean, I know that's the big downside of virtual is that your step counter is way down compared to where it should be for these conferences but there was nothing revolutionary in the opening parts of the keynote. It was just, you know sort of beating the drum that has been talked about, has been simmering in the background from sort of the more progressive side of security. So if you've been focusing on primarily traditional techniques and the on-premise world, then perhaps this was a little a bit of an eye-opener and something where you go, wow, there's, you know there's something else out here and we can move things forward. For people who are, you know, more cloud native or more into that automation space, that data space this is really just sort of a head nodding going, yeap, I agree with this. This makes sense. This is where we all should be at this point. But as we know, you know there's a very long tail insecurity and insecurity organizations. So to have that message, you know repeated from a large stage like the keynote I think was very important. >> Well you know, we're going to be, theCUBE will be onsite and virtual with our virtual platform for Amazon web services reinforced coming up in Houston. So that's going to be interesting to see and you compare contrast like an AWS reinforce which is kind of the I there I think they had the first conference two years ago so it's kind of a new conference. And then you got the old kind of RSA conference. The question I have for you, is it a just a position of almost two conferences, right? You got the cloud native AWS, which is really about, oh shared responsibility, et cetera, et cetera a lot more action happening there. And you got this conference here seem come the old school legacy players. So I want to get your thoughts on that. And I want to get your take on just just the cryptographers panel, because, you know, as I'm not saying this as a state-of-the-art that the old guys saying get off my lawn, you know crypto, we're the crypto purists, they were trashing NFTs which as you know, is all the rage. So I, and Ron rivers who wrote new co-create RSA public key technology, which is isn't everything these days. Is this a sign of just get off my lawn? Or is it a sign of the times trashing the NFTs? What's your take? >> Yeah, well, so let's tackle the NFTs then we'll do the contrast between the two conferences. But I thought the NFT, you know Ron and Addie both had really interesting ways of explaining what an NFT was, because that's most of the discussion around the NFT is exactly what are we buying or what are we investing in? And so I think it was Addie who said, you know it was basically you have a tulip then you could have a picture of a tulip and then you could have something explaining the picture of the tulip and that's what an NFT is. So I think, you know, but at the same time he recognized the value of potential for artists. So I think there was some definitely, you know get off my lawn, but also sort of the the cryptographer panels is always sort of very pragmatic, very evidence-based as shown today when they actually were talking about a paper by Schnorr who debates, whether RSA or if he has new math that he thinks can debunk RSA or at least break the algorithm. And so they had a very logical and intelligent discussion about that. But the cryptographers panel in contrast to the rest of the keynote, it's not about the hype. It's not about what's going on in the industry. It's really is truly a cryptographers panel talking about the math, talking about the fundamental underpinnings of our security things as a big nerd, I'm a huge fan but a lot of people watch that and just kind of go, okay now's a great time to grab a snack and maybe move those legs a little bit. But if you're interested in the more technical deeper dive side, it's definitely worth taking in. >> Super fascinating and I think, you know, it's funny, they said it's not even a picture of a tulip it's s pointer to a picture of a tulip. Which is technically it. >> That was it. >> It's interesting how, again, this is all fun. NFTs are, I mean, you can't help, but get an Amber by decentralization. And that, that wave is coming. It's very interesting how you got a decentralization wave coming, yet a lot of people want to hang on to the centralized view. Okay, this is an architectural conflict. Is there a balance in your mind as a techie, we look at security, certainly as the perimeter is gone that's not even debate anymore, but as we have much more of a distributed computing environment, is there a need for some sensuality and or is it going to be all decentralized in your opinion? >> Yeah that's actually a really interesting question. It's a great set up to connect both of these points of sort of the cryptographers panel and that contrast between newer conferences and RSA because the cryptographers panel brought up the fact that you can't have resilient systems unless you're going for a distributed systems, unless you're spreading things out because otherwise you're creating a central point of failure, even if it's at hyper-scale which is not resilient by definition. So that was a very interesting and very valid point. I think the reality is it's a combination of the two is that we want resilient systems that are distributed that scale up independently of other factors. You know, so if you're sitting in the cloud you're going multi-region or maybe even multicloud, you know you want this distributed area just for that as Verner from AWS calls it, you know, the reduced blast radius. So if something breaks, not everything does but then the challenge from a security and from an operational point of view, is you need that central visibility. And I think this is where automation, where machine learning and really viewing security as a data problem, comes into play. If you have the systems distributed but you can provide visibility centrally which is something we can achieve with modern cloud technologies, you kind of hit that sweet spot. You've got resilient underpinnings in your systems but you as a team can actually understand what's going on because that was a, yet another point from Carmela and from Ross on the cryptographers panel when it comes to AI and machine learning, we're at the point where we don't really understand a lot of what's going on in the algorithm we kind of understand the output and the input. So again, it tied back to that resiliency. So I think that key is distributed systems are great but you need that central visibility and you only get there through viewing things as a data problem, heavy automation and modern tooling. >> Great great insight, Mark. Great, great call out there. And great point tied in there. Let me ask you a question on your take on the keynote in the conference in general as first day gets going. Do you see this evolving from the classic enterprise kind of buyer supplier relationship to much more of a CSO driven or CXO driven? I need to start building about my teams. I got to start hiring developers, not so much in operation side. I mean, I see InfoSec is these industries are not going away. People are still buying tools and stacking up the tool shed but there's been a big trend towards platforms and shifting left from a developer CICB pipeline standpoint which speaks to scale on the cloud native side and that distributed side. So is this conference hitting that Mark, or you still think there are more hardware and service systems people? What's the makeup? What's the take? >> I think we're definitely starting to a shift. So a great example of that is the CSA. The Cloud Security Alliance always runs a day one or day zero summit at RSA. And this year it was a CSO executive summit. And whereas in previous years it's been practitioners. So that is a good sign I think, that's a positive sign to start to look at a long ignored area of security, which is how do we train the next generation of security professionals. We've always taken this traditional view. We've, you know, people go through the standard you get your CISSP, you hold onto it forever. You know, you do your time on the firewall, you go through the standard thing but I think we really need to adjust and look for people with that automation capability, with development, with better business skills and definitely better communication skills, because really as we integrate as we leave our sort of protected little cave of security, we need to be better business people and better team players. >> Well Mark, I really appreciate you coming on here. A cube alumni and a trusted resource and verified, trusted contributor. Thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts on the RSA conference and breaking down the keynote analysis, the RSA conference. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Well, what we got you here to take a minute to plug what you're doing at Lacework, what you're excited about. What's going on over there? >> Sure, I appreciate that. So I just joined Lacework, I'm a weekend. So I'm drinking from the fire hose of knowledge and what I've found so far, fantastic platform, fantastic teams. It's got me wrapped up and excited again because we're approaching, you know security from the data point of view. We're really, we're born in the cloud, built for the cloud and we're trying to help teams really gather context. And the thing that appealed to me about that was that it's not just targeting the security team. It's targeting builders, it's targeting the business, it's giving them that visibility into what's going on so that they can make informed decision. And for me, that's really what security is all about. >> Well, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for sharing. >> Thank you. >> Okay CUBE coverage of RSA conference here with Lacework, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>As we've been reporting, the pandemic has called CSOs to really shift their spending priorities towards securing remote workers. Almost overnight. Zero trust has gone from buzzword to mandate. What's more as we wrote in our recent cybersecurity breaking analysis, not only Maseca pro secured increasingly distributed workforce, but now they have to be wary of software updates in the digital supply chain, including the very patches designed to protect them against cyber attacks. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Q conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome Derek manky. Who's chief security insights, and global threat alliances for four guard labs with fresh data from its global threat landscape report. Derek. Welcome. Great to see you. >>Thanks so much for, for the invitation to speak. It's always a pleasure. Multicover yeah, >>You're welcome. So first I wonder if you could explain for the audience, what is for guard labs and what's its relationship to fortunate? >>Right. So 40 grand labs is, is our global sockets, our global threat intelligence operation center. It never sleeps, and this is the beat. Um, you know, it's, it's been here since inception at port in it. So it's it's 20, 21 years in the making, since Fortinet was founded, uh, we have built this in-house, uh, so we don't go yum technology. We built everything from the ground up, including creating our own training programs for our, our analysts. We're following malware, following exploits. We even have a unique program that I created back in 2006 to ethical hacking program. And it's a zero-day research. So we try to meet the hackers, the bad guys to their game. And we of course do that responsibly to work with vendors, to close schools and create virtual patches. Um, and, but, you know, so it's, it's everything from, uh, customer protection first and foremost, to following, uh, the threat landscape and cyber. It's very important to understand who they are, what they're doing, who they're, uh, what they're targeting, what tools are they using? >>Yeah, that's great. Some serious DNA and skills in that group. And it's, it's critical because like you said, you can, you can minimize the spread of those malware very, very quickly. So what, what now you have, uh, the global threat landscape report. We're going to talk about that, but what exactly is that? >>Right? So this a global threat landscape report, it's a summary of, uh, all, all the data that we collect over a period of time. So we released this, that biannually two times a year. Um, cyber crime is changing very fast, as you can imagine. So, uh, while we do release security blogs, and, uh, what we call threat signals for breaking security events, we have a lot of other vehicles to release threat intelligence, but this threat landscape report is truly global. It looks at all of our global data. So we have over 5 million censorship worldwide in 40 guard labs, we're processing. I know it seems like a very large amount, but North of a hundred billion, uh, threat events in just one day. And we have to take the task of taking all of that data and put that onto scale for half a year and compile that into something, um, that is, uh, the, you know, that that's digestible. That's a, a very tough task, as you can imagine, so that, you know, we have to work with a huge technologies back to machine learning and artificial intelligence automation. And of course our analyst view to do that. >>Yeah. So this year, of course, there's like the every year is a battle, but this year was an extra battle. Can you explain what you saw in terms of the hacker dynamics over the past? Let's say 12 months. I know you do this twice a year, but what trends did you see evolving throughout the year and what have you seen with the way that attackers have exploited this expanded attack surface outside of corporate network? >>Yeah, it was quite interesting last year. It certainly was not normal. Like we all say, um, and that was no exception for cybersecurity. You know, if we look at cyber criminals and how they pivoted and adapted to the scrap threat landscape, cyber cyber criminals are always trying to take advantage of the weakest link of the chain. They're trying to always prey off here and ride waves of global trends and themes. We've seen this before in, uh, natural disasters as an example, you know, um, trying to do charity kind of scams and campaigns. And they're usually limited to a region where that incident happened and they usually live about two to three weeks, maybe a month at the most. And then they'll move on to the next to the next trip. That's braking, of course, because COVID is so global and dominant. Um, we saw attacks coming in from, uh, well over 40 different languages as an example, um, in regions all across the world that wasn't lasting two to three weeks and it lasted for the better part of a year. >>And of course, what they're, they're using this as a vehicle, right? Not preying on the fear. They're doing everything from initial lockdown, uh, fishing. We were as COVID-19 movers to, um, uh, lay off notices then to phase one, reopenings all the way up to fast forward to where we are today with vaccine rollover development. So there's always that new flavor and theme that they were rolling out, but because it was so successful for them, they were able to, they didn't have to innovate too much, right. They didn't have to expand and shifted to new to new trends. And themes are really developed on new rats families as an example, or a new sophisticated malware. That was the first half of the year and the second half of the year. Um, of course people started to experience COVID fatigue, right? Um, people started to become, we did a lot of education around this. >>People started to become more aware of this threat. And so, um, cyber criminals have started to, um, as we expected, started to become more sophisticated with their attacks. We saw an expansion in different ransomware families. We saw more of a shift of focus on, on, um, uh, you know, targeting the digital supply chain as an example. And so that, that was, that was really towards Q4. Uh, so it, it was a long lived lead year with success on the Google themes, um, targeting healthcare as an example, a lot of, um, a lot of the organizations that were, you know, really in a vulnerable position, I would say >>So, okay. I want to clarify something because my assumption was that they actually did really increase the sophistication, but it sounds like that was kind of a first half trends. Not only did they have to adapt and not have to, but they adapt it to these new vulnerabilities. Uh, my sense was that when you talk about the digital supply chain, that that was a fairly sophisticated attack. Am I, am I getting that right? That they did their sort of their, their, their increased sophistication in the first half, and then they sort of deployed it, did it, uh, w what actually happened there from your data? >>Well, if we look at, so generally there's two types of attacks that we look at, we look at the, uh, the premeditated sophisticated attacks that can have, um, you know, a lot of ramp up work on their end, a lot of time developing the, the, the, the weaponization phase. So developing, uh, the exploits of the sophisticated malware that they're gonna use for the campaign reconnaissance, understanding the targets, where platforms are developed, um, the blueprinting that DNA of, of, of the supply chain, those take time. Um, in fact years, even if we look back to, um, uh, 10 plus years ago with the Stuxnet attacks, as an example that was on, uh, nuclear centrifuges, um, and that, that had four different zero-day weapons at the time. That was very sophisticated, that took over two years to develop as an example. So some of these can take years of time to develop, but they're, they're, uh, very specific in terms of the targets are going to go after obviously the ROI from their end. >>Uh, the other type of attack that we see is as ongoing, um, these broad, wide sweeping attacks, and the reality for those ones is they don't unfortunately need to be too sophisticated. And those ones were the ones I was talking about that were really just playing on the cool, the deem, and they still do today with the vaccine road and development. Uh, but, but it's really because they're just playing on, on, um, you know, social engineering, um, using, uh, topical themes. And in fact, the weapons they're using these vulnerabilities are from our research data. And this was highlighted actually the first pop landscape before last year, uh, on average were two to three years old. So we're not talking about fresh vulnerabilities. You've got to patch right away. I mean, these are things that should have been patched two years ago, but they're still unfortunately having success with that. >>So you mentioned stuck next Stuxnet as the former sort of example, of one of the types of attacks that you see. And I always felt like that was a watershed moment. One of the most sophisticated, if not the most sophisticated attack that we'd ever seen. When I talk to CSOs about the recent government hack, they, they, they suggest I infer maybe they don't suggest it. I infer that it was of similar sophistication. It was maybe thousands of people working on this for years and years and years. Is that, is that accurate or not necessarily? >>Yeah, there's definitely a, there's definitely some comparisons there. Uh, you know, one of the largest things is, uh, both attacks used digital circuits certificate personation, so they're digitally signed. So, you know, of course that whole technology using cryptography is designed by design, uh, to say that, you know, this piece of software installed in your system, hassles certificate is coming from the source. It's legitimate. Of course, if that's compromised, that's all out of the window. And, um, yeah, this is what we saw in both attacks. In fact, you know, stocks in that they also had digitally designed, uh, certificates that were compromised. So when it gets to that level of students or, uh, sophistication, that means definitely that there's a target that there has been usually months of, of, uh, homework done by cyber criminals, for reconnaissance to be able to weaponize that. >>W w what did you see with respect to ransomware? What were the trends there over the past 12 months? I've heard some data and it's pretty scary, but what did you see? >>Yeah, so we're actually, ransomware is always the thorn in our side, and it's going to continue to be so, um, you know, in fact, uh, ransomware is not a new itself. It was actually first created in 1989, and they demanded ransom payments through snail mail. This was to appeal a box, obviously that, that, that didn't take off. Wasn't a successful on the internet was porn at the time. But if you look at it now, of course, over the last 10 years, really, that's where it ran. The ransomware model has been, uh, you know, lucrative, right? I mean, it's been, um, using, uh, by force encrypting data on systems, so that users had to, if they were forced to pay the ransom because they wanted access to their data back data was the target currency for ransomware. That's shifted now. And that's actually been a big pivotal over the last year or so, because again, before it was this let's cast a wide net, in fact, as many people as we can random, um, and try to see if we can hold some of their data for ransom. >>Some people that data may be valuable, it may not be valuable. Um, and that model still exists. Uh, and we see that, but really the big shift that we saw last year and the threat landscape before it was a shift to targeted rats. So again, the sophistication is starting to rise because they're not just going out to random data. They're going out to data that they know is valuable to large organizations, and they're taking that a step further now. So there's various ransomware families. We saw that have now reverted to extortion and blackmail, right? So they're taking that data, encrypting it and saying, unless you pay us as large sum of money, we're going to release this to the public or sell it to a buyer on the dark web. And of course you can imagine the amount of, um, you know, damages that can happen from that. The other thing we're seeing is, is a target of going to revenue services, right? So if they can cripple networks, it's essentially a denial of service. They know that the company is going to be bleeding, you know, X, millions of dollars a day, so they can demand Y million dollars of ransom payments, and that's effectively what's happening. So it's, again, becoming more targeted, uh, and more sophisticated. And unfortunately the ransom is going up. >>So they go to where the money is. And of course your job is to, it's a lower the ROI for them, a constant challenge. Um, we talked about some of the attack vectors, uh, that you saw this year that, that cyber criminals are targeting. I wonder if, if, you know, given the work from home, if things like IOT devices and cameras and, you know, thermostats, uh, with 75% of the work force at home, is this infrastructure more vulnerable? I guess, of course it is. But what did you see there in terms of attacks on those devices? >>Yeah, so, uh, um, uh, you know, unfortunately the attack surface as we call it, uh, so the amount of target points is expanding. It's not shifting, it's expanding. We still see, um, I saw, I mentioned earlier vulnerabilities from two years ago that are being used in some cases, you know, over the holidays where e-commerce means we saw e-commerce heavily under attack in e-commerce has spikes since last summer, right. It's been a huge amount of traffic increase everybody's shopping from home. And, uh, those vulnerabilities going after a shopping cart, plugins, as an example, are five to six years old. So we still have this theme of old vulnerabilities are still new in a sense being attacked, but we're also now seeing this complication of, yeah, as you said, IOT, uh, B roll out everywhere, the really quick shift to work from home. Uh, we really have to treat this as if you guys, as the, uh, distributed branch model for enterprise, right. >>And it's really now the secure branch. How do we take, um, um, you know, any of these devices on, on those networks and secure them, uh, because yeah, if you look at the, what we highlighted in our landscape report and the top 10 attacks that we're seeing, so hacking attacks hacking in tabs, this is who our IPS triggers. You know, we're seeing attempts to go after IOT devices. Uh, right now they're mostly, uh, favoring, uh, well in terms of targets, um, consumer grade routers. Uh, but they're also looking at, um, uh, DVR devices as an example for, uh, you know, home entertainment systems, uh, network attached storage as well, and IP security cameras, um, some of the newer devices, uh, what, the quote unquote smart devices that are now on, you know, virtual assistance and home networks. Uh, we actually released a predictions piece at the end of last year as well. So this is what we call the new intelligent edge. And that's what I think is we're really going to see this year in terms of what's ahead. Um, cause we always have to look ahead and prepare for that. But yeah, right now, unfortunately, the story is, all of this is still happening. IOT is being targeted. Of course they're being targeted because they're easy targets. Um, it's like for cybercriminals, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. There's not just one, but there's multiple vulnerabilities, security holes associated with these devices, easy entry points into networks. >>I mean, it's, um, I mean, attackers they're, they're highly capable. They're organized, they're well-funded they move fast, they're they're agile, uh, and they follow the money. As we were saying, uh, you, you mentioned, you know, co vaccines and, you know, big pharma healthcare, uh, where >>Did you see advanced, persistent >>Threat groups really targeting? Were there any patterns that emerged in terms of other industry types or organizations being targeted? >>Yeah. So just to be clear again, when we talk about AP teams, um, uh, advanced, specific correct group, the groups themselves they're targeting, these are usually the more sophisticated groups, of course. So going back to that theme, these are usually the target, the, um, the premeditated targeted attacks usually points to nation state. Um, sometimes of course there's overlap. They can be affiliated with cyber crime, cyber crime, uh, uh, groups are typically, um, looking at some other targets for ROI, uh, bio there's there's a blend, right? So as an example, if we're looking at the, uh, apt groups I had last year, absolutely. Number one I would say would be healthcare. Healthcare was one of those, and it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, very unfortunate, but obviously with the shift that was happening at a pop up medical facilities, there's a big, a rush to change networks, uh, for a good cause of course, but with that game, um, you know, uh, security holes and concerns the targets and, and that's what we saw IPT groups targeting was going after those and, and ransomware and the cyber crime shrine followed as well. Right? Because if you can follow, uh, those critical networks and crippled them on from cybercriminals point of view, you can, you can expect them to pay the ransom because they think that they need to buy in order to, um, get those systems back online. Uh, in fact, last year or two, unfortunately we saw the first, um, uh, death that was caused because of a denial of service attack in healthcare, right. Facilities were weren't available because of the cyber attack. Patients had to be diverted and didn't make it on the way. >>All right. Jericho, sufficiently bummed out. So maybe in the time remaining, we can talk about remediation strategies. You know, we know there's no silver bullet in security. Uh, but what approaches are you recommending for organizations? How are you consulting with folks? >>Sure. Yeah. So a couple of things, um, good news is there's a lot that we can do about this, right? And, um, and, and basic measures go a long way. So a couple of things just to get out of the way I call it housekeeping, cyber hygiene, but it's always worth reminding. So when we talk about keeping security patches up to date, we always have to talk about that because that is reality as et cetera, these, these vulnerabilities that are still being successful are five to six years old in some cases, the majority two years old. Um, so being able to do that, manage that from an organization's point of view, really treat the new work from home. I don't like to call it a work from home. So the reality is it's work from anywhere a lot of the times for some people. So really treat that as, as the, um, as a secure branch, uh, methodology, doing things like segmentations on network, secure wifi access, multi-factor authentication is a huge muscle, right? >>So using multi-factor authentication because passwords are dead, um, using things like, uh, XDR. So Xers is a combination of detection and response for end points. This is a mass centralized management thing, right? So, uh, endpoint detection and response, as an example, those are all, uh, you know, good security things. So of course having security inspection, that that's what we do. So good threat intelligence baked into your security solution. That's supported by labs angles. So, uh, that's, uh, you know, uh, antivirus, intrusion prevention, web filtering, sandbox, and so forth, but then it gets that that's the security stack beyond that it gets into the end user, right? Everybody has a responsibility. This is that supply chain. We talked about. The supply chain is, is, is a target for attackers attackers have their own supply chain as well. And we're also part of that supply chain, right? The end users where we're constantly fished for social engineering. So using phishing campaigns against employees to better do training and awareness is always recommended to, um, so that's what we can do, obviously that's, what's recommended to secure, uh, via the endpoints in the secure branch there's things we're also doing in the industry, um, to fight back against that with prime as well. >>Well, I, I want to actually talk about that and talk about ecosystems and collaboration, because while you have competitors, you all want the same thing. You, SecOps teams are like superheroes in my book. I mean, they're trying to save the world from the bad guys. And I remember I was talking to Robert Gates on the cube a couple of years ago, a former defense secretary. And I said, yeah, but don't, we have like the best security people and can't we go on the offensive and weaponize that ourselves. Of course, there's examples of that. Us. Government's pretty good at it, even though they won't admit it. But his answer to me was, yeah, we gotta be careful because we have a lot more to lose than many countries. So I thought that was pretty interesting, but how do you collaborate with whether it's the U S government or other governments or other other competitors even, or your ecosystem? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah. Th th this is what, this is what makes me tick. I love working with industry. I've actually built programs for 15 years of collaboration in the industry. Um, so, you know, we, we need, I always say we can't win this war alone. You actually hit on this point earlier, you talked about following and trying to disrupt the ROI of cybercriminals. Absolutely. That is our target, right. We're always looking at how we can disrupt their business model. Uh, and, and in order, there's obviously a lot of different ways to do that, right? So a couple of things we do is resiliency. That's what we just talked about increasing the security stack so that they go knocking on someone else's door. But beyond that, uh, it comes down to private, private sector collaborations. So, uh, we, we, uh, co-founder of the cyber threat Alliance in 2014 as an example, this was our fierce competitors coming in to work with us to share intelligence, because like you said, um, competitors in the space, but we need to work together to do the better fight. >>And so this is a Venn diagram. What's compared notes, let's team up, uh, when there's a breaking attack and make sure that we have the intelligence so that we can still remain competitive on the technology stack to gradation the solutions themselves. Uh, but let's, let's level the playing field here because cybercriminals moved out, uh, you know, um, uh, that, that there's no borders and they move with great agility. So, uh, that's one thing we do in the private private sector. Uh, there's also, uh, public private sector relationships, right? So we're working with Interpol as an example, Interfor project gateway, and that's when we find attribution. So it's not just the, what are these people doing like infrastructure, but who, who are they, where are they operating? What, what events tools are they creating? We've actually worked on cases that are led down to, um, uh, warrants and arrests, you know, and in some cases, one case with a $60 million business email compromise fraud scam, the great news is if you look at the industry as a whole, uh, over the last three to four months has been for take downs, a motet net Walker, uh, um, there's also IE Gregor, uh, recently as well too. >>And, and Ian Gregor they're actually going in and arresting the affiliates. So not just the CEO or the King, kind of these organizations, but the people who are distributing the ransomware themselves. And that was a unprecedented step, really important. So you really start to paint a picture of this, again, supply chain, this ecosystem of cyber criminals and how we can hit them, where it hurts on all angles. I've most recently, um, I've been heavily involved with the world economic forum. Uh, so I'm, co-author of a report from last year of the partnership on cyber crime. And, uh, this is really not just the pro uh, private, private sector, but the private and public sector working together. We know a lot about cybercriminals. We can't arrest them. Uh, we can't take servers offline from the data centers, but working together, we can have that whole, you know, that holistic effect. >>Great. Thank you for that, Derek. What if people want, want to go deeper? Uh, I know you guys mentioned that you do blogs, but are there other resources that, that they can tap? Yeah, absolutely. So, >>Uh, everything you can see is on our threat research blog on, uh, so 40 net blog, it's under expired research. We also put out, uh, playbooks, w we're doing blah, this is more for the, um, the heroes as he called them the security operation centers. Uh, we're doing playbooks on the aggressors. And so this is a playbook on the offense, on the offense. What are they up to? How are they doing that? That's on 40 guard.com. Uh, we also release, uh, threat signals there. So, um, we typically release, uh, about 50 of those a year, and those are all, um, our, our insights and views into specific attacks that are now >>Well, Derek Mackie, thanks so much for joining us today. And thanks for the work that you and your teams do. Very important. >>Thanks. It's yeah, it's a pleasure. And, uh, rest assured we will still be there 24 seven, three 65. >>Good to know. Good to know. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>As we've been reporting, the pandemic has called CSOs to really shift their spending priorities towards securing remote workers. Almost overnight. Zero trust has gone from buzzword to mandate. What's more as we wrote in our recent cybersecurity breaking analysis, not only Maseca pro secured increasingly distributed workforce, but now they have to be wary of software updates in the digital supply chain, including the very patches designed to protect them against cyber attacks. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Q conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome Derek manky. Who's chief security insights, and global threat alliances for four guard labs with fresh data from its global threat landscape report. Derek. Welcome. Great to see you. >>Thanks so much for, for the invitation to speak. It's always a pleasure. Multicover yeah, >>You're welcome. So first I wonder if you could explain for the audience, what is for guard labs and what's its relationship to fortunate? >>Right. So 40 grand labs is, is our global sockets, our global threat intelligence operation center. It never sleeps, and this is the beat. Um, you know, it's, it's been here since inception at port in it. So it's it's 20, 21 years in the making, since Fortinet was founded, uh, we have built this in-house, uh, so we don't go yum technology. We built everything from the ground up, including creating our own training programs for our, our analysts. We're following malware, following exploits. We even have a unique program that I created back in 2006 to ethical hacking program. And it's a zero-day research. So we try to meet the hackers, the bad guys to their game. And we of course do that responsibly to work with vendors, to close schools and create virtual patches. Um, and, but, you know, so it's, it's everything from, uh, customer protection first and foremost, to following, uh, the threat landscape and cyber. It's very important to understand who they are, what they're doing, who they're, uh, what they're targeting, what tools are they using? >>Yeah, that's great. Some serious DNA and skills in that group. And it's, it's critical because like you said, you can, you can minimize the spread of those malware very, very quickly. So what, what now you have, uh, the global threat landscape report. We're going to talk about that, but what exactly is that? >>Right? So this a global threat landscape report, it's a summary of, uh, all, all the data that we collect over a period of time. So we released this, that biannually two times a year. Um, cyber crime is changing very fast, as you can imagine. So, uh, while we do release security blogs, and, uh, what we call threat signals for breaking security events, we have a lot of other vehicles to release threat intelligence, but this threat landscape report is truly global. It looks at all of our global data. So we have over 5 million censorship worldwide in 40 guard labs, we're processing. I know it seems like a very large amount, but North of a hundred billion, uh, threat events in just one day. And we have to take the task of taking all of that data and put that onto scale for half a year and compile that into something, um, that is, uh, the, you know, that that's digestible. That's a, a very tough task, as you can imagine, so that, you know, we have to work with a huge technologies back to machine learning and artificial intelligence automation. And of course our analyst view to do that. >>Yeah. So this year, of course, there's like the every year is a battle, but this year was an extra battle. Can you explain what you saw in terms of the hacker dynamics over the past? Let's say 12 months. I know you do this twice a year, but what trends did you see evolving throughout the year and what have you seen with the way that attackers have exploited this expanded attack surface outside of corporate network? >>Yeah, it was quite interesting last year. It certainly was not normal. Like we all say, um, and that was no exception for cybersecurity. You know, if we look at cyber criminals and how they pivoted and adapted to the scrap threat landscape, cyber cyber criminals are always trying to take advantage of the weakest link of the chain. They're trying to always prey off here and ride waves of global trends and themes. We've seen this before in, uh, natural disasters as an example, you know, um, trying to do charity kind of scams and campaigns. And they're usually limited to a region where that incident happened and they usually live about two to three weeks, maybe a month at the most. And then they'll move on to the next to the next trip. That's braking, of course, because COVID is so global and dominant. Um, we saw attacks coming in from, uh, well over 40 different languages as an example, um, in regions all across the world that wasn't lasting two to three weeks and it lasted for the better part of a year. >>And of course, what they're, they're using this as a vehicle, right? Not preying on the fear. They're doing everything from initial lockdown, uh, fishing. We were as COVID-19 movers to, um, uh, lay off notices then to phase one, reopenings all the way up to fast forward to where we are today with vaccine rollover development. So there's always that new flavor and theme that they were rolling out, but because it was so successful for them, they were able to, they didn't have to innovate too much, right. They didn't have to expand and shifted to new to new trends. And themes are really developed on new rats families as an example, or a new sophisticated malware. That was the first half of the year and the second half of the year. Um, of course people started to experience COVID fatigue, right? Um, people started to become, we did a lot of education around this. >>People started to become more aware of this threat. And so, um, cyber criminals have started to, um, as we expected, started to become more sophisticated with their attacks. We saw an expansion in different ransomware families. We saw more of a shift of focus on, on, um, uh, you know, targeting the digital supply chain as an example. And so that, that was, that was really towards Q4. Uh, so it, it was a long lived lead year with success on the Google themes, um, targeting healthcare as an example, a lot of, um, a lot of the organizations that were, you know, really in a vulnerable position, I would say >>So, okay. I want to clarify something because my assumption was that they actually did really increase the sophistication, but it sounds like that was kind of a first half trends. Not only did they have to adapt and not have to, but they adapt it to these new vulnerabilities. Uh, my sense was that when you talk about the digital supply chain, that that was a fairly sophisticated attack. Am I, am I getting that right? That they did their sort of their, their, their increased sophistication in the first half, and then they sort of deployed it, did it, uh, w what actually happened there from your data? >>Well, if we look at, so generally there's two types of attacks that we look at, we look at the, uh, the premeditated sophisticated attacks that can have, um, you know, a lot of ramp up work on their end, a lot of time developing the, the, the, the weaponization phase. So developing, uh, the exploits of the sophisticated malware that they're gonna use for the campaign reconnaissance, understanding the targets, where platforms are developed, um, the blueprinting that DNA of, of, of the supply chain, those take time. Um, in fact years, even if we look back to, um, uh, 10 plus years ago with the Stuxnet attacks, as an example that was on, uh, nuclear centrifuges, um, and that, that had four different zero-day weapons at the time. That was very sophisticated, that took over two years to develop as an example. So some of these can take years of time to develop, but they're, they're, uh, very specific in terms of the targets are going to go after obviously the ROI from their end. >>Uh, the other type of attack that we see is as ongoing, um, these broad, wide sweeping attacks, and the reality for those ones is they don't unfortunately need to be too sophisticated. And those ones were the ones I was talking about that were really just playing on the cool, the deem, and they still do today with the vaccine road and development. Uh, but, but it's really because they're just playing on, on, um, you know, social engineering, um, using, uh, topical themes. And in fact, the weapons they're using these vulnerabilities are from our research data. And this was highlighted actually the first pop landscape before last year, uh, on average were two to three years old. So we're not talking about fresh vulnerabilities. You've got to patch right away. I mean, these are things that should have been patched two years ago, but they're still unfortunately having success with that. >>So you mentioned stuck next Stuxnet as the former sort of example, of one of the types of attacks that you see. And I always felt like that was a watershed moment. One of the most sophisticated, if not the most sophisticated attack that we'd ever seen. When I talk to CSOs about the recent government hack, they, they, they suggest I infer maybe they don't suggest it. I infer that it was of similar sophistication. It was maybe thousands of people working on this for years and years and years. Is that, is that accurate or not necessarily? >>Yeah, there's definitely a, there's definitely some comparisons there. Uh, you know, one of the largest things is, uh, both attacks used digital circuits certificate personation, so they're digitally signed. So, you know, of course that whole technology using cryptography is designed by design, uh, to say that, you know, this piece of software installed in your system, hassles certificate is coming from the source. It's legitimate. Of course, if that's compromised, that's all out of the window. And, um, yeah, this is what we saw in both attacks. In fact, you know, stocks in that they also had digitally designed, uh, certificates that were compromised. So when it gets to that level of students or, uh, sophistication, that means definitely that there's a target that there has been usually months of, of, uh, homework done by cyber criminals, for reconnaissance to be able to weaponize that. >>W w what did you see with respect to ransomware? What were the trends there over the past 12 months? I've heard some data and it's pretty scary, but what did you see? >>Yeah, so we're actually, ransomware is always the thorn in our side, and it's going to continue to be so, um, you know, in fact, uh, ransomware is not a new itself. It was actually first created in 1989, and they demanded ransom payments through snail mail. This was to appeal a box, obviously that, that, that didn't take off. Wasn't a successful on the internet was porn at the time. But if you look at it now, of course, over the last 10 years, really, that's where it ran. The ransomware model has been, uh, you know, lucrative, right? I mean, it's been, um, using, uh, by force encrypting data on systems, so that users had to, if they were forced to pay the ransom because they wanted access to their data back data was the target currency for ransomware. That's shifted now. And that's actually been a big pivotal over the last year or so, because again, before it was this let's cast a wide net, in fact, as many people as we can random, um, and try to see if we can hold some of their data for ransom. >>Some people that data may be valuable, it may not be valuable. Um, and that model still exists. Uh, and we see that, but really the big shift that we saw last year and the threat landscape before it was a shift to targeted rats. So again, the sophistication is starting to rise because they're not just going out to random data. They're going out to data that they know is valuable to large organizations, and they're taking that a step further now. So there's various ransomware families. We saw that have now reverted to extortion and blackmail, right? So they're taking that data, encrypting it and saying, unless you pay us as large sum of money, we're going to release this to the public or sell it to a buyer on the dark web. And of course you can imagine the amount of, um, you know, damages that can happen from that. The other thing we're seeing is, is a target of going to revenue services, right? So if they can cripple networks, it's essentially a denial of service. They know that the company is going to be bleeding, you know, X, millions of dollars a day, so they can demand Y million dollars of ransom payments, and that's effectively what's happening. So it's, again, becoming more targeted, uh, and more sophisticated. And unfortunately the ransom is going up. >>So they go to where the money is. And of course your job is to, it's a lower the ROI for them, a constant challenge. Um, we talked about some of the attack vectors, uh, that you saw this year that, that cyber criminals are targeting. I wonder if, if, you know, given the work from home, if things like IOT devices and cameras and, you know, thermostats, uh, with 75% of the work force at home, is this infrastructure more vulnerable? I guess, of course it is. But what did you see there in terms of attacks on those devices? >>Yeah, so, uh, um, uh, you know, unfortunately the attack surface as we call it, uh, so the amount of target points is expanding. It's not shifting, it's expanding. We still see, um, I saw, I mentioned earlier vulnerabilities from two years ago that are being used in some cases, you know, over the holidays where e-commerce means we saw e-commerce heavily under attack in e-commerce has spikes since last summer, right. It's been a huge amount of traffic increase everybody's shopping from home. And, uh, those vulnerabilities going after a shopping cart, plugins, as an example, are five to six years old. So we still have this theme of old vulnerabilities are still new in a sense being attacked, but we're also now seeing this complication of, yeah, as you said, IOT, uh, B roll out everywhere, the really quick shift to work from home. Uh, we really have to treat this as if you guys, as the, uh, distributed branch model for enterprise, right. >>And it's really now the secure branch. How do we take, um, um, you know, any of these devices on, on those networks and secure them, uh, because yeah, if you look at the, what we highlighted in our landscape report and the top 10 attacks that we're seeing, so hacking attacks hacking in tabs, this is who our IPS triggers. You know, we're seeing attempts to go after IOT devices. Uh, right now they're mostly, uh, favoring, uh, well in terms of targets, um, consumer grade routers. Uh, but they're also looking at, um, uh, DVR devices as an example for, uh, you know, home entertainment systems, uh, network attached storage as well, and IP security cameras, um, some of the newer devices, uh, what, the quote unquote smart devices that are now on, you know, virtual assistance and home networks. Uh, we actually released a predictions piece at the end of last year as well. So this is what we call the new intelligent edge. And that's what I think is we're really going to see this year in terms of what's ahead. Um, cause we always have to look ahead and prepare for that. But yeah, right now, unfortunately, the story is, all of this is still happening. IOT is being targeted. Of course they're being targeted because they're easy targets. Um, it's like for cybercriminals, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. There's not just one, but there's multiple vulnerabilities, security holes associated with these devices, easy entry points into networks. >>I mean, it's, um, I mean, attackers they're, they're highly capable. They're organized, they're well-funded they move fast, they're they're agile, uh, and they follow the money. As we were saying, uh, you, you mentioned, you know, co vaccines and, you know, big pharma healthcare, uh, where >>Did you see advanced, persistent >>Threat groups really targeting? Were there any patterns that emerged in terms of other industry types or organizations being targeted? >>Yeah. So just to be clear again, when we talk about AP teams, um, uh, advanced, specific correct group, the groups themselves they're targeting, these are usually the more sophisticated groups, of course. So going back to that theme, these are usually the target, the, um, the premeditated targeted attacks usually points to nation state. Um, sometimes of course there's overlap. They can be affiliated with cyber crime, cyber crime, uh, uh, groups are typically, um, looking at some other targets for ROI, uh, bio there's there's a blend, right? So as an example, if we're looking at the, uh, apt groups I had last year, absolutely. Number one I would say would be healthcare. Healthcare was one of those, and it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, very unfortunate, but obviously with the shift that was happening at a pop up medical facilities, there's a big, a rush to change networks, uh, for a good cause of course, but with that game, um, you know, uh, security holes and concerns the targets and, and that's what we saw IPT groups targeting was going after those and, and ransomware and the cyber crime shrine followed as well. Right? Because if you can follow, uh, those critical networks and crippled them on from cybercriminals point of view, you can, you can expect them to pay the ransom because they think that they need to buy in order to, um, get those systems back online. Uh, in fact, last year or two, unfortunately we saw the first, um, uh, death that was caused because of a denial of service attack in healthcare, right. Facilities were weren't available because of the cyber attack. Patients had to be diverted and didn't make it on the way. >>All right. Jericho, sufficiently bummed out. So maybe in the time remaining, we can talk about remediation strategies. You know, we know there's no silver bullet in security. Uh, but what approaches are you recommending for organizations? How are you consulting with folks? >>Sure. Yeah. So a couple of things, um, good news is there's a lot that we can do about this, right? And, um, and, and basic measures go a long way. So a couple of things just to get out of the way I call it housekeeping, cyber hygiene, but it's always worth reminding. So when we talk about keeping security patches up to date, we always have to talk about that because that is reality as et cetera, these, these vulnerabilities that are still being successful are five to six years old in some cases, the majority two years old. Um, so being able to do that, manage that from an organization's point of view, really treat the new work from home. I don't like to call it a work from home. So the reality is it's work from anywhere a lot of the times for some people. So really treat that as, as the, um, as a secure branch, uh, methodology, doing things like segmentations on network, secure wifi access, multi-factor authentication is a huge muscle, right? >>So using multi-factor authentication because passwords are dead, um, using things like, uh, XDR. So Xers is a combination of detection and response for end points. This is a mass centralized management thing, right? So, uh, endpoint detection and response, as an example, those are all, uh, you know, good security things. So of course having security inspection, that that's what we do. So good threat intelligence baked into your security solution. That's supported by labs angles. So, uh, that's, uh, you know, uh, antivirus, intrusion prevention, web filtering, sandbox, and so forth, but then it gets that that's the security stack beyond that it gets into the end user, right? Everybody has a responsibility. This is that supply chain. We talked about. The supply chain is, is, is a target for attackers attackers have their own supply chain as well. And we're also part of that supply chain, right? The end users where we're constantly fished for social engineering. So using phishing campaigns against employees to better do training and awareness is always recommended to, um, so that's what we can do, obviously that's, what's recommended to secure, uh, via the endpoints in the secure branch there's things we're also doing in the industry, um, to fight back against that with prime as well. >>Well, I, I want to actually talk about that and talk about ecosystems and collaboration, because while you have competitors, you all want the same thing. You, SecOps teams are like superheroes in my book. I mean, they're trying to save the world from the bad guys. And I remember I was talking to Robert Gates on the cube a couple of years ago, a former defense secretary. And I said, yeah, but don't, we have like the best security people and can't we go on the offensive and weaponize that ourselves. Of course, there's examples of that. Us. Government's pretty good at it, even though they won't admit it. But his answer to me was, yeah, we gotta be careful because we have a lot more to lose than many countries. So I thought that was pretty interesting, but how do you collaborate with whether it's the U S government or other governments or other other competitors even, or your ecosystem? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah. Th th this is what, this is what makes me tick. I love working with industry. I've actually built programs for 15 years of collaboration in the industry. Um, so, you know, we, we need, I always say we can't win this war alone. You actually hit on this point earlier, you talked about following and trying to disrupt the ROI of cybercriminals. Absolutely. That is our target, right. We're always looking at how we can disrupt their business model. Uh, and, and in order, there's obviously a lot of different ways to do that, right? So a couple of things we do is resiliency. That's what we just talked about increasing the security stack so that they go knocking on someone else's door. But beyond that, uh, it comes down to private, private sector collaborations. So, uh, we, we, uh, co-founder of the cyber threat Alliance in 2014 as an example, this was our fierce competitors coming in to work with us to share intelligence, because like you said, um, competitors in the space, but we need to work together to do the better fight. >>And so this is a Venn diagram. What's compared notes, let's team up, uh, when there's a breaking attack and make sure that we have the intelligence so that we can still remain competitive on the technology stack to gradation the solutions themselves. Uh, but let's, let's level the playing field here because cybercriminals moved out, uh, you know, um, uh, that, that there's no borders and they move with great agility. So, uh, that's one thing we do in the private private sector. Uh, there's also, uh, public private sector relationships, right? So we're working with Interpol as an example, Interfor project gateway, and that's when we find attribution. So it's not just the, what are these people doing like infrastructure, but who, who are they, where are they operating? What, what events tools are they creating? We've actually worked on cases that are led down to, um, uh, warrants and arrests, you know, and in some cases, one case with a $60 million business email compromise fraud scam, the great news is if you look at the industry as a whole, uh, over the last three to four months has been for take downs, a motet net Walker, uh, um, there's also IE Gregor, uh, recently as well too. >>And, and Ian Gregor they're actually going in and arresting the affiliates. So not just the CEO or the King, kind of these organizations, but the people who are distributing the ransomware themselves. And that was a unprecedented step, really important. So you really start to paint a picture of this, again, supply chain, this ecosystem of cyber criminals and how we can hit them, where it hurts on all angles. I've most recently, um, I've been heavily involved with the world economic forum. Uh, so I'm, co-author of a report from last year of the partnership on cyber crime. And, uh, this is really not just the pro uh, private, private sector, but the private and public sector working together. We know a lot about cybercriminals. We can't arrest them. Uh, we can't take servers offline from the data centers, but working together, we can have that whole, you know, that holistic effect. >>Great. Thank you for that, Derek. What if people want, want to go deeper? Uh, I know you guys mentioned that you do blogs, but are there other resources that, that they can tap? Yeah, absolutely. So, >>Uh, everything you can see is on our threat research blog on, uh, so 40 net blog, it's under expired research. We also put out, uh, playbooks, w we're doing blah, this is more for the, um, the heroes as he called them the security operation centers. Uh, we're doing playbooks on the aggressors. And so this is a playbook on the offense, on the offense. What are they up to? How are they doing that? That's on 40 guard.com. Uh, we also release, uh, threat signals there. So, um, we typically release, uh, about 50 of those a year, and those are all, um, our, our insights and views into specific attacks that are now >>Well, Derek Mackie, thanks so much for joining us today. And thanks for the work that you and your teams do. Very important. >>Thanks. It's yeah, it's a pleasure. And, uh, rest assured we will still be there 24 seven, three 65. >>Good to know. Good to know. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome back to the Cube on Cloud. We're talking about developers. And while so many people remember the mean from 2010 of Steve Balmer jumping around on stage development developers and developers, uh, many people know what really important is really important about developers. They probably read the 2013 book called The New King Makers by Stephen O. Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Stevens, who is an industry analyst with Red Monk who was co founded by the aforementioned Stephen O. Grady. Rachel, Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. >>Well, I've had the opportunity, Thio read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've got to talk events back when we used to do those in people. And >>I'm so >>glad that you get to come on the program especially. You were the ones I reached out. When we have this developer track, um, if you could just give our audience a little bit about your background. You know, that developer cred that you have Because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies. But, you know, I'm an infrastructure guy by training I've been learning about, you know, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years. But I'm not myself much of developer. I've touched a thing or two in the years. >>Yeah. So happy to be here. Red Monk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then, kind of as the company, The founder, Stephen James, notice that the decision making that developers was really a driver for what was actually ending up in the Enterprise. And as even more true, as cloud came onto, the scene is open source exploded, and I think it's become a lot more of a common view now. But in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion, but I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. My work is an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand, bottoms up technology, adoption trends, so that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? So, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of Red Monk in 30 seconds. >>Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers For the longest time. I just said there was this huge gap you talk about. Bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general I t. And the business sides of the house were like, I don't know, We don't know what those people in the corner we're doing, you know, it's important and things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we? In your estimation, you know, our developers do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we have for this is whether the Enterprise Developer is its enterprise development oxymoron. In 2020 and 2021 >>I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year. In the last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job bring in tools, regardless of whether they maybe have that official approval through the right channels because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running. We are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and thio shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building APS is growing. And so, as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, um, the tools that they need to do those, um, tasks to get these APS built is that the decision making us fall into them? This is what I need. This is what needs to come in, and so we're seeing. Basically, the tools that enterprise is air using are the tools that developers want to be using, and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >>Now I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers were being asked to do Mawr and Mawr. We've seen these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive. And number one we found it necessarily. It wasn't necessarily cheaper. And number two, I couldn't make changes, and I didn't understand what was happening. So when when I talked to Enterprises today, absolutely. I need to have skills that's internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast, and therefore I need skills that I need people that can build what they have. What what do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? Uh, you know, we've talked so many times over the years is to you know, there's there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers way. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have and where things trending? >>Yeah, it's It's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there is just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice and decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things? And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days and that you are making a lot of decisions and you are wiring a lot of things together and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. E think. One of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like Full stack developer really carried a lot of panache, maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away. Just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be ableto spanned this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we're asking people to dio. So we're seeing this explosion of choice, which is meaning that there is a little bit more focused and where developers are trying to actually figure out what is my niche. What is it that I'm supposed to focus on. And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >>Rachel is such a great point there. We've actually seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CFCF landscape and look at everything out there or goto any of your public cloud providers, there's no way that anybody even working for those companies no good portion of the tools that are out there so nobody could be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint, you know, there is the discussion of, you know what do I shift? Left What? You know, Can I just say, Okay, this piece of it, it could be a manage service. I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house. What is it that's important. And obviously, you know, a zoo analyst. We know it varies greatly across companies, but you know what? What are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have skill set and the tools in house that they should understand. And what can they push off to their platform of choice? >>Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really pressing because one of the trends that we're watching closely, it's just this rise of manage services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like, what an I team. That's they have, like the Nicholas Carr. I t doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all the way. And then we realized, Oh, we've got to bring that all back. Um, but we also realize that we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and wiring together, your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a manage service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite APS where we're going to say, Okay, I'm gonna pull in back end AP ice from a whole bunch of tools like twilio or stripe or all zero where algo Leah, all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app. And I can have this great user, um, interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself. But I am responsible for wiring at all together. So I think it's that wire together set of interest that is happening for developers as the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the manage services being important. Um played an important role in how absent composed, and it's the composition of that APs that is happening internally. >>What one of the one of the regular research items that I see a red monk is you know what languages you know. Where are the trends going? There's been relative stability, but then something's changed. You know, I look at the tools that you mentioned Full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago, and he's like like like terror form is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months, Andi. I kind of laugh because it's like, OK, I managed. I measure a lot of the technology that I used in the decades. Um, not that await. This came out six months ago and it's kind of mature. And of course, you know, C I C d. Come on. If it's six weeks old, it's probably gone through a lot of generations. So what do you see? Do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the You know what the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do >>we need to >>be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >>Yeah. So when when you spoke about languages, we dio a semi annual review of language usage as a sign on get hub and in discussion as seen on stack overflow, which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world. But those air data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open eso just before anyone writes me angry letters that that's not the way that we should be doing it, Um, but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used, and there's some movement at the bottom. But the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like, um, we're seeing Scotland that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a jvm based language and having that support from Google. Or we're seeing typescript where it can piggyback off of the breath of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where were combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in, but also, language on its own is probably pretty stable. So, like as you start to make language choices as a developer, that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from, that may be a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict. But language trends are a little bit more stable over >>time, changing over time. You know, Boy, I I got to dig into, you know, relatively Recently I went down like the jam stack. Uh, ecosystem. I've been digging into a serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people. I talked to him. They're like, I don't even need to be a code. Or I could be a marketing person. And I can get things done when I talked to some developers there like a citizen developers. They're not developers. Come on, you know, I really need to be able to do this, so I'll give you your choices, toe. You know, serverless and some of these trends to kind of ext fan. You know who can you know? Code and development. >>Yeah. So for both translate jam stack and serve Ellis, One of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of APS that they approach will fit for will grow as the tool develops. And you add more functionality over time and all of these platforms expand the capability, but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said, we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of APS can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these APs, because I e. I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what that what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person. Like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical, that's really cool, and you're excited about that. Nobody else on your team could build. You're not walking around saying I am a low code marketing person like that, that that's that's that's demeaning. Like you're like. No, I'm technical. I'm a technical market, or look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living like and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and >>you don't >>wanna demean and said, Oh, that was I did a low code that just like everybody, is just trying to solve problems. And everybody, um, is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need toe work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >>Yeah, Rachel, what? Want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020 everyone is distributed. Lots of conversations about where we work. Can we bring the remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had the chance that interview that the head of remote. Forget lab. They're over 1000 people and they're fully remote. So, you know, remote. Absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers, it is no longer, you know. Oh, hey, here's my CV. It's I'm on git Hub. You can see the code I've done. We haven't talked about open source yet, so give us your take on kind of developers today. Career paths. Andi. Kind of the the online community there. >>Yeah, this could be a whole own conversation. We'll try to figure out my points. Um, so I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project Hustle versus doing, exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your get hub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion and a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you you need to be spending your time on the side working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances, like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask. These people toe also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source, having an understanding of how tools are done. Having this, um, this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point Teoh is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills two other employers you can kind of maybe make your way in is a junior developer because you worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still again. It's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is to correct sides of this argument. And both of those things are true. At the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like, or even advancing in a career path If you're already a developer, it's It's tricky. >>Well, I want to get your take on something to you know, I think back to you know, I go back a decade or two I started working with about 20 years ago. Back in the crazy days were just Colonel Daughter Warg and, you know, patches everywhere and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing on most of the people contributing to the free software before we're calling it open source. Most of the time, it was their side Hustle was the thing they're doing. What was their passion? Project? I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously, there's a lot of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I goto the Linux Foundation shows. I mean, you've got whole companies that are you know, that that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on, you know, you know, governance, you know, contribution from the individual versus companies. You know, there's a lot of change going on there. The public cloud their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And you know what's good? What's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >>Yeah. E think the governance of open source projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these air live conversations that are ongoing and a lot of communities e think one of the things that is interesting overall, though, is just watching if you're if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like where it was at one point, um, deemed a cancer by one of the vendors in the space, and now it is something that is just absolutely an inherent part of most well tech vendors and and users is an important part of how they are building and using software today, like open source is really an integral tool. And what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprises role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And e don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet. But I think that just looking at that long view, it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing >>So Rachel without giving away state secrets. We know read Monk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say okay, I wanna at 2030 look back and say, Boy, this is wonderful for developers. You know, everything is going good. What things have we done along the way? Where have we made progress? >>Yeah, I think I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite APS and thinking about what that developer experience looks like. I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together and There's just so much for developers to dio to actually get all of these APs from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, How can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers air trying to accomplish? How can you think about where your ATF, It's not on your tool or you your project? Whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space, but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade. Is trying to help people actually get everything wired together in a coherent way. >>Rachel. No shortage of work to do there really appreciate you joining us. Thrilled to have you finally as a cube. Alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the developer content for the cube on cloud, I'm stew minimum, and as always, thank you for watching the Cube.