(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Fal.Con 22. I'm Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. This is day one of our coverage. We had the big keynotes this morning. Derek Jeter was one of the keynotes. We have a big Yankee fan here: George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. George, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> It's great to be here. >> Boston fan, you know, I tweeted out Derek Jeter. He broke my heart many times, but I can't hate on Jeter. You got to have respect for the guy. >> Well, I still remember I was in Japan when Boston was down you know, by three games and came back to win. So I've got my own heartbreak as well. >> It did heal some wounds, but it almost changed the rivalry, you know? I mean, >> Yeah. >> Once, it's kind of neutralized it, you know? It's just not as interesting. I mean, I'm a season ticket holder. I go to all the games and Yankee games are great. A lot of it used to be, you would never walk into Fenway park with, you know pin stripes, when today there's as many Yankee fans as there are... >> I know. >> Boston fans. Anyway, at Fenway, I mean. >> Yeah. >> Why did you start CrowdStrike? >> Biggest thing for me was to really change the game in how people were looking at security. And at my previous company, I think a lot of people were buying security and not getting the outcome that they wanted. Not- I got acquired by a company, not my first company. So, to be clear, and before I started CrowdStrike, I was in the antivirus world, and they were spending a lot of money with antivirus vendors but not getting the outcome I thought they should achieve, which is to stop the breach, not just stop malware. And for me, security should be outcome based not sort of product based. And the biggest thing for us was how could we create the sales force of security that was focused on getting the right outcome: stopping the breach. >> And the premise, I've seen it, the unstoppable breach is a myth. No CSOs don't live by that mantra, but you do. How are you doing on that journey? >> Well I think, look, there's no 100% of anything in security, but what we've done is really created a platform that's focused on identifying and stopping breaches as well as now, extending that out into helping IT identify assets and their hygiene and basically providing more visibility into IT assets. So, we talked about the convergence of that. Maybe we'll get into it, but. >> Dave Vellante: Sure. >> We're doing pretty well. And from our standpoint, we've got a lot of customers, almost 20,000, that rely on us day to day to help stop the breach. >> Well, and when you dig into the CrowdStrike architecture, what's so fascinating is, you know, Dave, we've talked about this: agent bad. Well, not necessarily, if you can have a lightweight agent that can scale and support a number of modules, then you can consolidate all these point tools out there. You talked about in your keynote, your pillars, workloads, which really end points >> Right. >> ID, which we're going to talk about. Identity data and network security. You're not a network security specialist, >> Right. >> But the other three, >> Yes. >> You're knocking down. >> Yeah. >> You guys went deep into that today. Talk about that. >> We did, most folks are going to know us for endpoint and Cloud workload protection and visibility. We did an acquisition almost two years to the day on preempt. And that was our identity play, identity threat protection and detection. And that really turned out to be a smart move, because it's the hottest topic right now. If you look at all the breaches over the last couple years, it's all identity based. Big, big talking points in our keynotes today. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> And then the third area is on data, and data is really the you know, the new currency that people trade in. So how do you identify and protect endpoints and workloads? How do you tie that together with identity, as well as understanding how you connect the dots and the data and where data flows? And that's really been our focus and we continue to deliver on that for customers. >> And you've had a real dogma, I'll call it, about Cloud Native. I've had this conversation with Frank Slootman, "No we're not going to do a halfway house." You, I think, said it really well today. I think it was you who said it. If you've got On-Prem and Cloud, you got two code bases, >> George Kurtz: Right. >> That you got to maintain. >> That's it, yeah. >> And that means you're taking away resources from one or the other. >> That's exactly right. And what a lot of our competitors have done is they started On-Prem as an AV vendor, and then they took what they had and they basically put it in a Cloud instance called a Cloud, which doesn't really scale. And then, you know, where they need to, they basically still keep their On-Prem, and that just diffuses your engineering team. And most of the On-Prem stuff doesn't even have the features of what they're trying to offer from the Cloud. So either you're Cloud Native or you're not. You can't be halfway. >> But it doesn't mean that you can't include and ingest On-Prem data- >> Well, absolutely. >> into your platform, and that's what I think most people just some reason don't seem to understand. >> Well our agents run wherever. They certainly run On-Prem. >> Dave Vellante: Right. Right. >> And they run in the Cloud, they run wherever. But the crowd in the CrowdStrike is the fact that we can crowdsource this threat information at scale into our threat graph, which gives us unique insight, 7 trillion events per week. And you can't do that if you're not Cloud Native. And that crowd gives the, we call, community immunity. We see all kinds of attacks across 176 different countries. That benefit accrues to all of our customers. >> But how do you envision and maintain and preserve a lightweight agent that can support so many modules? As you do more acquisitions and you knock down new areas and bring in new functionality, go after things like operations technology, how is it that you're able to keep that agent lightweight? >> Well, we started as a platform company, meaning that the whole idea was we're going to build a lightweight agent. First iteration had no security capabilities. It was collect data, get it into a common data architecture or threat graph, in one spot. And then once we had the data then we applied AI to it and we created different workflows. So, the first incarnation was get data into the Cloud at scale. And that still holds true today. So if you think about why we can actually have all these different modules without an impact on the performance, it's we collect data one time. It's a threat data, you know? We're not collecting user data, but threat data collection mechanism. Once we have all that data, then we can slice and dice and create other modules. So the new modules never have to even touch the agent 'cause we've already collected the data. >> I'm going to just keep going, Dave, unless you shove your way in. >> No, no, go ahead. No, no, no. I'm waiting to pounce. >> But okay, so, I think, George, but George, I need to ask you about a comment that you made about we're not just shoving it into a data lake. But you are collecting all the data. Can you explain that nuance? >> Yeah. So there's a difference between a collect and forward agent. It means they just collect a bunch of data. They'll probably store it in a lot of space on the endpoint. It's slow and cumbersome, and then they'll forward it up into another data lake. So you have no context going into no context. Our agent is a smart agent, which actually allows us to always track the context of all these processes in what's happening on the endpoint. And it's a mini graph, meaning we keep track of the relationships. And as we ship that contextual information to the Cloud, we never lose that context. And then it goes into the bigger graph database, always with the same level of context. So, we keep the context of each individual workload or endpoint, and then across the Cloud, we have the context of all of those put together. It's massive. And that allows us to create different insights rather than a data lake, which is, you know, you're looking for, you're creating a bigger needle stack looking for needles. >> And I'm envisioning almost an index that is super, super fast. I mean, you're talking about sub, well second kind of near real time responses, correct? >> Absolutely. So a lot of what we do in terms of protection is already pushed down to the endpoint , 'cause it has intelligence and the AI model. And then again, the Cloud is always looking for different anomalies, not only on each individual endpoint or workload, but across the entire spectrum of our customer base. And that's all real time. It continually self-learns from all the data we collect. >> So when, yeah, when you've made these architectural decisions over time, there was a time when saying that you needed to run an agent could be a deal killer somewhere for people who argued against that. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> You've made the right decision there, clearly. Having everything be crowdsourced into Cloud makes perfect sense. Has that, though, posed a challenge from a sovereignty perspective? If you were deploying stuff On-Prem all over the place, you don't need to worry about that. Everything is here >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> in a given country. How do you address the challenges of sovereignty when these agents are sending data into some sort of centralized Cloud space that crosses boundaries? >> Well, yeah, I guess what we would, let me go back to the beginning. So I started company in 2011 and I had to convince people that delivering endpoint security from the Cloud was going to be a good thing. >> Dave Vellante: Right. (chuckles) >> You know, you go into a Swiss bank and a bunch of other places and they're like, you're crazy. Right? >> Dave Nicholson: Right. >> They all became customers afterwards, right? And you have to just look at what they're doing. And the question I would have in the early days is, well, let me ask you are you using Dropbox, Box? Are you using a Microsoft? You know, what are you using? Well, they're all sending data to the Cloud. So good news! You already have a model, you've already approved that, right? So let's talk about our benefit. And you know, you can either have an adversary steal your data or you can send threat data to our Cloud, which by the way is in a lot of sovereign Clouds that are out there. And when you actually break it down to what we're sending to the Cloud, it's threat data, right? It isn't user files and documents and stuff. It's threat data. So, we work through all of that. And the Cloud is bigger than CrowdStrike. So you look at Sales Force, Service Now, Workday, et cetera. That's being used all over the place, Box, Dropbox. We just tagged onto it. Like why shouldn't security be the platform of record, and why shouldn't CrowdStrike be the platform of record and be the pillar of Cloud security? >> Explain your observability strategy, 'cause you acquired Humio for, I mean, I think it was $400 million, which is a song. >> Yeah. >> And then Reposify is the latest acquisition. I see that as an extension, 'cause it gives you visibility. Is that part of your security, of your observability play? Explain where you do play and don't play. >> Sure. Well observability is a big, you know, fluffy word. Where we play is in probably the first two areas of observability, right? There's five, kind of, pillars. We're focused on event collection. Let's get events from the endpoints. Let's get events from really anywhere in the network. And we can do that with Humio is now log scale. And then the second piece is with our agents, let's get an understanding of their, the asset itself. What is the asset? What state is it in? Does it have vulnerabilities? Does it have, you know, is it running out of disc space? Is it have, does it have a performance issue? Those are really the first two, kind of, areas of observability. We're not in application performance, we're in let's collect data from the endpoint and other sources, and let's understand if the thing is working, right? And that's a huge value for customers. And we can do that because we already have a privileged spot on the endpoint with our agent. >> Got it. Question on the TAM. Like I look at your TAMs, your charts, I love it. You know, generally do. Were you taking known data from you know, firms like IDC >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> and saying, okay we're going to play there, now we're made this acquisition. We're new modules, now we're playing there. Awesome. I think you got a big TAM. And I guess that's, that's the point. There's no lack of market for you. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> But I do feel like there's this unknown unquantifiable piece of your TAM. IDC can't see it, 'cause they're kind of looking back >> George Kurtz: Right. >> seein' what the market do last year and we'll forecast it out. It's almost, you got to be a futurist to see it. How do you think about your total available market and the opportunity that's out there? >> Well, it's well in excess of 120 billion and we've actually updated that recently. So it's even beyond that. But if you look at all the modules each module has a discreet TAM and again, for what, you know, what we're focused on is how do you give an outcome to a customer? So a lot of the modules map back into specific TAM and product categories. When you add 'em all up and when you look at, you know, some of the new things that we're coming out with, again, it's well in excess of 120 billion. So that's why we like to say like, you know, we're not an endpoint company. We're really, truly a security platform company that was born in the Cloud. And I think if you see the growth rates, and one of the things that we've talked about, and I think you might have pointed out in prior podcasts, is we're the second fastest company to 2 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, only behind Zoom. And you know I would argue- great company, by the way, a customer- but that was a black Swan event in a pandemic, right? >> Dave Vellante: I'll say! >> Yeah. >> So we are rarefied air when you think about the capabilities that we have and the performance and the TAM that's available to us. >> The other thing I said in my breaking analysis was 'cause you guys aspire to be a generational company. And I think you got a really good shot at being one, but to be a generational company, you have to have an ecosystem. So I'd love you to talk about the ecosystem, but where you want to see it in five years. >> Well, it really is a good point and we are a partner first company. Ecosystem is really important. Cameras probably can't see all the vendors that are here that are our partners, right? It's a big part of this show that we're at. You see a lot of, well, you see some vendors behind us. >> Yep. >> We have to realize in 2022, and I think this is something that we did well and it's my philosophy, is we are not the only game in town. We like to be, and we are, for many companies the security platform on record, but we don't do everything. We talked about network in other areas. We can't do everything. You can't be good and try to do everything. So, for customers today, what they're looking at is best of platform. And in the early days of security, I've been in it over 30 years, it used to be best of breed products, then it was best of suite, now it's best of platform. So what do I mean by that? It means that customers don't want to engineer their own solution. They, like Lego blocks, they want to pull the platforms, and they want to stitch 'em together via API. And they want to say, okay, CrowdStrike works with Okta, works with Zscaler, works with Proofpoint, et cetera. And that's what customers want. So, ecosystem is incredibly important for us. >> Explain that. You mentioned Okta, I had another question for you. I was at Reinforce, and I saw this better together presentation, CrowdStrike and Okta talking about identity. You've got an identity module. Explain to people how you're not competing with Okta. You guys complement each other, there. >> Well, an identity kind of broker, if you will, is basically what Okta does in others, right? So you log in single sign on and you get access. They broker access to all these other applications. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> That's not what we do. What we do is we look at those endpoints and workloads and domain controllers and directory services and we figure out, are there vulnerabilities and are there threats associated with them? And we call that out. The second piece, which is critical, is we prevent lateral movement. So if credentials are stolen we can prevent those credentials from being laundered or used and moved laterally, which is a key part of how breaches happen. We then create a trust score on those endpoints and workloads. And we basically say, okay, do we think the trust on the endpoint and workload is high or low? Do we think the identity, you know, is it George on the endpoint, or not? We give that a score. And we pass that along to Okta or Ping or whoever, and they then use that as part of their calculus in how they broker access to other resources. So it really is better together. >> So your execution has been stellar. This is my competition question. You obviously have competition out there. I think architecturally, you've got some advantages. You have a great relationship with AWS. I don't know what's going on with Google, but Kevin's up on stage. >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> They're now part of Google. >> George Kurtz: We have a great relationship with them. >> Microsoft obviously, a competitor. You obviously do some things in, >> Right. >> in Azure. Are you building the security Cloud? >> We are. We think we are, because when you look at the amount of data that we actually ingest, when you look at companies using us for critical decisions and critical protection, not only on their On-Prem, but also in their Cloud environment, and the knowledge we have, we think it is a security Cloud. You know, you had, you had Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow and each of them had their respective Clouds. When I started the company, there was no security Cloud. You know, it wasn't any of the companies that you know. It wasn't the firewall companies, wasn't the AV companies. And I think we really defined ourselves as the security Cloud. And the level of knowledge and insights we have in our Cloud, I think, are world class. >> But you know, it's a difference of being those- 'cause you mentioned those other, you know, seminal Clouds. They, like Salesforce, Workday, they're building their own Clouds. Maybe not so much Workday, but certainly Salesforce and ServiceNow built their own >> Yeah. >> Clouds, their own data centers. You're building on top of hyperscalers, correct? >> Well, >> Well you have your own data centers, too. >> We have our own data centers, yeah. So when we first started, we started in AWS as many do, and we have a great relationship there. We continue to build out. We are a huge customer and we also have, you know, with data sovereignty and those sort of things, we've got a lot of our sort of data that sits in our private Cloud. So it's a hybrid approach and we think it's the best of both worlds. >> Okay. And you mean you can manage those costs and it's, how do you make the decision? Is it just sovereignty or is it cost as well? >> Well, there's an operational element. There's cost. There's everything. There's a lot that goes into it. >> Right. >> And at the end of the day we want to make sure that we're using the right technology in the right Clouds to solve the right problem. >> Well, George, congratulations on being back in person. That's got to feel good. >> It feels really good. >> Got a really good audience here. I don't know what the numbers are but there's many thousands here, >> Thousands, yeah. >> at the ARIA. Really appreciate your time. And thanks for having The Cube here. You guys built a great set for us. >> Well, we appreciate all you do. I enjoy your programs. And I think hopefully we've given the audience a good idea of what CrowdStrike's all about, the impact we have and certainly the growth trajectory that we're on. So thank you. >> Fantastic. All right, George Kurtz, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're going to wrap up day one. We'll be back tomorrow, first thing in the morning, live from the ARIA. We'll see you then. (calm music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back, here on the Cube along with Dave Vellante, I am John Walls. We're live at .conf2017, as Splunk continues with day two of its get together here the nation's capital, Washington D.C. Home game for me, I love it. Dave's up the road in Boston, so, hey, you had to hit the road a little bit, but not as bad as it can be sometimes for you. >> No, I'll take D.C. over Vegas. Sorry, Vegas. >> Yeah, but you travel a lot, man, you do, you're on the road. Chris Kurtz travels a lot, too. He's come with us from Arizona State University, he's a systems architect out there. Chris, always good to see you, we had a chance to visit last year for the first time. >> Yep. >> A member of the Splunk trust. And a gentleman with quite a diverse background, I mean. You supported Mars missions. As far as the... >> The Spirit and Opportunity. >> Facilitated out in Phoenix. Working now, as you said, at Arizona State, but also the Trust. Let's talk about that a little bit, because there was some conversation yesterday from the keynote stage about expanding that group? >> Absolutely. >> Adding 14 new members. And for a lot of people at home, who might not be familiar with the Splunk trust, talk about the concept and how you put it into practice. >> Absolutely, so, the Splunk trust is the organization that Splunk set up as a community leader, as a community activist. Our, kind of, watch word is, is that, "We're not the smartest people in the room, "but we'll be the most helpful." and, so, our purpose is... >> John: I'm not sure about that first part, too, by the way. >> Thank you, very much. >> John: I think you're short-changing yourself. >> So, our organization preface is we act as members of the community to help direct community people who have issues and help them externally, but also, to help Splunk and what direction they should go. "Hey, we see this pain point from a lot of the customers, "this is something that maybe Splunk should concentrate on." We're often given access to betas or even earlier, or, you know, even potential products. It's, "How should we build this, is this something that "you would use? "Is this something that you would like?" Table data sets was a feature that I worked on for a year, that was released last year. You know, "Is this something that you would use, "is this something that you would want?" and, sometimes, you know, users fall through the cracks in the support system and they don't know how to get support help, or they don't know where to get directed, and we can volunteer and say, you know, "Show them where the Splunk answers group is very powerful." There's an app for that, we can show them Splunkbase and help them when those things fall through the cracks. So, we provide community enrichment and support, but we're not an official representative of Splunk, even though we're appointed by Splunk on a year-to-year basis. >> John: There aren't that many of ya, right? >> Well, there's a couple, 42 this time. And, you serve for a year and it can be renewed each year, you reapply. Or you can be volunteered, you know, somebody else can... >> Nominate you. >> Can nominate for us. And there's no guarantee. We, the members of the trust vote and then that goes to Splunk and Splunk makes the final decision. Some companies allow that, some don't, it depends. ASU is very generous and let's me participate and give them my time to the organization. >> And I said ASU, Arizona State University. >> That's what I was thinking. >> I never fully introduced that, I'm sorry. >> What do you have to do to qualify and what's the hurdle? >> So, be the most helpful person in the room, that's what you need to do to qualify. So you need to be a part... You can't work for Splunk, you have to be a partner or a customer, and you need to give to the community in some way. So, you need to give back to the community. You participate on Answers, which is the online, kind of, self-support forum. You need to speak in the community, maybe run a user group, a lot of us do run the user groups. I run the user group in Arizona. And, you need to be respected amongst the community and, people go, you know, "I want to go to them, "they'll help me or at least get me to the right person." >> Is it predominantly or exclusively technical practitioners, or not necessarily? >> This year, they divided us in to, kind of, organizational units, so there's architects, and practitioner, and developer. So, we're all technical, but, this year we're going to have the ability to focus a little more on a specific area. You know, "What do you do for a living, "what do you do with Splunk? "Do you architect with Splunk internally, "do you just provide Splunk practice? "Are you a Splunk developer that makes apps? "How do you use Splunk on a daily basis?" And, again, there are partners as well. So, Aplura and Defense Point, I think, are both tied with four members a piece. So that's one of those things that, you know, they're going out to individual customers and helping them everyday. >> So, it's really taking this notion of a customer advisory board to a whole another level. I mean, it's not a passive, you know, group of people that, maybe, meets once a year. >> Right. >> It's an ongoing, active, organic institution essentially. >> Absolutely, we have quarterly meetings online and at those meetings a different Splunk, sometimes executives, sometimes product managers or engineering managers, you know, come and speak to us. And it can be anything from, "Hey, we're developing this "internal product and are we interested, you know, "is that useful to you?" Or, "What enhancements do you feel the product need?" Or, you know, "This is a new feature we're working on "to look and feel." I was consulted about the conf logo. "Hey, Chris, you're an average customer, "which of these four logos do you think really, you know, "kind of helps set the mood?" And, you know, did they take my advice? Does it really matter, no, but they were willing to just... I'm not associated, I'm not in the bowels of the company. >> So this isn't your logo over here? >> That is actually the one that I chose. >> Oh, excellent, I would assume so, right. >> Who organizes the quarterly meetings? >> So, the quarterly meetings are organized by Splunk in the community. There's a community group that's underneath Brian Goldfarb, who's the Chief Marketing Officer. So, he organizes the quarterly meetings. He gets to herd all the cats, because we're all across the world. You know, you have to figure out a time zone, you have to figure out where, you have to figure out when. But, most of the time, there's some suggestions. "Hey, you know, the engineering manager "for section x would like to speak." But, sometimes it's like, "Yeah, we would like to talk "to the person in charge of Search Head Clustering," for example. "We see some pain points in the community," or something like that, so, it's wide-ranging. But, you know, we're not just a group to rubber stamp anything that Splunk does, but we're also not a group to just sit there and complain about things we don't like. It's really very much a give and take. Splunk is generous and open enough to give us that access, and we take that very seriously. To be able to help guide Splunk in making their product the best it can be. It's an amazing product, I'm an evangelist, have been since I started using it. But, also, to help the customers. If the customers are having a pain point, we're probably going to hear about that first. >> Dave: When did you start using? >> I've been using Splunk for about five years. And when I started using Splunk at ASU, it had been a 50GB license and they'd just bought another 100GB, and it needed re-working, it needed architecting. So, when I came in, our chief information security officer and our VP for operations are the ones who directed me. And I said, "What do you want to grow for?" And they said, "Architect it for a terabyte, "assume it's going to take us several years to get there." So, I rebuilt the current environment and we architected it for a terabyte and here we are, four-and-a-half, five years later, we're at a terabyte. And, we're still growing and we're looking at Cloud, you know, we're looking at other use-cases. I think the biggest ship for us is that, we talked about this briefly last year, is that I work for John Rome, who's the Deputy CIO for Arizona State, and he's in charge of business intelligence and analytics. So, it is an enterprise application for data at ASU. It is not part of the security office, it's not part of operations, it's not part of depth. Those are all customers. And, so, internally those are customers and I think that's an amazing opportunity to say that, "Those are customers of mine." So, I'm not beholden to, you know, building the system so it's only useful for security, or building it so it's only useful for operations. They're my customers, and we avoid any appearance of, "Oh, I don't want to put my data in a security product. "I don't want to put my data in an operations product." Nobody questions putting their data in the data warehouse, that's the appropriate place for the data to go. So, that's the beauty of the system that we've developed, is they're both customers of mine. >> All right, so let's talk about your work at Arizona State, little bit. I don't know the size now, I'm trying to think of it, a huge... >> Chris: We're the largest single university in the United States. >> Probably what, 60,000-70,000? >> Total enrollment 104-110,000. A lot of that's online, I think we have about 78,000 or more at the main campus. But, we're the single largest university in the U.S. There are groups like the University of California that's larger overall, but not single institution. >> So, you know... >> Massive. >> Big project, yeah. Where are you now, then? What have you been using Splunk for that maybe you weren't last year when you and I had a chance to visit? >> Yeah, so, we started using it as a security product. It was brought in to make security more agile in getting that information from the operations and the networking groups, firewalls was the first thing we were brought in for. Now, we're starting to look at other use-cases, we're starting to look at edge cases. "Are we using it for academic integrity?" So, the very beginning so that we're looking at, "If a student is taking a test, are they the person "taking the test?" We're looking at it to make sure the students' accounts are safe and not compromised. We're looking at rolling out multi-factor to the university and being able to protect that. And, we're taking a lot of those functions and pushing them down to our help desk, so the help desk has all of the tools they need to be able to support the student and take care of their issue on the first call. That's really important, we have an amazing help desk organization, amazing care organization. And that's the goal is, it doesn't matter how long the call takes, you do that on the first call. And Splunk is a key portion of that to be able to provide them with the right information. And they don't have to go and try to get somebody from network engineering just to solve the student problem, they can see what the problem is from the beginning. >> Academic integrity, explain that. >> Yeah, so, you know, I don't think that there's any student who doesn't want to do their own work and do the best possible thing they can. But, sometimes, students get in a position where they need some help and, maybe, that isn't always exactly what they should do. So, you need to make sure that the student is taking the test that they're signed up for, that they didn't have any assistance, especially in online classes. We need to keep our degree important and valid, and, obviously, none of our students want to, but occasionally you find somebody who hasn't done exactly what they're supposed to. And we need to be able to validate that. So, we need to be able to validate that someone did what they said they did or did the work that they said they did. It's just like, nobody wants to plagiarize, but, occasionally it does happen and we need to protect ourselves and protect the students. >> And you can do that with data? >> We can absolutely do. >> You can ensure that integrity, how? Explain that a little bit. >> A little bit, yeah. So, we look at where the student logs in from. If the login routinely from Tempe, Arizona and then, suddenly there's a login from someplace else. Oftentimes, that has nothing to do with academic integrity, that has to do with there is an account compromise. We need to protect the students' personal information, both HIPAA and FIRPA. We need to protect their privacy information, just generally available PII. So we look at when they logged in, where they logged in, how they logged in. Did the how-to factor worked? I think academic integrity is really a much smaller portion of that, I think the more thing is we need to protect those students. So, we look at how they logged in, when they logged in, what type of machine they logged in from. I mean, if you're using a Surface and you've been using a Surface to login for months and then, all of a sudden, you login from an iPhone, you might have gotten a new iPhone, but, you know, you might not have. So, we put all those pieces of information, all those launch together to build a case that, "Do we need to reset this user's password for safety?" >> But I think academic integrity's important from the brand as well, because the consumers of your students, the employers out there, they may be leery of online courses. So, to the extent that you can say, "Hey, we've got this covered, we actually can ensure "that academic integrity through data." That enhances the value of the degree and the ASU brand, right? >> Absolutely, we don't think that any student wants to do anything that they're not supposed to. It does happen, you know. >> But even if it's one, right, or even if it's the perception of the employer that it can happen? >> John: The possibility. >> Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, is that we need to protect that brand and we need to protect the students. I think protecting students is the number one thing, protecting employees is the number one thing. Everything else falls from that. >> Okay, what about other student behaviors? I mean, you're sort of trafficking around campus, maybe, food consumption, dorm living, I mean, all these kinds of things that with sensors or, what have you, you could extract reams of data? >> We're doing a lot of that. We're partnering with Amazon to look at the Amazon Echo and using them in dorms to provide them voice interface. "Echo, where is my next class?" Or, "What time does the Memorial Union open?" Or, "How late can I get a pizza," and that type of thing. We want to build an environment that's not only fun for the students, but very powerful, and uses the latest technology. >> Pricing, I want to talk pricing, all right? I dig for the one little wart in Splunk and it's hard to find. But, I've heard some chirping about pricing because pricing is a function of the volume of data. The data curve is growing, it's reshaping. What are your thoughts? What do you tell Splunk about pricing? >> So, a lot of people say, "Man, Splunk is expensive." And, I don't think Splunk is expensive. Once you've achieved a volume, it's got a good pricing structure. I think that anything that Splunk tries to do to change the pricing model is a bad direction. >> Dave: So you like it the way it is? >> I like it the way it is. I believe that we've made an investment in a perpetual-licensed product and I certainly don't think that what we're spending on it, for a maintenance year is a bad thing. And i think that we get a good value for the product. And we're going to continue to use it for years to come. >> I've always felt, like, "Your price is too high," has never been a deal-breaker for software companies. They've generally navigated through that criticism. And it's been, you know, ultimately an indicator of success more than anything else. But, your point is if the values there, you pay for it. Are you able to find ways to save money using Splunk that essentially pay for that premium? >> Absolutely, so one of the very first things we did with Splunk, is we looked at our employee direct deposit, we talked about this briefly last year. We looked at employee direct deposit and we were being targeted by a Malaysian hacking group who was using phishing emails to phish credentials from us. You know, you send an email that looks very much like a university login and says, "You need to login "and change your password or you're not going to be able "to work in an hour." A lot of employees, especially employees in areas that aren't high tech, you know, in the psychology department, they may fill-in that information and then the hackers login and change their direct deposit. And then the university ends up paying the employee again and eating those costs. Our original use-case was on-the-fly, we saved $30,000 in a single payroll run. Pretty easy to pay for Splunk when you do that. And so, that was our very original use-case. And that came from just looking at the data. "Is this useful, where are these people logging in from?" There's a change, you know, and I think that that's very important. The thing I love about Splunk is, because it's schema on demand, because there's no hard schema, and that it's use-case on demand. Is that, every single good use-case in the very beginning was standing around the water cooler, having a drink and saying, "I wonder if combine data set A, "we combine data set B, we come up with something that "nobody was asking about." And now when we something that we can help fix, we can help grow, we can make more efficient. To the question of how you deal with all that data is, you tune, you decide what data is important, you decide what data is unimportant, you clean up the logs that you don't care about. And we spent a year, we didn't buy Splunk for one year, we didn't buy a new license, or didn't buy an expansion license, because we took a year to compact and say, "Okay, all the data we're getting "from this firewall, is that all necessary, "is there anything redundant?" "Does it have redundant dates, does it have redundant "time stamps, et cetera." >> Right. >> And I pulled that information out and that just gave us a little bit of breathing room, and then we're going to turn around and take another chunk. >> Help. >> No schema on right sounds icky but it's profound. >> You mentioned the word, help, again, big word, key word. Chris Kurtz, one of the most helpful guys in the community of the Splunk. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for being with us, Chris Kurtz. Back with more, Dave and I are going to take a short break, about a half-hour, we'll continue our coverage here live at .conf2017. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back to wrap up Fal.con 2022 CrowdStrike's customer event. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. My co-host, Dave Nicholson, is on injured reserve today, so I'm solo. But I wanted to just give the audience a census to some of my quick takeaways. Really haven't given a ton of thought on this. We'll do review after we check out the videos and the transcripts, and do what we do at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I'd say the first thing is, look CrowdStrike continues to expand it's footprint. And, it's adding the identity module, through the preempt acquisition. Working very closely with managed service providers, MSPs, managed security service providers. Having an SMB play. So CrowdStrike has 20,000 customers. I think it could, it could 10X that, you know, over some period of time. As I've said earlier, it's on a path by mid-decade to be a 5 billion company, in terms of revenue. At the macro level, security is somewhat, I'd say it's less discretionary than some other investments. You know, you can, you can probably hold off buying a new storage device. You can maybe clean that up. You know, you might be able to hold off on some of your analytics, but at the end of the day, security is not completely non-discretionary. It's competing. The CISO is competing with other budgets. Okay? So it's, while it's less discretionary, it is still, you know, not an open checkbook for the CISO. Now, having said that, from CrowdStrike standpoint it has an excellent opportunity to consolidate tools. It's one of the biggest problems in the security business Go to Optiv and check out their security taxonomy. It'll make your eyes bleed. There's so many tools and companies that are really focused on one specialization. But really, what CrowdStrike can do with its 22 modules, to say, hey, we can give you ROI and consolidate those. And not only is it risk reduction, it's lowering the labor cost and labor intensity, so you can focus on other areas and free up the biggest problem that CISOs have. It's the lack of enough talent. So, really strong business value and value proposition. A lot of that is enabled by the architecture. We've talked about this. You can check out my breaking analysis that I dropped last weekend, on CrowdStrike. And, you know, can it become a generational company. But it's really built on a cloud-native architecture. George Kurtz and company, they shunned having an on-premise architecture. Much like Snowflake Frank Slootman has said, we're not doing a halfway house. We're going to put all our resources on a cloud-native architecture. The lightweight agent that allows them to add new modules and collect more data, and scale out. The purpose-built threat graph and and time series database, and asset graph that they've built. And very strong use of AI, to not only stop known malware, but stop unknown malware. Identify threats. Do that curation. And really, you know, support the SecOp teams. Product wise, I think the big three takeaways, and there were others, but the big three for me is EDR extending into XDR. You know, X is the extending for, in really, the core of endpoint detection and response, extending that further. Well, it seems to be a big buzzword these days. CrowdStrike, I think, is very focused on making a more complete, a holistic offering, beyond endpoint. And I think it's going to do very well in that space. They're not alone. There are others. It's a very competitive space. The second is identity. Through the acquisition of Preempt. CrowdStrike building that identity module. Partnering with leaders like Okta, to really provide that sort of, treating identity, if you will, as an endpoint. And then sort of Humio is now Falcon Log Scale. Bringing together, you know, the data and the observability piece, and the security piece, is kind of the three big product trends that I saw. I think the last point I'll make, before we wrap, is the ecosystem. The ecosystem here is good. It reminds me, I said, a number of times this week, of ServiceNow in 2013 I think the difference is, CrowdStrike has an SMB play it can go after many more customers, and actually have an even broader platform. And I think it can accelerate its ecosystem faster than ServiceNow was able to do that. I mean, it's got to be, sort of, an open and collaborative sort of ecosystem. You know, ServiceNow is kind of, more of, a one-way street. And I think the other piece of that ecosystem, that we see evolving, into IOT, into the operations technology and critical infrastructure. Which is so important, because critical infrastructure of nations is so vulnerable. We're seeing this in the Ukraine. Security is a key component now of any warfare. And going forward, it's always going to be a key component. Nation states are going to go after trust, or secure infrastructure, or critical infrastructure. Try to disable that and disrupt that. So securing those operation assets is going to be very critical. Not just the refrigerator and the coffee maker, but really going after those critical infrastructures. (chuckles) Getting asked to break. And the last thing I'll say, is the developer platform. We heard from ML that, the opportunity that's there, to build out a PaaS layer, super PaaS layer, if you will, so that developers can add value. I think if that happens, this ecosystem, which is breaking down, will explode. This is Dave Vellante, wrapping up at CrowdStrike, Fal.con 2022, Fal.con 2022. Go to SiliconAngle.com, for all the news. Check out theCUBE.net. You'll see these videos on demand and many others. Check out (indistinct).com for all the research. And look for where we'll be next. Of course, re:Invent is the big fall event, but there are many others in between. Thanks for watching. We're out. (music plays out)

>>Hi, we're back. We're watching, you're watching the cube coverage of Falcon 2022 live from the aria in Las Vegas, Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson and we, yes, folks, there are females in the cyber security industry. Amanda Adams is here. So the vice president of America Alliance at CrowdStrike. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>We it's, it's fantastic to, to actually, as I was starting to wonder, but we >>Do have females in leadership. >>Wait, I'm just kidding. There are plenty of females here, but this cybersecurity industry in general, maybe if we have time, we can talk about that, but I wanna talk about the, the Alliance program, but before I do, yeah. You know, you, you got a nice career here at CrowdStrike, right? You've kind of seen the ascendancy, the rocket ship you've been on it for five years. Yep. So what's that been like? And if you had to put on the binoculars and look five years forward, what can you tell us in that 10 year span? Oh >>My goodness. What a journey it's been over the last five, six years. I've been with CrowdStrike almost six years and really starting with our first core group of partners and building out the alliances, seen obviously the transformation with our sales organization. And as we scaled, I think of our, of our technology. We started with, I think, two products at that time, we were focused on reinventing how our customers thought about NextGen AB but also endpoint detection response. From there, the evolution is really driving towards that cloud security platform, right? How our partners fit into that. And, and how we've evolved is it's not just resell. It's not just focusing on the margin and transactions. We really have focused on building the strategic relationships with our partners, but also our customers and fitting them in that better together story with that CrowdStrike platform. It's been the biggest shift. Yeah. >>And you've got that. The platform chops for that. It's just, I think you're up to 22 modules now. So you're not a point product. You guys make that, that, that point lot now in terms of the, the partners and the ecosystem, you know, it's, it's, it's good here. I mean, it's, this it's buzzing. I've said it's like service. I've said, number of times, it's like service. Now back in 2013, I was there now. They didn't have the down market, the SMB that you have that's right. And I think you you're gonna have an order. You got 20,000 customers. That's right. I predict CrowdStrike's gonna have 200,000. I, I'm not gonna predict when I need to think about that. But, but in thinking about the, the, the co your colleagues and the partners and the skill sets that have evolved, what's critical today. And, and, and what do you see as critical in the future? >>So from a skill set standpoint, if I'm a partner and engaging with CrowdStrike and our customers, if you think about, again, evolving away from just resell, we have eight routes to market. So while that may sound complicated, the way that I like to think about it is that we truly flex to our partners, go to market their business models of what works best for their organization, but also their customers. The way that they've changed, I think from a skillset standpoint is looking beyond just the technology from a platform, building a better together story with our tech Alliance partners or store, if thinking about the XDR Alliance, which we are focusing on, there's so much great value in bringing that to our customers from a skillset standpoint, beyond those services services, we've talked about every day. I know that this is gonna be a top topic for the week yesterday through our partner summit, George, our CEO, as well as Jim Cidel, that's really the opportunity as we expand in new modules. If you think about humo or log scale identity, and then cloud our partners play a critical role when it comes into the cloud migration deployment integration services, really, we're not gonna get bigger from a services organization. And that's where we need our partners to step in. >>Yeah. And, you know, we we've talked a lot about XDR yeah. Already in day one here. Yeah. With, with the X extending into other areas. That's right. I think that services be, would become even more critical at that point, you know, as you spread out into the, really the internet of things that's right. Especially all of the old things that are out there that maybe should be on the internet, but aren't yet. Yeah. But once they are security is important. So what are you doing in that arena from a services perspective to, to bolster that capability? Is it, is it, is it internally, or is it through partners generally? >>It's definitely, I think we look to our partners to extend beyond the core of what we do. We do endpoint really well, right? Our services is one of the best in the business. When you look at instant response, our proactive services, supporting our customers. If you think to XDR of integration, building out those connect air packs with our customers, building the alliances, we really do work with our partners to drive that successful outcome with our customers. But also too, I think about it with our tech alliances of building out the integration that takes a lot of effort and work. We have a great team internally, which will help guide those services to be, to be built. Right. You have to have support when you're building the integrations, which is great, but really from like a tech Alliance and store standpoint, looking to add use cases, add value to more store apps for our customers, that's where we're headed. Right. >>What about developers? Do you see that as a component of the ecosystem in the future? Yeah, >>Without a doubt. I mean, I think that as our partner program evolves right now working with our, our developers, I mean, there's different personas that we work with with our customer standpoint, but from a partner working with them to build our new codes, the integration that's gonna be pretty important. >>So we were, we sort of tongue in cheek at the beginning of this interview yeah. With women in tech. And it's a, it's a topic that, on the cube that we've been very passionate about since day one yep. On the cube. So how'd you get in to this business? H how did your, your career progress, how did you get to where you are? >>You know, I have been incredibly fortunate to have connections, and I think it's who, you know, and your network, not necessarily what, you know, to a certain extent, you have to be smart to make it long term. Right. You have to have integrity. Do what you're saying. You're gonna do. I first started at Cisco and I had a connection of, it was actually a parent of somebody I grew up with. And they're like, you would fit in very nicely to Cisco. And I started with their channel marketing team, learned a ton about the business, how to structure, how to support. And that was the first step into technology. If you would've asked me 20 years ago, what did I wanna do? I actually wanted to be a GM of an organization. And I was coming outta I come on, which is great, which I'm, it really is right up. >>If you knew me, you're like, that actually makes a lot of sense. But coming outta college, I had an opportunity. I was interviewing with the golden state warriors in California, and I was interviewing with Cisco and that I had two ops and I was living in San Jose at the time. The golden state warriors of course paid less. It was a better opportunity in sales, but it was obviously where I wanted to go from athletics. And I grew up in athletics, playing volleyball. Cisco paid me more, and it was in San Jose. And really the, the golden state warriors seemed that I was having that conversation. They said, one year community is gonna be awful. It's awful from San Jose to Oakland, but also too, like you have more money on the table. Go take that. And so I could have very much ended up in athletics, most likely in the back office, somewhere. Like I would love that. And then from there, I went from Cisco. I actually worked for a reseller for quite some time, looking at, or selling into Manhattan when I moved from California to Manhattan, went to tenable. And that was when I shifted really into channel management. I love relationships, getting snow people, building partnerships, seeing that long term, that's really where I thrive. And then from there came to CrowdStrike, which in itself has been an incredible journey. I bet. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think there's an important thread there to pull on. And that is, we, we put a lot of emphasis on stem, which people, some sometimes translate into one thing, writing code that's right. There are, but would you agree? There are many, many, many opportunities in tech that aren't just coding. >>Absolutely. >>And I think I, as a father of three daughters, it's, it's a message that I have shared with them. Yeah. They are not interested in the coding part of things, but still, they need to know that there are so many opportunities and, and it's always, sometimes it's happenstance in terms of finding the opportunity in your case, it was, you know, cosmic connection that's right. But, but that's, you know, that's something that we can foster is that idea that it's not just about the hardcore engineering and coding aspect, it's business >>That's right. So if, if there was one thing that I can walk away from today is I say that all the time, right? If you look at CrowdStrike in our mission, we really don't have a mission statement. We stop breaches every single day. When I come to work and I support our partners, I'm not super technical. I obviously know our technology and I, I enable and train our partners, but I'm not coding. Right. And I make an impact to our business, our partners, more importantly, our customers, every single day, we have folks that you can come from a marketing operations. There is legal, there's finance. I deal with folks all across the business that aren't super technical, but are making a huge impact. And I, I don't think that we talk about the opportunities outside of engineering with the broader groups. We talk about stem a lot, but within college, and I look to see like getting those early in career folks, either through an intern program could be sales, but too, if they don't like, like sales, then they shift into marketing or operations. It's a great way to get into the industry. >>Yeah. But I still think you gotta like tech to be in the tech business. Oh, you >>Do? Yeah. You do. I'm >>Not saying it's like deep down is like, not all of us, but a lot of us are kind of just, you know, well, at least you, >>At least you can't hate it. >>Right. Okay. But so women, 50% of the population, I think the stat is 17% in the technology. Yeah. Industry, maybe it's changed a little bit, but you know, 20% or, or less, why do you think that is? >>I, you know, I always go back to within technology, people hire from their network and people that they know, and usually your network are people that are very like-minded or similar to you. I have referred females into CrowdStrike. It's a priority of mine. I also have a circle that is also men, but also too, if you look at the folks that are hired into CrowdStrike, but also other technology companies, that's the first thing that I go to also too. I think it's a little bit intimidating. Right. I have a very strong personality and I'm very direct, but also too, like I can keep up with our industry when it comes to that stereotypes essentially. And some people maybe are introverted and they're not quite sure where they fit in. Right. Whether it's marketing operations, et cetera. So they, they're not sure of the opportunities or even aware of where to get started. You know what I mean? >>Yeah. I mean, I think there is a, a, a stereotype today, but I'm not sure why it's, is it unique to the, to the technology industry? No. Is it not? Right? It happens >>Thinking, I mean, there's so many industries where healthcare, >>Maybe not so much. Right. Because you know, >>You have nurses versus doctors. I feel like that is flipped. >>Yeah. That's true. Nurses versus doctors. Right. Well, I, I know a lot of women doctors though, but >>Yeah. That's kind of flipped. It's better. >>Yeah. Says >>Flipped over. Yeah. I think it's more women in medical school now, but than than men. But, >>And, and I do think in our industry, you know, when you look at companies like IBM, HPE, Cisco, Dell, and, and, and many others. Yeah. They are making a concerted effort for on round diversity. They typically have somebody who's in charge of diversity. They report, you know, maybe not directly to the CEO, but they certainly have a seat at the table. That's right. And you know, maybe you call it, oh, it's quotas. Maybe the, the old white guys feel, you know, a little slighted, whatever. It's like, nobody's crying for us. I mean, it's not like we got screwed. >>See, I know problema we can do this in Spanish. Oh, oh, >>Oh, you're not a old white guy. Sorry. We can do >>This in Spanish if you want. >>Okay. Here we go. So, no, but, but, but I, so I do think that, that the industry in general, I talked to John Chambers about this recently and he was like, look, we gotta do way better. And I don't disagree with that. But I think that, I think the industry is doing better, but I wonder if like a rocket ship company, like CrowdStrike who has so many other things going on, you know, maybe they gotta get you a certain size. I mean, you've reached escape velocity. You're doing obviously a lot of corporate, you know, good. Yeah. You know, and, and, and, and we just had earlier on we, you know, motor motor guides was very cool. Yeah. So maybe it's a maturity thing. Maybe these larger companies with you crowd size $40 billion market cap, but maybe the, the hundred plus billion dollar market cap companies. I don't know. I don't know. You guys got a bigger market cap than Dell. So >>I, I don't think it's necessarily related to market cap. I think it's the size of the organization of how many roles are open that we currently write. So we're at just over 6,000 employees. If you look at Cisco, how many thousands of employees they have there's >>Right. Maybe a hundred thousand employees. >>That's right. There's >>More opportunities. How many, what's a headcount of crowd strike >>Just over 6,000, >>6,000. So, okay. But >>If you think about the, the areas of opportunity for advancement, and we were talking about this earlier, when you look at early and career or entry level, it's actually quite, even right across the Americas of, we do have a great female population. And then as progression happens, that's where it, it tees off from a, a female in leadership. And we're doing, we're focusing on that, right? Under JC Herrera's leadership, as well as with George. One of the things that I always think is important though, is that you're mindful as, as the female within the organization and that you're out seeking somebody, who's not only a mentor, but is a direct champion for you when you're not in the room. Right. This is true of CrowdStrike. It's true of every organization. You're not gonna be aware of the opportunities as the roles are being created. And really, as the roles are being created, they probably have somebody in mind. Right. And so if you have somebody that's in that room says, you know what, Amanda Adams would be perfect for that. Let's go talk to her about it. You have to have somebody who's your champion. Yeah. >>There there's, there's, there's a saying that 80% of the most important moments in your life happen in your absence. Yeah. And that's exactly right. You know, when they're, when someone needs to be there to champion, you, >>Did that happen for you? >>Yes. I have a very strong champion. >>So I mean, I, my observation is if, if you are a woman in tech and you're in a senior leadership position, like you are, or you're a, you're a general manager or a P and L manager or a CEO, you have to be so incredibly talented because all things being equal, maybe it's changing somewhat in some of those companies I talked about, but for the last 30 years, all takes be equal. A, a, a woman is gonna lose out to a man who is as qualified. And, and I think that's maybe slowly changing. Maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't. And maybe that's, some people think that's unfair, but you know, think about people of color. Right. They, they, they, they grew up with less op opportunities for education. And this is just the statistics that's right. Right. So should society overcompensate for that? I personally think, yes, the, the answer is just, they should, there should still be some type of meritocracy that's right. You know, but society has a responsibility to, you know, rise up all ships. >>I think there's a couple ways that you can address that through Falcon funds, scholarship programs, absolutely. Looking at supporting folks that are coming outta school, our internship program, providing those opportunities, but then just being mindful right. Of whether or not you publish the stats or not. We do have somebody who's responsible for D I, within CrowdStrike. They are looking at that and at least taking that step to understand what can we do to support the advancement across minorities. But also women is really, really important. >>Did you not have a good educational opportunity when you were growing up where you're like you had to me? Yeah, no, seriously, >>No. Seriously. I went to pretty scary schools. Right. >>Okay. So you could have gone down a really bad path. >>I, a lot of people that I grew up with went down really, really bad paths. I think the inflection point at, at least for me what the inflection point was becoming aware of this entire universe. Yeah. I was, I was headed down a path where I wasn't aware that any of this existed, when I got out of college, they were advertising in the newspaper for Cisco sales engineers, $150,000 a year. We will train. I'm a smart guy. I had no idea what that meant. Right. I could have easily gone and gotten one of those jobs. It was seven or eight years before I intersected with the tech world again. And so, you know, kind of parallel with your experience with you had someone randomly, it's like, you'd be great at Cisco. Yeah. But if, if you're not around that, and so you take people in different communities who are just, this might as well be a different planet. Yes. Yeah. The idea of eating in a restaurant where someone is serving you, food is uncomfortable, right? The idea of checking into a hotel, the idea of flying somewhere on an airplane, we talk about imposter syndrome. That's right. There are deep seated discomfort levels that people have because they just, this is completely foreign, but >>You're saying you could have foreign, you could have gone down a path where selling drugs or jacking cars was, was, was lucrative. >>I had, I had, yeah. I mean, we're getting, we're getting like deep into societal things. I was, I was very lucky. My parents were very, very young, but they're still together to this day. I had loving parents. We were very, very poor. We were surrounded by really, really, really bad stuff. So. >>Okay. So, so, okay. So this, >>I, I don't, I don't compare my situation to others. >>White woman. That's I guess this is my point. Yeah. The dynamic is different than, than a kid who grew up in the inner city. Yes. Right. And, and, and they're both important to address, but yeah. I think you gotta address them in different ways. >>Yes. But if they're, but if they're both completely ignorant of this, >>They don't know it. So it's lack of >>A, they'll never be here. >>You >>Never be here. And it's such a huge, this is such a huge difference from the rest of the world and from the rest, from the rest of our economy. >>So what would you tell a young girl? My daughters, aren't interested in tech. They want to go into fashion or healthcare, whatever Dave's daughters maybe would be a young girl, preteen, maybe teen interested in, not sure which path, why tech, what would advice would you give? >>I think just understanding what you enjoy about life, right? Like which skills are you great at? What characteristics about roles and not really focusing on a specific product. Definitely not cybersecurity versus like the broader network. I mean, literally what do you enjoy doing? And then the roles of, you know, from the skillset that's needed, whether that be marketing, and then you can start to dive into, do I wanna support marketing for a corporate environment for retail, for technology like that will come and follow your passion, which I know is so easy to say, right? But if you're passionate about certain things, I love relationships. I think that holding myself from integrity standpoint, leading with integrity, but building strong relationships on trust, that's something I take really pride in and what I get enjoyment with. It's >>Obviously your superpower. >>It, >>It is. >>But >>Then it will go back to OST too, just being authentic in the process of building those relationships, being direct to the transparency of understanding, like again, knowing what you're good at and then where you can fit into an organization, awareness of technology opportunities, I think will all lend that to. But I also wouldn't worry, like when I was 17 year old, I, I thought I would be playing volleyball in college and then going to work for a professional sports team. You know, life works out very differently. Yeah. >>Right. And then, and for those of you out there, so I love that. Thank you for that great interview. Really appreciate letting us go far field for those of you might say, well, I don't know, man. I don't know what my passion is. I'll give you a line from my daughter, Alicia, you don't learn a lot for your kids. She said, well, if you don't know what your passion is, follow your curiosity. That's great. There you go. Amanda Adams. Thanks so much. It was great to have you on. Okay. Thank you. Keep it right there. We're back with George Kurtz. We're to the short break. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson. You watching the cube from Falcon 22 in Las Vegas.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to Fal.Con 2022, CrowdStrike's big user conference. You're watching the Cube. My name is Dave Vallante. I'm here with my co-host David Nicholson. CrowdStrike is a company that was founded over 10 years ago. This is about 11 years, almost to the day. They're 2 billion company in revenue terms. They're growing at about 60% a year. They've got a path they've committed to wall street. They've got a path to $5 billion by mid decade. They got a $40 billion market cap. They're free, free cash flow positive and trying to build essentially a generational company with a very growing Tam and a modern platform. CrowdStrike has the fundamental belief that the unstoppable breach is a myth. David Nicholson, even though CSOs don't believe that, CrowdStrike is on a mission. Right? >> I didn't hear the phrase. Zero trust mentioned in the keynote >> Right. >> What was mentioned was this idea that CrowdStrike isn't simply a tool, it's a platform. And obviously it takes a platform to get to 5 billion. >> Yeah. So let's talk about the keynote. George Kurtz, the CEO came on. I thought the keynote was, was measured, but very substantive. It was not a lot of hype in there. Most security conferences, the two exceptions are this one and Reinforce, Amazon's big security conference. Steven Schmidt. The first time I was at a Reinforce said "All this narrative about security is such a bad industry" and "We're not doing a great job." And "It's so scary." That doesn't help the industry. George Kurtz sort of took a similar message. And you know what, Dave? When I think of security outside the context of IT I think of like security guards >> Right. >> Like protecting the billionaires. Right? That's a powerful, you know, positive thing. It's not really a defensive movement even though it is defensive but so that was kind of his posture there. But he talked about essentially what I call, not his words permanent changes in the, in the in the cyber defense industry, subsequent to the pandemic. Again, he didn't specifically mention the pandemic but he alluded to, you know, this new world that we live in. Fal.Con is a hundred sessions, eight tracks. And really his contention is we're in the early innings. These guys got 20,000 customers. And I think they got the potential to have hundreds of thousands. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, if I'm working with a security company I want them to be measured. I'm not looking for hype. I don't want those. I don't want those guards to be in disco shirts. I want them in black suits. So, you know, so the, the, the point about measured is is I think a positive one. I was struck by the competence of the people who were on stage today. I have seen very very large companies become kind of bureaucratic. And sometimes you don't get the best of the best up on stage. And we saw a lot of impressive folks. >> Yeah. Michael Santonis get up, but before we get to him. So, a couple points that Kurtz made he said, "digital transformation is needed to bring modern architectures to IT. And that brings modern security." And he laid out that whole sort of old way, new way very Andy Jassy-like old guard, new guard. He didn't hit on it that hard but he basically said "security is all about mitigating risk." And he mentioned that the the CSO I say CSO, he says CSO or CSO has a seat at the board. Now, many CSOs are board level participants. And then he went into the sort of four pillars of, of workload, and the areas that they focus on. So workload to them is end point, identity, and then data. They don't touch network security. That's where they partner with the likes of Cisco, >> Right. >> And Palo Alto networks. But then they went deep into identity threat protection, data, which is their observability platform from an acquisition called Humio. And then they went big time into XDR. We're going to talk about all this stuff. He said, "data is the new digital currency." Talked a lot about how they're now renaming, Humio, Log Scale. That's their Splunk killer. We're going to talk about that all week. And he talked a little bit about the single agent architecture. That is kind of the linchpin of CrowdStrike's architecture. And then Michael Santonis, the CTO came on and did a deep dive into each of those, and really went deep into XDR extended, right? Detection and response. XDR building on EDR. >> Yeah. I think the subject of XDR is something we'll be, we'll be touching on a lot. I think in the next two days. I thought the extension into observability was very, very interesting. When you look at performance metrics, where things are gathering those things in and being able to use a single agent to do so. That speaks to this idea that they are a platform and not just a tool. It's easy to say that you aspire to be a platform. I think that's a proof point. On the subject, by the way of their fundamental architecture. Over the years, there have been times when saying that your infrastructure requires an agent that would've been a deal killer. People say "No agents!" They've stuck to their guns because they know that the best way to deliver what they deliver is to have an agent in the environment. And it has proven to be the right strategy. >> Well, this is one of the things I want to explore with the technical architects that come on here today is, how do you build a lightweight agent that can do everything that you say it's going to do? Because they started out at endpoint, and then they've extended it to all these other modules, you know, identity. They're now into observability. They've got this data platform. They just announced that acquisition of another company they bought Preempt, which is their identity. They announced Responsify, responsify? Reposify, which is sort of extends the observability and gives them visualization or visibility. And I'm like, how do you take? How do you keep an agent lightweight? That's one of the things I want to better understand. And then the other is, as you get into XDR I thought Michael Santonis was pretty interesting. He had black hat last month. He did a little video, you know. >> That was great >> Man in the street, what's XDR what's XDR what's XDR. I thought the best response was, somebody said "a holistic approach to end point security." And so it's really an evolution of, of EDR. So we're going to talk about that. But, how do you keep an agent lightweight and still support all these other capabilities? That's something I really want to dig into, you know, without getting bloated. >> Yeah, Yeah. I think it's all about the TLAs, Dave. It's about the S, it's about SDKs and APIs and having an ecosystem of partners that will look at the lightweight agent and then develop around it. Again, going back to the idea of platform, it's critical. If you're trying to do it all on your own, you get bloat. If you try to be all things to all people with your agent, if you try to reverse engineer every capability that's out there, it doesn't work. >> Well that's one of the things that, again I want to explore because CrowdStrike is trying to be a generational company. In the Breaking Analysis that we published this week. One of the things I said, "In order to be a generational company you have to have a strong ecosystem." Now the ecosystem here is respectable, you know, but it's obviously not AWS class. You know, I think Snowflake is a really good example, ServiceNow. This feels to me like ServiceNow circa 2013. >> Yeah. >> And we've seen how ServiceNow has evolved. You know, Okta, bought Off Zero to give them the developer angle. We heard a little bit about a developer platform today. I want to dig into that some more. And we heard a lot about everybody hates their DLP. I want to get rid of my DLP, data loss prevention. And so, and the same thing with the SIM. One of the ETR round table, Eric Bradley, our colleague at a round table said "If it weren't for the compliance requirements, I would replace my SIM with XDR." And so that's again, another interesting topic. CrowdStrike, cloud native, lightweight agent, you know, some really interesting tuck in acquisitions. Great go-to-market, you know, not super hype just product that works and gets stuff done, you know, seems to have a really good, bright future. >> Yeah, no, I would agree. Definitely. No hype necessary. Just constant execution moving forward. It's clearly something that will be increasingly in demand. Another subject that came up that I thought was interesting, in the keynote, was this idea of security for elections, extending into the realm of misinformation and disinformation which are both very very loaded terms. It'll be very interesting to see how security works its way into that realm in the future. >> Yeah, yeah, >> Yeah. >> Yeah, his guy, Kevin Mandia, who is the CEO of Mandiant, which just got acquired. Google just closed the deal for $5.4 billion. I thought that was kind of light, by the way, I thought Mandiant was worth more than that. Still a good number, but, and Kevin, you know was the founder and, >> Great guy. >> they were self-funded. >> Yeah, yeah impressive. >> So. But I thought he was really impressive. He talked about election security in terms of hardening you know, the election infrastructure, but then, boom he went right to what I see as the biggest issue, disinformation. And so I'm sitting there asking myself, okay how do you deal with that? And what he talked about was mapping network effects and monitoring network effects, >> Right. >> to see who's pumping the disinformation and building career streams to really monitor those network effects, positive, you know, factual or non-factual network or information. Because a lot of times, you know, networks will pump factual information to build credibility. Right? >> Right. >> And get street cred, earn that trust. You know, you talk about zero trust. And then pump disinformation into the network. So they've now got a track. We'll get, we have Kevin Mandia on later with Sean Henry who's the CSO yeah, the the CSO or C S O, chief security officer of CrowdStrike >> more TLA. Well, so, you can think of it as almost the modern equivalent of the political ad where the candidate at the end says I support this ad or I stand behind whatever's in this ad. Forget about trying to define what is dis or misinformation. What is opinion versus fact. Let's have a standard for finding, for exposing where the information is coming from. So if you could see, if you're reading something and there is something that is easily de-code able that says this information is coming from a troll farm of a thousand bots and you can sort of examine the underlying ethos behind where this information is coming from. And you can take that into consideration. Personally, I'm not a believer in trying to filter stuff out. Put the garbage out there, just make sure people know where the garbage is coming from so they can make decisions about it. >> So I got a thought on that because, Kevin Mandia touched on it. Again, I want to ask about this. He said, so this whole idea of these, you know detecting the bots and monitoring the networks. Then he said, you can I think he said something that's to the effect of. "You can go on the offensive." And I'm thinking, okay, what does that mean? So for instance, you see it all the time. Anytime I see some kind of fact put out there, I got to start reading the comments and like cause I like to see both sides, you know. I'm right down the middle. And you'll go down and like 40 comments down, you're like, oh this is, this is fake. This video was edited, >> Right. >> Da, da, da, da, and then a bunch of other people. But then the bots take over and that gets buried. So, maybe going on the offensive is to your point. Go ahead and put it out there. But then the bots, the positive bots say, okay, by the way, this is fake news. This is an edited video FYI. And this is who put it out and here's the bot graph or something like that. And then you attack the bots with more bots and then now everybody can sort of of see it, you know? And it's not like you don't have to, you know email your friend and saying, "Hey dude, this is fake news." >> Right, right. >> You know, Do some research. >> Yeah. >> Put the research out there in volume is what you're saying. >> Yeah. So, it's an, it's just I thought it was an interesting segue into another area of security under the heading of election security. That is fraught with a lot of danger if done wrong, if done incorrectly, you know, you you get into the realm of opinion making. And we should be free to see information, but we also should have access to information about where the information is coming from. >> The other narrative that you hear. So, everything's down today again and I haven't checked lately, but security generally, we wrote about this in our Breaking Analysis. Security, somewhat, has held up in the stock market better than the broad tech market. Why? And the premise is, George Kurt said this on the last conference call, earnings call, that "security is non-discretionary." At the same time he did say that sales cycles are getting a little longer, but we see this as a positive for CrowdStrike. Because CrowdStrike, their mission, or one of their missions is to consolidate all these point tools. We've talked many, many times in the Cube, and in Breaking Analysis and on Silicon Angle, and on Wikibon, how the the security business use too many point tools. You know this as a former CTO. And, now you've got all these stove pipes, the number one challenge the CSOs face is lack of talent. CrowdStrike's premise is they can consolidate that with the Fal.Con platform, and have a single point of control. "Single pane of glass" to use that bromide. So, the question is, is security really non-discretionary? My answer to that is yes and no. It is to a sense, because security is the number one priority. You can't be lax on security. But at the same time the CSO doesn't have an open checkbook, >> Right. >> He or she can't just say, okay, I need this. I need that. I need this. There's other competing initiatives that have to be taken in balance. And so, we've seen in the ETR spending data, you know. By the way, everything's up relative to where it was, pre you know, right at the pandemic, right when, pandemic year everything was flat to down. Everything's up, really up last year, I don't know 8 to 10%. It was expected to be up 8% this year, let's call it 6 to 7% in 21. We were calling for 7 to 8% this year. It's back down to like, you know, 4 or 5% now. It's still healthy, but it's softer. People are being more circumspect. People aren't sure about what the fed's going to do next. Interest rates, you know, loom large. A lot of uncertainty out here. So, in that sense, I would say security is not non-discretionary. Sorry for the double negative. What's your take? >> I think it's less discretionary. >> Okay. >> Food, water, air. Non-discretionary. (David laughing) And then you move away in sort of gradations from that point. I would say that yeah, it is, it falls into the category of less-discretionary. >> Alright. >> Which is a good place to be. >> Dave Nicholson and David Vallante here. Two days of wall to wall coverage of Fal.Con 2022, CrowdStrike's big user conference. We got some great guests. Keep it right there, we'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> In just over 10 years, CrowdStrike has become a leading independent security firm with more than 2 billion in annual recurring revenue, nearly 60% ARR growth, and approximate $40 billion market capitalization, very high retention rates, low churn, and a path to 5 billion in revenue by mid decade. The company has joined Palo Alto Networks as a gold standard pure play cyber security firm. It has achieved this lofty status with an architecture that goes beyond a point product. With outstanding go to market and financial execution, some sharp acquisitions and an ever increasing total available market. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" and ahead of Falcon, Fal.Con, CrowdStrike's user conference, we take a deeper look into CrowdStrike, its performance, its platform, and survey data from our partner ETR. Now, the general consensus is that spending on Cyber is non-discretionary and is held up better than other technology sectors. While this is generally true, as this data shows, it's nuanced. Let's explore this a bit. First, this is a year-to-date chart of the stock performance of CrowdStrike relative to Palo Alto, the BUG ETF, which is a Cyber index, the NASDAQ and SentinelOne, a relatively new entrant to the IPO public markets. Now, as you can see the security sector as evidenced by the orange line, that Cyber ETF, is holding up better than the overall NASDAQ which is off 28% year-to-date. Palo Alto has held up incredibly well, the best, being off only around 4% year-to-date. Whereas CrowdStrike is off in the double digits this year. But up as we talked about in one of our last "Breaking Analysis" on Cyber, up from its lows this past May. Now, CrowdStrike had a very nice beat and raise on August 30th. But the stop didn't respond well initially. We asked "Breaking Analysis" contributor, Chip Simonton for his technical take and he stated that CrowdStrike has bounced around for the last three months in its current range. He said that Cyber stocks have held up better than the rest of the market, as we're showing. And now might be a good time to take a shot but he is cautious. FedEx had a warning today of a global recession and that's obvious case for a concern. You know, maybe some of these quality Cyber stocks like Palo Alto and CrowdStrike and Zscaler will outperform in a recession, but that play is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it's feeling like a longer, more drawn out tech lash than many had hoped. Perhaps as much as 12 to 18 months of bouncing around with sellers still in control, is generally the sentiment from Simonton. So in terms of Cyber spending being non-discretionary, we'd say it's less discretionary than other it sectors but the CISO still does not have an open wallet, as we've reported before. We've seen that spending momentum has decelerated in all sectors throughout the year. This is an across the board trend. Now, independent of the stock price, George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, he's running a marathon, not a sprint. And this company is running at a nice pace despite tough macro headwinds. The company is free cash flow positive and is in the black, or a non-GAAP operating profit basis and yet it's growing ARR at nearly 60%. Frank Slootman uses the term inherent profitability, meaning that the company could drive more profits if it wanted to dial down expenses especially in go to market costs. But that would be a mistake for a company like CrowdStrike, in our opinion. While it has an impressive nearly 20,000 customers, there are hundreds of thousands of customers that CrowdStrike could penetrate. So like Snowflake and Slootman, Kurtz is not taking its foot off the gas. Now, the fundamental strength of CrowdStrike and its secret sauce is its architecture and platform, in our view, so let's take a deeper look. CrowdStrike believes that the unstoppable breach is a myth. Now, CISOs don't agree with that because they assume they're going to get breached, but that's CrowdStrike's point of view, so lofty vision. CrowdStrike's mission is to consolidate the patchwork of solutions by introducing modules that go beyond point products. CrowdStrike has more than 20 modules, I think 22, that span a range of capabilities as shown in this table. Now, there are a few critical aspects of the CrowdStrike architecture that bear mentioning. First is the lightweight agent, that is fundamental. You know, we're used to thinking that agentless is good and agent is bad, but in this case, a powerful but small, slim and easy to install but unobtrusive agent has its advantages because it supports multiple CrowdStrike modules. The second point is CrowdStrike from the beginning has been dogmatic about getting all the telemetry data into the cloud. It sort of shunned doing bespoke on prem so that all the data could be analyzed. So the more agents that CrowdStrike installs around the world, the more data it has access to and the better its intelligence. Few companies have access to more data, perhaps Microsoft given it scale and size is an exception in that endpoint space. CrowdStrike has developed a purpose-built threat graph and analytics platform that allows it to quickly ingest in near real time key telemetry data and detect not only known malware, that's pretty straightforward, pretty much anybody could do that. But using machine intelligence, it can also detect unknown malware and other potentially malicious behavior using indicators of attack, IOC, or IOAs. Humio is shown here as a company that CrowdStrike bought for around 400 million in early 2020, early 2021. It's the company's Splunk killer and will serve as an observability platform. It's really starting to take off, that's a great market for them to go after. CrowdStrike, to try to put it into sort of a summary, uses a three pronged approach. First is it's next generation anti-virus, meaning it's SaaS base. SAS based solution that can do fast lookups to telemetry data and that data lives in the cloud. And this leverages cloud strikes proprietary threat graph. Now, the second is endpoint detection and response. CrowdStrike sends all endpoint activity to the cloud and can process the data in real time. CrowdStrike EDR allows you to search data history and its partners with threat intelligent platforms who push the data into CrowdStrike, the CrowdStrike cloud. This increases CloudStrike's observation space. It also has containment capabilities in EDR to fence off compromised system. Now, the third leg of the stool is CrowdStrike's world class manage hunting approach. Like many firms, CrowdStrike has a crack team of experts that is looking at the data, but CrowdStrike's advantage is the amount of data, that observation space that we just talked about, and near real time capabilities of the architecture thanks to that proprietary database that they've developed. And all this is built in the cloud and so it enables global scale. And of course, agility. Now, let's dig into some of the survey data and take a look at what ETR respondents are saying about the spending momentum for CrowdStrike in context with its peers. Here's a very recent dataset, the October preliminary data from the October dataset in ETR's survey. Eric Bradley shared with us, ETR's head of strategy, and he runs the round tables, he's a frequent "Breaking Analysis" contributor. This is an XY graph with Netcore or spending momentum on the vertical axis and the overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis. That dotted red line at 40% indicates an elevated level of spending velocity. Anything above that, we consider really impressive. Note the CrowdStrike progression since the pandemic started. The two notable points are one, that CrowdStrike has remained consistently above that 40% mark and two, it has made notable progress to the right. You can see that sort of squiggly line consistently increasing its share with one little anomaly there in the early days of over a two-year period. The other call out here is Microsoft in the upper-right. We circled Microsoft as usual. Microsoft messes up the data because it's such a dominant player and has referenced earlier as a massive scale and very quality telemetry from its endpoints. Unlike AWS, Microsoft is a direct competitor of CrowdStrike's. Nonetheless, the sector remains very strong with lots of players. Cyber is a large and expanding TAM with too many point tools that CrowdStrike is well positioned to consolidate, in our view. Now, here's a more narrow view of that same XY graph. What it does is it takes out Microsoft to kind of normalize the data a bit and it compares a number of firms that specialize in endpoint, along with CrowdStrike such as Tanium which also has a lightweight agent, by the way, and appears to be doing pretty well. SentinelOne did a relatively recent IPO, took off, stock hasn't done as well since, as you saw earlier. Carbon Black which VMware bought for around $2 billion and Cylance which is the Blackberry pivot. Now, we've also for context included Palo Alto and Cisco because they are major players with the big presence in security and they've got solutions that compete with CrowdStrike. But you can see how CrowdStrike looms large with a higher net score than these others. Although Palo Alto is very impressive, as is Cisco, steady. But Palo Alto also, sorry, CrowdStrike also has a very steady posture instead of just looming on that X axis. Let's now take a look at XDR, extended detection and response. XDR is kind of this bit of a buzzword but CrowdStrike seems to be taking the mantle and trying to sort of own the category and define it, in our view. It's a natural evolution of endpoint detection and response, EDR. In a recent ETR Roundtable hosted by our colleague, Eric Bradley, the sentiment among several CIOs is that existing SIEM, security information and event management platforms are inadequate and some see XDR as a replacement for, or at least a strong compliment to SIEM. CISOs want a single view of their data. Hmm, you haven't heard that before. They want help prioritizing potentially high impact breaches and they want to automate the low level stuff because the problem is sometimes too much information becomes information overload and you can't prioritize. So they want to consolidate platforms. They want better co consistency. They have too many dashboards, too many stove pipes. They have difficulty scaling and they have inconsistent telemetry data. As one CISO said, it's a call out here. "If the regulatory requirement isn't there, I absolutely would get rid of my SIEM." So CrowdStrike, we feel, is in a good position to continue to gain, share and disrupt this space. And that's what Dave Nicholson and I will be looking for next week when theCUBE is at Fal.Con, CrowdStrike's user conference. We'll be there for two days at the area in Vegas. In addition to CrowdStrike CEO, we'll hear from government cyber experts. We always hear that at security conferences and the CEO of Mandiant. Google just the other day closed its $5 billion plus acquisition of Mandiant, which is a threat intelligence expert and MSSP. I'm going to hear a lot about MSSPs by the way. CrowdStrike is a growing MSSP base. We think that's a really interesting sector because many companies don't have a SOC. As many as 50% of companies in the United States don't have a security operations center. So they need help, that's where MSPs come in. At the conference, there'll be a real focus on the Falcon platform. And we expect CrowdStrike to educate the audience on its multiple modules and how to take advantage of the capabilities beyond endpoint. And we'll also be watching for the ecosystem conversations. We saw this at reinforced, for example, where CrowdStrike and Okta were presenting together to show how these companies products compliment each other in the marketplace. Sometimes it gets confusing when you hear that CrowdStrike has an identity product. Okta, of course, is the identity specialist. So we'll be helping extract that signal from the noise. Because a generational company must have a strong ecosystem. CrowdStrike is evolving and our belief is that it has some work to do to create a stronger partner flywheel, and we're eager to dig into that next week. So if you're at the event, please do stop by theCUBE, say hello to Dave Nicholson and myself. Okay, we're going to leave it there today. Many thanks to Chip Simonton and Eric Bradley for their input and contributions to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson, who does production, he also manages our podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, in our Boston studios, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some wonderful editing and I really appreciate that. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" Podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Brought to you by five nine. >> Yeah, good afternoon. Welcome to Orlando, Florida The Cube is here at Enterprise Connect. Twenty ninety nine. Lisa Martin with my co host to Minuteman Stew and I have been Here's starting on Day two stew. Good afternoon, >> Lisa. Great to see Yeah. Day two of three. Enterprise Connect. >> It's not that sunny >> here in the Sunshine State, but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice controlled environment. Walk by. I saw the alligator for bid. They've got nice planning. They've got I love in the atrium there. There's great branding of thie E c. Nineteen. Everybody's taken photos of it. I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning showing some of the setting here. So >> it's a It's a nice >> event way said sixty five hundred intended, which is nice. It's not one of these, you know, twenty thirty thousand. You're just buried by people toe big Expo Hall. But, you know, you could really get to talk to some people and enjoy the size of the show. >> Yeah, I agree. The size is great. It does no pun intended. Facilitate that collaboration and communication. You mentioned a number of attendees about one hundred forty vendors, and you can hear the noise behind soon. MIAs were in the ex ball in the booth of five nine and lots of conversations going on. This is an event that I find very interesting state because we talk about the contact center were all consumers every day. And we talked about this with a lot of our guests yesterday that the customer experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization, that it's essential to deliver an Omni Channel customer experience meeting with the consumer wherever they want to be and also facilitating a connected conversation so that if a shot is initiated and then the consumer goes to social or makes a phone call, that problem resolution is actually moving forward before we get into. Today's key knows a couple of really interesting things that you and I learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on when we were talking with Blair Pleasant. One of the things that she and five nine uncovered with some research is that an employee's satisfaction was lower on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers, which was surprising from a collab and communications perspective that if employees, especially those agents on the front line, are having some challenges, it's going to be directly relating Tio customer Lifetime Value. >> Yeah, it was a little bit surprising, you know, if you think about just in general, you know, often the admin is not the key focus there. It's I need to get business outcomes. I need to get R. A Y. You know what I care about is, you know, how is my customer doing? But at the end of the day, you talk about the contact centers. If I don't have an agent that's engaged, really, how is that conversation going to go with the customer? So they need to think about that, You know? How will the technology help them do their job? Better help them game mastery faster? There were some things that I saw really parallel toe conversation we're having about cloud in general, which is, you know, there's lots of technologies out there, but it's often it's not the technology issue it is, you know, the organization and the people issue in the keynote this morning there was a big customer panel and that was definitely something we heard. I love one of the customers actually said We're going to make all these changes And they had the Don't panic towels, which, of course, harkens back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy S O. You know, we know things are going to change. There might be some things you need to work through. But don't worry, we're there to help on. We will get through this and at the end, it should be better. >> No, I like that. You brought that up. I love that Tabal. Don't panic because, you know, we were talking yesterday a lot about the customer experience, the expectations of this rising, empowered consumer also the agent experience. But then, of course, there's the internal collaboration that's essential to all of this. And as I think, the gentleman that you're referring to was from Continental G talking about Hey, we don't have all the answers. But adoption of these tools internally is critical, but it's also a cultural sort of stepwise process. I thought that was very cool, that they actually were very transparent with their people. We identify this is not going to be smooth sailing, but it's an essential part of our business growth. >> Yeah, I tell you, it was really interesting. Listen, the panel there was one of the companies up there. They're pretty large and they said, Look, we're going to standardize on a single tool and everybody's going to get on board. And I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that because, you know, the engineering group versus the marketing group versus you know, the Contact Centre. There's certain things that they need to be able to collaborate. But thing like, you know, one tool to rule them all. You know, it sounds a little bit tough out there. Yes, there needs to be some standardization, but, you know, we see that in the cloud world. You know, it turns out customers are using multiple clouds out there because there should be a main one that we focus on. But if I need a best of breed piece for here, or if there's ah, feature functionality, they can't get elsewhere. I need tohave that, and we see that at this show there's just such a diverse ecosystem meant, and there's one hundred forty there's people that make device. There's all these software pieces, there's some big hubs. And then there are all the ancillary things that help plug and enhance and do this because there is some great innovation going on here. Some cool software, things that we're hoping toe, you know, take everything from, you know, White Board and voice two speech and globalization to the next phase. >> Yeah, that was very interesting. Especially the Microsoft teams demo. That Lori writing team this morning, The panel Now that you talked about, there were seven, uh, customers from a variety of industries. Kurtz was their continental. We mentioned, I think, paychecks. I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking about their plans to migrate to cloud, all in some percentage, considering the numbers that we heard yesterday stew in terms of the cloud penetration for the contact center market, what were your thoughts? They're about those things. All in Depends on what makes sense. >> Yeah, It reminds me of what we were talking about in the public loud discussion two years ago. Way No cloud is growing at a very fast pace. Look at our friend here at five. Nine they were growing at a much faster pace, then the contact center. Overall, I believe they're growing somewhere twenty five percent as opposed The industry as a whole is growing at about nine percent. So we understand that cloud is growing faster than the market overall. And it was one of moderated. The panel said that today is about a third, a third, a third on premises hybrid in public and where that kind of steady state will be. I think it's still too early to tell in this industry, just as it is in cloud overall. But absolutely I burst a little bit when it's like, Well, you will never do this one this way. Well, you know, never is not something that we like to say in it because you never know when when that will be possible. You know, my background I worked on virtual ization, started out in test Devon. It reached a point where really there was no technical reasons that it couldn't do it when he rolled. The really large companies will never use cloud for it. Really. Who is better it scaling and updating and making sure you can manage an environment then those hyper scale players. You know, Microsoft got a big present here. You don't ask him. Like her soft customer. Uh oh. You're running off his three sixty five. You're living on Azure. What version of that are you running? And do you have the latest security patch as opposed to? If I have a Windows desktop and I'm not doing up a weight, have I done my patron? If I Donald this stuff and you amplify that by thousands of you know of agents and Contact Center, we know that Cloud has certain speed, agility and being up to get new features and updates in there that I just can't do nearly as well if it is something that I am installing and having to maintain myself or with a service organization, >> right? And so we talked yesterday with the number of guests about what are some of the imperatives to move to cloud in the end, the sum of the non obvious ones cost obviously, is one that we talk about all the time rights to it. Any show that we're at, but also the opportunity for businesses to leverage the burgeoning power of a I. Of course, every show we go Teo Isa Buzzword Machine learning. And of course, the cloud provides the opportunity for there to be more data to train the machines to be better at context and her overall. And, of course, internal communications. >> Right. And something that I like to hear at this show is start talking about a PC compatibility. You talk about the partnerships that are going on, It is not one software stack we're talking about platforms. We're talking about how integrations can happen so that if somebody has the cool new thing that does, you know, a real time engagement better than what I had before. Well, I could probably plug that in, and it's going to work on my platform. You know, everybody here talks about Well, whether you're, you know, a web, acts of Microsoft teams a zoom shop O r. You know any of those various environment, other? Everybody's working across those environments. We've had some standardisation here s O so that whichever one I've chosen, I'm not locked into one environment. And you know, I can help modernized the pieces as a need and take advantage of those new innovations when they come >> Absolutely all right. So, stew, you're a man on the street last night. Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard in some of the folks that you met Way. >> It's interesting. We think we talked about it in our open yesterday. There are a number of companies that have been around for a while And what are they doing today? What is their focus? And couple of companies have done rebranding. So the big party there was a line and I managed to get myself in. Is Polly So Polly has rebranded? Of course it was Polycom and Plantronics coming together. How many times we hear it on the keynote stage that they mentioned that everywhere you go, they're branding is there, So look kudos to their branding and messaging team. We're going to have their CEO on the programme tomorrow, but, you know, you know, the CEO talked about, you know, their new logo. It's like the meaning behind it. Of course, Polly means many, but there's three piece, and if you look at it, it looks like the iconic conference phone. So, you know the room was in there. Everybody is enjoying the appetizers and the open bar. But, you know, there was people, people, no polycom. I'm back in our conference room. We've got one of those speaker phones in there in the nineties. I usedto, you know, sell their conference phones in their video conferencing When I worked for was now a via but was lucid at the time. So there's a lot of intersections. Thie. Other thing I've really found is it feels like everybody here, you know, at one point in their career either work for Cisco or worked for, you know, the Lucent family. You know, of course, T back in the day had the whole telecom space, but it is like many other shows. We go to a rather interconnected community here on DH. You know, we'd guess on It's like, Oh, yeah, Cisco, Skype. And now at five nines. Yeah, it is friendly. You don't see some of the, you know, some of the places we go There's bitter rivalries between, you know, key competitors, and yeah, while you know, all the contact centers don't love, you know that they're there. Brothers and sisters, a two competitors there. Chances are they've worked with half the people there on, you know, Sometimes the future will be working with again. So it's it's a it's a good atmosphere. The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to the show, a Zoe said at the top. >> And this show has evolved over the last night. We were talking about yesterday twenty eight, twenty nine years, starting out as being called PBX and then re branding to Voice Con and then in about twenty eleven to Enterprise Connect. And it was interesting that because the word innovation comes up all the time, as does evolution of communications and collaborations. But when the king it was his kicked off this morning they talked about This is the biggest ever enterprise connect that they've had. So you can feel and you can hear it behind us the momentum, the excitement he talked about. There's a lot of cover artery here. There's a lot of two degrees of separation and tech, but the opportunities for every business, whether yours selling a small particles service on the Amazon marketplace or you're a big a global enterprise, the opportunity to connect and deliver a superior a competitive advantage to your customer experience. This table stakes these days if you don't have that opportunity. Those capabilities. There's going to be something that's going to come and replace you in a heartbeat. >> Yeah, absolutely. At least I have a background in space. But there were places where our walk Drano said, Wow, there's applicability for our business. I mean, we use a number of the collaboration Sweets, You know, I mentioned, I've got I've got maps for, you know, not just the Google sweet, but all the collaboration tools on there's technology that I'm like Gucci. I want to understand that a lot of them are downloaded an app. You can start using them for free. And then there's a Freeman model and and others arm or enterprise licenses on. It's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic as to, you know, it is the pricing. Is Mohr built for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional? You know, I'm going to buy boxes and have a huge capital expense up front. So >> what do you think if you look back to your early days in the call center when you were just a young pup, how much easier your job have been? If you had had some of the capabilities that we're talking about >> now least I wish, you know, back in the nineties, you know, if I just had linked in alone, I could have supercharged s o much of what I did. But all these other tools, right? Putting at my fingertips information. It was like, you know, Lisa tell you date myself in the nineties and taking a call where everybody that works in the call center You knew the area code of every single environment that it didn't tell you where it wass you would be like, Oh, yeah, I, too want to hide in New York. How you doing? You could be whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon based on what part it was like. Oh, wait, I'm talking Arizona. They don't follow daylight savings time. We'd remember all that stuff today. There's too many exchanges. Everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go. S o it was It was a smaller country back then. But in the other hand, the technology is actually going to give us the opportunity to be ableto imbue that allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness that today's digital age sometimes tries to tear away from us. >> Exactly. We need that empathy in that connectedness. So, stew, we have a great program today. Stick around. We've got some folks from Selah Jin we've got. It's now on the programme within communications Fuse. Tetra VX five nine, of course. And there in that little and zoom this afternoon. Yes, thank you. Five O'Clock for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

live from New York City it's the cube covering Lenovo transform 2.0 brought to you by Lenovo cubes live coverage of vote transform here in New York City I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host stu minimun so Stu this is the second ever Lenovo transform event and yet it's the third time the cube has been at a Lenovo explain to me what's going on here first first of all I mean Rebecca set the stage here we're at basketball city in New York City right on the water it feels like you know we just hit intermission time everybody got let out after after the keynotes of a good energy yes absolutely yes two years ago we were actually at a Lenovo show and the Enterprise Group is a small piece of it so ashton kutcher was there showing off the cool new note moto foam that has like the snap-on things that now they have like a 5g upgradable version of that so there is still the consumer group I saw some really cool gaming headsets that I might know myself but our focus today really talked about the enterprise the data center group is the ones that bring us in and we're gonna have a bunch of their guests on but you know Lenovo obviously company been around for a long time even though I know some people like wait who's Lenovo and they like wait look at the laptop their company gave them oh that's all I know is it every day right absolutely and they drive a lot of the things behind the scenes just cuz that's the IT business you know I still most people I talk to they're like what do you do I'm like it's computer stuff you know you don't understand so the big news of the day obviously is the net up Lenovo partnership to global powerhouse is coming together I want to unpack that with you but but first of all let's just talk about where Lenovo is at this moment in time this is a company that is really turning the corner and and we're starting to see a lot of positive growth explain tell our viewers where we are get our computers up to speed so so absolutely really good point we're gonna get to that that NetApp which is the big news of the day but to set the stage if you think over a decade ago when Lenovo acquired the PC division out of IBM ThinkPad brand people knew everything like that couple of years they went down and then they grew it become the number one PC manufacturer worldwide well they picked up the server division last year we were talking about 25 years of these x86 servers in the history and everything like that well history seems to be repeating yourself lenovo hopes it all repeats itself because they had about two years of well revenue to crime a little bit where do they focus and now they're starting to see growth you know some good growth and you know I think if it's you know year-over-year that the fastest growing you know vendor in the space you know large global presence so a lot of excitement there on all of the pieces from Lenovo hyper scale I'd love to talk about we're gonna have some segments here you know the storage piece as those solutions go together things like hyper-converged were there their large growth with new panics so a lot of things happening Lenovo and starting to see the fruits of the big Motorola Mobility and x86 server acquisitions really starting to hit on all cylinders ok so now so we and we are going to talk about all of those things later on the show I've got a lot of great guests coming but but but Lenovo NetApp so we're having Kurtz Kagan and Brett Anderson of net upcoming on the show right up after this what do you make of the deal and is it is it going to be the game changer that these two executives are predicting so when you look at Lenovo and say ok you know they didn't form you know a server group when they they bought the server division it's a datacenter group and if you have the data center let's not forget they actually have some nice networking pieces which what's the old the BNT pieces but when they talked about really their global scale you know the whole data center piece and mobility go together you've got to have storage and lenovo has a bunch of storage pieces they have a lot of partnerships we mentioned lenovo companies like pivot three scale computing are helping them but you know you bring that up and up is the largest independent storage company today now last numbers i saw friends at IDC we're putting out the numbers that you know net up is number two overall Dell and its various pieces of course Dell EMC from the EMC acquisition is number one but you know net up is there a broad portfolio getting in there with the all flash or a markets and this will be joint development ten products and two families but net offers very strong position in the all flashier a market and if you look at what storage is today there's really servers inside and this is servers there so this is not just wrapping these together you know and go to market but you know they are going to do joint development they're gonna work on innovation together they've got a joint venture in China because while Lenovo is global it is their positioning in China that will help them I remember if I saw right just you know they announced it today they start shipping tomorrow like overnight they will be the number three player in China and they have you know goal to drive them to be a force number one there and that's the story you hit with Lenovo they've got growth they've got a good usually at least top three position in many pieces of the market and through partnerships to requisitions that you know they are they are helping to themselves to broaden their portfolio move up the stack on some of these and deliver these solutions to help as they Kirk said it you know they're helping solve some of humanity's biggest challenges we're gonna talk about like supercomputers and the like that do some of those really cool things well I want to get back to what you chose to the strategy of the company in terms of the relationships because that really has been lenovo's their operating model is is are these collaborations these partnerships and they have them with with the big companies that everyone sort of the Amazon the Google the Microsoft and then they also have them with a lot of small smaller players is that in this fast-moving fast changing IT environment is that smart yeah absolutely they have to no single vendor can do it all usually we had a you know a decade or so where it was like well let's vertically integrate and put it all together then people thought well maybe it's just gonna be commoditized I mean come on Intel's the big sponsor here you know arm and arm of course that's probably you know the number one partner that lenovo has everybody's partnering with Intel everybody's parking with Nvidia VMware and Microsoft are the same you and I are going to be at Microsoft ignite in two weeks we're gonna be talking to a Lenovo executive they're one of the four biggest sponsors at that show working on as your staff working on the solutions I was at VMworld a couple of weeks ago Lenovo at a big booth they're talking about first that they have with VMware visa and moving in that market so of course Dell has a very strong relationship to VMware but Lenovo partners across a lot of these environments and to speak to how do you differentiate the story I really like is there's you know this is a multi-faceted market so yes there's the enterprise there's traditional markets that Lenovo from server early well there's new changing markets like Pike hyper-converged but as I mentioned like the hyper scale their strategy there is what they call odium Plus which means they do some customization but it massive scale these are tens or hundreds thousand plus servers that they will build for a vendor in a specific environment and it's not just off-the-shelf Intel that they do for that and there are some players in the server market that have just left not specifically HPE pretty sure that they're not touching that market it is relatively low margin it is very hard to get there you need that global scale so lenovo differentiating how they compete against the you know Dell Dell AMC and HP ease of the world as well as the ODMs out there kind of a generic brands so that they're making good progress and the partnerships absolutely are going to help them get there I'm glad we not only have a couple of partners we have you know one of the supercomputer customers on to really talk about some of those cool use cases you mentioned this idea of how Lenovo competes and the the theme that we keep hearing from all of the Lenovo executives is this relentless focus on the customer and really trying to comport itself as this brand that can be trusted that is ethical that is responsible is is that enough is that enough to just to just be to win your heart customers hearts and minds or do you need to be a little more so so so look it if there's one thing that you want to stick and start on focusing on the customer is a great place you're not gonna lose customers because they love you and you support them that's great when you talk about trust the storage world that's what we buy buy on trust and risk is what the storage and networking people buy so that's a great thing but it's not enough and I'm excited Rebekah we've got a whole bunch of interviews be able to dig in got the net up one kicking off and then some of the other pieces to really help us answer that question as to right start with the customer and everything leads from there so they're gonna be a great show thank you so much always a pleasure co-hosting with you alright excited for 6:00 with us at the cube we will have more from Lenovo transform here in New York City in just a few minutes