>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for live from Las Vegas. We're here at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave a long time, very excited to have in-person events back ish. I'll say we're going to be talking about automation as a boardroom imperative. We have two guests joining us here, James Matras here consulting principal. America's intelligent automation leader at UI and Irv. Dennis retired EA partner, and former CFO of HUD gentlemen. Welcome to the program. Exciting topic automation as a boardroom imperative, James says COO and start with you. How do you discuss the value of automation as being a key component and driver of transformation? >>That's a great question. I think what we've seen in the last couple of years is the evolution of what automation used to be. Two is going nine. And we've seen the shift from what we call generation one, which is very RPA centric type automation to more generation two, which is the combined integration of multiple technologies. It can target an intern process and it's quite important that you understand the pivotal shift because it's not enabling us to move from a task micro top agenda to a macro agenda actually impacts an organization at a strategic level. The ability to be able to look at processes more deeply to automate them in an end to end process collectively and use these different technologies in a synergistic manner truly becomes powerful because it shifts the narrative from a micro process agenda into more systemic area. >>So gen zero is an Emmanuel gen one is RPA point tools that individual maybe getting their personal productivity out. And then now you're saying gen three is across the enterprise. Where are we in terms of, you know, take your experience from your practical experience? Where do you think the world is? It's like probably between zero and one still. Right. But the advanced folks of thinking about gen three, w what's your, >>Yeah, it's a great question. And, um, when you and I, I can do the comparison being private and public sector on this because I was 37 years with E Y then went into retirement and CFL at HUD CFO. Ed was, was a HUD was nowhere. They had to just do all the intelligence digitalization, um, throughout, uh, from scratch. The private sector is probably five or six years ahead of them. But when you think about James talks about the gen one, two and three, the private sector is probably somewhere between two and three. And I know we're talking about the board in this conversation. Um, boards probably have one and two on their radar. Some boards may have three, some may not, but that's where the real strategic focus for boards needs to be is looking forward and, and getting ahead. But I think from a public sector standpoint, lot to go private sector, more to go as well. But, uh, there's a, there's a bit of a gap, but the public sector is probably only about three or four years behind the private sector >>To be okay. Let's look at the numbers, look at, look at the progress for the quarter. And now it's like discussion on cyber discussion on digital discussion on automated issue. It really changed the narrative over the last decade. >>Yeah, I think when you think of boards today, the lots of conversation on cyber that that conversation has been around for a while. A lot of conversation on ESG today, that conversation is getting, getting very popular. But I think when you think of next three, a Jen talks that bear James talks about, um, that's got to start elevating itself if it's not within the boardroom right now, because that will be the future of the company. And the way I think of it from a board's conversation is if a company doesn't think of themselves as a technology company in all aspects, no matter what you do, you are a technology company or you need to be. And if you're not thinking along that way, you're gonna, you're gonna lose market share and you're going to start falling behind your competitors. >>Well, and how much acceleration did the pandemic bring to just that organizations that weren't digital forward last year are probably gone? >>I think it certainly has shifted quite a lot. There's been a drive, the relevance of technology and hard plays for us in the modern workforce in the modern workplace has fundamentally changed the pandemic. We reimagine how we do things. Technology has progressed in itself significantly, and that made a big difference for, for all the environments as a result of that. So certainly is one of the byproducts of the pandemic has been certainly a good thing for everybody. >>Where does automation fit in the board? Virginia? You've got compensation committee. You've probably, I mean, there's somebody in charge of cyber. You got ESG now there's automation part of a broader digital agenda. Where's what's the right word. >>You know, I, I would personally put it in a enterprise risk management from a standpoint that if you're not focused on it, it's going to be a risk to the enterprise. And, um, when you think of automation and intelligent automation and RPA, uh, I think boards have a pretty good sense of how you interface with your customers and your vendors. I think a big push ought to be looking internally at your own infrastructure. You know, what are you, what are you doing in the HR space? What are you doing in a financial statement, close process? What are you doing your procurement process? I suspect there's still a lot of very routine transactions and processing within those, that infrastructure that if you just apply some RPA artificial intelligence, that data extraction techniques, you can probably eliminate a lot of man hours from the routine stuff. And, and the many man hours is probably not the right way to think of it. You could elevate people's work from being pushing numbers around to being data analyzers. And that's where the excitement is for people to see. >>It's not how it's viewed at organizations. We're not eliminating hours. Well focusing folks on much more strategic down at a test. >>Yes. I would say that that's exactly right now in the private sector, you're always going to have the efficiency play and profitability. So there will be an element of that. I know when at HUD we're, we're focused, we were not focused on eliminating hours because we needed people and we focused on creating efficiencies within the space and having people convert from, again, being Trent routine transactions, to being data analyzers and made the jobs, I'm sure. Fund for them as well. I mean, this is a lot of fun stuff. And, and if, uh, uh, companies need to be pushing this down through their entire infrastructure, not just dealing with our customers and the third parties that they deal with >>Catalyst or have been public sector. So you mentioned they may be five or six years behind, but I've seen certain public sector organizations really lean in, they learn from, from the private sector. And then even when you think about some of the military, how advanced they are absolutely. You know, the private could learn from them and if they could open it up. But >>So, yeah, I think that's, that's well said I was in this, you know, the that's the civilian part with, with the housing and urban development. I think the catalyst is, uh, bringing the expertise in, uh, I know when I, when I came, I went to HUD to elevate their financial infrastructure. It was, it was probably the worst of the cabinet agency. The financials were a mess. There was no, there was a, uh, there was not a clean audit opinion for eight years. And I was there to fix that and we fixed it through digitalization and digital transformation, as well as a financial transformation. The catalyst is just creating the education, letting people know what is, what, what technology can do. You don't have to be a programmer, but it's like driving a car. Anybody can drive a car, but we can't mechanic, you know, work as a mechanic on it. >>So I think it's creating education, letting people know what it can do. And at HUD, for example, we did a very simple, I was telling James earlier, we did a very simple RPA project on an, an, a financial statement, close process. It was 2,600 hours, six months. Once we implemented the RPA, brought that down to 70 hours, two weeks, people's eyes exploded with it. And then all of a sudden, I said, I want everyone to go back and come back with, with any manual process, any routine process that can convert to an RPA. And I got a list of a hundred, then it came then became trying to slow everything down. We're not going to do it overnight. Yeah, exactly. >>So, but it was self-funding. It was >>Self-funded. Yes. >>And, and how do you take that message to customers that it could be self-funding how how's that resonating >>Very well. And I think it was important. I always like to say, it's a point of differentiation because you look at, uh, mentioned earlier that organizations are basically technology companies. That's what they are. But now if you look across that we no longer compete at the ERP level without got SAP, Oracle, it's not a point of differentiation. We don't compete the application layer where they've got service. Now, black line, how we use them is helpful. We competed the digital layer and with automation is a major component of that. That's where your differentiation takes place. Now, if you have a point of differentiation, that is self-funding, it fundamentally changes the game. And that's why it's so important for boards to understand this, because that risk management, if you've not doing it, somebody is getting ahead of the game much faster than you are. >>Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned ERP and it, and it triggered something in my mind. Cause I, I said this 10 years ago about data. If in the nineties, you, you couldn't have picked SAP necessarily as the winner of ERP. But if you could have picked the companies that were using ERP could have made a lot of money in the stock market because they outperform their peers. And the same thing was true with data. And I think the same thing is going to be true with automation in the coming decade. >>Couldn't agree more. And I think that's exactly the point that differential acceleration happening this. And it's harder because of the Europeans. Once you knew what it was, you can put the boundaries on it. Digital, the options are infinite. It's just continuous progress as are from there. >>I've got a question for you. You talked about some great stats about how dramatically faster things were took far less time. How does that help from an adoption perspective? I know how much cultural change is very difficult for folks in any organization, but that sort of self-serving how does that help fuel adoption? >>Well, it's interesting. Um, it's, it is a, we're actually going to talk about this tomorrow. It is a framework and it's got to start at the leadership has got to start with governance. It's got to start with a detailed plan. That's executable. And it's got to start with getting buy-in from not only your, the, the organization, but the people you're dealing with outside the organization. Um, it's, it's, uh, I think that's absolutely critical. And when you bring this back to the boardroom, they are the leaders of the companies. And, and I, James, I talked about this as we're getting ready for tomorrow's session. I think the number one thing a board can do today is an own personal self assessment. Do they understand automation? Do they understand what next generation three is? Do they understand what the different components can do? And do they understand how the companies are implementing it? And if I was a board member, uh, on our boards, I say, we need to understand that or else this is nothing's going to happen. We're going to be here at the reliance of the CEO and the CFO strategy, which may or may not include or be thinking about this next three. So leadership at the top is going to drive this. And it's so critical. >>We were talking about catalyst before. And you mentioned education and expertise. I'm always curious as to what drew you to public sector because it's, yeah, I mean, very successful, you know, you're, you're with one of the global SIS directly, you can make a lot more money and that side. So what was it did, was it a desire to it's a great country? Was it >>Take one for the team and I'm going to do a selfish plug here. I just actually wrote a book in this whole thing called transforming a federal agency. What's the name of the book transforming and federal agency. And it's, uh, I spent my time at E Y for 37 years, fully retired. I wanted to give back and do meaningful work. And we lived in Columbus, Ohio, as I was talking about earlier, I was going to go teach and I got a call from the president's personnel office to see if I wanted to come. And these, the CFO at HUD with secretary Carson and change turn the agency around, uh, that took me a little while to say yes, because I wasn't sure I wanted something full time. It was a, it was in DC. So I'd be in a commuting role back and forth. My family's in Columbus. >>Um, but it was, uh, I did it and I loved it. It was, uh, I would pray, I would ask anyone that's has the ability to go into public service at any point in their career to do it. It's it was very rewarding. It was one of my favorite three years of life. And to your point, I didn't have to do it, but, uh, if I wanted to do something and give back and that met the criteria and we were very successful in turning it around with the digital transformation and a lot of stuff that we're talking about today gave me the ability to talk about it because I helped lead it >>For sharing that and did it. So did it start with the CFO's office? Because the first time I ever even heard about our RPO RPA was at a CFO conference and I started talking to him like, oh, this is going to be game changing. Is that where it started? Is that where it lands today? >>From an infrastructure standpoint, the CFO has the wonderful ability to see most processes within a company and its entire lifestyle from beginning to end. So CFO has that visibility to understand where efficiencies can happen in the process. And so the CFO plays a dramatically important role in this. And you think about a CFO's role today versus 20 years ago, it's no longer this, the bean counter rolling up numbers that become a business advisors to the board, to the CEO and to the executive suite. Um, so the CFO, I think has probably the best visibility of all the processes on a global basis. And they can see where the, the efficiencies and the implementation of automation can happen. >>So they can be catalysts and really fueling the actual >>Redesign of work. Yes, they, they, they probably need to be the catalyst. And as a board member, you want to be asking what is the CFO's strategic imperative for the next year? And if it doesn't include this, it's just got to get on the agenda. >>Well, curve ball here is his CFO question and you know, three years or two years ago, you wouldn't have even thought, I mean, let me set it up better. One of the industries that is highly automated is crypto. Yeah. You wouldn't even thought about crypto in your balance sheet a couple of years ago, but I'm not sure it's a widespread board level discussion, but as a CFO, what do you make of the trend to put Bitcoin on balance sheets? >>Yeah, I'm probably not the right person to ask because I'm a conservative guy. >>If somebody supported me and he said, Hey, why don't we put crypto on the balance sheet? >>I would get much more educated. I wouldn't shut it down. I would put it into, let's get more educated. Let's get the experts in here. Let's understand what's really happening with it. Let's understand what the risks are, what the rewards are. And can we absorb any sort of risk or reward with it? And when you say put it on the balance sheet, you can put it on in a small way to test it out. I wouldn't put the whole, I wouldn't make the whole balance sheet for Dell on day one. So that's why I would think about it. Just tell, tell me more, get me educated. How did you think about it? How can it help our business? How can I help our shareholders? How does it grow the bottom line? And then, then you start making decisions. >>Cause CFOs, let me find nature often conservative and most CFOs that I talked to just say no way, not a chance, but you're, maybe you're not as conservative as you think. Well, >>No, but I will never say go away on anything. I mean, cause I want to learn. I want to know. I mean, um, if you like all this stuff, that's new, it's easy to say go away, right? Yeah. But all of a sudden, three years later, the go away, all your competitors are doing it at a competitive advantage. So never say go away, get yourself educated before you jump into it. >>That's good advice. Yeah. In any walk of life question for you, or have you talked about the education aspect there? I'm curious from a risk mitigation perspective, especially given the last 18, 19 months, so tumultuous, so scary for all those organizations that were very digital, they're either gone or they accelerated very quickly. How much of an education do you have to provide certain industries? And are you seeing certain industries? I think healthcare manufacturing, financial services as being leaders in the uptake? >>Well, I think the financial service industries, for sure, they, they, they get this and then they need to, uh, cause they, you know, they're, they're a transaction and based, uh, industry. Uh, so they get it completely. Um, you know, I think maybe some manufacturing distribution, some of the old line businesses are, you know, they may not be thinking of this as progressively as they should. Um, but they'll get there. They're going to have to get there eventually. Um, you know, when you think about the education, my, I thought you were gonna ask a question about the education of the workforce. And I think as a board member, I would be really focused on, uh, how am I educating my workforce of the future? And do I have the workforce of the future today? Do I have to educate them to have to bring in hiring for it? Do I have to bring third-party service providers to get us there? So as a board member really focus on, do I have the right workforce to get us to this next stage? And if not, what do I need to do to get there? Because >>We'll allocate a percentage of their budgets to training and education. And the question is where do they put it >>In? Is it the right training and education, right? >>Where do they focus though? Right now we hear you iPad talking about they're a horizontal play, but James, when you and Lisa, we were asking about industry, when you go to market, are you, are you more focused on verticals? Are you thinking, >>No, it's on two things. So which often find is regardless of the sector with some nuanced variation, the back office functions are regionally the procure to pay process as the same fundamentals, regardless of the sector where the differentiation comes in at a sector of service is when you start going to the middle of the front office, I mean a mining has only one customer. They sold their product to image the retailer has an endless number of them. So when you get to the middle and front office and really start engaging with a customer and external vendors, then a differentiation is very unique and you'd have a lot of sort of customers having sector specific nuances and variations in how you use the platform. And that's where the shift now is happening as well is the back office functions that are largely driven by the CFO. If now getting good, robust value out of it, there's pivot to make it a differentiator in the market, comes in the front and middle office. And that's where we starting to say, sector specific genres solutions, nuances really come to the fall >>Deep industry expertise. Do you think digital at all changes that the reason I ask it because I see Amazon as a retail and then they're in cloud and they're in grocery other in content Apple's in, in financial services and you're seeing these internet giants with a dual agenda, they're disrupting horizontal technology and then there's disruptive industries. And my premise is it's because of data and digital. Do you ever see that industry specialization changing that value chain >>Without a doubt? And I think it's happens initially. It starts off. When people have started looking at the process, they realize there's such key dependencies on the upstream and downstream components of the value chain that they want to control it. So they actually start bridging out of what the core practices or the core business to own a broader agenda. And with digital, you can do it. You can actively interact more systemically that installs triggering, well, maybe I have a different product offering. Maybe I can own this. Could I monetize the information I had at my disposal today in a completely new line. And that really what gets truly innovative and starts creating a revenue increase as opposed as the cost saving. And that's what they're really going after. It's how do I, >>The vertical integration is not new. The plenty of ended up Koch industries, Tyson foods, but now it's digital. So presumably you can do it faster with greater greater scale >>Without a doubt. And you don't have to move your big ERP and things like that. Cause that's the only way it takes five years to move my technology backbone with digital. I can do the interaction tomorrow and we can build up enough to be able to sustain that in the short term. >>Right. And speaking of speed, unfortunately, guys, we are out of time, but thank you. Fantastic conversation automation as a board imperative guys, that's been great James or >>Thank you for your time. Thank you so much >>For Dave a long day. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue. We are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for stick around Dave and I will be right back. Okay.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back everybody jeff frick here with the cube coming to you from our palo alto studios with a cube conversation with a great influencer we haven't had him on for a while last had him on uh in may i think of 2019 mid 2019. we're excited to welcome back to the program he's kevin l jackson he is the ceo of gc globalnet kevin great to see you today hey how you doing jeff thanks for having me it's uh it's been a while but i really enjoyed it yeah i really enjoy being on thecube well thank you for uh for coming back so we've got you on to talk about citrix we had you last on we had you on a citrix synergy this year obviously covet hit all the all the events have gone virtual and digital and citrix made an interesting move they decided to kind of break their thing into three buckets kind of around the main topics that people are interested in in their world and that's cloud so they had a citrix cloud summit they had a citrix workplace summit and now they just had their last one of the three which is the citrix security summit uh just wrapped up so before we jump into that i just want to get your take how are you doing how you getting through the kind of covid madness from you know the light switch moment that we experienced in march april 2. you know now we're like seven eight months into this and it's not going to end anytime soon well you know it's it was kind of different for me because um i've been working from home and remotely since i guess 2014 being a consultant and with all my different clients i was doing a lot more traveling um but with respect to doing meetings and being on collaborative systems all day long it's sort of like uh old hat and i say welcome to my world but i find that you know society is really changing the things that you thought were necessary in business you know being physically at meetings and shaking hands that's all like you know although we don't do that anymore yeah i used to joke right when we started this year that we finally got to 2020 the year that we know everything right with the benefit of hindsight but it turned out to be the year that we actually find out that we don't know anything and everything that we thought we knew in fact is not necessarily what we thought and um we got thrown into this we got thrown into this thing and you know thankfully for you and for me we're in you know we're in the tech space we can we can go to digital we're not in the hotel business or the hospitality business or you know so many businesses that are still suffering uh greatly but we were able to make the move in i.t and and citrix is a big piece of that in terms of enabling people to support remote work they've always been in remote work but this really changed the game a lot and i think as you said before we turned on the cameras accelerated you know this digital transformation way faster than anybody planned on oh oh yeah absolutely and another one of the areas that was particularly um accelerated they sort of put the rockets on is security which i'm really happy about because of the rapid increase in the number of remote workers i mean historically companies had most of their workforce in their own buildings on on their own property and there was a small percentage that would remote work remotely right but it's completely flipped now and it flipped within a period of a week or a week and a half and many of these companies were really scrambling to make you know their entire workforce be able to communicate collaborate and just get access to information uh remotely right right well david talked about it in the security keynote you know that you know as you said when this light switch moment hit in mid-march you had to get everybody uh secure and take care of your people and get them set up but you know he talked a little bit about you know maybe there were some shortcuts taken um and now that we've been into this thing in a prolonged duration and again it's going to be going on for a while longer uh that there's really an opportunity to to make sure that you put all the proper uh systems in place and make sure that you're protecting people you're protecting the assets and you're protecting you know the jewels of the company which today are data right and data in all the systems that people are working with every single day yeah yeah absolutely they had to rapidly rethink all of the work models and this uh accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of cloud and it was just this this huge demand for remote work but it was also important to uh keep to think about the user experience the employee experience i mean they were learning new things learning new technologies trying to figure out how to how to do new things and that at the beginning of this uh trend this transition people were thinking that hey you know after a few months we'll be okay but now and it's starting to sink in that this stuff is here to stay so you have to understand that work is not a place and i think actually david said that right it's really you have to look at how the worker is delivering and contributing to the mission of the organization to the business model and you have to be able to measure the workers level of output and their accomplishment and be able to do this remotely so back to office is is not going to happen in reality so the employee experience through this digital environment this digital work space it's critical yeah i think one of the quotes he had whether i think was either this one or one of the prior ones is like back to work is not back to normal right we're not going to go back to the way that it was before but it's interesting you touched on employee experience and that's a big piece of the conversation right how do we measure output versus you know just time punching the clock how do we give people that that experience that they've come to expect with the way they interact in technology in their personal lives but there's an interesting you know kind of conflict and i think you've talked about it before between employee experience and security because those two kind of inherently are going to be always in conflict because the employee's going to want more access to more things easier to use and yet you've got to keep security baked in throughout the stack whether it's access to the systems whether it's the individual and and so there's always this built-in kind of tension between those two objectives well the tension is because of history security has always been sort of a a second thought an afterthought uh you know you said due to work oh security we'll catch up to it when we need to but now because of the importance of data and the inherently global connectivity that we have the the need for security has is paramount so in order to attract that in order to address that the existing infrastructures had this where we just bolted security on to the existing infrastructures uh this is when they when the data centers and we said well as long as it's in our data center we can control it but then we with this covet thing we'll just burst out of any data center we have to rely on cloud so this this concept of just bolting on security just doesn't work because you no longer own or control the security right so you have to look at the entire platform and have a holistic security approach and it has to go from being infrastructure-centric to data centric because that's the only way you're going to provide security to your data to those remote employees right right and there's a very significant shift we hear all the time we've got rsa uh all the time to talk about security and that's this concept of zero trust and and the idea that rather than as you said kind of the old school you put a a wall and a moat around the things that you're trying to protect right you kind of start from the perspective of i don't trust anybody i don't trust where they're coming from i don't trust their device i don't trust that they have access to those applications and i don't trust that they have access to that data and then you basically enable that on a kind of a need to know basis across all those different factors at kind of the least the least amount that they need to get their job done it's a really different kind of approach to thinking about security right and but it's a standardized approach i mean before present time you would customize security to the individual or 2d organization or component of the organization because you know you knew where they were and you would you would say well they won't accept this so we'll do that so everything was sort of piecemeal now that work is not a location you have to be much more standardized much more focused and being able to track and secure that data requires things like digital rights management and and secure browsers and some of the work that citrix has done with google has really been amazing they they looked at it from a different point of view they said okay where people are always working through the cloud in different locations from from anywhere but they all work through their browser so you know we could and i think this was something that the vice president at google said uh sunil potty i believe uh vice president of google cloud they said well we can capitalize on that interface without affecting the experience and he was talking about chrome so so citrix and and google have worked together to drive sort of an agent-less experience to order to enhance security so instead of making everything location specific or organizational specific they set a standard and they support this intent-driven security model yeah it's interesting sunil's a really sharp guy we've had him on thecube a ton of times uh over the years but there's another really interesting take on security and i want to get your your feedback on it and that's kind of this coopetation right and silicon valley is very famous for you know coopetation you might be competing tooth and nail with the company across the street at the same time you got an opportunity to partner you might share apis you know it's a really interesting thing and one of the the items that came out of the citrix show was this new thing called the workspace security alliance because what's interesting in security that even if we're competitors if you're suddenly getting a new type of threat where you're getting a new type of attack and there's a new you know kind of profile actually the industry likes to share that information to help other people in the security business as kind of you know us versus the bad guys even if we're you know competing for purchase orders we're competing you know kind of face-to-face so they announced this security alliance which is pretty interesting to basically bring in partners to support uh coopetition around the zero trust framework uh yeah absolutely this is happening across just about every industry though you're going away from uh point-to-point relationships to where you're operating and working within an ecosystem and in security just this week it's been highlighted by the uh the trick trick bot um activity this uh persistent uh malware that i guess this week is attacking um health care uh facilities the actual the u.s department of homeland security put out an alert now and this is a threat to the entire ecosystem so everyone has to work together to protect everyone's data and that improves that that is the way forward and that's really the only way to be successful so uh we have to go from this point-to-point mindset to understanding that we're all in the same boat together and in this uh alliance the workspace security alliance is an indication that citrix gets it right everyone has workers everyone's workers are remote okay and everyone has to protect their own data so why don't we work together to do that yeah that's great that's interesting i had not heard of that alert but what we are hearing a lot of um in in a lot of the interviews that we're doing is kind of a resurfacing of kind of old techniques uh that the bad guys are using to to try to get remote workers because they're not necessarily surrounded with as much security or have as much baked in in their home setup as they have in the office and apparently you know ransomware is really on the rise and the sophistication of the ransom where folks is very high and that they try to go after your backup and all in you know your replication stuff before they actually hit you up for the uh for the want for the money so it's it's there's absolutely that's right yeah go ahead i'm sorry i was just saying that's indicative of the shift that most of your workers are no longer in your facilities than now and at home where companies never really put a lot of investment into protecting that channel that data channel they didn't think they needed to right right one of the other interesting things that came up uh at the citrix event was the use of uh artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically have a dynamic environment where you're adjusting you know kind of the access levels based on the behavior of the individual so what apps are they accessing what you know are they moving stuff around are they downloading stuff and to actually kind of keep a monitor if you will to look for anomalies and behavior so even if someone is trusted to do a particular type of thing if suddenly they're you know kind of out of band for a while then you know you can flag alerts to say hey what's going on is that this person did their job change you know why are they doing things that they don't normally do maybe there's a reason maybe there isn't a reason maybe it's not them so you know i think there's so many great applications for applied machine learning and artificial intelligence and these are the types of applications where you're going to see the huge benefits come from this type of technology oh yeah absolutely i mean the citrix analytics for security is really a um security service right um that monitors the activities of of people on the internet and it this machine learning gives you or gives the service this insight no one company can monitor the entire internet and you can go anywhere on the internet so bob working together leveraging this external service you can actually have automated remediation of your users you can put this specific user security risk score so um companies and organizations can be assured that they are within their risk tolerance right right and of course the other thing you've been in the business for a while that we're seeing that we're just kind of on the cusp of right is 5g and iot so a lot more connected devices a lot more data a lot more data moving at machine speed which is really what 5g is all about it's not necessarily for having a better phone call right so we're just going to see you know kind of again this this growth in terms of attack surfaces this growth in terms of the quantity of data and the growth in terms of the the the rate of change that that data is coming in and and the scale and the speed with the old uh you know velocity and and variety and volume uh the old big data memes so again the other thing go ahead the other thing it's not just data when you have 5g the virtual machines themselves are going to be traveling over this network so it's a whole new paradigm yeah yeah so the uh once again to have you know kind of a platform approach to make sure you're applying intelligence to keep an eye on all these things from zero trust uh uh kind of baseline position right pretty damn important yeah absolutely with with edge computing the internet of things this whole infrastructure based data centric approach where you can focus on how the individual is interacting with the network is important and and uh another real important component of that is the um software-defined wide area network because people work from everywhere and you have to monitor what they're doing right right yeah it's really worked from anywhere not necessarily work from home anymore i just want to you know again you've been doing this for a while get your feedback on on the fact that this is so much of a human problem and so much of a human opportunity versus just pure technology i think it's really easy to kind of get wrapped up in the technology but i think you said before digital transformation is a cultural issue it's not a technology issue and getting people to change the way they work and to change the way they work with each other and to change what they're measuring um as you said kobe kind of accelerated that whole thing but this has always been more of a cultural challenge in a technology challenge yeah the technology in a relative sense of you is kind of easy right but it's the expectations of humans is what they're used to is what they have been told in the past is the right thing no longer is right so you have to teach you have to learn you have to accept change and not just change but rapid change and accelerated change and people just don't like change they're uncomfortable in change so another aspect of this culture is learning to be adaptable and to accept change because it's going to come whether you want it or not faster than you think as well for sure you're right well that's great so kevin i'll give i give you the final word as as you think about how things have changed and again i think i think the significant thing is that we went from you know kind of this light switch moment where it was you know emergency and and quick get everything squared away but now we're in this we're in kind of this new normal it's going to be going for a while we'll get back to some some version of a hybrid uh solution at some point and you and i will be seeing each other at trade shows at some point in time in the in the future but it's not going to go back the way that it was and people can't wait and hope that it goes back the way that it was and really need to get behind this kind of hybrid if you will work environment and helping people you know be more productive with the tools they need it always gets back to giving the right people the right information at the right time to do what they need to do so just kind of get your perspective as we you know kind of get to the end of 2020 we're going to turn the page here rapidly on 2021 and we're going to start 2021 in kind of the same place we are today well to be honest we've talked about a lot of these things but the answer to all of them is agility agility agility is the key to success this is like not locking into a single cloud you're going to have multiple clouds not locking into a single application you have multiple applications not assuming that you're always going to be working from home or working through a certain browser you have to be agile to adapt to rapid change and the organizations that recognize that and uh teach their workers teach their entire ecosystem to operate together in a rapidly changing world with agility will be successful that's a great that's a great way to leave it i saw beth comstack the former vice chair at ge give a keynote one time and one of her great lines was get comfortable with being uncomfortable and i think you nailed it right this is about agility it's about change it's we've seen it in devops where you embrace change you don't try to avoid it you know you take that really at the top level and try to architect to be successful in that environment as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and praying it doesn't absolutely all right well kevin so great to catch up i'm i'm sorry it's been as long as it's been but hopefully it'll be uh shorter uh before the next time we get to see each other yes fine thank you very much i really enjoyed it absolutely all right he's kevin l jackson i'm jeff frick you're watching thecube from our palo alto studios keep conversation we'll see you next time you

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here, at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, with Keith Townsend, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, Kevin Jackson, the founder of GovCloud. Kevin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity. >> So this has been an exciting day. Keith and I have been geeking out all day, starting with the keynote this morning. Talking about employee experience is so relevant, theCUBE covers a ton of technology events, we don't often hear about employee experience as a catalyst to digital transformation, but it is. >> No, absolutely. Citrix, the keynote today was just very impressive. Not because of technology, and not that it wasn't impressive, but it was the focus. Today's world has really been focused around digital transformation. What processes in your organization are the right ones? And Citrix has developed and is delivering tools to help organizations understand those processes which should be digitized, and it's really about the employee experience because companies in the commercial world, in the consumer space, have really focused on consumer experience and customer experience. Those that have been successful in doing that have seen their market share grow. Well, this is all about looking at your employee experience. Instead of looking outside, look inside. If you're able to improve your employee experience, you get more efficiency, you get better employees, and you get better products and services. >> So Kevin, talk to us about the importance of examining your processes prior to automating. I was visiting my parents the other day and they're remodeling their home, and I said, you know, I made a joke about how we automate in ITS, I said you know what, you guys are moving much too slow, I'm going to buy you two more saws, so you can go faster. And a lot of times I feel like that's the way we tackle automation and process improvement. What have you seen out in the field, and where should companies start versus where they do start? >> So one of the biggest problems companies have is their history. They have a process that they've done for years, in their eyes it's been very successful, and I'm not saying it wasn't successful, but it was successful in a different era, successful in a different environment. Today's environment moves much faster. It's much broader. It's not regionalized. It's international. So organizations need to understand what their processes are, and which of their old processes can actually be effective in the new environment. Many of them can be, but they need to be tweaked. They need to be updated. They may need to be entirely changed. When those processes were designed, you didn't have customers with smart phones that can access your products and services. We're going from a physical world to a virtual world. So the first thing is to understand which processes need to be digitized. Maybe the saws were a good thing, but maybe they weren't. Maybe they need a level to go faster and to go better, to improve the quality of the output, not necessarily cutting more wood. >> So these changes are subtle. How does Citrix help kind of break down the processes and help you determine? You know, one of the things that we learnt, early cloud. It's not wise to put everything in the cloud up front, it's what makes a difference and moves the ball. David talked a lot this morning about employees want to move the ball forward. How does Citrix help move the ball forward in determining what processes should be automated? >> Yeah, great question. One of the biggest problems with cloud computing is sort of the adoption of the cloud-first policy. People misunderstood that policy and many companies misunderstand the implementation of that today. Cloud-first doesn't mean put everything in the cloud and get rid of all your legacy, it means evaluate cloud first and make a decision as to what data should go in the cloud and what processes should go in the cloud. Any organization of any significant size is still going to need legacy data centers. They still may need managed services, and cloud computing would be part of that hybrid mix. So what Citrix is doing is providing the tools so that you can get the data about the processes and understand which data should go in the cloud, which data should stay in your legacy data center, and which data could be managed by manage service providers. So customers, Citrix customers that actually leverage this intelligent workspace have the required tool to do digital transformation. >> When you're out talking with customers in different industries, public sector, government, where are they in understanding how critical the employee experience is, from recruiting and onboarding, to actually those employees interfacing with their customers? I mean, it's such a critical function. >> Oh, absolutely, and digital transformation is really not about the technology as much as it's about the culture. Organizations that undergo this journey oftentimes forget about the cultural transformation that needs to occur within the organization. And that means training, that means education, and it also means redefining the roles within the organization. Citrix provides many of the tools for helping employees understand their role, redefining their role, educating employees. So all of this is critical to digital transformation. >> And that's not easy to do, as well. I think this morning, and I've heard this recently from a number of events I've covered, is there are five generations active in the workforce today. So you've got my parents, the baby boomers, you've got the generation younger, too, younger than I am, who were born on smart devices, and there's different expectations, there's different levels of technology expertise, so companies like Citrix have to really balance that employee experience across five generations with very different expectations. >> Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a colleague of mine and he was relaying a story to me when an employee was working an application, right? And he finished the task, went home, came back the next day and all the work was gone, and the employee was saying, "What happened? "I worked hard on it, it took me hours." And the manager said, "Well did you save it?" And he said, "Well what's that?" (laughs) Because if you're born in the cloud you don't press a button to save, it's automatic. This was a millennial that was born with technology and actually didn't understand the concept of having to save something, because it was always in the cloud. This is cultural, and you need to address this culture when you are improving and modifying your business processes. >> So when you're an organization of any size you can look at this employee experience journey and be overwhelmed, and think, wow. You know what, you could hear a story like that and say, "Where do I start to change?" Like my SAP app, you're still going to have to hit save, that's not going to change tomorrow. So where's the starting point? >> Really, the starting point is data. Collecting data, understanding the data, interpreting the data, because then you can make the appropriate decisions within the context of what your organization or industry is doing. Although I do a lot of public sector, most of my work today is in commercial industry, and employees are in an environment that's forever changing, where their context changes from second to second. They're doing one application then doing another application. They're responding to a client or customer, then responding to a colleague, and then immediately responding to the manager. This context switching is normal for computers but it's not normal for people, so this is important as you move forward in the world. >> So what I'm hearing is a term, an SAP coin, X-data, experience data. The idea that you need to collect, as much pressure as we're under to transform digitally, the first step is to collect and analyze the data. One of the questions I put towards another analyst was where is this data coming from? I know the data is because people are doing stuff, and there's a trail somewhere, but where do I go first to start as the indicator to collect this data to analyze? >> Well the old school method of doing that would be a survey, or you would observe a worker. Now the actual act of conducting a survey or observing work changes the work process. All right, so the data that you get from that can also be colored or flawed based upon the observer. Citrix experience, their desktop has artificial intelligence built into it. The worker can actually do their task, unbeknownst to them that they are being observed, that the data is being collected with respect to that process. Don't get scared, this is not George Orwell in 1984, though that's been a while, I guess. It's not Big Brother looking at you. The data is anonymized, right? It's not about you, it's about the task that you're completing. So you now have a tool to collect real data and you can continue to collect that data because processes have a life, they change. So you can monitor that, and update and tweak it. >> And an important outcome of that data collection and analysis is delivery, using it to deliver a personalized experience to the user, regardless of generation, how born in the cloud they were or not. >> Absolutely. And now, you're heading back to that cultural aspect. The digital transformation is really cultural transformation. >> Then another aspect, no, output of that, is that you could correlate this X-data with operational data and see where there's human error. So your processes analysis, you champion process analysis, you can say, okay, where are we making the most mistakes, because we're having a human translate something from one screen to another, while we see where this error rate is coming up and now we can automate or modernize this process to improve the overall not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's important to understand not just the investment that you're making in any process, but the return you're getting from that process. By collecting data, you can determine if value is being delivered not just to the organization, but to your customers. So this ROI, return on investment, is often not just about money. It's about the value of the employee, and you can actually measure that value. Measure what they're doing, measure the return, and drive better environments, better employees, better outcomes based on the data. >> And that's got to elevate up to the C-suite as a business imperative, to understand that ROI, because those are employees that in many facets are involved and connected with those customers who are paying for products and services. So those employees, whether they're in sales or marketing, or finance, or legal, or a contact center, they're critical touchpoints to your customers. If their experience isn't great and they decide to leave, that customer experience, that's a possible brand reputation challenge. >> No, absolutely. And you touched upon touchpoints, right? In the past, you basically knew how your client was going to interact with you. Dissimilarly, you need to understand how your employee interacts with the organization. They're not going to just be in a cube interacting with the IT every day. They may be at home. They may, in the very near future, not today, they may be interacting with Alexa to get your information, or through Alexa with one of your clients and one of your customers. How do you manage that touchpoint? Well, with tools like Citrix, they are actually giving you the ability to normalize data across multiple channels, across multiple touchpoints, so you can make sure you have the same experience, the preferred experience with your clients and customers as well as with your employees. >> Serious impact. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> It was very enjoyable, thank you. >> Good, our pleasure. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (percussive music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering the RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by ForeScout. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at RSA at Moscone at downtown San Francisco. We're in the ForeScout booth, our first time in the ForeScout booth, we're really excited to be here and we're talking about cyber security, I don't know what the official number is this year, probably 45 thousand professionals walkin' around, talkin' about security. And we've got our next guest on, he is Russell Jones, partner on cyber risk services for Deloitte. Russell, great to meet you! >> Same to meet you as well. >> So, I asked him before we turned on, what's getting you excited these days and he said, everything! So, this is a crazy busy space. What have you been working on lately, what's kind of your take away from the first couple days at the show? >> Yeah, it is a crazy, busy space and if you look at the cyber landscape, everything's moving at the speed of the internet, so it's this cat and mouse game in terms of attackers trying to find new ways to get into systems that is driving the industry. When you talk about health care though, the issue is these systems, like medical devices, often times are connected to people. >> Right. >> And so, the implications of a hack against, let's say, a MRI machine or a fusion pump, could be devastating to an actual person connected to it. And that's really what's driving a lot of innovation in terms of some of the technologies you see, like ForeScout, and also, a lot of what's going on from a regulatory perspective, and also the hospitals and the health care system themselves. >> Right. >> Trying to solve that problem, managing cyber risk as it relates to clinical technology. >> And a lot of that stuff wasn't connected before, right? There weren't IP addresses on every MRI machine or all these pump machines or, you know, you have a pacemaker, all these things. How are they looking at kind of the risk reward from a connected device that gives you all kinds of benefits-- >> Yeah. >> but it does open up this attack surface that previously had maybe an air gap there? >> That's a great point, bottom line is the life saving, life extending attributes of these medical technologies and medical devices far outweighs the risk of cyber, however, we got to be smart about managing that risk. So, we're going to see more connectivity, not less. Train's left the station, in terms of what's coming and in the future of the healthcare, connecting more of, not only the medical devices, but the information in them and being able to share that and then bring it together and aggregate it in ways that, you know, with analytics on top of it allows doctors and researchers in the clinical community to connect dots in ways that solve cancer, solve some different maladies that have plagued us forever. >> Right. >> So I think, on the one hand, it's great, this connectivity is extending healthcare out to people in rural locations and it's also bringing together a lot of different data from everything from your Fitbit to your pacemaker to apps that you have on your phone in a way that's going to benefit us. >> Right, right, so, one of the things about healthcare is they're way out in front of, kind of, not healthcare in terms of regulations. >> Yeah. >> You know, and HIPAA's been around for a long time, GDPR just went into place in Europe last year, so when you look at it from a regulatory environment, which people have to consider, there's not only the complexity of the machines, there's not only the complexity of the security, but you also have regulatory environment. >> Yeah. >> How is the cyber security in healthcare, with their very unique regulations, kind of impacting the way people should think about the problem, the way they should implement solutions? >> That's a good question, I think we've thought about, in the cyber community, forever. We talk about confidentiality, integrity, availability, right, the triangle. When you think about healthcare and clinical technology and medical devices, you need to flip that triangle upside down and the focus is integrity and availability, those things together equal patient safety. So, in other words, as we're connecting more of these devices to each other, to electronic health record systems, to the cloud, the integrity of the information in there, which is being used by doctors and other folks to make decisions about treatment, about surgical procedures, about medicines, it's crucial that that information and the integrity of it is maintained. And then the availability of the device is critical, right? If you're going in to get an MRI and it's down because it's been hacked, there's usually not a spare MRI and so there's a profound impact for patients that are scheduled back to back to back to back to go get that procedure, that MRI that's going to be used by a doctor to do some surgery or some other kind of a treatment plan >> Right. >> So integrity and availability are huge in the cyber world. And, if you look at the regulations, depending on which one we're talking and which part of the world, right? You mentioned HIPAA, we've got security and privacy, you've got GDPR, you've got the FDA that have guidance around what they want the manufacturers to do, building security into the devices. >> Right. >> They all have an impact on cyber and how it's going to be addressed, how we're going to manage cyber risk in the healthcare world. >> Right. >> In that environment. >> And then there's this whole new thing, I went to the Wall Street Journal Health Conference a couple weeks back, I don't know if you were there, but there was two people up where you now you can take your genetic footprint, right? >> Yeah. >> You can take your 23andMe results and after you figure out where your family's from, you can actually sell it back into a research market-- >> Yeah. >> so that doctors and clinicians and people doing trials on new drugs can now take your data in kind of a marketplace, back into a whole nother application so it's kind of outside of the core healthcare system, if you will. >> That's right. >> But I mean, it's basically, it's me, right? (laughs) In the form of my DNA footprint. >> Yup. >> It's crazy, crazy amounts of strange data that now is potentially exposed to a hack. >> That's right, and so the implications there, obviously, privacy, right? That's a huge issue, I think, that we're going to have to address and that's why you see GDPR and that's why you see the California Consumer Privacy Act. >> Right. >> There's a recognition that, again, the train's left the station, there's a lot of good things that come out of sharing data and sharing information, there's a lot benefits that can come out of it for the consumers, patients. There's a dark side as well and that has to be managed. That's why we have the privacy regulations that we have, we're probably going to see more, probably going to see more things like the California Consumer Privacy Act. >> Right. >> More states and eventually-- >> Right. >> probably a federal act for the US. >> Do you think that the healthcare industry is better equipped to deal with GDPR and the California Healthcare Act because of things like HIPAA and they kind of come from that world? Or is this just a whole new level of regulation that they now have to account for? >> I think it's probably a mixed bag. On the one hand, healthcare has been dealing with privacy for a long time, even before HIPAA, right. And then HIPAA has very specific requirements around how you have to manage that information and consent and notifying the patient of their rights. On your other hand, you look at some of the new things, like GDPR, it goes way beyond HIPAA, and I think-- >> It goes way beyond HIPAA? >> Goes way behind HIPAA, like for example, this whole notion of the right to be forgotten. >> Right. >> Right, that's a requirement on the GDPR. That means, me as a patient, if I tell my doctor, I want you to get rid of all my medical records, everything in your system everywhere about me, I want it gone. Not that it makes sense-- >> Right, right. >> but, at least in Europe, if they ask to do that, you have to be able to comply. From a technology perspective and a medical device perspective, some of these devices are very complex, ecosystem of devices, components that make up the product. >> Right >> That's a very difficult thing to do. There's no one delete button-- >> Right. >> that you hit that can delete you from all different instances, downstream from where you came into the healthcare system. >> Right. >> And so, when you think about it from a cyber perspective, it gets to be very challenging. >> The other thing, right, is health care's always under tremendous kind of price pressure from the insurers and the consumers and a bad medical event can wipe-- >> Yeah. >> people out, right? >> Yeah. >> Especially when they're later in life and they're not properly insured, when they're making kind of an ROI analysis on cyber investments versus all the other things they can spend their money on, and they can't spend it all on security, that's not possible, how are they factoring in kind of the cyber investment, it's kind of this new layer of investment that they have to make because all these things are invested versus just investing in better beds and better machines and better people? >> That's the million dollar question. (laughs) I would say, some hospitals and health systems are doing it better than others, so maybe a little bit more further along and mature about thinking about the total cost of ownership and also, the patient factor, right? What has to be balanced, obviously, is not just the costs, but at the end of the day, what's best for the patient. And you hear this term, patient centricity, a lot today. And there's a recognition from all the players in the echo system, it's all about the patient. >> I'm so glad you say that 'cause I think a lot of people probably think that the patient sometimes gets lost in this whole thing, but you're saying no. >> There is an acknowledgement over the last few years and it's called patient centricity, it's an acknowledgement that the way we're going into the future of healthcare and the kinds of medical devices and technology and cloud solutions that are becoming part of the healthcare fabric, they're all being built and geared towards the patient being the center of the equation, not the doctor, not the hospital, it's the patient. >> Right, right, right, that's good to hear. >> And so, to answer your original question, we're in early days and really trying to balance the patient and patient centricity versus we've got vulnerabilities in our environment that could impact the patient and we've only got limited people and costs. >> Right, right. >> Making decisions that kind of balance all of those things. >> Right, alright Russell, last question, we're sitting here in the ForeScout booth. >> Yes. >> Obviously you have a relationship with them, talk about kind of what their solution adds to some of the stuff that you're workin' on. >> So, ForeScout, one of the reasons that we're working closely with ForeScout, their solution, really, they've taken an approach that's holistic around these issues that we're talking about, right, managing cyber risk, complex environment, a lot of different devices that are connected to each other and to the cloud and to the internet. They have built a solution that focuses on ability to have visibility into those devices that are on your network, some of which you may not even know exists, and then being able to kind of build an asset inventory around that visibility that allows you to do things like detect, based on policy, activity that suggests that you might be hacked or there might be some internal processes or players that are doing things that are going to put patients at risk or have you in non-compliance with GDPR, HIPAA and the rest. >> Right. >> And then their solution goes beyond ability to kind of visibility and detect, but to actually do something actionable, right? Security controls and orchestration with other technologies, like Simp Solutions and SOAR Solutions. Being able to orchestrate, hey, I know that I detected some activity on this infusion pump that suggests that we may being hacked, let me send an alert out, but then let me also, maybe, quarantine that part of the network. So, it's the ability to orchestrate between different security technologies that exist in a hospital environment, that's what we like about ForeScout. >> I'm just curious, when they run their first kind of crawl, if you will-- >> Yeah. >> are people surprised at the results of what's on there, that they had no clue? >> I mean, yes and no. >> Yes and no, okay. >> I think, most of the big hospitals that we work with, they know that, what they don't know, and especially when-- >> They know what they don't know. >> you're talkin' about a health system that maybe has a 100 thousand connected medical devices across the health system, they know what they don't know. They're looking for solutions to help them better manage and understand the things that they don't know, that they don't know. >> Right. >> Versus what they do know about. >> Right. >> And I think that's what we bring to the table in terms of kind of cyber risk services Deloitte brings, and then that's what ForeScout brings with their solution to be able to kind of help solve those problems. >> Well Russell, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to share those stories, super-- >> Thank you. >> super important work, you know, it's one thing to steal a few bucks out of the bank account, like you said. >> Yeah. >> It's another thing to start taking down machines at the hospital, not a good thing. >> Not a good thing. >> Alright >> Thank you. >> He's Russell, I'm Jeff, you're watchin' theCUBE, we're at RSA in Moscone in the ForeScout booth, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

(inspirational music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in our Palo Alto studio. The conference season hasn't really kicked off yet into full swing so we can do a lot more kind of intimate stuff here in the studio, for a CUBE Conversation. And we're really excited to have a many time CUBE alum on, and a new guest, both from Western Digital. So Dave Tang, Senior Vice President at Western Digital. Great to see you again, Dave. >> Great to be here, Jeff. >> Absolutely and Martin Fink, he is the Chief Technology Officer at Western Digital, a longtime HP alum. I'm sure people recognized you from that and our great machine keynotes we were talking about it. So great to finally meet you, Martin. >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> Absolutely, so you guys are here talking about and we've got an ongoing program actually with Western Digital about Data Makes Possible, right. With all the things that are going on in tech at the end of the day, right, there's data, it's got to be stored somewhere and then of course there's processes and things going on. We've been exploring media and entertainment, sports, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, you know. All the places that this continues to reach out and it's such a fun project because you guys are a rising tide, lifts all boats, kind of company and really enjoy watching this whole ecosystem grow. So I really want to thank you for that. But now there's some new things that we want to talk about that you guys are doing to continue really in that same theme, and that's the support of this RISC-V. So first off, for people who have no idea, what is RISC-V? Let's jump into that and then kind of what is the announcement and why it's important. >> Sure, so RISC-V is an, you know, the tagline is, it's an open source instruction set architecture. So what does that mean, just so people can kind of understand. So today the world is dominated by two instruction set architectures. For the most part the, we'll call the desktop enterprise world is dominated by the Intel instruction set architecture and that's what's in most PCs, what people talk about as x86. And then the embedded and mobile space tends to be dominated by Arm, or by Arm Holdings. And so both of those are great architectures but they're also proprietary, they're owned by their respective companies. So RISC-V is essentially a third entrant, we'll say, into this world, but the distinction is that it's completely open source. So everything about the instruction set is available to all and anybody can implement it. We can all share the implementations. We can share the code that makes up that instruction set architecture, and very importantly for us and part of our motivation is the freedom to innovate. So we now have the ability to modify the instruction set or change the implementation of the instruction set, to optimize it for our devices and our storage and our drives, etc. >> So is this the first kind of open source play in microprocessor architecture? >> No, there's been other attempts at this. OpenSpark kind of comes to mind, and things like that, but the ability to get a community of individuals to kind of rally around this in a meaningful way has really been a challenge. And so I'd say that right now, RISC-V presents probably the best sort of clean slate, let's take some thing new to the market out there. >> So open source, obviously we've seen you know, take over the software world, first in the operating system which everybody is familiar with Linux but then we see it time and time again in different applications, Hadoop. I mean, there's just a proliferation of open source projects. The benefits are tremendous. Pretty easy to ascertain at a typical software case, how is that going to be applied do you think within the microprocessor world? >> So it's a little bit different. When we're talking about open source hardware or open source chips and microprocessors, you're dealing with a physical device. So even though you can open source all of the designs and the code associated with that device, you still have to fabricate it. You still have to create a physical design and you still have to call up a fab and say, will you make this for me at these particular volumes? And so that's the difference. So there are some differences between open source software where it's, you know, you create the bits and then you distribute those bits through the Internet and all is good. Whereas here, you still have a physical need to fabricate something. >> Now, how much more flexibility can you do then for the output when you can actually impact the architecture as opposed to just creating a custom chip design, on top of somebody else's architecture? >> Well, let me give you probably a really simple, concrete example that kind of people can internalize of some of our motivation behind this, because that might sort of help get people through this. If you think of a very typical surveillance application, you have a camera pointed into a room or a hallway. The reality is we're basically grabbing a ton of video frames but very few of them change, right? So the typical surveillance application is it never changes and you really want, only know when stuff changes. Well, today, in very simple terms, all of those frames get routed up to some big server somewhere and that server spends a lot of time trying to figure out, okay have I got a frame that changed? Have I got a frame that changed, and so on. And then eventually it'll find maybe two or three or five frames that have got something interesting. So in the world what we're trying to do is to say, okay well why don't we take that, find no changes, and push that right down to the device? So we basically store all those frames, why don't we go figure out all the frames that mean nothing, and only ship up to that big bad server the frames that have something interesting and something you want to go analyze and do some work on? So that's a very typical application that's quite meaningful because we can do all of that work at the device. We can eliminate shipping a whole bunch of data to where it's just going to get discarded anyways, and we can allow the end customer to really focus on the data that matters, and get some intelligence. >> And that's critical as we get more and more immersed in a data-centric world, where we have realtime applications like Martin described as well as large data-centric applications like of course, big data analytics, but also training for AI systems or machine learning. These workloads are going to become more and more diverse and they're going to need more specialized architectures and more specialized processing. So big data is getting bigger and faster and these realtime fast data applications are getting faster and bigger. So we need ways to contend with that, that really go beyond what's available with general purpose architectures. >> So that's a great point because if we take this example of video frames, now if I can build a processor that is customized to only do that, that's the only thing it does. It can be very low power, very efficient, and do that one thing very very well, and the cost adder, if you want to call it that, to the device where we put it, is a tiny fraction, but the cost savings of the overall solution is significant. So this ability to customize the instruction set to only do what you need it to do for that very special purpose, that's gold. >> So I just wanted to, Dave, we've talked about a lot of interesting innovations that you guys have come up with over the years, with the helium launch. Which I don't know, a couple, two, three years ago, you were just at the MAMR event, really energy assisted recording. So this is really kind of foundational within the storage and the media itself and how you guys do better and take advantage of evolving land space. This is a kind of a different play for Western Digital, this isn't a direct kind of improvement in the way that storage media and architecture works but this is really more of, I'm going to ask you. What is the Western Digital play here? Why is this an important space for you guys in your core storage business? >> Well we're really broadening our focus to really develop and innovate around technologies that really help the world extract more value from data as a whole, right. So it's way beyond storage these days, right. We're looking for better ways to capture, preserve, access, and transform the data. And unless you transform it, you can't really extract the value out of it so as we see all these new applications for data and the vast possibilities for data, we really want to pave the path and help the industry innovate to bring all those applications to reality. >> It's interesting too because one of the great topics always in computing is you know, you got compute and store, which has to go to which, right. And nobody wants to move a lot of data, that's hard and may or may not be easy to get compute. Especially these IoT applications, remote devices, tough conditions and power, which we mentioned a little bit before we went on air. So the the landscape for the for the need for compute and store in networking is radically changing than either the desktop or what we're seeing a consolidation in clouds. So what's interesting here, where does the scale come, right? At the end of the day, scale always wins. And that's where we've seen historically where the general-purpose microprocessor architectures is dominated but used to be a slew of specialty purpose architectures but now there's an opportunity to bring scale to this. So how does that scale game continue to evolve? >> So it's a great point that scale does matter and we've seen that repeatedly and so it's a significant part of the reason why we decided to go early with a significant commitment was to tell the world that we were bringing scale to the equation. And so what we communicated to the marketplace is we ship on the order of a billion processor cores a year, most people don't realize that all of our devices from USB sticks to hard drives, all have processors on them. And so we said, hey we're going to basically go all-in and go big and that translates into a billion cores that we ship every year and we're going to go on a program to essentially migrate all of those cores to RISC-V. It'll take a few years to get there but we'll migrate all of those cores and so we basically were signaling to the market, hey scale is now here. Scale is here, you can make the investments, you can go forward, you can make that commitment to RISC-V because essentially we've got your back. >> So just to make sure we get that clear. So you guys have announced that you're going to slowly migrate over time your micro processors that power your devices to the tune of approximately a billion with a B, cores per year to this new architecture. >> That is correct. >> And has that started? >> So the design has started. So we have started to design and develop our first two cores but the actual manifestation into devices probably in the early stage of 2020. >> Okay, okay. But that's a pretty significant commitment and again, the ideas you explicitly said it's a signal to the ecosystem, this is worth your investment because there is some scale here. >> Martin: That's right. >> Yeah, pretty exciting. And how do you think it's going to open up the ability for you to do new things with your devices that you before either couldn't do or we're too expensive with dollars or power. >> Martin: So we're going to step and iterate through this and one key point here is a lot of people tend to want to start in this processor world at the very high end, right. I'm going to go take on a Xeon processor or something like that. It's not what we're doing. We're basically saying, we're going to go at the small end, the tiny end where power matters. Power matters a lot in our devices and where can we achieve the optimum combination of power and performance. So even in our small devices like a USB stick or a client SSD or something like that, if we can reduce power consumption and even just maintain performance that's a huge win for our customers, you know. If you think about your laptop and if I reduce the power consumption of that SSD in there so that you have longer battery life and you can get you know through the day better, that's a huge win, right. And I don't impact performance in the process, that's a huge win. So what we do, what we're doing right now is we're developing the cores based on the RISC-V architecture and then what we're going to do is once we've got that sort of design, sort of complete is we want to take all of the typical client workloads and profile them on that. Then we want to find out, okay where are the hot spots? What are the two or three things that are really consuming all the power and how do we go optimize, by either creating two or three instructions or by optimizing the micro architecture for an existing instruction. And then iterate through that a few times so that we really get a big win, even at the very low end of the spectrum and then we just iterate through that with time. >> We're in a unique position I think in that the technologies that we develop span everything from the actual media where the bits are stored, whether it's solid-state flash or rotating magnetic disk and the recording heads. We take those technologies and build them all the way up into devices and platforms and full-fledged data center systems. And if we can optimize and tune all the way from that core media level all the way up through into the system level, we can deliver significantly higher value, we believe, to the marketplace. So this is the start of that, that enables us to customize command sets and optimize the flow of data so that we can we can allow users to access it when and where they need it. >> So I think there's another actually really cool point, which goes back to the open source nature of this and we try to be very clear about this. We're not going to develop our cores for all applications. We want the world to develop all sorts of different cores. And so for many applications somebody else might come in and say, hey we've got a really cool core. So one of the companies we've partnered with and invested in for example, is Esperanto. They've actually decided to go at the high end and do a machine learning accelerator. Hey, maybe we'll use that for some machine learning applications in our system level performance. So we don't have to do it all but we've got a common architecture across the portfolio and that speaks to that sort of open source nature of the RISC-V architecture is we want the world to get going. We want our competitors to get on board, we want partners, we want software providers, we want everybody on board. >> It's such a different ecosystem with open-source and the way the contributions are made and the way contributions are valued and the way that people can go find niches that are underserved. It's this really interesting kind of bifurcation of the market really, you don't really want to be in the big general-purpose middle anymore. That's not a great place to be, there's all kinds of specialty places where you can build the competence and with software and you know with, thank goodness for Moore's law decreasing prices of the power of the compute and now the cloud, which is basically always available. Really a exciting time to develop a myriad of different applications. >> Right and you talked before about scale in terms of points of implementation that will drive adoption and drive this to critical mass but there's another aspect of scale relative to the architecture within a single system that's also important that I think RISC-V helps to break down some barriers. Because with general purpose computer architectures, they assume a certain ratio of memory and storage and processing and bandwidth for interconnect and if you exceed those ratios, you have to add a whole new processor. Even though you don't need to need the processing capability, you need it for scale. So that's another great benefit of these new architectures is that the diversity of data needs where some are going to be large data sets, some are going to be small data sets that need need high bandwidth. You can customize and blend that recipe as you need to, you're not at the mercy of these fixed ratios. >> Yeah and I think you know it's so much of kind of what is cloud computing. And the atomic nature of it, that you can apply the ratios, the amount that you need as you need, you can change it on the fly, you can tone it up, tone it down. And I think the other interesting thing that you touched on is some of these new, which are now relatively special-purpose but are going to be general-purpose very soon in terms of machine learning and AI and applying those to different places and applying them closer to the problem. It's a very very interesting evolution of the landscape but what I want to do is kind of close on you Martin, especially because again kind of back to the machine. Not the machine specifically but you have been in the business of looking way down the road for a long time. So you came out, I'd looked at your LinkedIn, you retired for three months, congratulations. (laughs) Hope you got some my golf in but you came back to Western Digital so why did you come back? And as you look down the road a ways, what do you see that it excites you, that got you off that three-month little tour around the golf course and I'm sorry I had to tease about that. But what do you see? What are you excited about that you came back and got involved in an open source microprocessor project? >> So the the short answer was that, I saw the opportunity at Western Digital to be where data lives. So I had spent my entire career, will call it at the compute or the server side of things and the interesting thing is I had a very close relationship with SanDisk, which was acquired by Western Digital. And so I had, we'll call it an insider view, of what was possible there and so what triggered was essentially what we're talking about here was given that about half the world's data lands on Western Digital devices, taking that from a real position of strength in the marketplace and say, what could we go do to make data more intelligent and rather than start kind of at that server end and so that I saw that potential there and it was just incredible, so that's that's what made me want to join. >> Exciting times. Dave good get. (laughs) >> We're delighted to have Martin with us. >> All right, well we look forward to watch it evolve. We've got another another whole set of events we're going to do again together with Western Digital that we're excited about. Again, covering Data Makes Possible but you know kind of uplifting into the application space as a lot of the cool things that people are doing in innovation. So Martin, great to finally meet you and thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks for the time. >> David as always and I think we'll see in a month or so. >> Right, always a pleasure Jeff, thanks. >> All right Martin Fink, Dave Tang. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time. (inspirational music)