>>Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on the cube. And thank you for joining us here for this cube conversation today. And we're talking about data. Of course, it's a blessing and the respect that it's become such a valuable asset. So many companies around the world, it's also a curse, obviously, because it is certainly can be vulnerable. It is under attack and Druva is all about protecting your data and preventing those attacks. And with us to talk about that a little bit more in depth as Jaspreet Singh, who is the founder and CEO at Druva and Steven Manley, who was the company's CTO. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us here on the queue. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>So Jaspreet, let me just begin with you. Let's, let's talk about the larger picture of data these days. And, and we read, it seems as though every day about some kind of invasion, you know, where some ransomware attack it's become all too commonplace. So if you wouldn't maybe just set the stage a little bit for the state of ransomware here in 2021. >>That's right. John, I think Lansing has now a new national security threat and at the scene, uh, all around us, this, uh, almost every single day, we hear about businesses getting hit with a, a new ransomware attack, uh, ransomware 1.0 was more a malware situation impacting our data. And as you know, the pandemic transformed the entire data landscape, like the application, the terror, the entire supply chain delivery model as to be more online, more connected, which, you know, for this mortar stores, this whole approach towards a malware coming in, we're also seeing ransomware 2.0, it is all about like insider techs or, or, or in general security misconfiguration, which could lead to data being exfiltrated or traded off in the market. So in general, as data is far more connected, far more expected to be online security techs from either malware or human oriented security issues are becoming more and more dominant threat to, to our, our entire data landscape. Right? >>Yeah. So, so Steven, if you would, I'd like you to just to follow up on this, this, uh, uh, will the landscape to take one of Jaspreet's terms here about what you're seeing in terms of, of kind of these evolving threats now, um, used to be probably, I don't know, five, six years ago, it was a very different, uh, set of problems and challenges and companies maybe weren't as laser focused as they are now. Um, maybe take us through that, that process, what has happened with regard to the client base that you see and you're working with in terms of their recognition and other steps that they need to take going forward as they modernize their operations? >>Yeah. You know, I th I think there's, there's two things we see from, uh, from sort of a technical perspective. The first one is in just pre-call that ransomware 1.0, ransomware 1.0, uh, is mainstream at this point, you know, so, so you, you can go out there and you don't have to be an expert hacker there's ransomware as a service. You know, your average, your average teenager can basically download a ransomware attack kit, uh, you know, get, get a pretty lightweight cloud account and attack school districts, hospitals, municipal organizations, whatever it is, you know, with what we would consider the traditional ransomware and, and that's become ubiquitous. And that's why we see all these reports of, there are multiple ransomware attacks every minute, you know, in the United States and around the world. So, so that's, that's, that's one part which is you're going to get hit. >>Now you'll probably get heading in with the more traditional ransomware, but, you know, like any industry, the ransomware people have evolved. And so it's as just breed said, they are constantly innovating. And so what we're seeing now from, uh, from sort of a marketplace standpoint is, you know, getting smarter about the ransomware attack. So, so laying low, longer, uh, you know, sort of corrupting or attacking data a little bit more slowly. So it's harder to detect specifically attacking backup infrastructure so that you won't be able to recover exfiltrating data. So that, so that now you can have sort of two types of threats, one that your data is encrypted, and the other is if you don't pay us, we're just going to post it on the internet. So, so you've got stage one, which is ubiquitous, and you've got to protect yourself against that because anyone can be attacked at any time. And then you've got stage two where it's getting smarter and that's where organizations then have to step up their game and say, I've got to keep my backup safer. Uh, I've got to be able to detect things a little bit more easily, and I need to start really understanding my data footprint. So I understand what can be exfiltrated and what that's going to mean to me as a business. >>So, Jess, um, to that point, that Steven was just talking about how the organizations need to get smarter in terms of your communications that you're having with the folks in the C-suite, um, is that point, is that you, if they readily identified today, I mean, are, do they get it, um, are the, is the communication going out to their stakeholders, are the business priorities being aligned appropriately? I mean, what, what are organizations and specifically on that executive level, what are they doing right now? Um, in terms of, of preparation in terms of protections that, that, uh, again, are so necessary, I would think. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think we do see customers truly making strides to solving the problem. There's not a one facet that, you know, one solution fits all problem either, right? So there's, there's, there's, there's a whole productive nature of preventing ransomware detection and response. There's a readiness aspect of it, but what happens when you do get here now that recovery element to it, how do I recover in time in shape from a attack like this, the customers are evolving. They're understanding at the same time, they actually deploying appropriate technologies to, to put all the three aspects of solving the solution. What does Stickney like any of the security challenge? This is, uh, you know, there's not a one application solve all problems. Typically the OLAP and controls built by a multiple group and multiple parties to make sure you're ready to response towards a tech like this. >>And just to jump in, because one of the things I find fascinating as we go through this, the customer conversations I have, I've I've been doing, you know, sort of data protection for a long time. We won't get into that, but, but most of my time I'd spent talking to, you know, VPs of it. Maybe I'd see a CIO. It's fascinating. Now we will have conversations with boards of directors because it becomes such a big issue. And the focus is, is, is so different, right? Because they understand that this isn't just like a usual backup and recovery, or even the traditional disaster recovery that you might do from a natural disaster or some sort of hardware outage. They're seeing that there are so many stages now to an orchestrator recovery. These customers we work with where it's, it's, it's not just about, I need a little bit to technology. They're really looking for how do I operationalize all of this? You know, because once you're up at the board of directors, this is no longer a which product is better than X, Y, or Z. It's a discussion about who can really insulate me from the risk, because these, these can be business sending events. If you're not careful, >>Right? I mean, you're ready. This is a great point. And actually, Steven, I hadn't really thought about these fiduciary responsibilities that boards have. And obviously we think about operations. We think about PNL, right? We think about all, but I hadn't really thought about how also data protection. And I want to talk about data resiliency, how those come into play, as well as those board decisions are made. So let's talk about resiliency. I want you guys to explain this concept to me. Um, so the, you know, what, what's the distinction between protection and resiliency because to me, they're, they're maybe not exactly synonymous, but they're kind of cousins in some respects. So a Jaspreet, if you will talk about resiliency and how you define that. >>Sure. So I just see what I mentioned, right? The prediction was more about how do I actually save guard my data to actually, you know, recover from an incident right there, didn't say residency is all about being ready to respond in time, right? The forward-leaning pusher of making sure, you know, am I ready to not just recover from a very, uh, you know, age, old problem of application failure or, or human errors, but also a cyber attack or a, you know, a true age incident or a cyber recovery or security incident, which I'm prepared to respond in a appropriate SLA across the board. Right. Uh, and resiliency also goes beyond, you know, just the nature of data itself, right? You're, you're talking about applications, environments ecosystem to truly understand that the enterprise operation needs it. Data needs to be holistic. We talked through how do I get my business online, faster. Right. And that's the two nature of differentiation between, uh, protection going towards resiliency. >>And then as obviously driving a lot of your product development. Right. And, and, and I know you've got the data resilience, resiliency, cloud, um, service that you're offering now. So Steven blitz blitz, let's dive into that a little bit. Um, what was the Genesis of that offering and, and what do you see as its primary advantages to your clients? >>Yeah, so, so I think, I think there's, there's really those, those tier two key words there it's resiliency and it's cloud. So just brief, kind of walked about how your resiliency is that step forward. It's that shift left, whatever term you want to use. To me, the best part about the cloud is, and like I said, I've been doing this for a long time and I've yet to meet a customer. Who's come to me and said, I really wish I could spend more money and more time on my data protection infrastructure. I love sticking together, multiple separate products. It's just a great use of my time. Right? Nobody says that what they really say is, could you just solve this problem for me? This is, this is hard capacity planning and patching and upgrades and tying together all the different components from up to seven different vendors. >>This is hard work. And I just need this to work. I need this to work seamlessly. And so we, we, we looked at that cloud part and we said, well, when you think of cloud, you think of something that's flexible. You think of something that's on demand. You think of something that does the job for you. And so, you know, when we talk about this data resiliency cloud, it's about, you know, moving onto your front foot, getting aggressive, being ready for what's coming, but having, you know, frankly, Druva do it for you as opposed to saying here's some technology, good luck. You know, Mr. And Mrs. Customer, you know, we've got this solved for you, it's our job to take care of it. >>And to add to it, you know, this entire resiliency question cannot be solved to a simple, a software is approach is a fundamental belief because the same network, the same principles of operation, the same people involved, you know, what, what those are involved around the primary application that the resiliency aspect has to be air gap appropriately, not just at the data level, but ID and operations limit as well. Right? So a notion of a cloud, almost a social distancing for your data, right? And you're in your ego to the enterprise that, Hey, if anything happens to my primary network application stack data, my second Bree cloud, my redundancy cloud is ready to respond inappropriate, define SNDs to recover my Buddhist business holistically as a combination of integrating with SecOps as a combination of truly integrating disaster recovery elements with cyber recovery elements, truly understanding application recovery from a backup and recovery point of view. So holistically understanding the notion of resiliency and simplifying it to the elements of public cloud. Yes, sir. >>How do you bend that for your clients? Because as you both pointed out, they have different needs, right? And they have, they have different obviously different that they're involved in different sectors of different operations with different priorities and all that. How is the data resiliency cloud, uh, providing them with the kind of flexibility and aid, the kind of adaptability that you need in order to conform it for what you need and not necessarily, you know, what someone else in another sector is, is all about. >>So, so for me, there's a couple of things that, that is great about, about being the data resiliency cloud. One is that we've got well over 3,500 customers, which means that no matter what segment you're looking in, you're not going to be alone, right? If you're, if you're healthcare, if you're finance, if you're a manufacturing, Druva, Druva understands, you know, what you, and many of, of your similar sort of companies look like, which enables us to work in a lot of ways and enables us to understand what trends are happening across your industry, whether it's, you know, ransomware attacks that are coming across, you know, say manufacturing space and how those look or what data growth looks like, or what type of applications are important in those industries. So it's, it's really useful for us to be able to say, we understand these different verticals because we've got such a broad customer base. >>I think the second thing that comes in then is every customer. I meet the number one question they asked me, and Amanda might not be the first one, but it's the one they want to ask. It's always, how am I doing compared to everybody else? And so it's really useful to, to be able to sit down and say, look in your industry. This is what we see as the standards right now. So this is where you fall. You're sort of maybe a stage two, everybody else's at stage three will help you move forward. You, our industry as a whole is actually ahead of many of the other industries, but this is what's coming next for it for others. And so it's really useful for those customers to understand where they sit in respect to, to sort of the broader marketplace. And so that's one of the values I think we bring is that we do have such a broad understanding of our customers because we are a service as opposed to just selling software. >>Yeah. And those customers too, um, as you've talked about, they're looking maybe at their, their, their competitive landscape and trying to decide, okay, are we keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak? Um, but all of you, all of us, we're all trying to, we're trying to keep up with the bad guys. And so in terms of that going forward, what does that challenge for you at Druva in terms of being anticipatory in terms of trying to recognize, uh, their trends and their movements and, and therefore we're thinking so that you can be that, that great, uh, protective mechanism, you can be that prophylactic measure that stands between a company and something bad from happening. >>So I I'll start. And then, uh, it's funny cause, uh, you know, just breed and I had just this morning, we were actually talking about some of the future of ransomware protection and one of the things that we are using a lot in driven, and I get every company says they're doing it is the use of AIML, especially in detecting, uh, sort of unusual trends. Um, but, but you know, but I think we're different than most because the AIML we use is again, across, you know, two and a half billion backups every year, right? Because we, we get, we get visibility across everybody. So it's not just isolated, but we're looking at things like, you know, unusual access patterns in the data and usual access patterns based on administrators, because like Jaspreet said, said at the beginning, one of the things we see the ransomware attackers doing is they're trying to get entire control of your environment because if I control your environment, if I control your phone system, your email, I can get control of your backup application and delete everything. >>So we're even doing things to sort of prevent, oh, you know, we were getting unusual administrative access patterns. Let's stop that. We're getting unusual recovery patterns. Maybe that's somebody trying to steal data out. Let's track that. So our use of AIML is across a much broader data set than anybody else. And it's looking at a lot more than just, you know, sort of data, data pattern changes took to a much broader set of things. And, and basically, again, it's, it's sort of a, a bi-weekly meeting we have where Jaspreet comes in with more ideas that basically for our, for, for our team to start to go, what else can we do? Because the landscape keeps changing. >>And on top of it, I think also if you think about data protection or even data storage was never designed from a security point of view, it was always designed from a point of view of recoverability of data tool. Application issues are basically not corruption, but security or the thinking help us also fundamentally understand how do we think about elements of zero trust all around the platform and how do you make sure to what Steven mentioned, if your IDP gets compromised, if you do have a bad actor, enter a data protection solution, make us, how do you still make sure levels of automatization immutability like multiple levels of control that it plays to make sure no bad actor take construct control and true recoverability resiliency is possible across a variety of scenarios and Trudy customer driven SLA. So both foundationally, uh, we've, we've truly built something which is now, uh, it's very deep in and focused on security. The same time as Steven mentioned to understanding of customer landscape really helps us understand bad actors thought more, better, and more faster than many of our, uh, in the industry competition. >>Well, the need is great. That's for sure. And gentlemen, I want to thank you for the time today to talk about, uh, what Druva is doing and wish you continued success down the road. Thanks to you both. >>Thank >>You. All right. We've been talking about data, keeping it safe, keeping your data safe. That's what Druva is all about. And I'm John Walls and you've been watching the cube.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM. Think the digital experience I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us manager of ECM solutions at auto owners insurance company, Ryan, welcome to the program. Thank you. And Michelle Christianson is here as well. VP of enterprise report management practice at end choice, Michelle. It's good to have you on the program. Thank you. Thank you. So let's, let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of and choice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about auto owners company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders, but give us an overview of auto owners insurance. >>Sure. So I don't want to said insurance is an insurance company. That's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Um, just by our name being auto owners insurance, which is how we started. Um, we write all personal lines, commercial lines and also have a life insurance company, >>So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about end choice. I know this, you guys are an IBM gold business partner, but this is end choices first time on the cubes. So give us a background. Sure, sure. Great. So in choice are an IBM gold business partner. Uh, we have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas, um, Austin, Texas, and, uh, Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM digital business automation space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped, uh, through the years. And we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM solutions. And talk to me a little bit Michelle, about how it is that you work with with, um, auto owners. >>So we assisted auto owners recently in their digital transformation journey and they were, uh, dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get for moving forward, you know, provided better customer satisfaction, um, experience, um, for their clients agents. And so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM digital business automation portfolio. Excellent client. Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about auto owners, your relationship with IBM and choice and how is it helping you to address some, the challenges in the market today? >>Sure. So I don't know if this has a long-term relationship with IBM. Um, originally starting back as we go as a mainframe customer and then, you know, more recently, um, helping us with different modern technology initiatives. Uh, they were instrumental in the nineties when we created our initial web offerings. And then more recently they've been helping us with our digital business automation, which has helped us to, um, mature our content, offering it. >>So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM. Right. And you mentioned the nineties, ah, a time when we didn't have to wear a mask on our faces. So a couple of decades it goes back. Yeah. >>Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that back, you know, back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things, >>Uh, the seventies, another good time. All right. So Michelle had talked to me a little bit about what end choices doing with IBM solutions to help auto owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said, this is a company that was founded in 1916. And I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation a lot harder than it sounds well. That's correct. Just as I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategies, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like auto owners, um, with their journey by first realizing, um, their existing, existing, digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need. And then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and process. And finally we re-invent, um, their strategic offering with modern capabilities. >>So we're focused on technologies like RPA machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure. So any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go forward. So this offers us, our clients, um, smarter and more into intuitive interfaces, creating basically a better user experience and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know, we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we reinvent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice have ha has helped auto owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern. And I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >>Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at auto owners with IBM. Um, when I started the team about seven years ago, we originally started using file NATS and data cap and case manager and content aggregator, um, as our first, um, movement from a traditional, um, platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform. And that helped us a lot to improve our business process, um, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable more recently, we've been working with Michelle and the team on our, um, migration to a content management on demand platform. And that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills, um, to our agents and customers, um, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are, um, important, um, for our customers to be able to see it to, um, engage from, with auto owners in a, in a digital era. >>So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that is that, is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents. So a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how, um, that like content manager on demand, for example, and what you're doing with ETF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >>Sure. So, uh, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management management on demand journey. Um, one is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Um, specifically some functionality around searching and searchability of our content, um, that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, um, ability to implement, uh, records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, um, as well as, um, some different options to be able to present the content, uh, to our customers and agents in a, in a better and more modern way. Um, and I'm choices role rolling that has really been, sorry, guide us on that journey, um, to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >>Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about hybrid cloud AI data, a big theme of, uh, IBM think is your, how is enChoice using hybrid cloud and AI, you mentioned some of the ways, but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like auto owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. Well, sure, sure. So, um, of course with the Calpec offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the cloud Pak for automation, um, several of those offerings are, some of them are, um, uh, built specifically to, uh, survive or to, to, um, be hosted in a hybrid environment. And as we working with auto owners, um, transforming their platforms going forward, for example, they just invested in, in a, um, a, uh, I just lost the word here. I, they just invested in a new platform mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. >>So, um, Ryan mentioned, uh, some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers and a particular, um, that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, um, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to management manage it. And of course, um, just that whole, um, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner. Um, we work with, uh, these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those? Um, it's great to take advantage of the new stuff, but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. >>And, um, so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those excellent leading edge. Ran, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, uh, sorry. Uh, an insurance company from the early 19 hundreds moving into the using container technology. I'll have stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about hybrid cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from, from your policy holders. >>Yeah, for sure. So, uh, first and foremost, um, we were a red hat open shift, uh, customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform. Um, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to, uh, move to cloud pack, um, and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. Um, at the end of last year, we updated our license thing so that we can move in that direction and we're starting to, um, deploy, um, digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform, which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability. Um, just a lot of ease of use things, um, for my team, um, to make their jobs easier, but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. Um, there's also a number of products that are in the, um, containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing, um, the same a couple, um, and those are both things that we're looking at auto owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents, um, to continue to grow the business >>Very forward-thinking uh, awesome Ryan, thanks for sharing with us. What auto insurance or auto owners insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how, how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from end choices perspective in terms of your digital transformation. Um, well we have been a hundred percent focus on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and, uh, and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey. Um, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know, helping transform our clients experience such that, you know, customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. >>So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients, we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. That is good. It sounds like the last year has been, uh, very fruitful for you. And I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM solutions, the transformation that you're both of your companies are on, and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. Thank you. Thank you for Rand Dunnings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM. Think that digital experience.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us, Manager of ECM Solutions at Auto-Owners Insurance Company, Ryan, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. And Michelle Christensen is here as well, VP of Enterprise Report Management Practice at enChoice, Michelle, it's good to have you on the program. >> Thank you. Thank you. So let's, Ryan let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of enChoice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about Auto-Owners Company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders but give us an overview of Auto-Owners Insurance. >> Sure. So Auto-Owners Insurance is an insurance company that's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Despite our name being Auto-Owners Insurance, which is how we started, we write all personal lines, commercial lines, and also have a life insurance company. >> So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about enChoice. I know this, you guys are an IBM Gold Business Partner but this is enChoice's first time on the Cube, so give us a background. >> Sure, sure, great. So enChoice are an IBM Gold Business Partner. We have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas of Austin, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton, Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM Digital Business Automation Space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped through the years and we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM Solutions. >> And talk to me a little bit Michelle about how it is that you work with with Auto-Owners. >> So we assisted Auto-Owners recently in their digital transformations journey and they were dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get moving forward, you know provide a better customer satisfaction experience for their client's agents, and so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on-demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM Digital Business Automation Portfolio. >> Excellent, Ryan Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. >> Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Auto-Owners, your relationship with IBM and enChoice and how is it helping you to address some of the challenges in the market today? >> Sure. So Auto-Owners has a long-term relationship with IBM originally starting back years ago as a mainframe customer and then, you know more recently helping us with different modern technology initiatives. They were instrumental in the nineties when we redid our initial web offerings, and then more recently they've been helping us with our Digital Business Automation which has helped us to mature our content offering at Owners. >> So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM, Ryan, and then you mentioned the nineties at a time when we didn't have to wear masks on our faces. (laughing) So a couple of decades it goes back, yeah? >> Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that, that, you know back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things. >> The seventies, another good time. (laughing) All right. So Michelle, talk to me a little bit about what enChoice is doing with IBM Solutions to help Auto-Owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said this is a company that was founded in 1916, and I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation. It's a lot harder than it sounds. >> Well, that's correct. Yes. As I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategy, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like Auto-Owners with their journey, by first realizing their existing digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need, and then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and processizations and finally we re-invent their strategic offering with modern capabilities. So we're focused on technologies like RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure, so any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go for it. So this offers us, our clients smarter and more intuitive interfaces creating basically a better user experience, and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. >> Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we re-invent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice has helped Auto-Owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern, and I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >> Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at Auto-Owners with IBM. When I started the team about seven years ago we originally started using file NATS and data cap, and case manager, and content aggregator as our first movement from a traditional platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform, and that helped us a lot to improve our business process, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable. More recently, we've been working with Michelle and the enChoice team on our migration to a content management on-demand platform, and that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills to our agents and customers, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are important for our customers to be able to see it, to engage with Auto-Owners in a, in a digital era. >> So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that, is that is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents, so a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how that like content manager on-demand, for example and what you're doing with ECF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >> Sure. So, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management on-demand journey. One is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided, and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Specifically, some functionality around searching and searchability of our content that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, ability to implement records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, as well as some different options to be able to present the content to our customers and agents in a in a better and more modern way and enChoice's role in that has really been to guide us on that journey to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >> Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about Hybrid Cloud AI Data a big theme of IBM Think this year. How is enChoice using Hybrid Cloud and AI? You mentioned some of the other ways but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like Auto-Owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. >> Well, sure, sure. So of course with the Cloud Pak offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the Cloud Pak for automation, several of those offerings are some of them are built specifically to survive or to to be hosted in a hybrid environment, and as we're working with Auto-Owners transforming their platforms going forward for example, they just invested in, in a, a I just lost the word here. They just invested in a, a new platform, mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats, and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. So Ryan mentioned some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers in a particular that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to manage it. And of course, just that whole, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner, we work with these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those. It's great to take advantage of the new stuff but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. And so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs, tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those. >> Excellent leading edge. Ryan, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, sorry an insurance company from the early 1900's moving into the using container technology. I love stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about Hybrid Cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation, and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from from your policy holders. >> Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, we were a Red Hat OpenShift customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to move to a Cloud Pak and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. At the end of last year, we updated our licensing so that we can move in that direction, and we're starting to deploy digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability, just a lot of ease of use things for my team to make their jobs easier but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. There's also a number of products that are in the containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing to name a couple. And those are both things that we're looking at Auto-Owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents to continue to grow the business. >> Very forward-thinking, awesome Ryan. Thanks for sharing with us what Auto-Owners Insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from enChoice's perspective in terms of your digital transformation. >> Well, we have been a hundred percent focused on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know helping transform our client's experience such that you know customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. >> That is good. It sounds like the last year has been very fruitful for you, and I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes. I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM Solutions, the transformation that both of your companies are on and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for Ryan Dennings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think The Digital Experience. (upbeat music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. Everyone live here in San Francisco, California is the cubes coverage of Google Cloud Next twenty nineteen star Third day of three days of wall to wall coverage. John for a maiko stupid demon devil on things out around the floor. Getting stories, getting scoops. Of course, we're here with Sadeer has Bay. Who's the director of product management? Google Cloud. So great to see you again. Go on Back on last year, I'LL see Big Query was a big product that we love. We thought the fifty many times about database with geek out on the databases. But it's not just about the databases. We talked about this yesterday, all morning on our kickoff. There is going to be database explosion everywhere. Okay, it's not. There's no one database anymore. It's a lot of databases, so that means data in whatever database format document relational, Unstructured. What you want to call it is gonna be coming into analytical tools. Yes, this's really important. It's also complex. Yeah, these be made easier. You guys have made their seers announcements Let's get to the hard news. What's the big news from your group around Big Queria Mail Auto ml Some of the news share >> the news. Perfect, I think not. Just databases are growing, but also applications. There's an explosion off different applications. Every organization is using hundreds of them, right from sales force to work today. So many of them, and so having a centralized place where you can bring all the data together, analyze it and make decisions. It's critical. So in that realm to break the data silos, we have announced a few important things that they went. One is clouded effusion, making it easy for customers to bring in data from different sources on Prum Ices in Cloud so that you can go out and as you bring the data and transform and visually just go out and move the data into Big query for for analysis, the whole idea is the board and have Dragon drop called free environment for customers to easily bring daytime. So we have, like, you know, a lot of customers, just bringing in all the data from their compromise. The system's oracle, my sequel whatever and then moving that into into big Query as they analyze. So that's one big thing. Super excited about it. A lot of attraction, lot of good feedback from our customers that they went. The second thing is Big Query, which is our Cloud Skill Data warehouse. We have customers from few terabytes to hundreds of terabytes with it. Way also have an inline experience for customers, like a data analyst who want to analyze data, Let's say from sales force work, they are from some other tools like that if you want to do that. Three. I have made hundred less connectors to all these different sense applications available to our partners. Like five Grand Super Metrics in Macquarie five four Barrel Box out of the box for two five clicks, >> you'LL be able to cloud but not above, but I guess that's afraid. But it's important. Connectors. Integration points are critical table stakes. Now you guys are making that a table stakes, not an ad on service the paid. You >> just basically go in and do five clicks. You can get the data, and you can use one of the partners connectors for making all the decisions. And also that's there. and we also announced Migration Service to migrate from candidate that shift those things. So just making it easy to get data into recipe so that you can unlock the value of the data is the first thing >> this has become the big story here. From the Cube standpoint on DH student, I've been talking about day all week. Data migration has been a pain in the butt, and it's critical linchpin that some say it could be the tell sign of how well Google Cloud will do in the Enterprise because it's not an easy solution. It's not just, oh, just move stuff over And the prizes have unique requirements. There's all kinds of governance, all kinds of weird deal things going on. So how are you guys making it easy? I guess that's the question. How you gonna make migrating in good for the enterprise? >> I think the one thing I'll tell you just before I had a customer tell me one pain. You have the best highways, but you're on grams to the highway. Is that a challenge? Can you pick that on? I'm like here are afraid. Analogy. Yeah, it's great. And so last year or so we have been focused on making the migration really easy for customers. We know a lot of customers want to move to cloud. And as they moved to cloud, we want to make sure that it's easy drag, drop, click and go for migration. So we're making that >> holding the on ramps basically get to get the data in the big challenge. What's the big learnings? What's the big accomplishment? >> I think the biggest thing has Bean in past. People have to write a lot ofthe court to go ahead and do these kind of activities. Now it is becoming Click and go, make it really cold free environment for customers. Make it highly reliable. And so that's one area. But that's just the first part of the process, right? What customers want is not just to get data into cloud into the query. They want to go out and get a lot of value out off it. And within that context, what we have done is way made some announcements and, uh, in the in that area. One big thing is the B I engine, because he'd be a engine. It's basically an acceleration on top of the query you get, like subsequently, agency response times for interactive dash boarding, interactive now reporting. So that's their butt in with that. What we're also announced is connected sheets, so connected sheets is basically going to give you spreadsheet experience on top ofthe big credit data sets. You can analyze two hundred ten billion rose off data and macquarie directly with drag drop weakened upriver tables again. Do visualizations customers love spreadsheets in general? >> Yeah, City area. I'm glad you brought it out. We run a lot of our business on sheep's way of so many of the pieces there and write if those the highways, we're using our data. You know what's the first step out of the starts? What are some of the big use cases that you see with that? >> So I think Andy, she is a good example of so air. Isha has a lot of their users operational users. You needed to have access to data on DH, so they basically first challenge was they really have ah subsequently agency so that they can actually do interact with access to the data and also be an engine is helping with that. They used their story on top. Off half now Big Quit it, Gordon. Make it accessible. Be engine will vote with all the other partner tooling too. But on the other side, they also needed to have spread sheet like really complex analysis of the business that they can improve operation. Last year we announced they have saved almost five to ten percent on operational costs, and in the airline, that's pretty massive. So basically they were able to go out and use our connective sheets experience. They have bean early Alfa customer to go out and use it to go in and analyse the business, optimize it and also so that's what customers are able to do with connected sheets. Take massive amounts of data off the business and analyze it and make better. How >> do we use that? So, for a cost, pretend way want to be a customer? We have so many tweets and data points from our media. I think fifty million people are in our kind of Twitter network that we've thought indexed over the years I tried to download on the C S V. It's horrible. So we use sheets, but also this They've had limitations on the han that client. So do we just go to Big Query? How would we work >> that you can use data fusion with you? Clicks move later into Big Query wants you now have it in big query in sheets. You will have an option from data connectors Macquarie. And once you go there, if you're in extended al far, you should get infection. Alfa. And then when you click on that, it will allow you to pick any table in bickering. And once you link the sheets to be query table, it's literally the spreadsheet is a >> run in >> front and got through the whole big query. So when you're doing a favour tables when you're saying Hey, aggregate, by this and all, it actually is internally calling big credit to do those activities. So you remove the barrier off doing something in the in the presentation layer and move that to the engine that actually can do the lot skill. >> Is this shipping? Now you mention it. Extended beta. What's the product? >> It's an extended out far for connected sheets. Okay, so it's like we're working with few customers early on board and >> make sure guys doing lighthouse accounts classic classic Early. >> If customers are already G sweet customer, we would love to get get >> more criteria on the connected sheets of Alfa sending bait after Now What's what's the criteria? >> I think nothing. If customers are ready to go ahead and give us feedback, that's what we care of. Okay, so you want to start with, like, twenty twenty five customers and then expanded over this year and expand it, >> maybe making available to people watching. Let us let us know what the hell what do they go? >> Throw it to me and then I can go with that. Folks, >> sit here. One of the other announcements saw this week I'm curious. How it connects into your pieces is a lot of the open source databases and Google offering those service maybe even expand as because we know, as John said in the open there, the proliferation of databases is only gonna increase. >> I think open source way announced lot of partnerships on the databases. Customers need different types of operational databases on. This is a great, great opportunity for us to partner with some of our partners and providing that, and it's not just data basis. We also announced announced Partnership with Confident. I've been working with the confident team for last one place here, working on the relationship, making sure our customers haven't. I believe customers should always have choice. And we have our native service with Cloud pops up. A lot of customers liked after they're familiar with CAFTA. So with our relationship with Khan fluent and what we announced now, customers will get native experience with CAFTA on Jessie P. I'm looking forward to that, making sure our customers are happy and especially in the streaming analytic space where you can get real time streams of data you want to be, Oh, directly analytics on top of it. That is a really high value add for us, So that's great. And so so that's the That's what I'm looking forward to his customers being able to go out and use all of these open source databases as well as messaging systems to go ahead and and do newer scenarios for with us. >> Okay, so you got big Big query. ML was announced in G. A big query also has auto support Auto ml tables. What does that mean? What's going what's going on today? >> So we announced aquarium L at Kew Blast next invader. So we're going Ta be that because PML is basically a sequel interface to creating machine learning models at scale. So if you have all your data and query, you can write two lines ofthe sequel and go ahead and create a model tow with, Let's say, clustering. We announced plastering. Now we announced Matrix factory ization. One great example I will give you is booking dot com booking dot com, one of the largest travel portals in the in the world. They have a challenge where all the hotel rooms have different kinds off criteria which says they have a TV. I have a ll the different things available and their problem was data quality. There was a lot of challenges with the quality of data they were getting. They were able to use clustering algorithm in sequel in Macquarie so that they could say, Hey, what are the anomalies in this data? Sets and identify their hotel rooms. That would say I'm a satellite TV, but no TV available. So those claims direct Lansing stuff. They were easily able to do with a data analyst sequel experience so that's that. >> That's a great example of automation. Yeah, humans would have to come in, clean the data that manually and or write scripts, >> so that's there. But on the other side, we also have, Ah, amazing technology in Auto Emma. So we had our primal table are normal vision off thermal available for customers to use on different technologies. But we realized a lot of problems in enterprise. Customers are structured data problems, So I have attained equerry. I want to be able to go in and use the same technology like neural networks. It will create models on top of that data. So with auto Emel tables, what we're enabling is customers can literally go in auto Emel Table Portal say, Here is a big query table. I want to be able to go out and create a model on. Here is the column that I want to predict from. Based on that data, and just three click a button will create an automated the best model possible. You'LL get really high accuracy with it, and then you will be able to go out and do predictions through an FBI or U can do bulk predictions out and started back into Aquarian also. So that's the whole thing when making machine learning accessible to everyone in the organization. That's our goal on with that, with a better product to exactly it should be in built into the product. >> So we know you've got a lot of great tech. But you also talk to a lot of customers. Wonder if you might have any good, you know, one example toe to really highlight. Thie updates that you >> think booking dot com is a good example. Our scent. Twentieth Century Fox last year shared their experience off how they could do segmentation of customers and target customers based on their past movies, that they're watched and now they could go out and protect. We have customers like News UK. They're doing subscription prediction like which customers are more likely to subscribe to their newspapers. Which ones are trying may turn out s o those He examples off how machine learning is helping customers like basically to go out and target better customers and make better decisions. >> So, do you talk about the ecosystem? Because one of things we were riffing on yesterday and I was giving a monologue, Dave, about we had a little argument, but I was saying that the old way was a lot of people are seeing an opportunity to make more margin as a system integrated or global less I, for instance. So if you're in the ecosystem dealing with Google, there's a margin opportunity because you guys lower the cost and increase the capability on the analytic side. Mention streaming analytics. So there's a business model moneymaking opportunity for partners that have to be kind of figured out. >> I was the >> equation there. Can you share that? Because there's actually an opportunity, because if you don't spend a lot of time analyzing the content from the data, talk aboutthe >> money means that there's a huge opportunity that, like global system integrators, to come in and help our customers. I think the big challenges more than the margin, there is lot of value in data that customers can get out off. There's a lot of interesting insights, not a good decision making they can do, and a lot of customers do need help in ramping up and making sure they can get value out of that. And it's a great opportunity for our global Asai partners and I've been meeting a lot of them at the show to come in and help organizations accelerate the whole process off, getting insights from from their data, making better decisions, do no more machine learning, leverage all of that. And I think there is a huge opportunity for them to come in. Help accelerate. What's the >> play about what some other low hanging fruit opportunities I'LL see that on ramping or the data ingestion is one >> one loving fruit? Yes, I think no hanging is just moving migration. Earlier, he said. Break the data silos. Get the data into DCP. There's a huge opportunity for customers to be like, you know, get a lot of value. By that migration is a huge opportunity. A lot of customers want to move to cloud, then they don't want to invest more and more and infrastructure on them so that they can begin level Is the benefits off loud? And I think helping customers my great migrations is going to be a huge Obviously, we actually announced the migration program also like a weak back also way. We will give training credits to our customers. We will fund some of the initial input, initial investment and migration activities without a side partners and all, so that that should help there. So I think that's one area. And the second area, I would say, is once the data is in the platform getting value out ofit with aquarium in auto ml, how do you help us? It must be done. I think that would be a huge opportunity. >> So you feel good too, dear. But, you know, build an ecosystem. Yeah. You feel good about that? >> Yeah, way feel very strongly about our technology partners, which are like folks like looker like tableau like, uh, talent confluence, tri factor for data prep All of those that partner ecosystem is there great and also the side partner ecosystem but for delivery so that we can provide great service to our customers >> will be given good logos on that slide. I got to say, Try facts and all the other ones were pretty good etcetera. Okay, so what's the top story for you in the show here, besides your crew out on the date aside for your area was a top story. And then generally, in your opinion, what's the most important story here in Google Cloud next. >> I think two things in general. The biggest news, I think, is open source partnership that we have announced. I'm looking forward to that. It's a great thing. It's a good thing both for the organizations as well as us on DH. Then generally, you'LL see lot off examples of enterprise customers betting on us from HSBC ends at bank that was there with mean in the session. They talked about how they're getting value out ofthe outof our data platform in general, it's amazing to see a lot more enterprises adopting and coming here telling their stories, sharing it with force. >> Okay, thanks so much for joining us. Look, you appreciate it. Good to see you again. Congratulations. Perfect fusion ingesting on ramps into the into the superhighway of Big Query Big engine. They're they're large scale data. Whereas I'm Jeffers dipping them in. We'LL stay with you for more coverage after this short break