>>Okay, welcome back to the Cube coverage of Dr Khan 2021. I'm John for your host. Had a great guest here. Dana Lawson. Vice president. Engineering and technology partnerships that get up dana. Welcome to the cube. You're leading the engineering team over at GIT hub. Been been around the block in the cloud enterprise area. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. >>Well, thanks for having me. Don, I am super excited. Dr. 2021 Wow. I can't believe it's been that long. Right. >>Got the keynote coverage automation. The top trend here in the world. DevoPS DEP sec apps, developer productivity, modern errors here, a lot of action uh and dr conscious more attendance every year, containers setting up the cloud native. You know the tsunami of new ways that people are programming. New way teams are formed new way people are being super productive with the pandemic. We've seen developers really lead the charge in the virtual work environment. So a lot of action. So first tell us what's going on in the developer community right now, give us your take, >>I mean, my take on it is the developer teams are just working closer than ever before. You know, we see this across all industries, whether you're going through your own digital transformation and trying to streamline your workflow, um you know, we have this concept of devops now for about a decade and and we all were hopeful I was one of those early adopters that like, yes, this will change the world, as you can imagine, and like we're seeing it materialized and I feel like in this historic year, uh it's on steroids, we see teams working across the aisle doing things we've never experienced before with this concept of interconnected tools. And so we're seeing really the, I would say the practice of devops really going across every member of the team and not being just a practice that maybe one person on your team did. You know, this trend has been ongoing for a while. But with these new key technologies out there, it's really on fire in my opinion, >>outside of just the whole cloud native awesomeness that's happening. You see kubernetes enabling a lot of new things, the virtual work environment with the pandemic developers, just like just the way we've been working a long time. Finally, it just got standardized for the rest of the world, the world. Um they didn't really miss a beat and, and combined again with the cloud scale and we saw the earnings from all the big companies, the developers have been super productive this year. Do you see um that continuing and what, how is it going to change in your opinion as the pandemic kind of lifts a little bit and now the new normal gets back to real life. Certainly those benefits came out is what's your take on this engineering dynamic going on. >>I mean you said it they're like this is a common kind of workflow that people had pre pandemic, especially in the open source community where it's literally a bunch of random people around the world that don't obviously get to talk as as quickly and as uh you know, synchronously and so a saint communications gone up in what we've seen there is teams really tuning in their automation, right? So whereas you may have had it in your backlog to say, you know what, I should probably go automate that workflow now that we have been forced. Even even companies that haven't haven't thought about in the past to say, okay, how do I get code from A to B. Seamlessly? There's spending time on those workflows. and I think that we're seeing that naturally, you know, in the keynote where I mentioned some of the Research that we've done is we're seeing developers work more but we're seeing them work more on open source projects and the things that they want to work on not necessarily going and saying I'm going to go and spend 20 hours at work. But really it's that that continuation of like hey instead of automation being an afterthought we're gonna make it something that is at the forethought of what we're doing. And so what it's really done is just increase the time spent on writing great code and hopefully having a better up time. I am a I am a DEvops SRE sys admin, whatever you wanna call it at heart forever will be. Um and so you know, getting to have more time to spend on S. L. O. S. And really the, you know like I call it the safety guards, the rails of your system so that you can just really go in there and allow everybody to contribute. And that's what I think we're seeing and we're going to continue to see that as things just get easier as stuff happens out of the virtual box. >>I mean simple or easy. It's always a good strategy. I was just reporting for our team on the cube con and cloud native con. There's more cloud native con going on than cube con because kubernetes got kind of boring. Um, and enabled more cloud native development. And then the other trend that we've been reporting on is end user contribution to open sores. You're starting to see end users, not just the usual suspects like lift and whatnot. You're seeing like real enterprises like having teams contributing into open source in a big way. This is a kind of a new, interesting dynamic. What's your take on that? Is that a signal of simplicity? What does it mean? >>I'm going to tell you, I think that companies and big names that realized they were using open source and they have been all along, um, it's been around for a minute. Some of our most favorite libraries and frameworks have been open source from the beginning. You hear me talking about Java and Tomcat that's open source. And so it's really this understanding of the workflow. So I want to say that what we see now is there should be an investment because the world's team of open source developers are powering our technology and why shouldn't we as companies embrace and actually get back and spend that quality time because us innovating together on open source privately and publicly just makes everything better for everybody. And so I I think we're going to continue to see this trim. I'm excited about it. GIT hub has done some amazing work in this space by with get up sponsors because we want open source to continue to enable the innovation and having people participate. And now we're seeing it with businesses alike. And so I think we're going to see this practice continue on and really take a look not only of the technology they're using, but the open source practices like how do these maintainers and these open source teams shit reliable quality code that is changing the world. And how can we put those practices within our own development teams on what we're building for our customers? So you're just going to continue to see this. And I think also with that being said because the barrier of entry has has lowered some by the advancement. What we're seeing the rise of the citizen developer as well. So we're seeing you know people all within the company and some that are much more further along with their transformations participate in a way they never have before. Whether it's like you know the design part in the design thinking of it to like how do you curate and have a great experience for your customers. We're just seeing participation at all levels of development stack and that also is the stuff outside of the actual code being written because it's so interconnected and so I I don't know I'm excited. I'm excited to see what we're going to unlock by having people participate more so than ever and then having companies invest in that participation. >>I love your enthusiasm. I agree. I think it's a great time for open source because it has democratized, it is bringing in new people. The aperture of the personas coming in >>is not >>just computer science and engineering. This hybrid SRE rolls developing and then you've got creative. There's a creativity aspect coming back and I've been riffing on this for a few years but I'm kind of seeing this development, love to get your thoughts used to be like craftsmanship was involved in building software and then Agile came in ship fast and iterate. Um and now craft is coming back. You're starting to see creativity and the developer experience through collaboration tools and kind of this democratization. What's your thoughts on this? And no, I know you I know you think about this as an engineering leader. Um Craft agile bring them both together. Speed and quality is craft coming back. >>Craft is definitely coming back and I think it is because we we melt the mundane stuff, right? Like, you know, we're all hyper focused on like you want to be the bush out there, you gotta ship immediately agile, agile, agile. But what we know is like you can ship a bunch of stuff, nobody wants very fast, you can ship a bunch of stuff that hasn't been curated to really, you know, solve the problem now, you'll be fast but will be awesome. I think people demand more. And I really believe that because we've embraced some of these frameworks, workflows and tool sets, that we get a focus on the craft and that's what we're trying to do, right? Ultimately we want every person that builds to be an innovator and not just an innovator for innovation state, but because they're changing and affecting somebody's life, right? And so when we dig deep and focusing on the craft, and we still have these expertise, we're just gonna be applying that in a very intentional way versus okay, hurry up. Bill, Bill Bill, hurry up, hurry up. Bill Bill, Bill, go, go, go, because now it's connected. And so we're seeing the rise of that craft and what I think is going to in turn happen is we're all going to have a better experience, we're all going to reap the benefits of having that expertise. You know, there's a spirit sometimes when we talk about automation and devops and, you know, interconnected tool systems that maybe you're taking somebody's job that they were doing before the daily task. No way. All we're doing is saying like, cool, take the repeatable thing that you're doing over and over and over, and let's focus on that craft, lets you know if your security person and you want to get down and deep and understand where vulnerabilities are going to come from and things that people haven't even thought of. Cool, let's take away some of the other things that we know can be caught and solved without you paying attention in some aspects. I think we just need along the whole stack. So it's pretty exciting times. >>Yeah, I did it and we call that different, undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, just get it out of the way since you brought that up. Let's take automation down that road of experience. What does it mean for the developer? Because this is really an opportunity. Right. So the phrase I've heard is if you do it more than a few times, just automated away. So when is the right time to automate where this automation play into the developer experience? When does it make it more productive? Where's the innovation angle you share your thoughts on when people look through the prism of automation productivity versus innovation? What's the what's the automation view there? >>I mean, you know it is it is a good like, you know, little metric could be done it five times and it's the same thing over and over and over. Your question is now like do you have to be doing that? I mean you should because you're doing it. So I think it's about finding and defining your own boundary for what you need, right? I mean it's hard to get out there and say every workflow like we can go and apply the stamp. We already tried that with agile frameworks for like everybody you're gonna do scrum, we're going to combine, you know what? It doesn't work. What we really need to do is have teams understand their workflows, right, understand and do some diagnosis and saying like we're in the system and I think that's powerful metrics and insights of going like where are we having a slowdown? Where are people spending their time if people are spending their time doing break fix or they're spending their time continuously trying to jam something into a certain pipeline, you have to ask yourself, is this something that we should be spending that time on? What if we had that time freed up? And so I do think you can go and put some good boundaries in there, whatever yours may be. I love I love some of those rule sets but really you know, deadlocks and automation starts with the process, right? We think about it and when I developed software always think about it through that design. Thinking lands of how will this work when I get to it. And so if we're focusing on the design aspect and the user experience, then we start looking at the pieces in between from that code to having people use it and say what do I need to do? And sometimes you know depending on your industry, you may have these other needs that not everybody has. So it's hard to say there's a one size fits all. But there is a good rule like if you've done the same repeatable thing over every every day, uh numerous days like you probably should just go spend the time to automate that. And I think it's the convincing point, right? Like if we go and and a lot of us are are nerds and engineers at heart and I love freaking math. So it's that like okay if we spend two hours building maybe a hub action for a doctor one time instead of somebody happened to repeat this process no matter what it is. Like you're giving that time back in that time is mental capacity, mental capacity that can be applied to something that's more important and hopefully the more important thing is the user experience. Um So yeah, I mean you know we all have those little systems out there. I say use them but take a step back. I think the bigger, the harder part is like yes, you will have to slow down for a minute, which is scary to go and build something repeatable so that you can speed back up. You know, >>it's awesome. Great, great inside love, love the energy a lot to ask you while you're here because this is something I've been thinking about. I'm hearing a lot of developers talking about, understand the workflow you mentioned that's a key thing. I love that. Getting in and understanding the customer experience working backwards, but that brings up the whole. How do you form the teams? How do you think about team formation? Because at cloud scale with cloud native, you can use building blocks, You have automation, you can easily compose and then build intellectual property around things. Use containers, make things easier. So as you start thinking about teams, is it better to have teams focus on, say workflows and then decoupled teams? Is there a strategy for general purpose teams or how do you look at the team formation from the developer perspective to make the experience great, high quality. Is there a state of the art in your opinion, given the compose ability and all the ease of use going on? I mean, what's the ideal way to think this through? What's your thoughts? >>Oh, you know, there's, I'm going to say there's not one team team to rule them all, there's not one team kind of foundation that's gonna be able to be applicable, it's all different, right? Like even within the same company, especially at scale, you may have these different compositions of your team and I think it comes down to like, what problems are you trying to solve within your workflow? What are you trying to accomplish? I think when we, when we step back and we think about our Ci cd pipelines and really code from idea into cloud that I believe in a unified system, because I don't want developers worrying about it and doing one offs, I'm like, you don't need to know that, and that's been an argument that's going on, you know, I'm a huge kubernetes fan and so it's been like, should, should, should the feature developers understand the entrance of kubernetes? I'm gonna say something controversial, I'm gonna say no, I'm gonna say they don't need to know, they need to know how to monitor alert and how to have smart rollbacks and have a system that does it for them. That's why we have Orchestration, that's why we have dr containers, that's why we have world class eight PM and monitoring systems in place because we've done that, we've done that hard work. So I would say no, they don't need to know that, so, but you still need these needs, right? Depending upon where you are in this transformation, right? Maybe you're still like, you know, integrating some of these cloud needed principles and toolsets and so you need some smes I do really love the SRE embedded model, not embedded, like on your, you know, like embedded, like a chip set, but embedded in the team, because that person really should be a mentor and should be a force multiplier. You don't want to fall in the trap and be like oh we have an SRE on the team. They're going to do all the devops stuff. No no no no they're going to go and help you think about your product through a customer lens right there. They're the experts going like whoa maybe we should have an S. L. A. Because this is a tier one feature lets go and make sure we build that automation so that we curate this feature with the highest level availability but then teach the team how to do that. So now you have this practice as a part right? Like you're honing your craft, you have this practice now. Does that mean they need to go learn everything about like the monitoring sweet and tools are used. No, but they should understand how to read the output of that. And so there's not one team size to rule them all. Unfortunately, I personally, I'll tell you what I'm a fan of is like I think that you should have flexibility. Like once again think about the points where you need to have the connective unified system, right? And then you have this opportunity for developers to have some agency and creative freedom because maybe you've been on a team that's been working on, I don't know, let's say your audit service. I think every every software has some component of audit uh, you know, in some ability because you want to know what he was using one well after they've done their tour of duty because most of the cool stuff, they've already fixed and made a feature set. Let them go roll into something else because then you have that connective tissue on the inner points of your system that are always the same, right? We want really repeatability. We want them just to focus on writing the code. And I think because of these advancements we are unlocking opportunity for developers to think broader, right? Like maybe you've been on the platform team and you want to go dip your toes into writing features well, 90 okay, maybe not 90 but also 80% of that, you know, every day repeatable task, like focus on that and get that shit out. But then you have the sme and you're really thinking holistically as a customer obsessed team of what you're building and why. So I love that. No one way. >>Yeah, I love the idea of the platform person just having more flex out because that brings a platform mindset to the other pieces, but also feature acceleration versus product strategy. Thinking through the arc of why you're building in the first place, Right? So and then the embedded SRE great point there, great call out there because everything's cloud scale now, you gotta have pen tests built in automation, >>who's gonna >>design that. So I think it's really interesting how you're putting that together and I think that's very relevant. Um and any um new things that you see happening now with with cloud Native, you mentioned cabernets, I think you know the story that we've been telling is kubernetes got boring and that's good. Right? So, >>meaning its meaning it's working >>and people like it, it's interoperability or frustration. It feels like a unifying connective tissue between under the hood and above at the application layer. So it's nice but the consequence of that is there's more cloud native going on, so that means more services are going to be connected and torn down. You mentioned observe ability and monitoring. That's important too. So as an engineering leader, that's not another department. Right? That's gonna be core to the developers. What's your thoughts on how to integrate observe ability now there's a zillion companies doing it now but is that you know >>there is a zillion. My thoughts are like heck yeah. Like conservative observe ability isn't at the end of the stack. Right, observe ability is apart just like qualities apart. Just like when we think about agile, let me just throw it this way right? Like when dr came right, we had it basically have this maybe this baby os encompassed on servers. So you can have multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple distributed. Right? I think of like let's let's say that like your team is that Docker container man, you want everything in their right? It is a part of the practice. You want your learning, you want your logging, you want it all wrapped up in this nice little bow and you want lots of them all working together harmoniously. The same thing can be said about our teams. We want them to be their own little micro operating system where they have all the resources available for them to go and do the thing that they are intending to do and not have to worry about that subset. But it also gives them that control. Right? So it's building in that layer of abstraction that's needed but also understanding why it's important. So it's a little bit of both. Right? We're not going to curate deep subject matter experts. You know, I'm, you know the Oh yes, I model and every aspect right? Like we're not going to turn a friend and engineer necessarily into a network engineer. But utilizing the tool sets, having a playbook where it is controlled, maintained in a part of your culture. All that's gonna do is allow you to move faster and it's allow you to see what's really running out there in the wild. And I see these trends happening. I think we're continuing to see the rise of cloud native technologies because applications now are really a set of a P. I. S. That go across the world and in and out. And so the way that we develop is slightly different. And so we need to think about, well, how is it orchestrated and deployed? Well, if you have a repeatable pattern once again, if we go back to that and think of our team and I promise nobody asked me to come up with this as like a little darker, a little docker container itself. You know, you're gonna write that image into what makes sense for you and have all the resources available and you're gonna rinse and repeat that over and over and over again. And so I mean, we're just seeing, seeing this continue this continuation of, you know, monitoring devops? S sorry, it's not a problem. It's a culture, right? It's not one person's job or a role. It's a part of how you build great software. It's just a practice. >>You mentioned abstraction layer used to be conventional wisdom that they were good. But there's trade offs whose performance tradeoffs or some overhead. Not anymore. It's good. You can basically build an abstraction layer and say, hey, I don't want to deal with networking anymore. It's gonna make it programmable. >>That's cool. No >>problem. So you start to see these new innovation patterns. Right. So what are you most excited about when you start to see these new kinds of things of being brought on that were limited years ago? Like you start an abstraction layers, you see the role of the SRE you're seeing um the democratization of new developers coming in that are bringing new perspectives. She's seeing all these new kinds of ways that's re factoring how people write code. But what are you seeing is the most exciting >>for me? Honestly, it's like the opportunity for anybody to really be a builder maker developer, right? You don't have to have a traditional CS degree if you do that's awesome, Like come and teach us awesome stuff that we probably should know. That's foundational. I don't have a CS degree. You know, we're moving on from these opportunities where it's self taught to where you actually 100% can go and learn and build and create. We're seeing the rise in these communities. I feel like these toolsets are really just lowering the barrier of entry for those people that don't have advantage to go to like a four year school and get a degree for people that are just like have a great idea what excites me is that next developer, You know, we talk about the 100 million developer sitting somewhere in the world, just going, I have a great idea and I'm gonna change the world and I don't know how to get started, but they do, they have it at their hands now. You know, if you can go onto a website, get a little bit dangerous with these tool sets, you can go and get your idea to the masses and what we're going to end up doing is like you said, democratizing tech, it's going to bring in new ways to think it's going to change how we interact with systems. We get we get our blinders on sometimes, especially, you know, I live in Portland on the West Coast, the US, we know that the world is vast, majorly huge, dynamic, awesome place. The things that work for me may not work for somebody on the other side of the world. The things that I do may not be relevant. But we're going to find that human connection. We're going to continue to say, well, wait a minute. How can we optimize for any human anywhere? How can we help take all these differences but doing them in a repeatable pattern. So like for me that's exciting is these toolsets that we've been working on for years, are now going to put put in people's hands that never thought they could. And that is exciting. And like to see to see the rise of just creativity is what really makes humans special because we build and make >>and the fact that it's more inclusive now becoming more inclusive on all aspects of inclusive whether it's individuals and coders types of code. So uh integration is the new normal right integrating in uh data control planes, all that goodness coming in because of the ease of use of developer experience. Super awesome. Um dana you're awesome. Great to have you on the cube and sharing your energy and insight. Great call outs on many topics. A lot of gems being dropped. Their thanks for coming on the cube. >>Well thanks for having me. It's been awesome and doctor comes been great. I can't wait to see the rest of the show. >>Dr khan 2021 Virtual real life coming back maybe in physical next year or hybrid for sure. Just the cube coverage of Dr khan 2021. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching

>>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Great guests here cube alumni Stephen Chin, vice president of developer relations for jay frog Stephen, great to see you again this remote this time this last time was in person. Our last physical event. We had you in the queue but great to see you. Thanks for coming in remotely. >>No, no, I'm very glad to be here. And also it was, it was awesome to be in person at our s a conference when we last talked and the last year has been super exciting with a whole bunch of crazy things like the I. P. O. And doing virtual events. So we've, we're transitioning to the new normal. We're looking forward to things getting to be hybrid. >>Great success with jay frog. We've been documenting the history of this company, very developer focused the successful I. P. O. And just the continuation that you guys have transitioned beautifully to virtual because you know, developer company, it runs virtual, but also you guys have been all about simplicity for developers and and we've been talking for many, many years with you guys on this. This is the theme that dr khan again, this is a developer conference, not so much an operator conference, but more of a deva deV developer focused. You guys have been there from the beginning, um nationally reported on it. But talk about jay Frog and the Doctor partnership and why is this event so important for you? >>Yeah. So I think um like like you said, jay Frog has and always is a developer focused company. So we we build tools and things which which focus on developer use cases, how you get your code to production and streamlining the entire devoPS pipeline. And one of the things which which we believe very strongly in and I think we're very aligned with with doctor on this is having secure clean upstream dependencies for your Docker images for other package and language dependencies and um you know, with the announcement of dr khan and dr Hubbs model changing, we wanted to make sure that we have the best integration with doctor and also the best support for our customers on with Docker hub. So one of the things we did strategically is um, we um combined our platforms so um you can get the best in class developer tools for managing images from Docker. Um everyone uses their um desktop tools for for building and managing your containers and then you can push them right to the best container registry for managing Docker Images, which is the jay frog platform. And just like Docker has free tools available for developers to use. We have a free tier which integrates nicely what their offerings and one of the things which we collaborate with them on is for anybody using our free tier in the cloud. Um there's there's no limits on the Docker images. You can pull no rate limiting, no throttling. So it just makes a clean seamless developer experience to to manage your cloud native projects and applications. >>What's the role of the container registry in cloud NATO? You brought that up? But can you just expand on that point? >>Yeah. So I think when you when you're doing deployments to production, you want to make sure both that you have the best security so that you're making sure that you're scanning and checking for vulnerabilities in your application and also that you have a complete um traceability. Basically you need a database in a log of everything you're pushing out to production. So what container registries allow you to do is um they keep all of the um releases all of the Docker images which are pushing out. You can go back and roll back to a previous version. You can see exactly what's included in those Docker images. And we jay frog, we have a product called X ray which does deep scanning of container images. So it'll go into the Docker Image, it'll go into any packages installed, it'll go into application libraries and it does kind of this onion peel apart of your entire document image to figure out exactly what you're using. Are there any vulnerabilities? And the funny thing about about Docker Images is um because of the number of libraries and packages and installed things which you haven't given Docker Image. If you just take your released Docker Image and let it sit on the shelf for a month, you have thousands of vulnerabilities, just just buy it um, by accruing from different reported zero day vulnerabilities over time. So it's extremely important that you, you know what those are, you can evaluate the risk to your organization and then mitigated as quickly as possible. If there is anything which could impact your customers, >>you bring up a great point right there and that is ultimately a developer thing that's been, that's generational, you know what generation you come from and that's always the problem getting the patches in the old days, getting a new code updated now when you have cloud native, that's more important than ever. And I also want to get your thoughts on this because you guys have been early on shift left two years ago, shift left was not it was not a new thing for you guys ever. So you got shift left building security at the point of coding, but you're bringing up a whole another thing which is okay automation. How do you make it? So the developments nothing stop what they're doing and then get back and say, okay, what's out there and my containers. So so how do you simplify that role? Because that's where the partnership, I think really people are looking to you guys and Dakar on is how do you make my life easier? Bottom line, what's it, what's it, what's it about? >>Yeah. So I I think when you when you're looking at trying to manage um large applications which are deployed to big kubernetes clusters and and how you have kind of this, this um all this infrastructure behind it. One of the one of the challenges is how do you know what you have that in production? Um So what, how do you know exactly what's released and what dependencies are out there and how easily can you trace those back? Um And one of the things which we're gonna be talking about at um swamp up next week is managing the overall devops lifecycle from code all the way through to production. Um And we we have a great platform for doing package management for doing vulnerability scanning, for doing um ci cd but you you need a bunch of other tools too. So you need um integrations like docker so you can get trusted packages into your system. You need integrations with observe ability tools like data, dog, elastic and you need it some tools for doing incident management like Patriot duty. And what we've, what we've built out um is we built out an ecosystem of partner integrations which with the J frog platform at the center lets you manage your entire and and life cycle of um devops infrastructure. And this this addresses security. It addresses the need to do quick patches and fixes and production and it kind of stitches together all the tools which all of the successful companies are using to manage their fast moving continuous release cycle, um and puts all that information together with seamless integration with even developer tools which um which folks are using on a day to day basis, like slack jeer A and M. S. Teams. >>So the bottom line then for the developer is you take the best of breed stuff and put it, make it all work together easily. That right? >>Yeah. I mean it's like it's seamless from you. You've got an incidents, you click a button, it sticks Ajira ticket in for you to resolve. Um you can tie that with the code, commits what you're doing and then directly to the security vulnerability which is reported by X ray. So it stitches all these different tools and technologies together for a for a seamless developer experience. And I think the great relationship we have with Docker um offers developers again, this this best in class container management um and trusted images combined with the world's best container registry. >>Awesome. Well let's get into that container issue products. I think that's the fascinating and super important thing that you guys solve a big problem for. So I gotta ask you, what are the security risks of using unverified and outdated Docker containers? Could you share your thoughts on what people should pay attention to because if they got unverified and outdated Docker containers, you mentioned vulnerabilities. What are those specific risks to them? >>Yeah, so I there's there's a lot of um different instances where you can see in the news or even some of the new government mandates coming out that um if you're not taking the right measures to secure your production applications and to patch critical vulnerabilities and libraries you're using, um you end up with um supply chain vulnerability risks like what happened to solar winds and what's been fueling the recent government mandates. So I think there's a there's a whole class of of different vulnerabilities which um bad actors can exploit. It can actually go quite deep with um folks um exploiting application software. Neither your your company or in other people's systems with with the move to cloud native, we also have heavily interconnected systems with a lot of different attack points from the container to the application level to the operating system level. So there's multiple different attack vectors for people to get into your software. And the best defense is an organization against security. Vulnerabilities is to know about them quickly and to mitigate them and fix them in production as quickly as possible. And this requires having a fast continuous deployment strategy for how you can update your code quickly, very quick identification of vulnerabilities with tools like X ray and other security scanning tools, um and just just good um integration with tools developers are using because at the end of the day it's the developers who both are picking the libraries and dependencies which are gonna be pushed into production and also they're the ones who have to react and and fix it when there's a uh production incident, >>you know, machine learning and automation. And it's always, I love that tech because it's always kind of cool because it's it's devops in action, but you know, it's it's not like a silver bullet, your machine, your machine learning is only as good as your your data and the code is written on staying with automation. You're not automating the right things or or wrong things. It's all it's all subjective based on what you're doing and you know Beauty's in the eye of the beholder when you do things like that. So I wanna hear your thoughts on on automation because that's really been a big part of the story here, both on simplicity and making the load lighter for developers. So when you have to go out and look at modifying code updates and looking at say um unverified containers or one that gets a little bit of a hair on it with with with more updates that are needed as we say, what do you what's the role of automation? How do you guys view that and how do you talk to the developers out there when posturing for a strategy on and a playbook for automation? >>Yeah, I think you're you're touching on one of the most critical parts of of any good devops um platform is from end to end. Everything should be automated with the right quality gates inserted at different points so that if there's a um test failure, if you have a build failure, if you have a security vulnerability, the the automatic um points in there will be triggered so that your release process will be stopped um that you have automated rollbacks in production um so that you can make sure that their issues which affect your customers, you can quickly roll back and once you get into production um having the right tools for observe ability so that you can actually sift through what is a essentially a big data problem. So with large systems you get so much data coming back from your application, from the production systems, from all these different sources that even an easy way to sift through and identify what are the messages coming back telling you that there's a problem that there's a real issue that you need to address versus what's just background noise about different different processes or different application alerts, which really don't affect the security of the functionality of your applications. So I think this this end to end automation gives you the visibility and the single pane of glass to to know how to manage and diagnose your devops infrastructure. >>You know, steve you bring up a great point. I love this conversation because it always highlights to me why I love uh Coop Con and Cloud Native con part of the C N C F and dr khan, because to me it's like a microcosm of two worlds that are living together. Right? You got I think Coop khan has proven its more operated but not like operator operator, developer operators. And you got dr khan almost pure software development, but now becoming operators. So you've got that almost those two worlds are fusing together where they are running together. You have operating concerns like well the Parachute open, will it work? And how do I roll back these roll back? These are like operating questions that now developers got to think about. So I think we're seeing this kind of confluence of true devops next level where you can't you can be just a developer and have a little bit of opposite you and not be a problem. Right? Or or get down under the under the hood and be an operator whenever you want. So they're seeing a flex. What's your thoughts on this is just more about my observation kind of real time here? >>Yeah, so um I think it's an interesting, obviously observation on the industry and I think you know, I've been doing DEVOPS for for a long time now and um I started as a developer who needed to push to production, needed to have the ability to to manage releases and packages and be able to automate everything. Um and this naturally leads you on a path of doing more operations, being able to manage your production, being able to have fewer incidents and issues. Um I think DEVOPS has evolved to become a very complicated um set of tools and problems which it solves and even kubernetes as an example. Um It's not easy to set up like setting up a kubernetes cluster and managing, it is a full time job now that said, I think what you're seeing now is more and more companies are shifting back to developers as a focus because teams and developers are the kingmakers ends with the rise of cloud computing, you don't need a full operations team, you don't need a huge infrastructure stack, you can you can easily get set up in the cloud on on amazon google or as your and start deploying today to production from from a small team straight from code to production. And I think as we evolve and as we get better tools, simpler ways of managing your deployments of managing your packages, this makes it possible for um development teams to do that entire site lifecycle from code through to production with good quality checks with um good security and also with the ability to manage simple production incidents all by themselves. So I think that's that's coming where devoPS is shifting back to development teams. >>It's great to have your leadership and your experience. All right there. That's a great call out, great observation, nice gym there. I think that's right on. I think to get your thoughts if you don't mind going next level because you're, you're nailing what I see is the successful companies having these teams that could be and and workflows and have a mix of a team. I was talking about Dana Lawson who was the VP of engineering get up and she and I were riffing on this idea that you don't have to have a monolithic team because you've got you no longer have a monolithic environment. So you have this microservices and now you can have these, I'm gonna call micro teams, but you're starting to see an SRE on the team, that's the developer. Right? So this idea of having an SRE department maybe for big companies, that could be cool if you're hyper scalar, but these development teams are having certain formations. What's your observation to your customer base in terms of how your customers are organizing? Because I think you nailed the success form of how teams are executing because it's so much more agile, you get the reliability, you need to have security baked in, you want end to end visibility because you got services starting and stopping. How are teams? How are you seeing developers? What's the state of the art in your mind for formation? >>Yeah, so I think um we we work with a lot of the biggest companies who were really at the bleeding edge of innovation and devoPS and continuous delivery. And when you look at those teams, they have, they have very, very small teams, um supporting thousands of developers teams um building and deploying applications. So um when you think of of SRE and deVOPS focus there is actually a very small number of those folks who typically support humongous organizations and I think what we're hearing from them is their increasingly getting requirements from the teams who want to be self service, right? They want to be able to take their applications, have simple platforms to deploy it themselves to manage things. Um They don't they don't want to go through heavy way processes, they wanted to be automated and lightweight and I think this is this is putting pressure on deVOPS teams to to evolve and to adopt more platforms and services which allow developers to to do things themselves. And I think over time um this doesn't this doesn't get rid of the need for for devops and for SRE roles and organizations but it it changes because now they become the enablers of success and good development teams. It's it's kind of like um like how I. T. Organizations they support you with automated rollouts with all these tools rather than in person as much as they can do with automation. Um That helps the entire organization. I think devops is becoming the same thing where they're now simplifying and automating how developers can be self service and organizations. >>And I think it's a great evolution to because that makes total sense because it is kind of like what the I. T. Used to do in the old days but its the scale is different, the services are different, the deVOPS tools are different and so they really are enabling not just the cost center there really driving value. Um and this brings up the whole next threat. I'd love to get your thoughts because you guys are, have been doing this for developers for a while. Tools versus platform because you know, this whole platform where we're a platform were control plane, there's still a need for tooling for developers. How do we thread the needle between? What's, what's good for a tool? What's good for a platform? >>Yeah, So I I think that um, you know, there's always a lot of focus and it's, it's easier if you can take an end to end platform, which solves a bunch of different use cases together. But um, I I think a lot of folks, um, when you're looking at what you need and how you want to apply, um, devops practices to your organization, you ideally you want to be able to use best in breed tools to be able to solve exactly what your use cases. And this is one of the reasons why as a company with jay frog, we we try to be as open as possible to integrations with the entire vendor ecosystem. So um, it doesn't matter what ci cd tool you're using, you could be using Jenkins circle, ci spinnaker checked on, it doesn't matter what observe ability platform you're using in production, it doesn't matter what um tools you're using for collaboration. We, we support that whole ecosystem and we make it possible for you to select the the best of breed tools and technologies that you need to be successful as an organization. And I think the risk is if, if you, if you kind of accept vendor lock in on a single platform or or a single cloud platform even um then you're, you're not getting the best in breed tools and technologies which you need to stay ahead of the curve and devops is a very, very fast moving um, um, discipline along with all the cloud native technologies which you use for application development and for production. So if you're, if you're not staying at the bleeding edge and kind of pushing things forward, then you're then you're behind and if you're behind, you're not be able to keep up with the releases, the deployments, you need to be secure. So I think what you see is the leading organizations are pushing the envelope on on security, on deployment and they're they're using the best tools in the industry to make that happen. >>Stephen great to have you on the cube. I want to just get your thoughts on jay frog and the doctor partnership to wrap this up. Could you take them in to explain what's the most important thing that developers should pay attention to when it comes to security for Docker images? >>Yeah. So I think when you're when you're developer and you're looking at your your security strategy, um you want tools that help you that come to you and that help you. So you want things which are going to give you alerts in your I. D. With things which are going to trigger your in your Ci cd and your build process. And we should make it easy for you to identify mitigate and release um things which will help you do that. So we we provide a lot of those tools with jay frog and our doctor partnership. And I think if you if you look at our push towards helping developers to become more productive, build better applications and more secure applications, this is something the entire industry needs for us to address. What's increasingly a risk to software development, which is a higher profile vulnerabilities, which are affecting the entire industry. >>Great stuff. Big fan of jay frog watching you guys be so successful, you know, making things easy for developers is uh, and simpler and reducing the steps it takes to do things as a, I say, is the classic magic formula for any company, Make it easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something and make it simple. Um, good success formula. Great stuff. Great to have you on um for a minute or two, take a minute to plug what's going on in jay frog and share what's the latest increase with the company, what you guys are doing? Obviously public company. Great place to work, getting awards for that. Give the update on jay frog, put a plug in. >>Yeah. And also dr Frog, I've been having a lot of fun working at J frog, it's very, very fast growing. We have a lot of awesome announcements at swamp up. Um like the partnerships were doing um secure release bundles for deployments and just just a range of advances. I think the number of new features and innovation we put into the product in the past six months since I. P. O. Is astounding. So we're really trying to push the edge on devops um and we're also gonna be announcing and talking about stuff that dr khan as well and continue to invest in the cloud native and the devops ecosystem with our support of the continuous delivery foundation and the C. N C F, which I'm also heavily involved in. So it's it's exciting time to be in the devoPS industry and I think you can see that we're really helping software developers to improve their art to become better, better at release. Again, managing production applications >>and the ecosystem is just flourishing. It's only the beginning and again Making bring the craft back in Agile, which is a super big theme this year. Stephen. Great, great to see you. Thanks for dropping those gems and insights here on the Cube here at Dr. 2021 virtual. Thanks for coming on. >>Yeah. Thank you john. >>Okay. Dr. 2020 coverage virtual. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back to theCUBES's coverage of Dockercon 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We have Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker. Was also involved in the CNCF technical oversight and variety of other technical activities. Justin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE Virtual this year, again, twice in a row and maybe next year will be in person but certainly hybrid, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you too. Yeah, in person would be nice one of these days, yes. >> Yeah, when we get real life back. It's almost there, I can feel it, but there's so much activity. One of the things that we've been talking about, certainly in theCUBE and even here at DockerCon, same story. The pandemic really hasn't truly impacted developer community, because most of the people have been working remotely and virtually for many, many decades. And if you think about just in the past 10 years, all the innovation in cloud has come from virtual teams, open-source softwares, always had good kind of governance and a democratization of kind of how it becomes built. So not a bit's been skipped during the pandemic. In fact, if anything supply chain of software development has increased. So- >> Yeah, I think that it's definitely true that open-source was really the place that pioneered remote working. And a lot of the work methods the people worked out to do open-source as in communication and things like that, were things that people have adopted. It's a slightly different community. I'd say open-source projects like meetings less than some other organizations, but there was definitely that pioneering thing. And a lot of the companies that started off remote first, were in open-source software, and they started off for those reasons as well because developers were already working like that, and they could just hire them and they could continue to work like that. >> Yeah, one of the upsides of all this is that people won't tolerate even zoom or in person meetings that just go on, 15, 30 minutes good call. Why do we have a meeting? What's the purpose? (faintly speaking) the way to go. Let's get into the developer community. One of the things I love about DockerCon this year 2021 is the envelopes being pushed again almost to another level, it's almost a new level, this next level of containers is bringing more innovation to the table and productivity and simplicity. Some of the same messages last year but now more than ever, stuff's going on. What are you hearing directly from the community? You talk to a lot of the developers out of the millions of developers in the Docker ecosystem. What are they saying now in 2021? What's going on in their mind? >> Yeah, I think it's an area... More and more people are using Docker, and they're using it every day and it's a change that's been going on, obviously for a while, but it begins to sort of, as it spreads, the kind of developers using Docker, so different from... When I started at Docker, coming up for six years ago, it was a very bleeding edge type thing for early adopters. Now it's everywhere, millions and millions of ordinary developers are using Docker every day. And the kinds of things that's telling us is, well, some of this stuff that we thought, well, five years ago was an amazing breakthrough and simplicity. Now that's on its own still too hard. One of the things I mentioned in my keynote was that, we're talking to developers who just primarily have been working windows all their life but more and more applications being shipped on Linux. And they using Linux containers, but they find Docker files really hard because they have really, Linux shell scrapes and not a windows developer doesn't know how to use a Linux shell script. And it's bringing it down to that next level of use where you can adopt these things more easily, the pitched to the kind of level of developer who is just thinking about their language, their APIs and they don't want to have to learn kind of lots of new things to do Docker. They'll learn some, but they really wanted to kind of integrate better into the environments they work in and help them more. We've been working on a lot of detailed instructions about like how to use Docker better with JavaScript and Python, because people have told us, be specific about these things, tell us exactly how I do make things work well with the way I'm doing things now. >> What is the big upside for containers for the folks watching? And last year, one of the most popular sessions was the one-on-one Peter McKay did, which was fascinating, packed with people. And the adoption of containers is going everywhere and enabling a lot of growth. What's the main message to these new developers that are coming on board to ecosystem. >> I think what's happening is that people are gradually, very slowly starting to think about containers in a different way. When we started, the question everyone kept asking was about containers and VMS, what's the difference? That question didn't really, kind of really address what the big fundamental changes that containers made to how people work was. I'd like to think about it in terms of the physical shipping containers, like people are concerned about like, can you escape from the box? Can I get out of a container? These kinds of questions. This is not really the important question about containers is kind of escape from the box. The question is, what does it enable you to build? The shipping container let us build the supply chains that let people build products and factories and things that would never have been possible without the ability to actually just ship things in a routine and predictable and reliable and secure way, getting that content and the things that come in the container and you actually work more effectively. And, so I think that now we're talking about like what's the effect of containers on the industry as a whole? What are the things that we can learn about repeatability and documentation and metadata and reliability, that we kind of talked about a little bit before, but these are becoming the important use cases for containers. Containers are really about, they're not about that kind of security and escape piece, there're about the content, the supply chain and your actual process of working. >> What do you, first of all, great call out on the security piece. I want to get that in a second. I think that's a killer one. You've mentioned supply chain, can you define software supply chain, and is that where the automation value comes in? Because a lot of people are talking about automation is improving the developer experience. So can you clarify quickly, what do you mean by the software supply chain? And is that where automation comes in? Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, so the software supply chain is really that process by which you get components of software to build your applications. Around 99% of companies are using open-source software to build applications. And the vast majority of the pieces of any modern application art consists mainly of open-source software and some tries source software, and some software that people are writing themselves. But you've got to get these components in, you've got to make sure that they're updated and scanned and they're reliable. And that's the software supply chain is that process for bringing in components that you're using to build your applications. And so, the way automation comes in, is just because there's so much of the software dealing with it manually is just difficult, and it's an ongoing process of build and test and CI and all those scanning and all those processes. And I think as software developers, we fundamentally know that the most valuable things are the things that we automate. They're the things that we do all the time and they're important. And that a lot of building a software is about building repeatable processes, rather than just doing things one by one, because we know that we have to keep updating software, we have to keep fixing bags, we have to keep improving software. And so you've got to be able to keep doing these things, and automation is what helps us do that. >> I was talking to Dana Lawson the VP of Engineering at GitHub, and she and I were chatting about this one topic. I want to get your thoughts on it, because she was definitely of the camp of automation helps with productivity. No doubt, check, double check there. The question I have for you is how do you see the impact on say the developer experience and innovation specifically? Because, okay, I can see the productivity, okay, something happens a bunch of times automated. Then you start thinking about supply chain, then you thought about developer experience and ultimately with Kubernetes around the corner, with the relationship with containers, you can see the cloud-native benefits from an innovation standpoint. Can you share your thoughts on the automation impact to experience for the developer and the innovation strategies they need? >> Well, I think that one of the ways we're trying to think about everything we do at Docker is that we should be helping build processes rather than helping you do something once, because, if you do something three times, you want to automate it, but what if the first time you did it, that could also build that automated process. And if it was, why isn't it as easy to make something automated as it is to do it once? There's no real reason why it shouldn't be. And I think that kind of... I was having a conversation with someone the other day about how they would... They had kind of reversed their thinking and they found that often it was easier to start with automation and harder to do things manually. And that's a kind of real reversal of that kind of role between automation and doing stuff run, so, and it's not how we think about it, but I think it's really interesting to think about that kind of thing, and how could we make automation really, really simple. >> Well, that's a great example when you have that kind of environment, and certainly the psychology is better to have automation but if everyone's saying it's hard to do manual, that means they're at some sort of scale, right? So scale matters, right? So as you start getting the SRE vibes going, and you start getting Cloud Scale in cloud-native apps, that's going to be cool. Now, the question I want to ask you, because while the other thing that's happening is more people are coming into open-source than ever before, not just young developers, but also end users. Not like the hardcore-end users, looking like classic enterprises are coming in. So as more developers come in and increase over the year, what does that mean for the experience for developers? Now you have, does that change it? How do you view that? Because as more developers come in, you have institutional knowledge, you have scale, you have learnings, what's your thoughts on on the impact as the population of developers increase? How does Docker view that? >> Yeah, now, I think it's really interesting trend. It's been very visible in CNCF for the last few years. We've been seeing a lot more active end-user, company's doing open-source. Spotify has been one of the examples with a backstage project they brought into CNCF and other areas where they work. And I think it's part of this growing trend that's really important to Docker, Docker is a bottom up technology adoption company. Developers are using Docker because it works for them and they love it. And developers are doing open-source in their companies because open-source works for them and they love it. And it works for their business as well. And whereas historically like the the model was, you would buy kind of large enterprise products, with big procurement deals that were often not what the developers wanted, but now you're getting developers saying, what we want to do is adopt these open-source projects, because we know how they work, we already understand that we know how to integrate them better into our processes. And I think it's that developer lad demand that's really important, and it's the kind of integration that developers want to do, the kind of products that they want to work with, because they understand them and love them, and they had targeted at developers and that's incredibly important. And I think that's very much where Docker's focused and we really want to... Open-source is of the core of everything we've always done. We've built with the open-source community, and we've kind of come from that kind of environment. And we built things that we love as developers and that other developers love. >> Talk about your thoughts on security. Obviously it's always built in from the beginning, Shift-Left is the ethos, day two operations, AI apps, whatever people want to call that. Post-deployment mode, security has to be at the center of this, containers can be a great solution and give some great flexibility for developers. Can you talk about your view and Docker view on the security posture and situation? >> Yeah, I think Shift-Left is incredibly important because just doing things late, everyone knows is the wrong thing from the point of view of productivity. But I think Shift-Left can just mean, ask the developers to do everything, which is really a bit too much. I think that sometimes things need to be shifted even further left than people have actually thought. So like, why are you expecting developers to scan components to see if they're allowed to use? If they should be using them or they should be updated, why hasn't that happened before the developer even gets there? I think there's a, I sorted my keynote about this whole piece, about trusted content. And it's really important that we really shift that even further left, so it's long before it gets to the developer, those things that are happening. Security, it's a huge area, of course, but it's very much, we need to help developers because security is non-obvious. I think the more you understand about security, the more you understand that it doesn't come naturally to people and they need to be helped with it, and they need to learn a lot about things in a way to, I found myself that, learning how to think like an attacker is a really important way of thinking about how to secure softwares, like what what would they do rather than just thinking about the normal kind of, oh, this works in the (faintly speaking) What happens if things go wrong? That you have to think about as well. So there's a lot of work to do to educate and help and build tools that help developers there. And it's been really good working with Snyk, cause they're a very developer focused security company, that's why we chose to work with them. Whereas historically, security companies have been very oriented towards kind of the operator side of it, not the development side, not the developer experience. And the other piece is really around supply chain security. That's just kind of a new security area. And it's very important from the container point of view, because one of the things containers let you do is really control the components that you're using to build applications and manage them better. And so we can really build tooling that helps you manage, that helps you understand what's in a container, helps you understand where it came from, how it was built and automate those processes and sign and authenticate them as well. And we've been working with CNCF on Nature V2, which is for signing revamp of the container signing process, because people really want to know who originated this container? Where did it come from? What did they say is in it? There's a lot of work about build up materials and composition analysis and all those things that you need to know about. What's in a container, and the... >> Everyone wants to know what's in a container. If you've got a Kubernetes cluster for instance, that's all highly secure and in comes a container, how do you know what the... There's no perimeter, right? So again, as you said, thinking like an attack vector there, you got to understand that, this is where the action is, right? This is where a lot of work's being done on this idea of always on security. You don't know when the container's coming in. during the run stage, you're running a business now, it's not just build and share, your running infrastructure. >> Absolutely, you really want full control about everything that goes into it, and you want to know where everything that you're running in production came from, and you pretty tired of this, and that's your end to end supply chain. It's everything from developer inputs through the build process and grow to production. And in production, understanding whether it needs to be updated and whether there's new discover vulnerabilities and whether it's being attacked and how that relates back to what came into it in the first place. >> Lot more intelligence, lot more monitoring. You guys are enabling all that I know it's cool. Great stuff. Hey, I want to get your thoughts on just what got you here on the calendar, looking at the DockerCon '21 event, and we're having a fun time here with, we're on theCUBE track, get the keynote track. But if you look at the sessions that's going on, you got, and I'll get your comment on this, cause it's really interesting how it's cleverly laid out this is. You've got the classic run share build and then you've got a track called accelerate, interesting metadata around these labels. Take us through, because this basically shows the maturation of containers. We already talked about the relationship, somewhat with Kubernetes, everyone kind of sees that direction clearly, but you got acceleration, which is a key new track, but run, share, build, what's your reaction to that? Share your observations of what the layout of those names and what it means to an enterprise and people building. >> Yeah, (faintly speaking) has been Docker's kind of motto for a long time. It kind of encapsulates that kind of process of like, the developer building application, the collaborative piece that's really important about sharing content in containers and then obviously putting into production because that's the aim. But, accelerate is incredibly important too. Developers are just being asked to do a lot. Everything is software, there's a lot of software, and a lot of software has to be created and we've got to make it easier to do this. And that kind of getting quickly from idea to business outcomes and results is what modern software teams are really driving at. And, I think we've really been focused this last year on what the team needs to succeed, and especially, small focused teams delivering business value. It's how we're structured internally as well and is how our customers, to a large extent are structured. And there's that kind of focus on accelerating those business outcomes and the feedback loops from your ideas to what the feedback that your customers give you at helping you understand that it's really important. >> Talk about final question for you in terms of the topic here, cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, this is, put multicloud asides more hype. Everyone has multiple clouds, but it speaks to the general distributed computing architecture when you talk about public cloud and on-premises cloud operations. So modern developers looking at that as, okay, distributed environment, edge, whatever you're going to call it. What's your view of Docker as it goes forward for the folks watching, who have experience with Docker, loved the vibe, loved the open-source, but now I've got to start thinking about putting the containers everywhere. What's the Docker pitch, so to speak, with a tech story that they should walk away with from you? What's the story, what's the pitch? >> Yeah, so containers everywhere has been a sort of emerging trend for a while, the last year or so. The whole Kubernetes at the edge thing has really exploded with people experimenting with lots and lots of different architectures for different kinds of environments at the edge. What's totally clear is that people want to be able to update software really easily at the edge the way you can in the cloud. We can't have the sort of, there's no point in shipping a modern piece of manufacturing equipment that you can't update the software on, because the software is how it works, more and more equipment is becoming very general purpose, people making general purpose robots, general purpose factories, general purpose everything which need to be specialized into the application they're going to run that week. And also people are getting more and more feedback and data and feedback from the data. So if you're building something that runs on a farm, you're getting permanent feedback about how well it's doing and how well the crops are growing was coming back. And so everywhere you've got this, we need to update. And everywhere you need to update, you want containers because containers are the simple reliable way to update software. >> I know you talked about CNCF and your role there. Also the CTO of Docker, I have to ask cause we were just covered Coop con and cloud-native con just last month and this month. And it's clear that Kubernetes is becoming boringly good in a way that's good to be boring, right? It means it's working. And it's becoming more cloud-native con than Coop-con. That has been kind of editorial observation, which speaks to what we feel is a trend towards more cloud-native discussions, less about Kubernetes. So, it's still Kubernetes stuff going on, don't get me wrong, just saying it's not as controversial in the sense that people kind of clearly understand why that's important, and all the discussions now seem to be on cloud-native modern developer workflows. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree, if not, what's your take? >> Yeah, I think that's definitely true. Kubernetes is definitely much more boring. Everyone is using it. They're using it in production now vastly more than they were a few years ago, when it was just experiment, experiment, experiment, now it's production scale out. The ecosystem in CNCF is kind of huge. There's so many little bits that have to be filled in storage and networking and all that. So there's actually a lot of pieces that are around Kubernetes, but, there's definitely more of a focus coming on the developer experience there. Compared to DockerCon, the audience at Coop Con is incarnated kind of still much more operator focused rather than developer focused. And it's very nice coming to DockerCon, just to feel like being amongst that developer community, Coop Con still has a way to gauge to have more of a real developer audience, but the project is starting to pair with a more developer focused kind of aim or things like backstage from Spotify is a really interesting one where it's about operations, but it's a developer portal focused things. So, I think it's happening, and there's a lot more talk about that. There's a whole bunch of infrastructure, there's a lot more security projects in CNCF than they were before. And we're doing a lot of work on supply chain security and CNCF just released a white paper on that few days ago. So there's a lot of work there that touches on developer needs. I still think that audience (faintly speaking) that much different from DockerCon which is I think 80% developers and maybe 10% infrastructure rather than the other way round. >> I think if you're going to get operators it can be SRE/platformleads. The platform leads are definitely inside DockerCon now than they've ever been before from my observation. So, but that speaks to the sign of the times. Most development teams have an SRE in the team, not an SRE team. They're just starting to see much more integration amongst the kind of a threaded or threaded teams or whatnot. So... >> Yeah. (faintly speaking) Operate your apps is the model. And I think that it's going to lead to more and more crossover between these communities. It's what DevOps was supposed to be about, somehow got diverted into building DevOps teams instead of working together, but we'll get there. >> It's clear from my standpoint, at least from reporting here is that, from the DockerCon and community at large, cloud-native community, having end-to-end work-load visibility on developer test run, everything seems to be the consensus, without a doubt. And then having multiple teams, and then having some platform, have some flexing people moving between teams for the most part, but built insecurity, built in SRE, built in DevOps, DevSecOps, all the way from end-to-end. >> Absolutely, we know that that's what does work best, it's where most organizations are heading at different speeds, because it's very different from the traditional architecture. It takes time to get there, but that's the model that has come out of microservices that really containers enabled and allow that model to happen. And it's the team architecture of containers. >> Hey, monolithic applications have monolithic organizations, microservices have microservices teams. Justin, great to have you on theCUBE for this conversation. If folks watching this interview, check out Justin's keynote, came from the main stage, great stuff. Justin, thanks for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate your time and insight. >> Thank you, good to see you again. >> Okay, this is theCUBES's coverage of DockerCon 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Individuals create developers, translate ideas to code, to create great applications and great applications. Touch everyone. A Docker. We know that collaboration is key to your innovation sharing ideas, working together. Launching the most secure applications. Docker is with you wherever your team innovates, whether it be robots or autonomous cars, we're doing research to save lives during a pandemic, revolutionizing, how to buy and sell goods online, or even going into the unknown frontiers of space. Docker is launching innovation everywhere. Join us on the journey to build, share, run the future. >>Hello and welcome to Docker con 2021. We're incredibly excited to have more than 80,000 of you join us today from all over the world. As it was last year, this year at DockerCon is 100% virtual and 100% free. So as to enable as many community members as possible to join us now, 100%. Virtual is also an acknowledgement of the continuing global pandemic in particular, the ongoing tragedies in India and Brazil, the Docker community is a global one. And on behalf of all Dr. Khan attendees, we are donating $10,000 to UNICEF support efforts to fight the virus in those countries. Now, even in those regions of the world where the pandemic is being brought under control, virtual first is the new normal. It's been a challenging transition. This includes our team here at Docker. And we know from talking with many of you that you and your developer teams are challenged by this as well. So to help application development teams better collaborate and ship faster, we've been working on some powerful new features and we thought it would be fun to start off with a demo of those. How about it? Want to have a look? All right. Then no further delay. I'd like to introduce Youi Cal and Ben, gosh, over to you and Ben >>Morning, Ben, thanks for jumping on real quick. >>Have you seen the email from Scott? The one about updates and the docs landing page Smith, the doc combat and more prominence. >>Yeah. I've got something working on my local machine. I haven't committed anything yet. I was thinking we could try, um, that new Docker dev environments feature. >>Yeah, that's cool. So if you hit the share button, what I should do is it will take all of your code and the dependencies and the image you're basing it on and wrap that up as one image for me. And I can then just monitor all my machines that have been one click, like, and then have it side by side, along with the changes I've been looking at as well, because I was also having a bit of a look and then I can really see how it differs to what I'm doing. Maybe I can combine it to do the best of both worlds. >>Sounds good. Uh, let me get that over to you, >>Wilson. Yeah. If you pay with the image name, I'll get that started up. >>All right. Sen send it over >>Cheesy. Okay, great. Let's have a quick look at what you he was doing then. So I've been messing around similar to do with the batter. I've got movie at the top here and I think it looks pretty cool. Let's just grab that image from you. Pick out that started on a dev environment. What this is doing. It's just going to grab the image down, which you can take all of the code, the dependencies only get brunches working on and I'll get that opened up in my idea. Ready to use. It's a here close. We can see our environment as my Molly image, just coming down there and I've got my new idea. >>We'll load this up and it'll just connect to my dev environment. There we go. It's connected to the container. So we're working all in the container here and now give it a moment. What we'll do is we'll see what changes you've been making as well on the code. So it's like she's been working on a landing page as well, and it looks like she's been changing the banner as well. So let's get this running. Let's see what she's actually doing and how it looks. We'll set up our checklist and then we'll see how that works. >>Great. So that's now rolling. So let's just have a look at what you use doing what changes she had made. Compare those to mine just jumped back into my dev container UI, see that I've got both of those running side by side with my changes and news changes. Okay. So she's put Molly up there rather than mobi or somebody had the same idea. So I think in a way I can make us both happy. So if we just jumped back into what we'll do, just add Molly and Moby and here I'll save that. And what we can see is, cause I'm just working within the container rather than having to do sort of rebuild of everything or serve, or just reload my content. No, that's straight the page. So what I can then do is I can come up with my browser here. Once that's all refreshed, refresh the page once hopefully, maybe twice, we should then be able to see your refresh it or should be able to see that we get Malia mobi come up. So there we go, got Molly mobi. So what we'll do now is we'll describe that state. It sends us our image and then we'll just create one of those to share with URI or share. And we'll get a link for that. I guess we'll send that back over to you. >>So I've had a look at what you were doing and I'm actually going to change. I think that might work for both of us. I wondered if you could take a look at it. If I send it over. >>Sounds good. Let me grab the link. >>Yeah, it's a dev environment link again. So if you just open that back in the doc dashboard, it should be able to open up the code that I've changed and then just run it in the same way you normally do. And that shouldn't interrupt what you're already working on because there'll be able to run side by side with your other brunch. You already got, >>Got it. Got it. Loading here. Well, that's great. It's Molly and movie together. I love it. I think we should ship it. >>Awesome. I guess it's chip it and get on with the rest of.com. Wasn't that cool. Thank you Joey. Thanks Ben. Everyone we'll have more of this later in the keynote. So stay tuned. Let's say earlier, we've all been challenged by this past year, whether the COVID pandemic, the complete evaporation of customer demand in many industries, unemployment or business bankruptcies, we all been touched in some way. And yet, even to miss these tragedies last year, we saw multiple sources of hope and inspiration. For example, in response to COVID we saw global communities, including the tech community rapidly innovate solutions for analyzing the spread of the virus, sequencing its genes and visualizing infection rates. In fact, if all in teams collaborating on solutions for COVID have created more than 1,400 publicly shareable images on Docker hub. As another example, we all witnessed the historic landing and exploration of Mars by the perseverance Rover and its ingenuity drone. >>Now what's common in these examples, these innovative and ambitious accomplishments were made possible not by any single individual, but by teams of individuals collaborating together. The power of teams is why we've made development teams central to Docker's mission to build tools and content development teams love to help them get their ideas from code to cloud as quickly as possible. One of the frictions we've seen that can slow down to them in teams is that the path from code to cloud can be a confusing one, riddle with multiple point products, tools, and images that need to be integrated and maintained an automated pipeline in order for teams to be productive. That's why a year and a half ago we refocused Docker on helping development teams make sense of all this specifically, our goal is to provide development teams with the trusted content, the sharing capabilities and the pipeline integrations with best of breed third-party tools to help teams ship faster in short, to provide a collaborative application development platform. >>Everything a team needs to build. Sharon run create applications. Now, as I noted earlier, it's been a challenging year for everyone on our planet and has been similar for us here at Docker. Our team had to adapt to working from home local lockdowns caused by the pandemic and other challenges. And despite all this together with our community and ecosystem partners, we accomplished many exciting milestones. For example, in open source together with the community and our partners, we open sourced or made major contributions to many projects, including OCI distribution and the composed plugins building on these open source projects. We had powerful new capabilities to the Docker product, both free and subscription. For example, support for WSL two and apple, Silicon and Docker, desktop and vulnerability scanning audit logs and image management and Docker hub. >>And finally delivering an easy to use well-integrated development experience with best of breed tools and content is only possible through close collaboration with our ecosystem partners. For example, this last year we had over 100 commercialized fees, join our Docker verified publisher program and over 200 open source projects, join our Docker sponsored open source program. As a result of these efforts, we've seen some exciting growth in the Docker community in the 12 months since last year's Docker con for example, the number of registered developers grew 80% to over 8 million. These developers created many new images increasing the total by 56% to almost 11 million. And the images in all these repositories were pulled by more than 13 million monthly active IP addresses totaling 13 billion pulls a month. Now while the growth is exciting by Docker, we're even more excited about the stories we hear from you and your development teams about how you're using Docker and its impact on your businesses. For example, cancer researchers and their bioinformatics development team at the Washington university school of medicine needed a way to quickly analyze their clinical trial results and then share the models, the data and the analysis with other researchers they use Docker because it gives them the ease of use choice of pipeline tools and speed of sharing so critical to their research. And most importantly to the lives of their patients stay tuned for another powerful customer story later in the keynote from Matt fall, VP of engineering at Oracle insights. >>So with this last year behind us, what's next for Docker, but challenge you this last year of force changes in how development teams work, but we felt for years to come. And what we've learned in our discussions with you will have long lasting impact on our product roadmap. One of the biggest takeaways from those discussions that you and your development team want to be quicker to adapt, to changes in your environment so you can ship faster. So what is DACA doing to help with this first trusted content to own the teams that can focus their energies on what is unique to their businesses and spend as little time as possible on undifferentiated work are able to adapt more quickly and ship faster in order to do so. They need to be able to trust other components that make up their app together with our partners. >>Docker is doubling down and providing development teams with trusted content and the tools they need to use it in their applications. Second, remote collaboration on a development team, asking a coworker to take a look at your code used to be as easy as swiveling their chair around, but given what's happened in the last year, that's no longer the case. So as you even been hinted in the demo at the beginning, you'll see us deliver more capabilities for remote collaboration within a development team. And we're enabling development team to quickly adapt to any team configuration all on prem hybrid, all work from home, helping them remain productive and focused on shipping third ecosystem integrations, those development teams that can quickly take advantage of innovations throughout the ecosystem. Instead of getting locked into a single monolithic pipeline, there'll be the ones able to deliver amps, which impact their businesses faster. >>So together with our ecosystem partners, we are investing in more integrations with best of breed tools, right? Integrated automated app pipelines. Furthermore, we'll be writing more public API APIs and SDKs to enable ecosystem partners and development teams to roll their own integrations. We'll be sharing more details about remote collaboration and ecosystem integrations. Later in the keynote, I'd like to take a moment to share with Docker and our partners are doing for trusted content, providing development teams, access to content. They can trust, allows them to focus their coding efforts on what's unique and differentiated to that end Docker and our partners are bringing more and more trusted content to Docker hub Docker official images are 160 images of popular upstream open source projects that serve as foundational building blocks for any application. These include operating systems, programming, languages, databases, and more. Furthermore, these are updated patch scan and certified frequently. So I said, no image is older than 30 days. >>Docker verified publisher images are published by more than 100 commercialized feeds. The image Rebos are explicitly designated verify. So the developers searching for components for their app know that the ISV is actively maintaining the image. Docker sponsored open source projects announced late last year features images for more than 200 open source communities. Docker sponsors these communities through providing free storage and networking resources and offering their community members unrestricted access repos for businesses allow businesses to update and share their apps privately within their organizations using role-based access control and user authentication. No, and finally, public repos for communities enable community projects to be freely shared with anonymous and authenticated users alike. >>And for all these different types of content, we provide services for both development teams and ISP, for example, vulnerability scanning and digital signing for enhanced security search and filtering for discoverability packaging and updating services and analytics about how these products are being used. All this trusted content, we make available to develop teams for them directly to discover poll and integrate into their applications. Our goal is to meet development teams where they live. So for those organizations that prefer to manage their internal distribution of trusted content, we've collaborated with leading container registry partners. We announced our partnership with J frog late last year. And today we're very pleased to announce our partnerships with Amazon and Miranda's for providing an integrated seamless experience for joint for our joint customers. Lastly, the container images themselves and this end to end flow are built on open industry standards, which provided all the teams with flexibility and choice trusted content enables development teams to rapidly build. >>As I let them focus on their unique differentiated features and use trusted building blocks for the rest. We'll be talking more about trusted content as well as remote collaboration and ecosystem integrations later in the keynote. Now ecosystem partners are not only integral to the Docker experience for development teams. They're also integral to a great DockerCon experience, but please join me in thanking our Dr. Kent on sponsors and checking out their talks throughout the day. I also want to thank some others first up Docker team. Like all of you this last year has been extremely challenging for us, but the Docker team rose to the challenge and worked together to continue shipping great product, the Docker community of captains, community leaders, and contributors with your welcoming newcomers, enthusiasm for Docker and open exchanges of best practices and ideas talker, wouldn't be Docker without you. And finally, our development team customers. >>You trust us to help you build apps. Your businesses rely on. We don't take that trust for granted. Thank you. In closing, we often hear about the tenant's developer capable of great individual feeds that can transform project. But I wonder if we, as an industry have perhaps gotten this wrong by putting so much emphasis on weight, on the individual as discussed at the beginning, great accomplishments like innovative responses to COVID-19 like landing on Mars are more often the results of individuals collaborating together as a team, which is why our mission here at Docker is delivered tools and content developers love to help their team succeed and become 10 X teams. Thanks again for joining us, we look forward to having a great DockerCon with you today, as well as a great year ahead of us. Thanks and be well. >>Hi, I'm Dana Lawson, VP of engineering here at get hub. And my job is to enable this rich interconnected community of builders and makers to build even more and hopefully have a great time doing it in order to enable the best platform for developers, which I know is something we are all passionate about. We need to partner across the ecosystem to ensure that developers can have a great experience across get hub and all the tools that they want to use. No matter what they are. My team works to build the tools and relationships to make that possible. I am so excited to join Scott on this virtual stage to talk about increasing developer velocity. So let's dive in now, I know this may be hard for some of you to believe, but as a former CIS admin, some 21 years ago, working on sense spark workstations, we've come such a long way for random scripts and desperate systems that we've stitched together to this whole inclusive developer workflow experience being a CIS admin. >>Then you were just one piece of the siloed experience, but I didn't want to just push code to production. So I created scripts that did it for me. I taught myself how to code. I was the model lazy CIS admin that got dangerous and having pushed a little too far. I realized that working in production and building features is really a team sport that we had the opportunity, all of us to be customer obsessed today. As developers, we can go beyond the traditional dev ops mindset. We can really focus on adding value to the customer experience by ensuring that we have work that contributes to increasing uptime via and SLS all while being agile and productive. We get there. When we move from a pass the Baton system to now having an interconnected developer workflow that increases velocity in every part of the cycle, we get to work better and smarter. >>And honestly, in a way that is so much more enjoyable because we automate away all the mundane and manual and boring tasks. So we get to focus on what really matters shipping, the things that humans get to use and love. Docker has been a big part of enabling this transformation. 10, 20 years ago, we had Tomcat containers, which are not Docker containers. And for y'all hearing this the first time go Google it. But that was the way we built our applications. We had to segment them on the server and give them resources. Today. We have Docker containers, these little mini Oasys and Docker images. You can do it multiple times in an orchestrated manner with the power of actions enabled and Docker. It's just so incredible what you can do. And by the way, I'm showing you actions in Docker, which I hope you use because both are great and free for open source. >>But the key takeaway is really the workflow and the automation, which you certainly can do with other tools. Okay, I'm going to show you just how easy this is, because believe me, if this is something I can learn and do anybody out there can, and in this demo, I'll show you about the basic components needed to create and use a package, Docker container actions. And like I said, you won't believe how awesome the combination of Docker and actions is because you can enable your workflow to do no matter what you're trying to do in this super baby example. We're so small. You could take like 10 seconds. Like I am here creating an action due to a simple task, like pushing a message to your logs. And the cool thing is you can use it on any the bit on this one. Like I said, we're going to use push. >>You can do, uh, even to order a pizza every time you roll into production, if you wanted, but at get hub, that'd be a lot of pizzas. And the funny thing is somebody out there is actually tried this and written that action. If you haven't used Docker and actions together, check out the docs on either get hub or Docker to get you started. And a huge shout out to all those doc writers out there. I built this demo today using those instructions. And if I can do it, I know you can too, but enough yapping let's get started to save some time. And since a lot of us are Docker and get hub nerds, I've already created a repo with a Docker file. So we're going to skip that step. Next. I'm going to create an action's Yammel file. And if you don't Yammer, you know, actions, the metadata defines my important log stuff to capture and the input and my time out per parameter to pass and puts to the Docker container, get up a build image from your Docker file and run the commands in a new container. >>Using the Sigma image. The cool thing is, is you can use any Docker image in any language for your actions. It doesn't matter if it's go or whatever in today's I'm going to use a shell script and an input variable to print my important log stuff to file. And like I said, you know me, I love me some. So let's see this action in a workflow. When an action is in a private repo, like the one I demonstrating today, the action can only be used in workflows in the same repository, but public actions can be used by workflows in any repository. So unfortunately you won't get access to the super awesome action, but don't worry in the Guild marketplace, there are over 8,000 actions available, especially the most important one, that pizza action. So go try it out. Now you can do this in a couple of ways, whether you're doing it in your preferred ID or for today's demo, I'm just going to use the gooey. I'm going to navigate to my actions tab as I've done here. And I'm going to in my workflow, select new work, hello, probably load some workflows to Claire to get you started, but I'm using the one I've copied. Like I said, the lazy developer I am in. I'm going to replace it with my action. >>That's it. So now we're going to go and we're going to start our commitment new file. Now, if we go over to our actions tab, we can see the workflow in progress in my repository. I just click the actions tab. And because they wrote the actions on push, we can watch the visualization under jobs and click the job to see the important stuff we're logging in the input stamp in the printed log. And we'll just wait for this to run. Hello, Mona and boom. Just like that. It runs automatically within our action. We told it to go run as soon as the files updated because we're doing it on push merge. That's right. Folks in just a few minutes, I built an action that writes an entry to a log file every time I push. So I don't have to do it manually. In essence, with automation, you can be kind to your future self and save time and effort to focus on what really matters. >>Imagine what I could do with even a little more time, probably order all y'all pieces. That is the power of the interconnected workflow. And it's amazing. And I hope you all go try it out, but why do we care about all of that? Just like in the demo, I took a manual task with both tape, which both takes time and it's easy to forget and automated it. So I don't have to think about it. And it's executed every time consistently. That means less time for me to worry about my human errors and mistakes, and more time to focus on actually building the cool stuff that people want. Obviously, automation, developer productivity, but what is even more important to me is the developer happiness tools like BS, code actions, Docker, Heroku, and many others reduce manual work, which allows us to focus on building things that are awesome. >>And to get into that wonderful state that we call flow. According to research by UC Irvine in Humboldt university in Germany, it takes an average of 23 minutes to enter optimal creative state. What we call the flow or to reenter it after distraction like your dog on your office store. So staying in flow is so critical to developer productivity and as a developer, it just feels good to be cranking away at something with deep focus. I certainly know that I love that feeling intuitive collaboration and automation features we built in to get hub help developer, Sam flow, allowing you and your team to do so much more, to bring the benefits of automation into perspective in our annual October's report by Dr. Nicole, Forsgren. One of my buddies here at get hub, took a look at the developer productivity in the stork year. You know what we found? >>We found that public GitHub repositories that use the Automational pull requests, merge those pull requests. 1.2 times faster. And the number of pooled merged pull requests increased by 1.3 times, that is 34% more poor requests merged. And other words, automation can con can dramatically increase, but the speed and quantity of work completed in any role, just like an open source development, you'll work more efficiently with greater impact when you invest the bulk of your time in the work that adds the most value and eliminate or outsource the rest because you don't need to do it, make the machines by elaborate by leveraging automation in their workflows teams, minimize manual work and reclaim that time for innovation and maintain that state of flow with development and collaboration. More importantly, their work is more enjoyable because they're not wasting the time doing the things that the machines or robots can do for them. >>And I remember what I said at the beginning. Many of us want to be efficient, heck even lazy. So why would I spend my time doing something I can automate? Now you can read more about this research behind the art behind this at October set, get hub.com, which also includes a lot of other cool info about the open source ecosystem and how it's evolving. Speaking of the open source ecosystem we at get hub are so honored to be the home of more than 65 million developers who build software together for everywhere across the globe. Today, we're seeing software development taking shape as the world's largest team sport, where development teams collaborate, build and ship products. It's no longer a solo effort like it was for me. You don't have to take my word for it. Check out this globe. This globe shows real data. Every speck of light you see here represents a contribution to an open source project, somewhere on earth. >>These arts reach across continents, cultures, and other divides. It's distributed collaboration at its finest. 20 years ago, we had no concept of dev ops, SecOps and lots, or the new ops that are going to be happening. But today's development and ops teams are connected like ever before. This is only going to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, especially as we continue to empower the next hundred million developers, automation helps us focus on what's important and to greatly accelerate innovation. Just this past year, we saw some of the most groundbreaking technological advancements and achievements I'll say ever, including critical COVID-19 vaccine trials, as well as the first power flight on Mars. This past month, these breakthroughs were only possible because of the interconnected collaborative open source communities on get hub and the amazing tools and workflows that empower us all to create and innovate. Let's continue building, integrating, and automating. So we collectively can give developers the experience. They deserve all of the automation and beautiful eye UIs that we can muster so they can continue to build the things that truly do change the world. Thank you again for having me today, Dr. Khan, it has been a pleasure to be here with all you nerds. >>Hello. I'm Justin. Komack lovely to see you here. Talking to developers, their world is getting much more complex. Developers are being asked to do everything security ops on goal data analysis, all being put on the rockers. Software's eating the world. Of course, and this all make sense in that view, but they need help. One team. I told you it's shifted all our.net apps to run on Linux from windows, but their developers found the complexity of Docker files based on the Linux shell scripts really difficult has helped make these things easier for your teams. Your ones collaborate more in a virtual world, but you've asked us to make this simpler and more lightweight. You, the developers have asked for a paved road experience. You want things to just work with a simple options to be there, but it's not just the paved road. You also want to be able to go off-road and do interesting and different things. >>Use different components, experiments, innovate as well. We'll always offer you both those choices at different times. Different developers want different things. It may shift for ones the other paved road or off road. Sometimes you want reliability, dependability in the zone for day to day work, but sometimes you have to do something new, incorporate new things in your pipeline, build applications for new places. Then you knew those off-road abilities too. So you can really get under the hood and go and build something weird and wonderful and amazing. That gives you new options. Talk as an independent choice. We don't own the roads. We're not pushing you into any technology choices because we own them. We're really supporting and driving open standards, such as ISEI working opensource with the CNCF. We want to help you get your applications from your laptops, the clouds, and beyond, even into space. >>Let's talk about the key focus areas, that frame, what DACA is doing going forward. These are simplicity, sharing, flexibility, trusted content and care supply chain compared to building where the underlying kernel primitives like namespaces and Seagraves the original Docker CLI was just amazing Docker engine. It's a magical experience for everyone. It really brought those innovations and put them in a world where anyone would use that, but that's not enough. We need to continue to innovate. And it was trying to get more done faster all the time. And there's a lot more we can do. We're here to take complexity away from deeply complicated underlying things and give developers tools that are just amazing and magical. One of the area we haven't done enough and make things magical enough that we're really planning around now is that, you know, Docker images, uh, they're the key parts of your application, but you know, how do I do something with an image? How do I, where do I attach volumes with this image? What's the API. Whereas the SDK for this image, how do I find an example or docs in an API driven world? Every bit of software should have an API and an API description. And our vision is that every container should have this API description and the ability for you to understand how to use it. And it's all a seamless thing from, you know, from your code to the cloud local and remote, you can, you can use containers in this amazing and exciting way. >>One thing I really noticed in the last year is that companies that started off remote fast have constant collaboration. They have zoom calls, apron all day terminals, shattering that always working together. Other teams are really trying to learn how to do this style because they didn't start like that. We used to walk around to other people's desks or share services on the local office network. And it's very difficult to do that anymore. You want sharing to be really simple, lightweight, and informal. Let me try your container or just maybe let's collaborate on this together. Um, you know, fast collaboration on the analysts, fast iteration, fast working together, and he wants to share more. You want to share how to develop environments, not just an image. And we all work by seeing something someone else in our team is doing saying, how can I do that too? I can, I want to make that sharing really, really easy. Ben's going to talk about this more in the interest of one minute. >>We know how you're excited by apple. Silicon and gravis are not excited because there's a new architecture, but excited because it's faster, cooler, cheaper, better, and offers new possibilities. The M one support was the most asked for thing on our public roadmap, EFA, and we listened and share that we see really exciting possibilities, usership arm applications, all the way from desktop to production. We know that you all use different clouds and different bases have deployed to, um, you know, we work with AWS and Azure and Google and more, um, and we want to help you ship on prime as well. And we know that you use huge number of languages and the containers help build applications that use different languages for different parts of the application or for different applications, right? You can choose the best tool. You have JavaScript hat or everywhere go. And re-ask Python for data and ML, perhaps getting excited about WebAssembly after hearing about a cube con, you know, there's all sorts of things. >>So we need to make that as easier. We've been running the whole month of Python on the blog, and we're doing a month of JavaScript because we had one specific support about how do I best put this language into production of that language into production. That detail is important for you. GPS have been difficult to use. We've added GPS suppose in desktop for windows, but we know there's a lot more to do to make the, how multi architecture, multi hardware, multi accelerator world work better and also securely. Um, so there's a lot more work to do to support you in all these things you want to do. >>How do we start building a tenor has applications, but it turns out we're using existing images as components. I couldn't assist survey earlier this year, almost half of container image usage was public images rather than private images. And this is growing rapidly. Almost all software has open source components and maybe 85% of the average application is open source code. And what you're doing is taking whole container images as modules in your application. And this was always the model with Docker compose. And it's a model that you're already et cetera, writing you trust Docker, official images. We know that they might go to 25% of poles on Docker hub and Docker hub provides you the widest choice and the best support that trusted content. We're talking to people about how to make this more helpful. We know, for example, that winter 69 four is just showing us as support, but the image doesn't yet tell you that we're working with canonical to improve messaging from specific images about left lifecycle and support. >>We know that you need more images, regularly updated free of vulnerabilities, easy to use and discover, and Donnie and Marie neuro, going to talk about that more this last year, the solar winds attack has been in the, in the news. A lot, the software you're using and trusting could be compromised and might be all over your organization. We need to reduce the risk of using vital open-source components. We're seeing more software supply chain attacks being targeted as the supply chain, because it's often an easier place to attack and production software. We need to be able to use this external code safely. We need to, everyone needs to start from trusted sources like photography images. They need to scan for known vulnerabilities using Docker scan that we built in partnership with sneak and lost DockerCon last year, we need just keep updating base images and dependencies, and we'll, we're going to help you have the control and understanding about your images that you need to do this. >>And there's more, we're also working on the nursery V2 project in the CNCF to revamp container signings, or you can tell way or software comes from we're working on tooling to make updates easier, and to help you understand and manage all the principals carrier you're using security is a growing concern for all of us. It's really important. And we're going to help you work with security. We can't achieve all our dreams, whether that's space travel or amazing developer products ever see without deep partnerships with our community to cloud is RA and the cloud providers aware most of you ship your occasion production and simple routes that take your work and deploy it easily. Reliably and securely are really important. Just get into production simply and easily and securely. And we've done a bunch of work on that. And, um, but we know there's more to do. >>The CNCF on the open source cloud native community are an amazing ecosystem of creators and lovely people creating an amazing strong community and supporting a huge amount of innovation has its roots in the container ecosystem and his dreams beyond that much of the innovation is focused around operate experience so far, but developer experience is really a growing concern in that community as well. And we're really excited to work on that. We also uses appraiser tool. Then we know you do, and we know that you want it to be easier to use in your environment. We just shifted Docker hub to work on, um, Kubernetes fully. And, um, we're also using many of the other projects are Argo from atheists. We're spending a lot of time working with Microsoft, Amazon right now on getting natural UV to ready to ship in the next few. That's a really detailed piece of collaboration we've been working on for a long term. Long time is really important for our community as the scarcity of the container containers and, um, getting content for you, working together makes us stronger. Our community is made up of all of you have. Um, it's always amazing to be reminded of that as a huge open source community that we already proud to work with. It's an amazing amount of innovation that you're all creating and where perhaps it, what with you and share with you as well. Thank you very much. And thank you for being here. >>Really excited to talk to you today and share more about what Docker is doing to help make you faster, make your team faster and turn your application delivery into something that makes you a 10 X team. What we're hearing from you, the developers using Docker everyday fits across three common themes that we hear consistently over and over. We hear that your time is super important. It's critical, and you want to move faster. You want your tools to get out of your way, and instead to enable you to accelerate and focus on the things you want to be doing. And part of that is that finding great content, great application components that you can incorporate into your apps to move faster is really hard. It's hard to discover. It's hard to find high quality content that you can trust that, you know, passes your test and your configuration needs. >>And it's hard to create good content as well. And you're looking for more safety, more guardrails to help guide you along that way so that you can focus on creating value for your company. Secondly, you're telling us that it's a really far to collaborate effectively with your team and you want to do more, to work more effectively together to help your tools become more and more seamless to help you stay in sync, both with yourself across all of your development environments, as well as with your teammates so that you can more effectively collaborate together. Review each other's work, maintain things and keep them in sync. And finally, you want your applications to run consistently in every single environment, whether that's your local development environment, a cloud-based development environment, your CGI pipeline, or the cloud for production, and you want that micro service to provide that consistent experience everywhere you go so that you have similar tools, similar environments, and you don't need to worry about things getting in your way, but instead things make it easy for you to focus on what you wanna do and what Docker is doing to help solve all of these problems for you and your colleagues is creating a collaborative app dev platform. >>And this collaborative application development platform consists of multiple different pieces. I'm not going to walk through all of them today, but the overall view is that we're providing all the tooling you need from the development environment, to the container images, to the collaboration services, to the pipelines and integrations that enable you to focus on making your applications amazing and changing the world. If we start zooming on a one of those aspects, collaboration we hear from developers regularly is that they're challenged in synchronizing their own setups across environments. They want to be able to duplicate the setup of their teammates. Look, then they can easily get up and running with the same applications, the same tooling, the same version of the same libraries, the same frameworks. And they want to know if their applications are good before they're ready to share them in an official space. >>They want to collaborate on things before they're done, rather than feeling like they have to officially published something before they can effectively share it with others to work on it, to solve this. We're thrilled today to announce Docker, dev environments, Docker, dev environments, transform how your team collaborates. They make creating, sharing standardized development environments. As simple as a Docker poll, they make it easy to review your colleagues work without affecting your own work. And they increase the reproducibility of your own work and decreased production issues in doing so because you've got consistent environments all the way through. Now, I'm going to pass it off to our principal product manager, Ben Gotch to walk you through more detail on Docker dev environments. >>Hi, I'm Ben. I work as a principal program manager at DACA. One of the areas that doc has been looking at to see what's hard today for developers is sharing changes that you make from the inner loop where the inner loop is a better development, where you write code, test it, build it, run it, and ultimately get feedback on those changes before you merge them and try and actually ship them out to production. Most amount of us build this flow and get there still leaves a lot of challenges. People need to jump between branches to look at each other's work. Independence. Dependencies can be different when you're doing that and doing this in this new hybrid wall of work. Isn't any easier either the ability to just save someone, Hey, come and check this out. It's become much harder. People can't come and sit down at your desk or take your laptop away for 10 minutes to just grab and look at what you're doing. >>A lot of the reason that development is hard when you're remote, is that looking at changes and what's going on requires more than just code requires all the dependencies and everything you've got set up and that complete context of your development environment, to understand what you're doing and solving this in a remote first world is hard. We wanted to look at how we could make this better. Let's do that in a way that let you keep working the way you do today. Didn't want you to have to use a browser. We didn't want you to have to use a new idea. And we wanted to do this in a way that was application centric. We wanted to let you work with all the rest of the application already using C for all the services and all those dependencies you need as part of that. And with that, we're excited to talk more about docket developer environments, dev environments are new part of the Docker experience that makes it easier you to get started with your whole inner leap, working inside a container, then able to share and collaborate more than just the code. >>We want it to enable you to share your whole modern development environment, your whole setup from DACA, with your team on any operating system, we'll be launching a limited beta of dev environments in the coming month. And a GA dev environments will be ID agnostic and supporting composts. This means you'll be able to use an extend your existing composed files to create your own development environment in whatever idea, working in dev environments designed to be local. First, they work with Docker desktop and say your existing ID, and let you share that whole inner loop, that whole development context, all of your teammates in just one collect. This means if you want to get feedback on the working progress change or the PR it's as simple as opening another idea instance, and looking at what your team is working on because we're using compose. You can just extend your existing oppose file when you're already working with, to actually create this whole application and have it all working in the context of the rest of the services. >>So it's actually the whole environment you're working with module one service that doesn't really understand what it's doing alone. And with that, let's jump into a quick demo. So you can see here, two dev environments up and running. First one here is the same container dev environment. So if I want to go into that, let's see what's going on in the various code button here. If that one open, I can get straight into my application to start making changes inside that dev container. And I've got all my dependencies in here, so I can just run that straight in that second application I have here is one that's opened up in compose, and I can see that I've also got my backend, my front end and my database. So I've got all my services running here. So if I want, I can open one or more of these in a dev environment, meaning that that container has the context that dev environment has the context of the whole application. >>So I can get back into and connect to all the other services that I need to test this application properly, all of them, one unit. And then when I've made my changes and I'm ready to share, I can hit my share button type in the refund them on to share that too. And then give that image to someone to get going, pick that up and just start working with that code and all my dependencies, simple as putting an image, looking ahead, we're going to be expanding development environments, more of your dependencies for the whole developer worst space. We want to look at backing up and letting you share your volumes to make data science and database setups more repeatable and going. I'm still all of this under a single workspace for your team containing images, your dev environments, your volumes, and more we've really want to allow you to create a fully portable Linux development environment. >>So everyone you're working with on any operating system, as I said, our MVP we're coming next month. And that was for vs code using their dev container primitive and more support for other ideas. We'll follow to find out more about what's happening and what's coming up next in the future of this. And to actually get a bit of a deeper dive in the experience. Can we check out the talk I'm doing with Georgie and girl later on today? Thank you, Ben, amazing story about how Docker is helping to make developer teams more collaborative. Now I'd like to talk more about applications while the dev environment is like the workbench around what you're building. The application itself has all the different components, libraries, and frameworks, and other code that make up the application itself. And we hear developers saying all the time things like, how do they know if their images are good? >>How do they know if they're secure? How do they know if they're minimal? How do they make great images and great Docker files and how do they keep their images secure? And up-to-date on every one of those ties into how do I create more trust? How do I know that I'm building high quality applications to enable you to do this even more effectively than today? We are pleased to announce the DACA verified polisher program. This broadens trusted content by extending beyond Docker official images, to give you more and more trusted building blocks that you can incorporate into your applications. It gives you confidence that you're getting what you expect because Docker verifies every single one of these publishers to make sure they are who they say they are. This improves our secure supply chain story. And finally it simplifies your discovery of the best building blocks by making it easy for you to find things that you know, you can trust so that you can incorporate them into your applications and move on and on the right. You can see some examples of the publishers that are involved in Docker, official images and our Docker verified publisher program. Now I'm pleased to introduce you to marina. Kubicki our senior product manager who will walk you through more about what we're doing to create a better experience for you around trust. >>Thank you, Dani, >>Mario Andretti, who is a famous Italian sports car driver. One said that if everything feels under control, you're just not driving. You're not driving fast enough. Maya Andretti is not a software developer and a software developers. We know that no matter how fast we need to go in order to drive the innovation that we're working on, we can never allow our applications to spin out of control and a Docker. As we continue talking to our, to the developers, what we're realizing is that in order to reach that speed, the developers are the, the, the development community is looking for the building blocks and the tools that will, they will enable them to drive at the speed that they need to go and have the trust in those building blocks. And in those tools that they will be able to maintain control over their applications. So as we think about some of the things that we can do to, to address those concerns, uh, we're realizing that we can pursue them in a number of different venues, including creating reliable content, including creating partnerships that expands the options for the reliable content. >>Um, in order to, in a we're looking at creating integrations, no link security tools, talk about the reliable content. The first thing that comes to mind are the Docker official images, which is a program that we launched several years ago. And this is a set of curated, actively maintained, open source images that, uh, include, uh, operating systems and databases and programming languages. And it would become immensely popular for, for, for creating the base layers of, of the images of, of the different images, images, and applications. And would we realizing that, uh, many developers are, instead of creating something from scratch, basically start with one of the official images for their basis, and then build on top of that. And this program has become so popular that it now makes up a quarter of all of the, uh, Docker poles, which essentially ends up being several billion pulse every single month. >>As we look beyond what we can do for the open source. Uh, we're very ability on the open source, uh, spectrum. We are very excited to announce that we're launching the Docker verified publishers program, which is continuing providing the trust around the content, but now working with, uh, some of the industry leaders, uh, in multiple, in multiple verticals across the entire technology technical spec, it costs entire, uh, high tech in order to provide you with more options of the images that you can use for building your applications. And it still comes back to trust that when you are searching for content in Docker hub, and you see the verified publisher badge, you know, that this is, this is the content that, that is part of the, that comes from one of our partners. And you're not running the risk of pulling the malicious image from an employee master source. >>As we look beyond what we can do for, for providing the reliable content, we're also looking at some of the tools and the infrastructure that we can do, uh, to create a security around the content that you're creating. So last year at the last ad, the last year's DockerCon, we announced partnership with sneak. And later on last year, we launched our DACA, desktop and Docker hub vulnerability scans that allow you the options of writing scans in them along multiple points in your dev cycle. And in addition to providing you with information on the vulnerability on, on the vulnerabilities, in, in your code, uh, it also provides you with a guidance on how to re remediate those vulnerabilities. But as we look beyond the vulnerability scans, we're also looking at some of the other things that we can do, you know, to, to, to, uh, further ensure that the integrity and the security around your images, your images, and with that, uh, later on this year, we're looking to, uh, launch the scope, personal access tokens, and instead of talking about them, I will simply show you what they look like. >>So if you can see here, this is my page in Docker hub, where I've created a four, uh, tokens, uh, read-write delete, read, write, read only in public read in public creeper read only. So, uh, earlier today I went in and I, I logged in, uh, with my read only token. And when you see, when I'm going to pull an image, it's going to allow me to pull an image, not a problem success. And then when I do the next step, I'm going to ask to push an image into the same repo. Uh, would you see is that it's going to give me an error message saying that they access is denied, uh, because there is an additional authentication required. So these are the things that we're looking to add to our roadmap. As we continue thinking about the things that we can do to provide, um, to provide additional building blocks, content, building blocks, uh, and, and, and tools to build the trust so that our DACA developer and skinned code faster than Mario Andretti could ever imagine. Uh, thank you to >>Thank you, marina. It's amazing what you can do to improve the trusted content so that you can accelerate your development more and move more quickly, move more collaboratively and build upon the great work of others. Finally, we hear over and over as that developers are working on their applications that they're looking for, environments that are consistent, that are the same as production, and that they want their applications to really run anywhere, any environment, any architecture, any cloud one great example is the recent announcement of apple Silicon. We heard from developers on uproar that they needed Docker to be available for that architecture before they could add those to it and be successful. And we listened. And based on that, we are pleased to share with you Docker, desktop on apple Silicon. This enables you to run your apps consistently anywhere, whether that's developing on your team's latest dev hardware, deploying an ARM-based cloud environments and having a consistent architecture across your development and production or using multi-year architecture support, which enables your whole team to collaborate on its application, using private repositories on Docker hub, and thrilled to introduce you to Hughie cower, senior director for product management, who will walk you through more of what we're doing to create a great developer experience. >>Senior director of product management at Docker. And I'd like to jump straight into a demo. This is the Mac mini with the apple Silicon processor. And I want to show you how you can now do an end-to-end arm workflow from my M one Mac mini to raspberry PI. As you can see, we have vs code and Docker desktop installed on a, my, the Mac mini. I have a small example here, and I have a raspberry PI three with an led strip, and I want to turn those LEDs into a moving rainbow. This Dockerfile here, builds the application. We build the image with the Docker, build X command to make the image compatible for all raspberry pies with the arm. 64. Part of this build is built with the native power of the M one chip. I also add the push option to easily share the image with my team so they can give it a try to now Dr. >>Creates the local image with the application and uploads it to Docker hub after we've built and pushed the image. We can go to Docker hub and see the new image on Docker hub. You can also explore a variety of images that are compatible with arm processors. Now let's go to the raspberry PI. I have Docker already installed and it's running Ubuntu 64 bit with the Docker run command. I can run the application and let's see what will happen from there. You can see Docker is downloading the image automatically from Docker hub and when it's running, if it's works right, there are some nice colors. And with that, if we have an end-to-end workflow for arm, where continuing to invest into providing you a great developer experience, that's easy to install. Easy to get started with. As you saw in the demo, if you're interested in the new Mac, mini are interested in developing for our platforms in general, we've got you covered with the same experience you've come to expect from Docker with over 95,000 arm images on hub, including many Docker official images. >>We think you'll find what you're looking for. Thank you again to the community that helped us to test the tech previews. We're so delighted to hear when folks say that the new Docker desktop for apple Silicon, it just works for them, but that's not all we've been working on. As Dani mentioned, consistency of developer experience across environments is so important. We're introducing composed V2 that makes compose a first-class citizen in the Docker CLI you no longer need to install a separate composed biter in order to use composed, deploying to production is simpler than ever with the new compose integration that enables you to deploy directly to Amazon ECS or Azure ACI with the same methods you use to run your application locally. If you're interested in running slightly different services, when you're debugging versus testing or, um, just general development, you can manage that all in one place with the new composed service to hear more about what's new and Docker desktop, please join me in the three 15 breakout session this afternoon. >>And now I'd love to tell you a bit more about bill decks and convince you to try it. If you haven't already it's our next gen build command, and it's no longer experimental as shown in the demo with built X, you'll be able to do multi architecture builds, share those builds with your team and the community on Docker hub. With build X, you can speed up your build processes with remote caches or build all the targets in your composed file in parallel with build X bake. And there's so much more if you're using Docker, desktop or Docker, CE you can use build X checkout tonus is talk this afternoon at three 45 to learn more about build X. And with that, I hope everyone has a great Dr. Khan and back over to you, Donnie. >>Thank you UA. It's amazing to hear about what we're doing to create a better developer experience and make sure that Docker works everywhere you need to work. Finally, I'd like to wrap up by showing you everything that we've announced today and everything that we've done recently to make your lives better and give you more and more for the single price of your Docker subscription. We've announced the Docker verified publisher program we've announced scoped personal access tokens to make it easier for you to have a secure CCI pipeline. We've announced Docker dev environments to improve your collaboration with your team. Uh, we shared with you Docker, desktop and apple Silicon, to make sure that, you know, Docker runs everywhere. You need it to run. And we've announced Docker compose version two, finally making it a first-class citizen amongst all the other great Docker tools. And we've done so much more recently as well from audit logs to advanced image management, to compose service profiles, to improve where you can run Docker more easily. >>Finally, as we look forward, where we're headed in the upcoming year is continuing to invest in these themes of helping you build, share, and run modern apps more effectively. We're going to be doing more to help you create a secure supply chain with which only grows more and more important as time goes on. We're going to be optimizing your update experience to make sure that you can easily understand the current state of your application, all its components and keep them all current without worrying about breaking everything as you're doing. So we're going to make it easier for you to synchronize your work. Using cloud sync features. We're going to improve collaboration through dev environments and beyond, and we're going to do make it easy for you to run your microservice in your environments without worrying about things like architecture or differences between those environments. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled about what we're able to do to help make your lives better. And now you're going to be hearing from one of our customers about what they're doing to launch their business with Docker >>I'm Matt Falk, I'm the head of engineering and orbital insight. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about data from space. So who am I like many of you, I'm a software developer and a software developer about seven companies so far, and now I'm a head of engineering. So I spend most of my time doing meetings, but occasionally I'll still spend time doing design discussions, doing code reviews. And in my free time, I still like to dabble on things like project oiler. So who's Oberlin site. What do we do? Portal insight is a large data supplier and analytics provider where we take data geospatial data anywhere on the planet, any overhead sensor, and translate that into insights for the end customer. So specifically we have a suite of high performance, artificial intelligence and machine learning analytics that run on this geospatial data. >>And we build them to specifically determine natural and human service level activity anywhere on the planet. What that really means is we take any type of data associated with a latitude and longitude and we identify patterns so that we can, so we can detect anomalies. And that's everything that we do is all about identifying those patterns to detect anomalies. So more specifically, what type of problems do we solve? So supply chain intelligence, this is one of the use cases that we we'd like to talk about a lot. It's one of our main primary verticals that we go after right now. And as Scott mentioned earlier, this had a huge impact last year when COVID hit. So specifically supply chain intelligence is all about identifying movement patterns to and from operating facilities to identify changes in those supply chains. How do we do this? So for us, we can do things where we track the movement of trucks. >>So identifying trucks, moving from one location to another in aggregate, same thing we can do with foot traffic. We can do the same thing for looking at aggregate groups of people moving from one location to another and analyzing their patterns of life. We can look at two different locations to determine how people are moving from one location to another, or going back and forth. All of this is extremely valuable for detecting how a supply chain operates and then identifying the changes to that supply chain. As I said last year with COVID, everything changed in particular supply chains changed incredibly, and it was hugely important for customers to know where their goods or their products are coming from and where they were going, where there were disruptions in their supply chain and how that's affecting their overall supply and demand. So to use our platform, our suite of tools, you can start to gain a much better picture of where your suppliers or your distributors are going from coming from or going to. >>So what's our team look like? So my team is currently about 50 engineers. Um, we're spread into four different teams and the teams are structured like this. So the first team that we have is infrastructure engineering and this team largely deals with deploying our Dockers using Kubernetes. So this team is all about taking Dockers, built by other teams, sometimes building the Dockers themselves and putting them into our production system, our platform engineering team, they produce these microservices. So they produce microservice, Docker images. They develop and test with them locally. Their entire environments are dockerized. They produce these doctors, hand them over to him for infrastructure engineering to be deployed. Similarly, our product engineering team does the same thing. They develop and test with Dr. Locally. They also produce a suite of Docker images that the infrastructure team can then deploy. And lastly, we have our R and D team, and this team specifically produces machine learning algorithms using Nvidia Docker collectively, we've actually built 381 Docker repositories and 14 million. >>We've had 14 million Docker pools over the lifetime of the company, just a few stats about us. Um, but what I'm really getting to here is you can see actually doctors becoming almost a form of communication between these teams. So one of the paradigms in software engineering that you're probably familiar with encapsulation, it's really helpful for a lot of software engineering problems to break the problem down, isolate the different pieces of it and start building interfaces between the code. This allows you to scale different pieces of the platform or different pieces of your code in different ways that allows you to scale up certain pieces and keep others at a smaller level so that you can meet customer demands. And for us, one of the things that we can largely do now is use Dockers as that interface. So instead of having an entire platform where all teams are talking to each other, and everything's kind of, mishmashed in a monolithic application, we can now say this team is only able to talk to this team by passing over a particular Docker image that defines the interface of what needs to be built before it passes to the team and really allows us to scalp our development and be much more efficient. >>Also, I'd like to say we are hiring. Um, so we have a number of open roles. We have about 30 open roles in our engineering team that we're looking to fill by the end of this year. So if any of this sounds really interesting to you, please reach out after the presentation. >>So what does our platform do? Really? Our platform allows you to answer any geospatial question, and we do this at three different inputs. So first off, where do you want to look? So we did this as what we call an AOI or an area of interest larger. You can think of this as a polygon drawn on the map. So we have a curated data set of almost 4 million AOIs, which you can go and you can search and use for your analysis, but you're also free to build your own. Second question is what you want to look for. We do this with the more interesting part of our platform of our machine learning and AI capabilities. So we have a suite of algorithms that automatically allow you to identify trucks, buildings, hundreds of different types of aircraft, different types of land use, how many people are moving from one location to another different locations that people in a particular area are moving to or coming from all of these different analyses or all these different analytics are available at the click of a button, and then determine what you want to look for. >>Lastly, you determine when you want to find what you're looking for. So that's just, uh, you know, do you want to look for the next three hours? Do you want to look for the last week? Do you want to look every month for the past two, whatever the time cadence is, you decide that you hit go and out pops a time series, and that time series tells you specifically where you want it to look what you want it to look for and how many, or what percentage of the thing you're looking for appears in that area. Again, we do all of this to work towards patterns. So we use all this data to produce a time series from there. We can look at it, determine the patterns, and then specifically identify the anomalies. As I mentioned with supply chain, this is extremely valuable to identify where things change. So we can answer these questions, looking at a particular operating facility, looking at particular, what is happening with the level of activity is at that operating facility where people are coming from, where they're going to, after visiting that particular facility and identify when and where that changes here, you can just see it's a picture of our platform. It's actually showing all the devices in Manhattan, um, over a period of time. And it's more of a heat map view. So you can actually see the hotspots in the area. >>So really the, and this is the heart of the talk, but what happened in 2020? So for men, you know, like many of you, 2020 was a difficult year COVID hit. And that changed a lot of what we're doing, not from an engineering perspective, but also from an entire company perspective for us, the motivation really became to make sure that we were lowering our costs and increasing innovation simultaneously. Now those two things often compete with each other. A lot of times you want to increase innovation, that's going to increase your costs, but the challenge last year was how to do both simultaneously. So here's a few stats for you from our team. In Q1 of last year, we were spending almost $600,000 per month on compute costs prior to COVID happening. That wasn't hugely a concern for us. It was a lot of money, but it wasn't as critical as it was last year when we really needed to be much more efficient. >>Second one is flexibility for us. We were deployed on a single cloud environment while we were cloud thought ready, and that was great. We want it to be more flexible. We want it to be on more cloud environments so that we could reach more customers. And also eventually get onto class side networks, extending the base of our customers as well from a custom analytics perspective. This is where we get into our traction. So last year, over the entire year, we computed 54,000 custom analytics for different users. We wanted to make sure that this number was steadily increasing despite us trying to lower our costs. So we didn't want the lowering cost to come as the sacrifice of our user base. Lastly, of particular percentage here that I'll say definitely needs to be improved is 75% of our projects never fail. So this is where we start to get into a bit of stability of our platform. >>Now I'm not saying that 25% of our projects fail the way we measure this is if you have a particular project or computation that runs every day and any one of those runs sale account, that is a failure because from an end-user perspective, that's an issue. So this is something that we know we needed to improve on and we needed to grow and make our platform more stable. I'm going to something that we really focused on last year. So where are we now? So now coming out of the COVID valley, we are starting to soar again. Um, we had, uh, back in April of last year, we had the entire engineering team. We actually paused all development for about four weeks. You had everyone focused on reducing our compute costs in the cloud. We got it down to 200 K over the period of a few months. >>And for the next 12 months, we hit that number every month. This is huge for us. This is extremely important. Like I said, in the COVID time period where costs and operating efficiency was everything. So for us to do that, that was a huge accomplishment last year and something we'll keep going forward. One thing I would actually like to really highlight here, two is what allowed us to do that. So first off, being in the cloud, being able to migrate things like that, that was one thing. And we were able to use there's different cloud services in a more particular, in a more efficient way. We had a very detailed tracking of how we were spending things. We increased our data retention policies. We optimized our processing. However, one additional piece was switching to new technologies on, in particular, we migrated to get lab CICB. >>Um, and this is something that the costs we use Docker was extremely, extremely easy. We didn't have to go build new new code containers or repositories or change our code in order to do this. We were simply able to migrate the containers over and start using a new CIC so much. In fact, that we were able to do that migration with three engineers in just two weeks from a cloud environment and flexibility standpoint, we're now operating in two different clouds. We were able to last night, I've over the last nine months to operate in the second cloud environment. And again, this is something that Docker helped with incredibly. Um, we didn't have to go and build all new interfaces to all new, different services or all different tools in the next cloud provider. All we had to do was build a base cloud infrastructure that ups agnostic the way, all the different details of the cloud provider. >>And then our doctors just worked. We can move them to another environment up and running, and our platform was ready to go from a traction perspective. We're about a third of the way through the year. At this point, we've already exceeded the amount of customer analytics we produce last year. And this is thanks to a ton more albums, that whole suite of new analytics that we've been able to build over the past 12 months and we'll continue to build going forward. So this is really, really great outcome for us because we were able to show that our costs are staying down, but our analytics and our customer traction, honestly, from a stability perspective, we improved from 75% to 86%, not quite yet 99 or three nines or four nines, but we are getting there. Um, and this is actually thanks to really containerizing and modularizing different pieces of our platform so that we could scale up in different areas. This allowed us to increase that stability. This piece of the code works over here, toxin an interface to the rest of the system. We can scale this piece up separately from the rest of the system, and that allows us much more easily identify issues in the system, fix those and then correct the system overall. So basically this is a summary of where we were last year, where we are now and how much more successful we are now because of the issues that we went through last year and largely brought on by COVID. >>But that this is just a screenshot of the, our, our solution actually working on supply chain. So this is in particular, it is showing traceability of a distribution warehouse in salt lake city. It's right in the center of the screen here. You can see the nice kind of orange red center. That's a distribution warehouse and all the lines outside of that, all the dots outside of that are showing where people are, where trucks are moving from that location. So this is really helpful for supply chain companies because they can start to identify where their suppliers are, are coming from or where their distributors are going to. So with that, I want to say, thanks again for following along and enjoy the rest of DockerCon.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation we've been reporting that the Kovan pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending outlook legacy on print on-prem infrastructure in traditional software licensing models they're giving away two approaches that enable more flexibility in business agility automation initiatives that reduce human labor labor that's not value add has really been gaining traction for the past 18 months the pandemic has only accelerated to focus on such efforts and robotic process automation or RPA along with machine intelligence have been the beneficiaries relative to other segments of the IT stack welcome to this week's wiki Vaughn cube insights powered by ETR my name is Dave Volante and in this breaking analysis we're gonna update you on the latest demand picture for the red-hot RP a sector will also focus on two main areas today first we're gonna review the basics of the RP a space for those that may not be as familiar with the market next we'll share with you the spending data and outlook in the RT ARPA space from ETR and we're really dig into the kovat impact on this market segment and take a look at the competitive outlook we're gonna pay particular attention to the leaders in this space and then we're gonna wrap up so let me start with kind of the RPI basics if you're not familiar with our PA here's what you really need to know happy hour PA gained traction by taking software robots and pointing them at existing applications to mimic human behavior and automate repeatable and well understood processes keyboard behavior that is now a challenge with early RPA implementations is that most customers chose to point these bots at legacy backend office systems now that the open emails and fill out forms and the like so that's great because it digitizes processes around legacy systems awesome ROI but the problem is that these bots will they interact with a user interface of that application and many of these apps they really don't have an API so any change in data or the interface breaks the automation down now more recently automations are interacting to apps through api's that makes them less brittle but of course you know the quality of api's as you well know will vary so enter your machine intelligence into the equation there's been a lot of discussion around the intersection of our PA and AI and that's allowed organizations to automate more processes that do so in a way that takes an augmentation approach using things like natural language processing or speech recognition and machine learning to iterate and improve automations and you know this trend holds a lot of promise and is a lot of talk about it in the marketplace particularly in the form of really trying to understand which processes to automate and where the best ROI can be achieved for organization but it's important to note it's really still early days with this AI intersection nonetheless investors you know they're ahead of the game they've they've poured money into this space as we've been reporting now for you know well over a year or two uipath an automation anywhere have raised close to two billion dollars and have been growing very very rapidly we're gonna talk more about that existing players like blue prism they've actually benefited from the automation tailwind and other you know process business process players take for example like Pegasus Toombs I mean they started in the early 80s they've added our PA to their platform as have many others by the way including Microsoft who has barely been trying to crack into this market for a while in fact Microsoft just bought a small company called soft emotive and to really try to shore up its RP a game but you know just a quick aside in our view Microsoft is their well behind the leaders it's gonna take years for them to get where the leaders are today yeah but it's Microsoft so you don't want to ignore them now the big buzzword here is hyper automation evidently it's a torrent a coin term coined by Gartner and uipath has picked up on this in a big way and so is automation anywhere now those both those companies are in hyper growth so it plays more established companies for example pega yeah they look at the term differently you know of course their vision is Rp a is a small portion of their their their vision these established firms they want to incorporate their business process automation z' that have been built over decades into a systems view of the organization using existing platforms the upstarts of course they want to build from new platforms what's really happening in the marketplace and like in many situations is this emergence of a hybrid you know quasi-equilibrium here we saw this in mainframes who certainly you know saw it in middleware enterprise data warehouses and we've seen it in the cloud you know where most companies don't just throw away the investments that they've made in legacy systems now they're stable they're operationalized and rather what they do is they overlay the more modern technologies and they kind of create an abstraction layer of their business that incorporates the old and the new but the growth is much much higher in the new as we know it and that leads me to the TAM the total available market let's look at the RPM you know we think the TAM expansion opportunity is pretty substantial we put this chart together awhile back that really underscores that the progression of our PA from you know simple BOTS automating back-office functions to really infusing automations in virtually all applications you know if you expand the definition beyond our PA software into the broader automation opportunities the other thing about it this this could be a much much larger than depicted here maybe well over a hundred billion dollar Tam as a I powered automation becomes fundamental to every organization in their operating model anyway it's a big opportunity and the data suggests that it's growing rapidly so let's turn to the data let's look at the spending and bring ETR into the equation so which technologies are showing new adoptions in tech on balance the tech sector has done pretty well despite this pandemic at the time of this video the Nasdaq Composite is up about a point and a half year to date and as we know from previous surveys that heading into 2020 there was a pullback in a narrowing of new technology adoptions as organizations began to operationalize their digital initiatives and place bets this chart shows new adoptions across three survey dates the gray is April last year the blue is January which is pre-pandemic really and the survey of more than 1,200 IT buyers is really the latest one which is the April so this survey took place at the height of the US lockdown and you can see look at all PA it's got 22% new adoptions what does that mean it means that 22% of the customers in the survey we're planning our PA spend there that are planning for our PA spend are planning new adoptions now that's a figure that says hi as machine learning and artificial intelligence and of course as we said these two technologies are increasingly playing a role together so our PA adoptions more than containers more than videoconferencing which has had this tailwind from work from home and more than cloud more than mobile device management so it's really one of the hottest sectors in terms of new adoptions now let's look at some of the players in our PA and try to really better understand their positions here's a chart that uses the two primary met work net metrics that we've been sharing over the past year net score or spending momentum is on the y-axis and market share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set is on the x-axis the chart plots are PA players in the et our data set and you can see uipath in automate anyway our the to market leaders they show both spending momentum and market awareness then you see blue prism and peg is in there and the rest of the pack and I'll say this about pegye systems I recently spoke to their CEO Alan trifler he's an amazing self-made billionaire he's got a great business you know peg that really doesn't see you know itself anyway as an RPA play and I don't either our PA is really a small part of their story but they're in the data set and certainly automation related so it's what's showing but it's a bit of an oranges and tangerines comparison now notice in the upper right of this chart you can see that the net scores are in the green shade and there's a little bit of red in there but remember net score is a simple metric sort of like Net Promoter Score in PS it subtracts customer spending less from those spending more and that's the difference and you can see very very strong net scores for both uipath in automation anywhere and I'm gonna discuss that more in a moment but there's lots of green in the chart and even pega or as I said it's really not an RPA specialist they've got a solid net score now let's look at a time series of this net score in the spending momentum what we do here is this chart takes the three leaders uipath automation anywhere and blue prism and it plots their net scores over time goes all the way back to the January 18 survey now let me make a couple of points here uipath in automation anywhere 70% plus net scores is very impressive and amongst the highest in the data set even though you see some of the Lawson momentum in the UI path line and the convergence with automation anywhere they're both very very strong and you can see in the upper right you can see the shared end which is an indicator of the presence of the company in the data set how many response is out of the 1200 plus so you might say well wait a minute you I passed the I had they had layoffs last fall and automation anywhere they more recently just recently had layoffs how can they show such strength well I make a few points first fast-growing companies like this that have raised you know nearly a billion dollars each they've got investors to serve and they're going to course-correct when they feel like there's some slack in the system yet to me it's not a sign of fundamental trouble second both of these companies are going to continue to invest heavily on research and development uipath has 60 openings on its website mostly in engineering automation anywhere they only have nine openings but I would expect both companies to up their engineering hiring especially given the Microsoft acquisition today third remember this is not an indicator of the amount of money spent in absolute dollars rather it looks at spending momentum of the doll in dollar terms as well if you were to cut the data by larger companies let's say the Fortune 1000 where the average contract values are higher you'd see that you I pass a net score jumps to 77% automation anywhere would drop into the 60s and blue prison would stay about the same where it is today today so let's look for example in the global 2000 so we'll expand that notion of a fortune 1000 let's go to the global 2000 where there's more of an end slice and you can see the picture changes from the overall data sample this chart shows the net scores in the global 2000 where the ends are more than 25 responses across all the three surveys gray as last April blue was January yellow is April 2020 and you can see the year-on-year decline and the modest step down during the the Colvin lockdown which again surveyed in April but still very elevated net scores for uipath and automation anywhere and respectable for the other so the point is Co vyd has not really crushed the RPA market I mean if anything is witnessed by the new adoptions it's maybe it's certainly better off than most IT sectors now let's dig into the net scores of the two leaders a little bit more uipath and automation anywhere remember net scores of very important metric and I want to spend the moment explaining how we use it you see this wheel chart this red green gray it really shows how the net score method is applied now we've taken the UI path example from the April survey net score works by asking buyers relative to last year are you adopting new that's the 28% are you increasing spend by 6 percent or greater that's 51 percent are you expecting flat spending that's 15 percent or a decrease in spend of 6 percent or more or finally are you replacing the vendor checking them out so look at this you can see for UI path added up 79 percent of respondents expect to increase spending in 2020 relative to 2019 and again remember this survey was taken at the height of the kovat lockdown let me show you the data for automation anywhere same exact methodology 72 percent of automation anywhere a customer's plan to spend more only 1 percent plan to spend less with zero replacements so very strong fundamentals as it relates to spending momentum for both UI path and automation anywhere now how is presents or what we call market share in the data set changing on a year-on-year basis well this is the last data point that I want to show and it relates to that metric of market share which again is the measure of pervasiveness it's calculated by dividing the number of mentions of a vendor in a sector by the total mentions of that sector in this case RP a and this chart shows the year-on-year change in customer growth comparing market share from the April 20 survey with that from the April 19 data and you can see the yellow line at 11% is the sector average uipath has the fastest growth automation anywhere is growing faster than the market average and blue prism is below the average now this looks back to last year and it'll be interesting to see how this picture changes with the next survey based on what we're seeing with the next net scores which is a forward-looking metric all right let's wrap so we're seeing that the bifurcated market is high that the automation trend generally is real and that the RP a drill down specifically shows us an example in action we think that kovat 919 not hit these numbers would actually be higher by maybe as much as 10% but in the near near to mid term we would expect a pretty fast return to normal patterns of demand if I put normal and air quotes for our PA in fact you know we don't expect a real v-shaped recovery across the board but our PA is you know one of those areas where we actually may see such a rebound the pandemic really underscores the need to accelerate digital transformations our PA we think is going to be a central player in that movie along with AI the cloud all right we have to leave it there for now so remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts just all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts please subscribe to the series would appreciate that and check out ETR dot plus for all the data I also publish a full report every week on wiki bound comm tons of data there as well and Silicon angle comm has all the news and I published there alright this is Dave Volante thanks for watching this episode of the cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time [Music]

>>from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I F s. Hi, buddy. Welcome to Boston. You're watching the cubes coverage of I s s World in the Heinz Auditorium in Boston. I'm Day Volonte with my co host, Paul Gill and Paul. This is the the largest enterprise resource planning software company that our audience probably has never heard of. This is our second year covering I f s World. Last year was in Atlanta. They moved to Boston. I f s is a Swedish based company. They do about $600 million in annual revenue, about 3700 employees. And interestingly, they have a development center in Sri Lanka, of all places. Which is kind of was war torn for the last 15 years or so, but nonetheless, evidently, a lot of talent and beautiful views, but so welcome. >>Thank you, Dave. I have to admit, before our coverage last year, I had never even heard of this company been around this industry for more than 30 years. Never heard of this company. They've got 10,000 customers. They've got a full house next door in the keynote and very enthusiastic group. This is a focus company. It's a company that has a lot of ah ah, vision about where wants to go some impressive vision documents and really a company that I think it's coming out of the shadows in the U. S. And it will be a force to be reckoned with. >>So I should say they were founded in the in the mid 19 eighties, and then it kind of re architected their whole platform around Client server. You remember the component move? It was a sort of big trends in the in the nineties. In the mid nineties opened up offices in the United States. We're gonna talk to the head of North America later, and that's one of the big growth areas that growing at about three. They claim to be growing at three x the overall market rate, which is a good benchmark. They're really their focus is really three areas e r. P asset management software and field service management, and they talk about deep functionality. So, for instance, they compete with Oracle ASAP. Certainly Microsoft and in four company we've covered in four talks a lot about the last mile functionality. That's not terminology that I f s uses, but they do similar types of things. I'll give you some examples because, okay, what's last mile? Functionality? Things like, um, detailed invoicing integration, contract management. Very narrow search results on things like I just want to search for a refurbished parts so they have functionality to allow you to do that. Chain. A custom e custody chain of custody for handling dangerous toxic chemicals. Certain modules to handle FDA compliance. A real kind of nitty gritty stuff to help companies avoid custom modifications in certain industries. Energy, construction, aerospace and defense is a big area for that. For them, a CZ well as manufacturing, >>there's a segment of the e r P market that often is under uh is under seeing. There's a lot of these companies that started out in niches Peoples off being a famous example, starting out on a niche of the market and then growing into other areas. And this company continues to be very focused even after 35 years, as you mentioned, just energy aerospace, a few construction, a few basic industries that they serve serve them at a very deep level focused on the mid market primarily, but they have a new positioning this year. They're calling the challengers for the challengers, which I like. It's a it's a message that I think resonates. It's easy to understand there position their customers is being the companies that are going to challenge the big guys in their industries and this time of digital transformation and disruption. You know, that's what it's all about. I think it's a great message of bringing out this year. >>Of course I like it because the Cube is a challenger, right? Okay, even though we're number one of the segments that we cover, we started out as a sort of a challenger. Interestingly, I f s and the gardener Magic Corners actually, leader and Field Service Management. They made an acquisition that they announced today of a company called Asked. He asked, U S he is a pink sheet OTC company. I mean, they're very small is a tuck in acquisition that maybe they had a They had a sub $20 million market cap. They probably do 25 $30 million in revenue. Um, Darren rules. The CEO said that this place is them is the leader in field service management, which is interesting. We're gonna ask him about that to your other point. You look around the ecosystem here that they have 400 partners. I was surprised last night. I came early to sort of walk around the hall floor. You see large companies here like Accenture. Um and I'm surprised. I mean, I remember the early days when we did the service. Now conferences 2013 or so you didn't see accent. You're Delloye E Y p W c. Now you see them at the service now event here that you see them? I mean, and I talked to essential last night. They said, Yeah, well, we actually do a lot of business in Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian region, and we want to grow the business in the U. S. >>Europe tends to be kind of a blind spot for us cos they don't see the size of the European market, all the activities where some of the great e. R. P. Innovation has come out of Europe. This company, as you mentioned growing three times the rate of the market, they have a ah focus on your very tight with those customers that they serve and they understand them very well. And this is a you can see why it's centuries is is serving this market because, you know they're simply following the money. There's only so much growth left in the S a P market in the Oracle market. But as the CEO Darren said this morning, Ah, half of their revenues last year were from net new customers. So that's that's a great metric. That indicates that there's a lot of new business for these partners to pursue. >>Well, I think there's there's some fatigue, obviously, for big, long multi year s AP integrations, you're also seeing, you know, at the macro we work with Enterprise Technology Research and we have access to their data set. One of the things that we're seeing is a slowdown in the macro. Clearly, buyers are planning to spend less on I T in the second half of 2019 than they did in the first half of 2019 and they expect to spend less in Q four than they expected to in July. So things are clearly softening at the macro level. They're reverting back to pre 2018 levels but it's not falling off a cliff. One of the things that I've talked to e t. R about the premise we put forth love to get your thoughts is essentially we started digital transformation projects, Let's say in earnest in 2016 2017 doing a lot of pilots started kind of pre production in 2018. And during that time, what people were doing is they were had a lot of redundancy. They would maintain the legacy systems and they were experimenting with disruptive technologies. You saw, obviously a lot of you. I path a lot of snowflake and other sort of disruptive technology. Certainly an infrastructure. Pure storage was the beneficiary of that. So you had this sort of dual strategy. We had redundancy of legacy systems, and then the new stuff. What's happening now is, is the theory is that we're going into production. Would digital transformation projects and where were killing the legacy stuff? Okay, we're ready to cut over >>to a new land on that anymore, >>right? We're not going to spend them anymore. Dial that down. Number one. Number two is we're not just gonna spray and pray on all new tech Blockchain a i rp et cetera. We're gonna now focus on those areas that we think are going to drive business value. So both the incumbents and the disruptors are getting somewhat affected by that. That slowdown in that narrowing of the focused. And so I think that's really what's happening. And we're gonna, I think, have to absorb that for a year or so before we start to see new wave of spending. >>There's been a lot of spending on I t over the last three years. As you say, driven by this need, this transition that's going on now we're being going to see some of those legacy systems turned off. The more important thing I have to look at, I think the overall spending is where is that money being spent is being spent on on servers or is it being spent on cloud service is, and I think you would see a fairly dramatic shift going on. They're so the overall, the macro. I think it's still healthy for I t. There's still a lot of spending going on, but it's shifting to a new area there. They're killing off some of that redundancy. >>Well, the TR data shows couple things. There's no question that server and storage spending is has been declining and attenuating for a number of quarters now. And there's been a shift going on from that. Core infrastructure, obviously, into Cloud Cloud continues its steady march in terms of taking over market share. Other areas of bright spots security is clearly one. You're seeing a lot of spending in an analytics, especially new analytics. I mentioned Snowflake before we're disrupting kind of terror Data's traditional legacy enterprise data warehouse market. The R P. A market is also very hot. You AI path is a company that continues to extend beyond its its peers, although I have to say automation anywhere looks very strong. Blue Prison looks very strong. Cloudera interestingly used to be the darling is hitting sort of all time lows in the E. T R database, which is, by the way, that one of the best data sets I've ever seen on on spending enterprise software is actually still pretty strong. Particularly, uh, you know, workday look strong. Sales force still looks pretty strong. Splunk Because of the security uplift, it still looks pretty strong. I have a lot of data on I f s Like you said, they don't really show up in the e t R survey base. Um, but I would expect, with kind of growth, we're seeing $600 million. Company hopes to be a $1,000,000,000 by 2022 2021. I would think they're going to start showing up in the spending >>service well again in Europe. They may be They may be more dominant player than we see in the US. As I said, I really had not even heard of the company before last year, which was surprising for a company with 10,000 customers. Again, they're focused on the mid market in the mid market tends to fly a bit under the radar. Everyone thinks about what's happening in the enterprise is a huge opportunity out there. Many more mid market companies and there are enterprises. And that's a that's been historically a fertile ground for e. R. P. Companies to launch. You know J. D. Edwards came out of the mid market thes are companies that may end up being acquired by the Giants, but they build up a very healthy base of customers, sort of under the radar. >>Well, the other point I wanted to make I kind of started to about the digital transformation is, as they say, people are getting sort of sick of the big, long, ASAP complicated implementations. As small companies become midsize companies and larger midsize companies, they they look toward an enterprise resource planning, type of, of platform. And they're probably saying, All right, wait. I've got some choices here. I could go with an an I F. S, you know, or maybe another alternative. T s a p. You know, A S A P is maybe maybe the safe bet. Although, you know, it looks like i f s is got when you look around at the customers, they have has some real traction, obviously a lot of references, no question about it. One of things they've been digging for saw this gardener doing them for a P I integrations. Well, they've announced some major AP I integrations. We're gonna talk to them about that and poke it that a little bit and see if that will So to solve that criticism, that what Gardner calls caution, you know, let's see how real that is in talking to some of the customers will be talkinto the executives on members of the ecosystem. And obviously Paul and I will be giving our analysis as well. Final thoughts >>here. Just the challenge, I think, is you note for these midmarket focus Cos. Has been growing with their customers. And that's why you see of Lawson's in the JD Edwards of the World. Many of these these mid market companies eventually are acquired by the big E R P vendors. The customers eventually, if they grow, have to go through this transition. If they're going to go to Enterprise. The R P you know, they're forced into a couple of big choices. The opportunity and the challenge for F s is, can they grow those customers as they move into enterprise grade size? Can they grow them with with E. I. F s product line without having them forcing them to transition to something bigger? >>So a lot of here a lot of action here in Boston, we heard from several outside speakers. There was Linda Hill from Harvard. They had a digital transformation CEO panel, the CEO of soo say who will be on later uh PTC, a Conway, former PeopleSoft CEO was on there. And then, of course, Tony Hawk, which was a lot of fun, obviously a challenger. All right, so keep it right there, buddy. You're watching the Cube live from I F s World Conference at the Heinz in Boston right back, right after this short break.

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way. >> Welcome back to Miami. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. This is Day two of the mon 2019 3 cubes. Third year at V mon, We did New Orleans. We did Chicago last year. Course here at the Fountain Blue in Miami. Great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave a lot. It was my co host, Peter Burroughs. Abba Dabbas. Eye is Adi is here. He's the head of a Charles Russell speech. Liza London based law firm. How about great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thankyou. So you tell us about this judge. Interesting name. Charles Russell. Speech lease. It was a merger of two firms, Right. Tell us how it all came about. >> Back in 2,014 Charles, loss of species performed for a merger between two different companies. Charles docile and speaks Lee Burcham from a 90 perspective. That was very interesting for the two departments coming together s So we have a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies Two different systems different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by emerging back in 2,014 for five years on way here today >> that we see this a lot, you know, Emanate goes down. The acquiring company of this sounds like it was a merger. You know, they sort of battle. Okay, who's going toe? Really? Which framework is going to win? Because I'm sure had that conversation. But so to take us through that merger, what it entailed what? What the scenario looked like and how you plan for it. Sure. >> So I was part of the Charles. Also legacy Charles Russell team on, then obviously speaks about. Some had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out. Okay, What systems? You have free mail. What systems you have for document management system playing trump cards. Which is who's got the best system and which way do we wantto move forward? A little. >> Ah, >> so but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially used the same types of software so essentially that from that perspective it was It was it was quite simple. But then way had to work out. How do we How do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area. Which office do we move into? Sort of logistics around that. Can we fit in pre merger? It was six. Charles Lawson had sickle. Roughly 600 people, especially birds, had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah. So working out space logistics was was an issues >> making that even even more complicated, right? Yeah. >> One of the things that's interesting about a law firm, like versus a traditional manufacturer or AW financial services firm that has a lot of very fast right writing systems and have to scale on those lines is a law firms feature very complex dogs, very complex in from out of files, a lot of files that are written. But at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different work flows very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago from now on MySpace steak, and it was you're getting into brexit stuff, too, so that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new work clothes that you guys trying to support? And then adding, On top of that, the complexity of bringing these two firm GPR >> GPO itself was It was a year old project for us on. Obviously, we've got offices. The Middle East, but obviously is in the Far East on DH in Central Europe has well, so data logistics or where it sits, is an issue for us as well. So GDP, ours being a big project for us in terms of the merger itself. It was it was very, very difficult for the two I T departments to come together on actually work out. How how do we go to one unified systems? Essentially one doctor man, just in one email system. All of that took a lot of plan in law project management on essentially within the legal press itself. We got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it on within. I think It was 18 month period. We had merged order, different systems and various offices because speech the Bertram and Time is what I had. Offices in Zurich and Geneva were to merge with different offices together as well. So it was. It was a big, big task for the i T department on the firm itself. >> They're very tight migration deadlines. And and as you started to approach those deadlines you had to worry about, Okay, When we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't? You know, I have bad data, data, corruption and the like. So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? >> So wait, we're here. C'mon on DH. Veen was It was it was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business Different storage systems, Different actualization system's way used to mean a CZ. The middleman basically, to my great data, from one day to center to another, using swink it. So where there was a large amount of terabytes and terabytes, amount of data way had swing kit available to us using team were able to be to be essentially a love the environments into the swing care and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And vain was essentially part on on top of that, making sure that the data that we were coming that will bring in a cross is true and not corrupt on DH, that using some of their technology is sure backups and stuff like that really, really was essential to, you know, do migration going well >> And was was Wien installed and both organizations at the time? Or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? >> And yeah, So Legacy Charles also had way was actually myself going back probably eight years ago. Version For a time, I think team had 20,000 customers. So to here >> there were version 10 now 33 150 >> 1,001,000, 4,000 month. >> That makes me proud that we invested in vain when we did good car. So yeah, it was It was a good call from us, and essentially three other side of the business did not have. But then we just wait. Expanded our Venus State to look at both sides and then bring him across on. And then, ever since then, we've grown our vamos state across the world, across all of officers. So >> So how did you do that? So that was that was another migration that had to occur. And did you? You kind of do those simultaneously. Did you do the theme of migration first, and then bring the two systems together? >> Do you seem to do Stouffer special sauce in the migration? >> Yeah. So Veen was essentially a tool that we used to my great data sensors from one data center to another using their backup technology using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well. When when we had the limited down time periods that we've had, they give us the flexibility to actually Circe the business is during these particular ours. We're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have access to these systems because we're going to bring up systems from point A to point B. So veen was essential to them if >> you had to do it over again. If he had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What what advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? >> I would say Give your partners and lawyers more realistic time. Pray the time frame that we would get. >> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time for him. >> Exactly. Yeah, so says ensured that the amount of work it's it's not just day to itself. You know, we're talking network and we're talking security. We're talking, you know, to to similar sized companies coming together. We were very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together because, you know, way could have taken our time. We could have got to take this free four years a CE, far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time for him and that business to parts of the business from Day one can collaborate much better with each other. So >> we talked a lot about digital business transformation and you know, our approach or our observations on the digital business transformations, the process by which you altar and change your firm to re institutionalize the work. Change your game. Tomato Grover. All governments model as you use data as an asset, so that's affecting every firm everywhere. How's it affecting a law firm and you know your law from specifically on? How is that going to change your stance in your approach to data protection >> Data is incredibly important to unlawful. A zit is to most most organizations, but in terms of, you know, one of one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms. We work with the financial institutions, so we held information by that. We hold personal data way hold all times of information. Charles Oscar speech leads works with Aware is of law apart from Kunal. So the areas of law that they worked with his vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold and essentially I mean, for us data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility tow our data. How do we How do we work that data? How do we then market based on the data that we have? How do we market ourselves from that data. You know, there might be one area the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law. But then, you know that that could correspond with the litigation issue. You know, how do we work that data? To be to be an advancing to our businesses is extremely important. For >> what? What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious. I was liketo ask the practitioners of what they think about. You know what was announced. You had, uh, well, you had the ve made $1,000,000,000. That's kind of fun and cool, but But you had the with the program, which was kind of interesting. The whole ap I look the beam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as a host that needed to recover from, you know, a replicated instance. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation, things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, Hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. >> So, essentially, I think I've been a really good question is very relevant to us many of not just ourselves law firm but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud based services now for us. I mean, this was a big thing five years ago way you know, everyone was talking about public clouds. Us. We're now we're now looking clouds and where basically, we've bean pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloudlike Citrix, for example. Their licensing model was based around their services. So is Microsoft in Mike's off? You don't you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore. Within premises you have off 365 A lot of the SAS applications are moving toward the cloud on DH. What wrote me? I had to say doing the keynote in regards to act, too. And how team are trying to be the visionaries in terms of look at that cloud is their next big thing for the next 10 years, offering often a crucial and for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies limited understanding, essentially having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another. It's fantastic, you know, we've offered, you know I've spoken to, obviously are United directors around the other law firms where I wanted to have gone to the public cloud. But they don't know how to come back in and having a tall that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in house to go form a ws to zoo. Or if there's a particular assess application, for example, that piers better with a W s. But you've got your other application that piers with that particular application is your Why would you want to have in the door? You'll probably want to move into a W eso for us, I think. What? The message coming out of'em on this year has bean really, really helpful for us. >> So So when you started with theme, they had it said 20,000 custom You like the 20001st customer on DIT was coincided with the virtual ization, you know, craze. Do you feel like the team knowing what you know about them, you have a lot of experience with them Consort of Replicate that success in this town intendant and in Act two, >> I think when I first looked at them, Wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You know you given iPhone to your grandmother or to your children, and they have to play with it. And I see the beam as an intuitive piece of software that easy fighting professionals to get on with it, as their slogan said a few years ago. It just works. It does just work. Wear were great advocates of him. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using we've managed companies using and when I see you know, when you go to the sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think going back to your question I think Wei si oui, si, vamos a strategic partner for us when we see their vision and we believe in their vision, and I think what they're doing in terms of what they working on next few years, I think we're well favor there, and I think, you know, essentially, that's where the most of their business is going to come from, >> where you sit down with, you know, rat mayor over over vodka and he says, Tell me the one thing I could do to make your life you know, easier, better you can't say cut prices s a hellhole. But what would you advise him to >> make my life better >> other than Jim instead of >> yeah, eyes that >> would make you crazy. >> So in terms of a zoo, a technology, >> your business relationship or something, she'd like to see them do that would. I >> think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seen license rentals will be a good thing. I know, I know. They give you a valuation license keys, and that's something that you can use. So, for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and PM's having license rentals for a period of time, able >> to spin it up and spin it down actually allowed >> Exactly. Yeah, that would be an advantage. I think in terms of what you know what they're doing in the marketplace, and a lot of law firms use him. I feel I can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used to be my fingers on eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem, and the way they got that problem, you know the way, the way they communicated to reverse the way they a lot of different teams across the the Europe and the US go involved. I think, you know, in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they what they do for us. I don't think there's anything more to add. Teoh. Right? Maia's vision. >> That's great for their custom of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is not heavy. Really? Thank you very much. You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy Peter, and I'll be back with our next guests right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the front of Blue Hotel. You're watching the Cube from Vienna on 2019 right back.

>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the em. Where Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the PM where >> hi. Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier way are in the middle of the excitement and the action at the, um where Radio twenty nineteen in San Francisco. Please welcome back to the Cube. David Tennant House, the chief research officer at the end. Where. David Welcome back. >> Thank you. It's always great to have the Cube here radio, >> and it's we had in a really exciting day. And then suddenly this whole space opens up and you can imagine all the innovation and the collaboration that's going on in here. This is the fifteenth radio. This is just one of several big programs that the M where does that really inspires and fosters this really collaborative, innovative culture? You've been here for five years. You came from Microsoft tells a little bit about what makes not just radio, but the emir's culture of innovation unique and really gives it some competitive advantage in the market. >> Yeah, well, so that you know, I think there's a number of different things there. People are super passionate about technology I think there's also this shared thing at P m. Where which is, you know, we're a little understated, right? We're not a big consumer brand. And, you know, we almost pride ourselves in creating technology that goes under the covers, right? So whether it's inside the data center, you know, can we make, you know, with virtual ization, right, Khun? Oui. Make it so that you can run ten times as many virtual machines as you had physical machines and the applications never have to know, right? So that's kind of, you know, for us, it's perfect, technically hard problem and, you know, a little understated. So that kind of, you know, fits with our culture. I think another thing that we found, you know, having a research group often a challenge. His researchers will go to people in the product teams, and they sort of want to start the discussion. I've got this new idea, and maybe it could really help you with your product. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the product people are, you know, they're working against deadlines. They want to get stuff out. They don't want people derailing their, you know, their agenda and their work. So something we find at PM where which is really I find unique, is let's say we goto a product team in many other companies environments, and I'm really not naming anyone. What happens is you gotta have a discussion with somebody who sort of, you know, is the expert on whatever name your technology and you say the reason starting point isn't Hey, I've got this whole new way of doing your stuff, right? Starting point is can you tell me how your stuff works? And usually the response that other companies is. Why do you want to know? Right. It's a really pointed defense of we find it. The m where is really people are incredibly open. I don't, you know, know exactly how this got embedded in the culture. Maybe because it was a spin off from the university, but deeply embedded in this culture is Oh, yeah, let me tell you how this stuff works. And, uh, you know, maybe you'LL have a better idea. We don't even have to start with, You know, we have a better idea. It's like, you know, and then from there way can have ongoing discussions about >> Oh, that prints and improve it. That Cruz, why you have a community? Yeah, transparent creates openness that creates solidarity around open >> concept. Exactly. And and that's kind of what you see here. Radio. I don't know if people can see in the background is This is, you know, already day for in the Expo Hall and people don't want to leave and they're walking around. They're looking at each other's posters, they're talking to each other, making connections, and then they're going to build on those connections in the coming, you know, week. It's months and over the next year. And, you know, this is they said, you know, this has been going on for four days. You think that by now people have seen all the posters, they talked about everything there is still finding things that they want to talk to the kid. >> The candy store is a lot to taste here and learn ivory engaged graphic contents good and congratulations and thank you. And I just want to add, >> like something I love is, uh, getting here. Actually, before people arrive on the first day each year because when they come in, it's like greeting old friends right. It's sort of like a reunion except nobody's worried about, you know, like school reunion. You know, people are just playing happy to see each other, so that fits with that community thing, you know, because sometimes they're there in their teams and they don't necessarily get what you're being humble. We've talked last year about some of the content you put together in the team, so it's not. It's a hive mind, but you're the chief researcher, >> So you've gotta figure out on at least some canvas to start shaping framing sets of agendas to go after that. So if you can. So Lisa and I were just talking about this here today about how if you have a tech canvas, you don't want to create barriers of thinking. You want to open it up but not make it two restricted. That's your job. What can you tell us about the research agenda that's here and way out there and how how do you see that aperture range >> of yeah topics? Well, I think you know, I want to re first before even getting into that agenda, reaffirm a key point you made right, which is don't constrain people too much. So radio, by the way, is really very, you know, bottoms up. This is not about saying, you know, here's the four topics people really submit. It's a very competitive process people want to be. Not every engineering BM where gets to come to radio, right? It's it's eighteen hundred developers, which is an incredible commitment by the company. He's still a small fraction of our community, so they're actually submitting, you know, bottoms up, uh, to you know, see you and then we have a program committee that reviews it. So that's Ah, bottoms up part of the process from where I sit, You know what I think happens is whether it's our research team or filtering. You know, we'LL look at what comes. Bottoms up and say, Well, what's the signal to noise? For example, there's you know, we've had this year a tremendous amount of machine learning activity, and you see this in the posters here and in the presentations. However, you know that it wasn't too hard to detect a rising signal a couple years ago. So in that case a couple years ago, we said, OK, this is important. We see it in the external community way see it in the developer community. We see it within our own teams and developers. Clearly important. So starting a few years ago, we pulled together some of the senior most technologists, the principal engineers, a subset of them, and said, Hey, we want you guys to dio what we call a of a test study for tests are going faster, but also Veum, Where? Technology Study. We want you to actually do a strategy, but not a business strategy. Technology strategy. Look at the landscape of this. Look at where we are. Look at where we need to be and start charting a course. So in that sense, what we you know, coming out of that was, for example, information of an internal machine Learning program office? Who? One of them gold. It's billed the ML community. You talked about that before. Inside the company. It's not just a technical goal, it's an organizational on community goal. And that's just sort of, you know, kind of one example that wasn't the only output of that. But it's it's one example and what you see a big surprise, you know, kind of ten x, the engagement in the space so that that would be, you know, one case. I think one of the key things is, well, pick up on different topics. And then the thing that we do that I think it's different from some other companies to stop and say what our enterprise is going to need to do because at the end of the war in enterprise company and our customers, our enterprises and their needs her actually, although they're in different verticals, for example, let me just use machine learning. But it could be blockchain. It could be I ot. Actually, what they need is different from, say, the machine learning that that the hyper scale er's needs. So we realised that actually, there's a very interesting needs for us to explore the underserved parts of machine learning because all of these companies, if you look at them, they have a larger number of machine learning problems to work on the hyper scaler. You know, Facebook, Google, love them. They're actually working on a very focused set of problems, right? It's you know it's at serving. It's the social network graph. It's, you know, cat photo recognition, and I don't mean to knock those and they've got a great business is built around them. But notice it's a small number of problems. They do it it immense scale. Okay, given Enterprise probably wants to apply machine learning to a large number of problems, they're not going to run each of those problems on a million servers there, actually, probably running those problems on tens or hundreds of the EMS, right? And so what's the technology they need to address those problems and you can go through way looked at, you know, machine learning That way. We looked at I ot that when he said, You know, look, we think the analytics and the M L. That's a really cool things. We want to play in that space, too. But you know what everybody's trying to do. That, and not a lot of attention being paid to our enterprise is going to secure right and and managed all these I O T devices and the gateways to the devices. So we chartered a strategy for both research and business in that space, watching same thing, really exciting technology Now for enterprises, it's not about big point. It's not about currency, right? It's a money decentralized trust. It's an infrastructure for decentralized trust and effectively think of this is, you know, a database like thing. Except now it's going to be shared across many different organizations. And it's going to change how organizations work with each other and how they work with their auditors on how they work with their regulators. So this is great. >> But, you know, let's focus on what am I the way I just retweeted while you were talking? I just got a clip from last year. I asked you that question about Blockchain. You nailed it Way talked about how all the hype and fraud and i CEOs and confusing it. Yeah, but the world kept moving along. A lot of progress on the supply chain side, lots of interest, rafters trust. He sat realized that it's not about >> the eye. Indio. Yeah, so wave you, that is, You know that there's the high poker and, you know, they'LL be a deflation after the hiker passes. But there's real signal under there and so, you know, and we just turn our strategy and we keep marching down that path, and we're, you know, building up more partners, more people to work with. So it's it's that sort of thing. Quantum computing, right? We're not, you know, developing our own quantum computers. I can tell you that right now, and we're not even doing quantum algorithms. I have some albums researchers, but they're not doing quantum algorithm. You know, I kind of wish we were doing some of that stuff, but what we did do, and we looked at this and we said, Okay, hold on a key challenges. Uh, when the quantum computers do show up, we're going to need to transition to new cryptography to quantum resistant. You know, our post quantum there. Two terms, they're used. Cryptography enterprise customers are going to need to do that. Well, one second, they can't wait till this shows up. It takes ten years. Change your crypto. And by the way, you know if you've encrypted data and other people got a copy of your encrypted data, if it's long living data like, you know, health care records, you don't want them decrypting that in five or ten years. So you got a sort of start now and again, this goes back to what oh enterprise customers need to do Well, okay. The new crypto standards for miffed and others aren't quite ready, Okay, but But by the time they're ready, it's going to be too late to get started. Okay, But we could start working with our customers to work on crypto agility to change how they handle their cryptography. First off, get a good inventory of it, and then get set up so that they're using essentially plug mobile libraries so that it's easier for them to change their cryptography as soon as the standard shows up. And by the way, even if quantum computing takes a lot longer than we all think, this is good hygiene anyway. In other words, it's just a no regrets move for our customers and Khun. We sort of help them go down that path. And this is an example where we can actually also partner with our colleagues that are, say, other parts of Del technologies to help make that work for We're working with others in the industry, you know, intel, and we've kind of convened a form of players within the industry. You know, start working in that direction again. What do enterprise you know, what's the cool new technology. What oh enterprises need. >> So you talked about this event being open in terms of like the agenda and the topics being driven from the bottom of it, That gets really cool. So in the spirit of talking about customers and, like you were saying designing for what enterprises need and all of the variations that encompasses where is customer influence not just a radio, but within the em wears research and innovation programs and strategy. What's that? I mean, I just Advisors don't like that. It's >> a great question. So, like many companies, you know, we do have various advisory body's right, so we bring them in and, well, we'Ll sort of half like, you know, the sea tabs are customer technical advisory body. So the more technical people in some of our kind of more leading customers and we'LL show them things that we're working on, you know, under any kind of India arrangement, and get their feedback, you know, sort of OK, Does this make sense? You know? If not, why not? If it does, you know often it's not that finery, right? It's how would you use it? And we really sort of them give that feedback backto our teams. Now many people do this kind of thing, so we have lots of other customer engagements. We bring customers into forms like radio to be on panels, breakouts, things like that to give presentation so that basically, let's face it in one or two events, that's not going to convey much signal to our engineers. It's a madam, a six storey engineers way want you to be out talking to customers, right? So getting our engineers to be at PM world but way have programmes to actually allow engineers and encourage them to get out, make customer visits above and beyond. And by the way, if you look at it again, our principal engineers in our fellows I think what you find is the vast bulk of them are distinguished because they love engaging with customers. They don't just do it because it's part of the job. They love getting that feedback, so it actually helps them in their career, and we try to sort of essentially teach that to folks. One of the programs we have that in the CTO office, but I love it's not him. It's not in my part, So you know this is a case of I love all the things that we have that just my own, You know, uh, is it's like it's like loving your nieces and nephews, right? Not just your own children way. You were going to ask you your favorite child so way have, like, the CTO ambassadors program, Uh, which basically is coming from the field. So we have, you know, field engineers. They're not on the development side, but these air super technical people that are out in the field touching our customers all the time in any company, there's always a subset of those folks that just have a really good intuitions for where the customers are going and are good at raising their hands about that. So way actually have a program with CTO Ambassador Program CTO way where, you know, literally we give them a pin right way, give them a bad on DH. So we've tried to identify that subset of the field engineers and way regularly bring them in, you know, to pollo alter or bring them together. Whether it's a V m world or radio or whatever again, same thing. We're going to let them know what we've got cooking. We're going to get their feedback. We're gonna hear from them on. And this is not just on research right away. This is on the product pipe lines. You know what's going on in the road map and everything else now to me again. That's just actually a starting point. Because when I put my people in front of Seo is its telling my people, this is the group of folks. When you have a new idea, don't just talk to the product people go find CTO is because, you know, one of the best ways and I'm gonna be a little selfish. One of the best ways for us to influence the customers it influence the company is to get customers excited about something you were doing right. So you know Helen Lawson talk about technology push. And if you really want to be a success, we'LL get innovating it. In a large company, you need to create whole absolutely, and so the CDOs are great. They help us find people to do posies with, because you have to find just the right. You have to find a customer that has a need for this new stuff, but they also have to be somebody that understands this isn't yet a product. This is a journey, right? We're going to jointly try something out. You're gonna learn about whether this new tech can help you and how it could help you. We're going to learn what the product ultimately means, but, you know, you're not gonna be able to actually take out your checkbook at the end and get it right away. So you have toe, you know, be comfortable investing the time and energy, and then they have >> a spy in three that is really one of the core elements that's essential to drive innovation. >> Absolutely. And you need that. As I said, you need that customer partnership to help fine tune things. It's, you know, one of the things more broadly I try to do with research team is, you know, on the one, and give them the freedom to say, Hey, I have a new idea and I want to explore that new idea. That's great. Now, if you think about it right, then they're running open. Luke, they're running based on, you know, kind of their guesses. What educated guess. Right? And their intuition what people might want in the future. So that's good. What a then do it say. Okay, that's great. Uh, you know, you did a little bit. You wrote a paper build a prototype. Okay, so now they get a prototype bill. Okay, That starts getting this idea little more concrete. They're okay with that. The next step, it sort of is. Okay. Now, >> you got to >> get somebody to use that prototype, because I need you to get. And you need you to get feedback and create a feedback loop. Because otherwise, what's gonna happen is they made that first intuitive guests. So let's say they had their really phenomenal and they have a seventy five percent chance of getting it right. Okay, that that. But if they now continue to make a series of educated guesses and they have, ah, you know, seventy eighty percent chance on each educated guests and they make a siri's of four or five of those they have almost, you know, very quickly, close to zero chance of being in the right spot if you just multiply out the probabilities. But if they make that first big league and they start getting customer feedback That actually helps them right get more and more focused on where the bull's eye is. You have a really great chance of changing, >> so they don't build this great technology with no customers. Crichton second >> don't want somebody for a problem, right? But if you want to, you know, kind of have >> some really big ball change. You've >> got to be. >> Well, you've got to be willing to make that first big step without the feedback because the customers don't wear right. And if you just went to the customers said if you had this, what would you do? And they probably say, No, no, no. Instead of that, I want another feature over here. So you got to go and build that first prototype and take the leap of faith. The issue is, if you compound the leap of faith, your odds of being successful slope. If you quickly get into the hands of the customers, get feedback and start focusing in on where the value is, your chance goes up dramatically. >> Awesome. I wish we had more time with you, David. We're gonna let you get back to all of the amazing innovation that I have no doubt it's going on right behind us. Thank you. Something, Johnny on the Cube today. >> Look forward to seeing you again soon. >> Absolutely. For John Ferrier, I'm least Martin. You're watching the cubes. Exclusive coverage of the young Where? Radio twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> run. Welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I have remote. Sarah Varney is the chief marketing officer Tulio Company. We've covered for many, many years one of the most successful A p I now public company. Um, Sarah, welcome to the Cube competition. Good to see you remotely. You're in San Francisco? Were in Palo Alto. Um, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> So you guys have been really a powerhouse company? Twilio. We've been following the rise and success. It just seems just success that the success of success go public stock keeps growing. Big acquisition would send grid for $2,000,000,000 in October. We covered that, but really kind of reading the tea leaves and connecting the dots. It's really the continued evolution of Cloud sas, where AP eyes are becoming Maur and Maur the lingua franca for the next generation way. That's coming, but is going into a whole nother direction. You guys are a big part of that. You're the chief marketing officer. It's >> a hard >> story to tell because it's it's kind of under the hood nerdy, but it's also really big business benefits. So as the c m o. How do you get your arms around that you've been in the business for a while? Take him in to explain the strategy around how you're handling. That's Willie. Oh, Marketing. >> Sure, Yeah. I mean, I do. I agree that, uh, you know, Tulio is >> very much an ingredient brand, but at the same time, everyone is interacting with with in some cheaper form, probably every day, whether or not they realize it or not. If you're getting an appointment reminder from your >> dentist's confirming an appointment, that's probably Tulio behind the scenes, >> if you are communicating with your uber driver to say that you are headed outside that is normally powered by Coolio technology. So even though it might be, ah, technology that exists lower in the stack and something you might not physically see, it is very much something that people everywhere getting every day and you know our goal really is to Leo is to make sure that we're helping companies across the globe from all different types of industries, of all shapes and sizes. to bridge the communication gap with their customers. You know, every day there's a new channel to keep up to speed with. There's a new way that people are customers that are demanding Thio be communicated with. And we want companies to be out in front of that s O that you know, they can connect with their customers on any channel, if that's what's up. If that's SMS. If that's voice, if that's even fax, we want to make that ah possibility. >> I love the Positioning Cloud Communications Company. That's kind of what you guys Air Corps, because you're bringing it all together. And I think you know, the mobile Revolution, starting with the iPhone and 2007. You look at that as a seminal moment and you say OK, mobile device. It's a phone, It's a computer. It's got applications on it. This is a device that's unique to the rest of the infrastructure, but developers and your programming on it, and those things all integrate together. That's where a lot of people kind of saw that for the first time. Then you add cloud to it. Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the top three Amazon dominating really kind of brings a P. I focus even more to make these service's. These Web service is go to a whole nother level on dhe. That's the big wave that we're seeing. I'd >> love to get >> your thoughts and you worked at salesforce dot com, which really pioneered sass. And they were the first real cloud company before you started to see Amazon really cloud infrastructure to service. So Platforms asserts and suffers of service evolve. You were there early. You had a lot of experience working with AP Exchange APP stores early on its sales force. How does that compare to now? What is the trajectory and how does it all connect? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that when I, you know my joke is always that when I started on the APP exchange, its sales force, the Apple App store didn't even exist. So the explosion of mobile devices was just we weren't even. We weren't even there quite yet, and I was working with Iess V's Thio to help them. I think about how they could launch big businesses in the cloud on, I think at that point people were were rotating hard away from the world of on premise, which required a ton of investment of a hardware perspective and service's perspective, and in the process of that, rotated very almost overcorrected towards package solutions. And I think over the last few years what we've seen and something that Tulio is definitely behind and you could see in the vision of our product roadmap he's coming back to the middle, where you have the benefits of the cloud, the speed, the ability to stand something out very quickly. But you also have unlimited customization ability, and you can really put that Theobald ity to build palette for applications that bring the best of different solutions in different applications through a p. I's in the hands of of your developers. Sorry. Go ahead. >> I think that's a great point. I want to just double down on that for a second and ask you how you guys are seeing the developer traction on this because one of the core things that were been reporting over the past couple years this year in particular is the rise of things like Kubernetes Cloud native, where developers now have a seamless way to program the infrastructure, the hard stuff. So you're seeing a faster development cycle for those application developers. Is that where the customization piece comes in? Is that where you guys see that connection point? And what does that mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. But at a higher level, we really want to empower developers. You create a custom connected journey across >> all different parts of how our customers interacting with the brand. You know, >> if you think about I. I had a recent incident with an airline that will remain nameless, but I I left my laptop on a plane in to get that laptop back. Took multiple calls. Thio the customer service desk. I was bounced around to a bunch of different people. The tracking of that computer was a near impossible. At one point, it traveled from New Jersey, Thio Ireland. You know, there was just so many different points of that journey where there was disconnection and I began to lose trust in this the ability of this customer service department, uh, you know, this This company had an A P I based approach. They could bring all of the data from these different systems from there. >> Your pee from their serum, you know, from their shipping vendor all in one place. And I wouldn't have had that that experience with that particular airline. >> So if you see a P Eyes is a data connector model, really, connecting data sets together fast and easy. >> Ideo. I think it's a way I think developers love working in AP eyes because they can bring all the they can pick the best of breed solutions and bring over that data into one customer united customer experience so that your customer doesn't have >> to do that heavy lifting. It's all there for them. >> You know, one of the things you see from companies like Salesforce pioneering the early days of Assassin Cloud. I mean, even Andy jassy it Amazon many times, and he always uses the expression that they use the Amazon cold you got. You have to be misunderstood for a long time. If you want to be a leader in an emerging Newmarket. You guys that twilio kind of have done that and continue to surpass expectations because you've been kind of skating to where the puck is now, which is the cloud Native Wave. Third party applications, Coyote security all kind of come together for developers. So as a company that's been different and been disruptive as the c m o. >> How do you >> take that? Uh, that that vision in Montreat the next level as you market the solution because you are kind of different. You are not new per se, but you're a new way to create value for customers. How do you go out and tell that story with some of the marketing things that you do? Um, take that twilio to the next level. >> I mean, I personally, in >> my experience, I think, uh, the easiest marking jobs are the ones where you have amazing customer stories and there is no shortage of amazing innovation and our customer base on. And, you know, I think if you think about the companies that are making the news, if that's lift, if that's, you know, cos like Airbnb, they're not. If you think about their business, they're not inventing something. Brando. The Hoover didn't invent the taxi, uh, air being beaten and then a hotel room. But they invented a new way to consume their product to communicate around their product. And, you know, I think it's very easy to show the power of Tulio and how we've evolved through some of these these customer stories. And it's not just the kind of Silicon Valley fast growing, you know, start ups that we're all familiar with here, just just living and being located in the region. But, you know, we're starting to see this more and more in the enterprise as well. Ah, and people really hardest in communication to make sure that that they themselves are not disrupted. >> Yeah, of course. We love that. The enterprise high we've been doing for 10 years now. Everyone talks enterprise because the confidence of consumer ization of I t. Is happening. It's the lines are blurring. Share some customers successors because I think this is a great, great example of just great marketing that the customers do the talking for you. You always got to do this thing. You know the standard operational things and have some a text back and all that good stuff. But at the end of the day, when you have your customer sharing their success, that's really the ultimate testimonial. So share some cool examples of notable customers, if you can. >> Yeah, well, look I mean, we have a wide range, I'll tell you. Three Medtronic, one of the largest medical device companies in the world. They provide a solution for Type one diabetes. They provide a pump that is constantly monitoring the glucose levels in someone's blood. What they've done with Julio's. Now they're layering on messaging capability. So if someone's glucose levels all to a level that's unsafe, they could be messaged. And you know, this is not just for the patient. But if you think of a young child who suffers from Type one diabetes, this could be a very stressful situation for their parents and their caregiving team. And now that team can constantly be in the loop, and they don't have to worry if they are at work and wondering, you know how they're chai that was doing at school. Or, you know, if they're on the soccer field and concerned about you know how, uh, their condition could be affected by them. Participating in that sport s so completely different from your more, um uh, straight down the middle startup that we see here in the Valley. >> So basically, messaging is to keep value. It's not so much a tech thing. It's more of a the outcome. It's a critical service piece toe. Have those kind of real time communications? >> Yes, absolutely. Because, I mean, if you think about >> it monitoring your your, uh, glucose levels, that's not a new phenomenon. People have been doing that for years, but layering on communications on top of this has brought a real time element Thio monitoring this, uh, this condition and has liberated people with this condition so that, you know, they can get back to the things that they've always going to do without having to worry about. You know, the state of their health. It's gone. >> It's like infrastructure is code for devil up you guys air for communications. You make it easy to do that for things like that. Talk about the impact of scale over the years because now you know, we're seeing the data tsunami happen Every day I ot devices air coming on. Everything's got. Ah, a sensor on it. You got doorbells. You got everything out there now has got an I P address and connected in that could potentially be a messaging unit of of data. This is just getting massive. How you guys see scale? And how do you guys getting around the next wave on that piece? >> Yeah. I mean, I think one of the >> huge benefits in working with polio is our super network. So we're constantly maintaining relationships with all the key carriers across the globe to make sure that we can get deliver our to our customers the best routes. And so that means also that they can stand up business virtually anywhere across the globe, a cz, their entry in new markets and coyote. This is especially true for anyone who is in the eye ot space. If you think about the dock Ellis category, companies like lime, uh, who are, you know, delivering rental bike service is where and you know, a market where market share just grabbing as much market share is possible. It seems to be the name of the game. They're able to partner with Julio in bed sim cards and all of their bicycles, and now be able to you track all of those all of those bicycles across the globe as well as scooters. Ah, and then take that information, uh, figure out how customers are engaging with their product and ultimately build a better solution. Long term, >> real time messaging will never go away as values. I see just like data. So it's gonna get faster and larger amounts of messaging making sense of it. Do. The heavy lifting is great story. You guys done a great job. Thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Get the plug in for twilio real quick. What's new with the company employees out? See the public companies? You really can't talk about futures, but what's on your plate? What's on the horizon for Tulio? What's the update? >> Yeah, I mean, the company is >> growing extremely quickly. We're really excited about the context, but center market especially. We launched our flex contact center Solution, uh, was made generally available just this past October. On a CZ you've mentioned we're super excited to welcome sing grid into the family of products you know, really, round out our full set communication in the eyes of people communicate with their customers in any way possible. And I would be, uh, it would be a crime for me, not to mention our user conference coming up this August August 6th and seventh at Mosconi West and that's called Signal s O. I highly encourage you to attend. It's a great opportunity to hear from experts in the communications space and also our customers. >> Well, we love the name signal. Extracting the signal from the noise was our original kind of tag line. Really appreciate it. And with all those customers, must be a hard challenge to have a cup conference, doing the keynote selections and figuring out what to do. What you're gonna have breakout sessions. Just get a little more detail on the event. You're gonna see the stage and customer story's going to break out sections. What's the format for the event? >> Yeah, so it's It's a two day, um, session. At most witty West. We have a number of breakouts. We have hands on training, which we call super class. We have, uh, keynotes. Last year we had an interactive performance with the band. OK, go. Uh, we had the creators of Westworld onstage. Geoff Lawson, our CEO, always kicked the Hoff ER, and it's just a great, exciting two days on, and we also this year, given that were hosting it during the summer time frame, we have ah camp experience for your children. And if you're looking to combine it with a summer vacation so we're super excited about signal, it's, uh, it's, Ah, two of my favorite days of the year from, Ah, Giulio perspective. And I'd love for everyone to come join us. >> We got a great customer success over the years, and great names congratulate Sarah. Thanks for been the time here in the Cube. I'm John Furry here in Palo Alto. Ceremony the chief marketing officer with Julio in San Francisco via remote. Thanks for watching this cute conversation.

(upbeat techno music) >> Live, from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018 bought to you by Infor. >> Well Welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018. We are in DC, nation's capitol. Kind of sandwiched between the Capitol Hill and the White House, where there is never a dull moment these days. (laughing) >> John Walls with Dave Vellante and we are joined by Chris Lilley, who is the national managing principle of tech solutions at Grant Thornton. Chris, good to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Good to see you, thank you. >> Yeah, so first off, let's just talk about the relationship, Grant Thornton and Infor. Still fairly new? >> Yes. >> It's been about a year, a year and a half, in the making. >> It's been slightly over a year. >> Yeah, let's talk about how that began and then kind of a status update, where you are right now? >> Sure. Well, it began about a year ago, around that time that Coke made an investment into Infor and Grant Thornton was looking at expanding our technology footprint, looking at other vendors who were providing solutions to the clients that, you know, the we serve. We also saw that Infor has a very, very common client base with Grant Thornton and we spent a few days with Gardner, we spend a few days with Forrester; learned about their products, learned where they were, were very impressed and decided to make a commitment to the relationship. It's been a terrific first year with Infor. >> I talked to one of the principles last year of Coke, PAL, and he said to me that one of the benefits that we're going to bring to Infor is that we have relationships with guys like Grant Thornton. We're not going to get him in a headlock, but we're going to expose them to Infor and say, "Hey look, look for opportunities," because we think they exist and that that's what you found, right? >> 100%. To elaborate a little on the story, we spent a few days with Coke out in Wichita, understood what they saw in Infor and obviously we were aware of Infor, aware of their product base, but what they have done with the product over the past four or five years? Frankly, news to us. And where they've taken the product, the investments they've made, the other products that they've acquired around their core, the kind of edge products, if you will, absolutely tremendous and decided to make that investment. So it wasn't so much of an arm twist. >> Right >> It was some awareness that they created for us and we decided to jump in. >> What was your, all be, you know, you ah-ha that you said because you spent a little bit of time? >> Mm-hmm. >> Doing your due diligence and working, again, with the Coke folks, so, what was it that got your attention you think? I tell ya, there's really something here. >> Yeah, I think what put us over the top, is we we brought our leadership team up to New York for a few days, spent a little bit of time with Charles Phillips, who is incredibly impressive and can probably sell anything to anybody. But we really spent time with their hook and loop folks and their developers. And when we saw kind of the brainchild of hook and loop, which I don't know if you're familiar with what this? >> The in-house agency, sure. >> Yeah, the in-house-agency and what they are doing to make the product more user-friendly, to make it more engaging. When you look at the world that we live in right now, you know, I see a phone here, everything's easy to use and intuitive. Business applications are not. Now, it's a lot harder issue we're dealing with, but what they've done with the interface, what they've done with the usability kind of, that was our ah-ha moment. They showed us a couple other things that they have done for specific clients with their analytics tool set and how they've integrated that in some dashboarding and we were committed at that point. >> So talk about Grant Thornton's unique approach in terms of how you're applying Infor with clients. What's hot? You know, any specific industries and trends that you're seeing. >> Sure. What we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that when we made the commitment, we followed through on that commitment. We very narrowly focused our initial relationship with with Infor. Our industry focus is healthcare, public sector. Our product focus is the cloud suite products along with the enterprise asset management product. By focusing on the enterprise asset management product, that allows us to get into the asset intensive industries. So, utilities, anything with large fleets, public sector munies that are managing infrastructure. So we made that commitment very narrowly so that we weren't trying to be too many things to too many people and we could really commit to them, make the investment that we needed to make. We obviously had a technology practice so we know how to do this work and the way I think about technology practices today is they're really there to transform businesses, right? We used to spend a lot of time making technology work. Technology works. Now we've got to make sure that our clients step back from what they do today, leverage the best practice in the technology, or the leading practice in the technology, and transform their business around it. That's how we've approached the relationship with Infor. >> Well that's interesting because we heard Charles' keynote day one, and he talked on theCUBE about the disparity between the number of jobs that are out there and the number of candidates that are qualified, so there's a disparity there and then he showed productivity numbers and I remember back in, I don't know what it was, 80's or 90's, whatever it was, before the PC kicked in. >> Mm-hmm. >> In a big way, in terms of productivity impact. The spending was going through the roof, but you couldn't see it in the productivity and you're sort of seeing the same thing today. The tech market's booming, but the productivity numbers are relatively flat, so the promise is that, okay, we're going to have efficiencies out of cloud, you know, all this data that we've been collecting for all this time applying machine intelligence is going to drive, we've predicted, productivity. >> Right >> The next sort of big wave. It's kind of your job to make that all happen. >> Yeah, and so, I'm guilty. I've been in this industry a long time. I've seen the waves from the Y2K to the ERPs, to when we went to distributed internet, so I've seen all that. Absolutely agree, the productivity gains haven't been there but I would say that foundation is now laid. If you think about what we did during that time frame, we got our clients onto fairly common platform, somewhat consistent practices, right? They did a lot of custom work still, but we also cleaned up a lot of data, but what we did at that point, is we did it in silos. And enterprises don't run in silos. They have to run at the enterprise level. We've got the foundation laid now, we're now to the next generation. The next generation says your basic transaction processing systems? Use 'em as they come. Let's look at what's available to us. Let's look at the partner ecosystem that's out there. Let's look at the connectivity that's out there. Let's look at how we can better engage our client base and better run our operations and that's where I think we're going to start to see the productivity and that's what Infor is doing with their last mile functionality, they're taking the need to spin any customization away from the client, they're givin' it to 'em but they're letting us think about how to transform the business and drive value. >> You talked about utilities, which is a unique animal unto itself, right? From the regulatory environment, from their various services, what they provide and the scale they provide it at? Where can Infor come in and play in that space in terms of people being receptive to new ideas, being receptive to new mousetraps when, you know, sometimes they're bound too. >> Right. >> By what they can and can't do. >> Right, that's a good question. So utilities an interesting industry, right? Everybody says utilities are behind, they are slow to adapt. But if you think about the utility and fundamentally what they do, they're one of the most complex advanced engineering businesses that you can find in the world, right? From the generation to the distribution of power is a highly complex activity that they do extremely well. So they've made a ton of investment to make sure they keep doing that extremely well, deliver power safely. We got to renew the infrastructure so they got to spend money there and that's where we see Infor coming in. If you think about what's out there right now, all the sensors that we can put in to the generation facilities, all the devices that we can use. We can use drones to look at the solar farms, figure out where the maintenance needs to be done. I think what you're going to see is Infor product being adapted into how they operate the business. Analytics being applied to how they manage their maintenance facility, which is critical in utility. Analytics being brought in to how they prepare for storms. If you think about the recovery, what we just went through in the south. You know, 800,000 people out? Relatively quick recovery there. Now it's painful, and everybody's not back, I'm not saying it's easy but the utilities down there used a lot of information to better position crews for recovery. I think that's how you're going to see it on the operational side. On the customer side, you're going to see utilities do more and more what everybody else is doing. How do you want to interact with me? When do you want to interact with me? Where do you want to interact with me? Utilities will start putting all that out there and they are putting it out there. The websites are good, they're starting to go to mobility. So I think Infor products will play across that entire space. >> You're right about the utilities, I mean the instrumentation of the homes through smart meters, I mean what a transformation in the last 10 years? Five to 10 years, even. >> Yep. >> And it's all about the data. It always come back to data. (laughing) Healthcare and public sector, utilities as well, highly regulated industries. >> Yes. >> That you chose. By design, I presume. >> Yes. >> Talk about that in terms of Grant Thornton's wheelhouse. >> Yeah, we chose healthcare and public sector because we have good existing practices. Specific in healthcare space, we were doing a lot of epic cerner work, which is their ERM systems >> Yeah. >> That are out there. Lawson is by far the leading product in their ERP back office. So it made a natural fit for us to jump into that. Grant Thornton also has a very large public sector practice, both at the federal and state local level, so again, it gave us an avenue to get in, bring Infor into some of our existing clients. But back to your point about being regulated environments, Grant Thornton is basically a public accounting firm so we're used to dealing in regulatory environment, that's part of our culture. Quality is what we focus on as a firm. We understand how to interact with the regulators. Personally, I think, things are moving so quickly that the regulators, in some cases, are still catching up. But the one piece of advice I would have to all of clients out there that operate in the regulated world, rely on your partners. Rely on your software provider, your internal audit, your external audit, your systems integrator to help you keep current with the regulatory changes. On the tail of that is all the exposure on the cyber side. If you think about what's going on, you've mentioned in home devices, smart meters, those are all access points so we've got to really harden the access and the infrastructure to make sure that people aren't using those to gain control of these systems. >> Yeah the threat matrix is expanding. >> The matrix is huge. >> And then, you know, securing the data. (laughing) Security, in many ways, is do over, right? (laughing) In this new world. >> And just looking forward, and briefly if you will, before we let you go? >> Yep. >> Where do you see the relationship going then? Because you've established your verticals, you know where you're working, you know what's going on. What's next step then? Because there's always something else down the road, right? >> Yeah, so in our industry, we've got some terrific competitors out there who have also engaged with Infor. There's some other products out there. So I think what we need to focus on now, we've got the relationship, Infor is an incredible company, they're incredibly collaborative. They're agile. We recently were working with a healthcare provider who was dealing with some of the personnel issues you were talking about, resource shortages. How do I optimize scheduling? Who do I need? Where do I need 'em? Infor was all over it. They brought in their chief nursing officer, she helped us think through how to better manage that, used their workforce management product. So, where we want to go with them is we want to innovate with them. We want to bring the innovation that we're applying, whether it's robotics in terms of bots, whether it's digital transformation which are all buzzwords, and leverage all that. But the other thing I think we're starting to really get our arms around is the broader ecosystem. They're all cloud enabled. There are a significant number of niche players out there that can bring us point solutions. You know, you mentioned the data? The data's the key to all that so we want to help them understand, architect that. Use the technology to solve our client's business problems. >> And you know these buzzwords are actually, there's substance behind them. I mean, every company is trying to get digital, right? >> Yes. >> Every company has, or should have, a digital strategy, is tying to figure out and seize pathways to, maybe not monetizing data directly but figuring out how data contributes to monetization. Software robots are real. They work. >> Right. >> Not perfect, chat bots aren't perfect but they're getting better, and better and better. You look at things like fraud detection, how far that's come just in the last five or six years? You pointed out earlier, Chris, the technology is there, it works. It's not a mystery anymore, right? I've been around a long time, too And technology used to be so mysterious and nobody knew how it worked. The Wall Street analysts, it was like, how's this tech work? Today, it's ubiquitous. >> Yes, agree, absolutely. >> It's the process, it's the people, it's the collaboration, that's the hard part. >> Yeah, I mean you said it earlier, it's getting businesses to adopt what they do, right? To really focus on where they can add value and get the people to come along. >> Chris, thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Appreciate the time. >> Sure. >> And enjoy the rest of the show and again, we do thank you for the time here today. >> Okay, take care. >> Good deal, alright. Back with more here, you're watching theCUBE from Washington D.C. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, welcome to the nation's capital, a rain soaked Washington DC. We're here for Inforum 18, Dave Vellante, John Walls We're in the Walter Washington Convention Center. The fourth time, theCUBE has been at an Infor show and getting bigger and better than ever, David. >> That's right John. This is, let's see, the first one was in New Orleans several years ago. Then Infor skipped a year, and then did Javits couple years in a row. That's sort of the headquarters of where Infor is, very close to the Javits Center. And Charles Phillips, of course, lives in New York City. And this year they decided to come to the nation's capital. I mean, Infor is an interesting company. About $3billion in revenue, essentially it is a private equity roll up. From Golden Gate and others, that really the roots of it are in Lawson Softwares. Some of you may remember Lawson Softwares, the enterprise software company. And then Charles Phillips came on, and of course he was the architect of Oracle's M and A. Probably spent $30 plus billion for Larry Ellison, remaking Oracle. Completely transforming Oracle, brought some of that expertise to Infor in this private equity play, this roll up. And then bought many, many software companies, rolled them up together and really started to compete, using a different model. So, Infor's sort of expertise, if you will is around so called Micro verticals, so they cover a lot of different industries, hospitality industries, they got also manufacturing, ERP, >> Retail financial >> Retail financial, health care, and then they also have horizontal applications like Human Capital management. Their differentiation, is several fold. One major point is they go after what they call the last mile. So they call this micro verticals. So the last mile functionality that would normally have to be customized, Infor does that work for you. Now, the advantage of that is two fold. One is you don't have to do a bunch of custom mods all that hard work is done. The second is, another part of the differentiation is cloud. So they chose, several years ago to go with AWS cloud to put their SaaS on the cloud. Charles Phillips said 'hey when we were an on-prem software company, we didn't manage our own servers for our customers. Or manage customer servers, we didn't do that. So why would we do it in the cloud? We don't want to compete with Google and Microsoft and Amazon in terms of scale, so were going to put our software on the Amazon cloud.' So that's another point of differentiation, the reason that is so important in the context of custom mods, is if you're rolling out new upgrades on a periodic basis, and you hear this a lot from Servicenow customers, for example another cloud software company. You can't do custom mods and then take advantage of the new releases. Because you're going to be way behind. Okay, so you have to have that hard work done so that you can avoid those custom modification. And that is something Infor has been very proud of. So as I say, $3billion company. Last year they took a $2billion investment from Koch industries. Now that investment, largely went to recapitalising the company, the private equity guys probably took some money off the table as did the four, what I call the four horsemen. They were the four, sort of new founders of Infor including Charles Phillips, Pam Murphey who is still there and then two others Duncan Angove and Stephan who have left the company, so they have got some succession planning now. We saw a different, two new faces up on stage Soma and we're going to have some other folks on that we'll introduce you to. But so, now we're entering a new phase and it's the phase of what Charles Phillip's coined 'Human Potentials'. So big focus this year on human capital management, we heard that. Big focus on AI, they talked a lot about robotic process automation. I just had a meeting, last night at the airport in DCA with the head of marketing at an RPA company, UiPath, they are smoking hot, they just raised 225 million they have gone from 2 million to 200 million over night. And that space is exploding, it was interesting to hear Charles Phillips talk a lot today about Robotic process automation, RPA. Which is essentially software >> Break that down for me. >> So RPA is software robots and software robots are used to automate mundane tasks. Having machines do very specific tasks and you are seeing this a lot in financial services and a lot of back office automation. It's not physical robots moving around, it's basically software based processes that machines can do. Repetitive processes, that machines can do better. Machines don't get tired, so they can do these repetitive tasks, take that away those mundane tasks away from humans. You heard a lot of conversation about that today. You also heard a little competitive fire. So Oracle is now taking ads out against Infor, we've seen that. All the cabs here, many of the cabs have Oracle branding on them. So Oracle is paying attention to Infor. >> And they're right down the road here too, by the way. You know, I mean, Western Virginia not far so this is their backyard. >> Well congratulations Infor, Oracle is paying attention to you that means, must mean you're hurting them We've seen this before with others, I mean we certainly saw it, you know in past days with IBM, we see it extensively with Workday. We've seen some kind of, tit for tat with SalesForce, even though SalesForce is one of Oracles largest customers. So that's been kind of fun, fun to watch. And now Infor, so Infor clearly is doing some damage, to the traditional guys. Oracle, SAP, Workday maybe not so much Workday is growing like crazy, but Infor claims it is growing SaaS revenue 50% faster than Oracle's SaaS revenue. It's growing double the rate of SAP, and growing as fast almost as Workday, is kind of what it claims. And so, this whole enterprise resource planning, HCM, vertical market software, horizontal software the market is always been hot. It's a huge, huge market. Many, many, tens of billions, it's probably a hundred billion dollar TAM. And the big, big whales are of course Oracle and SAP, and then of course, SalesForce and you've seen the emergence of companies like ServiceNow which has quite a bit of different strategy but with Oracle, with Infor's sort of Oracle heritage a lot of people in the company came from Oracle so they know where the skeletons are buried they know how to compete, they have relationships with the customers. And they're offering some differentiation, as they say with those Micro verticals, the last mile, and the pure cloud model. Now, if you look at the income statement you'll see the SaaS portion of the business only represents about 25% of the revenues but remember, that's a ratable model. So you're only recognizing revenue as you're, as the months go on, so you're billing sort of monthly if you will, or recognizing monthly. And so, as a result that skews and dampens the effects of the SaaS software, I think from a booking stand point is probably much higher, proportion of bookings I would guess closer to 50% as they said they took $2billion last year from Koch industries. That $2billion dollars didn't really hit the balance sheets, they get about $330million on the balance sheet. And they've a lot of debt, because they you know did you know, it was a private equity you know leverage deal. They did a lot of acquisitions, so they've probably got about $5.7billions of what they call net debt, which presumably is debt after cash. So I would guess close to $6billion in debt. They're a quasi, they're not a public company they're a private company, but they act in many ways like a public company, I would suspect within the next couple of years here, if this kind of growth continues that you'll see an IPO, from Infor. Although, presumably Koch industries, we heard Koch on stage today, they said they've made $15billion in investments in technology companies. $2billion, this has to be one of their largest. And, but that's patient capital. They get the benefit of the cash flow, they can probably take dividends if they want to do that. And if they're smart, and they invest and they can take market share from Oracle and SAP and others, and gain share in the market space, they can do an IPO. They're revenues are $3billion, their valuation, they implied a valuation based on the Koch industries investment is $15billion. So if they can take that $15billion to $30billion 20 to 30 billion, there's going to be a nice return. >> You know I thought, what's interesting about Koch too they talked about this, it's certainly as you talked about 2billion right. They put the money in, but they're also, it's a symbiotic relationship, in that that Koch is using it's organization as a test lab. For a lot of products and services, that Infor is producing. And allowing them to refine that under the Koch umbrella before they take it out to the market place. So that's pretty true, I feel like seems to makes sense. You have a company that has 60,000 world wide employees, you're in dozens of countries, you've a chance to let them take their products to scale, in maybe a somewhat more friendlier, controlled environment before you take it out to the marketplace. That seems to make a lot of sense. >> Yeah, we heard the CIO of Koch industries today and I talked to him last year, and we were talking about some of the technical debt that they had, again going back to those custom modifications that I was talking about earlier. They were in this terrible virtuous cycle almost a negative virtuous cycle where they had so many custom mods that they couldn't make changes. So the applications were becoming voxalised, so they were becoming non competitive and that is the last thing that a line of business wants to hear, is 'hey we can't make the changes, right IT says no, we can't touch the code, it's working or changes take too long. They take months or sometimes years, to get to a major release and so as a result Koch was looking for ways to simplify its application portfolio and its application infrastructure. The other thing that Koch industries has brought is, you might notice on the show floor here, you see Accenture, you see Deloitte, you're seeing Grant Thornton, now these guys weren't really going after, or going hard after the Infor base before. I think, a company like Koch industries does a lot of business with these SIs and so I think Koch has introduced the SIs to the Infor opportunity and maybe nudged them a little bit and say 'hey as a big you know supplier to us, we're a big customer of yours we want you to pay attention to that opportunity and in earnest go look at ways to partner with Infor. And that's happened, my intelligence suggests there are many multi million dollar deals that are being capitalized by these big SIs and they do a ton of business with SAP and Oracle. So that's another positive in the tail wind that Koch industries, I think it's brought to the table. >> Alright, you mention human potential which is the real overarching theme of the show here this week. Again, we're here in Washington DC. I was just listening to Van Jones from CNN. One of their anchors and political contributor talking about that as his personal mantra but certainly that intersects with what Infor is talking about in terms of unlocking human potential and using technology to do that. Share a little light from Charles Phillip's perspective the key note address that he gave, in terms of how do they view human potential and unlocking it with the use of their services? >> Well we're going to have Charles Phillip's on so we'll certainly ask him that but Charles Phillip's is a guy with a lot of potential. And that he is realizing that potential >> Lot of track record too >> Exactly, this is an individual with a military background, he became I don't know if you know the story but he became a highly successful Wall Street analyst. He wrote the seminal piece in the 90s that said the software industry, is too many software players and is going to consolidate. Larry Ellison, prior to reading that used to denigrate competitors for writing cheques not code. Meaning, his competitors were acquiring companies instead of innovating. Well then, he went on a spending spree probably 30, 35 million dollars in acquisitions orchestrated by Charles Phillips. And they totally remade Oracle starting with a soft hostile takeover. And then now you see Oracle, obviously this Saas powerhouse with many many companies that were bought in. Charles Phillips left Oracle, became the CEO of Infor and we heard today, architected an entirely new strategy with a stack, they call this thing the Stack. I'll just go through this briefly, I wrote about it last year, in the WikiBon blog. They've got the Infor platform, the Infor OS and then it goes all the way up to AI, the last mile software, the cloud. They have this thing called GT nexus, which is a supply chain network and that where their IoT play fits. Then they bought a company last year called Birst, to do BI and analytics, and then on top of that is Coleman. So they've got this stack that they are basically infusing into their applications, and I will answer your question. Essentially what they want to do is, use automation and artificial intelligence to essentially coach people, worker, as they're doing their jobs. So we heard today, that there are more openings than there are unemployed >> Employees, yeah. >> And productivity is going down. So Infor, Charles Phillips wants to attack that problem through software and automation. How do you do that? Well, if you could use artificial intelligence to monitor people's KPIs, they didn't use those terms but that is essentially what they are doing. And then provide feedback on outcomes, 'hey you could have done it differently. You could have done it more quickly. The outcome could have been better if.' Also, analyzing other factors like the relationship for example, using data to analyze the relationship between say tenure or were you recently promoted or turn over on the productivity of for instance stores, retail stores for example. And so, you're seeing an infusion of AI and software and automation in to the entire application portfolio to unlock the human potential. That's one part of it, the other part of it is Charles Phillips is big on diversity, big on women in business, and so that's another angle that I am sure we are going to hear more about this week. >> I thought it was interesting too any time a show comes to Washington there is a reason. And it's generally federal sector based, policy based. There's a regulatory undertone of some kind. And it was addressed somewhat on the key note stage here this morning. But the idea, the notion was that federal regulation and federal mandates, whatever, can't keep up the pace. They just can't, and it really is up to the tech sector because it works on a much different time frame, right? I mean, changes are made by the minute, whereas policy gets shaped by the year. You know, up on the hill here, not far about 3 miles 2 miles from here. So, the tech sector's responsibility in that regard in terms of being more diverse, of having more inclusivity, of looking at environmental considerations. All these things, and of unleashing human potential. And not at making a government do that. Not letting a regulation do that. That certainly plays in the Infor's thinking as well, I would think? >> Yes, so first of all we were down here at the AWS public sector event in June. And there were ten thousand people here. So AWS has a huge presence here. Infor and AWS are big time partners. And remember the CIA was the first deal, the first cloud deal, that AWS did, they won. IBM contested it, the judge eviscerated IBM in his ruling. Basically saying they were gaming the system. They were purposely misinterpreting the RFP. Amazon won hands down, it was a huge victory for Amazon. Forced IBM to go out and capitulate and purchase Softlayer for $2billion. I believe that only helps a company like Infor who has decided to be all public cloud, with AWS and drafting off AWS' deep ties to various government agencies, in the GovCloud. So for instance, AWS was first with fedramp. First with a lot of different certifications and security hurdles. And so Infor can just draft off of that. The CIA, again a big account, we heard the CIA talk in June about how security on the worst day of cloud is better than its client server applications on their best day. And so, I suspect Infor is doing business with the CIA although that's not come out publicly. But I would think that there is an advantage Infor has because of that AWS relationship. And that makes DC all the much more important for them. Well, we are at Inforum 18, we have a full 2 days of scheduling for you. Great guest coming up here on theCUBE. I am with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls We'll continue here on theCUBE live from DC right after this break.

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City It's theCube covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Ballante. We're joined by Mike Rodgers. He is the CSIO of Pilot Flying J. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Pilot Flying J and your relationship with Inforum. >> So Pilot Flying J is a travel center. We cater to basically over the road truckers and we do have a big gas business too. We operate about 700 locations. Most of them are owned fully by Pilot Flying J. Some of them are dealers where they have a relationship with us. They're in our network but we don't know them. So we run the majority of the locations and we own about 40% of the overall road diesel market. >> Rebecca: In the US and Canada? >> In the US and Canada. >> Okay and talk about your relationship with Inforum. >> So our relationship with Inforum really goes back to Lawson. I've been with the company for about two years. We run Lawson. David Clo-thy will tell you probably 25 years. The company has very rapidly. Started off as a small little Tennessee company. Well now it's a rather large company and we felt we knew we had to make a change relative to our human capital management and our financial systems is because we basically outgrew it. And we like to write a lot of things so we wrote a lot of applications out of our desperate sylo. And of course it's a lot of technical debt that goes along with them. So when I start with the company. We started on valuation process and picked for as the partner to replace all of our financial systems, and all of our human capital management systems. >> And so you migrating from traditional legacy lawson to the cloud suite. >> Pretty much, I would characterize it as a migration but we had very little in the vein of human capital management. And what we did have, we wrote ourselves. For example, we wrote our own applicant tracking system, which we'll of course have to integrate into lawson. So we have an integration layer that we have to support there and that's just one. There was a slide put up this morning that showed that we're going to eliminate 26 systems that we either bought as the best of breed type of application or we wrote ourselves. >> So how painful is that? Is that why you-- >> It's extremely painful. >> They brought you in for this task and you obviously knew this coming in or just-- >> Oh I knew this coming in. >> Dave: No surprise. >> No surprise and by the way, pilot is no different than a lot of other retailers in other companies out there. We've got a lot of technical there and I will tell you the more I see about Inforum. The more I think we made the right decision. I really like the cloud strategy. I'd like the integration associated with all the different functions specifically within the HCM suite. It's not a roll up like some of the other guys have rolled up. They bought but whether it's PeopleSoft or whatever and they many talk about it being integrated, bit it's not as integrated as the Inforum suite. >> So if I may, sorry. We want to stay on the migrations for a second because it's non-trivial and people. The conundrum of migrations is nobody wants to do them because it's just such a heavy lift. But the longer you wait, the more technical debt you accrue. >> I use to say you have to get off the treadmill. You have to stop and say we're not going to keep digging ourself in this ditch and it's going to be painful. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be disruptive and I use to say the (indistinct speaking) usually get fired. That really is, I might say that laughingly but-- >> Dave: You got a got attitude about-- >> It's hard, okay. It's a hard thing not just for the IT guys. It's a hard thing for the organization with respect to change management. >> So incredible amount of planning obviously. You knew your freezing code. >> Pretty much because why would we continue to develop something. I wouldn't say we were 100% frozen. Things come out especially in HR where there's a regulation thing. >> Dave: Compliance, right. >> Right compliance and you got to do it so we got pretty good at saying we're not going to, we're going to wait for Inforum. And we've got a lot of it implemented. We're continuing. We got a nice plan. An iterative plan, we're not trying to blow the ocean and convert everything all at once. Very good engagement from the business. We have a lot of business partners here with us. Like the IT representation at this conference. It's the smallest compared to the business. >> So I would think a key there though is because when you freeze code. It slows your business down, but then when you actually go to the new platform. You want to be able to move faster and leap frog your competition. >> I would argue that really, because we really didn't have much. It really hasn't slow much down. Where we had to do something from a compliance perspective, we've done it. But it hasn't really slowed us down. The leap frog that we're going to do when we implement the whole cloud suite is going to be enormous. >> Sorry about. >> I wanted you to step back a little bit and tell our viewers about some of the specific HCM challenges you have and what you, talk about the pain, I guess is what I want you to describe. >> We run travel service. We're open 365 days a year, 24/7. They never close. They're all on food operations. >> Rebecca: Of the three quick services food operations. >> It could be up to three. If we don't have three in every stores someone said that. We may have one in every store plus a deli operation that we run ourselves and we actually create the food. Whether it's pizza, meatloaf whatever the truck drivers really want with respect to our food offering. They want something different, more variety. So yeah, it's a very complex business. It's hard and we're very spread out throughout the country. We're not necessarily in a big cities like New York. you're not going to see a pilot in New York City. You're going to see a pilot or a flying J on major interstates throughout the country. So there were spread out. So connecting with our team members has been a challenge for us. And our owner Jimmy Haslam will tell you that we probably have not any give himself a vibe. And we are connecting with the team member so we're doing a lot to facilitate that connection. We'd actually partner with the Disney Institute to help us with that. And we've actually called Inforum for project connect. So it's going to provide that connection platform to those team members that are spread throughout the country and Canada for that matter. That we don't get to see that very often, if ever. >> We're hearing a lot at the keynote retail has been highlighted a lot and Pilot J is a form of retail in that sense. And talking about how important it is for the customer experience. The trucker themselves who come in to apply at Pilot Flying J. >> Our strategy is focused on making it a great place to work. In other words, doing the right things for our team member and the investment at Inforum is really going to provide that platform. The other part is making it a great place to shop, and we want our customer to come back. Okay we sell a commodity, let's face it. We sell diesel. You can buy it down the road. We want the experience when they come into our store. We want to take care of our guest like nobody else takes care of them. We got a truck driver. There was an article written in New York Times but you don't throw away people. These guys, you got it, you're wearing it. Your tie, your shirt, whatever came on a truck, and these guys, they're great people. I've talked to a million of them. We want to be the place where they come that feels like home and we want to make a better day for the truck or the driver. It's a tough job. They work hard. They're waking their families. When they come into a pilot. It should feel like somewhat of an oasis. >> Right so, it's super clean I understand. >> Yeah, we try to make them clean. Remember If you're a truck driver and you're away for week's on end. You're going to shower at our locations and so the showers are cleaned and maintained after every shower. Nobody gets in a dirty shower. The rest it's challenging. We have 3000 people come through our doors every day at every location so it's challenging to keep the rest rooms in particular clean. But the showers are cleaned before anybody gets in them. >> And you own the real estate or you lease it? >> We own. >> Dave: Really. >> I'm sure we lease some of this. I've got a question for Dave. We own most of our-- >> But your in the real estate business too. >> Oh yeah. We're definitely in the real estate business. >> What about the data? How is the way in which you use data evolving? >> It's evolving very rapidly and we are a data rich company especially with respect to the professional driver which is the majority of our profitable business. They scan their loyalty card whenever they come. We have a 92% swipe rate and that's because they use those points to buy food, buy showers. >> Rebecca: They're rewarded. >> They're rewarded and it's lucrative to them. They're managing a business so they use that as currency. So that data provides us with the ability to solve. We needed utility along the customer journey. For example, we may know when a guy needs a shower and we may have a fuel buying advantage at a certain location. Offer them a free shower if he fuels at location X because it's beneficial for him and us. Okay we're going to give him a free shower or a free slice of pizza if we feel we have an advantage with respect to purchasing petroleum. >> You're building loyalty. >> Right and builds loyalty so that's on the customer side. >> Rebecca: That's the nudge they need to walk in-- >> To be able to use our digital platforms, our digital properties to take the data and drive behavior, and loyalty. It's really about loyalty. We want to give good things to our loyal customers, take good care of them and solve the problems they have. 'Cause they'll come back. And Jimmy says we want them to come back. He says it and we do things that are going to solve the problem they have. They're going to come back because it's the least friction. >> Are you using data for the logistics in any way, for these truckers in other ways? >> Yeah, that's not Inforum, however well for the truckers. We're using logistics with respect to how we procure petroleum. And I'm probably not going to get into a lot of that because we feel it's a competitive thing there with respect to how we do it. And we are investing a good bit of money into how we procure and manage how we distribute petroleum to our various locations. >> That's a data lever. You got advantage better than-- >> That's where a lot of data reach and we can use data very effectively. >> So data literally is oil. We had a guest on. >> Well data is abundant insights aren't necessarily so that's where you're making money. You've mentioned before Mike that you said you are more confident after you go through this migration, but Inforum was the right decision. What gives you that confidence? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah, it's a couple of things. Number one, and we talked about the technical debt right. So lifting everything to the cloud give me a unique opportunity to eliminate the technical debt 'cause we're not going to write it. We're going to stay current on the latest release of the software. Whereas if you looked around here, everybody will tell you they're behind releases, releases, releases on enterprise software that they've purchased from somebody else that's not in the cloud. So number one elimination of technical debt and staying current on the existing platforms. You really can't customize it. You can customize it within the tool so with the customization or configuration or extensibility carries along as they operate the software. That's the biggest events and I think being in the cloud. I was showing some data to my boss the other day regarding how our infrastructure investment has gone up. Really been able to manage the actual investment with the number of servers, VMware and all that we're running has grown exponentially. That's 'cause we hadn't retire anything. We're going to, with Inforum we're retire 26 platforms. They're going away. They'll be out of the infrastructure and it will be in the cloud. I don't have to manage anymore. >> You're getting rid of stuff, wow. >> Mike: Getting rid of it. >> GRS recall, that never happens in IT. >> I took personal responsibility for the decommissioning aspect of the project. >> I'm going to ask you another IT question is that latest release because you're in the cloud and you're multi-tenet, you have to go essentially into the next release. Does that create down stream problems for you. How do you plan for that? >> Well we're new into it, okay. We're working with Inforum on that and it's perfect now but they get it. We got to be careful when we make the release so we can be prepared for it. So far there have been upgrades and it's been nerve racking. A new release of code that we hadn't really tested or whatever but I think we'll get that route resolved. I said it's new, we got to become efficient in how that happens. We need a little bit of prior notice. >> Dave: Forced agile. >> Yeah, forced agile. Here it comes. (laughing) >> There's a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence here at Inforum. Where would you say Pilot Flying J is with regard to using artificial intelligence as part of your workforce. Giving your workers access to it and also more tools to make the right decision at the right time. >> I think it's at the stage now where it's really cool and it's somewhat of a buzz thing. AI when machine learning. I think it's going to be very relevant and probably not the too distant future. It's not on my immediate road map to worry about artificial intelligence. We thought about doing a project with IBM on fuel procurement and pricing with Lawson. It's just really not quite ready yet. What we can develop is deep insights with the data we have to make better decisions, and put power in the hands of our pricing team or our logistics team to make really good decisions. I think that's for us. Let's get that perfected and then we talked about the voice recognition that we heard yesterday. That I think is imminent and I think it's important for us and it's going to be on our road map because as a truck driver. I'm driving and if I can have the ability to ask questions of our app and purvey information back to that driver, without him having to touch his phone. There's a value of that. Most that has to be architected through the right type of data. How we structure our data to be able to access via natural speech but it is something that is on our road map. >> How large is your IT organization? Roughly. >> In number of people? >> Dave: Yeah. We have about 250 people in our IT organization but we do have a significant use of partners. >> And they're distributed or? >> No, they're in Tennessee. And for the notes popping now we use offshore resources with certain integration partners. We have a couple primary integration partners that we're using. >> So reason I'm asking so as you move to this cloud sass platform. How are you thinking about protecting your data and is it changing. >> It's a good question. And all of a sudden, for awhile there I think we do a great as securing it. We invested a significant amount of money protecting our data. I think I'd be naive to say that we could do a better job than Amazon web services. >> Dave: I would agree, no offense. >> And I think one of the gentleman was speaking yesterday said the same thing. And one of my guys looked at me says that's what we've been saying. I think there's always a risk. Security is a big deal especially with what's happened with one-acry and the subsequent problem. There's going to be more. I think that Amazon could be on top of it. I think together we can do a good job on security. It doesn't worry me anymore than it worries me everyday with respect to my own infrastructure. And it does worry me just not anymore. >> Great, well Mike, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a really enlightening conversation. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Ballante. We'll have more from Inforum in a little bit. (uptempo piano music)