>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent conversations with IT decision makers show a stark contrast between exiting 2023 versus the mindset when we were leaving 2022. CIOs are generally funding new initiatives by pushing off or cutting lower priority items, while security efforts are still being funded. Those that enable business initiatives that generate revenue or taking priority over cleaning up legacy technical debt. The bottom line is, for the moment, at least, the mindset is not cut everything, rather, it's put a pause on cleaning up legacy hairballs and fund monetization. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we tap recent discussions from two primary sources, year-end ETR roundtables with IT decision makers, and CUBE conversations with data, cloud, and IT architecture practitioners. The sources of data for this breaking analysis come from the following areas. Eric Bradley's recent ETR year end panel featured a financial services DevOps and SRE manager, a CSO in a large hospitality firm, a director of IT for a big tech company, the head of IT infrastructure for a financial firm, and a CTO for global travel enterprise, and for our upcoming Supercloud2 conference on January 17th, which you can register free by the way, at supercloud.world, we've had CUBE conversations with data and cloud practitioners, specifically, heads of data in retail and financial services, a cloud architect and a biotech firm, the director of cloud and data at a large media firm, and the director of engineering at a financial services company. Now we've curated commentary from these sources and now we share them with you today as anecdotal evidence supporting what we've been reporting on in the marketplace for these last couple of quarters. On this program, we've likened the economy to the slingshot effect when you're driving, when you're cruising along at full speed on the highway, and suddenly you see red brake lights up ahead, so, you tap your own brakes and then you speed up again, and traffic is moving along at full speed, so, you think nothing of it, and then, all of a sudden, the same thing happens. You slow down to a crawl and you start wondering, "What the heck is happening?" And you become a lot more cautious about the rate of acceleration when you start moving again. Well, that's the trend in IT spend right now. Back in June, we reported that despite the macro headwinds, CIOs were still expecting 6% to 7% spending growth for 2022. Now that was down from 8%, which we reported at the beginning of 2022. That was before Ukraine, and Fed tightening, but given those two factors, you know that that seemed pretty robust, but throughout the fall, we began reporting consistently declining expectations where CIOs are now saying Q4 will come in at around 3% growth relative to last year, and they're expecting, or should we say hoping that it pops back up in 2023 to 4% to 5%. The recent ETR panelists, when they heard this, are saying based on their businesses and discussions with their peers, they could see low single digit growth for 2023, so, 1%, 2%, 3%, so, this sort of slingshotting, or sometimes we call it a seesaw economy, has caught everyone off guard. Amazon is a good example of this, and there are others, but Amazon entered the pandemic with around 800,000 employees. It doubled that workforce during the pandemic. Now, right before Thanksgiving in 2022, Amazon announced that it was laying off 10,000 employees, and, Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, just last week announced that number is now going to grow to 18,000. Now look, this is a rounding error at Amazon from a headcount standpoint and their headcount remains far above 2019 levels. Its stock price, however, does not and it's back down to 2019 levels. The point is that visibility is very poor right now and it's reflected in that uncertainty. We've seen a lot of layoffs, obviously, the stock market's choppy, et cetera. Now importantly, not everything is on hold, and this downturn is different from previous tech pullbacks in that the speed at which new initiatives can be rolled out is much greater thanks to the cloud, and if you can show a fast return, you're going to get funding. Organizations are pausing on the cleanup of technical debt, unless it's driving fast business value. They're holding off on modernization projects. Those business enablement initiatives are still getting funded. CIOs are finding the money by consolidating redundant vendors, and they're stealing from other pockets of budget, so, it's not surprising that cybersecurity remains the number one technology priority in 2023. We've been reporting that for quite some time now. It's specifically cloud, cloud native security container and API security. That's where all the action is, because there's still holes to plug from that forced march to digital that occurred during COVID. Cloud migration, kind of showing here on number two on this chart, still a high priority, while optimizing cloud spend is definitely a strategy that organizations are taking to cut costs. It's behind consolidating redundant vendors by a long shot. There's very little evidence that cloud repatriation, i.e., moving workloads back on prem is a major cost cutting trend. The data just doesn't show it. What is a trend is getting more real time with analytics, so, companies can do faster and more accurate customer targeting, and they're really prioritizing that, obviously, in this down economy. Real time, we sometimes lose it, what's real time? Real time, we sometimes define as before you lose the customer. Now in the hiring front, customers tell us they're still having a hard time finding qualified site reliability engineers, SREs, Kubernetes expertise, and deep analytics pros. These job markets remain very tight. Let's stay with security for just a moment. We said many times that, prior to COVID, zero trust was this undefined buzzword, and the joke, of course, is, if you ask three people, "What is zero trust?" You're going to get three different answers, but the truth is that virtually every security company that was resisting taking a position on zero trust in an attempt to avoid... They didn't want to get caught up in the buzzword vortex, but they're now really being forced to go there by CISOs, so, there are some good quotes here on cyber that we want to share that came out of the recent conversations that we cited up front. The first one, "Zero trust is the highest ROI, because it enables business transformation." In other words, if I can have good security, I can move fast, it's not a blocker anymore. Second quote here, "ZTA," zero trust architecture, "Is more than securing the perimeter. It encompasses strong authentication and multiple identity layers. It requires taking a software approach to security instead of a hardware focus." The next one, "I'd love to have a security data lake that I could apply to asset management, vulnerability management, incident management, incident response, and all aspects for my security team. I see huge promise in that space," and the last one, I see NLP, natural language processing, as the foundation for email security, so, instead of searching for IP addresses, you can now read emails at light speed and identify phishing threats, so, look at, this is a small snapshot of the mindset around security, but I'll add, when you talk to the likes of CrowdStrike, and Zscaler, and Okta, and Palo Alto Networks, and many other security firms, they're listening to these narratives around zero trust. I'm confident they're working hard on skating to this puck, if you will. A good example is this idea of a security data lake and using analytics to improve security. We're hearing a lot about that. We're hearing architectures, there's acquisitions in that regard, and so, that's becoming real, and there are many other examples, because data is at the heart of digital business. This is the next area that we want to talk about. It's obvious that data, as a topic, gets a lot of mind share amongst practitioners, but getting data right is still really hard. It's a challenge for most organizations to get ROI and expected return out of data. Most companies still put data at the periphery of their businesses. It's not at the core. Data lives within silos or different business units, different clouds, it's on-prem, and increasingly it's at the edge, and it seems like the problem is getting worse before it gets better, so, here are some instructive comments from our recent conversations. The first one, "We're publishing events onto Kafka, having those events be processed by Dataproc." Dataproc is a Google managed service to run Hadoop, and Spark, and Flank, and Presto, and a bunch of other open source tools. We're putting them into the appropriate storage models within Google, and then normalize the data into BigQuery, and only then can you take advantage of tools like ThoughtSpot, so, here's a company like ThoughtSpot, and they're all about simplifying data, democratizing data, but to get there, you have to go through some pretty complex processes, so, this is a good example. All right, another comment. "In order to use Google's AI tools, we have to put the data into BigQuery. They haven't integrated in the way AWS and Snowflake have with SageMaker. Moving the data is too expensive, time consuming, and risky," so, I'll just say this, sharing data is a killer super cloud use case, and firms like Snowflake are on top of it, but it's still not pretty across clouds, and Google's posture seems to be, "We're going to let our database product competitiveness drive the strategy first, and the ecosystem is going to take a backseat." Now, in a way, I get it, owning the database is critical, and Google doesn't want to capitulate on that front. Look, BigQuery is really good and competitive, but you can't help but roll your eyes when a CEO stands up, and look, I'm not calling out Thomas Kurian, every CEO does this, and talks about how important their customers are, and they'll do whatever is right by the customer, so, look, I'm telling you, I'm rolling my eyes on that. Now let me also comment, AWS has figured this out. They're killing it in database. If you take Redshift for example, it's still growing, as is Aurora, really fast growing services and other data stores, but AWS realizes it can make more money in the long-term partnering with the Snowflakes and Databricks of the world, and other ecosystem vendors versus sub optimizing their relationships with partners and customers in order to sell more of their own homegrown tools. I get it. It's hard not to feature your own product. IBM chose OS/2 over Windows, and tried for years to popularize it. It failed. Lotus, go back way back to Lotus 1, 2, and 3, they refused to run on Windows when it first came out. They were running on DEC VAX. Many of you young people in the United States have never even heard of DEC VAX. IBM wanted to run every everything only in its cloud, the same with Oracle, originally. VMware, as you might recall, tried to build its own cloud, but, eventually, when the market speaks and reveals what seems to be obvious to analysts, years before, the vendors come around, they face reality, and they stop wasting money, fighting a losing battle. "The trend is your friend," as the saying goes. All right, last pull quote on data, "The hardest part is transformations, moving traditional Informatica, Teradata, or Oracle infrastructure to something more modern and real time, and that's why people still run apps in COBOL. In IT, we rarely get rid of stuff, rather we add on another coat of paint until the wood rots out or the roof is going to cave in. All right, the last key finding we want to highlight is going to bring us back to the cloud repatriation myth. Followers of this program know it's a real sore spot with us. We've heard the stories about repatriation, we've read the thoughtful articles from VCs on the subject, we've been whispered to by vendors that you should investigate this trend. It's really happening, but the data simply doesn't support it. Here's the question that was posed to these practitioners. If you had unlimited budget and the economy miraculously flipped, what initiatives would you tackle first? Where would you really lean into? The first answer, "I'd rip out legacy on-prem infrastructure and move to the cloud even faster," so, the thing here is, look, maybe renting infrastructure is more expensive than owning, maybe, but if I can optimize my rental with better utilization, turn off compute, use things like serverless, get on a steeper and higher performance over time, and lower cost Silicon curve with things like Graviton, tap best of breed tools in AI, and other areas that make my business more competitive. Move faster, fail faster, experiment more quickly, and cheaply, what's that worth? Even the most hard-o CFOs understand the business benefits far outweigh the possible added cost per gigabyte, and, again, I stress "possible." Okay, other interesting comments from practitioners. "I'd hire 50 more data engineers and accelerate our real-time data capabilities to better target customers." Real-time is becoming a thing. AI is being injected into data and apps to make faster decisions, perhaps, with less or even no human involvement. That's on the rise. Next quote, "I'd like to focus on resolving the concerns around cloud data compliance," so, again, despite the risks of data being spread out in different clouds, organizations realize cloud is a given, and they want to find ways to make it work better, not move away from it. The same thing in the next one, "I would automate the data analytics pipeline and focus on a safer way to share data across the states without moving it," and, finally, "The way I'm addressing complexity is to standardize on a single cloud." MonoCloud is actually a thing. We're hearing this more and more. Yes, my company has multiple clouds, but in my group, we've standardized on a single cloud to simplify things, and this is a somewhat dangerous trend, because it's creating even more silos and it's an opportunity that needs to be addressed, and that's why we've been talking so much about supercloud is a cross-cloud, unifying, architectural framework, or, perhaps, it's a platform. In fact, that's a question that we will be exploring later this month at Supercloud2 live from our Palo Alto Studios. Is supercloud an architecture or is it a platform? And in this program, we're featuring technologists, analysts, practitioners to explore the intersection between data and cloud and the future of cloud computing, so, you don't want to miss this opportunity. Go to supercloud.world. You can register for free and participate in the event directly. All right, thanks for listening. That's a wrap. I'd like to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages our podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media, and in our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some great editing. Thank you, all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you've got to do is search "breaking analysis podcasts." I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com where you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me, @Dante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. By all means, check out etr.ai. They get the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be doing our annual predictions post in a few weeks, once the data comes out from the January survey. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everybody, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music)

>> On January 17th, 2023 join theCUBE community for SuperCloud2 where we explore the intersection of cloud and data. One of our gold sponsors is ChaosSearch and I'm here with Ed Walsh, CEO of the company. Ed, why should people attend SuperCloud2? >> That's good question. Listen, Supercloud is a mega trend, just like you said, data and cloud, I would also add analytics to it and some companies but also some end user enterprise and some companies are using it for great, things you couldn't possibly do without this design principle. In fact, if you're doing anything around cloud, data analytics, you need to look at these things or you're not going to keep up with your data growth. >> Awesome. January 17th, go to SuperCloud.World and register. You don't want to miss the conversations with data mesh founders, Zhamak Dehghani, technologists like Bob Muglia and customers building super clouds like Wal-Mart. Don't miss it.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2. This is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics in the future of cloud and data. In this segment, we're going to look deeper into the life sciences business with Jesse Cugliotta, who leads the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry practice at Snowflake. And Nicholas Nick Taylor, who's the executive director of Informatics at Ionis Pharmaceuticals. Gentlemen, thanks for coming in theCUBE and participating in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us- >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome, okay, we're go really try to look at data sharing as a use case and try to understand what's happening in the healthcare industry generally and specifically, how Nick thinks about sharing data in a governed fashion whether tapping the capabilities of multiple clouds is advantageous long term or presents more challenges than the effort is worth. And to start, Jesse, you lead this industry practice for Snowflake and it's a challenging and vibrant area. It's one that's hyper-focused on data privacy. So the first question is, you know there was a time when healthcare and other regulated industries wouldn't go near the cloud. What are you seeing today in the industry around cloud adoption and specifically multi-cloud adoption? >> Yeah, for years I've heard that healthcare and life sciences has been cloud diverse, but in spite of all of that if you look at a lot of aspects of this industry today, they've been running in the cloud for over 10 years now. Particularly when you look at CRM technologies or HR or HCM, even clinical technologies like EDC or ETMF. And it's interesting that you mentioned multi-cloud as well because this has always been an underlying reality especially within life sciences. This industry grows through acquisition where companies are looking to boost their future development pipeline either by buying up smaller biotechs, they may have like a late or a mid-stage promising candidate. And what typically happens is the larger pharma could then use their commercial muscle and their regulatory experience to move it to approvals and into the market. And I think the last few decades of cheap capital certainly accelerated that trend over the last couple of years. But this typically means that these new combined institutions may have technologies that are running on multiple clouds or multiple cloud strategies in various different regions to your point. And what we've often found is that they're not planning to standardize everything onto a single cloud provider. They're often looking for technologies that embrace this multi-cloud approach and work seamlessly across them. And I think this is a big reason why we, here at Snowflake, we've seen such strong momentum and growth across this industry because healthcare and life science has actually been one of our fastest growing sectors over the last couple of years. And a big part of that is in fact that we run on not only all three major cloud providers, but individual accounts within each and any one of them, they had the ability to communicate and interoperate with one another, like a globally interconnected database. >> Great, thank you for that setup. And so Nick, tell us more about your role and Ionis Pharma please. >> Sure. So I've been at Ionis for around five years now. You know, when when I joined it was, the IT department was pretty small. There wasn't a lot of warehousing, there wasn't a lot of kind of big data there. We saw an opportunity with Snowflake pretty early on as a provider that would be a lot of benefit for us, you know, 'cause we're small, wanted something that was fairly hands off. You know, I remember the days where you had to get a lot of DBAs in to fine tune your databases, make sure everything was running really, really well. The notion that there's, you know, no indexes to tune, right? There's very few knobs and dials, you can turn on Snowflake. That was appealing that, you know, it just kind of worked. So we found a use case to bring the platform in. We basically used it as a logging replacement as a Splunk kind of replacement with a platform called Elysium Analytics as a way to just get it in the door and give us the opportunity to solve a real world use case, but also to help us start to experiment using Snowflake as a platform. It took us a while to A, get the funding to bring it in, but B, build the momentum behind it. But, you know, as we experimented we added more data in there, we ran a few more experiments, we piloted in few more applications, we really saw the power of the platform and now, we are becoming a commercial organization. And with that comes a lot of major datasets. And so, you know, we really see Snowflake as being a very important part of our ecology going forward to help us build out our infrastructure. >> Okay, and you are running, your group runs on Azure, it's kind of mono cloud, single cloud, but others within Ionis are using other clouds, but you're not currently, you know, collaborating in terms of data sharing. And I wonder if you could talk about how your data needs have evolved over the past decade. I know you came from another highly regulated industry in financial services. So what's changed? You sort of touched on this before, you had these, you know, very specialized individuals who were, you know, DBAs, and, you know, could tune databases and the like, so that's evolved, but how has generally your needs evolved? Just kind of make an observation over the last, you know, five or seven years. What have you seen? >> Well, we, I wasn't in a group that did a lot of warehousing. It was more like online trade capture, but, you know, it was very much on-prem. You know, being in the cloud is very much a dirty word back then. I know that's changed since I've left. But in, you know, we had major, major teams of everyone who could do everything, right. As I mentioned in the pharma organization, there's a lot fewer of us. So the data needs there are very different, right? It's, we have a lot of SaaS applications. One of the difficulties with bringing a lot of SaaS applications on board is obviously data integration. So making sure the data is the same between them. But one of the big problems is joining the data across those SaaS applications. So one of the benefits, one of the things that we use Snowflake for is to basically take data out of these SaaS applications and load them into a warehouse so we can do those joins. So we use technologies like Boomi, we use technologies like Fivetran, like DBT to bring this data all into one place and start to kind of join that basically, allow us to do, run experiments, do analysis, basically take better, find better use for our data that was siloed in the past. You mentioned- >> Yeah. And just to add on to Nick's point there. >> Go ahead. >> That's actually something very common that we're seeing across the industry is because a lot of these SaaS applications that you mentioned, Nick, they're with from vendors that are trying to build their own ecosystem in walled garden. And by definition, many of them do not want to integrate with one another. So from a, you know, from a data platform vendor's perspective, we see this as a huge opportunity to help organizations like Ionis and others kind of deal with the challenges that Nick is speaking about because if the individual platform vendors are never going to make that part of their strategy, we see it as a great way to add additional value to these customers. >> Well, this data sharing thing is interesting. There's a lot of walled gardens out there. Oracle is a walled garden, AWS in many ways is a walled garden. You know, Microsoft has its walled garden. You could argue Snowflake is a walled garden. But the, what we're seeing and the whole reason behind the notion of super-cloud is we're creating an abstraction layer where you actually, in this case for this use case, can share data in a governed manner. Let's forget about the cross-cloud for a moment. I'll come back to that, but I wonder, Nick, if you could talk about how you are sharing data, again, Snowflake sort of, it's, I look at Snowflake like the app store, Apple, we're going to control everything, we're going to guarantee with data clean rooms and governance and the standards that we've created within that platform, we're going to make sure that it's safe for you to share data in this highly regulated industry. Are you doing that today? And take us through, you know, the considerations that you have in that regard. >> So it's kind of early days for us in Snowflake in general, but certainly in data sharing, we have a couple of examples. So data marketplace, you know, that's a great invention. It's, I've been a small IT shop again, right? The fact that we are able to just bring down terabyte size datasets straight into our Snowflake and run analytics directly on that is huge, right? The fact that we don't have to FTP these massive files around run jobs that may break, being able to just have that on tap is huge for us. We've recently been talking to one of our CRO feeds- CRO organizations about getting their data feeds in. Historically, this clinical trial data that comes in on an FTP file, we have to process it, take it through the platforms, put it into the warehouse. But one of the CROs that we talked to recently when we were reinvestigate in what data opportunities they have, they were a Snowflake customer and we are, I think, the first production customer they have, have taken that feed. So they're basically exposing their tables of data that historically came in these FTP files directly into our Snowflake instance now. We haven't taken advantage of that. It only actually flipped the switch about three or four weeks ago. But that's pretty big for us again, right? We don't have to worry about maintaining those jobs that take those files in. We don't have to worry about the jobs that take those and shove them on the warehouse. We now have a feed that's directly there that we can use a tool like DBT to push through directly into our model. And then the third avenue that's came up, actually fairly recently as well was genetics data. So genetics data that's highly, highly regulated. We had to be very careful with that. And we had a conversation with Snowflake about the data white rooms practice, and we see that as a pretty interesting opportunity. We are having one organization run genetic analysis being able to send us those genetic datasets, but then there's another organization that's actually has the in quotes "metadata" around that, so age, ethnicity, location, et cetera. And being able to join those two datasets through some kind of mechanism would be really beneficial to the organization. Being able to build a data white room so we can put that genetic data in a secure place, anonymize it, and then share the amalgamated data back out in a way that's able to be joined to the anonymized metadata, that could be pretty huge for us as well. >> Okay, so this is interesting. So you talk about FTP, which was the common way to share data. And so you basically, it's so, I got it now you take it and do whatever you want with it. Now we're talking, Jesse, about sharing the same copy of live data. How common is that use case in your industry? >> It's become very common over the last couple of years. And I think a big part of it is having the right technology to do it effectively. You know, as Nick mentioned, historically, this was done by people sending files around. And the challenge with that approach, of course, while there are multiple challenges, one, every time you send a file around your, by definition creating a copy of the data because you have to pull it out of your system of record, put it into a file, put it on some server where somebody else picks it up. And by definition at that point you've lost governance. So this creates challenges in general hesitation to doing so. It's not that it hasn't happened, but the other challenge with it is that the data's no longer real time. You know, you're working with a copy of data that was as fresh as at the time at that when that was actually extracted. And that creates limitations in terms of how effective this can be. What we're starting to see now with some of our customers is live sharing of information. And there's two aspects of that that are important. One is that you're not actually physically creating the copy and sending it to someone else, you're actually exposing it from where it exists and allowing another consumer to interact with it from their own account that could be in another region, some are running in another cloud. So this concept of super-cloud or cross-cloud could becoming realized here. But the other important aspect of it is that when that other- when that other entity is querying your data, they're seeing it in a real time state. And this is particularly important when you think about use cases like supply chain planning, where you're leveraging data across various different enterprises. If I'm a manufacturer or if I'm a contract manufacturer and I can see the actual inventory positions of my clients, of my distributors, of the levels of consumption at the pharmacy or the hospital that gives me a lot of indication as to how my demand profile is changing over time versus working with a static picture that may have been from three weeks ago. And this has become incredibly important as supply chains are becoming more constrained and the ability to plan accurately has never been more important. >> Yeah. So the race is on to solve these problems. So it start, we started with, hey, okay, cloud, Dave, we're going to simplify database, we're going to put it in the cloud, give virtually infinite resources, separate compute from storage. Okay, check, we got that. Now we've moved into sort of data clean rooms and governance and you've got an ecosystem that's forming around this to make it safer to share data. And then, you know, nirvana, at least near term nirvana is we're going to build data applications and we're going to be able to share live data and then you start to get into monetization. Do you see, Nick, in the near future where I know you've got relationships with, for instance, big pharma like AstraZeneca, do you see a situation where you start sharing data with them? Is that in the near term? Is that more long term? What are the considerations in that regard? >> I mean, it's something we've been thinking about. We haven't actually addressed that yet. Yeah, I could see situations where, you know, some of these big relationships where we do need to share a lot of data, it would be very nice to be able to just flick a switch and share our data assets across to those organizations. But, you know, that's a ways off for us now. We're mainly looking at bringing data in at the moment. >> One of the things that we've seen in financial services in particular, and Jesse, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is companies like Goldman or Capital One or Nasdaq taking their stack, their software, their tooling actually putting it on the cloud and facing it to their customers and selling that as a new monetization vector as part of their digital or business transformation. Are you seeing that Jesse at all in healthcare or is it happening today or do you see a day when that happens or is healthier or just too scary to do that? >> No, we're seeing the early stages of this as well. And I think it's for some of the reasons we talked about earlier. You know, it's a much more secure way to work with a colleague if you don't have to copy your data and potentially expose it. And some of the reasons that people have historically copied that data is that they needed to leverage some sort of algorithm or application that a third party was providing. So maybe someone was predicting the ideal location and run a clinical trial for this particular rare disease category where there are only so many patients around the world that may actually be candidates for this disease. So you have to pick the ideal location. Well, sending the dataset to do so, you know, would involve a fairly complicated process similar to what Nick was mentioning earlier. If the company who was providing the logic or the algorithm to determine that location could bring that algorithm to you and you run it against your own data, that's a much more ideal and a much safer and more secure way for this industry to actually start to work with some of these partners and vendors. And that's one of the things that we're looking to enable going into this year is that, you know, the whole concept should be bring the logic to your data versus your data to the logic and the underlying sharing mechanisms that we've spoken about are actually what are powering that today. >> And so thank you for that, Jesse. >> Yes, Dave. >> And so Nick- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, if I could add, yeah, if I could add to that, that's something certainly we've been thinking about. In fact, we'd started talking to Snowflake about that a couple of years ago. We saw the power there again of the platform to be able to say, well, could we, we were thinking in more of a data share, but could we share our data out to say an AI/ML vendor, have them do the analytics and then share the data, the results back to us. Now, you know, there's more powerful mechanisms to do that within the Snowflake ecosystem now, but you know, we probably wouldn't need to have onsite AI/ML people, right? Some of that stuff's very sophisticated, expensive resources, hard to find, you know, it's much better for us to find a company that would be able to build those analytics, maintain those analytics for us. And you know, we saw an opportunity to do that a couple years ago and we're kind of excited about the opportunity there that we can just basically do it with a no op, right? We share the data route, we have the analytics done, we get the result back and it's just fairly seamless. >> I mean, I could have a whole another Cube session on this, guys, but I mean, I just did a a session with Andy Thurai, a Constellation research about how difficult it's been for organization to get ROI because they don't have the expertise in house so they want to either outsource it or rely on vendor R&D companies to inject that AI and machine intelligence directly into applications. My follow-up question to you Nick is, when you think about, 'cause Jesse was talking about, you know, let the data basically stay where it is and you know bring the compute to that data. If that data lives on different clouds, and maybe it's not your group, but maybe it's other parts of Ionis or maybe it's your partners like AstraZeneca, or you know, the AI/ML partners and they're potentially on other clouds or that data is on other clouds. Do you see that, again, coming back to super-cloud, do you see it as an advantage to be able to have a consistent experience across those clouds? Or is that just kind of get in the way and make things more complex? What's your take on that, Nick? >> Well, from the vendors, so from the client side, it's kind of seamless with Snowflake for us. So we know for a fact that one of the datasets we have at the moment, Compile, which is a, the large multi terabyte dataset I was talking about. They're on AWS on the East Coast and we are on Azure on the West Coast. And they had to do a few tweaks in the background to make sure the data was pushed over from, but from my point of view, the data just exists, right? So for me, I think it's hugely beneficial that Snowflake supports this kind of infrastructure, right? We don't have to jump through hoops to like, okay, well, we'll download it here and then re-upload it here. They already have the mechanism in the background to do these multi-cloud shares. So it's not important for us internally at the moment. I could see potentially at some point where we start linking across different groups in the organization that do have maybe Amazon or Google Cloud, but certainly within our providers. We know for a fact that they're on different services at the moment and it just works. >> Yeah, and we learned from Benoit Dageville, who came into the studio on August 9th with first Supercloud in 2022 that Snowflake uses a single global instance across regions and across clouds, yeah, whether or not you can query across you know, big regions, it just depends, right? It depends on latency. You might have to make a copy or maybe do some tweaks in the background. But guys, we got to jump, I really appreciate your time. Really thoughtful discussion on the future of data and cloud, specifically within healthcare and pharma. Thank you for your time. >> Thanks- >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE team and my co-host, John Furrier. Keep it right there for more action at Supercloud 2. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante the ascendancy of AWS under the leadership of Andy jassy was marked by a tsunami of data and corresponding cloud services to leverage that data now those Services they mainly came in the form of Primitives I.E basic building blocks that were used by developers to create more sophisticated capabilities AWS in the 2020s being led by CEO Adam solipski will be marked by four high-level Trends in our opinion one A Rush of data that will dwarf anything we've previously seen two a doubling or even tripling down on the basic elements of cloud compute storage database security Etc three a greater emphasis on end-to-end integration of AWS services to simplify and accelerate customer adoption of cloud and four significantly deeper business integration of cloud Beyond it as an underlying element of organizational operations hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we extract and analyze nuggets from John furrier's annual sit-down with the CEO of AWS we'll share data from ETR and other sources to set the context for the market and competition in cloud and we'll give you our glimpse of what to expect at re invent in 2022. now before we get into the core of our analysis Alibaba has announced earnings they always announced after the big three you know a month later and we've updated our Q3 slash November hyperscale Computing forecast for the year as seen here and we're going to spend a lot of time on this as most of you have seen the bulk of it already but suffice to say alibaba's cloud business is hitting that same macro Trend that we're seeing across the board but a more substantial slowdown than we expected and more substantial than its peers they're facing China headwinds they've been restructuring its Cloud business and it's led to significantly slower growth uh in in the you know low double digits as opposed to where we had it at 15 this puts our year-end estimates for 2022 Revenue at 161 billion still a healthy 34 growth with AWS surpassing 80 billion in 2022 Revenue now on a related note one of the big themes in Cloud that we've been reporting on is how customers are optimizing their Cloud spend it's a technique that they use and when the economy looks a little shaky and here's a graphic that we pulled from aws's website which shows the various pricing plans at a high level as you know they're much more granular than that and more sophisticated but Simplicity we'll just keep it here basically there are four levels first one here is on demand I.E pay by the drink now we're going to jump down to what we've labeled as number two spot instances that's like the right place at the right time I can use that extra capacity in the moment the third is reserved instances or RIS where I pay up front to get a discount and the fourth is sort of optimized savings plans where customers commit to a one or three year term and for a better price now you'll notice we labeled the choices in a different order than AWS presented them on its website and that's because we believe that the order that we chose is the natural progression for customers this started on demand they maybe experiment with spot instances they move to reserve instances when the cloud bill becomes too onerous and if you're large enough you lock in for one or three years okay the interesting thing is the order in which AWS presents them we believe that on-demand accounts for the majority of AWS customer spending now if you think about it those on-demand customers they're also at risk customers yeah sure there's some switching costs like egress and learning curve but many customers they have multiple clouds and they've got experience and so they're kind of already up to a learning curve and if you're not married to AWS with a longer term commitment there's less friction to switch now AWS here presents the most attractive plan from a financial perspective second after on demand and it's also the plan that makes the greatest commitment from a lock-in standpoint now In fairness to AWS it's also true that there is a trend towards subscription-based pricing and we have some data on that this chart is from an ETR drill down survey the end is 300. pay attention to the bars on the right the left side is sort of busy but the pink is subscription and you can see the trend upward the light blue is consumption based or on demand based pricing and you can see there's a steady Trend toward subscription now we'll dig into this in a later episode of Breaking analysis but we'll share with you a little some tidbits with the data that ETR provides you can select which segment is and pass or you can go up the stack Etc but so when you choose is and paths 44 of customers either prefer or are required to use on-demand pricing whereas around 40 percent of customers say they either prefer or are required to use subscription pricing again that's for is so now the further mu you move up the stack the more prominent subscription pricing becomes often with sixty percent or more for the software-based offerings that require or prefer subscription and interestingly cyber security tracks along with software at around 60 percent that that prefer subscription it's likely because as with software you're not shutting down your cyber protection on demand all right let's get into the expectations for reinvent and we're going to start with an observation in data in this 2018 book seeing digital author David michella made the point that whereas most companies apply data on the periphery of their business kind of as an add-on function successful data companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook have placed data at the core of their operations they've operationalized data and they apply machine intelligence to that foundational element why is this the fact is it's not easy to do what the internet Giants have done very very sophisticated engineering and and and cultural discipline and this brings us to reinvent 2022 in the future of cloud machine learning and AI will increasingly be infused into applications we believe the data stack and the application stack are coming together as organizations build data apps and data products data expertise is moving from the domain of Highly specialized individuals to Everyday business people and we are just at the cusp of this trend this will in our view be a massive theme of not only re invent 22 but of cloud in the 2020s the vision of data mesh We Believe jamachtagani's principles will be realized in this decade now what we'd like to do now is share with you a glimpse of the thinking of Adam solipsky from his sit down with John Furrier each year John has a one-on-one conversation with the CEO of AWS AWS he's been doing this for years and the outcome is a better understanding of the directional thinking of the leader of the number one Cloud platform so we're now going to share some direct quotes I'm going to run through them with some commentary and then bring in some ETR data to analyze the market implications here we go this is from solipsky quote I.T in general and data are moving from departments into becoming intrinsic parts of how businesses function okay we're talking here about deeper business integration let's go on to the next one quote in time we'll stop talking about people who have the word analyst we inserted data he meant data data analyst in their title rather will have hundreds of millions of people who analyze data as part of their day-to-day job most of whom will not have the word analyst anywhere in their title we're talking about graphic designers and pizza shop owners and product managers and data scientists as well he threw that in I'm going to come back to that very interesting so he's talking about here about democratizing data operationalizing data next quote customers need to be able to take an end-to-end integrated view of their entire data Journey from ingestion to storage to harmonizing the data to being able to query it doing business Intelligence and human-based Analysis and being able to collaborate and share data and we've been putting together we being Amazon together a broad Suite of tools from database to analytics to business intelligence to help customers with that and this last statement it's true Amazon has a lot of tools and you know they're beginning to become more and more integrated but again under jassy there was not a lot of emphasis on that end-to-end integrated view we believe it's clear from these statements that solipsky's customer interactions are leading him to underscore that the time has come for this capability okay continuing quote if you have data in one place you shouldn't have to move it every time you want to analyze that data couldn't agree more it would be much better if you could leave that data in place avoid all the ETL which has become a nasty three-letter word more and more we're building capabilities where you can query that data in place end quote okay this we see a lot in the marketplace Oracle with mySQL Heatwave the entire Trend toward converge database snowflake [ __ ] extending their platforms into transaction and analytics respectively and so forth a lot of the partners are are doing things as well in that vein let's go into the next quote the other phenomenon is infusing machine learning into all those capabilities yes the comments from the michelleographic come into play here infusing Ai and machine intelligence everywhere next one quote it's not a data Cloud it's not a separate Cloud it's a series of broad but integrated capabilities to help you manage the end-to-end life cycle of your data there you go we AWS are the cloud we're going to come back to that in a moment as well next set of comments around data very interesting here quote data governance is a huge issue really what customers need is to find the right balance of their organization between access to data and control and if you provide too much access then you're nervous that your data is going to end up in places that it shouldn't shouldn't be viewed by people who shouldn't be viewing it and you feel like you lack security around that data and by the way what happens then is people overreact and they lock it down so that almost nobody can see it it's those handcuffs there's data and asset are reliability we've talked about that for years okay very well put by solipsky but this is a gap in our in our view within AWS today and we're we're hoping that they close it at reinvent it's not easy to share data in a safe way within AWS today outside of your organization so we're going to look for that at re invent 2022. now all this leads to the following statement by solipsky quote data clean room is a really interesting area and I think there's a lot of different Industries in which clean rooms are applicable I think that clean rooms are an interesting way of enabling multiple parties to share and collaborate on the data while completely respecting each party's rights and their privacy mandate okay again this is a gap currently within AWS today in our view and we know snowflake is well down this path and databricks with Delta sharing is also on this curve so AWS has to address this and demonstrate this end-to-end data integration and the ability to safely share data in our view now let's bring in some ETR spending data to put some context around these comments with reference points in the form of AWS itself and its competitors and partners here's a chart from ETR that shows Net score or spending momentum on the x-axis an overlap or pervasiveness in the survey um sorry let me go back up the net scores on the y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey is on the x-axis so spending momentum by pervasiveness okay or should have share within the data set the table that's inserted there with the Reds and the greens that informs us to how the dots are positioned so it's Net score and then the shared ends are how the plots are determined now we've filtered the data on the three big data segments analytics database and machine learning slash Ai and we've only selected one company with fewer than 100 ends in the survey and that's databricks you'll see why in a moment the red dotted line indicates highly elevated customer spend at 40 percent now as usual snowflake outperforms all players on the y-axis with a Net score of 63 percent off the charts all three big U.S cloud players are above that line with Microsoft and AWS dominating the x-axis so very impressive that they have such spending momentum and they're so large and you see a number of other emerging data players like rafana and datadog mongodbs there in the mix and then more established players data players like Splunk and Tableau now you got Cisco who's gonna you know it's a it's a it's a adjacent to their core networking business but they're definitely into you know the analytics business then the really established players in data like Informatica IBM and Oracle all with strong presence but you'll notice in the red from the momentum standpoint now what you're going to see in a moment is we put red highlights around databricks Snowflake and AWS why let's bring that back up and we'll explain so there's no way let's bring that back up Alex if you would there's no way AWS is going to hit the brakes on innovating at the base service level what we call Primitives earlier solipsky told Furrier as much in their sit down that AWS will serve the technical user and data science Community the traditional domain of data bricks and at the same time address the end-to-end integration data sharing and business line requirements that snowflake is positioned to serve now people often ask Snowflake and databricks how will you compete with the likes of AWS and we know the answer focus on data exclusively they have their multi-cloud plays perhaps the more interesting question is how will AWS compete with the likes of Specialists like Snowflake and data bricks and the answer is depicted here in this chart AWS is going to serve both the technical and developer communities and the data science audience and through end-to-end Integrations and future services that simplify the data Journey they're going to serve the business lines as well but the Nuance is in all the other dots in the hundreds or hundreds of thousands that are not shown here and that's the AWS ecosystem you can see AWS has earned the status of the number one Cloud platform that everyone wants to partner with as they say it has over a hundred thousand partners and that ecosystem combined with these capabilities that we're discussing well perhaps behind in areas like data sharing and integrated governance can wildly succeed by offering the capabilities and leveraging its ecosystem now for their part the snowflakes of the world have to stay focused on the mission build the best products possible and develop their own ecosystems to compete and attract the Mind share of both developers and business users and that's why it's so interesting to hear solipski basically say it's not a separate Cloud it's a set of integrated Services well snowflake is in our view building a super cloud on top of AWS Azure and Google when great products meet great sales and marketing good things can happen so this will be really fun to watch what AWS announces in this area at re invent all right one other topic that solipsky talked about was the correlation between serverless and container adoption and you know I don't know if this gets into there certainly their hybrid place maybe it starts to get into their multi-cloud we'll see but we have some data on this so again we're talking about the correlation between serverless and container adoption but before we get into that let's go back to 2017 and listen to what Andy jassy said on the cube about serverless play the clip very very earliest days of AWS Jeff used to say a lot if I were starting Amazon today I'd have built it on top of AWS we didn't have all the capability and all the functionality at that very moment but he knew what was coming and he saw what people were still able to accomplish even with where the services were at that point I think the same thing is true here with Lambda which is I think if Amazon were starting today it's a given they would build it on the cloud and I think we with a lot of the applications that comprise Amazon's consumer business we would build those on on our serverless capabilities now we still have plenty of capabilities and features and functionality we need to add to to Lambda and our various serverless services so that may not be true from the get-go right now but I think if you look at the hundreds of thousands of customers who are building on top of Lambda and lots of real applications you know finra has built a good chunk of their market watch application on top of Lambda and Thompson Reuters has built you know one of their key analytics apps like people are building real serious things on top of Lambda and the pace of iteration you'll see there will increase as well and I really believe that to be true over the next year or two so years ago when Jesse gave a road map that serverless was going to be a key developer platform going forward and so lipsky referenced the correlation between serverless and containers in the Furrier sit down so we wanted to test that within the ETR data set now here's a screen grab of The View across 1300 respondents from the October ETR survey and what we've done here is we've isolated on the cloud computing segment okay so you can see right there cloud computing segment now we've taken the functions from Google AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure functions all the serverless offerings and we've got Net score on the vertical axis we've got presence in the data set oh by the way 440 by the way is highly elevated remember that and then we've got on the horizontal axis we have the presence in the data center overlap okay that's relative to each other so remember 40 all these guys are above that 40 mark okay so you see that now what we're going to do this is just for serverless and what we're going to do is we're going to turn on containers to see the correlation and see what happens so watch what happens when we click on container boom everything moves to the right you can see all three move to the right Google drops a little bit but all the others now the the filtered end drops as well so you don't have as many people that are aggressively leaning into both but all three move to the right so watch again containers off and then containers on containers off containers on so you can see a really major correlation between containers and serverless okay so to get a better understanding of what that means I call my friend and former Cube co-host Stu miniman what he said was people generally used to think of VMS containers and serverless as distinctly different architectures but the lines are beginning to blur serverless makes things simpler for developers who don't want to worry about underlying infrastructure as solipsky and the data from ETR indicate serverless and containers are coming together but as Stu and I discussed there's a spectrum where on the left you have kind of native Cloud VMS in the middle you got AWS fargate and in the rightmost anchor is Lambda AWS Lambda now traditionally in the cloud if you wanted to use containers developers would have to build a container image they have to select and deploy the ec2 images that they or instances that they wanted to use they have to allocate a certain amount of memory and then fence off the apps in a virtual machine and then run the ec2 instances against the apps and then pay for all those ec2 resources now with AWS fargate you can run containerized apps with less infrastructure management but you still have some you know things that you can you can you can do with the with the infrastructure so with fargate what you do is you'd build the container images then you'd allocate your memory and compute resources then run the app and pay for the resources only when they're used so fargate lets you control the runtime environment while at the same time simplifying the infrastructure management you gotta you don't have to worry about isolating the app and other stuff like choosing server types and patching AWS does all that for you then there's Lambda with Lambda you don't have to worry about any of the underlying server infrastructure you're just running code AS functions so the developer spends their time worrying about the applications and the functions that you're calling the point is there's a movement and we saw in the data towards simplifying the development environment and allowing the cloud vendor AWS in this case to do more of the underlying management now some folks will still want to turn knobs and dials but increasingly we're going to see more higher level service adoption now re invent is always a fire hose of content so let's do a rapid rundown of what to expect we talked about operate optimizing data and the organization we talked about Cloud optimization there'll be a lot of talk on the show floor about best practices and customer sharing data solipsky is leading AWS into the next phase of growth and that means moving beyond I.T transformation into deeper business integration and organizational transformation not just digital transformation organizational transformation so he's leading a multi-vector strategy serving the traditional peeps who want fine-grained access to core services so we'll see continued Innovation compute storage AI Etc and simplification through integration and horizontal apps further up to stack Amazon connect is an example that's often cited now as we've reported many times databricks is moving from its stronghold realm of data science into business intelligence and analytics where snowflake is coming from its data analytics stronghold and moving into the world of data science AWS is going down a path of snowflake meet data bricks with an underlying cloud is and pass layer that puts these three companies on a very interesting trajectory and you can expect AWS to go right after the data sharing opportunity and in doing so it will have to address data governance they go hand in hand okay price performance that is a topic that will never go away and it's something that we haven't mentioned today silicon it's a it's an area we've covered extensively on breaking analysis from Nitro to graviton to the AWS acquisition of Annapurna its secret weapon new special specialized capabilities like inferential and trainium we'd expect something more at re invent maybe new graviton instances David floyer our colleague said he's expecting at some point a complete system on a chip SOC from AWS and maybe an arm-based server to eventually include high-speed cxl connections to devices and memories all to address next-gen applications data intensive applications with low power requirements and lower cost overall now of course every year Swami gives his usual update on machine learning and AI building on Amazon's years of sagemaker innovation perhaps a focus on conversational AI or a better support for vision and maybe better integration across Amazon's portfolio of you know large language models uh neural networks generative AI really infusing AI everywhere of course security always high on the list that reinvent and and Amazon even has reinforce a conference dedicated to it uh to security now here we'd like to see more on supply chain security and perhaps how AWS can help there as well as tooling to make the cio's life easier but the key so far is AWS is much more partner friendly in the security space than say for instance Microsoft traditionally so firms like OCTA and crowdstrike in Palo Alto have plenty of room to play in the AWS ecosystem we'd expect of course to hear something about ESG it's an important topic and hopefully how not only AWS is helping the environment that's important but also how they help customers save money and drive inclusion and diversity again very important topics and finally come back to it reinvent is an ecosystem event it's the Super Bowl of tech events and the ecosystem will be out in full force every tech company on the planet will have a presence and the cube will be featuring many of the partners from the serial floor as well as AWS execs and of course our own independent analysis so you'll definitely want to tune into thecube.net and check out our re invent coverage we start Monday evening and then we go wall to wall through Thursday hopefully my voice will come back we have three sets at the show and our entire team will be there so please reach out or stop by and say hello all right we're going to leave it there for today many thanks to Stu miniman and David floyer for the input to today's episode of course John Furrier for extracting the signal from the noise and a sit down with Adam solipski thanks to Alex Meyerson who was on production and manages the podcast Ken schiffman as well Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social and of course in our newsletters Rob hoef is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle does some great editing thank thanks to all of you remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen you can pop in the headphones go for a walk just search breaking analysis podcast I published each week on wikibon.com at siliconangle.com or you can email me at david.valante at siliconangle.com or DM me at di vallante or please comment on our LinkedIn posts and do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching we'll see it reinvent or we'll see you next time on breaking analysis [Music]

>> From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the Cube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> A better than expected earnings report in late August got people excited about Snowflake again, but the negative sentiment in the market is weighed heavily on virtually all growth tech stocks and Snowflake is no exception. As we've stressed many times the company's management is on a long term mission to dramatically simplify the way organizations use data. Snowflake is tapping into a multi hundred billion dollar total available market and continues to grow at a rapid pace. In our view, Snowflake is embarking on its third major wave of innovation data apps, while its first and second waves are still bearing significant fruit. Now for short term traders focused on the next 90 or 180 days, that probably doesn't matter. But those taking a longer view are asking, "Should we still be optimistic about the future of this high flyer or is it just another over hyped tech play?" Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. Snowflake's Quarter just ended. And in this breaking analysis we take a look at the most recent survey data from ETR to see what clues and nuggets we can extract to predict the near term future in the long term outlook for Snowflake which is going to announce its earnings at the end of this month. Okay, so you know the story. If you've been investor in Snowflake this year, it's been painful. We said at IPO, "If you really want to own this stock on day one, just hold your nose and buy it." But like most IPOs we said there will be likely a better entry point in the future, and not surprisingly that's been the case. Snowflake IPOed a price of 120, which you couldn't touch on day one unless you got into a friends and family Delio. And if you did, you're still up 5% or so. So congratulations. But at one point last year you were up well over 200%. That's been the nature of this volatile stock, and I certainly can't help you with the timing of the market. But longer term Snowflake is targeting 10 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2028. A big number. Is it achievable? Is it big enough? Tell you what, let's come back to that. Now shorter term, our expert trader and breaking analysis contributor Chip Simonton said he got out of the stock a while ago after having taken a shot at what turned out to be a bear market rally. He pointed out that the stock had been bouncing around the 150 level for the last few months and broke that to the downside last Friday. So he'd expect 150 is where the stock is going to find resistance on the way back up, but there's no sign of support right now. He said maybe at 120, which was the July low and of course the IPO price that we just talked about. Now, perhaps earnings will be a catalyst, when Snowflake announces on November 30th, but until the mentality toward growth tech changes, nothing's likely to change dramatically according to Simonton. So now that we have that out of the way, let's take a look at the spending data for Snowflake in the ETR survey. Here's a chart that shows the time series breakdown of snowflake's net score going back to the October, 2021 survey. Now at that time, Snowflake's net score stood at a robust 77%. And remember, net score is a measure of spending velocity. It's a proprietary network, and ETR derives it from a quarterly survey of IT buyers and asks the respondents, "Are you adopting the platform new? Are you spending 6% or more? Is you're spending flat? Is you're spending down 6% or worse? Or are you leaving the platform decommissioning?" You subtract the percent of customers that are spending less or churning from those that are spending more and adopting or adopting and you get a net score. And that's expressed as a percentage of customers responding. In this chart we show Snowflake's in out of the total survey which ranges... The total survey ranges between 1,200 and 1,400 each quarter. And the very last column... Oh sorry, very last row, we show the number of Snowflake respondents that are coming in the survey from the Fortune 500 and the Global 2000. Those are two very important Snowflake constituencies. Now what this data tells us is that Snowflake exited 2021 with very strong momentum in a net score of 82%, which is off the charts and it was actually accelerating from the previous survey. Now by April that sentiment had flipped and Snowflake came down to earth with a 68% net score. Still highly elevated relative to its peers, but meaningfully down. Why was that? Because we saw a drop in new ads and an increase in flat spend. Then into the July and most recent October surveys, you saw a significant drop in the percentage of customers that were spending more. Now, notably, the percentage of customers who are contemplating adding the platform is actually staying pretty strong, but it is off a bit this past survey. And combined with a slight uptick in planned churn, net score is now down to 60%. That uptick from 0% and 1% and then 3%, it's still small, but that net score at 60% is still 20 percentage points higher than our highly elevated benchmark of 40% as you recall from listening to earlier breaking analysis. That 40% range is we consider a milestone. Anything above that is actually quite strong. But again, Snowflake is down and coming back to churn, while 3% churn is very low, in previous quarters we've seen Snowflake 0% or 1% decommissions. Now the last thing to note in this chart is the meaningful uptick in survey respondents that are citing, they're using the Snowflake platform. That's up to 212 in the survey. So look, it's hard to imagine that Snowflake doesn't feel the softening in the market like everyone else. Snowflake is guiding for around 60% growth in product revenue against the tough compare from a year ago with a 2% operating margin. So like every company, the reaction of the street is going to come down to how accurate or conservative the guide is from their CFO. Now, earlier this year, Snowflake acquired a company called Streamlit for around $800 million. Streamlit is an open source Python library and it makes it easier to build data apps with machine learning, obviously a huge trend. And like Snowflake, generally its focus is on simplifying the complex, in this case making data science easier to integrate into data apps that business people can use. So we were excited this summer in the July ETR survey to see that they added some nice data and pick on Streamlit, which we're showing here in comparison to Snowflake's core business on the left hand side. That's the data warehousing, the Streamlit pieces on the right hand side. And we show again net score over time from the previous survey for Snowflake's core database and data warehouse offering again on the left as compared to a Streamlit on the right. Snowflake's core product had 194 responses in the October, 22 survey, Streamlit had an end of 73, which is up from 52 in the July survey. So significant uptick of people responding that they're doing business in adopting Streamlit. That was pretty impressive to us. And it's hard to see, but the net scores stayed pretty constant for Streamlit at 51%. It was 52% I think in the previous quarter, well over that magic 40% mark. But when you blend it with Snowflake, it does sort of bring things down a little bit. Now there are two key points here. One is that the acquisition seems to have gained exposure right out of the gate as evidenced by the large number of responses. And two, the spending momentum. Again while it's lower than Snowflake overall, and when you blend it with Snowflake it does pull it down, it's very healthy and steady. Now let's do a little pure comparison with some of our favorite names in this space. This chart shows net score or spending velocity in the Y-axis, an overlap or presence, pervasiveness if you will, in the data set on the X-axis. That red dotted line again is that 40% highly elevated net score that we like to talk about. And that table inserted informs us as to how the companies are plotted, where the dots set up, the net score, the ins. And we're comparing a number of database players, although just a caution, Oracle includes all of Oracle including its apps. But we just put it in there for reference because it is the leader in database. Right off the bat, Snowflake jumps out with a net score of 64%. The 60% from the earlier chart, again included Streamlit. So you can see its core database, data warehouse business actually is higher than the total company average that we showed you before 'cause the Streamlit is blended in. So when you separate it out, Streamlit is right on top of data bricks. Isn't that ironic? Only Snowflake and Databricks in this selection of names are above the 40% level. You see Mongo and Couchbase, they know they're solid and Teradata cloud actually showing pretty well compared to some of the earlier survey results. Now let's isolate on the database data platform sector and see how that shapes up. And for this analysis, same XY dimensions, we've added the big giants, AWS and Microsoft and Google. And notice that those three plus Snowflake are just at or above the 40% line. Snowflake continues to lead by a significant margin in spending momentum and it keeps creeping to the right. That's that end that we talked about earlier. Now here's an interesting tidbit. Snowflake is often asked, and I've asked them myself many times, "How are you faring relative to AWS, Microsoft and Google, these big whales with Redshift and Synapse and Big Query?" And Snowflake has been telling folks that 80% of its business comes from AWS. And when Microsoft heard that, they said, "Whoa, wait a minute, Snowflake, let's partner up." 'Cause Microsoft is smart, and they understand that the market is enormous. And if they could do better with Snowflake, one, they may steal some business from AWS. And two, even if Snowflake is winning against some of the Microsoft database products, if it wins on Azure, Microsoft is going to sell more compute and more storage, more AI tools, more other stuff to these customers. Now AWS is really aggressive from a partnering standpoint with Snowflake. They're openly negotiating, not openly, but they're negotiating better prices. They're realizing that when it comes to data, the cheaper that you make the offering, the more people are going to consume. At scale economies and operating leverage are really powerful things at volume that kick in. Now Microsoft, they're coming along, they obviously get it, but Google is seemingly resistant to that type of go to market partnership. Rather than lean into Snowflake as a great partner Google's field force is kind of fighting fashion. Google itself at Cloud next heavily messaged what they call the open data cloud, which is a direct rip off of Snowflake. So what can we say about Google? They continue to be kind of behind the curve when it comes to go to market. Now just a brief aside on the competitive posture. I've seen Slootman, Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake in action with his prior companies and how he depositioned the competition. At Data Domain, he eviscerated a company called Avamar with their, what he called their expensive and slow post process architecture. I think he actually called it garbage, if I recall at one conference I heard him speak at. And that sort of destroyed BMC when he was at ServiceNow, kind of positioning them as the equivalent of the department of motor vehicles. And so it's interesting to hear how Snowflake openly talks about the data platforms of AWS, Microsoft, Google, and data bricks. I'll give you this sort of short bumper sticker. Redshift is just an on-prem database that AWS morphed to the cloud, which by the way is kind of true. They actually did a brilliant job of it, but it's basically a fact. Microsoft Excel, a collection of legacy databases, which also kind of morphed to run in the cloud. And even Big Query, which is considered cloud native by many if not most, is being positioned by Snowflake as originally an on-prem database to support Google's ad business, maybe. And data bricks is for those people smart enough to get it to Berkeley that love complexity. And now Snowflake doesn't, they don't mention Berkeley as far as I know. That's my addition. But you get the point. And the interesting thing about Databricks and Snowflake is a while ago in the cube I said that there was a new workload type emerging around data where you have AWS cloud, Snowflake obviously for the cloud database and Databricks data for the data science and EML, you bring those things together and there's this new workload emerging that's going to be very powerful in the future. And it's interesting to see now the aspirations of all three of these platforms are colliding. That's quite a dynamic, especially when you see both Snowflake and Databricks putting venture money and getting their hooks into the loyalties of the same companies like DBT labs and Calibra. Anyway, Snowflake's posture is that we are the pioneer in cloud native data warehouse, data sharing and now data apps. And our platform is designed for business people that want simplicity. The other guys, yes, they're formidable, but we Snowflake have an architectural lead and of course we run in multiple clouds. So it's pretty strong positioning or depositioning, you have to admit. Now I'm not sure I agree with the big query knockoffs completely. I think that's a bit of a stretch, but snowflake, as we see in the ETR survey data is winning. So in thinking about the longer term future, let's talk about what's different with Snowflake, where it's headed and what the opportunities are for the company. Snowflake put itself on the map by focusing on simplifying data analytics. What's interesting about that is the company's founders are as you probably know from Oracle. And rather than focusing on transactional data, which is Oracle's sweet spot, the stuff they worked on when they were at Oracle, the founder said, "We're going to go somewhere else. We're going to attack the data warehousing problem and the data analytics problem." And they completely re-imagined the database and how it could be applied to solve those challenges and reimagine what was possible if you had virtually unlimited compute and storage capacity. And of course Snowflake became famous for separating the compute from storage and being able to completely shut down compute so you didn't have to pay for it when you're not using it. And the ability to have multiple clusters hit the same data without making endless copies and a consumption/cloud pricing model. And then of course everyone on the planet realized, "Wow, that's a pretty good idea." Every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley has been funding companies to copy that move. And that today has pretty much become mainstream in table stakes. But I would argue that Snowflake not only had the lead, but when you look at how others are approaching this problem, it's not necessarily as clean and as elegant. Some of the startups, the early startups I think get it and maybe had an advantage of starting later, which can be a disadvantage too. But AWS is a good example of what I'm saying here. Is its version of separating compute from storage was an afterthought and it's good, it's... Given what they had it was actually quite clever and customers like it, but it's more of a, "Okay, we're going to tier to storage to lower cost, we're going to sort of dial down the compute not completely, we're not going to shut it off, we're going to minimize the compute required." It's really not true as separation is like for instance Snowflake has. But having said that, we're talking about competitors with lots of resources and cohort offerings. And so I don't want to make this necessarily all about the product, but all things being equal architecture matters, okay? So that's the cloud S-curve, the first one we're showing. Snowflake's still on that S-curve, and in and of itself it's got legs, but it's not what's going to power the company to 10 billion. The next S-curve we denote is the multi-cloud in the middle. And now while 80% of Snowflake's revenue is AWS, Microsoft is ramping up and Google, well, we'll see. But the interesting part of that curve is data sharing, and this idea of data clean rooms. I mean it really should be called the data sharing curve, but I have my reasons for calling it multi-cloud. And this is all about network effects and data gravity, and you're seeing this play out today, especially in industries like financial services and healthcare and government that are highly regulated verticals where folks are super paranoid about compliance. There not going to share data if they're going to get sued for it, if they're going to be in the front page of the Wall Street Journal for some kind of privacy breach. And what Snowflake has done is said, "Put all the data in our cloud." Now, of course now that triggers a lot of people because it's a walled garden, okay? It is. That's the trade off. It's not the Wild West, it's not Windows, it's Mac, it's more controlled. But the idea is that as different parts of the organization or even partners begin to share data that they need, it's got to be governed, it's got to be secure, it's got to be compliant, it's got to be trusted. So Snowflake introduced the idea of, they call these things stable edges. I think that's the term that they use. And they track a metric around stable edges. And so a stable edge, or think of it as a persistent edge is an ongoing relationship between two parties that last for some period of time, more than a month. It's not just a one shot deal, one a done type of, "Oh guys shared it for a day, done." It sent you an FTP, it's done. No, it's got to have trajectory over time. Four weeks or six weeks or some period of time that's meaningful. And that metric is growing. Now I think sort of a different metric that they track. I think around 20% of Snowflake customers are actively sharing data today and then they track the number of those edge relationships that exist. So that's something that's unique. Because again, most data sharing is all about making copies of data. That's great for storage companies, it's bad for auditors, and it's bad for compliance officers. And that trend is just starting out, that middle S-curve, it's going to kind of hit the base of that steep part of the S-curve and it's going to have legs through this decade we think. And then finally the third wave that we show here is what we call super cloud. That's why I called it multi-cloud before, so it could invoke super cloud. The idea that you've built a PAS layer that is purpose built for a specific objective, and in this case it's building data apps that are cloud native, shareable and governed. And is a long-term trend that's going to take some time to develop. I mean, application development platforms can take five to 10 years to mature and gain significant adoption, but this one's unique. This is a critical play for Snowflake. If it's going to compete with the big cloud players, it has to have an app development framework like Snowpark. It has to accommodate new data types like transactional data. That's why it announced this thing called UniStore last June, Snowflake a summit. And the pattern that's forming here is Snowflake is building layer upon layer with its architecture at the core. It's not currently anyway, it's not going out and saying, "All right, we're going to buy a company that's got to another billion dollars in revenue and that's how we're going to get to 10 billion." So it's not buying its way into new markets through revenue. It's actually buying smaller companies that can complement Snowflake and that it can turn into revenue for growth that fit in to the data cloud. Now as to the 10 billion by fiscal year 28, is that achievable? That's the question. Yeah, I think so. Would the momentum resources go to market product and management prowess that Snowflake has? Yes, it's definitely achievable. And one could argue to $10 billion is too conservative. Indeed, Snowflake CFO, Mike Scarpelli will fully admit his forecaster built on existing offerings. He's not including revenue as I understand it from all the new stuff that's in the pipeline because he doesn't know what it's going to look like. He doesn't know what the adoption is going to look like. He doesn't have data on that adoption, not just yet anyway. And now of course things can change quite dramatically. It's possible that is forecast for existing businesses don't materialize or competition picks them off or a company like Databricks actually is able in the longer term replicate the functionality of Snowflake with open source technologies, which would be a very competitive source of innovation. But in our view, there's plenty of room for growth, the market is enormous and the real key is, can and will Snowflake deliver on the promises of simplifying data? Of course we've heard this before from data warehouse, the data mars and data legs and master data management and ETLs and data movers and data copiers and Hadoop and a raft of technologies that have not lived up to expectations. And we've also, by the way, seen some tremendous successes in the software business with the likes of ServiceNow and Salesforce. So will Snowflake be the next great software name and hit that 10 billion magic mark? I think so. Let's reconnect in 2028 and see. Okay, we'll leave it there today. I want to thank Chip Simonton for his input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our Editor in Chief over at Silicon Angle. He does some great editing for us. Check it out for all the news. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch David.vallante@siliconangle.com. DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai, they've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis. (upbeat music)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Is the glass half full or half empty? Well, it depends on how you want to look at it. CIOs are tapping the breaks on spending, that's clear. The latest macro survey data from ETR quantifies what we already know to be true, that IT spend is decelerating. CIOs and IT buyers forecast that their tech spend will grow by 5.5% this year. That's a meaningful deceleration from near year end 2021 expectations. But these levels are still well above historical norms. So while the feel good factor may be in some jeopardy, overall things are pretty good, at least for now. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we update you in the latest macro tech spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, including strategies that organizations are employing to cut costs, and which project categories continue to see the most traction. Now, CIOs were much more optimistic at the end of last year than they are today. Back then they thought their aggregates spend would increase by more than 8%. Of course, at that time the expectation was that the economy was ready to make a semi ordered return to normal, and that didn't happen as you well know. And you can see here the expectation for spending this year is down to 5.5% growth, as we said, and this is based on the most recent ETR CIO and IT buyer survey, which includes more than 1100 responses. So we started the year above 8% then made a meaningful decline into the mid sixes and nine months into the year, we're now in the mid fives, but this is still two to 300 basis points above historical norms for IT spending. And looking ahead to next year, CIOs are expecting accelerated growth edging back up toward that 6% level. Now as noted here, the visibility on this is probably less clear than pre COVID years of course, but the bottom line is digital transformations are continuing to push it spending above historical levels. Now the problem as we know, is earning estimates are coming down and forecasts are being lowered every day. I mean, as the saying goes the first disappointment is rarely the last. Even the semiconductor industry is seeing softness. Just this past week we saw AMD lower its quarterly revenue forecast by more than a billion dollars, as PC demand in the second half has significantly softened. But again, that's relative to some pretty amazing PC growth in the past couple of years thanks to the isolation economy. So we do see CIOs tapping the brakes, and these data points here tell an interesting story. ETR asked respondents about various actions that they're taking and these two stood out. The top line is, "We're accelerating new IT projects," and the bottom line is, "We're freezing IT projects," and you can see the convergence of those two lines, which of course signals the down. But again, these are not alarming data points. If you think about history. If you go back to Q1 2020, for example, just before the pandemic, that top line that was at 12% versus where it is today at 25%. And if you look at project freezes, they were at 22% in Q1 of 2020, which is significantly higher than today. So relatively speaking the spending dynamic is still strong. It just doesn't feel that way because we're coming out of an historic anomaly. Now, ETR asked a follow up question to respondents that indicated that spending would be down this quarter relative to the same quarter last year. So they wanted to better understand the most common actions that organizations would take to save money, and that's what this chart shows. The most common approach is still to consolidate redundant vendors across the lines of business. That was over 30%, as you can see here in the first set of bars. So presumably CIOs now have the latitude to go after so-called shadow projects, shadow IT, and implement standards across the organization via vendor consolidation. As well, there's a big jump in the survey from 14% to 20% of respondents saying that they were going after the Cloud bill, and that relates to the fourth set of bars which is scrutinizing consumption based services. So combined, 45% of respondents are looking at reducing their on demand spend. Now, some of that may be SaaS related, but most of the SaaS spend is committed, so pre-committed, but we do see organizations doing more audits and trying to eliminate or reduce orphaned licenses. Now the last data point that we want to focus on is the technology sectors that are of the highest priority. You can see here on the set of bars on the left while cybersecurity remains the top technology area, even this sector is showing a little bit of softness. What's really notable is the uptick in data related areas, that second set of bars, this category is now the second most cited, taking over from Cloud, which as you can see, remain strong, and of course Cloud continues to be a key component of digital transformations. As we've previously reported, machine learning, AI, and RPA are somewhat more strategic and more discretionary, and they've dropped below the 40% mark in terms of net score in the overall survey. We're not showing that data here, but we covered this in our last Breaking Analysis ahead of our UI path event. Now you have to remember these are the top seven sectors, and there are dozens in the ETR taxonomy, so making this list is goodness from a spending perspective. So even though there's some softness in most of these categories, these are the ones CIOs are most focused on addressing. So the big takeaways of this data are spending targets are coming down to the mid 5% range, but this is meaningfully higher than historical norms. And while CIOs, they are pumping the brakes on projects, they're still moving forward at rates faster than pre COVID levels and they're freezing fewer projects. Remember, this as well, this could be a skill shortage in play, but the slowdown is more likely related to the economic uncertainty. You know, we're seeing the two-sided coin of pay by the drink consumption models, right? You can dial it up as as you need to but you can also dial it down, and that's one of the alluring features of on demand. And we're seeing firms give more scrutiny to the Cloud bill, why wouldn't they? And there's a bit of unsurprising backlash to the flaws in today's SaaS pricing model that locks you in for specified terms. So people, when their term comes up are really going to scrutinize whether or not they have orphan licenses and try to reduce those. And it appears that the real savings can come from eliminating redundant vendors. That seems to be the biggest, you know, number one strategy, and that could favor some of the larger firms, think Oracle, Dell, Salesforce ServiceNow, IBM, HPE, Cisco, and others, you know, they may benefit from having more of larger footprint across the organization. You know, having that one throat to choke, you know one back to pat, as some like to say, but they could benefit those larger companies in least in the near term. Now having said that, we do see an uptick in data related areas as a priority for CIOs, and that could mean companies like Snowflake are in a strong position and can continue to thrive. You know, even though as we reported a couple of weeks ago, virtually all companies and sectors in the ETR data set are showing some softness related to spending a momentum from previous quarters. ETR will have its... will release its results next week and then we'll dig into the specific vendor action relative to previous quarters. So look, it feels like a meaningful slowdown but the sky is by no means falling. There are these kind of out of our control factors like interest rates, and Ukraine, and oil supply, and wages, et cetera, that are creating this uncertainty and causing firms to be more cautious. But generally we remain optimistic as leading tech companies are pretty well managed and have a lot of runway on the balance sheets, and can adjust costs to reflect the uncertain environment and remain flexible in their business models in doing so. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and he also manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Ken Schiffman is also out of our Boston studio as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who posts our Breaking Analysis and does some great editing. So thank you to all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, or feel free to comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave for the theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (relaxing music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The rapid pace of cloud adoption has changed the way organizations approach cybersecurity. Specifically, the cloud is increasingly becoming the first line of cyber defense. As such, along with communicating to the board and creating a security aware culture, the chief information security officer must ensure that the shared responsibility model is being applied properly. Meanwhile, the DevSecOps team has emerged as the critical link between strategy and execution, while audit becomes the free safety, if you will, in the equation, i.e., the last line of defense. Hello, and welcome to this week's, we keep on CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we'll share the latest data on hyperscale, IaaS, and PaaS market performance, along with some fresh ETR survey data. And we'll share some highlights and the puts and takes from the recent AWS re:Inforce event in Boston. But first, the macro. It's earning season, and that's what many people want to talk about, including us. As we reported last week, the macro spending picture is very mixed and weird. Think back to a week ago when SNAP reported. A player like SNAP misses and the Nasdaq drops 300 points. Meanwhile, Intel, the great semiconductor hope for America misses by a mile, cuts its revenue outlook by 15% for the year, and the Nasdaq was up nearly 250 points just ahead of the close, go figure. Earnings reports from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and some others underscored cautious outlooks, especially those exposed to the advertising revenue sector. But at the same time, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, were, let's say less bad than expected. And that brought a sigh of relief. And then there's Amazon, which beat on revenue, it beat on cloud revenue, and it gave positive guidance. The Nasdaq has seen this month best month since the isolation economy, which "Breaking Analysis" contributor, Chip Symington, attributes to what he calls an oversold rally. But there are many unknowns that remain. How bad will inflation be? Will the fed really stop tightening after September? The Senate just approved a big spending bill along with corporate tax hikes, which generally don't favor the economy. And on Monday, August 1st, the market will likely realize that we are in the summer quarter, and there's some work to be done. Which is why it's not surprising that investors sold the Nasdaq at the close today on Friday. Are people ready to call the bottom? Hmm, some maybe, but there's still lots of uncertainty. However, the cloud continues its march, despite some very slight deceleration in growth rates from the two leaders. Here's an update of our big four IaaS quarterly revenue data. The big four hyperscalers will account for $165 billion in revenue this year, slightly lower than what we had last quarter. We expect AWS to surpass 83 billion this year in revenue. Azure will be more than 2/3rds the size of AWS, a milestone from Microsoft. Both AWS and Azure came in slightly below our expectations, but still very solid growth at 33% and 46% respectively. GCP, Google Cloud Platform is the big concern. By our estimates GCP's growth rate decelerated from 47% in Q1, and was 38% this past quarter. The company is struggling to keep up with the two giants. Remember, both GCP and Azure, they play a shell game and hide the ball on their IaaS numbers, so we have to use a survey data and other means of estimating. But this is how we see the market shaping up in 2022. Now, before we leave the overall cloud discussion, here's some ETR data that shows the net score or spending momentum granularity for each of the hyperscalers. These bars show the breakdown for each company, with net score on the right and in parenthesis, net score from last quarter. lime green is new adoptions, forest green is spending up 6% or more, the gray is flat, pink is spending at 6% down or worse, and the bright red is replacement or churn. Subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score. One note is this is for each company's overall portfolio. So it's not just cloud. So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but there are a couple points worth noting. First, anything above 40% or 40, here as shown in the chart, is considered elevated. AWS, as you can see, is well above that 40% mark, as is Microsoft. And if you isolate Microsoft's Azure, only Azure, it jumps above AWS's momentum. Google is just barely hanging on to that 40 line, and Alibaba is well below, with both Google and Alibaba showing much higher replacements, that bright red. But here's the key point. AWS and Azure have virtually no churn, no replacements in that bright red. And all four companies are experiencing single-digit numbers in terms of decreased spending within customer accounts. People may be moving some workloads back on-prem selectively, but repatriation is definitely not a trend to bet the house on, in our view. Okay, let's get to the main subject of this "Breaking Analysis". TheCube was at AWS re:Inforce in Boston this week, and we have some observations to share. First, we had keynotes from Steven Schmidt who used to be the chief information security officer at Amazon on Web Services, now he's the CSO, the chief security officer of Amazon. Overall, he dropped the I in his title. CJ Moses is the CISO for AWS. Kurt Kufeld of AWS also spoke, as did Lena Smart, who's the MongoDB CISO, and she keynoted and also came on theCUBE. We'll go back to her in a moment. The key point Schmidt made, one of them anyway, was that Amazon sees more data points in a day than most organizations see in a lifetime. Actually, it adds up to quadrillions over a fairly short period of time, I think, it was within a month. That's quadrillion, it's 15 zeros, by the way. Now, there was drill down focus on data protection and privacy, governance, risk, and compliance, GRC, identity, big, big topic, both within AWS and the ecosystem, network security, and threat detection. Those are the five really highlighted areas. Re:Inforce is really about bringing a lot of best practice guidance to security practitioners, like how to get the most out of AWS tooling. Schmidt had a very strong statement saying, he said, "I can assure you with a 100% certainty that single controls and binary states will absolutely positively fail." Hence, the importance of course, of layered security. We heard a little bit of chat about getting ready for the future and skating to the security puck where quantum computing threatens to hack all of the existing cryptographic algorithms, and how AWS is trying to get in front of all that, and a new set of algorithms came out, AWS is testing. And, you know, we'll talk about that maybe in the future, but that's a ways off. And by its prominent presence, the ecosystem was there enforced, to talk about their role and filling the gaps and picking up where AWS leaves off. We heard a little bit about ransomware defense, but surprisingly, at least in the keynotes, no discussion about air gaps, which we've talked about in previous "Breaking Analysis", is a key factor. We heard a lot about services to help with threat detection and container security and DevOps, et cetera, but there really wasn't a lot of specific talk about how AWS is simplifying the life of the CISO. Now, maybe it's inherently assumed as AWS did a good job stressing that security is job number one, very credible and believable in that front. But you have to wonder if the world is getting simpler or more complex with cloud. And, you know, you might say, "Well, Dave, come on, of course it's better with cloud." But look, attacks are up, the threat surface is expanding, and new exfiltration records are being set every day. I think the hard truth is, the cloud is driving businesses forward and accelerating digital, and those businesses are now exposed more than ever. And that's why security has become such an important topic to boards and throughout the entire organization. Now, the other epiphany that we had at re:Inforce is that there are new layers and a new trust framework emerging in cyber. Roles are shifting, and as a direct result of the cloud, things are changing within organizations. And this first hit me in a conversation with long-time cyber practitioner and Wikibon colleague from our early Wikibon days, and friend, Mike Versace. And I spent two days testing the premise that Michael and I talked about. And here's an attempt to put that conversation into a graphic. The cloud is now the first line of defense. AWS specifically, but hyperscalers generally provide the services, the talent, the best practices, and automation tools to secure infrastructure and their physical data centers. And they're really good at it. The security inside of hyperscaler clouds is best of breed, it's world class. And that first line of defense does take some of the responsibility off of CISOs, but they have to understand and apply the shared responsibility model, where the cloud provider leaves it to the customer, of course, to make sure that the infrastructure they're deploying is properly configured. So in addition to creating a cyber aware culture and communicating up to the board, the CISO has to ensure compliance with and adherence to the model. That includes attracting and retaining the talent necessary to succeed. Now, on the subject of building a security culture, listen to this clip on one of the techniques that Lena Smart, remember, she's the CISO of MongoDB, one of the techniques she uses to foster awareness and build security cultures in her organization. Play the clip >> Having the Security Champion program, so that's just, it's like one of my babies. That and helping underrepresented groups in MongoDB kind of get on in the tech world are both really important to me. And so the Security Champion program is purely purely voluntary. We have over 100 members. And these are people, there's no bar to join, you don't have to be technical. If you're an executive assistant who wants to learn more about security, like my assistant does, you're more than welcome. Up to, we actually, people grade themselves when they join us. We give them a little tick box, like five is, I walk on security water, one is I can spell security, but I'd like to learn more. Mixing those groups together has been game-changing for us. >> Now, the next layer is really where it gets interesting. DevSecOps, you know, we hear about it all the time, shifting left. It implies designing security into the code at the dev level. Shift left and shield right is the kind of buzz phrase. But it's getting more and more complicated. So there are layers within the development cycle, i.e., securing the container. So the app code can't be threatened by backdoors or weaknesses in the containers. Then, securing the runtime to make sure the code is maintained and compliant. Then, the DevOps platform so that change management doesn't create gaps and exposures, and screw things up. And this is just for the application security side of the equation. What about the network and implementing zero trust principles, and securing endpoints, and machine to machine, and human to app communication? So there's a lot of burden being placed on the DevOps team, and they have to partner with the SecOps team to succeed. Those guys are not security experts. And finally, there's audit, which is the last line of defense or what I called at the open, the free safety, for you football fans. They have to do more than just tick the box for the board. That doesn't cut it anymore. They really have to know their stuff and make sure that what they sign off on is real. And then you throw ESG into the mix is becoming more important, making sure the supply chain is green and also secure. So you can see, while much of this stuff has been around for a long, long time, the cloud is accelerating innovation in the pace of delivery. And so much is changing as a result. Now, next, I want to share a graphic that we shared last week, but a little different twist. It's an XY graphic with net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the dataset on the horizontal. With that magic 40% red line as shown. Okay, I won't dig into the data and draw conclusions 'cause we did that last week, but two points I want to make. First, look at Microsoft in the upper-right hand corner. They are big in security and they're attracting a lot of dollars in the space. We've reported on this for a while. They're a five-star security company. And every time, from a spending standpoint in ETR data, that little methodology we use, every time I've run this chart, I've wondered, where the heck is AWS? Why aren't they showing up there? If security is so important to AWS, which it is, and its customers, why aren't they spending money with Amazon on security? And I asked this very question to Merrit Baer, who resides in the office of the CISO at AWS. Listen to her answer. >> It doesn't mean don't spend on security. There is a lot of goodness that we have to offer in ESS, external security services. But I think one of the unique parts of AWS is that we don't believe that security is something you should buy, it's something that you get from us. It's something that we do for you a lot of the time. I mean, this is the definition of the shared responsibility model, right? >> Now, maybe that's good messaging to the market. Merritt, you know, didn't say it outright, but essentially, Microsoft they charge for security. At AWS, it comes with the package. But it does answer my question. And, of course, the fact is that AWS can subsidize all this with egress charges. Now, on the flip side of that, (chuckles) you got Microsoft, you know, they're both, they're competing now. We can take CrowdStrike for instance. Microsoft and CrowdStrike, they compete with each other head to head. So it's an interesting dynamic within the ecosystem. Okay, but I want to turn to a powerful example of how AWS designs in security. And that is the idea of confidential computing. Of course, AWS is not the only one, but we're coming off of re:Inforce, and I really want to dig into something that David Floyer and I have talked about in previous episodes. And we had an opportunity to sit down with Arvind Raghu and J.D. Bean, two security experts from AWS, to talk about this subject. And let's share what we learned and why we think it matters. First, what is confidential computing? That's what this slide is designed to convey. To AWS, they would describe it this way. It's the use of special hardware and the associated firmware that protects customer code and data from any unauthorized access while the data is in use, i.e., while it's being processed. That's oftentimes a security gap. And there are two dimensions here. One is protecting the data and the code from operators on the cloud provider, i.e, in this case, AWS, and protecting the data and code from the customers themselves. In other words, from admin level users are possible malicious actors on the customer side where the code and data is being processed. And there are three capabilities that enable this. First, the AWS Nitro System, which is the foundation for virtualization. The second is Nitro Enclaves, which isolate environments, and then third, the Nitro Trusted Platform Module, TPM, which enables cryptographic assurances of the integrity of the Nitro instances. Now, we've talked about Nitro in the past, and we think it's a revolutionary innovation, so let's dig into that a bit. This is an AWS slide that was shared about how they protect and isolate data and code. On the left-hand side is a classical view of a virtualized architecture. You have a single host or a single server, and those white boxes represent processes on the main board, X86, or could be Intel, or AMD, or alternative architectures. And you have the hypervisor at the bottom which translates instructions to the CPU, allowing direct execution from a virtual machine into the CPU. But notice, you also have blocks for networking, and storage, and security. And the hypervisor emulates or translates IOS between the physical resources and the virtual machines. And it creates some overhead. Now, companies like VMware have done a great job, and others, of stripping out some of that overhead, but there's still an overhead there. That's why people still like to run on bare metal. Now, and while it's not shown in the graphic, there's an operating system in there somewhere, which is privileged, so it's got access to these resources, and it provides the services to the VMs. Now, on the right-hand side, you have the Nitro system. And you can see immediately the differences between the left and right, because the networking, the storage, and the security, the management, et cetera, they've been separated from the hypervisor and that main board, which has the Intel, AMD, throw in Graviton and Trainium, you know, whatever XPUs are in use in the cloud. And you can see that orange Nitro hypervisor. That is a purpose-built lightweight component for this system. And all the other functions are separated in isolated domains. So very strong isolation between the cloud software and the physical hardware running workloads, i.e., those white boxes on the main board. Now, this will run at practically bare metal speeds, and there are other benefits as well. One of the biggest is security. As we've previously reported, this came out of AWS's acquisition of Annapurna Labs, which we've estimated was picked up for a measly $350 million, which is a drop in the bucket for AWS to get such a strategic asset. And there are three enablers on this side. One is the Nitro cards, which are accelerators to offload that wasted work that's done in traditional architectures by typically the X86. We've estimated 25% to 30% of core capacity and cycles is wasted on those offloads. The second is the Nitro security chip, which is embedded and extends the root of trust to the main board hardware. And finally, the Nitro hypervisor, which allocates memory and CPU resources. So the Nitro cards communicate directly with the VMs without the hypervisors getting in the way, and they're not in the path. And all that data is encrypted while it's in motion, and of course, encryption at rest has been around for a while. We asked AWS, is this an, we presumed it was an Arm-based architecture. We wanted to confirm that. Or is it some other type of maybe hybrid using X86 and Arm? They told us the following, and quote, "The SoC, system on chips, for these hardware components are purpose-built and custom designed in-house by Amazon and Annapurna Labs. The same group responsible for other silicon innovations such as Graviton, Inferentia, Trainium, and AQUA. Now, the Nitro cards are Arm-based and do not use any X86 or X86/64 bit CPUs. Okay, so it confirms what we thought. So you may say, "Why should we even care about all this technical mumbo jumbo, Dave?" Well, a year ago, David Floyer and I published this piece explaining why Nitro and Graviton are secret weapons of Amazon that have been a decade in the making, and why everybody needs some type of Nitro to compete in the future. This is enabled, this Nitro innovations and the custom silicon enabled by the Annapurna acquisition. And AWS has the volume economics to make custom silicon. Not everybody can do it. And it's leveraging the Arm ecosystem, the standard software, and the fabrication volume, the manufacturing volume to revolutionize enterprise computing. Nitro, with the alternative processor, architectures like Graviton and others, enables AWS to be on a performance, cost, and power consumption curve that blows away anything we've ever seen from Intel. And Intel's disastrous earnings results that we saw this past week are a symptom of this mega trend that we've been talking about for years. In the same way that Intel and X86 destroyed the market for RISC chips, thanks to PC volumes, Arm is blowing away X86 with volume economics that cannot be matched by Intel. Thanks to, of course, to mobile and edge. Our prediction is that these innovations and the Arm ecosystem are migrating and will migrate further into enterprise computing, which is Intel's stronghold. Now, that stronghold is getting eaten away by the likes of AMD, Nvidia, and of course, Arm in the form of Graviton and other Arm-based alternatives. Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others are all designing custom silicon, and doing so much faster than Intel can go from design to tape out, roughly cutting that time in half. And the premise of this piece is that every company needs a Nitro to enable alternatives to the X86 in order to support emergent workloads that are data rich and AI-based, and to compete from an economic standpoint. So while at re:Inforce, we heard that the impetus for Nitro was security. Of course, the Arm ecosystem, and its ascendancy has enabled, in our view, AWS to create a platform that will set the enterprise computing market this decade and beyond. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Morrison, who is on production. And he does the podcast. And Ken Schiffman, our newest member of our Boston Studio team is also on production. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help spread the word on social media and in the community. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. He does some great, great work for us. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat theme music)

(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we've heard from the folks at Pluribus Networks and NVIDIA about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now, let's get the perspective from an independent analyst. And to do so, we welcome in ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte. Bob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our East Coast studios. >> Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> So this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's driving it? >> There's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the IT pendulum tends to swing back and forth, and we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it. And all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked, in one of our last surveys last year about network complexity, more than half, 54% came out and said, "Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be." And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility, yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, 9 out 10 organizations today are either beginning, in process, or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, and it probably shouldn't be a surprise, the number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility but I've created a lot of complexity. So now, I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experiences. >> Got it. I mean, I love how you bring in the data. ESG does a great job with that. The question is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink, kind of do over how networks are built? >> That's a really good point. Because certainly, unifying networks helps, right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers, are driving a lot more east-west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier. North-south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now, you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of microservices communicating with each other, users communicating to 'em. So there's a lot more traffic, and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you're starting to see as well, from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter-based, legacy, castle-and-moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. When everything's spread out, that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing organizations trying to make a shift. And I think much like, if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers in the SASE framework to enable a secure framework there, it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're fully protected. And that's really driving a lot of the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is really secure. Microsegmentation's another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're fully segmented out. And again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >> You mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword and now it's become a mandate. And I love the moat analogy. You build a moat to protect the queen in the castle. The queen's left the castle. It's just distributed. So how should we think about this Pluribus and NVIDIA solution? There's a spectrum. Help us understand that. You got appliances. You got pure software solutions. You got what Pluribus is doing with NVIDIA. Help us understand that. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, from a security perspective, they've got decentralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is, if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server, up through the rack, usually to a different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus, when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly, as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers, okay? So it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications. But the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility. >> Which they don't want to do. >> They don't want to do, right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Plus, when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there isn't going to do it. So when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly, the other side effects of that is the impact in the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers, because your CPUs are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what NVIDIA and Pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a SmartNIC, right, be able to deploy the DPU-based SmartNIC into the servers themselves, and then Pluribus has come in and said, "We're going to create that unified fabric across the networking space into those networking services all the way down to the server." So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPUs are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every round trip to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important, plus the fact that you're going to see, from an organizational aspect, we talked about the DevOps and NetOps teams, the network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies so that the DevOps teams don't have to worry about that. So essentially, they just create the guardrails and let the DevOps team run, 'cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >> Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or networking or security offload. And I've said many times, everybody needs a Nitro, like the Amazon Nitro. You can only buy Amazon Nitro if you go into AWS, right. But everybody needs a Nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >> Yeah, that's a great analogy to think about this. And I think I would take it a step further because it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum, because Pluribus and NVIDIA are doing this in a very open way. And so Pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So Leverage working with NVIDIA is also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations cannot only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric, across that environment from the server across the switches. The other key piece of what Pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications, supported by a unified cloud fabric from Pluribus. >> So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure right? >> Yeah, well, think what it does, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration, it helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same, unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications as well. >> Got it, so your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right, I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >> So I think, obviously, with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right, in different cloud environments, is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency, it's going to help them save money for visibility, for security, and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers, who are trying to build that hyperscale-like environment. You mentioned the Nitro card. This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >> Love it. Bob, thanks so much for coming in and sharing your insights. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome, thanks. >> All right, in a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on unified cloud networking and the key takeaways from today. You're watching "theCUBE", your leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here with John farrier. Welcome to the women in tech global event, featuring international women's day. John, this is an exciting day, March 8th, 2022. How did this all get started? >>Well, we started it out when we realized there was more stories to be told with virtual, with COVID. The virtualization of virtual events allowed us to do more stories. So we've been on this new format where we're creating seasons and episodic events, meaning you can still do an event and do 30 interviews like we're doing here for international women's day from around the world. We could have done a hundred there's enough stories out there. There's thousands of stories out there that need to be told, need to be scaled. And so we're just scratching the surface. So we are just starting to do is celebrate international women's day with as many videos we could do in a week, which is 30 and be part of widths and Stanford here in California, as part of their events with Stanford. And we're going to continue with international women's day. >>It's the big celebration, it's the big day, but then when it's over, we're going to continue with more episodes. So this is technically, I guess, season one episode, one of the international women's community site portal is going to be open and open to everyone. Who's going to be a community vibe and, uh, we'll get sponsors, but overall it's about bringing people together, creating tribes, letting people form their own communities and hopefully, uh, making the world a better place and supporting the mission, which is a great mission. Diversity inclusion and equity is a big mission. Uh, it's good for everyone. Everyone wins. >>Everyone does win. What are some of the interesting conversations that you've had with our international women's day guests that really were poignant to you? >>Well, the, one of the things was interesting by region. They had different kind of, um, feelings. The Asia Pacific was heavily skewed on a lot of international diversity around culture. Latin America was just all cloud computing. For instance, I felt that to be very technical, uh, more than agents in the interviews. Um, um, more diversity I study in Asia Pacific and Amy. It was really interesting because you have a lot going on there right now in Europe. So, um, and I'll see from a technical standpoint, data sovereignty and sustainability are two big themes. So from a tech trend standpoint, it was really amazing leaders. We interviewed, um, from technical, uh, folks to analysts, to senior executives in the C-suite. So it really good mix of people in the program. Uh, for today, >>We also had a young girl that I had the chance to speak with her and her father. And it was such a lovely conversation cause it reminded me of my dad's relationship with me. But she was told in high school age, no, you can't do physics. No, you can't do computer science. So the parents pulled her out of school. And so the, and she's brand new in her career path. And it was so nice to hear, to see that, that family, the role models within the family saying she wants to do physics and computer science. Let's find a place for her to be able to do that and have her start being able to, to build her own personal board of directors. At the age of like 22, 23, >>We hit an entrepreneur down in New Zealand. I interviewed she was from indigenous area and she had no milk or food on the table. They were so poor. They could barely get food. She worked her way through it and went to school. Education was number when it goes, she was so persistent, she got her education. And now she's the CEO of an AI company, amazing person. And she's like, Hey, there's no wall I can't run through. So that attitude was just so refreshing. And that was a consistent this year and it wasn't an in your face. It was just more of we're here, we're kicking butt. So let's keep it going. So on the entrepreneurial side, I found that really awesome on the senior leadership side, it was very much, um, community oriented, very open about sharing their experiences and also being a sponsor. So you're going to hear a lot about breaking the bias, but it's also about sponsoring opportunities and then helping people get involved so that they can get understand biases because everyone brings biases to the table. So I personally learned a lot this, this, this, uh, event. >>Yeah. I think the, the light that was shined on the bias was incredibly important. You know, the break, the bias, as you said, is the theme of this year's international women's day. And I, and I asked everybody that I spoke with, what does that mean to you? And where do you think we are on that journey? A world free of bias and stereotypes and discrimination. Obviously we're not there yet, but a lot of the women talked about the fact that that light is shining brightly, that the awareness is there, that for diversity equity and inclusion and having that awareness, there is a great launching launching pad, if you will, for being able to make more progress on actually breaking the bias. >>Yeah. That was a great point. I would also say to add to that by saying a lot of comments were on the same theme of check your bias when you fall, you speak in meetings. And it was just a lot of like protocol tactical, uh, ways to do things like, think about other people in the room versus just barreling ahead. Most guys do that actually. Um, and so that was another instructful thing. I think the other thing too was is that there was, again, more and more sharing. I mean, we had one person that you interviewed, her name was Anne green. Yeah. She's doing her own series. Uh, we're content. She's interviewing people, she's being a mentor and sharing it through content, Manny theory of AWS in Singapore, she's in space and Aero science talking about how the satellites are helping in the Ukraine, give information to everyone on the ground, not just governments and that's helping democracy. And that she's really excited that that contributes to some good there. Um, and she fled from a town where it was bombed. She was in a war zone and she escaped and got educated. So education's a theme. Um, don't let anyone tell you, you can't do it. Uh, and don't think there's only one pathway, right? This is tons of opportunities for participating in the tech economy for good, uh, in, in, in tech. So those are the keys. >>That's always been one of my favorite themes when we do women in tech events, John is that there is no direct pathway necessarily. I always love understanding those stories, but this year, one of the things that also was really clear was that women feeling what can't I do. And that sentiment was really echoed throughout. I think everybody that I spoke with that there was no, can I do this? Why can't I Not confidence? Which is palpable. Even when you're doing an interview by zoom, you can feel it. You can be inspired by, >>Well, at least a year, you do all the, a lot of the interviews. You're the face I had, you know, step aside for you because you're amazing. But one of the things you, you get appreciate this and love to get your reaction. One of the things I observed this year was because it was international focus, there was huge cube demand to be come to their region. We had one of the guests that won from Bahrain. She's like, I'll do the cube here. I'll be the host. So I think there was a real appetite for this kind of open dialogue conversations where they want the cube to come to their area. And so I know anyone watching wants to be a cube host in those areas, let us know, um, we're open. And to me that was more refreshing. Cause you know, me, I always wanna see the cube global go everywhere. But this year people are actually turning on their own cameras. They're doing their own interviews. They're sharing content and content creates community and bonding. And that was the big experience I saw this year was a lot more user generated activity engagement with each other in the group. >>I think that may have even been a product of the last two years of the pandemic of people really understanding the importance of community and collaboration and that it can be done via if you're only limited to video, you can do that. You can build a community and grow it and foster it in that way and create the content that really helps support it. >>That's a great point. That's actually one of the guests said COVID polled the future forward and digital. We see the value and other on the cyber side, um, Sally, as I mentioned there, um, earlier who we interviewed before, she's a cyber policy analyst and she's so smart. She's like, yeah, this is putting fold forward. And people understand cyber now, cyber misinformation, cyber war, the role of working at home, being isolated versus community. These are core societal issues that need to be solved and it's not just code that solves them. So it's going to be solved by the community. And that's really, that was the key. One of the key messages. It was very refreshing. >>It was very refreshing. I always love hearing the stories. I, the more personal the story, the more real it is and the more opportunities I think that it unlocks for the audience watching. Yeah, >>I mean, we had one person said she did a project on the side. It's going to be your big initiative within Amazon. You know, Amazon, one of our sponsors has a slogan think big, but deep dive deep. And she took a project on about educating, um, young girls and young women. And it turned out to be basically a build lab inside schools. And it took off. It is so successful side project, side hustle gone, gone big. So again, sparks of creativity, innovation can come from anywhere. It's just great stories. >>Another thing that came up in several of the conversations that I had was the data, the data that support that organizations that have at least 30% females at the executive level are better performing organizations. They are more profitable as well. So it was fun to kind of call out if we're talking about data science, what not the data that supports why international women's day is what it is, why it's becoming even bigger than that and the importance of showcasing those voices so that she can be what she can see. >>Yeah. Amazing stories. I got to say it again. I think the virtual studios where we have now with the pandemic is going to give us much more opportunities to get those stories out. And Lisa, you've done an amazing job. Your interviews were awesome. Thank you. And we can do a hundred. We'll give you a hundred interviews a week. >>We can, are you setting me up? No, it was fun. The international influence this year was fun. I mean, I think I started one of my interview days at 6:00 AM and it was just exciting to be able to connect to different parts of the world and to hear these stories and for the cube to be able to be the platform that is sharing all of that >>And the diversity of the interviews itself and the diversity of the environments that for instance, in Asia Pacific and your are diverse areas and they see it it's much further along. They live it every day. They know the benefits. So that again, that was another aha moment for us, I think this year. >>So how many, how many segments do we have for international women's day John >>30 segments, uh, 32 counting our little segments here. So 32 interviews. Um, we're going to probably add a section on the site for people to submit stories like a directory, uh, this, a zillion things going on, women of web three, Sandy, Carter's putting on an event. I know there's a security called. She S she scarcity events, she security, uh, going on women in security. Um, there's tons of activities it's vibrant tomorrow. Today. It'll be very much bumping up. So we'll try to curate as much links as possible. >>Awesome. John has been great doing this program with you. I look forward to seeing the interviews and being inspired by the many, many stories. You're going to be watching the cubes coverage of women in tech global event, featuring international women's day for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll see you soon.

>>Welcome everybody to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 we're in person for a real event to live stages, to remain studios, probably the industry's most important hybrid event of the year. Over 100 guests on the cube at AWS reinvent 2021. All right, so let's get right into it. This is 10 years of re-invent. We've been here for nine 20 plus thousand people. Everybody is coming from every industry, learning from each other, learning from AWS, learning from the things that you're observing as well. Of course, last year during the lockdown reinvent was purely virtual. Obviously the pandemic change the world for everyone. We went from thinking about the future to really just trying to make it through the next few weeks. Everybody was scrambling. What do we do? How do we pivot? How do we survive? Mode Wiley gloves, all a very bad thing, but it actually help accelerate customer journey to cloud. We saw a ton of digital innovation, >>Really looking to data and analytics and machine learning to find new opportunities, >>Some returned to the office, but now they have the tools to be able to stay at home and be more flexible. Pandemic has proven a lot of people that digital works here, but it's suppose, but it doesn't work. Every company has to be a data company. It's actually a mustache. And so is location data. They go >>Typically that data with some point we'll come back into the cloud into S3, but it will be used to do heavy duty training. And then those models get pushed back up to the us >>On the ground of all the grown under the drone. It instances where they either can't move or won't move, but their resources into the cloud. There's no conductivity latency comes up a lot in edge conversations. The value is the immediacy. Understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. You know, the edge, these are resorts. That's more DME they've done the full cloud in AWS regions. Cloud is something that's changing the world for a lot of customers. Obviously there's cost reasons. There's MNA reasons, remove complexity from users and make it really easy for new workloads to be added to the system. You can leverage all their AIML tools, IOT edge container, block chain, where the most complete portfolio of any cloud provider when it comes to storage and data virtually infinite resources. Now at your disposal. The last thing we wanted to be is a server huggers. We're ready to accelerate these transformations. We actually had an enterprise migrate one of the largest production applications in just four days. How do we secure our data? When we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations >>And decide who's allowed to see it, what they're allowed to see. And if you want to change your mind, you can do that instantly. And all access can be locked. >>Governance should be an enabler, not an inhibitor. You then have the modern apps. The modern apps to me are inherently iterative and inherently scalable and a amenable to change. It's not just the applications, analytics, it's AI, it's machine learning. Human interpretation is pretty talent, I would say. So that's where he comes in to augment the intelligence that we have in terms of extracting information. Now it's true infrastructure as code. If I'm spinning up servers, that means that's a low level primitive. That should be automated. Right? When we look at how we are to move up the stack and other areas, we just continue to listen to our customers. What is your business strategy and your business vision, and how do we design the technology solutions? Working back from that, using tools like insights in order to give customers advice. If you have found good, you have an idea. >>You know, the thing that he wants to disrupt, and we're letting people do that in different ways, giving control back to the end user, whether that's a consumer or an enterprise, they want to say I like it. And then I get the market is deciding I'm going to go with my software runs the best that's right. I get distribution that create value and runs fast. Our vision is eventually to have a community of about 10 to 20 million of the most extraordinary doers in the world. But really the goal is how can customers get value as quickly as possible for as low cost as possible. Point it out black and white. This is your cost. Now this is what your cost is going to be. And everybody's happy. There's a huge ecosystem of data tools out there. That's right, that you guys have as partners that want to snap together. >>So the trend is things are starting to snap together. We talk about the power of three, which is you bring a JSI partner, you bring an ISV partner, you bring AWS, you create that power of three and you take it to all customers. And you can start for a few pennies scale up, you know, into the petabytes and beyond. They have a better don't think that you wish you were 20. Again, with all this code out there, the next 15 years about opportunity transforming faster decision making your work now is to really drive the data cloud, get adoption of build that Supercloud we call it container first, cloud native first, and then make sure that everybody's kind of on that same ship running in the same direction. Five to 15% only of workloads have moved to the cloud. We're at the Dawn of the era of cloud. >>There's plenty of room for a lot of players. They can't hire enough developers. So this is the other thing that's happened during the pandemic. The war for talent is on talent is truly evenly split around the world. But what is not as opportunity in order to enable talent, do you need to educate them? Our skill builder platform provides 500 free training courses in 16 languages press 200 countries. We attract, we retain, we grow. The opportunity for innovation is limitless, and it's all about we're wrapping up four days of coverage. Two sets you go to the events and expect the signal from the noise. Stay tuned because there's always more on the cube. The global leader in live tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

>>Hey, everyone, welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Pleased to be here with an agreement ahead of small medium business SMB for Asia Pacific and Japan at Amazon Web services. Anna. It's great to have you on the programme, >>Lisa. I am delighted to be here and really excited to be talking about what we're gonna be talking about today, which is diversity and women in technology. >>One of the great things about International Women's Day Tuesday, March 8th, is there's always a campaign of theme. This year's theme is breaking the bias. What does that mean to you? And are we on our way to actually accomplish that? >>Look, Breaking the bias really is about all of us being more self aware in our workplaces. Really. What it means to me is understanding that the communities and the employment, the employee population, that all of us working is diverse. Um, and this is a great example of that, right? We are a global organisation and our employees come from across the world. I am representing people from across Asia Pacific and Japan. They look, feel and think differently to people in other parts of the world. So, really, what breaking the biases about is understanding our unconscious biases and thinking differently about how we approach conversations in the workplace to make sure that we're including everyone in the conversation. And honestly, Lisa, when you do that, you get much better. Business outcomes. I've seen that for sure. >>Definitely. There's some stats we can talk about later that I think really articulate that point incredibly well. But I want to talk about your background. You pivoted many times from lawyer to the CEO of ANZ Bank in the Philippines to now a leader at Amazon Web services. Talk to you about your career path with all those different pivots. How did you get to where you are tonight? >>Yeah, I mean, honestly, I recognise that I don't have a traditional Orthodox career plan, but that's my intention. I'm somebody who has always been really interested in the world around me, and I would say that my biggest driver is learning and being curious, which, as you know, is an Amazon leadership principles. So it's probably not a surprise that I ended up here at Ws, but really for me when I thought about my career and I have thought about it intentionally. I've been willing to put my hand up and take risks where I think probably others around me were not feeling as safe, and that's that's a function of who I am. But it's also a function of what I see women wanting to and needing to do more in order to bring their career forward. So as you say, I started my I had a pure technical lens when I started my career, which was being a lawyer, and there's been a lot of time just learning that and holding that skill set, I knew Lisa even then that that was not what I wanted to do forever. I wanted to do more than simply sit in an office and negotiate documents. Um, even though that was an exciting career, there was more that I wanted to do. So off the back of that, I moved into banking and was able to to learn and build some really important skill sets in terms of thinking about being a leader. And those skill sets include things like running a balance sheet, managing people thinking differently about risking compliance, which then allowed me to guess, run a bank and run the business. And then finally, how did I then pivot into technology? Well, it was a long conversation. If I'm honest with you, you know, there were there were conversations back and forth and I thought to myself and doing the right thing here. But what I could see for sure was that the world was moving to a technological context and for me not to take an opportunity to do it. A job like running a technology business across Asia, particularly Japan, just It just wasn't a possibility for me. I had to take the opportunity. So here I am, >>And that's one of the most exciting things I think is that these days every company has to be a tech company. Every company has to be a data company, a digital company with one of the lessons we've learned in the last couple of years. But another thing that we've learned is you mentioned skill sets. But it isn't just about those hard skill sets. What are some of those key soft skill sets that you think are really outstanding and really help to break down the bias. >>Yeah, again, Really interesting. So as I'm talking to women, when they hear about my career journey, a lot of them are surprised. How could you move into technology? And I think the challenge is that a lot of women view technology simply as a coding context. They view it as something that only someone with technical skills can do, and that is simply not the case. So if you look at a recent study by Deloitte Access Economics in Australia, for instance, the soft, skill intensive occupations are going to account for two thirds of all jobs by 2030. So if you think about that having a pure technical skill set, so certainly if you're going to do something like be a solutions architect or be a coda, it's really important that you must have those skills. But technology businesses are building and growing like no other, so we need all of those soft skills, like project management like P and L. Accountability and responsibility, like learning how to manage teams. These are caused fuels that have nothing to do with kind of fundamental technology, understanding that business contacts is important, but there are a lot of women out there who could be working in technology now but are a little bit scared to do so because they're thinking maybe they don't have the skills and I would encourage them to think differently. >>I think your your background with your pivots is a great articulation of you can take so many different backgrounds law banking into tech There's probably a fair amount of overlap there, but you also have you have in and of yourself thought diversity because of your background. I think that's another important thing for women to learn how important that thought diversity can be in any sort of job that they do, whether they are in a technical field. Or maybe they're in finance or operations or sales for a technology company. You guys talk about builders at A. W S. Talk to me about what a builder is, what's that definition and one of some of those key skill sets hard and soft that those builders exemplify. >>Yeah, so we are very build focused at AWS because we're building on behalf of our customers. But what that means is that the trays that make you a builder are exemplified by our leadership principles. So things like being curious. As you just pointed out, Lisa, these are the tenants of being a good builder, um, pursuing continuous learning. So whilst you you may know that you're good at something, you're not scared of trying something else. You're not scared of training and learning about something else. Being able to look around corners, um, and take calculated risks. I mean, whilst it may sound like my career journey has been pivot, pivot, pivot. Actually, if we're honest that these have been very intentional moves that I've made with my career to try to learn, as I said, to try to grow, um, and I've been fortunate and have been intentional also about building that leadership profile, But that's because I'm really fundamentally interested in how business and how people are connecting across the world. And as I said to you in a building context, really, that's about learning about how to build and run digital businesses. And at the end of the day is I guess the key message that I would send to everyone out there getting involved in a career in technology is not a bad move. >>No, it's definitely not a bad movie. I love the curiosity angle. That's one of those things that I'd love to hear. How do you encourage that? One of the biggest challenges. If we look at the stats of girls in stem programmes, from primary school to high school to university, as we see the numbers going down, we see them going up in university. And then, of course, when we're in, we're looking at the raw tech numbers. The number of women in technical positions is quite low to your point. There's many other opportunities besides technical positions. How do you encourage women to not be afraid to raise their hand and ask a question, even if they think maybe this is a dumb question? >>Uh, it's such a I think, you know, honestly, we need to see more women in leadership roles. Um, and, uh, and I think it's incumbent upon the organisations that are are running our businesses, that they make this a priority because you can't see I'm sorry. You can't be what you can't see Lisa, Um, and so it's great for us to talk about it. But once we start seeing women having active business, led conversations. That's where we're really going to see the dial shift. I have a 13 year old daughter, Um, and she's deeply interested in everything on her computer. Um, and what I try to do is encourage her to think differently about the type of roles that she could have if she was interested in, say, for instance, graphic design. She loves drawing, Um, singing. There are so many ways you can do all those YouTube videos. Maybe not, but you know, ways in which you can engage with technology to pursue a career that's interesting to you, regardless of your gender. So maybe the first part is making sure that we are talking about female leaders and what they're doing. I think also what we can do is start building programmes where we're involving women in building skills and certification skills. So here we've got this amazing event which we've built called She builds and I'm an active mentor for that. And what that's all about is kind of connecting women in the tech community and those who are interested with programmes that really speak to the way that women are thinking about their roles. So we have like minded peers. We have senior leaders, We have certification skills, programmes, always part of that, and we also have male allies. It's really important to include our male allies in that conversation, and you will have heard about things like male champions of change. These are very important conversations because again, what we know from statistics is that women are not as likely to build networks and sponsors as men are. And that's not statement of Miss Mala intense. What it means is that they just learn differently and think differently as they're building their careers. So if we're starting to get a man involved in the conversation in a more meaningful way, it's a conversation that's inclusive, and that's really what I want to drive. So I'm not sure I answered your question, but I certainly got to a couple of points that I was interested in highlighting, which is it's a conversation that has to happen at a grassroots level at a leadership level and across the organisation in terms of metrics, data understanding where women are and how to build and grow them >>right. But one of the things that you said that I was about to say was, We can't be what we can't see. We need to be able to elevate those female leaders like yourself so that more younger women and even women who maybe have been in the field for a while, can see the opportunities, the leadership. But you also brought up another great point. And that is, and something I was going to ask you about who are who are some of your mentors. And I imagine it's not just all females. It's got to be men as well. As you point out, it's incredibly important to have the men as allies. >>Yeah, absolutely. And certainly I wouldn't even be having this conversation with you now if I didn't have some amazing allies, both men and women, by my side as I've tracked this leadership journey. Certainly, um, Phil Davis, who is the head of our commercial organisation, Greg Pearson. These are people who have taken time out of their careers to talk with me about how we can help to build and grow women leaders, and to me, that's impactful. And I feel that that's an authentic engagement because there is a recognition in technology that we need to do more around this issue, and I see senior leaders like Matt Garman leading into the conversation. So for me, that's that's very inspiring. But I can't I couldn't have answered that question without telling you that the people who probably inspired me most in the organisation and within my network are those young women out there who are female founders. Now you know, I'm going to have to say a couple of names because I get the opportunity. Lisa, I've got a part of the networking, a women's networking, um, and mentoring organisation. And we have women here in Singapore like Ping Ping Han, who is building out an environmental education and sustainability digital business. We've got Francesco Cuccia, who is building Go get. She's already built it, which is an on demand workforce platform, which has over 250,000 people online that are helping people in Malaysia to work and has helped immensely during Covid. So what we're seeing with these young women is that they're actually building the digital businesses of the future, and it's not about, I mean, what I'm seeing them do is invest their time and energy in building. As I said, kind of programmes and models that are sustainable. So they're building businesses not just for the bottom line, but also to help the communities in which we operate, which to me is deeply inspirational. >>Absolutely. And the female founders need much more visibility than they're getting and obviously much more funding. One last point that I want to bring up because this is really important is that there is some data that I know that you have about performance company performance. When there are females at the helm, talk to me a little bit about that, and how can we help get that word out there more? Some more organisations understand the potential they have when they got that thought. Diversity. >>Yeah, it's such a wonderful point, and it's so well made now across the across media. But I feel like we need to double down on it because this is not a piecemeal conversation about doing the right thing. Um, sometimes we view it that way, and of course it is the right thing to have equity and diversity in our workplace. But in fact, there's so much data around how a diverse workforce creates better outcomes for business So in 2020 we had a McKenzie survey that found that companies with more than 30% of women executives were more likely to outperform companies with this percentage. So there is now a huge amount of data that's starting to show us what a diverse. And this is not just about gender. This is also about diversity across various lenses culture, ethnicity, minority groups, etcetera. So and for me, Lisa, it's just common sense. So if you're building a business that is trying to reach the most number of customers, it really is intuitive that you need to have all of those customers represented around the table. If you only have a single point of view, you're not going to represent all of those customers out there. And increasingly, those customers are expecting to be represented as part of your conversation in your business. So it totally makes sense from a business lens to build and recruit a diverse workforce. >>I couldn't agree more. One. I like to have one more question. Talk to me really quickly, briefly about how how are you building your teams to promote effectiveness through that diversity that, as you just described, can be so leading edge. >>Yeah, So what I'm doing is being intentional in my hiring practises. So this is something that all leaders can do. >>And that is really >>carefully about filling the roles in my organisation, where I'm given a role to fulfil, making sure that I'm looking at that diverse candidates, not just the same candidates who might have applied before. And that means sometimes throwing the net a bit wider than what you might usually have and thinking differently about the candidates that are applying. So, for instance, in my team, we have 50 50 men and women. Um, and we all come from very diverse backgrounds. We've got Indian, we've got Singaporean, we've got Australian talent, which means we've got a gender and cultural mix, which is actually, as I said, bringing a very different lens to the conversation when we're trying to solve customer problems. And what I would say is collaboration and respect is the cornerstone of the way that we should be. Building teams and diverse perspectives mean that our teams and the outcomes that we build are going to reflect the complexity of both the cross cultural and the divers, gender lens within which all of our customers are doing business today. >>Anna, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about the intentional pivots that you've made in your career, how inspiring those are two others and also how we're making progress on breaking the bias. My pleasure. >>Lisa. It's wonderful to join you. And thank you always think you for bringing us so much interesting data >>for Anna Greene. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cubes. Coverage of International Women's Showcase 2022.

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome to the Cuba's International Women's Showcase, featuring International Women's Day. I'm John, host of the Kiwi here in California. Great remote guest. She's amazing founder and C e O of Cuba, and great to see you. Okay, thanks for coming on. Um, good to see you. >>You as well. Always a pleasure. You >>know, International Women's Day is the big celebration. We're doing a lot of interviews with great people making things happen, moving and shaking things. Um, but every day, International Women's Day, As far as I'm concerned, it's happening all around the world. But these are stories of innovation, the stories of changes, the stories of transformation for the better. You've been doing a lot of things. Um and I want to get into that. But let's start with your background. Tell us a bit about who you are and what you've got going on. >>Yeah, my background is a little strange. I used to be a maritime archaeologists. So dumb shit breaks for a little bit. That was amazing. I always just It's only partial just because it's actually a bit of truth to it, that learning how to, you know, handle things at depth really does train you to be a C e o. Because you learn to control your breath and and focus on the things that matter and not be so reactive because it's three activity that will panic that will kill you. Uh, always knowing how to reframe. Return to the basics. Um, there's a really good things to hold on to, even in the world of business. Right? So I at some point, ended up doing doing a lot of things. Largely business development, following my time diving and amazing woman. Um, another woman for International Women's Day named Doctor who was a biotech entrepreneur from Japan, stepping down as her role at the helm of her company. Um, and she wanted to launch a space for a young innovators from around the world who are doing amazing work to tackle this very complex challenges we all know exist, um, and figure out a way to give them time and space to do their best work and pursue their their highest visions for change. We decided that we would focus on for-profit companies largely who were using sustainable, scalable business models to pursue both profit and purpose. Um creating a virtuous cycle between the return of money to a company and putting that into to go even further and faster towards, um, solving a problem. Um, so we now have companies over 200 companies from around the world that we have helped support tackling every single, sustainable development goal. Um, and I'm proud to say, you know, particularly related to the subject that fifty-nine percent of our companies have a woman founder or CO-FOUNDER. Um, and 69% of the founder of color. Um, so we're working with entrepreneurs from every every area of the world. Many approximate to the problem that they are trying to solve, so they intimately understand it. Um, and they're doing amazing things. >>Yeah, you can help the great mission. You have a lot of other things going on your helping women encouraging them to your career in the tech sector. Um, good statistics could be better, right? Is higher and better. So, um, what are you guys doing? What, you specifically to help and encourage women to forge their career and tech? >>Yeah. I mean, look, the good news is I do think that it's getting better. I particularly think that we will see the adventure is improving. Um, it takes a while because the companies that have been funded up until now are still working in the biggest amount in the later stages. So I think that percentage hasn't been shifting. But I have to believe that that's a bit of an illusion, and then a couple of years, we're going to start to sea level out. But you know as well as I do that they're pretty poultry statistics in terms of the amount of venture that women like cos. Capture, Um, and the other ways that women are doubted, um, in terms of their ability and potential. Um, so we we love to work with any underrepresented group of entrepreneurs, and there's ways that we do that whether it's helping them sort of find their power and hold space and be confident. And, um, you know, be able to pitch to any room, talk to any investor, talk to any customer but also working to be directed about some of the systemic challenges, both in terms of talking to existing investors and trying to educate them to see the opportunities that they're missing because there is a an economic imperative to them understanding what they're missing. Um, but there's also some things that we're doing in-house to make sure that we're also helping to close capital gaps for all our entrepreneurs. So we actually now have a suite of three capital mechanisms that are entrepreneurs can access on the back end of our incubator, a microphone fund, which is very quick turnaround, small amounts of capital for entrepreneurs who existing opportunities owns, which is a tax destination. Just this in the U. S. But that's meant to be deployed so that they can access capital towards revenue without credit checks, collateral being put up, a slow moving pace of banks and C. D. S s. It's particularly useful for people who may not raise venture. And it's useful for, uh, you know, people who maybe don't have that friends and family check that they can expect similar. We've got a great angel network who look at the best impact deals from around the world. Um, and it doesn't have to be a housing company, just a great venture that's pursuing impact on profit. Um, and then lastly, we're just about to announce that we have a fund of our own on the back end of our incubator that funds only healthy and companies. Um, it's an early stage fund. Um, but watch this space because our pipeline is just increasing your every year. We used to sort of just 16 companies here. Now, we're serving 60 this year, so, um, yeah, it's really exciting. Um, and so obviously, it's really great that, you know, we're going to be able to help scale the impact that we want to see. Uh, ideally a lot. A lot faster. >>Well, you definitely taking control. I remember when we had a few years ago. I think four years ago, you just thinking about getting going and going now with great tailwind. Um, >>and the diversity >>of sources of capital as well as diversity of firms is increasing. That's helping, uh, that we're seeing, but you're also got the back end fun for the housing companies. But also, you've been involved in we capital for a long time. Can you talk about that? Because that's a specific supporting women entrepreneurs initiative. Um, yeah. What's up with capital share? That >>was That was another venture that I-i embarked on with such coz. Um as well as Sheila Johnson and Jonny Adam, Person who runs Rethink Impact. We capital is a group of about 16 women that I pulled together women investors to invest through rethink impact, which is another fun that is looking for impact businesses but predominantly looking for those businesses that are led by women. So this investment group is women supporting women. Um, through the use of deployment of capital, um, they're doing amazingly well. They've had some really stunning news recently that I'll let you dig up. >>I'll definitely thanks for the lead there. I'm gonna go jump on that story. >>Yeah, >>the Okay, Thanks for that lead on that trend, though in Silicon Valley and certainly in other areas that are hot like New York, Boston and D. C. Where you're at, um, you're seeing now multiple years in almost a decade in of the pioneers of these women, only funds or women only firms and your investment. Um, and it's starting to increase to under all underrepresented minorities and entrepreneurs. Right? So take us through how you see that because it's just getting more popular. Is that going to continue to accelerate in your mind? Are their networks of networks. They cross pollinating. >>Yeah, I think you know, it's It's I'm glad to see it. And, you know, it's been a long time coming. I think you know, I think we all look forward to a future where it's not necessary. Um, and you know, funds. Just invest in everyone Until then, making sure that we have specific pools of capital allocated to ensure that that, you know, those entrepreneurs who have not always been equally represented get to pursue their ideas not just because they deserve to pursue their ideas, but because the world needs their ideas. Right. And as I mentioned, there is a business imperative, right? We've got lots of examples of businesses like banks that you wouldn't have gotten a shot just because the investors just didn't understand the opportunity. Um, and I think that's normal. That's human. It happens to everyone. You are successful as an investor largely because you recognize patterns. And if something is, you know, outside of your life experience, you are not going to identify it. So it's very important that we create different kinds of capital run by different types of people. Um, and, uh, and you know. I know lots of investors have every type that are investing in these funds because they recognize that, you know, perhaps the highest growth potential is gonna come out of these, you know, particular kind of funds, which is really exciting. >>That's super important, because half the world is women, and that's just like the population is inspired by many new ventures. And that's super exciting trend. I wanna ask you about your other areas of doing a lot of work in the queue has been to buy multiple times, um, initially reporting on a region out there, and that's certainly isn't important part of the world. Um, you've got a lot of good news going on there. Can you share what's going on with, uh, the social entrepreneurship going on in Bahrain around the region? >>Yeah, I'm happy to. We we've actually been so privileged to work with a W S for a very long time. Almost since the start of the incubator they've supported are entrepreneurs, all of our entrepreneurs with access to cloud credits and services. Um, and we've sort of double down with a W S in the last couple of years in areas where We both want to create an uplift, um, for small businesses and rapidly growing tax solutions to these these social environmental problems. We see. So there's been an excellent partner to do that. And one of the areas we did in the water was with rain, particularly with women, tech startups, women tech startups in Bahrain. Yeah, we did that last year. We had an amazing group of women over in D. C. Um, and we continue to support them. One of them is actually in the process of raising. I think she just closed her seed round recently. And that's why for, um, al yet, um, and she created playbook, which is an amazing, uh, platform for women to take master classes and network and really sort of level up, as one says, Um, but also, um, the mall of work. Um uh, just really talented women over in Bahrain, um, pushing the envelope and all sorts of directions, and it was wonderful to get the opportunity to work with them. Um, that has now spawned another set of programs serving entrepreneurs in the Middle East in North Africa. They were also working on with us as well as the U S. State Department. Um, so we're going to be working for the next two years with entrepreneurs to help our recovery from covid. Um, in China. Um, and then I'm also proud to say that we're working with a W s in South Africa because there is just an extraordinary energy, you know, in the continent, Um, and some amazing entrepreneurial minds working on, you know, the many problems and opportunities that they're facing and recognizing. Um So we're supporting, you know, companies that are working on finding, um, skilled refugees to be able to help them resettle and use their talents and make money. Um, sadly, are very relevant company now with what's going on in Ukraine. Um, but also, uh, zombie and satellite company, um, companies that are preventing food, food waste by providing, um, solar-powered refrigerators to rural areas in South Africa. Um, so a lot of, um, you know, just incredible talent and ideas that we're seeing globally. Um, and happy to be doubling down on that with the help of a W s. >>That's awesome. Yeah, following the work when we met in D. C. And again, you always had this international view um it's International Women's Day. It's not North America >>Women's Day. It's >>International Women's Day. Can you share your thoughts on how that landscape is changing outside the U. S. For example, and around the world and how the international peace is important and you mentioned pattern matching? Um, you also, when you see patterns, they become trends. What do you see forming that have been that that are locked in on the U. C they're locked in on that are happening that are driving. What are some of those trends that you see on the international side that's evolving? >>Yeah. You know, I think the wonderful opportunity with the Internet and social media is that, you know, both, uh, we can be more transparent about areas for improvement and put a little pressure where maybe things are moving fast enough. We've all seen the power of that, Um, the other, um, you know, things that certainly in countries where women maybe as free to move and operate, they can still acquire skills education they can set up cos they can do so so much. Um, you know, through these amazing technologies that we now have at our disposal growing an amazing rates. Um, they can connect via zoom. Right? I think that while the pandemic definitely set women back and we should acknowledge that, um, uh, the things that the pandemic perhaps helped us to exponentially scale will move women forward. And perhaps that's the target to hang on to, to feel optimistic about where we're headed. >>And also, there's a lot of problems to solve. And I think one of the things we're seeing you mentioned the Ukraine situation. You're seeing the geopolitical landscape changing radically with technology driving a lot of value. So with problems comes opportunities. Um, innovation plays a big role. Can you share some of the successful stories that you were inspired by that you've seen, um, in the past couple of years. And as you look forward, what What some of those innovation stories look like? And what are you inspired by? >>Yeah. I mean, there's so, so many. Um, you know, we just, uh, had a couple of entrepreneurs, and just the last year, Um, you know, after I think everyone sort of took an initial breath with the pandemic, They realize that they either had an opportunity or they had a problem to solve to your point. Um, and they did that well or not. And or some of them, you know, just didn't didn't have any more cards to play and had to really pivot. Um, it was really interesting to see how everyone handled handled that particular moment in time. One company that I think of is everywhere. Um, and she had created a wearable device that you can just put on your ear. It looks like an earring right at the top of your ear. Um, and it was for her for herself because she suffered from pulmonary complications. And, uh, without more discreet wearable, you know, had to wear a huge device and look around and oxygen tank and, you know, just to sort of have a good quality of life. Um, it turns out, obviously, during covid, that is a very useful item, not just for patients suffering from covid and wanting to know what their oxygen levels were doing, but also potentially athletics. So, um, she's really been able to double down as a result of the trends from the pandemic. Um, and I'm really proud of part of her. And that's actually where another great one that we just just came through. Our last 15 is Maya. Um, and she had a brick and mortar store. Um, uh, called Cherry Blossom. Intimate where she helped women have an enjoyable experience finding, uh, and fitting bras post mastectomy to include sort of, you know, the necessary, um, prosthetics and things like that. Um, she even made it so that you could go with your friends who haven't had a mistake, and she could also find some lovely luxury. Um, but the pandemic meant that that experience was sort of off the table. Um, and what they did was she decided to make it a technological one. So now she's she's essentially will be part of it. You can, you know, go to my, um, online. And you can, um, you know, order, uh, measure yourself, work with a specialist, all online, get a few different options, figure out the one that's perfect for you and the rest back. Um, and I don't think without the pandemic, that would not have happened. So she's now able to serve exponentially more. Um, you know, women who deserve to feel like themselves post it to me. >>That's also a model and inspirational. I have to ask you for the young women out there watching. What advice would you share with them as they navigate into a world that's changing and evolving and getting better with other women, mentors and entrepreneurs and or just an ecosystem of community? What advice would you give them as they step into the world and have to engage and experience life? >>Yeah, gosh, part of me always wants to resist that they don't listen to anyone to do you follow your heart, follow your gut, or at least be careful who you listen to because a lot of people will want to give you advice. I would >>say, Uh, that's good advice. Don't take my advice. Well, you've been a great leader. Love the work, you're doing it and I'll say N D. C. But all around the world and again, there's so much change going on with innovation. I mean, just the advances in technology across the board, from with machine learning and AI from linguistics and understanding. And I think we're going to be a bigger community. Your thoughts on as you see community organically becoming a big part of how people are engaging. What's your what's your view As you look out across the landscape, communities becoming a big part of tribes. What's your vision on how the role of communities place? >>You know, we we actually do you think a lot about community and healthy. And we say that are you know, alchemy really is providing space, you know, physical and mental space to think, um, access access to capital access to networks, Um, community, Um, and the community piece is very, very important. Are entrepreneurs leave us like the number one thing that they miss is being among like-minded, um, you know, slightly slightly crazy audacious people. Um, and I often joked that we're building a kind army because it is, you know, it's people who want to do it differently if people want to do it with integrity. Is people who are in it for a very different motivations than just money. Um, and, you know, you start to feel the power of that group together and its entirety and what that might look like as as a community solving global problems. Um, and it really is inspiring. Um, I do think that people are starving for FaceTime and people time, real human time after the pandemic, I think they won't go away. It's a great tool, but we all want a little bit of that, and I will mention just along those lines. And if you don't mind a quick plug for an event that we're having March 16, Um, also in partnership with a W s called Build her relevant to International Women's Day as well. People can, either. If they're in the city, they can come in person. But we also have a virtual program, and we'll be listening to some of the most inspiring. Women leaders and entrepreneurs both in government and also the private sector share their knowledge on the side of the pandemic for for, you know, the next tribal group of women entrepreneurs and leaders. >>That's great. Well, you are on our website for sure. >>Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. >>And we love the fact that you're in our community as well. Doing great work. Thanks for spending time with the Cube and on International Women's Day celebration. Thanks for coming on and sharing. >>Thank you, John. >>Okay. The Cube International showcase Women's Day, featuring some great guests all around the world, Not just in the U S. But all over the world. I'm your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, hm, Yeah.

>>Mm. >>Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women in Tech Showcase featuring National Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a great guest here of any theory a PJ head of aerospace and satellite for A W S A P J s Asia Pacific in Japan. Great to have you on many thanks for joining us. Talk about Space and International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. >>So obviously, aerospace space satellite is an area that's growing. It's changing. AWS has made a lot of strides closure, and I had a conversation last year about this. Remember when Andy Jassy told me about this initiative to 2.5 years or so ago? It was like, Wow, that makes a lot of sense Ground station, etcetera. So it just makes a lot of sense, a lot of heavy lifting, as they say in the satellite aerospace business. So you're leading the charge over there in a p J. And you're leading women in space and beyond. Tell us what's the Storey? How did you get there? What's going on. >>Thanks, John. Uh, yes. So I need the Asia Pacific business for Clint, um, as part of Amazon Web services, you know, that we have in industry business vertical that's dedicated to looking after our space and space customers. Uh, my journey began really? Three or four years ago when I started with a W s. I was based out of Australia. Uh, and Australia had a space agency that was being literally being born. Um, and I had the great privilege of meeting the country's chief scientist. At that point. That was Dr Alan Finkel. Uh, and we're having a conversation. It was really actually an education conference. And it was focused on youth and inspiring the next generation of students. Uh, and we hit upon space. Um, and we had this conversation, and at that stage, we didn't have a dedicated industry business vertical at A W s well supported space customers as much as we did many other customers in the sector, innovative customers. And after the conversation with Dr Finkel, um, he offered to introduce me, uh, to Megan Clark, who was back back then the first CEO of the Australian Space Agency. So that's literally how my journey into space started. We had a conversation. We worked out how we could possibly support the Australian Space Agency's remit and roadmap as they started growing the industry. Uh, and then a whole industry whole vertical was set up, clinic came on board. I have now a global team of experts around me. Um, you know, they've pretty much got experience from everything creating building a satellite, launching a satellite, working out how to down link process all those amazing imagery that we see because, you know, um, contrary to what a lot of people think, Uh, space is not just technology for a galaxy far, far away. It is very much tackling complex issues on earth. Um, and transforming lives with information. Um, you know, arranges for everything from wildfire detection to saving lives. Um, smart, smart agriculture for for farmers. So the time of different things that we're doing, Um, and as part of the Asia Pacific sector, uh, my task here is really just to grow the ecosystem. Women are an important part of that. We've got some stellar women out here in region, both within the AWS team, but also in our customer and partner sectors. So it's a really interesting space to be. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of opportunities and there's an incredible amount of growth so specific, exciting space to be >>Well, I gotta say I'm super inspired by that. One of the things that we've been talking about the Cuban I was talking to my co host for many, many years has been the democratisation of digital transformation. Cloud computing and cloud scale has democratised and change and level the playing field for many. And now space, which was it's a very complex area is being I want kind of democratised. It's easier to get access. You can launch a satellite for very low cost compared to what it was before getting access to some of the technology and with open source and with software, you now have more space computing things going on that's not out of reach. So for the people watching, share your thoughts on on that dynamic and also how people can get involved because there are real world problems to solve that can be solved now. That might have been out of reach, but now it's cloud. Can you share your thoughts. >>That's right. So you're right, John. Satellites orbiting There's more and more satellites being launched every day. The sensors are becoming more sophisticated. So we're collecting huge amounts of data. Um, one of our customers to cut lab tell us that we're collecting today three million square kilometres a day. That's gonna increase to about three billion over the next five years. So we're already reaching a point where it's impossible to store, analyse and make sense of such massive amounts of data without cloud computing. So we have services which play a very critical role. You know, technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning. Help us help these customers build up products and solutions, which then allows us to generate intelligence that's serving a lot of other sectors. So it could be agriculture. It could be disaster response and recovery. Um, it could be military intelligence. I'll give you an example of something that's very relevant, and that's happening in the last couple of weeks. So we have some amazing customers. We have Max our technologies. They use a W S to store their 100 petabytes imagery library, and they have daily collection, so they're using our ground station to gather insight about a lot of changing conditions on Earth. Usually Earth observation. That's, you know, tracking water pollution, water levels of air pollution. But they're also just tracking, um, intelligence of things like military build up in certain areas. Capella space is another one of our customers who do that. So over the last couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, uh, we've been watching, uh, images that have been collected by these commercial satellites, and they've been chronicling the build up, for instance, of Russian forces on Ukraine's borders and the ongoing invasion. They're providing intelligence that was previously only available from government sources. So when you talk about the democratisation of space, high resolution satellite images are becoming more and more ridiculous. Um, I saw the other day there was, uh, Anderson Cooper, CNN and then behind him, a screenshot from Capella, which is satellite imagery, which is very visible, high resolution transparency, which gives, um, respected journalists and media organisations regular contact with intelligence, direct intelligence which can help support media storytelling and help with the general public understanding of the crisis like what's happening in Ukraine. And >>I think on that point is, people can relate to it. And if you think about other things with computer vision, technology is getting so much stronger. Also, there's also metadata involved. So one of the things that's coming out of this Ukraine situation not only is tracking movements with the satellites in real time, but also misinformation and disinformation. Um, that's another big area because you can, uh, it's not just the pictures, it's what they mean. So it's well beyond just satellite >>well, beyond just satellite. Yeah, and you know, not to focus on just a crisis that's happening at the moment. There's 100 other use cases which were helping with customers around the globe. I want to give you a couple of other examples because I really want people to be inspired by what we're doing with space technology. So right here in Singapore, I have a company called Hero Factory. Um, now they use AI based on Earth observation. They have an analytics platform that basically help authorities around the region make key decisions to drive sustainable practises. So change detection for shipping Singapore is, you know, it's lots of traffic. And so if there's oil spills, that can be detected and remedy from space. Um, crop productivity, fruit picking, um, even just crop cover around urban areas. You know, climate change is an increasing and another increasing, uh, challenges global challenge that we need to tackle and space space technology actually makes it possible 15 50% of what they call e CVS. Essential climate variables can only be measured from space. So we have companies like satellite through, uh, one of our UK customers who are measuring, um, uh, carbon emissions. And so the you know, the range of opportunities that are out there, like you said previously untouched. We've just opened up doors for all sorts of innovations to become possible. >>It totally is intoxicating. Some of the fun things you can discuss with not only the future but solving today's problems. So it's definitely next level kind of things happening with space and space talent. So this is where you start to get into the conversation like I know some people in these major technical instance here in the US as sophomore second year is getting job offers. So there's a There's a there's a space race for talent if you will, um and women talent in particular is there on the table to So how How can you share that discussion? Because inspiration is one thing. But then people want to know what to do to get in. So how do you, um how do you handle the recruiting and motivating and or working with organisations to just pipeline interest? Because space is one of the things you get addicted to. >>Yeah. So I'm a huge advocate for science, technology, engineering, math. We you know, we highlights them as a pathway into space into technology. And I truly believe the next generation of talent will contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Whether that climate change or sustainability, Um, it's gonna come from them. I think I think that now we at Amazon Web services. We have several programmes that we're working on to engage kids and especially girls to be equipped with the latest cloud skills. So one of the programmes that we're delivering this year across Singapore Australia uh, we're partnering with an organisation called the Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology and we're launching a programme called Mission Discovery. It's basically students get together with an astronaut, NASA researcher, technology experts and they get an opportunity to work with these amazing characters, too. Create and design their own project and then the winning project will be launched will be taken up to the International space station. So it's a combination of technology skills, problem solving, confidence building. It's a it's a whole range and that's you know, we that's for kids from 14 to about 18. But actually it, in fact, because the pipeline build is so important not just for Amazon Web services but for industry sector for the growth of the overall industry sector. Uh, there's several programmes that were involved in and they range from sophomore is like you said all the way to to high school college a number of different programmes. So in Singapore, specifically, we have something called cloud Ready with Amazon Web services. It's a very holistic clouds killing programme that's curated for students from primary school, high school fresh graduates and then even earlier careers. So we're really determined to work together closely and it the lines really well with the Singapore government's economic national agenda, um so that that's one way and and then we have a tonne of other programmes specifically designed for women. So last year we launched a programme called She Does It's a Free online training learning programme, and the idea is really to inspire professional women to consider a career in the technology industry and show them pathways, support them through that learning process, bring them on board, help drive a community spirit. And, you know, we have a lot of affinity groups within Amazon, whether that's women in tech or a lot of affinity groups catering for a very specific niches. And all of those we find, uh, really working well to encourage that pipeline development that you talk about and bring me people that I can work with to develop and build these amazing solutions. >>Well, you've got so much passion. And by the way, if you have, if you're interested in a track on women in space, would be happy to to support that on our site, send us storeys, we'll we'll get We'll get them documented so super important to get the voices out there. Um and we really believe in it. So we love that. I have to ask you as the head of a PJ for a W S uh aerospace and satellite. You've you've seen You've been on a bunch of missions in the space programmes of the technologies. Are you seeing how that's trajectory coming to today and now you mentioned new generation. What problems do you see that need to be solved for this next generation? What opportunities are out there that are new? Because you've got the lens of the past? You're managing a big part of this new growing emerging business for us. But you clearly see the future. And you know, the younger generation is going to solve these problems and take the opportunities. What? What are they? >>Yes, Sometimes I think we're leaving a lot, uh, to solve. And then other times, I think, Well, we started some of those conversations. We started those discussions and it's a combination of policy technology. We do a lot of business coaching, so it's not just it's not just about the technology. We do think about the broader picture. Um, technology is transferring. We know that technology is transforming economies. We know that the future is digital and that diverse backgrounds, perspective, skills and experiences, particularly those of women minority, the youth must be part of the design creation and the management of the future roadmaps. Um, in terms of how do I see this going? Well, it's been sort of we've had under representation of women and perhaps youth. We we just haven't taken that into consideration for for a long time now. Now that gap is slowly becoming. It's getting closer and closer to being closed. Overall, we're still underrepresented. But I take heart from the fact that if we look at an agency like the US Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, that's a relatively young space agency in your A. I think they've got about three or 400 people working for them at this point in time, and the average age of that cohort John, is 28. Some 40% of its engineers and scientists are women. Um, this year, NASA is looking to recruit more female astronauts. Um, they're looking to recruit more people with disabilities. So in terms of changing in terms of solving those problems, whatever those problems are, we started the I guess we started the right representation mix, so it doesn't matter. Bring it on, you know, whether it is climate change or this ongoing crisis, productive. Um, global crisis around the world is going to require a lot more than just a single shot answer. And I think having diversity and having that representation, we know that it makes a difference to innovation outputs. We know that it makes a difference to productivity, growth, profit. But it's also just the right thing to do for so long. We haven't got it right, and I think if we can get this right, we will be able to solve the majority of some of the biggest things that we're looking at today. >>And the diversity of problems in the diversity of talent are two different things. But they come together because you're right. It's not about technology. It's about all fields of study sociology. It could be political science. Obviously you mentioned from the situation we have now. It could be cybersecurity. Space is highly contested. We dated long chat about that on the Last Cube interview with AWS. There's all these new new problems and so problem solving skills. You don't need to have a pedigree from Ivy League school to get into space. This is a great opportunity for anyone who can solve problems because their new No one's seen them before. >>That's exactly right. And you know, every time we go out, we have sessions with students or we're at universities. We tell them, Raise your voices. Don't be afraid to use your voice. It doesn't matter what you're studying. If you think you have something of value to say, say it. You know, by pushing your own limits, you push other people's limits, and you may just introduce something that simply hasn't been part of before. So your voice is important, and we do a lot of lot of coaching encouraging, getting people just to >>talk. >>And that in itself is a great start. I think >>you're in a very complex sector, your senior leader at AWS Amazon Web services in a really fun, exciting area, aerospace and satellite. And for the young people watching out there or who may see this video, what advice would you have for the young people who are trying to navigate through the complexities of now? Third year covid. You know, seeing all the global changes, um, seeing that massive technology acceleration with digital transformation, digitisation it's here, digital world we're in. >>It could >>be confusing. It could be weird. And so how would you talk to that person and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay? And what advice would you give? >>It is absolutely going to be okay. Look, from what I know, the next general are far more fluent in digital than I am. I mean, they speak nerd. They were born speaking nerd, so I don't have any. I can't possibly tell them what to do as far as technology is concerned because they're so gung ho about it. But I would advise them to spend time with people, explore new perspectives, understand what the other is trying to do or achieve, and investing times in a time in new relationships, people with different backgrounds and experience, they almost always have something to teach you. I mean, I am constantly learning Space tech is, um it's so complicated. Um, I can't possibly learn everything I have to buy myself just by researching and studying. I am totally reliant on my community of experts to help me learn. So my advice to the next generation kids is always always in this time in relationships. And the second thing is, don't be disheartened, You know, Um this has happened for millennia. Yes, we go up, then we come down. But there's always hope. You know, there there is always that we shape the future that we want. So there's no failure. We just have to learn to be resilient. Um, yeah, it's all a learning experience. So stay positive and chin up, because we can. We can do it. >>That's awesome. You know, when you mentioned the Ukraine in the Russian situation, you know, one of the things they did they cut the Internet off and all telecommunications and Elon Musk launched a star linked and gives them access, sending them terminals again. Just another illustration. That space can help. Um, and these in any situation, whether it's conflict or peace and so Well, I have you here, I have to ask you, what is the most important? Uh uh, storeys that are being talked about or not being talked about are both that people should pay attention to. And they look at the future of what aerospace satellite these emerging technologies can do for the world. What's your How would you kind of what are the most important things to pay attention to that either known or maybe not being talked about. >>They have been talked about John, but I'd love to see more prominent. I'd love to see more conversations about stirring the amazing work that's being done in our research communities. The research communities, you know, they work in a vast area of areas and using satellite imagery, for instance, to look at climate change across the world is efforts that are going into understanding how we tackle such a global issue. But the commercialisation that comes from the research community that's pretty slow. And and the reason it's loads because one is academics, academics churning out research papers. The linkage back into industry and industry is very, um, I guess we're always looking for how fast can it be done? And what sort of marginal profit am I gonna make for it? So there's not a lot of patients there for research that has to mature, generate outputs that you get that have a meaningful value for both sides. So, um, supporting our research communities to output some of these essential pieces of research that can Dr Impact for society as a whole, Um, maybe for industry to partner even more, I mean, and we and we do that all the time. But even more focus even more. Focus on. And I'll give you a small example last last year and it culminated this earlier this month, we signed an agreement with the ministry of With the Space Office in Singapore. Uh, so it's an MOU between AWS and the Singapore government, and we are determined to help them aligned to their national agenda around space around building an ecosystem. How do we support their space builders? What can we do to create more training pathways? What credits can we give? How do we use open datasets to support Singaporeans issues? And that could be claimed? That could be kind of change. It could be, um, productivity. Farming could be a whole range of things, but there's a lot that's happening that is not highlighted because it's not sexy specific, right? It's not the Mars mission, and it's not the next lunar mission, But these things are just as important. They're just focused more on earth rather than out there. >>Yeah, and I just said everyone speaking nerd these days are born with it, the next generations here, A lot of use cases. A lot of exciting areas. You get the big headlines, you know, the space launches, but also a lot of great research. As you mentioned, that's, uh, that people are doing amazing work, and it's now available open source. Cloud computing. All this is bringing to bear great conversation. Great inspiration. Great chatting with you. Love your enthusiasm for for the opportunity. And thanks for sharing your storey. Appreciate it. >>It's a pleasure to be with you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. >>Thanks, Manny. The women in tech showcase here, the Cube is presenting International Women's Day celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm really excited because for the first time in my CUBE career of six years, I have a father daughter duo maybe the first time in CUBE's history. Frank and Emma Arrigo from AWS join me guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Great to be here thank you. >> So, Emma, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about how you got to AWS and a little bit about your background. >> Yes, thanks Lisa. So I've joined AWS as a recent graduate from university. So I did my masters of data science and I was going through the grad, the grad job hunt applying for all these different places. And AWS appeared on my radar for an intern program. And Frank was there at the time and so I was like, "Should I do it?" But I still applied cause it was a great program. And so I went did that internship for three months over the summer of 2019-2020, and then I went back and finished my degree. And another grad role came up for in AWS in Tech U to be an associate solutions architect. And so I was approached to apply for that. And I got through to that program and joined the team almost a year ago in March, 2021 through Tech U and yeah, that's how I ended up at AWS. >> Excellent and so Frank, this is a pretty unique situation, father daughter duo at AWS let alone Amazon, let alone probably a lot of companies. Talk to me about it the parental lens. >> Yeah, look it is unique, there's a few family connections within AWS, but you know, definitely here in Australia, it's really rare, but I think the family connection is, you know Emma and we've got four kids, I've got four kids in total. So Emma has three brothers, you know, I've lived in tech, my entire career and so they've been part of it. You know, we've lived in the States, lived in Seattle for a couple of years. And so they'd come to the office and see what dad did. And so it wasn't a big surprise for them to understand what the role was and what we did, so, you know, they kind of grew up with it. And you know, when the opportunity came up for Emma, did the internship, I was excited for it because it was in a different area. It was working in a startup team doing some interesting work that really lined up with some of the interest Emma had. And so she kind of learned what it was like to be Amazonian through that internship and that was... I call that a long audition for a job. And she was then able to join Tech U program, which is a early career bootcamp, I like to think of it, which is the six month program to help our grads learn some of the fundamental skills because the value of a solutions architect or some of these other tech roles is you need experience. You need to have been in the game a while to be a trusted advisor to a customer. And it's hard to do that when you're a grad. So the bootcamp gives them the practical experience and then they get another six months on the job experience where they develop those skills and hone it and get ready to, you know, be a trusted advisor to the customers. >> Right, and that's such a great... I'm sure that's a tremendous opportunity to learn how to become that trusted advisor, especially from peers, such as yourself and I want to go back to you. Talk to me about your interest in IT, in data science. Was this something that you were always interested in primary school or in high school? Or was this something that kind of came on later on? >> Yeah, so my interest in tech kind of emerged as I went along in my education. So when I was younger, I really wanted to be an orthodontist for some reason. I don't know why. And then you just sort of in year eight and like early school sort of didn't really know what I wanted to do. Just sort of going through just trying to survive as a teenage girl at high school at an all girls school, didn't really have many, didn't really have career aspirations, I guess, and then one year I attended a information day at a university about engineering and that just really sparked my interest, I don't know why, but I was like, I've always been obsessed with like factories and those types of things and how things are made. And so that really just sparked my interest and I never really thought of it before. And so then that put STEM engineering on my radar and then I guess spoke with it about with the parents. And then they mentioned that tech would be a like IT, Information Technology would be really useful. And so then we approached the school to ask if I could do IT in year 11. So that's sort of our second last year of high school. And they said, "No, we couldn't do IT." I couldn't go to the boys' school to do IT. That girls don't do it or that not good at it. And I wasn't allowed, and they wouldn't let me do physics either. So I moved school in for the final two of high school to be able to do IT and physics to help, you know, get to the course I wanted to do. And so that was my journey into STEM. So it wasn't really on my radar, but then events like this and at university isn't it? Organizations sparked my interest. And then still when I entered university, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to major in nor where I wanted to work would never have thought it would be where, with my father, like I was aware of the world of IT and everything, but I wouldn't, if you'd asked me in first year, it wouldn't have been that I would probably, we would've said, I don't know an academic or something. I don't know. And then, but again, as the university went on and you attend networking events or club things, you sort of learn a bit more about the ecosystem. And then that's where yeah. Tech company sort of became where I was looking for jobs and roles for when I finished up. So that was kind of my journey to... >> So what I love though, that you and Frank, this is going to be a question for you, how Emma was told. "No, you can't study IT. No, you can't study physics. You can't go to the boys school and do that either." Talk to me about that, Frank, from your perspective as a parent of a daughter, and you said, I think she's got three brothers lucky, Emma, but talk to me about that from your perspective, in terms of going, my daughter has really has an in a strong interest in this and they're telling her no we're going to pivot and actually change schools to be able give her the opportunities that she wants to pursue. >> Yeah. Look, as a parent, we were shocked. You know, it was just an unexpected response, you know, in a lot of ways, the school that she was at was more of a finishing school than anything else, you know, preparing young ladies for marriage and, you know, career as a, I don't know, I will leave it at that. So we were really disappointed. And so very quickly we looked at other alternatives and other options and we pulled Emma out of school and we knew it was like the last two years are critical in Australia. We don't have a middle school and a senior school, it's all one, you know, combined thing. But those last two years are all about getting ready for university. And so we made a really tough call and we picked her up, dropped her into a totally new school. It was co-ed school. And then when we told her previous, her girl's school. I actually spoke to the vice principal and he said, "Oh, I can't believe you're sending her to a co-ed school. She's going to struggle 'cause boys are so much better in tech." And I was totally, I was lost for words, right? Because I felt back in my career and I had some amazing female managers, leaders, role models in my time that I worked for and I followed and they were always struggling because, you know, they were in the minority, but they were incredible, you know, technologists and leaders. And I just couldn't believe it. So as parents we made the tough call. We picked Emma up. We put her into another high school and she flourished, you know, Emma started a club, she got convolved with a whole bunch of other things. When she graduated, the teachers felt that she'd been there six years, right? The whole time of it. So she really made a mark, made an impact at this school and so much so that her younger brother then followed and went to that school and completed his high school there as well. But it, we just can't believe it. And we tell it everyone, this story, you know, we name the school, we won't name. We choose not to name them here, but we name the school because we just think it's really terrible guidance and terrible advice. Like we want people to follow their passion. I tell my kids and I tell the folks when I speak to, you know, early career folks, follow your passion first, guess what the job will appear. Right? You know, there'll be the... The work will come if you do something that you love. And then the second piece that I always say is, "Every future job is going to be a tech job." Technology is embedded in everything that we do. So the fact that you say, "A girl can't do technology," you're limiting yourselves, right? You don't want to think that, you want to think about the possibilities rather than the things you can't do. It's the things you can do. And the things that you haven't even thought about doing. So that's why, you know, it was so exciting to see that experience with Emma, and just seeing her grow through that and she became a bit of a STEM advocate at a high school as well. So, she saw the value of her role model that helped her. And she wants to be a.... Continue being a role model for others as well, which again, I think is admirable, right? It's about- >> Absolutely. >> Shining a light and leading and as a parent, irrespective that we work at the same company as a parent, that's what you want to see. You want to see your kids aim high and inspire others. That's what she does. >> Well, she's already been a role model too, I mean, to your younger brother, but one of the things that we say often, and theCUBE does a lot for women in technology events. And I'm fortunate to get to host a lot of those, we say, "You can't be what you can't see." So needing to have those role models who are visible. Now, it doesn't have to be female necessarily. and Frank you mentioned that you had female mentors and role models and in your illustrious career. But the important point is being able to elevate women into positions where others can see and can identify, "Oh, there's a role model. There's somebody that might be a mentor for me, or a sponsor down the road, it's critically important." And as of course, we look at the numbers in tech, women in technical roles are still quite low, but Emma, tell me a little bit about, you've been through the program. You talked about that. What are some of the things that you feel in like the last six months that you've been able to learn that had you not had this opportunity, maybe you wouldn't have. >> You know, I think that's a great point. So as a solutions architect, I get to be both technical. So hands on building an AWS, helping customers solve their problems, whether it be a data leak or I don't know, an image recognition tool to look for garbage dumped on the street or, and also thinking from the business perspective for the customers, so that's a fun part as the, of the role, but things I get to do. So currently I'm working on a demo for the conference in Sydney. So I'm building a traffic detection model using some computer vision and IOT so I get to bring my data science background to this build and also learn about new areas like IOT, Internet Of Things; Technologies. So that's been a really fun project and yeah, just having the ability to play around on AWS, we have... >> Right. Well, the exposure in the experiences is priceless. You can't put a price on that, but being able to get into the environment, learn it from a technical perspective, learn it from a practical perspective. And then of course get all the great things about getting to interact with customers and learning how different industries work, you mentioned you were in public sector. That just must be a field of dreams, I would imagine. >> I know. >> In some senses for you, right? >> Really have lucked out. I know it's, I'm like, "Wow, this my job is to play around with some new service, just because need to know about that for the customer meeting. Like I'm building a chatbot or helping build a chatbot for a customer, at the university. So yeah, things like that make it very, yeah. It's a pretty amazing role. >> It sounds, it sure sounds like it. And sounds like you're are excelling at it tremendously. Let me ask you Emma. For young girls who might be in a similar situation to where you were not that long ago with the school telling you, "No, you can't do IT." "No, you can't do physics." So you actually switched schools. What would you tell those young girls who might be in that situation about hearing the word, "No." And would you advise them to embrace a career in technology? >> Yeah, I would say that it really..... What makes me so sad is if my family didn't know about tech and had my... Supported me through that like if I would've just gone, "Oh, okay. I won't do it." You know what I mean? Like that just makes me really sad. How many people have missed out on studying what they wanted to study. So by having those types of experiences, so what I would say as advice is, "Back yourself, find supporters, whether it be your family or a teacher that you really sort of connect with, to be able to support you and through these decisions." And yeah, I think having those sponsors in a way, your advocates to help you make those choices and help support you through those choices. >> Yeah. I agree. And I have a feeling you're going to be one of those sponsors and mentors, if you aren't already Emma, I have a feeling that's just around the corner from you. So Frank, last question to you. What's the overall lesson here, if we look at statistics, I mentioned some of the stats about, you know, women in technical roles as usually less than 25% globally. But also we see data that shows that companies are more profitable and more performant when there's at least 30% of the executive suite it's women. So from your parental perspective, and from an Amazonian perspective, Frank, what's the lesson here? >> Well, look from an Amazonian perspective, we need to make sure that we have a team that represents our customers, right? And our customers aren't all boys. You know, they're not all blokes, as we say down here. So you've got to have a team that is made up of what represents your customers. So I think that's the Amazonian view. And so diverse perspectives, diverse experience, diverse backgrounds is what does that. The other from a parent, you know, I said it earlier. I think every future job is a tech job. And I think it's really important that as kids come through, you know, primary school, high school, whatever, they're prepared for that, they're already consumers of technology. You know, they need to be creators or, or participate in that environment. And I can give you an example, a few years ago, I worked for, at a large telco here. And we actually invested in a thing called code club, which was aimed at primary school kids, kids in grade four, five and six. So elementary school for my friends in America, it's kids in grade four, five and six. And they were learning how to use scratch. Scratch is this interactive tool like building lego to write programming and believe it or not, there were more girls interested and were part of code club. It was probably 60-40 was the ratio of young girls doing it compared to boys because it was creative, it was a creative outlet, they were building stuff and assembling and making these things that they loved to make. Right. But then what we saw was there'd be a drop off at high school, whether it's curriculum related or interests or distractions, I don't know what it is, but there things get lost along the way along high school. But I see it at the primary school stage at elementary school that the interest is there. So I think part of it is, there needs to be a bit of a switch up in education or other opportunities outside of school to really foster and nurture and develop this interest because it really does take all kinds to be successful in the role. And Emma talked about a chatbot that she's building and that's a conversational thing. I can't see geek boys having being able to impact and create a interesting conversation, right. Then there's other areas that seems to be skewed and biased based on a predominantly male view of the world. So we need the tech, the industry needs these diverse perspectives and these diverse views, because, you know, to your point, it's going to impact the bottom line. It's going to also deliver a better product and it's going to reflect society. It's going to reflect the customers that are using it because we're made up of every, every race and color, creed, gender. And we need a team that represents that. >> Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Well, it sounds like the Arrigo family are quite the supporters of this, but also we need more of both of you. We need more of the sponsors and the parents who are encouraging the kids and making the right decisions to help them get along that path. And we need more folks like Emma and more women that we can see, "Wow, look what she's doing in such a short time period. We want to be just like that." So you guys are, have both been fantastic. I thank you so much for joining me at the International. Women's Showcase, more power to your family. We need more folks like you guys, so great work. Keep it up. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For Frank and Emma Arrigo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Showcase 2022. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of the International Women's Showcase, 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to be joined by my next guest, Madhura DasGupta Sinha, the founder and CEO of Aspire For Her. Madhura, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's lovely to be here on this program. Thank you for having me, Lisa >> Tell me a little bit about your background. >> Lisa, I have been a banker for the last 25 years but the last two years of my journey have been professionally and personally the most satisfying and fulfilling. On 8th of March, 2020, I started Aspire For Her. So today is our second birthday. >> Lisa: Happy birthday. >> Thank you, Lisa >> Tell us a little bit about Aspire For Her >> It's been a wonderful journey. >> Yeah, what was the genesis of it? You're obviously very passionate about it but talk to us about the Genesis of Aspire For Her. >> Thank you for the question. I was looking at gender data emanating from India and that left me fairly disturbed and distressed, why? Well, I was looking at the economic participation of women and I realized that we are absolutely at the bottom of a list of 156 countries. I felt someone needs to do something about this problem and I thought that someone could be me. >> And so two years ago you launched Aspire For Her. Talk to me about what that has achieved in its first two years and now embarking on year three. >> Well, I think our journey has been absolutely fascinating Today we have more than 120,000 members, mentors, supporters across the globe, across 60 different countries. We have more than 150 women leaders who are mentors at Aspire For Her, we have about 50 organizations that are working with us jointly and partnering with us in our journey to motivate more women to enter and stay in the workforce. Our vision is to add more than 1 million women to the workforce by 2025 and 10 million women to the workforce by 2030 and we want to do that by using the power of networks and communities. >> Those are really lofty goals, but fantastic. You mentioned and across 60 countries so far and we're talking about just on your second birthday, all of that you've accomplished. Talk to me a little bit about some of the mentors and how did you find some of these people? >> Well, Lisa, we use a unique five point model to change mindsets, and the first pillar in that model is mentors and role models. Because we notice that four out of five women have no successful, professional women role models in their immediate network. We give them access. So these mentors are CEOs, CXOs, women leaders who have built businesses who want to give back and they come to us and want to be part of Aspire For Her. They are a big part of our equation for success. The second pillar that we work on is learning opportunities and we work with organizations like Amazon and many others to ensure that our members stand head over shoulders over others when they are being looked at for jobs and recruitment opportunities. The third pillar that we work on is what we call career previews. Now, if you are wanting to get women excited about careers we have to understand one thing, if she can see it, she can be it. That's the mantra that we follow as we open up doors and windows of women's minds to new age career options. The fourth pillar that we work on is what we call a peer community. And what we notice is that the community connects with each other, motivates each other and elevates each other and collectively finds solutions to problems. The fifth pillar that we work with is what we call 3E, employment, entrepreneurship, or education. We want every woman in our country and across the globe to be in 3E. We want every woman to be financially independent because financial independence is the cornerstone of all other forms of independence and that is how we can break all biases. >> That is fantastic. The five point model, how it leads of the 3E's. Something you said really resonated with me and that is: if she can see it, she can be it. And we often say, we can't be what we can't see but I love this spin that you've taken on that, you've put that positive mindset, if she can see it, we want to enable her to see it across the globe. As you talked about your goals of a million women in the workforce by 2025 which is just a few years down the road, you're well on your way to accomplishing that. Talk to me about some of the data. I know you have some interesting data from McKinsey that really supported the genesis of Aspire For Her. >> Yes, Lisa, in fact, there's a report for the "Power Of Parity" report which McKinsey publishes from time to time and I notice some very interesting data in that. McKinsey says, "If we have a little more "than 10% women more in the workforce "this will be a trillion dollar opportunity for India. "A 27% increase in our GDP." So if we get more women to work, it essentially means that they will add to their families, to their country, to their society, to the world. >> So the data is there showing just a 10% increase in women in the workforce leads to a 27% increase in India's GDP. We're talking about India alone here. Talk to me about how are you working with companies like AWS to help Aspire For Her achieve it's lofty goals. >> AWS has been an absolutely wonderful partner for us. And let me start by talking about the She Dares community, their focus on diversity and their thought leadership has been absolutely wonderful for us. Well, the She Dares community is meant for all women who want to be in tech careers whether today they're in school or in college or they're working in non-tech fields, but are interested in technology as a career option or they're taking a break and they wish to come back into the workforce. The AWS She Dares community welcomes all women like this. It's very inclusive, all embracive and that's what we love about building the community with AWS. We just started two months ago and today we have more than 10,000 members in India and we've had some fantastic stories also emanating from the She Dares community in AWS. >> I love that. You've 10,000 members in two months, the Aspire For Her program, not only does it have lofty goals but you've got a really fast growth trajectory. Share a story with me, if you will of a woman that that is in the She Dares program and where she came from and where she is now. >> Yes, let me share the story of Usha and we just shared this at the launch of AWS, just a couple of days back, Lisa. So Usha worked for just two years and the next 16 years of her life, she devoted to bringing up her family. A few years back, her husband suffered Parkinson's disease and she realized that the entire weight of the family was on her so she decided to join She Dares. She decided to sign up for the AWS cloud certification program. How did she do it? Well, she had the entire family's burden on her. She worked night and day, but somehow she squeezed out hours during the night where she would sit and study and ensured that she got certified. Remember, this was a woman who just spent two years in the workforce and the next 16 years, she had absolutely no connection with anything that was even remotely career oriented. But after getting certified and getting motivated by the community of She Dares, she decided to give it a shot and apply for a job with AWS. Two days ago, she got her offer letter. So today, she's proud-- >> What a fantastic story going from two years in the workforce, 16 years taking care of her family then the burden is on her with her husband falling ill and she finds this opportunity. I love the message there. How do you talk to women who might be in similar situations to Usha going, "I haven't been in the workforce "for a really long time, Tech seems intimidating." How do you help them achieve the courage to go forward >> Lisa, it's the same five point model that we use. If she can see it, she can be it. If she can see a role model like Usha, a woman who has been out of the workforce for a long time finds the confidence, finds her voice and finds the ability to just rise up above that adversity and ensure that she jumps right back into the workforce. >> And is Aspire For Her focused on STEM only, or are you focused on all industries for women? >> We are focused on all industries for women and we like to look at fairly new age careers as well. So whether it's an Instagram influencer, whether it's somebody who's opened patisserie for the best brownies in town, we like to celebrate all women and all their career paths, but STEM is a very important part of what we do because we know that the STEM skills gap in India and globally is a very serious problem and if we train women and reskill women in STEM, they will automatically gravitate towards those roles which will open up in the India of tomorrow. >> Are you able to reach young girls like say in primary school and high school as well, is this open to women of all ages? >> It's open to women of all ages. We like to start at the age 16 because that's when women start taking career decisions whether it's about writing competitive exams or whether it's about looking at which colleges they will get into so we like to start at 16 and there's really no age limit. >> That's fantastic that there's no age limit but also starting young. One of the things that we know about the tech industry is the percentage of women in technical roles is quite low, I believe it's below 25% and has been for quite some time. We see that in a lot of countries that drop off around the high school, 16 year age, how do you help attract these young girls to be interested in not just STEM but in creating a career for herself? >> So we like telling a lot of stories, Lisa, and there are constant nudges and triggers on our platform. So today I'm speaking with you and I'm sure that this will be beamed across our platforms as well, And people will look at Lisa and say, "Hey Lisa is doing this fantastic thing as a host. "And she's working with this great organization. "Why can we not be like Lisa?" And that's the way in which we motivate folks. And we try to ensure that every woman with a career story comes in and is able to share her journey, her path with our larger community whether that's through mentorship sessions, whether that's through role modeling, whether it's through coaching, whether it's through many fireside chats that we have, we have a lot of workshops and webinars. We are a COVID baby so we are very digital and we love technology. So that's how we try to create the community, ensure that there is enough excitement going every minute of the day. It's a very buzzing, humming, active community and we ensure that finally, everyone has that one thing in mind: I have to be financially independent and I cannot ever give up on my career. >> I love that: Be financially independent and not give up on my career. You must be obviously, very intentionally, you launched Aspire For Her, you mentioned two years ago today, on the 8th of March, 2020 right in the very onset of COVID but also on International Women's Day. Talk to me a little bit about why that was so important to launch on that day in International Women's history month. >> Well, when I was looking at the problem that was staring at women in India there's another interesting piece of statistic that's struck, which was that the percentage of women in the workforce has been declining steadily in India. And I thought that someone needed to do something about that problem, and I thought that someone could be me. I'm not a great one for symbols but I thought that if we launch it on Women's day, this will be a constant reminder for us to strive harder to get to those numbers quicker than we have set ourselves up for. That's the reason why I decided when the world was talking about women, it's a great idea for this to be like a conscience keeper for us. >> Perfect timing. Well, congratulations on all of the success that you have achieved in just a short two year time period. I can't wait to see what year three brings and sign me up to be a mentor. I'm a woman in STEM, I'm a woman that hosts this program. I would love to get involved and help encourage girls and other women to follow their passion. >> That is so amazing, Lisa, you are on and we'd love to welcome you aboard as a mentor >> Oh, excellent! Lucky me, my lucky day. Madhura, thank you so much for talking with us about Aspire For Her, and again, congratulations on all of your success. >> Thank you. >> And Madhura, you've got one final message for AWS employees that you want to leave, what is that? >> Thank you, Lisa, for the question, there is a message that I'd like to leave for all AWS employees across the globe, join us, be a part of our movement, it takes about three minutes to sign up for Aspire For Her. Please be a part of the change that you wish to see. Thank you. >> Well, Madhura again, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Congratulations on the success, the momentum that you have achieved in such a short time period. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, thank you, thank you, and I am going to send you the form to become a mentor as well (chuckling). >> I'm in, sign me up. >> Thank you >> For Madhura DasGupta Sinha, I'm, Lisa Martin, you're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of International Women's Showcase, 2022. (upbeat music)