>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. This is Cisco Live. I'm Dave a lot with stew Mina, man. And you're watching the Cube. The leader >> in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Dr. Thomas Shearer's here is the chief architect of tle Indus looks onboard and David Cope is back. He's a senior director of marketing development for the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks. So you're very welcome. So tell Indus. Tell us about Delinda. >> So Telindus, we are actually an integrator, a cloud operator, and a tech company. And we're partnering over the years with Cisco, with all the products that they have notably, and lately we are moving also into the public cloud. We have private cloud offering, but we see our first appetite coming up with our customers in the public cloud, which are heavily regulated industries. And there we are working notably with the team off Dave to have an offering there that enables them to move into the clouds. >> So these guys are a customer or a partner? >> Well, you know, what's special about them. They're actually both. So they're a big customer of Cisco offerings, Cloud Center and other offerings. The Cisco Container Platform. But they also use those to provide services to their customers. Expect so there are a great sounding board about what the market needs and how our products are working. >> So Thomas telling has been around since. If I saw right. Nineteen seventy nine. So you know, we weren't talking multi cloud back then, but it is a big discussion point here at the show. You said private public, you're using Cloud Center, maybe explain to us what multi cloud means to you and your customers today. >> I would say most customers that we have a large organizations we manage the IT infrastructure. We're also doing integration projects, but those customers they are normally not really technology companies, you know, they are searching to work with us because we deal with the good part off their IT operations. So at these companies they come from a private infrastructure, they have there these days. They're VMWare installation their private clouds and I think also, it will stay like this for for a good amount of time. So there's no good reason to just go into the cloud because it's fancy or because there is something that you cannot have certainly there is. But that's stable progress that they are following. So what we need is actually to catch the low hanging fruits that exist in a public cloud for our customers. But in such a way that it satisfies their day today IT operations and sometimes it's our IT operations who is doing that since we are managing this. So for us, actually, hyper cloud, to say short, is actually the standard, or multicloud. >> So I wonder we're almost two years into GDP, are one year into the owner's finds. How has GDP are affected? You and your customers and What's it like out there these days? >> GDPR is for me not the main reason for public, private, multicloud installations for us and that involves GDPR is the regulation that we are in, so our customers are notably from the financial sector, and they're very strict on conservative security. rules for good because their main business is they're selling trust. There is not much more business where you trust that much than a bank. They know everything about you, and that's something they cannot sacrifice. Now, in Europe, we have the advantage. Data is that strict regulation which puts kind of standards. And that involves obviously also the GDPR thing. But if I look into that standards, that regulation imposes its very technical, they say. For example, please make sure if you move into the clouds then avoid a lock-in, be confident on what will be your exit cost. What will be your transition cost, and don't get married to anyone. And that's where Dave's team comes into the game because that they provide that solution, actually. >> I mean, that's music to your ears, I would think. I mean, I have to be honest. If I were a public cloud provider, I'd say no, don't do multi cloud. We have one cloud, does it all, But no customer speaks like that. >> You're right. And I think to me what I love about Linda's in the way they use the product is they work in such a highly regulated environment, where policies managing common policies across very different environments becomes critical. So how do I manage access control and security profiles and placement policies all across very different multiplied environments? That's hard, and that's been one of the cornerstones that we've focused on in Cloud Centre. >> Yeah, so look, double click on that. We're talking Teo, a guest earlier, and I was asking them, sort of poking it. There's >> a lot of people who want that business because it's a huge >> business opportunity. It's, um, some big, well established companies. Cisco's coming at it from a position of strength, which course? Network, But I'll ask you the same question. What gives you confidence that Cisco is in the best position for customers? Two urn, right? Tio manage their multi cloud data environment? >> I think it's I think it's a great question. I mean, for my perspective and I love our customers perspective. But if you think about Cisco's heritage around the network and security, I think most people would agree. They're very strong there. It's a very natural extension to have Cisco be a leader and multicloud because after all, it's how do I securely connect very diverse environments together. And now a little further. Now, how do I help customers manage workloads, whether they be existing or new cloud native workloads, So we find it's a very natural extension to our core strength and through both development and acquisition Cisco's got a very, very broad and deep portfolio to do that. >>So your thoughts on that? >> Yes, Cisco is coming from a network in history. But if your now look into the components there is, actually, yeah, the Networking Foundation, there is CUCS, which we have, for example, in our infrastructure, there is hyperflex there are then solutions like CCP that you can run a DevOps organization can combine it with Cloud Center to make it hybrid. And just today I learned a new thing, which is Kubeflow. I just recognized Cisco is the first one that is coming up with a platform as a service enabled Private Cloud. So if you go private Cloud usually talk about running VM's. But now with With With a CCP and it's open source projects Kubeflow which I think will be very interesting to see in conjunction with CCPN I heard that it's going to happen. You're actually Cisco is the first one delivering such a solution to the markets. So it's growth that just have >> a thing for the cnc es eso que >> bernetti slow way Don't have to send a cease and desist letter, right? >> CCP that Francisco Container platform Ryan out sad Some while ago on Prim Cooper. Nettie Stack. Right. >> So, Thomas, you know, with the update on Cloud Center suite now containerized, You got micro services. It's built with communities underneath and using cube flow. I'm guessing that's meaningful to you. There's a lot of things in this announcement that it's like, Okay, it sounds good, but in the real world, you know what? What do you super excited for? The container ization? You know, I would think things like the action orchestrator and the cost Optimizer would have value, but, you know, police tell us yourself >> The CloudCenter was already valuable before, you know, we a did investigation about what kind of cloud brokering and cloud orchestrations solutions exist back in those days when it was called CliQr CloudCenter and me and my colleagues know that CliQr team back then as well as now at Cisco we appreciated that they they became one family now. For me, CloudCenter fulfills certain requirements that I simply have to fulfill for our customer. And it's a mandatory effect that I have to feel for them, like being able to ensure and guarantee portability. Implementing policies, segregation of duties were necessary, things like that. I have to say now that it becomes containerized. That's a lot of ease in managing CloudCenter as a solution by itself, and also you have the flexibility to have it better. Also, migratable. It's an important key point that CloudCloud eyes a non cloud centric product that you can run it on-prem that your orchestration that you don't have to log in on the orchestration there and have it on-prem but now can easily move it on things such a GKE because it's it's a container based solution. But I think also there's a SaaS option available so you can just subscribe to it. So you have full range of flexibilities so that a day to day management work flow engine doesn't become a day to day management thing by itself. >> So I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of your environment around since nineteen seventy nine. So you must have a lot of a lot of stuff, a lot of it that you've developed over the years. But you mentioned that you're starting to look a public clouds. You just mentioned your customer base, largely financial services. So they're highly regulated and maybe a little nervous about the cloud. But so paint a picture of your Maybe not for certain workloads. Paint a picture of your environment tunnel where you want to go from. From an architecture and an infrastructure perspective. >> We have our own what we call private managed cloud. That's a product we call U-flex which is  FlexPod reference architecture that's Cisco was networking NetApp storage. Cisco UCS in conjunction with the ember, as a compute. This we use since many years and as I already have said, the regulated market started opening up towards public cloud. So what does it mean? European Banking Authority. So EBA, who's the umbrella organization on European level. They send out a recommendation. Dear countries, please, your financial institution. If they go into the cloud that have to do ABC. The countries I have put in place those regulations they have put in place those controls and for them, they are mostly now in that let's investigate what its influence in the public they come from their private infrastructure. They are in our infrastructure, which is like private infrastructure virtualized and managed by us, mainly VM based. And now the news things on top that they investigate are things like big data, artificial intelligence and things like that which you mostly don't have in private infrastructure. So in that combination is what we have to provide to our customers but their mostly in and investigative mode. >> and okay. And and Cisco is your policy engine management engine across all those clouds, is that right? >> Yes we are able to manage those workloards with CloudCenter. Sometimes it depends also on the operating model. The customer himself is the one using CloudCenter, you know, so it depends, since we are in integrator, cloud operator and also offer our services in the public cloud. It's always the question about who has to manage what. >> One of the things, if I could just add on that we see people providing our products as a service. We're just talking about Kubernetes. Customers today are starting to move Kubernetes just from being like development now into production. And what we're seeing is that these new Kubernetes based applications have non containerized dependencies reach out to another traditional app, reach out to PaaS, a database. And what we try to do is to say, how do you give your customers the ability to get the new and the old working together? Because it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's a part of sort of the new cloud center capabilities also. >> That's that's a valid reason. So you have those legacy services and you don't want just to You cannot just replace them now. Now let's go all in. Let's be cloud native. So you have always thes interoperability things to handle and yeah, that's true. Actually, you can build quite some migration path using containerization. >> Yeah, I mean, you can't customer can't just over rotate to all the new fun buzz words. They got a business to run. Yeah, so this >> And how do I apply security policies and access control and to this very mixed environment now, common policies and that becomes challenging. >> But it's also part of our business. Yes, there have there, for example, financial institution than not a nineteen company. That's where we come in as a for Vita Toe. It's such an industry daddy, via highly value the partnership with Cisco Heavy Cat build new services together. We had that early adopters program, for example, regarding CCP. So Cisco is bringing a service provider into the loop to build what's just right for the customer for them on their behalf. Yes, you describe that is very challenging, is it's In some cases, it's chaos. But that's the opportunity I heard this morning that you guys are going after pretty hard. >> No, it's right. And you've got one set of desires for developers, but now we move into production. Now I t cops gets involved, the sea so gets involved. And how do we have then well thought out integrations into security and network management? Those air all of the things that we're trying to really focus on. >> Well, anywhere the definite zone. So you you were surrounded by infrastructures code. Is there a fits and club? Guys, Thanks so much for coming to Cuba and telling your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed. Thank you. Alright, Keep it right there, buddy. Stupid him and Dave. Alon. Today we're live from Cisco Live Barcelona. You watching the cube right back?

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage here in Las Vegas. Back at events re Mars, Amazon re Mars. I'm your host, John fur with the cube. Mars stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. It's great event brings together a lot of the industrial space machine learning and all the new changes in scaling up from going on the moon to, you know, doing great machine learning. And we've got two great guests here with kinda called lunar outpost, Justin Sears, CEO, Lauren, man. He's the co-founder and chief strategy officer lunar outpost. They're right next to us, watching their booth. Love the name, gentlemen. Welcome to the cube. >>Yeah. Thanks for having us, John. >>All right. So lunar outpost, I get the clues here. Tell us what you guys do. Start with that. >>Absolutely. So lunar outpost, we're a company based outta Colorado that has two missions headed to the moon over the course of the next 24 months. We're currently operating on Mars, which forest will tell you a little bit more about here in a second. And we're really pushing out towards expanding the infrastructure on the lunar surface. And then we're gonna utilize that to provide sustainable access to other planetary bodies. >>All right, far as teeing it up for you. Go, how cool is this? We don't, we wanna use every minute. What's the lunar surface look like? What's the infrastructure roads. You gonna pave it down. You what's going on. Well, >>Where we're going. No one has ever been. So, um, our first mission is going to Shackleton connecting Ridge on the south pole, the moon, and that's ripe to add infrastructure such as landing pads and other things. But our first Rover will be primarily driving across the surface, uh, exploring, uh, what the material looks like, prospecting for resources and testing new technologies. >>And you have a lot of technology involved. You're getting data in, you're just doing surveillance. What's the tech involved there. >>Yeah. So the primary technology that we're demonstrating is a 4g network for NOK. Um, we're providing them mobility services, which is basically like the old Verizon commercial. Can you hear me now? Uh, where the Rover drives farther and farther away from the Lander to test their signal strength, and then we're gonna have some other payloads ride sharing along with us for the ride >>Reminds me the old days of wifi. We used to call it war drive and you go around and try to find someone's wifi hotspot <laugh> inside the thing, but no, this is kind of cool. It brings up the whole thing. Now on lunar outpost, how big is the company? What's how what's to some of the stats heres some of the stats. >>Absolutely. So lunar outpost, 58 people, uh, growing quite quickly on track to double. So any of you watching, you want a job, please apply <laugh>. But with lunar outpost, uh, very similar to how launch companies provide people access to different parts of space. Lunar outpost provides people access to different spots on planetary bodies, whether it's the moon, Mars or beyond. So that's really where we're starting. >>So it's kinda like a managed service for all kinds of space utilities. If you kind of think about it, you're gonna provide services. Yeah, >>Absolutely. Yeah. It, it's definitely starting there and, and we're pushing towards building that infrastructure and that long term vision of utilizing space resources. But I can talk about that a little bit more here in a sec. >>Let's get into that. Let's talk about Mars first. You guys said what's going on with >>Mars. Absolutely. >>Yeah. So right now, uh, lunar outpost is part of the science team for, uh, Moxi, which is an instrument on the perseverance Rover. Yeah. Moxi is the first demonstration of space resource utilization on another planet. And what space resource utilization is basically taking resources on another planet, turning them into something useful. What Moxi does is it takes the CO2 from the atmosphere of Mars and atmosphere of Mars is mostly CO2 and it uses a process called solid oxide electrolysis to basically strip oxygen off of that CO2 to produce oh two and carbon monoxide. >>So it's what you need to self sustain on the surface. >>Exactly. It's not just sustaining, um, the astronauts, but also for producing oxygen for propellant. So it'll actually produce, um, it's a, it's a technology that'll produce a propellant for return rockets, um, to come back for Mars. So >>This is the real wildcard and all this, this, this exploration is how fast can the discoveries invent the new science to provide the life and the habitat on the surface. And that seems to be the real focus in the, in the conversations I heard on the keynote as well, get the infrastructure up so you can kinda land and, and we'll pull back and forth. Um, where are we on progress? You guys have the peg from one zero to 10, 10 being we're going, my grandmother's going, everyone's going to zero. Nothing's moving. >>We're making pretty rapid >>Progress. A three six, >>You know, I'll, I'll put it on an eight, John an >>Eight, I'll put it on >>Eight. This is why the mission force was just talking about that's launching within the next 12 months. This is no longer 10 years out. This is no longer 20 years away, 12 months. And then we have mission two shortly after, and that's just the beginning. We have over a dozen Landers that are headed to line surface this decade alone and heavy lift Landers and launchers, uh, start going to the moon and coming back by 2025. >>So, and you guys are from Colorado. You mentioned before you came on camera, right with the swap offices. So you got some space in Colorado, then the rovers to move around. You get, you get weird looks when people drive by and see the space gear. >>Oh yeah, definitely. So we have, um, you know, we have our facility in golden and our Nevada Colorado, and we'll take the vehicles out for strolls and you'll see construction workers, building stuff, and looking over and saying, what's >>Good place to work too. So you're, you're hiring great. You're doubling on the business model side. I can see a lot of demand. It's cheaper to launch stuff now in space. Is there becoming any rules of engagement relative to space? I don't wanna say verified, but like, you know, yet somehow get to the point where, I mean, I could launch a satellite, I could launch something for a couple hundred grand that might interfere with something legitimate. Do you see that on the radar because you guys are having ease of use so smaller, faster, cheaper to get out there. Now you gotta refine the infrastructure, get the services going. Is there threats from just random launches? >>It's a, it's a really interesting question. I mean, current state of the art people who have put rovers on other planetary bodies, you're talking like $3 billion, uh, for the March perseverance Rover. So historically there hasn't been that threat, but when you start talking about lowering the cost and the access to some of these different locations, I do think we'll get to the point where there might be folks that interfere with large scale operations. And that's something that's not very well defined in international law and something you won't really probably get any of the major space powers to agree to. So it's gonna be up to commercial companies to operate responsibly so we can make that space sustainable. And if there is a bad actor, I think it they'll weed themselves out over time. >>Yeah. It's gonna be of self govern, I think in the short term. Good point. Yeah. What about the technology? Where are we in the technology? What are some of the big, uh, challenges that we're overcoming now and what's that next 20 M stare in terms of the next milestone? Yeah, a tech perspective. >>Yeah. So the big technology technological hurdle that has been identified by many is the ability to survive the LUN night. Um, it gets exceptionally cold, uh, when the sun on the moon and that happens every 14 days for another, for, you know, for 14 days. So these long, cold lunar nights, uh, can destroy circuit boards and batteries and different components. So lunar outpost has invested in developing thermal technologies to overcome this, um, both in our offices, in the United States, but we also have opened a new office in, uh, Luxembourg in Europe. That's focusing specifically on thermal technologies to survive the lunar night, not just for rovers, but all sorts of space assets. >>Yeah. Huge. That's a hardware, you know, five, nine kind of like meantime between failure conversation, right. >><laugh> and it's, it gets fun, right? Because you talk five nines and it's such like, uh, you know, ingrained part of the aerospace community. But what we're pitching is we can send a dozen rovers for the cost of one of these historical rovers. So even if 25% of 'em fail, you still have eight rovers for the cost of one of the old rovers. And that's just the, economy's a scale. >>I saw James Hamilton here walking around. He's one of the legendary Amazonians who built out the data center. You might come by the cube. That's just like what they did with servers. Hey, if one breaks throw it away. Yeah. Why buy the big mainframe? Yeah. That's the new model. All right. So now about, uh, space space, that's a not space space, but like room to move around when you start getting some of these habitats going, um, how does space factor into the size of the location? Um, cuz you got the, to live there, solve some of the thermal problems. How do I live on space? I gotta have, you know, how many people gonna be there? What's your forecast? You think from a mission standpoint where there'll be dozens of people or is it still gonna be small teams? >>Yeah. >>Uh, what's that look like? >>I mean you >>Can guess it's okay. >>I mean, my vision's thousands of people. Yep. Uh, living and working in space because it's gonna be, especially the moon I think is a destination that's gonna grow, uh, for tourism. There's an insane drive from people to go visit a new destination. And the moon is one of the most unique experiences you could imagine. Yep. Um, in the near term for Artis, we're gonna start by supporting the Artis astronauts, which are gonna be small crews of astronauts. Um, you know, two to six in the near term. >>And to answer your question, uh, you know, in a different way, the habitat that we're actually gonna build, it's gonna take dozens of these robotic systems to build and maintain over time. And when we're actually talking, timelines, force talks, thousands of people living and working in space, I think that's gonna happen within the next 10 to 15 years. The first few folks are gonna be on the moon by 2025. And we're pushing towards having dozens of people living and working in space and by 2030. >>Yeah. I think it's an awesome goal. And I think it's doable question I'll have for you is the role of software in all this. I had a conversation with, uh, space nerd and we were talking and, and I said open sources everywhere now in the software. Yeah. How do you repair in space? Does you know, you don't want to have a firmware be down. So send down backhoe back to the United States. The us, wait a minute, it's the planet. I gotta go back to earth. Yeah. To get apart. So how does break fix work in space? How, how do you guys see that problem? >>So this one's actually quite fun. I mean, currently we don't have astronauts that can pick up a or change a tire. Uh, so you have to make robots that are really reliable, right. That can continuously operate for years at a time. But when you're talking about long-term repairs, there's some really cool ideas and concepts about standardization of some of these parts, you know, just like Lu knots on your car, right? Yeah. If everyone has the same Lu knots on their wheel, great. Now I can go change it out. I can switch off different parts that are available on the line surface. So I think we're moving towards, uh, that in the long >>Term you guys got a great company. Love the mission. Final question for both of you is I noticed that there's a huge community development around Mars, living on Mars, living on the moon. I mean, there's not a chat group that clubhouse app used, used to be around just kind of dying. But now it's when the Twitter spaces Reddit, you name it, there's a fanatical fan base that loves to talk about an engineer and kind of a collective intelligence, not, may not be official engineering, but they just love to talk about it. So there's a huge fan base for space. How does someone get involved if they really want to dive in and then how do you nurture that audience? How does that, is it developing? What's your take on this whole movement? It's it's beyond just being interested. It's it's become, I won't say cult-like but it's been, there's very, a lot of people in young people interested in space. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. There's, there's a whole, lots of places to get involved. There's, you know, societies, right? Like the Mar society there's technical committees, um, there's, you know, even potentially learning about these, you know, taking a space, resources master program and getting into the field and, and joining the company. So, um, we really, uh, thrive on that energy from the community and it really helps press us forward. And we hope to, uh, have a way to take everyone with us on the mission. And so stay tuned, follow our website. We'll be announcing some of that stuff soon. >>Awesome. And just one last, uh, quick pitch for you, John, I'll leave you with one thought. There are two things that space has an infinite amount of the first is power and the second is resources. And if we can find a way to access either of those, we can fundamentally change the way humanity operates. Yeah. So when you're talking about living on Mars long term, we're gonna need to access the resource from Mars. And then long term, once we get the transportation infrastructure in place, we can start bringing those resources back here to earth. So of course there are gonna be those people that sign up for that first mission out to Mars with SpaceX. But, uh, we'd love for folks to join on with us at lunar outpost and be a part of that kind of next leap accessing those resources. >>I love the mission, as always said, once in the cube, everything in star Trek will be invented someday. <laugh>, we're almost there except for the, the, uh, the transporter room. We don't have that done yet, but almost soon be there. All right. Well, thanks for coming. I, I really appreciate Justin for us for sharing. Great story. Final minute. Give a plug for the company. What are you guys looking for? You said hiring. Yep. Anything else you'd like to share? Put a plug in for lunar outpost. >>Absolutely. So we're hiring across the board, aerospace engineering, robotics engineering, sales marketing. Doesn't really matter. Uh, we're doubling as a company currently around 58 people, as we said, and we're looking for the top people that want to make an impact in aerospace. This is truly a unique moment. First time we've ever had continuous reliable operations. First time NASA is pushing really hard on the public private partnerships for commercial companies like ours to go out and create this sustainable presence on the moon. So whether you wanna work with us, our partner with us, we'd be excited to talk to you and, uh, yeah. Please contact us at info. Lunar outpost.com. >>We'll certainly follow up. Thanks for coming. I love the mission we're behind you and everyone else is too. You can see the energy it's gonna happen. It's the cube coverage from re Mars new actions happening in space on the ground, in the, on the moon you name it's happening right here in Vegas. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching.

>> Well, quick introductions for everybody kind of out there watching in the Data Summit. I'm Ali Tierney. I am the GVP. I run EMEA Sales for Snowflake, and I'm joined today with Michael Gillespie. Quick, just to introduce himself, what he does, and the DPE come structure as it goes. Go ahead, Micheal. >> Thanks, Ali. So as you said, I'm CDTO at Domino's Pizza Enterprises. So the company that I work for, we have the franchise rights and run Australia and New Zealand, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, and Denmark. And that's obviously Domino's Pizza for those markets. I look after four different verticals within the business. IT for the group, Strategy and Insights where our BI team resides and has a lot to do with Snowflake. Our Store Innovations Team, our Store Innovation Operations team which look at everything from robotics in store, how to use data better in store to be working at optimum level, and our digital team which is where I started in, actually, 13 years ago. And they're guiding our digital platform at a global level and how we localize it with the local marketing teams. >> Brilliant, I'm American and I grew up with Domino's Pizza, so help me understand, kind of, from a high structure. You've been there 13 years. My growing up experience was picking up a phone and pushing buttons and calling Domino's, and clearly a ton of modernization has come in the last 20 years, and you've been with the company for 13. What have you seen as you've grown into the DPE digital kind of space and you're driving that market? How are you guys using data? What have you seen happen over the last 13 years? >> Domino is itself, or at least DPE as well, has always been a data-driven business. What we've seen, though, as we've become more of a business that utilizes digital and technology to enhance, whether the customer experience or our store operations or our enterprise team. Is the availability of data to make decisions or to actually find insights. And if I look back, I've been lucky to go on a journey of 13 years with DPE. The power of analytics and data was apparent in a digital space. And it gave us a level of insight over a purchase that we never had before. So a great example of our first use of real data in a customer experience outside callbacks people are late, where we could give real-time feedback to a customer around their progression of their order through something called Pizza Tracker, which is shared across all and used across most Domino's in the world. And they're most common for most purchasing processes. Since then, we've gone from, I could count, very easily in between this call, how many orders would make in a day online, to now over 70% of our businesses online. We have a huge amount of data coming in from different, different areas of business. And now the challenge for myself and my team is how do we make this data readily available? To the local marketing teams, local operations teams. To really get better insights on the local market. So we've just gone from having a small pool of data to a tremendous quantum of data. >> So as you look to kind of localize your markets, right? I think you just mentioned seven or eight different markets that you're in. And I would assume then you have some data sharing that goes on within DPE, right? So Belgium wants something that's different than the Netherlands that was different than Japan, right? So how are you right now democratizing that data and giving it to your customers so that your end users can see how to use that, right? In local marketing in local, kind of, business uses. >> Correct. So, we have, we have nine markets now within DPE and all those markets, every market has unique needs and wants and challenges that they're trying to solve for. So our goal is to really try to simplify the access. And that's what we talk about democratizing data. We have a series of reports so we can build customized reports so that we don't have to do as many ad hoc requests. Then when giving those dashboards having the ability to customize and benchmark where you need to. And then when it comes down to a unique customer experience that's obviously going to be a localized marketing on them because different customers bought certain, certain volumes of pizza or sides and different market that's different. So we need to make the tools that each of them and or allow our marketing teams around the world to get access to the data that they can really help them make the most informed decisions to support their franchisees and stores. >> How much of your technology has moved in general to the cloud? And then secondarily to that question, as you've moved there, and I assume significant multi-clouds because you've got so many different regions and locations, how are using Snowflake to help move data into the cloud? >> I would say from a cloud perspective we're well advanced in being clouded for a majority of our platforms or at least moving in that direction. And we're being cloud friendly economic solution and some of that data solutions for quite a while. We still have some on-premise data, like most companies, and we're in the process of migrating. And we have to be aware that we operate within markets like Europe, where GDPR is there. And we have to, we have to be well across requirements from that ability that perspective. But regardless of GDPR or not with any form of customer data or employee data or any personal data we have, we know it's a privilege to hold. So anytime we are working with data we always want to make sure that we're storing it and accessing it in the most secure way. And then beyond that, we want to make sure that, as I talked about, we want to democratize data and make it more accessible. So, you know, I'm really looking forward to seeing as we build out and continue to build out our data strategy, how we continue to work with the likes of Snowflake to just bring faster and more insightful, you know, visibility into each particular market and at a global level as well. So that our global leaders can understand how the business is performing but also get micro where they need to. >> How, as you go through your cloud journey and then and with Snowflake specifically, how did you guys look to governance and how did you look to ensure your security around data? >> Yeah. So know for us, it's all about making sure we've got the right governance and controls and processes. So working with our security team, working with the right architects on data flow and processes, working with our legal team and representatives in each market and that's vital. You know, having policies and governance around any form of activity whether it be data or around changes on the website or changes even in any operational processes is important. So. >> Yeah >> And the greatest thing is if he can, you know, through, if you're making dashboards that are unquantifiable non-personal data, you know that's a lot easier to manage, as well. Because that's giving you a representation of groups not actually down to the particular customer. >> That makes perfect sense. How have you found migrating to Snowflake? Talk through that journey a little bit and I know you're relatively early in the journeys but talk at your experience has its been so far. >> You know, the BI team, my BI team and Strategy and Insights Team have definitely been huge fans of Snowflake and the support from the team there and and the partners we're using for integration. You know, one thing that I know that, that excites me from a strategic level, it's Snowflake's ability to be cloud agnostic and for us everything we build in the future we have chosen partners that we work with in the cloud space. We shouldn't be, we should always be having that ability to be flexible or we're always going to have some fragmented data sets and the ability to utilize a solution that can stretch out into those is very important. So you know, from a strategic level that's a great level of flexibility and from a micro level, and to look at how the team operate when they're coming with stories around greater efficiency, greater flexibility, reduced processing time, reduce, reduce time, reduction in costs and certain activities. That's a great story to be told. That's what I like about this story is that they were all wins. You know, I'm getting from the team that I can run more intensive workloads now. You know, that they can they can do more immediate action. You know, they are cutting down time, as I said, something down from hours to minutes down getting some early results and that's so important. >> So, tell me what kind of business insights you're delivering back to your stakeholders when you get through this process? The quick wins. >> Yeah, well I guess it's just us being able to get reports out faster. Get information out faster, Get access to any acts, build, build bespoke things quicker. It's all about Domino's as a business that's quite an entrepreneurial fast moving. So if you can find efficiencies that, like any business, that's, that's the point. But if we can find efficiencies within our team what it means is we've got a quantum of work the team can do or a service can do, or a bucket of costs can do. If we can reduce that quantum of whether it be cost or time and human effort, that means we can output more. One thing that we're also looking at is we talked about democratizing data earlier, but how can we empower, empower teams to get insights faster? Or to go, I always think there should be no one key holder. There should be key holders of obviously the security of the data and the, and the safety and the and the rules around it. But, in regards to broad insight data or in visibility of results, we should be trying to make that as accessible as possible so that teams can find the reading sites. You've got then thousands or hundreds of people that are looking. Whether it be franchisees at store or team members that had offices in different departments. If they can get greater visibility at a top level data and drill in micro and performance, imagine the insights you continue to do or if you can get reports in their hands faster. Time in a fast moving business a day or two of lost opportunity is huge. So how do you get to make those decisions faster? And how do you stay ahead of your game? >> So as you think of data cloud and as you think of how you're going to build out a DPE specific data cloud, where do you see that going? How, where do you get where's your nirvana and end goal from your data club? >> How do we make better use of that data? So, how do we win? We know that our data repositories are only going to continue to grow. You know, we're a business that was growing at a relatively strong rate. If you look at our previous results, we have a multitude of countries. We have 2,600 stores around the world pumping out pieces every night. And that's creating different forms of data. We have 70% of our customers online. When you're capturing a continuous amount of data. One thing that we want to do is not only manage it efficiently We know that capturing data is a privilege as well, so that we're capturing the right data. And then when you're capturing the right data we still know that the quantum of that will increase. So then how we are storing it and making sure that as we add more data to our repositories we are not actually making its harder to access or it's slower to access. So it's bringing down our reports that we're continuing to optimize and what we're seeing and I touched on when you're bringing time down from hours to minutes with a tool. We're doing that. We're bringing down those solutions. So being able to manage the increasing volume of data we're getting in a more efficient way. Being able to democratize the access of it in a safe, secure, but insightful way. But, you know, having the backing of a service like Snowflake in the background, supporting access and functioning about data. Hopefully, this just means that it will give us more ability to be nimble and do more in the future. >> As you've broken down data silos with using Snowflake and started to democratize data and put it all in one spot your ML becomes richer and more able to make better decisions because you got it all out of silos at this point. >> Yeah.We've got a better floral collection about data. And we can make those data repositories more accessible or no more efficient in accessing them. It's only going to enrich our models and it's going to challenge us. I can challenge and the business can challenge the strategy and insights and BI team to look at a multitude of ways as part of supporting the business. Because they've always got a backlog of reports or solutions they want to deliver. So, we had started a journey of being a data driven company. We have started the journey of a digital company many, many years ago. >> So as we leave today Michael and we wrap up. Last question I have for you is, as you know, everybody's coming and saying do the next bread is coolest next thing. What would you recommend the users of our conference? What would you say? Like how would you, how would you say to go to market and do it the right way? >> Yeah. Let's say the main thing is for those people to reflect upon their own business and understand the challenges at hand. it's very easy to be asked, why aren't we doing AI? Why aren't we doing machine learning? Why aren't we? But those are just solutions. You should be trying to take time to say okay, but what are some of that challenges? And then can we apply those technologies to it? or could a rudimentary approach, approach of just a simple report or a very basic algorithm solve for that. But if you could take your system to the next level with ML, don't do it for ML's sake or if you could take it with a complex data extract. Make sure you've got an angle inside of what you want to deliver. And then know, once you go down the path of anything more complicated, especially with things like machine learning, that it's a never-ending story. And you're probably not going to get the result you like in the first couple of weeks or month because that's what it is. It's a learning solution. It's a ever evolving beast and you can't just throw it out there and say, "Oh, everyone will be happy." So make sure you've got a fair commitment to getting into that game. And that you've got an envision in hand, and that envision will, I can tell you, usually move once you achieve it. Because you're only going to unlock more realities or more alternative solutions that'll grow from it. >> Absolutely. >> So be strong and want the challenges. >> I love that, and it's how we like to think about the data cloud in general, right? Is we are delivering to the business. At the end of the day, data is useless if you're not giving insights and ability for your business to make decisions and move forward. So I completely agree and I really appreciate the time you took today to sit down with me and educate me on Domino's and educate the world on how you're using data to make better decisions in the business. Thanks, Michael. >> Thanks for your time.

>>Hey, Sue, my great to see you. Welcome to the Data Cloud Summit. Super excited to have you welcome. >>Hey, Chris. Very nice to be there. Thank you for having me >>tell us a little bit about alien spending lakhs. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role. Italy and Benelux >>aliens, Benelux zits. Basically the aliens business in the region. Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. We serve the needs of the customer here by securing the future. We actually do both PNC asses. We call it properly and casualities in life investment management and health. We do retail, uh, small and medium enterprises. I am a regional chief Data and Biggs, officer for aliens. Benelux. I report directly to the regional CEO my job here in alliance to basically drive the data and analytics agenda for aliens. Vanilla, >>cinnamon. I understand you're getting your PhD in data science. It would be great for the audience to learn a little bit more about what's driving you to do that. And kind of what? What's most interesting to you about data science? A I m l >>the reason why I started to do this because there's so much relevance. Push that which is basically driving the agenda. We need to really look at the theoretical part off it as well. To kind of concrete eyes, Andi toe bring in a certain develop dependency, consistency, timelessness, etcetera. And obviously that which we're doing is very innovative. Here, Italians, monologues driven again by relevance and which is very good for the business. But the timelessness needs to also be the sustainability the scalability needs also has to be given to this particular relevance driven topic so that we don't just create superficial impact. But we create a long lasting and everlasting impact in our competitive intelligence intelligence that building against monologues. >>That's awesome. I mean, thanks for sharing that. So So I think. Cinnamon. When when you and I met back in March 1 of the big things that you were you were considering is, you know, uh, signing up with snowflake and becoming a customer. But part of that journey was convincing Ali on spent lakhs to move to the cloud in your journey. So kind of it would be great for you to explain to the audience. You know what that journey has been like. Was it hard to convince your organization moved to the cloud, What hurdles might you have seen in your journey to the cloud? >>It was not very different to any kind of a change on the kind of effort that you need to put in a change for a normal status go set up that which exists today. So, of course, in any kind of a change, your status could change or challenge that which you bring in. There is a considerable, uh, effort that you need to put in. And it's also your responsibility to basically do that because if you don't have that energy or if you don't have that commitment and you are not able to sustain the energy of the commitment that you show in the new agenda that you bring in, then probably you're not gonna be there to see the change through. Of course, it waas difficult, obviously, because, uh, there is already existing status. Go. And there we have a lot of benefits by moving to cloud, and obviously the benefits seems very interesting. But there is skepticism, and we s alliance is from a group perspective, and Benelux perspective is full of very, very clear on a point that we cannot take advantage off the data that which we have. We want to ensure that privacy is by design. Security is by design. And we give utmost care to our customer data. Um, mhm. And all of this basically brings in tow the concept off. Okay, what is it about moving to the cloud and where are we getting exposed? Where should we basically put together? A security by design privacy with some kind of concepts before we do it and etc. Are you ready? Can be ensured that we still keep the customers data A to a place where we basically can't bust. Well, those are the things that which had to be explained. A certain level of sensitization had to be created. A certain level of awareness. Uh, then the consideration part. Yeah, all of this basically takes its own cycle. >>Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. So we're super excited to call Ali on spending lakhs of customer. Now, what are you excited about with snowflake? And I know that you're you're looking at snowflake. Is this kind of data cloud and data cloud transformation project. Tell us a little bit more about, you know, What? What excites you about Snowflake? How you think you might use stuff like, um, in this kind of transformation of Ali on spending lakhs? >>I know that snowflake is brought to us as a product by you guys, but we look at snowflake is a kind off message. We are breaking down the silos. Literally. Onda. We look at snowflake as a kind often agent to do this. Uh, this is something that which is very important to understand that whatever you do with the organizational level, you still end up with a situation where you kind of reinforce the silos. But, snowflake, we have an opportunity here to even challenge that on break the data silos. Once the data silos is broke, you basically improve the find ability of data. You basically improve the understand ability of the data accessibility of the data interpret ability on everyone sees pretty much the same truth. And that's how the silos disappear. We're very, very excited about the journey that which, which we have in front of us because we're pretty new in it. In the sense that we are going toe haven't very exciting journey as we progress, we are also looking forward to see how Snowflakes road map is going to take us to the point off arrival, as I would call it in our own data revenge in >>today we live in this kind of multi cloud, multi cloud application world. What are some of the concerns you have as you transition from, you know, having stuff in a data center to using multiple clouds to using multiple tools? You know, what's what's some of the challenges you for? See having? What are the things that you're looking for from Snowflake to help you? Um, in that journey, >>there is always a reason why we basically make a change. And the reason is always mostly towards more efficiency, effectiveness and so on and so forth, right? I mean, basically, we have Catholics challenges on this. Catholic challenges can also be addressed with this move to the cloud, except but what We should be careful and should avoid us that the cost that which we have in terms of Camp X is just does not get re attributed into another cost called articulation, cost or arbitration cost. So having a multi cloud is definitely a challenge until you have a kind off orchestrator because we are doing a business here and we don't want to care about pretty much the orchestration. The are part off it on. This needs to be taken taken into account because there is this application cloud and there is this infrastructure cloud. You can have as many clothes as you want, whatever function that which is is supporting you. But that has to be encapsulate, er abstracted away from us so that we're able to focus on the business that we're here to do. And these are certain constraints that I really had as I was thinking about multi cloud or hybrid cloud and I was even focusing on how am I going toe orchestrate all of these different things Eso that you know, you kind of feel abstracted from those things. So well, those are the constraints that I think we still have toe conquer as we progress. I think we are evolving very fastly in that area. And you are the experts in that area, and you know exactly what you're doing there. But for me, what is very important is that uh, yeah, it gets abstracted away from us, and we just get the scalability that we need the elasticity that which we need the security by design the privacy by design on. Then I think this is perfect for us. >>Awesome. So? So I think a lot of customers that are listening to this are about to jump on the same journey that you're you're embarking on. What, is there a specific use case that you decided to kind of go? You know, you know, all in on Snowflake. What was the what was the kind of the initial driver for you to say? Hey, then the business driver on you saying, Hey, I'm gonna use this use case to drive transformation within within Ali and spend lakhs, >>I think virtualization, uh, it's the keep point that comes up the top of my head the moment you speak about what even did drive me to think about snowflake as an option, right? Why virtualization? Because obviously I don't want to move huge amount of data from left, right and center, because you know that when you start optimizing such a kind of an architectural, you end up creating pockets silos, which is totally against what we want to do. We want to break silos. But in the end, just because off the infrastructure needs in the computational needs, etcetera on the response rates and stuff like that, you start to create silos, bring with virtualization and especially with the performance that with Snowflake and provide us in that area. Now it seems like a possibility that we will be able to do that. I mean, it was not something that we just thought about, let's say, a few years back, but now it's definitely possible virtualization. It's one of the key points, but when you talk in the terms of use cases, we Italians monologues do not look at use cases. Actually, we look at business initiatives, so the reason why we don't look at it as use cases is because use cases used, kind off a start and stop. But we were not in the game. Off use cases were in the game off delivering future, that which our customer really wants to be secured. That's what the business we are in and that there are no use cases. There are initiatives there that which matches to the agenda for our customer. So when you start thinking about like that one of the most important things that snowflake offices is an opportunity is to obviously create on environment, so to say, on elastic scalable, uh, situation with the computer that which we need that which basically matches one on one with the agenda for our customer. So what I mean is the data warehousing on the cloud through data warehousing on the cloud is what waas on off our driving thought processes for We did not want to go and say that we will just do, uh, do Data Lake. We will just do data hub way don't belong toe religion. So to say, we basically are very opportunistic in this approach where we say we will have a data lake. We will have a data warehouse. We will have a data hub on. We will integrate it, you know, very a semantic way that which will match to the agenda of the customer and treat the customer as a sort of centric point. >>That's great. I appreciate that. So So, um, Suderman, thank you so much for for, you know, joining us today. Um, And again, thank you for your partnership. We snowflake is super excited. I'm I'm super excited Thio participate in this journey with you. Is there anything that you kind of like to let the audience know before we wrap up? >>Very happy about the way we started Toe talk. Converse. I think the proof of value as we did was a very good engagement with you guys. I mean, you guys were really there. I really appreciate the way that you took the proof of what I've worked with many other windows in terms of proof of value. But I think you had a marked difference in the way you you brought Snowflake. Tow us. Thank you so much and keep doing the good work. >>Thanks so much cinnamon for the partnership and were super pumped on, you know, making you very successful in your project. So thank you so much. >>Thank you.

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube, covering VeeamON, 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. It's our first day of coverage at VeeamON 2017. The first time The Cube has covered VeeamON and it's quite an event. About 3,000 people here and as I say, we're being going two days of coverage talking to executives and partners and of course, the customers, we love the customer segments. Markus Marksteiner is here. He's the CTO of Baloise Group, insurance company out of Switzerland. Markus, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome. >> So tell us a little bit about your company, your role and what are some of the things driving IT decisions. >> Okay, so are a life insurance and long life insurance company within Switzerland. We also have a bank in Switzerland which is included. We operate in Europe, in the country of Belgium and Germany and Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. So we are a company with about seven and a half thousand employees. And my role in there, is actually I'm a head of infrastructure and supports so I'm responsible for the data center, the user service center and the workplace environment. I also act as a group CTO because we have centralized all the data centers from the different locations to expose it to our headquarter. >> So financial services tends to be in the cutting edge of technology typically, very competitive industry and fast moving, very IT-oriented. What are some of the drivers in your business today? >> I think in the, especially in the insurance companies, we are, within Switzerland but also in Germany and Europe itself, it's a highly regulated market so. The possibility to, let's go for the public cloud is very limited because of regulation part. So therefore we have to deal with insurance companies within Europe but also within US and China, especially, which are very agile out on the market so. Therefore our business is now changing completely because from the traditional insurance which we have selled years ago, we will have to translate this into the industrialization world so meaning, we have to be more flexible on the market, to have shorter periods of production. And for me, as an IT reseller within the company, means my organization have to be agile as well. So, this is actually the most part we are changing to deal with security, that's the one part. But the other part is the agility. >> Paint a picture of your environment. What's it look like? Applications that you're supporting. What does your infrastructure look like. Your storage. Obviously, your backup, we'll talk about that. >> So we have, within Basel we have two data centers nearby. And we have now set up a third data center outside of Basel for disaster recovery because Basel is located on a earthquake area with a high risk impact so therefore our internal audit is set, it's not that good to have for the complete group data centers located on a earthquake plate so please set up a data center which is at least 100 kilometers away from our location now, so. Within the data centers, typically we have mainframes, we have servers, we have storage, all kinds of flavors. We have some centralization there. We have one with strategy in the infrastructure which a huge partnership with HP. In this area we have from storage part, we're using NetApp and DocuStorage. And as a backup software of course now, since nearly a year now, we are using Veeam for doing the backup of all the virtual machines. In the future, also the physical machines. And also we elevated Veeam because of the data implication into data center three. So this guarantees me to bring up the data at a certain time to get us into three to make the restore and the restart there. >> So you've got, two data centers within a synchronous distance and one is an asynchronous distance. Is that correct? So you have a three data center set up which is essentially is as close to zero data loss as you can get. >> Yeah, exactly. The data center three we are using not only as a cold backup standby data center, we are putting all the non-productive environment to this data center so we have all three data centers up and running and they have on a certain perspective productive level meaning for the developer, of course data center three is absolutely highly critical because they develop in data center three, all the data is there. For the productive part, we have data center one and two which is in Basel which has the availability there, so. We're using both sides and they're all connected together. >> How often do you test recovery in that set up? >> We're trying now to test it twice a year. But we cannot switch the complete data center because we have productive and-- >> Dave: It's too risky. >> It's too risky so we built up a reference model, a reference service where we have included all the environments we need to make it for the auditors visible that our infrastructure in data center three is working in case of an emergency. >> Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about the data protection strategy. So we have a high-level, we understand the data center approach but what about protecting the apps? How do you use Veeam? How did you start with Veeam and where are you now? >> I mean we came from an absolutely traditional data standards so we had a legacy backup system running based on file locks and then we started a certain time with NetApp and using snapshot technologies there. Because we had huge databases which are not able to fulfill the SLA anymore in the recovery mode so we have to switch them to them to NetApp. And then we started with data center three and then we had another problem. How can we replicate these data into data center three in a certain time to get the SLA fulfilled in case of an emergency. And there we made a revelation and Veeam was actually the one who was fulfilling all the requirements and it was easy to deal with them. So we decided, okay, let's try it Veeam. And at a certain time, we thought well, it's not only about data application with Veeam it's also about the complete backup stack, we can replace by this software. So we grow slowly with the possibilities we saw during the implementation phase. We said, okay, we can use this model and this model and then VeeamON came on so we could use the report part also for the sizing of the virtual machines and now on we just backing up almost everything with Veeam, so. >> Can you speak to organizationally, you know, how many people you have managing kind of backup and DR and what that experience has been like? >> In the past we had about three people which were responsible for the complete backup process. But they're very focused on their tooling, they could not tell me if the backup was correct. If the data was backuped correctly. They only say, yeah, my system is running and it's backuping but is it really also consistent. I don't know so we had to ask the engineers. With Veeam now, we switched completely. We do not have any responsible anymore for backup purposes itself. We took this because of the ease of use, the tool, we gave them directly to the engineers of Linux, of Citrix, or of Windows and they are now responsible for their own data. So they can now do the backups itself and they can also assure to me that this, what they do with the backup is correct and it's restartable. Because they have to check each time. >> Yeah, so you're not only operationally more efficient but you actually know that what you have works. >> Markus: Exactly. (laughing) Yeah, yeah. >> Great. I believe it's your first time at the conference. What's the experience been so far? What value have you been getting? What brought you here? >> Actually I came here with the goal to learn more about the Veeam company itself and this was actually during the networking areas and the networking part was very helpful for me to meet directly the management of Veeam to see what is their strategy and it was also in the general session, they have a story to tell and that's what, I was coming in here to get this information and in the sessions, and today also with the talks with Baronov directly and McKay, that's really, there's a spirit in this company. That's what we are looking for. Because we have so many big companies, vendors in our thing, where you do not have the connection to the management directly and for me it's very important because we try really to grow with our business and therefore I need a partner behind where I can rely on them. With Veeam, absolutely the case. >> So you mentioned supporting physical endpoints is something that interest you. Anything else from the announcements that you heard that excites you? Anything not there, that you're looking for in the future, too? >> Yeah, for the future for me it's actually the cloud connection is very important. Because we are still in the high-regulated market but I think also the insurance and the financial sector in Switzerland, there are slightly opening for the cloud services and also for us, it's the Office365 and Amazon web services, they're coming slightly into our organization and to know that there is also a possibility with the same backup software using this in a cloud, this gives me the feeling and also the assurance that I can go to my management and tell them, hey guys, we're choosing the right vendor because we can also use them for the cloud. I do not have to evaluate another product there for fulfilling this requirement. That's good to hear. >> So you sell insurance, your company does. Backup is largely insurance. How do you make the business case, what business benefits have you seen? Can you share with any metrics, maybe they're largely cost cutting. Maybe it's enabling DR. What can you share with us? >> The one thing I can share with you is actually we had a, that's not only based on Veeam by the product, by the backup itself, but it's also based on the Veeam reporter. We had in a branch office in Belgium. We have an issue where we had several active directory controllers running there. And with VeeamON, they reported that there's two controllers broken during the weekend and there's only one active directory controller available. Meaning, if this will also fail, we have to replicate the complete staff to Basel meaning 1500 users have to wait. And they are very aware about these profiles because they are using Citrix in the background. So meaning, we will probably have an issue there for about four to five almost a whole working day where a complete branch could not work. Meaning, there we just rolled up these two active controls with Veeam in a certain time period and then nothing happened. And I mean, counted in money, this would cost us at least a half a million Euro, this outage, if it occurred. >> Markus, in the key note, you know, one of the terms that gets thrown out is digital transformation. We've talked to a lot of financial service companies that, that terms resonate. What does it mean to your organization? How has it impacted your job? >> Yeah, it has a huge impact because our business lines they are now looking for other type of insurance. Meaning, in the past, we just insured the car for one year. So, the experience of the users then, also my kids is actually, I don't want to have a car insurance for a whole year because I'm only driving twice a month, a car. So they would like to have an insurance like insure what you use. >> Stu: As a service? >> As a service. And therefore we have to adapt this into completely other models because with our legacy systems, it's impossible. So what is our business doing? They're going out, looking for startup companies. Bringing them in and the startup companies, they start, typically in a cloud environment. They're very agile. And then when they bring out the product, the first thing is they ask for a connection to the legacy systems, for customer relationship management systems and stuff like this. So I have to really change my organization completely. And so I have to go away from these silos organization parts, into DevOps. And I also have to change my data center because I have to provide these services also as a cloud service, as it is possible in the public cloud, so. Meaning, the digitalization in the business has absolutely direct impact to my organization. >> I'd buy that service. I've got four kids, three driving, two at college. They really only need it a couple of months out of the year. I'll switch insurance companies. Give me a call. (laughing) All right, excellent. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Markus, we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. Continuous coverage of continuous data protection, continuous content flow. VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)