>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music) >> Good morning everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at MWC '23 in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm going to have a great conversation next with our esteemed CUBE analyst, Dave Nicholson. Dave, great to have you here. Great to be working this event with you. >> Good to be here with you, Lisa. >> So there are, good to be here with you and about 80,000 people. >> Dave: That's right. >> Virtually and and physically. And it's jammed in, and this is the most jammed show I've seen in years. >> Dave: It's crazy. >> So much going on in the telecom industry. What are some of your expectations for what you're going to hear and see at this year's event? >> So, I expect to hear a lot about 5G. Specifically 5G private networks, and the disaggregation of the hardware and software stacks that have driven telecom for decades. So we're at this transition into 5G. From a consumer perspective, we feel like, oh well 5G has been around for years. In terms of where it's actually been deployed, we're just at the beginning stages of that. >> Right, right. Talk about the changing of the stack. You know, the disaggregation. Why now is it too late? And what are the advantages? That it's going to enable telcos to move faster, I imagine? >> Yeah, so it's really analogous to what we see in the general IT industry that we cover so much. The move to cloud, sometimes you're gaining performance. You're always gaining agility and flexibility. A big concern of the legacy telecom providers is going to be maintaining availability, reliability against a backdrop of increasing agility in the direction that they want to go. So that's going to be the conversation. It's going to be the old school folks, who are interested in maintaining primarily availability and performance, excuse me, contrasted with the open source, OpenStack providers, who are going to be saying, hey this is a path to the future. Without that path to the future, things will stagnate. >> Talk about some of those OpenStack providers. I imagine those are some of the folks that we know quite well? >> Sure, sure. Yeah, so someone like Dell, for example. They're perfectly positioned at this sort of crossroads, because Dell has been creating "cloud stacks," that will live sometimes on-premises. And those stacks of infrastructure, based on cots, commercial off-the-shelf components, integrated within an ecosystem can live at the edge, at literally the base of transmitter towers. So when you think about this whole concept of RAN or a radio access network, think of a cellular tower with an antenna and a transmitter. The transmitter might live on that tower, or it might live in pieces at the base of the tower. But there's always at that base of the tower, forget about the acronyms, it's a box of stuff, teleco stuff. All of these things historically have been integrated into single packages. >> Right. >> For good reason. >> Right. >> Think back to a mainframe, where it was utterly, absolutely reliable. We moved, in the general IT space, from the era of the mainframe to the world of client server, through virtualization, containerization. That exact transition is happening in the world of telecom right now. >> Why is it finally happening now? It seems a bit late, given that in our consumer lives, we have this expectation that we could be mobile 24 by seven. >> Right. Well it's because, first of all, we get mad if a call doesn't go through. How often, when you make, when you try to make a cellular call or when you try to send a text, how often does it not work? >> I can count on one hand. >> Right, rarely. >> Right. >> Now, you may be in an area that has spotty coverage. But when you're in an area where you have coverage it just works all of the time. And you expect it to work all of the time. And the miracle of the services that have been delivered to us over the last decade has really kind of blunted the need for next generation stuff. Well, we're at this transition point. And 5G as a technology enables so much more bandwidth. Think of it as, you know, throughput bandwidth latency. It allows the kind of performance characteristics so that things can be delivered that couldn't be delivered in the past. Virtual reality, augmented reality. We're already seeing you know 4K data streams to our phones. So, it's sort of lagged because of our expectations for absolute, rock solid, reliability. >> Yeah. >> The technology is ahead of that area now. And so this question is how do you navigate from utter reliability to awesome openness without sacrificing performance and reliability? >> Well, and also from a stack perspective, from looking at desegregation, and the opportunities there are for the telcos, but also the public cloud providers, are they friends, are they foes? What's the relationship like? >> They're going to be frenemies. >> Lisa: Frenemies? >> Yeah, coopetition is going to be the word of the day again. Yeah because when you think of a cloud, most people automatically think off-premises. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Maybe they even think automatically you know, hyper scale or Azure, GCP, AWS. In this case, it really is a question of cloud as an operating model. Cloud facilitating agility, cloud adopting cloud native architecture from a software perspective, so that you can rapidly deploy net new capabilities into an environment. You can't do that with proprietary closed systems that might use a waterfall development process and take years to develop. You and I have covered the Kubernetes world pretty closely. And what's the big thing that we hear constantly? The hunger, the thirst for human resources, >> Right. >> people who can actually work in this world of containerization. >> Yes, yes. >> Well guess what? In the macroeconomic environment, a lot of folks in the IT space have recently been disrupted. This is a place to look, if you have that skillset. Look at the telecom space, because they need people who are forward thinking in the era of cloud. But this concept of cloud is really, it's going to be, the telcos are both competing and partnering with what we think of as the traditional, hyper scale public cloud providers. >> And what do you think, one of the things that we know at MWC '23 is virtually every industry is represented here. Every vertical is here, whether it's a sports arena, or a retail outlet, or a manufacturer. Every organization, every industry needs to have networks that deliver what they need to do but also enable them to move faster and deliver what the end user wants. What are some of the industries that you think are really ripe for this disruption? And the ability to use private 5G networks, for example? >> Well, so it's interesting, you mentioned private 5G networks. I think a good example of the transition that's underway is this, the move to 4K video. So, you get a high definition television. The first time you see a 720p TV, it's like oh my gosh, amazing. Then we get 1080p, then it's 4K. People get 4K TVs, they bring them home, and there's no content. >> No. >> The first content, was it from your cable provider? No. >> Yeah. >> Was it over the air? ABC, NBC, CBS? No, it was YouTube. YouTube delivered the first reliable 4K content, over the internet. Similarly, everything comes to us now to our mobile devices. So we're not accessing the world around us so much from a desktop or even a laptop. It's mobile. So if you want to communicate with a customer, it's mobile. If you're creating a private 5G network, you now are standing something up that is net new in a greenfield environment. And you can deploy agility and functionality that the large scale telecom providers can't, because of the massive investment they might need. So the irony is, you have a factory that sits on 20 acres and you have folks traveling around, if you create a private 5G network, it might become, it might be more feature rich than what your employees are used to being able to access through their personal mobile devices. >> Wow. >> Yeah, because you're starting net new, you have the luxury of starting greenfield, as opposed to the responsibility and legacy for supporting a massive system that exists already. >> So then, what's in it for the existing incumbent telcos from an advantage opportunity perspective? Because you mentioned frenemies, coopetition. >> Right. >> There's irony there, as you talked about. >> Right, well you could look at it as either opportunity or headache. And it's both. Because they have very, very real SLAs that they need to meet. >> Right. >> Very, very real expectations that have been set in terms of reliability, availability, and performance. So they can't slip off of that. Making that transition is, I think going to be driven by economics, because the idea of having things be open means that there's competition for every part of the stack. There will be a critical role for integration vendors. Folks like Dell, and the ecosystems that they're creating around this will be critical, because often you would prefer to have one back to pat or one throat to choke instead of many. So, you still want to have that centralized entity to go to when something goes wrong. >> Right. >> Or when you want to implement something new. So, for the incumbents, it's a classic example of what you do in the face of disruption. How do you leverage technology? In my role as adjunct faculty at the Wharton CTO Academy, we talk about the CTO mindset. And the idea that your role is to leverage technology, in the service of your organization's mission, whatever that organization and mission is. So from a telecom provider perspective, they need to stay on top of this. >> Yes. >> Or they will be disrupted. >> Right. >> It's fascinating to think of how this disruption's taking place. >> Lisa: They have no choice, if they want to survive. >> No, yeah they have no choice. >> Lisa: In the next few years. >> They have no choice, but they'll come along, kicking and screaming. I'm sure if you had someone sitting here in the industry, they'd say, well, no, no, no, no, no. >> Yeah, of course. >> We love it! It's like, yeah, well but you're going to have to make some painful changes to adopt these things. >> What are some of the opportunities for those folks like Dell that you mentioned, in terms of coming in, being able to disrupt that stack, open things up? Great opportunities for the Dells, and other similar organizations to really start gaining a bigger foothold in the telecom industry, I imagine. >> Well, I look at it through the lens of sort of traditional IT and the transitions that we've been watching for the last couple of decades. It's exactly the same. I mean you, there is a parallel. It is like coming out of the mainframe era to the client server era. So, you know, we went in that transition, it was mainframe operating systems, very, very closed systems to more slightly opened. You know, the worlds of SUN and SGI and HP, and the likes, transitioned to kind of Microsoft based software running with like Dell hardware. >> Yeah. >> And, that stack is now getting deployed into one of the remaining legacy environments which is the telco space. So, the opportunity for Dell is pretty massive because on some fronts they're competing with the move to proper off-premises public cloud. >> Right. >> In this case, they are the future for telecom as opposed to sort of representing legacy, compared to some of the other cloud opportunities that are out there. >> So ultimately, what does a modern telecom network look like? I imagine, cloud native? Distributed? >> Yeah, yeah. So, traditionally, like I said, you've got the tower and the transmitters and the computer hardware that's running it. Those are then networked together. So you can sort of think of it as leaves on a twig, on a branch, on a tree. Eventually it gets into a core network, where there is terrestrial line communication and or communication up to satellites. And that's all been humming along just fine, making the transition from 3G to 4G to 5G. But, the real transition from a cloud perspective is this idea that you're taking these proprietary systems, disaggrevating, disaggrevating them and disaggregating them, carving them up into pieces where now you're introducing virtualization. So there's a VMware play here. Some things are virtualized using that stack. I think more often we're going to be talking about containerized and truly cloud native stacks. So instead of having the proprietary stack, where all the hardware and software is designed together. Now you're going to have Dell servers running some execution layer, orchestration layer, for cloud native, containerized applications and microservices. And that's the way things are going to be developed. >> And who, from a stakeholder perspective is involved here? 'Cause one of the things that I'm hearing is with this disaggregation of the staff, which is a huge change, what you're articulated, that's already happened at enterprise IT, change management is a hard thing to do. If they want to be successful, and well not just survive, they want to thrive. I'm just imagining, who are the stakeholders that are involved in having to push those incumbents to make these decisions, to move faster, to become agile, to compete. >> So, I remember when VMware had the problem that anytime they suggested introducing a hypervisor to to virtualize a physical machine and then run software on top or an operating system on top, and then applications, the big question the customer would have was, well is Microsoft going to support that? What if I can't get support from Microsoft? I dunno if I can do this. Within about a year of those conversations taking place, the question was, can I run this in my production environment? So it was, can I get support in my test environment too? Can I please run this in production? >> Yeah. >> And so, there are folks in the kind of legacy telecom world who are going to be afraid. It's, whatever the dynamic is, there is a no one ever got fired for buying from fill in the blank >> Exactly, yep. >> in the telecom space. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Because they would buy a consolidated, aggregated stack. >> Right. >> And, if something went wrong they could say, boom, blame you. And yeah, that stack doesn't lend itself to the kind of pace of change. >> Right. >> So it doesn't necessarily need the same kind of change management. Or at least it's very, very centralized. >> Okay. Okay. >> We're getting into the brave new world of things where if you let them spin out of control, you can have big problems. And that's where the folks like Dell come in, to make sure that yes, disaggregated, yes best of commercial off-the-shelf stuff, but also the best in terms of performance and reliability and availability. >> Yeah. >> So, that's the execution part, you must execute flawlessly. >> It sounds like from a thematic perspective, the theme of MWC '23 is velocity. But it seems like an underlying theme under that, or maybe an overlying theme is disruption. It's going to be so interesting, we're only on day one. We just started our coverage. Four days of wall to wall coverage on theCUBE. Excited to hear what you're excited about, what you learn over the next few days. We get to host some segments together. >> Yeah. >> But it seems like disruption is the overall theme. And it's going to be so interesting to see how this industry evolves, what the opportunities are, what the coopetition opportunities are. We're going to be learning a lot this week. I'm excited. >> Yeah, and what's fascinating to me about this whole thing is we talk about this, all of this tumultuous, disruptive stuff that's happening. For the average consumer, they're never going to be aware of it. >> Nope. >> Dave: They're just going to see services piled on top of services. >> Which is what we want. >> There are billions of people with mobile devices and the hundreds of billions, I don't know, trillions I guess at some point of connected devices at the edge. >> Lisa: Yes, yes. >> The whole concept of the internet of things. We'll sort of be blissfully unaware of what's happening at the middle. But there's a lot of action there. So we're going to be focusing on that action that's going on. In, you know, in in the middle of it. >> Yeah. >> But there's also some cool consumer stuff out here. >> There is. >> I know I'm going to be checking out the augmented reality and virtual reality stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. Well it's all about that customer experience. We expect things right away, 24/7, wherever we are in the world. And it's enabling that to make that happen. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thank you so much for really sharing what you think you're excited about for the event and some of the trends in telecom. It sounds like it's such an interesting time to be unpacking this. >> It's going to be a great week. >> It is going to be a great week. All right, for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, covering day one of MWC '23. Stick around. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next at NUTANIX. We're here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight were joined by Wendy M. Pfeiffer. She is the chief information officer at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Wendy, thank you for having me. And this is not your first time you this year. A Cube alum. >> I am a Cube alum. It's so much fun. It's kind of weird, though. We're inside of this Cuban outside of us is all the action in the Exposition Hall is kind of crazy and cool. >> It is that there's a lot of energy here. I want to start our conversation by taking you back in time to nineteen eighties. You growing up in Silicon Valley, you notice an advertisement in the newspaper that dead tree medium NASA wants ideas on how to organize its dashboard. Better for astronauts. Yeah, >> So they had a program called CD T I cockpit displays of traffic information and they were looking for innovative ideas to make what was really a very small display provide information for the shuttle astronauts as they were re entering the atmosphere. And so, if you can imagine coming back into the atmosphere, it very high speed. And there was concern that there would be a traffic in the area. Regular airplanes flying, you know, relatively much slower. And so how could the same air traffic displays that were used for aviators be sort of modified to give real time information? Teo the astronauts, I will tell you that I never contributed much to that project, but I discovered large scale computer systems. And I just love the idea of these things large networks, large computers on just the through the vast interconnectedness of things. And so that got me interested in technology, whereas before I thought I was interested in science and math. And it turns out, of course, there's some great synergy among those topics. >> So So the internship at NASA is what propelled your interest and really, what launched your career in technology? Yes. Now you are the CEO of Nutanix. This this amazing company thiss startup That's now billion dollars with the market cap in multiple billions of dollars. Yes. So talk a little bit about your experience as CEO and what and what in what you're hearing, particularly at this dot next show. Yeah, I think >> one of the things that's happening is we're all in the midst of a huge transformation in terms of how digital technology affects business and empowers and enables business and as CEOs were right in the middle of that Wei have. Many of us have tons of legacy equipment and things from vendors, but we also have this desire for leading digital transformation in our companies. And so companies like Nutanix and there aren't many companies like Nutanix, but technologies like ours bridge that gap. We can run the legacy workloads in on premise data centers on pick a vendor's hardware. But we can also run the same work loads on our operating system in public clouds. And so it's kind of the best of both worlds, and it bridges thes two worlds that CEOs have been struggling to bridge, and it does so in a way that doesn't require us to re train our people or find, you know, a small team of rocket scientists who are, you know, worth more than the GDP of small countries. So we're able Teo, actually execute. Still keep the lights on. Still do the the old school things that we need to do but also operate with excellence at that more modern end of the technology spectrum. That's huge. And I'm hearing that from so many folks all around the show, whether it's, you know, people who are responsible for infrastructure or Dev Ops kind of crosses all of those bridges. And and as Nutanix, the CEO, I get to represent how any company like ours a billion and a half dollars publicly traded company, can use technology to enable itself, because I use our technology to do all the things we need to do as a company. >> But that's exactly just what you're talking about. That balance that these companies need to strike with thinking about the maintenance, thinking about the storage, thinking about the protection, but then also thinking in a much more visionary in strategic way about how we really transform our business and get our and get the work done that we need to get done. Can you talk a little bit about the fact that these consumer technologies have really leapfrog the thie enterprise vendors and sort of embarrassing it, frankly, should be for these big technology behemoth that they haven't done more to make cooler, sleeker technologies? >> Absolutely. Oh, my gosh, this is my favorite topic. And it's why I have my smart here. So on this smartphone, this is a is an apple phone on this smartphone. I have a ton of applications and a ton of functionality, and you know, so I have Facebook on my smartphone, right? And I love Facebook. >> But when I >> downloaded and I started using Facebook, I didn't say, you know Oh my gosh, fall. Now I have my social media application. So there's no way I could use Twitter or Instagram or anything else because my standard is Facebook. And that's the only thing I'm going to use. No, no, no. I have a multitude of APS and I used them as I choose when I want to, in the way that I want Teo, those abs inherit things from this platform. They have access to my contact data. They understand my location if I allow them tio etcetera. So all of those things are unconsciously in what is actually a phone. Now try to get your desk phone to do that right? It doesn't. And yet in the enterprise space, we have vendors who are selling us for millions of dollars, desk phones, and those were supposed to be as performance delightful, interesting as this device. And then we have laptop computers and we have desktop computers. None of those things is even a third as interesting, engaging, useful and easy to use as this consumer attack, which, by the way, is a lot less expensive. I spend millions of dollars on a V audio visual room systems of conferencing technology, whereas when I go home I can se teoh Amazon or Google. Hey, you know Amazon. Show me my my shows. You know I can I can I can ask for any show I want to watch on TV. When I downloaded Pokey Mongo, I love playing video games and games. When I downloaded Pokemon go on my phone. I >> didn't have to >> watch, you know, five five minute video snippets to teach me how to install the application. Within minutes, I was, you know, catching all the Pokemon I could what in what is really a very complex application that also includes augmented reality. And so I think it's time that first of all the vendors who sell to us, who are so used to that every three years, the enterprise license agreement is renewed. Or, you know, Hey, we're a pick something, you know, a one hardware vendors shop. So we that's what we standardize on that is doing two things. One, they're killing their own industry, and they're also killing. They're they're ruining. It is ability to deliver and to be useful and transformative. Two companies way and it way also have to demand better way. Have to stop buying that Dunc. And we have to start finding ways whether we have to build it ourselves or using machine learning tools to train the machine on how to do these things that that enterprise it cos don't deliver to us. And we also need to look for vendors like Nutanix that build that bridge that allow us to stop worrying about Oh my gosh, You know, we've got to make this legacy thing work with this new thing. We don't have to worry about that so much anymore. And now we can focus on this user experience The interaction design what we might do within an ecosystem That is our own unique companies and our own unique set of systems and also ultimately allowing our people, which is what companies are made up of allowing our people to to have the experience that they want tohave, just like we do with our own devices. I can choose how I want to interact with this thing, and I can turn it off if I don't want to use it. >> So so much of what you're talking about is really about getting companies and then the leaders of these companies to think differently. And that is the biggest managerial challenge. And it's a challenge when you're in sales. And so how do you How do you approach that problem? Because it because you've really laid it out so clearly we are used, Teo, so much intuitiveness and ease and beauty in the technology that we use in our personal lives. And then we come to work way put up with a lot of junk. >> We do, right? I mean, like, I know you're not saying anything out loud, but I know you. You're agree without you here with your laptop on the table there. You know, first of >> all, our work forces are changing. Generally, we keep talking, at least in circles that I sit in about, you know, the millennials are entering the work force. No. You know, the Millennials and Jen Zy are already make up almost half of our workforce today and will be at that somewhere around. I think it's seventy percent by twenty, twenty five of the workforce, so >> they're already here. Those >> folks already have a different relationship with technology than my generation did my generation. And I'm a Magen axe, I think. Yeah. Um so my my hub to Exactly So the big >> hair A my generation. >> I >> watched the birth of some of these consumer technologies, but this next couple of generations grew up with him already in place. And so they don't even think about the fact that this is technology. This is dependent, just is just part of them. And so I think we need Thio, Throw off the old filters and get out of the way. It's a lot more about choice and self service and freedom and flexibility and a mixed portfolio. And there are so many ways to educate ourselves about those things if if we don't naturally have that instinct. But it starts with diverse thinking, diverse tools. I believe that whatever you know, PC Mac laptop tablet mobile device that you're comfortable with your company should enable you to use. And you should use the applications that that makes the most sense to that make you the most productive. And then it's his job or it's leaderships job to create that that really rich ecosystem, where those applications and tools have the nutrients that they need and the capabilities that they need to work together well, understanding how to create and maintain that ecosystem mean what is an ecosystem? It's this sort of happy accident of all sorts of creatures at various levels in the in the pyramid coming together and figuring out a way to cohabit and to survive and then, hopefully to thrive. And so no one can get too important. No one voice no one species. No one layer can be outsized compared to the others because of So what do you have? Well, you have a species collapse. They run out of the fuel that helps them to thrive. And so I think, of course, our planet at a macro level is an example of that. But our company's our families, our neighborhoods. All of those things are micro examples that that matched the macro and are dependant on the same laws of physics and science and so on in order to thrive in to function. >> Well, you're talking you You just highlighted the importance of diversity. And and you made this comment about No one person can get two important or no one part of the species. In fact, if you look at the tech landscape Ueno, who's too important and it's the pros who are who are running the show in a lot of ways. Still, I want to hear from you as a senior leader, a female senior leader in technology you noticed, >> and Theo the manicure. Yeah, >> but how? What? What do you see? What? Tell us what it's like. I mean, is it as bad as we hear? And, um, and and And how have you in your career overcome a lot of these challenges? And then how What do you see as your responsibility to the next generation who's coming up? >> Absolutely. So it is as bad as we hear. It's sometimes worse than we here. And I think that especially there are certain sectors of society and tech society where the bro culture that we've heard about is fully in play. What mitigates that is the human beings who make up the bro culture so often. These guys don't understand the the effect of all of them and mass, and so often they're just being natural. Many, especially start ups. The start of fuel. Silicon Valley, You know, they started with some great ideas and with some dreamers and often those those people with the great ideas and dreamers you know they are males, and what do you do? You get your buddies together. You know, when you get a little extra money, you get the next round of bodies. You invite people, you know, so >> there's a little >> bit of that syndrome that's happening. There are also wonderful incubators and fields where women are also in that start up mode, and I'm a member of the Board of Girls and Tech. We have a number of things like Way have an amplified competition that supports women, tech the entrepreneurs, so there's certainly more than just men. But the history has been that however, a lot of people talk about that For me, that's not the emphasis for me. The emphasis is on how we change our jobs and our definition of work in general. And this is so fascinating to me. >> I think we've been working for years >> and years on, you know, how do we get more women and stem and encourage girls to go through this path in school? You know, it turns out women and men are both equally interested in science and math and all those things. But the starting jobs and tech are are horrendous when it comes to matching women's interests in skills and this isthe stereo, I'm going to start stereotype here. I hate doing this, but in general terms, men tend to be able to work on things serially. They tend to have a singular focus and to appreciate the singular focus and so you can lay out a path first, your socks and your shoes and the guy will follow that, and we'LL master each step along the way. And that's that's a way that you know, it's stereotypically a lot of male brain brains. Progress for women, for female brains were multifaceted way sort of have this ability. I don't know if it's evolutionary or environment or whatever. I'm not like an expert, thank God. >> But we have this >> ability to multi task all the time. I could be, you know, holding my kid and, um, talking on the phone and, you know, making sure dinners cooking, okay. And, you know, maybe it's a business call, and I might be hiring someone or firing someone, and I'm giving equal focused attention to each very important task. And so we sort of have that that ability because we have that ability. That's the kind of job that you know. Okay, you enter college and you're taking a software development computer science, of course. And you take all computer science courses until you get that degree. And now you get your first software developer job and you sit in this little cubicle and all day long you write code. Well, you know, fine. If I've sort of have that single threaded mentality, I'm ready. All right. I guess I'm going to do this. I'm gonna Masters are >> gonna get through the layers >> of writing code as fast as I can and someday I'll rule the world or start my own company over on the female side, we say this is going to kill me. I don't want to do that. What a boring jobs. Because Because also, I'm interested in I'm interested in the Japanese language and I'm interested in design. And, you know, I love to cook. And also, you know, I'm just been working through, you know, theories of space and time and in my physics study, and to just have to focus my mind all by myself all day long in this cubicle on writing, you know, some part of a bigger program. It's not attractive. And so what we find is that women are dropping out of thes focus degree programs and they're dropping out of the early stages of technology careers. Which means that by the time you get to my stage, there is not a very few of us right, >> So you said we needed we need to change the definition of work. Yes, What does that mean? >> Well, the Millennials and Gen Z and countries that are that are very young, like some of the Eastern European countries that air, that air, just reinventing themselves. They've already done that. It's the gig economy. It's the idea that as an individual, I can choose the things I want to work on. We've tried Teo, sort of emulate that in in the agile methodologies right? I get to choose my tasks, but it's this sort of. It was taken the soul out of it. But this is really that independent contractors might be doing. You know a few things that once I might be designing shoes like one of my friends is she's she's created her own shoe company, and at the same time I might be writing code Azaz a gig for some other company. And you know what? I might also be involved in, you know, a charitable work. Or I might be volunteering at my kid's school and doing all of those things together at the same time in parallel is interesting to us. It's engaging to us. We put more. >> So how'd you do that? At your team at NUTANIX? How do you help your employees, uh, do all the things that they want to do in addition to obviously getting their work done? Yeah, well, It's always a >> balance right. One of the really important things is to create an environment of tools and technologies and processes that allow people to choose the things they want to choose. It's not always well understood. Some people say thank you. I get to use the tools I like. Other people say there's too many tools what we d'Oh. And so we try to find something down the middle for those guys. Exactly. Secondly, I hire and mentor leaders who are very diverse and open, and they're thinking so that we can constantly kind of reinvent ourselves as an I T organization. But ultimately it gets down to enabling culturally people to think differently, to raise their hand and say, You know, I am a network engineer, but I would like Tio automate this thing over here or, you know, I Yes, I'm a systems engineer, but I'd like to deploy the network, just allowing them to get out of their comfort zone and to experiment. It's also really important to understand the balance of it. People who choose it love engineering and love technology, but we'LL also love process and interaction, and so we're already this mash up of personality types. And, you know, I would say more multifaceted you are, the more you're able to play multiple sports or or have multiple skills or play offense and defense, then the more able you are to thrive in the new World in the new economy. And sometimes it's just finding those mavericks Or, you know, I like to say I'm a little civil, like, you know, I've >> got a little personalities and you know it. Sometimes you got >> to bring one of those personalities to the table. Sometimes you have to bring many of those personalities to the table, and it's gonna be okay for folks to do that. >> I love it. I love it. Great. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's always fun talking to you. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight. You are watching the Cube. They'LL be much more to come

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here in Bahrain for exclusive coverage for AWS Summit, part of Amazon's new region being launched here in the Middle East. I'm John Furrier, your host, we have two great guests from C5 Accelerator in Washington D.C., now kicking it out in Bahrain. Hadyah Fathalla, executive director C5 Accelerate and Eva Dimitriadis, good to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Chief operating officer. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, congratulations. Bahrain, D.C. >> The world. >> The world, it's global. >> Thank you, yeah. >> C5 Global. >> It's great to be here. >> It's an exciting time. I mean, I got to ask you Eva, because we had previously met, talked about interviews in D.C. Smart people that known Amazon, because Teresa and Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos always say, "We're going to be misunderstood for a while." Come on, that's not true. (laughing) A region in this area is going to explode the entrepreneurial scene. What's your take? >> I think that's absolutely true. As we see today at the Summit, there's just such a growing number of entrepreneurs and people who are excited to embrace digital innovation. Three years ago I think the story would have been different but ever since we set up the accelerator here, which was the first once in Bahrain, we've just seen an explosion of interest and not just from Bahrain but from around the GCC. Even start ups from abroad coming and setting up here as their Middle East practice. >> Talk about C5 for a second. Let's take a minute, to explain what you guys do. I jumped ahead a little bit because I'm excited because I just love the entrepreneurial energy. This is a really important thing happening and you guys are playing a role. Talk about C5 Accelerate, what are you guys doin'? What's your business model? Just take a minute to explain as a set up. >> So I'll let Eva talk maybe more about our global operations but really C5 Accelerate a few years ago, branch the business which was largely an investment business, including innovation business and we built Bahrain's first and one the regions, in fact, first cloud enabled accelerators and Bahrain's very first technology accelerator and we did that in partnership with the Economic Development Board, the labor firm Tamkeen and obviously with AWS. Really we benefited from the first mover advantage and the thinking around that was that as Amazon grows it's geographic footprint there is great opportunity to build on the cloud in places like the Middle East where the ecosystem is nascent and there is an amazing first mover advantage. >> Yeah. >> So when we partnered with the government to build this, we realized as we do that, we also need to contribute to building a healthy ecosystem so we built this first accelerator and we have felt-- >> When was that, by the way? >> 2016. >> Great, thank you. >> Actually September marks our two year. We've since graduated five cohorts. We're gearing up for six and we have 34 start ups under our belt. Our first cohort was an all Bahraini cohort and today we're very proud to say that actually half of the start ups that have graduated from this program that is based out of Bahrain are international start ups. That's what we're doing locally. Maybe Eva can tell you a little bit more about what we're doing on a global scale. >> You know and that's important. I want to make sure you got that out about having a bunch of start ups under your belt because when I went to the start up Bahrain session yesterday I was really, really impressed by two things. One is, just the smart energy, the smart people who like understand entrepreneurship. Either went to school for it or have learned through the scar tissue of trial and tribulations like myself. And then the entrepreneurs were there themselves. >> Mm-hmm. >> And you know a healthy entrepreneurial community when they start bitchin' and moanin', they're all chirping away, they're hungry. There's a hungry appetite for entrepreneurship here and creating but it's not fake entrepreneurship. They're really hungry. They're, where's the cash? Where's the capital? So this is really a positive sign. >> It is and I want to add something really quick before Eva jumps in, I think in the past two years what's great about a small ecosystem and the ability to pivot and build fast is you actually see the impact that you can have as an individual and as a company and as a community really on the landscape. But also regionally we've had great collaborative efforts across the GCC and in the region with partners in Saudi and Kuwait and Egypt and in Jordan so I think there's a lot of momentum that we're riding on now, and I think it's a great time to be building in the tech space. >> Well Eva, before you get to your comments. I just want to follow up on the comment around Saudi and different regions because this is a trend that has been happening for a while in Silicon Valley, as you know. People have been leaving Silicon Valley, because it's cost to live there, but people have been putting engineering teams outside of Silicon Valley. I mean, 20 years ago, you only went outside of Silicon Valley or the US to outsource which is not really product development, it's just coding. Then the trend became real engineering and product development, real chops outside. We just had Abdul on from Saudi and he was talking about his shape of his team, the psychology, the make up of the people, it's just not in Saudi Arabia. It's in China, it's all over the world. As developers are working across the world, this is a really big deal. I mean this is the new dynamic. >> Yep. >> Diverse teams, geo located, no borders, this is going to change the political landscape. It's a cultural shift. >> Definitely, I mean I think it's a while before we have here the same secret sauce that exists in Silicon Valley or that has existed there for the past decade or so. But the emphasis on training and upscaling is huge and as we've heard a number of times today, there are so many incentives to do so for free so you can actually learn to code, you can become a certified AWS coder for free in Bahrain. Which is a phenomenal advantage and step up. I mean, no one would pay me to do that in the UK. I think that, along with a number of other initiatives are really going to leap frog the development here. And in terms of what you talk about, the sort of the landscape and geo location, it goes in so many different directions now. There's no single focus so we had a Swiss company last year come and incorporate in Bahrain, and hire developers here to grow their business. It can go in so many different directions. >> Yeah, the winner take all business model is an old business model and now it's everyone's winning so it's a little bit of flattening of the wealth and the opportunities but the pie is getting bigger. >> Yes. >> I think this is the dynamic that cloud and Amazon continues to demonstrate that the Oracles, for instance, of the world, we got to win it all, lock everyone in and we got to own it. That ethos is not, that dog's not hunting, as they say. This is changing the entrepreneurial landscape and the other thing I observe is the younger generation. Leveling up is very easy to them. It's like a video game, right? Leveling up is AI, blockchain, I think one of your companies I talked to, oh we're doing a blockchain implementation. They will eat up the cloud. >> Mm. >> I mean it's going to be like, pretty fast. >> You mentioned-- >> So I'm expecting some accelerated. >> Definitely. I mean you mentioned hungry but they're also fearless. The entrepreneurs that we work with have that perfect mix of a super smart idea and an understanding of a niche sector of the market but also this resilience and recklessness that you need to embrace the opportunity. And all the scary stuff that comes with it. >> And I think adding to that, I think what's great with Amazon coming to Bahrain, with us working across the globe, it's a cross pollination that happens because whether we like it or not, like Eva said, we are not Silicon Valley yet and maybe we don't aspire to be specifically Silicon Valley and we want to build our own unique ecosystem but the lessons learned from the likes of Silicon Valley and London and Singapore and China and everywhere else in the world. >> Yeah. >> Really helps build, not just the skills required but the grit that could otherwise be absent. >> The grit's key, yeah. >> And it can engender the kind of cultural shift that's necessary so you need, so you can develop these robust and resilient qualities that are necessary for a founder. >> Well, that's a really great point. I moved from the east coast in the US to California with my first start up because that's where the action was and I can tell ya, I've been there 20 years and I've been an entrepreneur doing things ever since. And there's a fallacy of trying to emulate Silicon Valley. Every i dotted, t crossed and trying to take the playbook. There's no direct match, however, there's some consistencies in there. That's grit, creativity, openness, capital markets and community and this is something that you guys kind of have in place. And then adapting that to your culture. Now I will say that my impression here is it feels a little bit Silicon Valley because it's a little bit more open and loose. People like to go fast. Fast and loose is the Silicon Valley way. Dubai's a little bit more like New York to me. So I can feel more, valley-like here. I'm not saying that Dubai's bad, I'm just saying it's different cultures. Bigger, its more ... >> There's definitely a lot of agility here. I think one of the other advantages which leads back into what C5 is as a whole, we're primarily an investment business. We have a venture capital fund based in the UK. What we're really looking for is investible, scalable business models where we're de risking the cost of capital with cloud computing because that is how ultimately these start ups scale. Another benefit that we really see in this market is value for money. If you're a start up in Silicon Valley and you get to the stage that some of our start ups get to when they finish their program, your valuation is pretty much always triple what we would see here, so valuation's a very sensitive subject. Our start ups hate talking about it. We structure our deals with them in a way that generally avoids having a valuation. >> It's very easy to do business here. You just keep on increasing the valuation, all the stars will come dropping to your doorstep. >> It's a nuanced area. >> Yeah. >> But that being said, you can get really good value for money businesses but more importantly you're investing in the teams and the entrepreneurs and there's no shortage of that here. >> Let's talk about the ecosystem here and then let's talk about the women in tech because one of the things that blew me away yesterday was Teresa Carlson held a women breakfast and for the first time I got kicked off a table because they wanted to make room for the workshop. >> Sorry about that. (laughing) >> I'm like, wait a minute. This is not an inclusive environment. Sorry, no, we need the table. Okay, I know, I was happy to tap out. But I wasn't expecting that and the energy and the, just really, again, this event, they had to lock the doors for the keynote so there's really a big interest across the board. Talk about the ecosystem and then the women in tech situation. >> So I think the ecosystem is an interesting question because, I mean, we work very collaboratively. Like I said, even though this initiative largely was kind of envisioned by the government and mainly by the Economic Development Board and I'm sure you got a chance to speak to Khalid Humaidan, he might have given you a bit of an idea of how this started off but really the EBD threw this idea of start up Bahrain to the community and said, "Look, you guys lead on it." And it took a little bit of time for the community to figure out what that really means and what it's going to look like but it really made the community and ourselves also think pragmatically about what we want this ecosystem to look like. So even though it's not as mature, like I said, as other ecosystems further away and especially in the west, it is coming together very nicely because it's coming together as a collaborative effort. You see a very good continuous consultative work between private sector, public sector, the start ups and then the other stakeholders, including ourselves, and academia. We still have a long way to go, I think specially in areas and this is something that I always emphasize, is to shift the culture you really need to start at a much younger age so at schools, at universities. We engage with them and are keen to do more on that front but I think we are laying the foundation for what I hope in the next five, 10 years will be a pretty competitive entrepreneurial and start up-- >> It might be sooner. >> Hopefully sooner. >> Yeah. >> I think we have the right recipe now to build a robust ecosystem. >> Yeah, I can say I can attest to that after what I saw yesterday. Your thoughts? >> Yeah I mean our team in Bahrain is 100% Bahraini. I'm based in London, but Hadyah here leads a phenomenal team who are all Bahraini citizens. Being the island that it is, we know everybody so Hadyah's done an excellent job of engaging with everyone from schools to universities to post grads to public sector, private sector. So really all the stakeholders in the ecosystem are engaged and everyone from the oil and gas industry to the finance sphere are thinking about how innovation can advance their businesses so that they don't get left behind at the train station. >> Yeah. >> It's really top of mind and top of agenda which is a very invigorating scenario. I think, going back to some of the initiatives, from bankruptcy laws to having a fintech bay with the Central Bank of Bahrain, there's just so much, like they're constantly pushing the envelope to make this a friendly environment for entrepreneurs to come and do business. >> And I want to add one thing. There's always this question of, does government have a role to drive innovation and create an ecosystem? >> They do. >> I think Bahrain is a good example for others in the region and even beyond to say actually government does have an important role. >> They do. >> If you look at Bahrain, it's government that has been very flexible and nimble in terms of moving to accommodate. Whether it's the new bankruptcy laws or allowing for the fintech sandbox and a cloud first policy and shaping the start up Bahrain. The government has taken the lead on a lot of these initiatives so it's a good example of how there can be a top down approach to building an entrepreneurial landscape but also where the bottom needs to come and meet the top so I think Bahrain a good example. >> Just to reiterate, my observation is that they know how to get things going and sponsor but they're also listening and self aware and even on theCUBE here, we heard comments like, we'll get out of the way. >> Mm-hmm. >> Now that's the difference between good judgment. >> Mm-hmm. >> You know? And, no, no I funded you, I own you, I mean I've seen that in the public sector or, we're going to fund you as an NGO and then I kind of own you so come to my receptions and be my show horse-- >> Mascot. >> Show all of my people how good I am, donating money. So there's a little bit of a balance between enabling. >> Yep. >> But at the end of the day, this is going to be a fast pace and that's where I think the speed, knowing when to get out of the way and letting the community go. I mean, people like speed here. Cars are driving fast, you got a Formula 1 race track up at 14 months. >> They like speed but sometimes things are surprisingly slow. >> Yes. >> So it's incredible that we are where we are. You asked about women in tech and I think there's something there that we're really proud of. C5 globally, 43% of the start up founders that we've supported through our accelerators are women. In terms of diversity, we're thrilled about that statistic. We'd like it be 50%. >> Yep. >> And I think that the Middle East, we're seeing so much hunger from women entrepreneurs and women who want to learn to code to be founders and we want to do everything in our power to enable that. >> Computer science degrees coming out of the university? >> Absolutely. Hadyah here had this fantastic idea a year ago to found what we call C5 Nebula. I'll let Hadyah talk about why we came up with that name and how it relates to our business but this is now a new stream of our business which really it's a membership platform where all women globally are invited to join and we provide education, upscaling, jogs, connectivity, mentorships and through this network we are allowing a complete globalization of the talent and skills that we have. >> Yeah. >> So you can be a student in D.C. wanting to come and volunteer to work for a company here and we will make that match happen. I think it's a very exciting phase for us and we've seen so much demand for this program. Maybe Hadyah can talk about why we came up with this name? >> Yeah, so like Eva said, we, I'm Bahraini, we've always had, we've been lucky to have been pioneering and have work very closely men and have had really equal opportunity but in industries like tech, globally, women's representation is lower than that of men and there are areas where there's still work to be done. >> A lot of work to be done, yeah. >> So last year, actually, with the first AWS Summit, when Teresa was out here, we figured we do a women in tech breakfast. When we were curating that guest list we couldn't find that many women and we didn't know if wasn't that we didn't know them or that they didn't exist and we realized really we need to put together something to bring all the women together and work more closely so we built Nebula, really to, like Eva said, do three things and a little more. One is the connectivity side of things and then the upscaling but also to raise awareness and appreciation. >> What is Nebula? >> What is? >> What is Nebula? >> So Nebula, scientifically it's an astrological, astronomical phenomenon-- >> But it's your network group, is that what it's called? >> It's a platform. >> Okay. >> So it's actually been officially launched three weeks ago, you can go online and visit it and it's a platform that allows you to become a member of Nebula and gives you access to mentorship, to opportunities to upscale and train but also to raise awareness and appreciation for the amazing opportunities for women in the tech space. >> Is there a URL? >> There is a URL, it's-- >> We've been debating what is is today. (laughing) >> It's www.c5nebula.com. >> Okay, I'll put it up, publish it with the video. >> And what it means, it's the Latin word for cloud and it's where stars are born. >> Yeah. It's also, what's important, is it's a compilation of a bunch of different clouds and electrons and it's a mess, it's a bit of a mess but it's a lot of forces working together and I guess the moral of the story is, we can create stars in the space but we all have to work together and it all has to come together to-- >> And it's powerful when you work together. >> Only 10% of VC funding worldwide goes to women founder companies and 1% of that goes to women of color so there's some staggering statistics there. Globally, this is not a Middle East problem, this is globally a real big area of disparity that we're trying to help address. >> Well you guys know our door's open in California and Boston, and certainly the women in tech, we got a big network, we can merge them into the Nebula connect our networks. >> We would love that. >> We would love that. >> We're open and anything you guys have to share with us we love co-creating with the communities, that's what we do at theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure. >> You got a great mission. Big supporter. C5 Accelerate, they're the ones on the ground, making things happen, gettin' those sparks of entrepreneurship and helping them capture them into one community, create some energy and some momentum and help people create value and also capture the value, that's what it's all about here. You got Amazon Web Services' region in the Middle East, CUBE coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(techy music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. (techy music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This is the live CUBE coverage here in Toronto, Ontario here in Canada for the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. This is day two of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage. We've got great presentations going on, live content here on theCUBE as well as in the sessions, great networking, but more important all the thought leaders in the industry around the world are coming together to try to set the standards and set up a great future for cryptocurrency and blockchain in general. Our next two guests are very special guests for theCUBE and we're excited to have them on, the Honorable Wayne Caines, Minister of National Security for the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge on the Fintech business development manager, part of the Bermuda Business Development Agency. Thank you guys for coming on, really appreciate the time. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Why this is so important is that we heard your presentation onstage, for the folks, they can catch it online when they film it and record it, but the Bermuda opportunity has really emerged as a shining light around the world, specifically in the United States. In California, where I live, Silicon Valley, you guys are now having great progress in hosting companies and being crypto-friendly. Take a minute to explain what's happening, what's the current situation, why Bermuda, why now, what's developing? >> This has all happened over the last eight months. We were looking in November of 2017 to go in the space. In January we went to the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland. When we went to Davos in Switzerland something very interesting happened. People kept coming up to us, I was like the Hound of the Baskerville, or the Pied Piper if you please, and so, so many people were coming up to us finding out more information about Bermuda. We realized that our plan that we thought we could phase in over 18 months, that it had to be accelerated. So, whilst we were at the World Economic Forum in Davos we said to people, "Listen, if you want to change the world, "if you want to help Bermuda to grow, if you're serious," this is a Thursday, "Meet us in Bermuda on the Monday morning." On the Monday morning there are 14 different people in the room. We sat in the room, we talked about what we wanted the world to be, how could Bermuda be in place, what are the needs in this industry, and by the Wednesday we had a complete and total framework, and so we split up into industries. Number one was ICOs, we wanted to look at how to regulate the ICO market. Number two, we wanted to look at digital asset exchanges or cryptocurrencies or how do we regulate security tokens and utility tokens and what do exchanges look like, how do we do exchanges in Bermuda, and then we wanted to talk about education and setting up incubators. And so, come fast forward to July, August, we have an ICO bill in place that allows us to look at setting up ICOs in Bermuda. We wanted to focus on the legal and the regulatory framework, so this is a nascent space. A number of people are concerned about the dark actors, and so we wanted to set up a jurisdiction that traded on our international reputation. Now, remember for the last 60 years reinsurance, finance, captives, hedge funds, people in the financial services market have been coming to Bermuda because that's what we do well. We were trading on the reputation of our country, and so we couldn't do anything to jeopardize that. And so, when we put in place the ICO legislation we had consultants from all over the world, people that were bastions and beasts in industry, in the ICO industry and in the crypto world came to Bermuda and helped us to develop the legislation around setting up an ICO. So, we passed the ICO legislation. The next phase was regulating cryptocurrencies, regulating digital assets, and we set up a piece of legislation called the Digital Asset Business Act, and that just regulates the digital asset space exchanges, and the last piece we wanted to do was a banking piece, and this is the last and we believe the most significant piece. We were talking to people and they were not able to open up bank accounts and they were not able to do, so we said, "Listen, "the Bermuda banking environment is very strong." Our banking partners were like, "Listen, "we love what you guys are doing, "but based on our corresponding banking relationships "we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that space," but how could we tell people to come to Bermuda, set up your company, and they can't open bank accounts? And so, we looked at, we just recently passed creating a new banking license that allows people to set up their business in Bermuda and set up banking relationships and set up bank accounts. That simply has to receive the governor's Royal Assent. As you know, Bermuda's still a British pan-territory, and financial matters have to get the okay of the Queen, and so that is in the final stages, but we're excited, we're seeing an influx, excuse me, a deluge of people coming to Bermuda to set up their companies in Bermuda. >> So, the first two pieces are in place, you have the legislation... >> Mm-hm. >> Mm-hm. >> You have the crypto piece, and now the banking's not yet, almost approved, right? >> It's there, it simply has to get the final sign-off, and we believe that it should take place within the next two weeks. So, by the time this goes to air and people see it we believe that piece will be in place. >> So, this is great news, so the historical perspective is you guys had a good reputation, you have things going on, now you added on a new piece not to compromise your existing relationships and build it on. What have you guys learned in the process, what did you discover, was it easy, was it hard, what are some of the learnings? >> What we've learnt is that KYC, know your customers, and the AML, anti-money laundering, and terrorist financing pieces, those are the critical pieces. People are looking in this space now for regulatory certainty, so when you're talking about people that are in the space that are doing ICOs of $500 million or exchanges that are becoming unicorns, a billion dollar entity in three months, they want a jurisdiction that has regulatory certainty. Not only do they want a jurisdiction with regulatory certainty, they want to open up the kimono. What has this country done in the past, what do they have to trade on? We're saying you can go to a number of countries in the world, but look at our reputation, what we're trading on, and so we wanted to create a space with regulatory certainty, and so we have a regulatory body in Bermuda called the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and they are an independent regulator that they penned the Digital Asset Business Act, and so the opportunity simply for people around the world saying, "Listen, we want to do an ICO, "we want to set up an exchange. "Where's a country that we can go to that has a solid reputation? Hold on, how many countries have law surrounding"-- >> Yeah. >> "The Digital Asset Business Act, how many ICO countries have laws. Guess what, Bermuda becomes a standout jurisdiction in that regard. >> Having a regulation signaling is really important, stability or comfort is one, but the one concern that we hear from entrepreneurs, including, you know, ourselves when we look at the market is service providers. You want to have enough service providers around the table so when I come in and domicile, say, in Bermuda you want to have the banking relationships, you want to have the fiduciary-- >> Yes. >> You want to have service providers, law firms and other people. >> Yes. >> How are you guys talking about that, is that already in place? How does that fit into the overall roadmap for your vision? >> I don't want to beat a horse (laughs) or beat a drum too much, that is what we do as a country. So, we have set up, whether it's a group of law firms and the Bermuda, excuse me, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, the Bermuda that's the register of companies that sets up the companies. We have Kevin, and Kevin will tell you about it, he leads our concierge team. So, it's one throat to choke, one person that needs, so when you come to really understand that the ease of business, a county that's business-friendly with a small country and with a small government it's about ease of reference. Kevin, tell us a little about the concierge team. >> It's like the Delaware of the glove, right? >> Absolutely. >> Come in, domicile, go and tell us how it works. >> I'll give you a little bit of background on what we do on the concierge side. So, one thing that we identified is that we want to make sure that we've got a structure and a very clearly defined roadmap for companies to follow so that process from when they first connect with the BDA in Bermuda to when they're incorporated and set up and moved to Bermuda to start running their business is a seamless process that has very clearly identifiable road marks of different criteria to get through. So, what I do as a concierge manager is I will identify who that company needs to connect with when they're on the ground in Bermuda, get those meetings set up for when they come down so that they have a very clearly mapped out day for their trip to Bermuda. So, they meet with the regulator, they meet with the government leaders, they meet with the folks who've put together legislation that, obviously you mentioned the service providers, so identifying who's the right law firm, corporate service provider, advisory firm on the ground in Bermuda, compliance company, and then making sure that depending on what that company wants to achieve out of their operation in Bermuda they've got an opportunity to connect with those partners on their first trip so that they can put that road map together for-- >> So, making it easy... >> Making it very easy to set up in Bermuda. >> So, walk me through, I want to come down, I want to do business-- >> Yeah. >> Like what I hear, what do I do? >> So, you send me an email and you say, "Listen, Wayne, we're looking at "doing an ICO launch in Bermuda. "I would like to meet with the regulator. "Can you put a couple law firms in place," in an email. I zip that over to Kevin or you go on our Fintech.bm website-- >> Yeah, I was going to say... >> Fintech.bm website, and Kevin literally organizes a meeting. So, when you come to Bermuda for your meeting you have a boardroom and all the key players will be in the boardroom. >> Got it. >> If you need somebody to pick you up at the airport, if you need a hotel, whatever you need from soup to nuts our team actually makes that available to you, so you're not running around trying to find different people to meet, everyone's there in the room. >> And the beauty of Bermuda is that, you know, the city of Hamilton's two square kilometers, so your ability to get a lot done in one day is, I think, second to nowhere else on the planet, and working with the BDA concierge team you're, you know, we connect with the client before they come down and make sure we identify what their needs are. >> The number one question I have to ask, and this is probably the most important for everyone, is do they have to wear Bermuda shorts? (laughs) >> When you come you tell us your size, you tell us what size and what color you want and we'll make sure, so the... I tell this story about the Bermuda shorts. The Bermuda shorts, Bermuda's always had to adapt and overcome. Bermuda, we have something called the Bermuda sloop and it's a sailing rig, and so we... The closest port to Bermuda is Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and we wanted to cut down the time of their voyage, so we created a sailing rig called the Bermuda rig or the Bermuda sloop. Over the years that has become the number one adopted rig on sailing boats. We've always had to adapt and become innovative. The Bermuda shorts were a way to adapt and to get through our very hot climate, and so if you look at just keep that in mind, the innovation of the Bermuda sloop and the Bermuda shorts. Now, this Fintech evolution is another step in that innovation and a way that we take what's going on in the world and adapt it to make it palatable for everyone. >> What's the brand promise for you guys when you look at when entrepreneurs out there and other major institutions, especially in the United States, again, Silicon Valley's one of the hottest issues around-- >> Yes. >> Startups for expansion, right now people are stalled, they don't know what to do, they hear Malta, they hear other things going on. What's the promise that you guys are making to the law firms and the people, entrepreneurs out there trying to establish and grow? >> The business proposition is this, you want a jurisdiction that is trading on years of solid regulation, a country and a government that understands business, how to be efficacious in business. When you come to Bermuda you are trading on a country that this is what we've done for a living. So, you don't have to worry about ethical government, is your money going to be safe. We have strong banking relationships, strong law firms, top tier law firms in Bermuda, but more importantly, we have legislation that is in place that allow you to have a secure environment with a clear regulatory framework. >> What should people look for as potentially might be gimmicks for other countries to promote that, you know, being the Delaware for the globe and domiciling, and what are some of the requirements? I mean, some have you've got to live there, you know, what are some of the things that are false promises that you hear from other potential areas that you guys see and don't have to require and put the pressure on someone? >> When you hear the people say, "We can turn your company around in the next day." That we don't require significant KYC and AML. Red flags immediately go up with the global regulatory bodies. We want when a person comes to Bermuda to know that we have set what we believe is called the Bermuda Standard. When you come to Bermuda you're going to have to jump through some legal and regulatory hoops. You can see regulation, the ICO regulation and the Digital Asset Business Act on BermudaLaws.bm. BermudaLaws.bm, and you can go through the legislation clause by clause to see if this meets your needs, how it will affect your business. It sets up clearly what the requirements are to be in Bermuda. >> What's the feedback from business, because you know, when you hear about certain things, that's why Delaware's so easy, easy to set up, source price all know how to do in a corporation, let's say in the United States-- >> We don't have the SEC handicaps that they have in America, going from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You're dealing with a colony that allows you to be in a domicile that all of the key players finances... We have a number of the key elements that are Bermuda. We're creating a biosphere that allows a person to be in a key space, and this is, you have first move as advantage in Bermuda. We have a number of things that we're working on, like the Estonia model of e-residency, which we will call EID, that creates a space that you are in Bermuda in a space that is, it's protected, it's governed. We believe that when companies set up in Bermuda they are getting the most secure, the strongest business reputation that a country could have. >> The other thing I would add, I'll just say, you know, quality, certainty, and community is what that brand represents. So, you know, you've got that historical quality of what Bermuda brings as a business jurisdiction, you have the certainty of the regulation and that pathway to setting your company up and incorporating in Bermuda, and then the community piece is something that we've been working on to make sure that any of the players that are coming to Bermuda and connecting with Bermuda and setting up there, they feel like they're really integrated into that whole community in Bermuda, whether it be from the government side, the private sector side. You can see it with the companies that have set up that are here today, you know, they really have embraced that Bermuda culture, the Bermuda shorts, and what we're really trying to do as a jurisdiction in the tech space. >> What can I expect if I domicile in Bermuda from a company perspective, what do I have to forecast? What's the budget, what do I got to do, what's my expectation? Allocate resources, what's going to be reporting, can you just give us some color commentary? >> So, with reference, it depends what you're trying to do, and so there will be different requirements for the ICO legislation. For the ICO legislation a key piece of the document actually is the whitepaper. Within the whitepaper you will settle what your scope of business is, what do you want to do, what you know, everything, everything that you require will be settled in your whitepaper. After the whitepaper is approved and if it is indeed successful, you go to the Bermuda Monetary Authority and they will outline what they require of you, and very shortly thereafter you will able to set up and do business in Bermuda. With reference to the digital asset exchanges, the Digital Asset Business Act, such a clear guideline, so you're going to need to have a key man in Bermuda, a key woman in Bermuda. >> Yeah. >> You're going to need to have a place of presence in Bermuda, so there are normal requirements-- >> There's levels of requirements based upon the scope. >> Absolutely. >> So, if you run an exchange it has to be like ghosting there. >> Yeah, yeah, you need boots on the ground. >> And that's why the AML and the KYC piece is so important. >> Yeah. Well, I'm super excited, I think this is a great progress and this has been a big uncertainty, you know, what does this signal. People have, you know, cognitive dissonance around some-- >> Yes. >> Of the decisions they're making, and I've seen entrepreneurs flip flop between Liechtenstein, Malta, Caymans. >> Right. >> You know, so this is a real concern and you guys want to be that place. >> Not only, we will say this, Bermuda is open for business, but remember, when you see the requirements that we have some companies won't meet the standard. We're not going to alter the standard to accommodate a business that might not be what we believe is best for Bermuda, and we believe that once people see the standard, the Bermuda Standard, it'll cascade down and we believe that high tides raises all boats. >> Yeah. >> We have a global standard, and if a company meets it we will be happy for them to set up and do business in Bermuda. >> Well, I got to say, it's looking certainly that leaders like Grant Fondo in Silicon Valley and others have heard good things. >> Yeah. >> How's been the reaction for some of the folks on the East Coast, in New York and around the United States and around the world? What has been some of the commentary, what's been the anecdotal feedback that you've heard? >> We're meeting three and four companies every day of the week. Our runway is full of Fintech companies coming to Bermuda, from... We have insurtech companies that are coming in Bermuda, people are coming to Bermuda for think tanks, to set up incubators and to do exploratory meetings, and so we're seeing a huge interest in Bermuda the likes have not been seen in the last 20 years in Bermuda. >> Well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you and thanks for sharing the update and congratulations. We'll keep in touch, we're following your progress from California, we'll follow up again. The Honorable Wayne Caines, the Minister of National Security of the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge taking care of business, making it easy for people. >> Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. >> We'll see, I'm going to come down, give me the demo. >> We're open for business and we're looking forward to seeing everybody. (laughs) >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Major developments happening in the blockchain, crypto space. We're starting to see formation clarity around, standards around traditional structures but not so traditional. It's not your grandfather's traditional model. This is what's great about blockchain and crypto. CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, stay with us. More day two coverage after this short break. (techy music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here, with The Cube. We're at Downtown San Francisco, Girls in Tech Catalyst. Great event. We've been coming for a couple of years. About 700 professionals, mainly women, a few men, and I think they brought in a busload of kids to get inspired, talking about their stories, and really, it's a series. It's a one-track conference, two days, about 20 minute talks and really good stuff. Really great content. Check it out online if you didn't register this year. Make sure you come next year, and we're excited to have our next guest, Cube alum, really from one of the hottest companies in tech right now, she's Wendy Pfeifer, the CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, great to see you again. >> Hey, nice to see you, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so we see you at Nutanix Next all the time, but we haven't seen you at Girls in Tech. >> Yeah. >> So how long have you been involved in Girls in Tech? >> So, I've been involved since the very first meet up, more than 10 years ago. Girls in Tech was very inspiring to me, and I was here at the Catalyst Conference last year, and I'm a member of the board of Girls in Tech as well, so I'm able to give back and provide some leadership at that level. >> So we just had Adriana on, and she was going through-- >> Yeah. >> Some of the numbers, I mean, the growth of this organization, second to Nutanix, is off the chart. >> Yeah. >> I mean, really amazing. >> It really is amazing, you know. In some ways our time has come. Adriana's had this big vision for a really long time. Really focused on educating women, helping them to understand the potential of careers in tech, and technology knowledge, and that's a global message, and a message that resonates at every age level, and in lots of different sectors of society, so it's juts a privilege to be able to partner with her and others on the board, to enable the vision, and Nutanix as well, you know, is donating, is present here at these conferences, and partnering at Catalyst and Amplify, and other parts of the organization. >> Right, because it's not only the right thing to do, it's also good business, which has been proven time and time again. >> Absolutely, and you know, it's kind of taken on this passion, mission, just excitement thing, but it is practical as well and you know, all the studies, I'm sure so many folks have talked with you about this. There's so many studies, there's so much research that says diversity brings better decision-making, better product development. >> Right. >> And better satisfaction in our work environments as well. >> Right. The other thing that struck me talking to Adriana, and I guess I just didn't know, kind of the breadth of types of activities that Girls in Tech's put on. So we've been to Catalyst before. We've been to-- the Pitch Night, Amplify-- >> Amplify, yeah. >> But I didn't know, she's running, you know, there's all kinds of different-- types of things. >> Absolutely. I think the underlying passion is for education. If you think about, particularly people in underserved communities, there is a real opportunity, you know coding, and learning to code, learning to interact with computers; that's a language that transcends geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, age, and religious boundaries, and it's something that, you know ever since my days at Yahoo, I really felt like technology could bring the world together, and today in particular, there is so much disparity between women and men and their access to technology education and technology careers. >> Right. >> That this is, you know, more than just creating a level playing field. I think we're making our own playing field. We're not going to their playing field, anymore. We're creating our own at locations like this. >> Right, and clearly a bunch of founders are here today, who've-- >> Yeah. >> Started their own companies. But the other thing I think is interesting, is culture keeps coming up time and time again in all these conversations, and Adriana's built a culture starting, always from the top down, with the board. It's a phenomenal board of professional women-- >> Yes. >> That she's pulled together of this organization. >> Yeah, there are a couple of males on the board, too. I want to make sure I point out. >> Yep. >> Because we're a diverse board as well, but she has. She has brought together people who are leaders in the technology space, but also folks who are passionate about building a healthy nonprofit organization; one that's global, one that can scale, and so we also look at the fundamentals, and the business fundamentals as well, so we are expanding from 60 to 100 countries, and from 100,000 members to 200,000 members, I mean, who would think, right? >> Right, right, right. >> It's extraordinary. Even then, though, those 200,000 women are a drop in the bucket, compared to the 50% of the global population-- >> Right. >> Who are female. >> Right. And then you work at Nutanix. Super hot-- >> Yeah. >> I don't want to say startup anymore. You guys have IPO'd. >> Right, right. >> But, you know, but you're livin' it in terms of trying to get enough, good, qualified talent-- >> Yes. >> Just to feed the one engine that I Nutanix, so it's a real-- >> Yeah. >> Demand in the market place. >> Definitely, that's the case, you know, we sort of struggle with the thought, you know, are there just not enough women candidates in these fields, but what we learn at conferences like this is, that there are enough women candidates, but we don't necessarily recognize those women, and we don't know where to find them, and they may not find the sort of work that we represent to be attractive. And so we're sort of trying to change how we speak and think. Culture is a good word, but it's a revolution. It's a cultural revolution in terms of identifying talent where it sits. We spoke a lot in the last day and a half around blended careers, the bringing together of art and technology, or communication and technology, and the fact is that technology just underscores everything we do-- >> Right. >> Nowadays. >> Right. >> And so, you know, having people who can blend those things, is a real advantage, and women have this ability to take a multi-faceted approach to the work that we do and the way that we live our lives. We multi-task as a sport. >> Right, right. It's interesting, too, as the machines get better and as A.I. gets better, machine learning, the softer skills applied with the context become so much more important than necessarily just the super hard-core coding skills. >> You know, I have a story around that. So, we've just deployed, my IT department has deployed a machine-learning tool at Nutanix, to replace a lot of the interactions that happen on our help desk, and we found we just couldn't scale as the company was scaling, so we've been training A.I. from a company called Moveworks, and you know, we've been training it uniquely with our voice, and I think a little bit with my voice, and I just had one of our employees write back to me and say, "Not only is this thing", we call it Xbot, "Not only is Xbot solving my problems, but", he said, "she is pretty sassy, too." And I'm like, yay, he knows it's a she! >> Right, right. >> Right, and she's sassy too, so yeah, that unique voice-- >> Right. >> Is infusing even the machine-learning training that we're doing-- >> Right. >> And I think that makes for a more delightful experience-- >> Right. >> For all of us. >> It's funny, the voice thing, 'cause you know, Google had their very famous, the restaurant reservation call-in demo-- >> Yes! >> They got capped on a little bit-- >> Right. >> For, you know, was it real or not, but what made it so, so dramatic was the human-like elements in the conversation of the machine-- with ums, and ahs-- >> Absolutely. >> And uhs, and pauses, which we laugh about, 'cause we can shoot Cube interviews, everybody wants to cut those parts out, and we're like no, that's what makes people, people. >> Right, exactly, I agree with you. And at the same time, you know, there are, you know, things that are uniquely female stereotypes. We're more wordy. We have more things to say. >> Right. >> You know, we're more multi-dimensional. We can hold two thoughts at the same time, and so that's part of the richness of communication and our interaction too, but to the extent to which we can embed that in our technologies and our interactions, those are the extent to which they'll be more delightful-- >> Right. >> It's no coincidence that Siri and Cortana and all of those A.I.s sort of have this female persona, and I don't know if you know this, the, you know, Cortana, who's the Microsoft, you know, A.I., you know, she's voiced by the same character that's Cortana in one of their video games-- >> Oh, really? >> And she's sort of this like, badass fighter gal, too, so check it out. >> Well, we know what happened to Bob, right? >> Right. >> I know, poor Bob. >> Which, ironically, was Melinda Gates's project. Which, I don't know if you knew-- that story. >> I did not know that. >> So yeah, Melinda Gates's introduction to Bill was as product manager for Bob, which, if you don't know that story, check it out. It's old history. >> Oh, that's-- fantastic! >> But it's very good. Alright, before I let you go, one last thing. >> Yes. >> So you spoke, and they've got these great posters all around the room with little highlights from people's-- >> Yes. >> Conversations and yours was, I described it off the wall, "It's okay to be bad." >> Yes. >> I'd love, for the people that missed it, what's the message there? It's an important message. >> Yeah. >> Especially for women. >> Yeah, I think as women, you know, we don't have a lot of role models and when I get up as a role model, I'm one of the few CIO's who's female and Silicon Valley. You know, we give these speeches, and they sort of make us like Mother Teresa, you know. First you hae your mission in mind, and you lean in, and you do all these awesome things. But the fact is, it is actually okay, to be yourself. It's okay to be bitchy. It's okay to be cranky. It's okay for anger to fuel you. It's okay to be aggressive, and even if your male counterparts tell you otherwise, or say, "Wow, that's "unseemly.", I think it's just okay. We don't have to be pure and perfect in order to be successful. I can be those things all at the same time. And I also say, it's also okay to be good, to be merciful, to be soft-spoken, to be wordy, to be studious; that combination of things. We're allowed to be our genuine selves, and we don't have to be perfect to be successful and I feel like I embody that-- in particular. >> Yes, you certainly do. You certainly do! >> What, I'm not perfect? >> Yes, I mean the Nutanix story is a phenomenal story. >> It is. We are fortunate, we've been there since the beginning-- >> Absolutely. >> Watching it grow, and so no-- >> Helping us to frame the story, so thanks to The Cube. I appreciate that. >> Well, and you're super successful, and the company's successful so the fact that are Wendy, you know, you are who you are. You're a big personality, and it comes through, and it's great, and it works, and you're successful, so, if they need someone to look up to, you're certainly a fantastic role model. >> Thank you so much. Well I appreciate that. It's funny, 'cause I have never tried to be a role model, and now, just by accident, I've survived long enough. Here I am. (both laughing) >> Well that's a whole different conversation-- >> Right, right. >> You just look around like, I am the oldest guy in the room. But that's a different thing. >> I know. You're actually the only guy, just sayin'. >> Alright, well Wendy thanks for takin' a few minutes, and I guess we'll see you next at Nutanix next, if not sooner. >> I look forward to it, thanks. >> Alright, thanks. She's Wendy, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from women, or Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here, with The Cube. We're at Downtown San Francisco, Girls in Tech Catalyst. Great event. We've been coming for a couple of years. About 700 professionals, mainly women, a few men, and I think they brought in a busload of kids to get inspired, talking about their stories, and really, it's a series. It's a one-track conference, two days, about 20 minute talks and really good stuff. Really great content. Check it out online if you didn't register this year. Make sure you come next year, and we're excited to have our next guest, Cube alum, really from one of the hottest companies in tech right now, she's Wendy Pfeifer, the CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, great to see you again. >> Hey, nice to see you, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so we see you at Nutanix Next all the time, but we haven't seen you at Girls in Tech. >> Yeah. >> So how long have you been involved in Girls in Tech? >> So, I've been involved since the very first meet up, more than 10 years ago. Girls in Tech was very inspiring to me, and I was here at the Catalyst Conference last year, and I'm a member of the board of Girls in Tech as well, so I'm able to give back and provide some leadership at that level. >> So we just had Adriana on, and she was going through-- >> Yeah. >> Some of the numbers, I mean, the growth of this organization, second to Nutanix, is off the chart. >> Yeah. >> I mean, really amazing. >> It really is amazing, you know. In some ways our time has come. Adriana's had this big vision for a really long time. Really focused on educating women, helping them to understand the potential of careers in tech, and technology knowledge, and that's a global message, and a message that resonates at every age level, and in lots of different sectors of society, so it's juts a privilege to be able to partner with her and others on the board, to enable the vision, and Nutanix as well, you know, is donating, is present here at these conferences, and partnering at Catalyst and Amplify, and other parts of the organization. >> Right, because it's not only the right thing to do, it's also good business, which has been proven time and time again. >> Absolutely, and you know, it's kind of taken on this passion, mission, just excitement thing, but it is practical as well and you know, all the studies, I'm sure so many folks have talked with you about this. There's so many studies, there's so much research that says diversity brings better decision-making, better product development. >> Right. >> And better satisfaction in our work environments as well. >> Right. The other thing that struck me talking to Adriana, and I guess I just didn't know, kind of the breadth of types of activities that Girls in Tech's put on. So we've been to Catalyst before. We've been to-- the Pitch Night, Amplify-- >> Amplify, yeah. >> But I didn't know, she's running, you know, there's all kinds of different-- types of things. >> Absolutely. I think the underlying passion is for education. If you think about, particularly people in underserved communities, there is a real opportunity, you know coding, and learning to code, learning to interact with computers; that's a language that transcends geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, age, and religious boundaries, and it's something that, you know ever since my days at Yahoo, I really felt like technology could bring the world together, and today in particular, there is so much disparity between women and men and their access to technology education and technology careers. >> Right. >> That this is, you know, more than just creating a level playing field. I think we're making our own playing field. We're not going to their playing field, anymore. We're creating our own at locations like this. >> Right, and clearly a bunch of founders are here today, who've-- >> Yeah. >> Started their own companies. But the other thing I think is interesting, is culture keeps coming up time and time again in all these conversations, and Adriana's built a culture starting, always from the top down, with the board. It's a phenomenal board of professional women-- >> Yes. >> That she's pulled together of this organization. >> Yeah, there are a couple of males on the board, too. I want to make sure I point out. >> Yep. >> Because we're a diverse board as well, but she has. She has brought together people who are leaders in the technology space, but also folks who are passionate about building a healthy nonprofit organization; one that's global, one that can scale, and so we also look at the fundamentals, and the business fundamentals as well, so we are expanding from 60 to 100 countries, and from 100,000 members to 200,000 members, I mean, who would think, right? >> Right, right, right. >> It's extraordinary. Even then, though, those 200,000 women are a drop in the bucket, compared to the 50% of the global population-- >> Right. >> Who are female. >> Right. And then you work at Nutanix. Super hot-- >> Yeah. >> I don't want to say startup anymore. You guys have IPO'd. >> Right, right. >> But, you know, but you're livin' it in terms of trying to get enough, good, qualified talent-- >> Yes. >> Just to feed the one engine that I Nutanix, so it's a real-- >> Yeah. >> Demand in the market place. >> Definitely, that's the case, you know, we sort of struggle with the thought, you know, are there just not enough women candidates in these fields, but what we learn at conferences like this is, that there are enough women candidates, but we don't necessarily recognize those women, and we don't know where to find them, and they may not find the sort of work that we represent to be attractive. And so we're sort of trying to change how we speak and think. Culture is a good word, but it's a revolution. It's a cultural revolution in terms of identifying talent where it sits. We spoke a lot in the last day and a half around blended careers, the bringing together of art and technology, or communication and technology, and the fact is that technology just underscores everything we do-- >> Right. >> Nowadays. >> Right. >> And so, you know, having people who can blend those things, is a real advantage, and women have this ability to take a multi-faceted approach to the work that we do and the way that we live our lives. We multi-task as a sport. >> Right, right. It's interesting, too, as the machines get better and as A.I. gets better, machine learning, the softer skills applied with the context become so much more important than necessarily just the super hard-core coding skills. >> You know, I have a story around that. So, we've just deployed, my IT department has deployed a machine-learning tool at Nutanix, to replace a lot of the interactions that happen on our help desk, and we found we just couldn't scale as the company was scaling, so we've been training A.I. from a company called Moveworks, and you know, we've been training it uniquely with our voice, and I think a little bit with my voice, and I just had one of our employees write back to me and say, "Not only is this thing", we call it Xbot, "Not only is Xbot solving my problems, but", he said, "she is pretty sassy, too." And I'm like, yay, he knows it's a she! >> Right, right. >> Right, and she's sassy too, so yeah, that unique voice-- >> Right. >> Is infusing even the machine-learning training that we're doing-- >> Right. >> And I think that makes for a more delightful experience-- >> Right. >> For all of us. >> It's funny, the voice thing, 'cause you know, Google had their very famous, the restaurant reservation call-in demo-- >> Yes! >> They got capped on a little bit-- >> Right. >> For, you know, was it real or not, but what made it so, so dramatic was the human-like elements in the conversation of the machine-- with ums, and ahs-- >> Absolutely. >> And uhs, and pauses, which we laugh about, 'cause we can shoot Cube interviews, everybody wants to cut those parts out, and we're like no, that's what makes people, people. >> Right, exactly, I agree with you. And at the same time, you know, there are, you know, things that are uniquely female stereotypes. We're more wordy. We have more things to say. >> Right. >> You know, we're more multi-dimensional. We can hold two thoughts at the same time, and so that's part of the richness of communication and our interaction too, but to the extent to which we can embed that in our technologies and our interactions, those are the extent to which they'll be more delightful-- >> Right. >> It's no coincidence that Siri and Cortana and all of those A.I.s sort of have this female persona, and I don't know if you know this, the, you know, Cortana, who's the Microsoft, you know, A.I., you know, she's voiced by the same character that's Cortana in one of their video games-- >> Oh, really? >> And she's sort of this like, badass fighter gal, too, so check it out. >> Well, we know what happened to Bob, right? >> Right. >> I know, poor Bob. >> Which, ironically, was Melinda Gates's project. Which, I don't know if you knew-- that story. >> I did not know that. >> So yeah, Melinda Gates's introduction to Bill was as product manager for Bob, which, if you don't know that story, check it out. It's old history. >> Oh, that's-- fantastic! >> But it's very good. Alright, before I let you go, one last thing. >> Yes. >> So you spoke, and they've got these great posters all around the room with little highlights from people's-- >> Yes. >> Conversations and yours was, I described it off the wall, "It's okay to be bad." >> Yes. >> I'd love, for the people that missed it, what's the message there? It's an important message. >> Yeah. >> Especially for women. >> Yeah, I think as women, you know, we don't have a lot of role models and when I get up as a role model, I'm one of the few CIO's who's female and Silicon Valley. You know, we give these speeches, and they sort of make us like Mother Teresa, you know. First you hae your mission in mind, and you lean in, and you do all these awesome things. But the fact is, it is actually okay, to be yourself. It's okay to be bitchy. It's okay to be cranky. It's okay for anger to fuel you. It's okay to be aggressive, and even if your male counterparts tell you otherwise, or say, "Wow, that's "unseemly.", I think it's just okay. We don't have to be pure and perfect in order to be successful. I can be those things all at the same time. And I also say, it's also okay to be good, to be merciful, to be soft-spoken, to be wordy, to be studious; that combination of things. We're allowed to be our genuine selves, and we don't have to be perfect to be successful and I feel like I embody that-- in particular. >> Yes, you certainly do. You certainly do! >> What, I'm not perfect? >> Yes, I mean the Nutanix story is a phenomenal story. >> It is. We are fortunate, we've been there since the beginning-- >> Absolutely. >> Watching it grow, and so no-- >> Helping us to frame the story, so thanks to The Cube. I appreciate that. >> Well, and you're super successful, and the company's successful so the fact that are Wendy, you know, you are who you are. You're a big personality, and it comes through, and it's great, and it works, and you're successful, so, if they need someone to look up to, you're certainly a fantastic role model. >> Thank you so much. Well I appreciate that. It's funny, 'cause I have never tried to be a role model, and now, just by accident, I've survived long enough. Here I am. (both laughing) >> Well that's a whole different conversation-- >> Right, right. >> You just look around like, I am the oldest guy in the room. But that's a different thing. >> I know. You're actually the only guy, just sayin'. >> Alright, well Wendy thanks for takin' a few minutes, and I guess we'll see you next at Nutanix next, if not sooner. >> I look forward to it, thanks. >> Alright, thanks. She's Wendy, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from women, or Girls in Tech Catalyst 2018. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to another Cube Conversation from our beautiful studio here in Palo Alto, California, and once again I'm joined by Eric Herzog. Eric is the CMO and vice president of channels in IBM Sports Group, Eric? >> Well thank you, we love coming to see theCUBE. And by the way, I'm a Palo Alto native! >> Hey, I've heard that! You know, I don't think we're going to get into that today. Maybe some other time we can talk about that. But what I do want to talk about is, storage has historically been way down in the food chain of strategy, of business strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> Now we're talking about digital business. And digital business at least from our perspective, and I think you would agree, is predicated on the idea that you use data as an asset. In fact, Wikibon says that the difference between business and digital business is that digital businesses use data as an asset. Now, since storage is where you put that data, and is responsible for availability, throughput, reliability, flexibility, in how you do things differently with data, that kind of elevates storage's position as part of a strategic digital business capability. But nobody talks about it. So, as a smart guy in the storage community, I'd like to talk to you about that. First off, do you agree with my proposition? >> Ah yeah, I would posit that in today's digital business world build around private clouds, storage is, if not the critical foundation, one of the top two critical foundations you have to rely for your digital business. So if you're the CEO or you're the CFO and you know you're gone digital business, if the storage goes down or the storage is slow, your digital business and the value of that data you're driving both internally and for your customers just dramatically shrank. So it's critical, critical. Just as when you're building a giant building in downtown San Francisco or downtown New York or downtown Singapore, if you don't have that foundation right, the building literally can fall right down. >> And in San Francisco, one of the big buildings is actually starting to lean about two or three degrees. It's got a bunch of people pretty freaked out. But let's talk about, therefore what are the strategic digital business capabilities that are associated with storage that CXOs have to start thinking about? You mentioned one, we call it true private cloud. >> Right. >> The idea that you're still going to need some capacity where the data has to be. Because you're not going to be able to put everything in the public cloud. So a true private cloud is going to be one of them. >> Eric: Right. >> What's another one? >> So I think the big thing here is modern data protection. In the modern data protection scheme, because you're a digital business, which means you probably have test guys, you have some DevOps guys, inside, that are constantly playing with your own code or commercial code that you've bought. To optimize for your digital business, you've got to be able to give them real data sets to work with. Now that doesn't mean you can't track it in case there's a data leak or whatever, but the bottom-line is you want those developers to be A, always be able to get it, B, have it to be self service, because the IT guys are keeping your digital business up and going, they can't be bothered with hey can you get me real data set? The quality of the data that those developers produce for you goes way up, so you have less downtime which by the way, if you're a digital business you don't want to have any downtime. >> Peter: Right. >> And it gets it faster. So if you're playing with some commercial software writing your own that you're using in a digital business, you want to get there before your competitors do. >> Peter: Right. >> So you want those DevOps guys constantly working, and you want to be able to do that. Yet at the same time the IT guy can focus on what they need to do. And by the way, they can track where all those copies of the real data sets are. So everybody wins and it makes it work well. >> So in other respects, what you're saying is that availability, which used to be associated with the performance of an individual application, is now associated with digital business strategy. Because you need to be able to test new business ideas, pursue new business ideas, be fast in bringing things to market. And the whole notion of availability extends beyond just making sure the data is where you need it to be, or where the application says it needs to be, to now using availability as a metric for ensuring that the data can be where it needs to be within the business, so the business can make the appropriate changes and adjustments and extensions to what its strategy is. >> Well, think of this as you've got a data set. The more you use that data set, not just for the primary storage that's used by the end users that are coming to your digital business, but for everything else. Back it up, okay great. Check box. Okay, interface with common API so the DevOps guys can use it. Another check box. Making sure that the test guys can test real data sets, not faux ones, guess what? Faster test time, more accurate test time, boom, better impact for your digital business. So extending the value of the data from just primary storage throughout your entire digital software development process is critical. And in today's world, that's what you can do with the modern data protection that, for example, we have with our IBM solutions. >> So let me build on top of that, because I think another capability might be increasing the association with speed of development. It used to be, again, that storage was very closely aligned with what your server needed. Increasingly, we're starting to see the concept of data protection and the concept of data availability actually start to mean something very, very different to developers. Are we now seeing developers and the developer ecosystem start to drive more of what's required in storage? >> Well, you've got to look at it, the developer wants to be able to spin things up quickly on their own. So in the old world, you do a ticket, you give it to the VMaura guy, the HyperV guy, the IT guy, takes a week or so. You don't want to do that. So with our stuff, for example, you could check in and check out, it integrates with all their APIs, they can quickly do their work. It's a real data set, not using fake data, so that makes it better from a reliability perspective, and it gets done faster and they know how it really is going to work when you deploy that in your digital business. They can check it in and check it out themselves, so it happens way faster. So all that means for you as a digital business guy is better time and faster time to market with more reliable products for your end users and your clients. >> And that's kind of a key, that's kind of what the goal is. So we've got three thus far. This notion of true private cloud, where we need resources where the data demands. This notion of modern data protection, which is to say that the notion of availability is beyond just backup and restore, >> Right. >> Peter: So now the multiple ways to use it. New communities are going to be more closely associated with storage capabilities like the developer world. >> Eric: Right, the DevOps. >> Are there multi-cloud? Are there other kind of strategic business capabilities that CXOs have to think about as they envision their digital business strategy and the role that storage is going to play in either constraining it or facilitating it? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, you can look at it in three buckets. Item one is that your storage infrastructure, you still may have some of your older tuff. You still may be using Oracle, not yet using Hadoop. And using an Oracle data warehouse versus Hadoop big data analytic workload. >> I hear there's some customers out there that still have z-series installed, running things. >> So, you've got to be able to take the thing and cut costs on your traditional infrastructure, and your traditional applications workloads and use cases, while you're going to the next generation and modernizing. So you want to be able to handle the older workloads and cut their costs, at the same time invest more in things like Hadoop and Spark and Mango. And Cassandra. You want to be able to do both. At the same time, as you create your private cloud infrastructure, you want to be able to use new paragons, such as containers. And if you're going to do that, you want a set of storage solutions, both software and array infrastructure that can support that. And that's a critical element, is being able to A, modernize and cut costs of your older while you're moving to the new. For all your new stuff you want to be out that it's optimized and the DevOps guys can work it and you've got all the right APIs. And then, for the true private cloud, you're going to containerize model just like the public cloud guys do, because you want every advantage for your own digital business that the public does, and we can do all of that, but it's critical that you do all of that continuum, from the newest of the new, to the application in the middle, but you still have the old stuff while you're getting the new stuff up and running. So it's critical, if I'm the CEO, to make sure that my storage does all of that. 'Cuz if I fall down on the old stuff, well that's a problem. I can't bill, I can't invoice, I can't ship things. >> Right. >> If I fall down on the new stuff, guess what? I'm completely uncompetitive. >> Mm hm. >> Right? If I fail on the container world, what I'll call the refactoring of my infrastructure, I've totally lost the game because I'm not making it fast, I'm not making it resilient, I'm not cutting my costs, because everything is cost competitive. If data is the value, everything is built around that data, that doesn't mean you want your data to be super expensive, got to figure a way to do it cost-effectively, yet still deliver the value in your digital business that the end user wants. >> And it's got to be flexibility across the board. Okay, so we've got some strategic capabilities that CXOs have to think about that storage is going to enable. It's February 2018, we're looking at say, October 2019, next 18 months. What's going to be the one or two biggest changes in the storage world do you think? >> Ah, okay. First thing is going to be the automation of storage software across the board. Not just for the storage guy, not that all storage companies don't love the storage guy, but increasingly there's a move to DevOps and other functions. So, while each company is managing eons and eons and eons of more storage capacity, they're not adding eons and eons of storage admins. So you've got to have the docker guy, you've got to have the application guy, be able to backup, be able to optimize their workloads, be able to go ahead and spin up a new container without calling the IT guy, because the IT guys are overworked. So that's item one, is integration with all the coming APIs, automation, self-service are critical. The more it's automated the more self-serve is is, the more you can factor in the non-storage guys into creating a true digital business. That's on number one. Second thing you've got is a new technology known as NVME. This is a very high performance storage interface, it's new to the market, all the big storage vendors are working on it including IMB. We did an announcement on February 20th all about NVME. The value there is more and more applications and workloads, because the performance of the system itself, which is already highly resistant, highly available, and highly capable of handling any failure mode, is it's super fast, which means you can put more and more applications and workloads on a physical infrastructure, which saves you time and saves you money. So those are two critical things. The rise of this automation paradime, and the self-service paired across all of your storage software, and integrating it with your application layer, being able to use real data sets, right, as modern did, and then this new high-performance storage interface that will dramatically allow more workloads for every ounce of storage you buy, saving you money, and also making highly performing to meet your digital business SLAs. >> I think those are two great ones. I'm going to add one more and I'm sure we're going to be talking more about this. I think over the course of the next year and a half we're going to see even greater understanding of the relationship between storage and data, and new rules, new conventions, new approaches to how to think about that relationship so that all this great stuff that's happening when the storage actually does become a strategic business capability. >> Yeah, you could say that storage managing software will morph into data management, or at least a hybrid of partially managing the storage but actually also managing the data. And things like what is the metadata and how can you use metadata to more effectively manage your business. And we're going a whole bunch of that with IBM and we've already announced several things around that, so that's an actually great observation. >> And it's not too far from there to say digital asset management. Not in a traditional marketing sense, but overall how it works. Eric Herzog, CMO, vice president of channels, IMB storage, once again thanks for coming theCUBE and talking to us about some of the things that are going to happen over the next 18 months in the storage world. >> Great, thank you very much, we always apprecite being with you, and thanks again. >> I'm Peter Burris, once again this has been a Cube conversation from our Palo Alto studios with Eric Herzog of IBM. Until next time. (upbeat music)

(click) >> Welcome this special Cube conversation in the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We are here with Ari Kuschnir, who is the founder and managing partner of Missing Pieces. Doing some really amazing work on the future of filmmaking. He's got a great entrepreneurial spirit. And creative desire to deliver great product. Welcome! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So, tell them about Missing Pieces and what's going on in your world. So, there's context. Take a minute to explain what you are working on. >> Well, the premise is to be at this intersection of storytelling technology. And to make stuff people actually want to watch. And VR and AR are parts of it. But not the whole. So, I know some of the conversation focus is on, is on VR, and we're just as excited about where storytelling is headed. In terms of what technology allows us to do. But the key for me is. I'm just passionate about, a new thing comes out. And I want to figure out how to make something really great. But meaningful, and powerful with that. >> We were talking before you came out about filmmaking, obviously trained in the discipline, obviously a variety of other things. But I want to get your perspective, we're on top of this new generation, what does that mean to you? When you hear that new generation, a new creative is coming? What does that mean to you? >> Yeah, I feel like I've ridden the wave of the thing as it's happened. And I mean, the company has too. So, I went to film school in the late 90s. And it was the first time you could buy like, first Final Cut, and the first wave of that. So you could make art little movies on the weekend, you no longer needed even to go to the school itself to borrow the equipment. That was revolutionary in 1999. And then 2005, when we started thinking about the company. You know, your Vimeo, YouTube, video i-Pod all come out within five months of each other. Towards the later part of the year. And it's a revolution. It's clear that with distribution, now not only can we make it and edit it in our laptops. But we can put it out, and millions of people could watch it. And that was the first time that was possible. And it was revolutionary. And I think it still is, to some degree. So, we've just, you know, as it evolves what I see is that, it's not, I've always felt like it's not enough to make the sausage as they say. You know, the directors, the talent that I sign now. Like the project we have now here at Sundance, young Jake. Jake is a great example of a creative who you can't fit in a box. He's an Internet artist, he's a rapper. He's an interactive video maker. He did an app called Emoji.Ink. And he does celebrity emoji portraits. He has a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. So, he can command his own audience. So, when a brand, or an agency comes to him. It's a very different approach than when they come for a very straight up work for hire, director's commercial kind of thing. That is the future, I mean. The future is about having a passionate audience, making things for that audience, understanding it. And being able to communicate with them on a daily basis, or a weekly basis in a powerful way, right? Through story. >> Yeah, I mean, you're riding the wave. And the waves are getting bigger. One of the things we do, we do a lot of tech coverage. And we see this in Cloud computing where software changed from Waterfall to Agile. And now the craft's coming back on the software side. But still now, software is eating the creative world. Because now a new wave is coming. So, speak to that, because you're, this is, you can almost look at the old ways. You mentioned the commercials and films. Almost like the Waterfall. You know, crafts, craft it up and you ship it. And you hope it works well. >> Ari: Yeah. >> But now, you have this new model of iteration. Where it's more Agile creative. How do you do Agile, like your artist, and not lose the craft? >> Yeah, well it's a challenge. Look, I've had so many opportunities in our 10 plus year career to kind of go in that direction of just like quantity over quality. And we could just never do it. I mean we're just not cut out for it. But at the same time, I'm not, I never ignore, how to optimize the content based on data, and based on what the landscape is looking like. So, an important thing for example that we consider in every project is context. Like what, how is this project going to be released? Oh, it turns out that, it's really a big social media push. It's not a TV thing. Or it turns out specifically it's Facebook versus Instagram. And that's a very different type of edit. And a very different type of way you start the video. 'Cause you've got a certain, even a different format, and a different way of looking at the content. So, you start to get into, and then you start to iterate, and look at the different ways in which you can repurpose, and rerelease the content, but customize it for each thing. So, you get into this really interesting place where the data is driving the story. And the feedback is driving the story. >> And the audience is part of the journey. >> Yes. And the comments, and the way in which people are taking the thing that you've made and re-interpreting it, is really interesting. And part of the story. >> You trigger a lot of emotion with me, when we're talking, because, you know, as an entrepreneur, I started media businesses turning into, and no-one has even seen this kind of media business before. But I have no media training of any kind. I did a science major. So, there's certain, and I've observed that there's dogma in the journalism business. And there's, but you know, how dare I challenge that, or others. You're doing the same thing. >> I love that by the way. >> So, I want to ask you. What is the dogma with the old world, 'cause the naysayers are usually the ones with the dogma. "Oh, it will never work!" >> Ari: Yeah. >> So, you're on the front end of this new trend. But you're going to have a visibility into what they're thinking, what is that? >> The dogma is, you know, the whole like, there's only big name directors, and you know, it's a certain caliber of work. And that craft is the ultimate thing. And that you just have to make the thing great. And it'll do the thing that is needs to do. Without any thinking in terms of context, or media buyer. How it can actually become a social, socially engaged piece. So, the thing that we're always fighting is some version of that. And then because we came from a scrappy place, but we're now, you know, a pretty legit thing, I think people, some people will still be like, well that's the kind of like, the problem solving sometimes gets interpreted as scrappy. Which is a word I really don't like. And I think-- >> It's a compliment on one hand. >> Yeah. >> But some people look at it as an insult. "Oh, he's just scrappy!" >> Well-- >> "He's not legit!" >> You never want to be the cheap solution. You want to be the solution that people call because nobody else can solve this problem for you. I think we, there's a strand of the company that's like, the kind of like, pick up the phone and we'll figure it out. And, the impossible project that nobody else can do. And then there's another strand where it's just like, you just want to make stuff people actually want to watch. How hard it that? The thing where you could just buy the media, and expect the results is trickier and trickier. >> I mean you could be different, and innovative, but that might not be good. But if you're good doing it, you're differentiated and you're innovating. >> Ari: That's right. >> What's the filmmaking track on that line. Because certainly there's a lot of innovation. And with innovation comes failure. But people are trying to be different. And being different actually is a good thing. What are some of the trends that you're seeing where people are having some success. And where people are stumbling. >> Yeah, that's a good. I mean what I see is, the things that do well take cultural context into account, and again speak to the people in that way. So, it's like a feedback loop that it's creating with its own audience. And we almost always, there's almost always a time in the process when we're dealing with an agency, or a brand where things start to go a little bit like, too, too much, and in that direction that you don't want it to take. Somebody, usually me, or someone will say, "Look, if we make these changes. "Or if we go in this direction. "We won't want to share it. "And if we don't want to share it, "nobody's going to want to share it." So, that becomes a key thing. Whereas before you could sort of away with some of that, now it's like, well, it has to pass this sort of, kind of litmus test in terms of like, are you comfortable with sharing this thing, because it speaks to you or not. >> So, I want to ask you the hard question, we're here at the Intel Tech Lounge, obviously Intel is doing a lot of tech things. They're trying to get all this new tech. And I see it on, whether you watch the NFL playoffs, with, you know, with the camera angles, the games, on basketball games. You see them using the power of technology-- >> We're actually working on an Intel Olympics VR related project that got a little tease ad, CES. So, I can just say that. >> Yeah I know, so what's the tech? What's the cool new game changer in your mind. As a tool that you need to be more successful, and other artists could use? >> Hmmm, well, you tend to, yeah I mean, I think we-- >> John: More horsepower, more compute, more-- >> No, I mean it's really the, What happened with the AR was really interesting, which was, everyone realized, oh, the phone's already in our pocket. While the headset needs to be something that really needs to be standalone. It needs to be $200. You know, like, you sort of, there's different kinds of headsets, of course. They do different kinds of things. But that's an extra hardware. The phone we already have in our pockets. So, everyone's started taking AR seriously. Including the big players. And what that allowed was a, a rethinking of what the possibilities with story would be. So, in some ways this last year has been a readjustment, and a rethinking of, well, what can you do with the phone that you've already got in your pocket. In terms of expanding the storytelling. Or placing a story in the middle of your living room, you know. A layer, using the phone as a window and a layer. But I'm equally as excited about what's coming in VR, interactive VR, room-scale VR, you know. The project that we have here is an interactive 360 project with a phone. >> What's that called? >> It's called On My Way. And the artist is young Jake. And the original conceit of it, is, it's Jake, there's four Jakes in a car. And every time you move the phone to a different Jake, it changes the Jake. So, as soon as it passes the quadrants. So, the four quadrant it kind of swaps the Jake. And that creates a really fun, and interesting thing. And he actually designed it for the phone, vertical. Because that's the way most people are going to experience it. >> John: That's awesome. >> But it's playing on a headset as well. >> Oh you're definitely a new creative. Love chatting with you. >> Thank you. >> Final, well, I have two questions, first one is, Sundance, what's the story this year? What's your report? If you had to go back and your friend asked you to give him a report, "Hey, what happened Ari, "what's going on at Sundance this year?" >> A combination of really interesting high-end VR projects. Some of them leaning into this kind of like more psychedelic less narrative driven stuff. Which I really like. Kind of like really embracing the fact that it's another world, and taking you there. And then the AR stuff. There's a thing called Tender, Ten Day R. Or Tendar. Which is a play on Tinder, by Tinder Claus. Which is, uses augmented reality, and emotion, and machine learning, everything that you could hope for in a really interesting way. So, that's kind of showing you where it's going. So, I think those two things. >> Psychedelic's interesting. I always, I mean this kind of tangent. But in, I've been seeing on The Cube interviews, I think we're going to have a digital hippy revolution. >> Ari: Definitely! >> And it's coming. I mean you can feel it. It's a different culture. >> When I was looking a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people are scared to, I mean, VR is a really great consciousness expanding way to go to get into other worlds. Without, you know-- >> And will all the crap going on in the world today you can almost look at this as a Sixties like movement in this modern era. Where it could be a major catalyst for massive change. >> Yeah, and there's a piece about, you know, this female shaman that grows through the tribe in Ecuador. And became the first ever female shaman for her tribe. And there's a piece called Chorus that, within it. Which is just super weird and trippy. And almost has no plot, but is amazing. >> All right Ari, you've got to run. Quick soundbite. What are you working on, what's exciting you these days? Share a little bit about what's happening. >> A variety of, again it's the full spectrum of storytelling, so it's not one thing. It's really pushing, experiential pushing, branded content pushing, original content that we're getting a lot more into that game. Long form series. VR series. Really, that's kind of the next wave for the company is to set foot, much stronger in the original space, and create our own original IP. Our own original content. >> Awesome, Ari Kuschnir managing partner and founder of Missing Pieces, check them out. Lot of great work. And again, it's a whole new game changing, from storytelling to the tech. The collision between technology and artistry, and creative, and it's happening. It's here at Sundance, at the Intel Tech Lounge. I'm John Furrier with The Cube conversation here at Sundance, which is part of our coverage. Was to look at the angle of Sundance 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. (upbeat techno music) >> This is the Cube, the leader in live coverage and we're covering Veritas Vision 2017, Veritas the tagline here is Truth and Information. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman and we're excited to have Tom Shaffstall here, he's the storage network analyst at Exelon energy company and we love, Tom, having practitioners on because we get the truth, so welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Set it up for us, your role, start with Exelon. Tell us about your interest in energy and what you guys are doing and of course your role at the company. >> We are a utility company that deals with both wind, solar, natural gas and nuclear generation. We have multiple, Exelon has multiple companies that are providing electricity in Chicago area and Philadelphia area, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. We are a pretty big company, employee wise and we have tons and tons of data and I'm in charge of making sure that that stuff gets backed up and stored properly. >> You saw the Richard Branson keynote this morning I presume? >> Tom: Yes, I enjoyed that, that was very good. >> It was very good, providing a little tailwind for much of your business, certainly the wind and solar parts of it. Okay, let's get into it. You're looking after that portion of the infrastructure, maybe paint a picture for us as to what it looks like in your environment, the applications that you're supporting and actually, let me check that. Before we get into that, what's happening in your business that is affecting your IT strategy? You hear a lot about digital transformation, obviously costs, pressures, what are your priorities from the business and how does it affect IT? >> Of course there's cost pressures from the management, but we also have, we're moving into the cloud as of the last couple years, we're also starting to look at data center as a service for our customers, for the businesses, so I'm involved in several different things in regards to the data centers, the service, cloud infrastructure and managing and monitoring all that stuff. >> What is that, data centers as a service? >> Unpack that a little bit for us, cloud strategy, how's that coming about? >> It's actually been done very well for us. We've gone through a whole set of stages and proof of concepts but we've also worked well with Microsoft Azure because that's where we're putting all our stuff and we have a production side, we have a development side and we also have now a sandbox which is pretty interesting for testing. We're putting all those in together with the infrastructure that we already have in regards to making sure things are done properly, the security is done properly, the ownership of the accounts are done properly, so everything is done in a real precise manner through our process. >> Data center as a service is essentially your hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses the public piece which is Azure, your private cloud on prem and all the associated corporate edicts and security and compliance, stuff that goes with that, is that correct? >> Correct and we also have remote sites that we're going to be doing, we have a lot of energy plants around the country that are really small, they don't have real big pipe so data center as a service really works for them as well, that's the things we're starting to look into as well. >> Part of that is the service catalog, getting that house in order, is that right? >> Tom: Yes. >> Do you do chargebacks or showbacks? >> Tom: Yes we do. >> You do chargebacks. >> Yeah so that's all included in that. >> Have you always done chargebacks? >> Over the past several years, we've really built it up more and been more precise in our chargebacks. >> I've always wondered, I wonder if you can comment from your experiences and your peers, you know 10 years ago you would ask folks if they're doing chargebacks they say no, it's just too complicated, we just put it out there. Sometimes we do showbacks but as cloud has come into prominence, people seem to be doing more and more chargebacks to be more cloud like and more precise. Maybe that's tooling, maybe that's culture, what's your experience been? >> We actually started doing more and more reporting on our physical and virtual environments about two years before we actually started into the Azure cloud. I think that was in preparation for that because they saw that that kind of technology was already there in the cloud and we wanted to be prepared for that and make sure that the accounting side of things was a little bit more precise in what we were doing, in charging back. >> Okay let's get into it, Stu. >> Can you maybe sketch out for us a little bit, how much data does your engineering team cover how many sites, what's the purview and how do we, give us this thumbnail sketch. >> We have three main data centers right now in Chicago and in the Baltimore area. Currently we're taking one of those data centers and we're consolidating into the sister data center which is about 20 miles away from each other. We're dwindling it down and our utilities for instance, are managing their own data centers as well. We have multiple data centers all over the country. We're putting most of our corporate stuff into two major data centers so we're in the process of moving those and we have about nine petabytes of data that we're actually backing up and managing, storage wise. That's just on the corporate side, that's not even on our nuclear side, we have more on that side. >> And the primary applications that you're supporting, you don't have to do an application portfolio, we only have 15, 20 minutes, but generally speaking, maybe talk about some of the more critical ones from a backup perspective. >> Backup perspective, we have Just Net backup, both on the nuclear side and on the corporate side, we are also using Data Insight as well on the corporate side and we just I believe got our nuclear guys interested in Data Insight stuff. >> But in terms of the applications that you're, the data that you're protecting, what applications are they supporting, if I could ask it that way. >> We have HP applications, suites, we have R Man, we have Oracle databases, we have SQL databases, and I'm at a loss. >> A lot of the core database stuff, so pretty high SLA. Tight RPO, RTO requirements on those or they vary? >> They vary depending on the categorization of the actual database or the actual application. >> And how do you deal with the variability of those service level agreements? Are you able to provide granular levels of service or is it one size fits all? >> We go down to the granular level. We don't try to do one size fits all, that just didn't work in the starting of things when I first started in the company, we saw that they were trying to do that and it just doesn't work. >> Predominantly or exclusively a Net Backup shop in terms of your data protection, is that right? >> Yes, we also have snap falding and stuff with our net apps our shares so we are backing those up and snapping them off to the other data center and vice versa. We have that capabilities as well. >> You've been at this position for over a decade and you've seen the end of the client server era, not the end, but the tail end of the curve, internet era, obviously now seeing the cloud, virtualization and into the cloud, how have those changes affected your data protection strategy over the years? >> With our virtual side of things, we've actually migrated most of our virtual backups just to VM ware. They are actually handling all that within our infrastructure where we hold all the VM ware servers. That's all done outside of Net Backup all together. We do take care of the production side of the VM ware servers that we have through Net Backup and we treat them as physical servers, but all our test and dev, all that stuff, that's done and held for 14 days and then it's gone. >> We talked a little bit about, off camera, you said you were very happy with Net Backup so you really haven't brought in alternatives. What about the product and the company is appealing to you? >> There's been a history with me because in a previous life if you want to call it, I was in the financial business, working in the data center and I had the opportunity to get into the early stages of Veritas Net Backup four I think it was and then I got out of the financial industry and got into the utility industry and it was automatically Net Backup, I was familiar with it, it's very easy to use, it's just pretty reliable for restores and all that kind of stuff, good management. >> Tom one of the things we've been poking at this week is, of course Veritas has a lot of Net Backup customers, you're a loyal one, talking about this digital transformation and software defined multicloud, hyperscale world, some of those things I think resonating, what are you hearing, what interests you from some of the new products that they're announcing and how do you see the relevance of what Veritas is saying in your world? >> What has interested me so far in our sessions and in the keynote sessions and all, I'm looking into possibly talking to our architects about Infomap and getting that maybe possibly in house and/or the data resiliency because we're already got most of our stuff in the cloud that we're pushing out there. We don't have to push any extra data out there right now, but we may still do that, we may be still migrating some data like for archiving and that kind of thing. That's a possibility but we will probably look to Veritas for that when we go to do those things. >> Thinking about what you've heard this week, you hear a lot from Veritas about modern data protection, cloud, application mobility, things of that nature. As a practitioner, how do you look at those things, those capabilities, are those things that you're considering actually actively architecting or building a plan around. Maybe you could talk about the futures a little bit. >> With our data, we have to make sure there's accountability somewhere, we have to make sure that we know who the owners of these things are and we have to coordinate with them in regards to moving anything, of course. With sip infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, all those regulations, we had to make sure that all our data is held properly and going into the cloud, we want to make sure that what we're putting out there is going to be put out there and held securely. There's still some trepidation in regards to that but I believe our company is moving forward and wanting to do more and could get less of a footprint in our data centers for hardware and all that kind of stuff. For the governance of this stuff, we have the Data Insight software out there, it's helping us to recognize what kind of files are out there, who's using them, who has access to them, and we are starting to use that more as well. We're currently doing a POC to try and get ownership to that actual data because we really don't other than what Data Insight already gives it, this is the number of people that have been using this data, I'm giving you ownership is the way it was before, but now we're able to actually classify, this is the owner, he's going to be the one that takes care of that side. >> Tom I'm just curious, we talk a lot about there's the opportunity of data. Is data for your business, is it a challenge to keep up with the growth and manage it and govern it or is your business turning that into an opportunity? >> It's my full time job and my boss's full time job to make sure that we have enough room for all the data that we're doing. We are trying to do some neat things in regards to managing it better and keeping data, especially for us, our upper management decided to ask us the question recently is are we doing replication between data centers to keep our DRs and all that kind of stuff viable? We were like, yeah and then we started going into that perspective and actually got it so that we can definitely say yes, we have everything here and here, we are DR safe. >> Do you test that? >> Yes. In fact we just recently did a full test of our corporate financial DR data and it went off without a hitch. >> Excellent, all right Tom, we'll give you the last word on the conference, Veritas Vision, how do you like it, why do you come to this, shows like this, what kinds of things do you learn, what's of interest to you? >> I like to get more information as to what Veritas is offering. They're a very good company, I've had a very good rapport with our salespeople and with the engineers, with the help desk people that come in and talk to you and make sure that if we're having issues, they're right on, I've just had a real good experience with Veritas and the whole realm of things. >> Things at the show, anything interesting that pops out to you? Things that you've learned, the take aways? >> We're looking more now into some of the cloud capabilities that you guys have, especially with the resiliency program with the Infomap and again, more information with the Data Insight, all the capability's there, it's going to start bringing out. Just the beauty of all that stuff actually working together and being more cohesive, because before you had Data Insight you had Infomap, you had, and they weren't really communicating properly to really help each other report. It's really good stuff that's happening. >> Tom Sheffstall, thanks very much for coming on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Washington, D.C. everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, this is day two of our coverage of .NEXT Conf #NEXTConf. Wendy M. Pfeiffer is here. She's the relatively new CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> Okay, you got my attention. You said there's a reason for it. >> Reason for the M? >> For the M. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's my mom's middle initial, her middle name is Michelle. My middle name is Michelle and my ten-year-old daughter Holly's middle name is Michelle and we sort of pass along our female heritage. I send Holly a message whenever I do anything publicly that it's a shout out to her. She gets to lead, she gets to be proud of her feminine heritage as well as her family heritage. >> I love that, that is fantastic. Quick aside, I'm going to make you laugh. We're at the race track one day and there was this one guy, and he was winning and I wasn't winning so I said, it's like the eighth race, How are you doing this? Well his last name began with an M. He goes, I'm just betting on all the horses with an M in it. >> That could be another good reason. Thanks for the tip. >> Anyway, welcome to theCUBE and welcome to Nutanix. Five months in on the job, you got a really strong IT background. GoPro, Yahoo, both companies of senior leadership. Robert Half, I think, was on the resume as well. >> Yeah, CISCO Systems, Exodus Communications. >> You've seen it all. >> Which means I'm old. I've been around a long time. Any company, I would work anywhere. >> Not as old as I am, honey. So, what's the experience been like at Nutanix? Tell us about the onboarding. >> It is a playground, I love it. Nutanix, I was hoping that they would have the technology that I love and they do. It's one of the first places I've worked where it doesn't matter if I need server storage, we have that. It's pretty cool. I have a really amazing team and then the leadership there is fantastic. It's also the first time in my career where I'm working for a company that sells to CIO's and so my opinion of our product matters. I get to be customer number one, drink our champagne, that sort of thing. In fact, I'm on that path, we call it Eat Your Own Dog Food, when I came on board and I said, I don't want the dog food. We're going to be drinking our own champagne. I want the good stuff. I'm getting to play and just experience the product and experience that process and then people care what I think, people who are developing product care what I think and that's great. >> Are the sales guys dragging you into situations as well? >> They are totally dragging me into situations. I'm not that compelling in direct sales but I have been giving them some tips on how to sell to CIO's. Just letting them know how to approach us, and some of the things that we care about and don't care about. What's great as well is, I'm not very good at being fake, so when I talk about using our product and when I'm excited about our product, it's pretty, you know, it's genuine. If I don't like something, you know that too. >> Well CIO's, you're part of a network. >> We are. >> And that network is sort of immutable, in my opinion. >> It's a secret cabal. It really is, we get together in treehouses and exchange the password. >> But there's a code, right? >> There is. >> You're not going to give another one of your peers some bad advice, even if you are a CIO of a company that's trying to sell to them. >> That's right. It's a small circle. I do belong to some groups that get together and talk about some of our common challenges and one of our cardinal rules is that no vendors are allowed and there's no selling. We do, if we have some expertise, we'll share that but we really don't cross that line. So when I do give advice, they know it's genuine, as much as possible. >> Wendy, we always like to ask CO's, what's challenging you today? Typical IT, we always said for years, it was like, Okay, your headcount next year is going to be flat, your budget's going to be declining. What do you see when you're talking to your peers? What are some of the biggest challenges that they see? >> It's a few things. One thing is, the transformation that's happening around digital technologies and moving into the cloud. It's requiring a transformation of skill sets as well. We really have a challenge, first of all, in deciding, if we have traditional IT folks, how do we transform their skill sets? How do you make an infrastructure guy or gal someone who writes code? That's one thing and just a dearth of talent. There aren't enough people entering the workforce. That's one thing. Another thing is, really just about the pace of innovation. By nature, when you get to a senior executive level, you're almost less innovative than you might've originally been but we're supposed to be the paragons of innovation and new ideas and so we struggle with that. We struggle to keep it fresh and reinvent ourselves. I left a fairly traditional career to go to GoPro, just because of that desire to reinvent myself and try something hard and new. We've got that struggle as well. I'd think as well, just the changing business models, too. There's a lot, we're always balancing CapEx, OpEx, a lot of us have a big investment in OpEx and in SaaS and then trying to balance that with CapEx. We've always got those challenges. I think that's a lot of it. >> Wendy, we're 10 years into this journey of what cloud and how it's going to affect it and the role of the CIO is something that's been in the center of it. Does the CIO become irrelevant? Does he become a broker of services? You talked a little bit about some of the changing roles. How was your viewpoint on cloud, has it changed over the last few years in some of your different roles and I'm curious inside of Nutanix, how public cloud fits into what you use. >> I think there's a couple of layers. One layer that doesn't go away is operations. Whether it's taking operational expertise and transforming that into code for DevOps, or whether it's transforming it into process for on-premise infrastructure, you have to have that knowledge and you have to have that leadership so I don't think the need for leadership is ever really going away. I think the center of leadership is changing over time and has sort of moved from place to place but ultimately, we have to have folks who understand how to build whatever it is, to scale, who understand how to flex, who understand how to deal with crisis. Then also, there's some fundamentals towards architecture and building blocks. Yes, we're architecting differently. We're architecting with code in the cloud but the principles underlying those things are relatively the same. I don't think that the functions, the need for leadership, is going away at all but I do think that we have to be flexible in our thinking. I will say the title CIO it's actually never kind of been right. Chief Digital Officer or Chief AWS Officer. All of those things are not exactly right. We need to not be so precious about titles and just go back to thinking and leading and innovating and let the titles take care of themselves. >> I got to still ask you about this emergent role of the Chief Data Officer. We can all agree data's important, whatever bromide you want to use, data's the new oil and so forth and so on. Many of the chief data officers that we've talked to are individuals that maybe do a lot of governance, lot of things that CIO's generally aren't responsible for. Yet at the same time, data is becoming this new competitive advantage and it's so important to information technology. What are your thoughts on data, helping companies become data-driven and what is the role of the CIO in that context? >> First of all, data is really, really important. How a company deals with its data is a gigantic differentiator. Obviously, we have all this opportunity in the areas of machine learning and potentially AI and so on. When I was at Yahoo, one of the things I worked on was our privacy initiatives and even back then, we had the ability to ingest a lot of data about our users and we had the ability, algorithmically, to do behavioral targeting. But we had to make some ethical decisions and some compliance decisions about how we used that data and so, the technology has been available for some time, but where we haven't caught up is in policy. I think that Chief Data Officer is really at the nexus of creating policy, understanding capabilities and deciding how we apply those things. We've always needed that role. Sometimes it's the CIO, sometimes it's the Chief Privacy Officer, we've always needed that role but the role is a little bit different, I think, with data because of the power of the data. I do think there's a need for some knowledge of the law, GDPR is coming down from Europe and there's a key factor there. Ultimately, data needs to be treated like an asset. It's product as much as anything else. I think someone who's akin to a Chief Product Officer needs to handle the company's data and that data needs to imbue the product, it needs to go to market plans. It also can be a reflection of the culture of the company, as well. Even collecting data on ourselves and how we operate and how our employees move through their cycles is very, very powerful. Always with ethics, though. That's the thing that, if you leave data in the hands of pure engineers or pure technologists, then you need some sorts of checks and balances as well because sometimes we're overcome by the possibilities of the technology, without thinking through the possibilities that affect human beings. We need that balance. >> I've always felt like the CIO is the field general and should be implementing the data strategy but he or she shouldn't be necessarily responsible for, Okay, how are we going to monetize the data? Who has access to data? What are the data policies? That seems like a full-time job but there is overlap, though. >> It's messy, right? A lot of times it has to do with, I mean at that sea level, those are all board-level positions, right? Ultimately, we're responsible for the financial health of the company >> Sure. >> At that level. Really, we're playing to our strengths. Sometimes we come to the table and we understand how to monetize data. Sometimes we come to the table and we know how to efficiently manage operations. There's usually a mix. There's somebody with a CTO or a CPO or a CIO title or a Chief Data Officer title, but it's less about the title and more about those strengths that show up around the executive table but there needs to be somebody, or maybe a combination of a couple of somebodies, who are hungry for the value that they can derive from that data and accrue that to value to the company. >> It's some notion of swim lanes for accountability but recognizing there's some overlap. We got to talk about women in tech, but go ahead. >> Just two things, Wendy. >> Did you notice I'm a girl? >> As a technology leader, I'm curious if you see differences between yourself being a technology leader in Silicon Valley and those outside the Valley and the second one, just curious if you've had any learnings working now for a company that sells to the enterprise versus being on the consumer side of the house at GoPro and some of the others? >> Silicon Valley is a bubble. We all breathe our own oxygen. We think we're pretty cool. We tend to be libertarian as a group and therefore, we have libertarian policies that are embodied in how we develop code, how we create product and we're creating our own little culture but we're not in sync with a lot of the rest of the world. Luckily, one of the pieces of our culture is about building things that are open and so people can repurpose our technologies in ways that make sense for them. The other thing is, even more profound, is the effect of millennials on both Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley. Millennials are changing how we develop code, how we organize our companies, et cetera. Your other question, can't remember. >> Consumer versus selling to the enterprise. >> I think the difference really is just internally, my job it was a different sport, working for a consumer company because people weren't generally smarter than me around my technology. In the consumer company. But they are a lot smarter than me. I am not the technical expert in the room at Nutanix. All of them know more than I do. >> No offense, but I'll bet. >> That was a little intimidating. I had to think twice, do I want to go back to being in junior high? >> Got to ask you, your journey. 17% of the IT industry's employment comprises women. Just so happens that 17% of the guests on theCUBE are women. We really try and go overboard on it. >> Hard to find us. >> There's a clear disparity in pay, it's well-documented. What was your journey to get here? >> It's only now that I'm old and wise and at a senior level that people are making a big thing about me being female. I've been female my entire career. >> Never heard boo. >> I never traded on it. I will tell you that throughout my career, I have been given advice that would seem ridiculous if it were given to a male. As an example, I've been told that I use too many words. That I'm too emotional. I've been told, can you imagine? If I said, Hey Bob, could you button up that top button of your shirt, there? When you sit down, don't spread your legs because I'm drawn to looking at Girls, women, we get that advice from senior advisors. We're told, Be less emotional. I've always ignored that advice. I'm a mom, I have the blonde 1980's hair. There's not much I can do about that. Being genuinely myself, it was all I could figure out how to be. It just so happens that now I'm in my 50's and I'm a CIO, so suddenly that's a thing. It's never been a thing. It's been something where my entire career, I've had to just keep my own counsel and be genuine and the fact that I'm female and feminine and a mom, doesn't diminish the fact that I'm also a brilliant technologist, that I'm good at leading people. I can feel empathy and care in my heart for a person, at the same time that I'm firing them for non-performance. I can be multifaceted. I think that's women's superpower. I think when we try to be just one thing or we try to be more like the traditional male in leadership, then it's like being Jerry Rice and walking onto the field with your legs tied together. My unfair advantage, to quote John Madden, I got to use my unfair advantage. My unfair advantage is that I think in a multifaceted way. >> Wendy M., thanks so much for coming. I'm glad we could make time for you, I'm glad you could make time for us. Thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it was fun. >> Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back to wrap. This is theCUBE in D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT. Right back.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studio, a Cube Conversation with Mike Banic, who's the VP of Marketing at Vectra Networks. Big news coming for you guys, you just had a good year, we love security and I want to drive a good conversation with you because you're in the front lines, you're seeing all the trends. You guys have been doing very well with AI for cyber, you're also impacting IT operations because security is certainly forcing modernization in the IT world, using data, just really interesting stuff. But hacking is the number one threat problem. What's the security trends, Mike, what are you seeing and what's happening? There's a ton of stuff happening, we're seeing ransomware, a bunch of stuff going on across the board, spearfishing to you name it. It's at a rampant pace; no perimeter anymore, a whole new ballgame. You know networking, you know the perimeter, now you're in the cloud, what are the trends? >> I think one of the things that a lot of people aren't paying enough attention to is the fact that all the systems they have in place are looking for exploits. They're looking for the use of malware, and there's a lot of attacks that actually don't use malware. There may be malware that's used for a specific exploit in the beginning to start it, but the smart attacker now, they sit and they lay low. They watch how your enterprise operates. They look at the tools that you use, and they steal credentials, and then they start to use those tools against the business to steal information or to do damage. And that's something you won't catch if you're using tools that are specifically looking for malware. And that's where using AI to look for explicit attacker behaviors becomes so useful. The other thing is that attackers are on the inside for much longer than people think. We look at M-Trends data from last year that says that the average amount of time that an attacker has gone unmitigated before it's discovered is 99 days. It's actually much longer than that. Those are just the attacks that are reported and those are just the attacks that we have data on. We've seen it actually run much longer than that. And we also know that an attacker can get admin credentials in three days or less. As soon as they get those, they have the keys to the kingdom. >> Yeah, and you mention hacker groups involved. It's lucrative, it's a whole business, we've seen that. >> Mike: It's a supply chain. >> It's a really big racket. Now, networking is interesting because footprints can be left on the network. So you've got encryption, oh, it's encrypted, but you can still get around the encryption. Talk about how you guys do it. How do you guys see the patterns? With encryption out there, you guys have the network footprints, what's the secret sauce, what's the formula? >> So what we're doing to detect this is we're looking at network metadata. We're not performing deep packet inspection. Deep packet inspection is the approach that a firewall uses or traditional intrusion detection and prevention platforms use. So what we're doing, we're collecting metadata, we're collecting log information, we're collecting cloud events, and we're using all that in our mix of analytics. What we're looking for are the behavioral patterns. So, I'll give you a really tangible example. Let's say you're the attacker, John, and you've got control of my computer, and you've got fingers on the keyboard. So you're using a RAT, a Remote Access Trojan. The way that I'm going to use advanced analytics or AI to detect that is I'm going to look at, first, the fact that my machine's opened a connection to an external IP address. That's your machine. I'm going to look for random silences, those are the pauses in the conversation. If I'm just web browsing, then my machine's going to interrupt all those random pauses 'cause I'm moving from page to page, site to site. If your IP address is always interrupting them, then you're in control of the conversation. Anybody in IT should care when an internal host is being controlled by an external host. I didn't have to read any of the web browsing traffic, any of the email traffic, the app traffic, in order to do that. I did that principally by analyzing network metadata. >> So this is unspoofable, either, because the network doesn't lie. >> That's correct. >> Because the packets have to move around. >> That's correct. The attacker has to perform certain things. There's no way for them to erase them. And there's a group of companies that tried to apply analytics to logs, and here's the problem they have. If the smart attacker knows that logs are sent in batches, it's like when somebody breaks into your house. They know they have about 45 seconds to get the alarm code right. They know that they have a certain amount of time before the batch of logs is sent up. So if they have admin access, they'll erase the footprint of what they've done on your machine, and there's no logs. If there's no body, there's no murder. >> Yeah, I've done a few ventures in my day that have been first movers and usually the first movers take the arrows in the back. One of my relatives says, if this is such a great idea, why hasn't someone else done it? So, the question for you guys is it's so obvious that now that you explain it that way that it's a great way to do it. Why hasn't someone else done it? Is it the timing, is it the founding team, is it the approach? I mean a lot of people are in network; you've got Cisco, you've got a zillion networking people. Why hasn't anyone else done this? >> There's a couple of things that come to mind right away. The first is that people who are in this business already, that want to take advantage of AI, it's really difficult to add it to an existing platform. You really have to start from scratch. And then the second is what you said about the approach. The approach that we've taken is very different than others. So there are people in this business that claim they're doing AI and they fall into one end of the spectrum or the other. They either have this big group of security researchers and they've hired a couple of data science guys and they're trying to solve this problem. Or they have a big data science team and they've got a couple of security researchers. We've taken an approach that's in the middle. Whenever we develop an algorithm, we take a security researcher who has a really strong experience or background in the attacker behavior we're trying to detect. And we pair them with somebody in data science who has expertise in the techniques that are going to be best used to detect that. We pair them up; the data scientist looks at the features that they can find in the network. The features I mentioned before, internal IP to external random silences, they determine what those are, they build the algorithm, and then they run it. Then we put it into precursor mode, just like Hitesh's Tesla has precursor stuff running as he's driving up and down the freeway, we do the same thing with our customers. And then once we see that the efficacy is really high, we release that into production. >> So it's a combination of timing and the management team's unique problem space that they addressed, and combined with people and data and software. >> Yes. >> You're kind of blending them all together, so it's a new approach. >> It is very much a new approach, and one following the approach that people have taken before. They go in one of those other two directions. >> I mean if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So Cisco sees everything they do their way, maybe an application developer might take a different approach. So, I buy that, so timing's good. What makes you guys different, what makes you guys think you could be successful? Because, you know, I hear this all the time. Amazon's out there, Amazon could just copy it, you always hear those arguments. How do you guys answer that question; manageability, what's the protection? >> I think first we've taken an approach that gives us a unique capability that is succeeding against others who are really explicitly trying to solve the cyber security problem. I think the other is that we've been very open-minded about not taking just one approach in a field like data science. We don't just use supervised machine learning, unsupervised. We don't just use neural networks. We use whatever tool is best to solve the problem. The other is, we're not religious about where the product gets deployed. We look at protecting cloud workloads, enterprise private cloud workloads. We look at traditional data centers, users, IoT devices, so we're looking at the threat landscape in a very holistic way. Many of the others out there have a very specific focus as they start, and I think our breadth and our approach is serving us well. >> The whole value proposition in business models tends to change in these new value utilities, if you will, like the clouds create. I mean Amazon's successful because they never look in the rear view mirror, they just continue to push forward. Sounds like you guys have that same approach, just keep moving the needle with more people, more data, more software. >> Yeah, relentless, it's day one. It's always day one, just like Jeff says. >> Alright so you guys are doing good, where do you guys do well, and specifically talk about this malware that was hacking computers and doing money on Bitcoin. Big story that's been in the news lately, a couple of weeks ago, but still it's important. Malware being used for not only hacking your cash, using your machine to generate Bitcoin. >> That's correct. So we have a set of algorithms that look for things we call botnet monetization behaviors. And Bitcoin mining is one of them. So, if somebody is mining Bitcoin on your computer they're not really stealing from you, they're just stealing compute cycles to mine Bitcoin. Finding this stuff is actually really important because the attack landscape can quickly pivot on you. I mentioned before that cyber attackers, it's a supply chain. If your machine is latched to a botnet and it's performing Bitcoin mining and the price of Bitcoin falls, the person who owns that botnet might say, screw Bitcoin mining, I'm going to sell all my bot machines to whoever the highest bidder is. Somebody finds out you work for a really interesting company and they want to steal data from you, they're going to buy that IP address, they're going to buy your machine, and they're going to start to launch a direct attack. We've actually seen that scenario in enterprises, and been able to alert the team in real time so they can stop it. And it's the AI that's doing this, it's a not a human that has to take an action. And that's the thing that's really cool in terms of helping us win. We see a lot of customers run red team exercises in parallel with an evaluation, and that red team is designed to explicitly challenge the blue team. It's not a pen test. A pen test is all about trying to see whether the hacker can break in. A red team, they actually give the attackers access to a computer on the inside and then they say, "You've got to steal this trophy." They give them a flag to steal. >> Capture the flag. >> Capture the flag! And the goal of the blue team is to defend it. What we've seen over and over again in these evals is that AI is able to detect those behaviors of the red team in real time fast enough for them to stop them, so the data isn't stolen. It becomes evidence that if we had this tool every day then we're a lot better off than we were before. >> So you guys aren't just looking for known patterns and mapping policy to some script. You guys are losing data in real time, inferring network behavior to look for anomalies. >> Exactly. I'll give you a great example. Last year when there was ransomware, the NotPetya attack. The thing that was interesting about that is it spread like a worm. We hadn't seen a worm since Confecker and that was 10 years ago. The interesting thing is we built an algorithm to detect worm-like behavior based on what we had seen 10 years ago with Confecker. It detected the spread of NotPetya. It's because we're looking for behavior and not the... >> The payload. >> The malware, not the payload, we're able to find it, even if it's a brand new attack vector like NotPetya. And that's the cool thing, 'cause the old style was, let me look for the precise definition of the malware or the exploit or the reputation list. >> And I personally believe we've reported on theCUBE that the cloud computing and distributed computing and even decentralized computing, for that matter, encourages more packet movement. More packet movement gives you more data. >> That's correct. >> So it's a great approach. Congratulations, Mike, on your success. Looking forward to seeing what you guys do this year. Keep in touch. Security, obviously, is top of mind. We care about that at theCUBE. Cyber warfare is number one problem in America. It's the number one problem for enterprises, government, and users. Spearfishing, malware, you name it, it's out there, we've all been hacked and we probably don't even know it. It's theCUBE hackin' the data here inside the studio, I'm John Furrier and thanks for watching. (bright music)