>>We're back with the cube at Falcon 2022, Dave ante and Dave Nicholson. We're at the aria. We do of course, a lot of events in Las Vegas. It's the, it's the place to do events. Dave, I think is my sixth or seventh time here this year. At least. I don't know. I lose track. Jeff Swain is here. He's the vice president of global programs store and tech alliances at CrowdStrike. Jeff. Good to see you again. We saw each other at reinvent in July in Boston. >>Yes. Yeah, it was great to see you again, Dave, thank >>Very much. And we talked about making this happen so thrilled to be here at, at, at CrowdStrike Falcon. We're gonna talk today about the CrowdStrike XDR Alliance partners. First of all, what's XDR >>Well, I hope you were paying attention to George's George's keynote this morning. I guess. You know, the one thing we know is that if you ask 10, five people, what XDR is you'll get 10 answers. >>I like this answer a holistic approach to endpoint security. I, that was, >>It was good. Simple. >>That was a good one at black hat. So, but tell us about the XDR Alliance partners program. Give us the update there. >>Yeah, so I mean, we spoke about it reinforced, you know, the XDR program is really predicated on having a robust ecosystem of partners to help us share that telemetry across all of the different parts of our customers' environment. So we've done a lot of work over the last few weeks and trying to bolster that environment specifically, putting a lot of focus on firewall. You'll see that Cisco and fortunate have both joined the XD XDR Alliance. So we're working on that right now. A lot of customer demand for firewall data into the telemetry set. You know, obviously it's a very rich data environment. There's a lot of logs on firewalls. And so it drives a lot of, of, of information that we can, we can leverage. So we're continuing to grow that. And what we're doing is building out different content packs that support different use cases. So firewall is one CAS B is another emails another and we're building, building out the, the partner set right across the board. So it's, it's, it's been a, a great set of >>Activity. So it's it's partners that have data. Yep. There's probably some, you know, Joe Tuchi year old boss used to say that that overlap is better than gaps. So there's sometimes there's competition, but that's from a customer standpoint, overlap is, is better than gaps. So as gonna mention Cisco forte and there are a number of others, they've got data. Yes. And they're gonna pump it into your system, our platform, and you've got the, your platform. You've got the ability to ingest. You've got the cloud native architecture, you've got the analytics and you've got the near real time analysis capability. Right, right. >>Augmented by people as well, which is a really important part of our value proposition. You know, we, it's not just relying purely on AI, but we have a human, a human aspect to it as well to make sure we're getting extremely accurate responses. And then there's the final phase is the response phase. So being able to take action on a CASB, for example, when we have a known bad actor operating in the cloud is a really important, easy action for our customer to take. That's highly valuable. You're >>Talking about your threat hunting capability, right? >>So it's threat hunting and our Intel capability as well. We use all of that information as well as the telemetry to make sure we're making good, actionable >>Decisions, Intel being machine intelligence or, or human and machine >>Human and human and machine intelligence that we have. We have a whole business that's out there gathering Intel. I believe you think to Adam Myers who runs that business. And you know, that Intel is critical to making good decisions for our customers. >>So the X and XDR is extended, correct. Extending to things like firewalls. That's pretty obvious in the security space. Are there some less obvious data sources that you look to extend to at some point? >>Yeah, I think we're gonna continually go with where the customer demand is. And firewalls is one of the first and is very significant. Other one, you'll see that we're announcing support for Microsoft 365 as well as part of this, this announcement, but then we'll still grow out into the other areas. NDR is, you know, a specific area where we've already got a number of partners in that, in that space. And, and we'll grow that as we go. I think one of the really exciting additional elements is the, the OCS F announcement that we made at at, at, at, at reinforced, which also is a shared data scheme across a number of vendors as well. So talking to Mike's point, Microsoft ST's point this morning in his keynote, it's really about the industry getting together to do better job for our customers. And XDR is the platform to do that. And crowd strikes it way of doing it is the only really true, visible way for a customer to get their hands on all that information, make the decision, see the good from the bad and take the action. So I feel like we're really well placed to help our customers in >>That space. Well, Kevin mania referenced this too today, basically saying the industry's doing a better job of collaborations. I mean, sometimes I'm skeptical because we've certainly seen people try to, you know, commercialize private information, private reports. Yeah. But, but, but you're talking about, you know, some of your quasi competitors cooperatives, you know, actually partnering with you now. So that's a, that's a good indicator. Yeah. I want to step back a little bit, talk about the macro, the big conversation on wall street. Everybody wants to talk about the macro of course, for obvious reasons, we just published our breaking analysis, talking about you guys potentially being a generational company and sort of digging into that a little bit. We've seen, you know, cyber investments hold up a little bit better, both in terms of customer spending and of course the stock market better than tech broadly. Yeah. So in that case it would, it would suggest that cyber investments are somewhat non-discretionary. So, but that is my question are cyber investments non-discretionary if, if so, how, >>You know, I think George George calls that out directly in our analyst reports as well that, you know, we believe that cyber is a non-discretionary spend, but I, I actually think it's more than that. I think in this current macro or economic environment where CIOs and CSOs are being asked to sweat their assets for significantly longer period of time, that actually creates vulnerabilities because they have older kit, that's running for a longer period that they normally, you know, round out or churn out of their environment. They're not getting the investment to replace those laptops. They're not getting the, I placement to replace those servers. We have to sweat them for a little bit longer, longer, which means they need to be on top of the security posture of those devices. So that means that we need the best possible telemetry that we can get to protect those in the best possible way. So I actually think not only is it makes it non-discretionary, it actually increases the, the business case for, for, for taking on a, a cyber project. >>And I buy that. I buy that the business case is better potentially for cyber business case. And cyber is about, about risk reduction, right? It's about, it's about reducing expected loss. I, I, I, I, but the same time CISOs don't have an open wallet. They have to compete with other P and L managers. I also think the advantage for CrowdStrike I'm, I'm getting deeper into the architecture and beginning to understand the power of a lightweight agent that can do handle. I think you're up to 22 modules now, correct? Yes. I've got questions on how you keep that lightweight, but, but nonetheless, if you can consolidate the point tools, which is, you know, one of the biggest challenges that, that SecOps teams face that strengthens the ROI as well. >>Absolutely. And if you look at what George was saying this morning in the keynote, the combination of being able to provide tools, not only to the SecOps team, but the it ops team as well, being able to give the it ops team visibility on how many assets they have. I mean, these simple, these are simple questions that we should be able to answer. But often when we ask, you know, an operations leader, can you answer it? It sometimes it's hard for them. We actually have a lot of that information. So we are able to bring that into the platform. We're able to show them, we're able to show them where the assets are, where the vulnerabilities are against those assets and help it ops do a better job as well as SecOps. So the, the strength, the case strengthens, as you said, the CSO can also be talking to the it ops budget. >>The edge is getting more real. We're certainly hearing a lot about it now we're seeing a lot more and you kind of got the, the near edge, like the home Depot and the lows, you know, stores. Yeah. Okay. That I, I can get a better handle on, okay. How do I secure that? I've got some standards, but that's the far edge. It's, it's the, the OT yes. Piece of it. That's sort of the brave new world. What are you seeing there? How do you protect those far flowing estates? >>I think this gets back to the question of what's what's new or what's coming and where do we see the, the next set of workloads that we have to tackle? You know, when we came along first instance, we were really doing a lot of the on-prem on-prem and, and, and known cloud infrastructure suites. Then we started really tackling the broader crowd market with tools and technology to give visibility and control of the overall cloud environment. OT represents that next big addressable market for us, because there are so many questions around devices where they are, how old they are, what they're running. So visibility into the OT network is extremely, extremely important. And, you know, the, the wall that has existed again between the CISO and the OT environments coming down, we're seeing that's closer, closer alignment between the security on both those worlds. So the announcement that we've made around extending our Falcon discover product, to be able to receive and understand device information from the OT network and bring it into the same console as the, the it and the OT in the same console to give one cohesive picture of, of visibility of all of our devices is a major step forward for our customers and for, for the industry as well. >>And we see that being, being able to get the visibility will then lead us to a place of being able to build our AI models, build our response frameworks. So then we can go to a full EDR and then beyond that, there's, you know, all the other things that CrowdStrike do so well, but this is the first step to really the first step on control is visibility. And >>The OT guys are engineers. So they're obviously conscious of this stuff. It's, it's more it's again, you're extending that culture, isn't >>It? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now when you're looking at threats, great, you want to do things to protect against those threats, but how much, how much of CrowdStrike's time is spent thinking about the friction that's involved in transactions? If I wanna go to the grocery store, think of me as an end point. If I wanna go to the grocery store, if I had to drive through three DUI checkpoints or car safety inspections. Yeah. Every time I went to the grocery store, I wouldn't be happy as an end point as an end user in this whole thing. Ideally, we'd be able just to be authenticated and then not have to worry about anything moving forward. Do you see that as your role, reducing friction 1%, >>That's again, one of the core tenants of, of, of why George founded the company. I mean, he tells the story of sitting on an airplane and seeing an executive who was also on the airplane, trying to boot their machine up and try and get an email out before the plane took off and watching the scanning happen, you know, old school virus scanning happening on the laptop and, and that executive not making it because, and he is like in this day and age, how can we be holding people back with that much friction in their day to day life? So that's one of the, again, founding principles of what we do at CrowdStrike was the security itself needs to support business growth, support, user growth, and actually get out of the way of how people do things. And we've seen progression along that lines. I think the zero trust work that we're doing right now really helps with that as well. >>Our integrations into other companies that play within the zero trust space makes that frictionless experience for the user, because yeah, we, we, we want to be there. We want to know everything that's happening, but we don't wanna see where we always want control points, but that's the value of the telemetry we take. We're taking all the data so we can see everything. And then we pick what we want to review rather than having to do the, the checkpoint approach of stop here. Now, let me see your credentials. Stop here. Let me see your credentials because we have a full field of, of knowledge and information on what the device is doing and what the user is doing. We're able to then do the trust with verify style approach. >>So coming back to the, to the edge in IOT, you know, bringing that zero trust concept to the, to the edge you've got, you've got it. And OT. Okay. So that's a new constituency, but you're consolidating that view. Your job gets harder. Doesn't it? So, so, so talk about how you resolve that. Do do the, do the concepts that you apply to traditional it endpoints apply at the edge. >>So first things we have to do is gain the visibility. And, and so the way in which we're doing that is effectively drawing information out from the OT environment at, by, by having a collector that's sitting there and bringing that into our console, which then will give us the ability to run our AI models and our other, you know, indications of attack or our indicators of misconfiguration into the model. So we can see whether something's good or bad whilst we're doing that. Obviously we're also working on building specific senses that will then sit in OT devices down, you know, one layer down from rather being collected and pulled and brought into the platform, being collected at the individual sensor level when we have that completed. And that requires a whole different ecosystem for us, it means that we have to engage with organizations like Rockwell and Siemens and Schneider, because they're the people who own the equipment, right? Yeah. And we have to certify with them to make sure that when we put technology onto their equipment, we're not going to cause any kind of critical failure that, you know, that could have genuine real world physical disastrous consequences. So we have to be super careful with how we build that, which we're we're in the process of >>Doing are the IOA signatures indicator as a tax. So I don't have to throw a dollar in the jar. Are the IOA signatures substantially similar at, at the edge, or >>I think we learn as we go, you know, first we have to gain the information and understand what good and bad looks like, what the kind of behaviors are there. But what we will see is that, you know, as someone's trying to, there's an actor, you know, making an attack, you know, will be able to see how they're affecting each of those endpoints individually, whether they're trying to take some form of control, whether they're switching them on and off in the edge and the far edge, it's a little bit more binary in terms of the kind of function of the device. It is the valve open or is the valve closed? It's is the production line running or is the production not line running, not running. So we need to be able to see that it's more about protecting the outcomes there as well. But again, you know, it's about first, we have to get the information. That's what this product will help us do, get it into the platform, get our teams over the top of it, learn more about what's going on there and then be able to take action. >>But the key point is the architecture will scale. And that's where the cloud native things comes >>Into. Yeah, it'll, it'll it'll scale. But to your, to your point about the lack of investment and infrastructure means older stuff means potentially wider gaps, bigger security holes, more opportunity for the security sector. Yep. I buy that. That makes sense. I think if it's a valid argument, when you, when you, when you know, we, we loosely talk about internet of things, edge, a lot of those things on the edge, there's probably a trillion dollars worth of a hundred year old garbage, and I'm only slightly exaggerating on the trillion and the a hundred years old, a lot of those critical devices that need to be sensed that are controlling our, our, our, our electrical grid. For example, a lot of those things need to be updated. So, so as you're pushing into that frontier, are you, you know, are, are you extending out developer kits and APIs to those people as they're developing those new things? Well, because some of the old stuff will never work. >>And that's what we're we're seeing is that there is a movement within the industrial control side of things to actually start, you know, doing this. Some, some simple things like removing the air gap from certain systems because you, now we can build a system around it. That's trustable and supportable. So now we can get access there over, over and over a network over the internet to, to, to kind of control a valve set that's down a pipeline or something like that. So there is, there is, there is willingness within the ecosystem, the, the IOT provider ecosystem to give us access to some of those, those controls, which, which wasn't there, which has led to some of some of these issues. Are we gonna be able to get to all of them? No, we're gonna have to make decisions based on customer demand, based on where the big, the big rock lie. And, and so we will continue to do that based on customer feedback on again, on what we see >>And the legacy air gaps in the OT worlds were by design for security reasons, or just sort of >>Mostly because there was no way to, to do before. Right. So it was, was like black >>Connectivity is >>So, so, so it was, people felt more comfortable sending an engineer route to the field truck roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To do it rather than expensive, rather. And, and exactly that, again, going back to our macro economic situation, you know, it's a very expensive way of managing and maintaining your fleet if you have to send someone to it every time. So there is a lot of there's, there's a lot of customer demand for change, and we're engaging in that change. And we want, we see a huge opportunity there >>Coming back to the X XDR Alliance, cuz that's kind of where we started. Where do you wanna see that go? What's your vision for that? >>So the Alliance itself has been fundamental in terms of now where we go with the overall platform. We are always constantly looking for customer feedback on where we go next on what additional elements to add that the Alliance members have been this fantastic time and effort in terms of engaging with us so that we can build in responses to their platforms, into, you know, into, into what we do. And they're seeing the value of it. I, I feel that over the next, you know, over the next two year period, we're gonna see those, our XDR Alliance and other XDR alliances growing out to get to each other and they will they'll touch each other. We will have to do it like the OSF project at AWS. And as that occurs, we're gonna be able to focus on customer outcomes, which is, you know, again, if you listen to George, you listen to Mike protecting the customers, the mission of CrowdStrike. So I think that's core to that, to, to that story. What we will see now is it's a great vehicle for us to give a structured approach to partnership. So we'll continue to invest in that. We've, we've got, we've got a pipeline of literally hundreds of, of partners who want to join. We've just gotta do that in a way that's consumable for us and consumable for the customer. >>Jeff Swain. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. It's great to have you. Yeah. Thanks guys. Thank you. Okay. And thank you for watching Dave Nicholson and Dave ante. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching the cube from Falcon 22 in Las Vegas, right back.

>>We're back with the cube at Falcon 2022, Dave ante and Dave Nicholson. We're at the aria. We do obvious of course, a lot of events in Las Vegas. It's the, it's the place to do events. Dave, I think is my sixth or seventh time here this year. At least. I don't know. I lose track. Jeff Swayne is here. He's the vice president of global programs store and tech alliances at CrowdStrike. Jeff. Good to see again. We saw each other at reinvent in July in Boston. >>Yes. Have it's great to see you again, Dave. Thank you very >>Much. And we talked about making this happen, so it's thrilled to be here at, at, at CrowdStrike Falcon. We're gonna talk today about the CrowdStrike XDR Alliance partners. First of all, what's XDR >>Well, I hope you were paying attention to George's George's keynote this morning. I guess. You know, the one thing we know is that if you ask 10, five people, what XDR is you'll get 10 answers. >>I like this answer a holistic approach to endpoint security. I, that was a, >>It was good. Simple. That >>Was a good one at black hat. So, but tell us about the XDR Alliance partners program. Give us the update there. >>Yeah, so I mean, we spoke about it reinforced, you know, the XDR program is really predicated on having a robust ecosystem of partners to help us share that telemetry across all of the different parts of our customers' environment. So we've done a lot of work over the last few weeks and trying to bolster that environment, specifically, putting a, a lot of focus on firewall. You'll see that Cisco and fortunate have both joined the XD XDR Alliance. So we're working on that right now. A lot of customer demand for firewall data into the telemetry set. You know, obviously it's a very rich data environment. There's a lot of logs on firewalls. And so it drives a lot of, of, of information that we can, we can leverage. So we're continuing to grow that. And what we're doing is building out different content packs that support different use cases. So firewall is one CAS B is another emails another and we're building, building out the, the partner set right across the board. So it's, it's, it's been a, a great set of >>Activity. So it's it's partners that have data. Yep. There's probably some, you know, Joe, Tuchi your old boss used to say that that overlap is better than gaps. So there's sometimes there's competition, but that's from a customer standpoint, overlap is, is better than gaps. So you gonna mention Cisco forte and there are a number of others. They've got data. Yes. And they're gonna pump it into your system, our platform, and you've got the, your platform. You've got the ability to ingest. You've got the cloud native architecture, you've got the analytics and you've got the near real time analysis capability, right. >>Augmented by people as well, which is a really important part of our value proposition. You know, we, it's not just relying purely on AI, but we have a human, a human aspect to it as well to make sure we're getting extremely accurate responses. And then there's the final phase is the response phase. So being able to take action on a CASB, for example, when we have a known bad actor operating in the cloud is a really important, easy action for our customer to take. That's highly valuable. You're >>Talking about your threat hunting capability, right? >>So threat hunting and our Intel capability as well. We use all of that information as well as the telemetry to make sure we're making good, actionable >>Decisions, Intel being machine intelligence or, or human in >>Machine human and human and machine intelligence that we have. We have a whole business that's out there gathering Intel. I believe you're thinking to Adam Myers who runs that business. And you know, that Intel is critical to making good decisions for our customers. >>So the X and XDR is extended, correct. Extending to things like firewalls. That's pretty obvious in the security space. Are there some less obvious data sources that you look to extend to at some point? >>Yeah, I think we're gonna continually go with where the customer demand is. Firewalls is one of the first and email is very significant. Other one, you'll see that we're announcing support for Microsoft 365 as well as part of this, this announcement, but then we'll still grow out into the other areas. NDR is, you know, a specific area where we've already got a number of partners in that, in that space. And, and we'll grow that as we go. I think one of the really exciting additional elements is the, the OCS F announcement that we made at at, at, at, at reinforced, which also is a shared data scheme across a number of vendors as well. So talking to Mike's point Microsoft's point this morning in his keynote, it's really about the industry getting together to do better job for our customers. And XDR is the platform to do that. And crowd strikes it way of doing it is the only really true, visible way for a customer to get their hands on all that information, make the decision, see the good from the bad and take the action. So I feel like we're really well placed to help our customers in >>That space. Well, Kevin, Mandy referenced this too today, basically saying the industry's doing a better job of collaboration. I mean, sometimes I'm skeptical because we've certainly seen people try to, you know, commercialize private information, private reports. Yeah. But, but, but you're talking about, you know, some of your quasi competitors cooperatives, you know, actually partnering with you now. So that's a, that's a good indicator. Yeah. I want to step back a little bit, talk about the macro, the big conversation on wall street. Everybody wants to talk about the macro of course, for obvious reasons, we just published our breaking analysis, talking about you guys potentially being a generational company and sort of digging into that a little bit. We've seen, you know, cyber investments hold up a little bit better, both in terms of customer spending and of course the stock market better than tech broadly. Yeah. So in that case it would, it would suggest that cyber investments are somewhat non-discretionary. So, but that's is my question are cyber investments non-discretionary if so, how, >>You know, I think George George calls that out directly in our analyst reports as well that, you know, we believe that cyber is a non-discretionary spend, but I, I actually think it's more than that. I think in this current macro of economic environment where CIOs and CSOs are being asked to sweat their assets for a significantly longer period of time, that actually creates vulnerabilities because they have older kit, that's running for a longer period that they normally, you know, round out or churn out of their environment. They're not getting the investment to replace those laptops. They're not getting the investment to replace those servers. We have to sweat them for a little bit longer, longer, which means they need to be on top of the security posture of those devices. So that means that we need the best possible telemetry that we can get to protect those in the best possible way. So I actually think not only is it makes it non-discretionary, it actually increases the, the business case for, for, for taking on a, a cyber project. >>And I buy that. I buy that the business case is better potentially for cyber business case. And cyber is about, about risk reduction, right? It's about, it's about reducing expected loss. I, I, I, I, but the same time CISOs don't have an open wallet. They have to compete with other P and L managers. I also think the advantage for CrowdStrike I'm, I'm getting deeper into the architecture and beginning to understand the power of a lightweight agent that can do handle. I think you're up to 22 modules now, correct? Yes. I've got questions on how you keep that lightweight, but, but nonetheless, if you can consolidate the point tools, which is, you know, one of the biggest challenges that, that SecOps teams face that strengthens the ROI as well. >>Absolutely. And if you look at what George was saying this morning in the keynote, the combination of being able to provide tools, not only to the SecOps team, but the it ops team as well, being able to give the it ops team visibility on how many assets they have. I mean, these simple, these are simple questions that we should be able to answer. But often when we ask, you know, an operations leader, can you answer it? It sometimes it's hard for them. We actually have a lot of that information. So we are able to bring that into the platform. We're able to show them, we're able to show them where the assets are, where the vulnerabilities are against those assets and help it ops do a better job as well as SecOps. So the, the strength, the case strengths, as you said, the CSO can also be talking to the it ops budget. >>The edge is getting more real. We're certainly hearing a lot about it. Now we're seeing a lot more and you kind of got the, the near edge. It's like the home Depot and the lows, you know, stores okay. That I, I can get a better handle on, okay. How do I secure that? I've got some standards, but that's the far edge. It's, it's the, the OT yes. Piece of it. That's sort of the brave new world. What are you seeing there? How do you protect those far flung estates? >>I think this gets back to the question of what's what's new what's coming and where do we see the, the next set of workloads that we have to tackle? You know, when we came along first instance, we were really doing a lot of the on-prem on-prem and, and, and known cloud infrastructure suites. Then we started really tackling the broader cloud market with tools and technology to give visibility and control of the overall cloud environment. OT represents that next big addressable market for us, because there are so many questions around devices where they are, how old they are, what they're running. So visibility into the OT network is extremely, extremely important. And, you know, the, the wall that has existed again between the CISO and the OT environments coming down, we're seeing that's closer, closer alignment between the security on both those worlds. So the announcement that we've made around extending our Falcon discover product, to be able to receive and understand device information from the OT network and bring it into the same console as the, the it and the OT in the same console to give one cohesive picture of, of visibility of all of our devices is a major step forward for our customers and for, for the industry as well. >>And we see that being, being able to get the visibility will then lead us to a place of being able to build our AI models, build our response frameworks. So then we can go to a full EDR and then beyond that, there's, you know, all the other things that CrowdStrike do so well, but this is the first step to really the first step on control is visibility. And >>The OT guys are engineers. So they're obviously conscious of this stuff. It's, it's more it's again, you're extending that culture, isn't it? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now when you're looking at threats, great, you want to do things to protect against those threats, but how much, how much of CrowdStrike's time is spent thinking about the friction that's involved in transactions? If I wanna go to the grocery store, think of me as an end point. If I wanna go to the grocery store, if I had to drive through three DUI checkpoints or car safety inspections, every time I went to the grocery store, I wouldn't be happy as an end point as an end user in this whole thing. Ideally, we'd be able just to be authenticated and then not have to worry about anything moving forward. Do you see that as your role, reducing friction >>100%, that's again, one of the core tenants of, of, of why George founded the company. I mean, he tells the story of sitting on an airplane and seeing an executive who was also on the airplane, trying to boot their machine up and trying, and get an email out before the plane took off and watching the scanning happen, you know, old school virus scanning happening on the laptop and, and that executive not making it because, and he is like in this day and age, how can we be holding people back with that much friction in their day to day life? So that's one of the, again, founding principles of what we do at CrowdStrike was the security itself needs to support business growth, support, user growth, and actually get out of the way of how people do things. And we've seen progression along that lines. I think the zero trust work that we're doing right now really helps with that as well. >>Our integrations into other companies that play within the zero trust space makes that frictionless experience for the user, because yeah, we, we, we want to be there. We want to know everything that's happening, but we don't want to see where we always want control points, but that's the value of the telemetry we take. We're taking all the data so that we can see everything. And then we pick what we want to review rather than having to do the, the checkpoint approach of stop here. Now, let me see your credentials stop here. And let me see your credentials because we have a full field of, of knowledge and information on what the device is doing and what the user is doing. We're able to then do the trust with verify style approach. >>So coming back to the, to the edge and IOT, you know, bringing that zero trust concept to the, to the edge you've got, you've got it and OT. Okay. So that's a new constituency, but you're consolidating that view. Your job gets harder. Doesn't it? So, so, so talk about how you resolve that. Do do the, do the concepts that you apply to traditional it endpoints apply at the edge. >>So first things we have to do is gain the visibility. And, and so the way in which we're doing that is effectively drawing information out from the OT environment at, by, by having a collector that's sitting there and bringing that into our console, which then will give us the ability to run our AI models and our other, you know, indications of attack or our indications of misconfiguration into the model. So we can see whether something's good or bad whilst we're doing that. Obviously we're also working on building specific sensors that will then sit in OT devices down, you know, one layer down from rather being collected and pulled and brought into the platform, being collected at the individual sensor level when we have that completed. And that requires a whole different ecosystem for us, it means that we have to engage with organizations like Rockwell and Siemens and Schneider, because they're the people who own the equipment, right? Yeah. And we have to certify with them to make sure that when we put technology onto their equipment, we're not going to cause any kind of critical failure that, you know, that could have genuine real world physical disastrous consequences. So we have to be super careful with how we build that, which we're we're in the process of doing >>Are the IOA signatures indicator as a tax. So I don't have to throw a dollar in the jar, are the IOA signatures substantially similar at, at the edge? I think >>We learn as we go, you know, first we have to gain the information and understand what good and bad looks like, what the kind of behaviors are there. But what we will see is that, you know, as someone's trying to make, if there's an actor, you know, making an attack, you know, we'll be able to see how they're affecting each of those end points individually, whether they're trying to take some form of control, whether they're switching them on and off in the edge and the far edge, it's a little bit more binary in terms of the kind of function of the device. It is the valve open or is the valve closed? It's is the production line running or is the production not line running, not running. So we need to be able to see that it's more about protecting the outcomes there as well. But again, you know, it's about first, we have to get the information. That's what this product will help us do. Get it into the platform, get our teams over the top of it, learn more about what's going on there and then be able to take action. >>But the key point is the architecture will scale. That's where the cloud native things >>Comes into. Yeah, it'll, it'll it'll scale. But to your, to your point about the lack of investment and infrastructure means older stuff means potentially wider gaps, bigger security holes, more opportunity for the security sector. Yep. I buy that. That makes sense. I think if it's a valid argument, when you, when you, when you know, we, we loosely talk about internet of things, edge, a lot of those things on the edge, there's probably a trillion dollars worth of a hundred year old garbage, and I'm only slightly exaggerating on the trillion and the a hundred years old, a lot of those critical devices that need to be sensed that are controlling our, our, our, our electrical grid. For example, a lot of those things need to be updated. So, so as you're pushing into that frontier, are you, you know, are, are you extending out developer kits and APIs to those people as they're developing those new things, right? Because some of the old stuff will never work. >>And that's what we're we're seeing is that there is a movement within the industrial control side of things to actually start, you know, doing this. Some, some simple things like removing the air gap from certain systems, because now we can build a system around it, that's trustable and supportable. So now we can get access there over, over and over a network over the internet to, to, to kind of control a valve set that's down a pipeline or something like that. So there is a, there is, there is willingness within the ecosystem, the, the IOT provider ecosystem to give us access to some of those, those controls, which, which wasn't there, which has led to some of some of these issues. Are we gonna be able to get to all of them? No, we're gonna have to make decisions based on customer demand, based on where the big, the big rock lie. And, and so we will continue to do that based on customer feedback on again, on what we see >>And the legacy air gaps in the OT worlds were by design for security reasons, or just sort of, >>I see. Because there was no way to, to do before. Right. So it was, was like >>Lack connectivity is, >>Yeah. So, so, so it was, people felt more comfortable sending an engineer route to the field truck roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To do it rather than expensive, rather. And, and exactly that, again, going back to our macro economic situation, you know, it's a very expensive way of managing and maintaining your fleet if you have to send someone to it every time. So there is a lot of there's, there's a lot of customer demand for change, and we're engaging in that change. And we want to see a huge opportunity there >>Coming back to the XDR Alliance, cuz that's kind of where we started. Where do you wanna see that go? What's your vision for that? >>So the Alliance itself has been fundamental in terms of now where we go with the overall platform. We are always constantly looking for customer feedback on where we go next on what additional elements to add. The, the Alliance members have video this fantastic time and effort in terms of engaging with us so that we can build in responses to their platforms, into, you know, into, into what we do. And they're seeing the value of it. I, I feel that over the next, you know, over the next two year period, we're gonna see those, our XDR Alliance and other XDR alliances growing out to get to each other and they will they'll touch each other. We will have to do it like this O project at AWS. And as that occurs, we're gonna be able to focus on customer outcomes, which is, you know, again, if you listen to George, you listen to Mike protecting the customers, the mission of CrowdStrike. So I think that's core to that, to, to that story. What we will see now is it's a great vehicle for us to give a structured approach to partnership. So we'll continue to invest in that. We've, we've got, we've got a pipeline of literally hundreds of, of partners who want to join. We've just gotta do that in a way that's consumable for us and consumable for the customer. >>Jeff Swain. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. It's great to have you. Yeah. Thanks guys. Thank you. Okay. And thank you for watching Dave Nicholson and Dave ante. We'll be back right to this short break. You're watching the cube from Falcon 22 in Las Vegas, right back.

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome to the Cubes Presentation of Women in Tech Global Event Celebrating International Women's Day I'm John for a host of the Cube. We had a great guest in Cuba. Alumni Veranda re vice president. Commercial sales for Europe, Middle East and Africa. EMEA at AWS Amazon Web service to great to see you. Thank you for coming in all the way across the pond and the US to Palo Alto from London. >>Thank you, John. Great to see you again. I'm super excited to be part of this particularly special event. >>Well, this is a celebration of International Women's Day. It's gonna continue throughout the rest of the year, and every day is International Women's Day. But you're actually international. Your women in Tech had a great career. We talk that reinvent. Let's step back and walk through your career. Highlights to date. What have been some of the key things in your career history that you can share? >>Uh, thanks, John. It's always nice to reflect on this, you know? Look, I the way I would classify my career. First of all, it's very it's been very international. I was born and raised in India I went to study in the US It was always a dream to go do that. I did my masters in Boston University. I then worked in the U S. For a good 17 years across A number of tech, uh, tech companies in particular, started my career at McKinsey in the very early days and then moved on to work for E M. C. You'll you'll probably remember them, John. Very well, of course, There now, Del um And then I moved over to Europe. So I've spent the last 18 years here in Europe. Um, and that's been across a couple of different things. I I always classify. Half my career has been strategy, transformation, consulting, and the other half of my career is doing the real job of actually running operations. And I've been, you know, 12 15 years in the tech and telecom sector had the excitement of running Schneider Electric's business in the UK Denniston and Private Equity went back to McKinsey Boomerang, and then a W s called me, and how could I possibly refuse that? So it's been really exciting, I think the one big take away when I reflect on my career is. I've always had this Northstar about leading a business someday, and then I've sort of through my career master set of skills to be able to do that. And I think that's probably what you see. Very eclectic, very mobile, very international and cross industry. Uh, in particular. >>I love the strategy and operations comment because they're both fun, but they're different ones. Very execution, tactical operating. The business strategy is kind of figuring out the future of the 20 mile stare. You know, playing that chess match, so to speak, all great skills and impressive. But I have to ask you, what got you in the tech sector? Why technology? >>Well, so you know, in some ways I kind of fell into it, John, right? Because when I was growing up, my father was always in the tech space, so he had a business and fax machines and he was a reseller of cannon. If you remember Cannon, um, and microfilm equipment and I grew up around him, and he was a real entrepreneur. I mean, always super visionary about new things that were coming out. And so as I followed him around, I said, I kind of wanna be him. And it's a little bit about that sort of role model right early in your career. And then when I moved to the U. S. To study again, it wasn't like I thought I was gonna go to attack. I mean, I wasn't an engineer, you know. I grew up in India with economics degree. That's when women went into We didn't necessarily go into science. But when I joined McKinsey in the early days, I ended up working with, you know, the big companies of the days. You know, the IBMs, the E M. C. Is the Microsoft the oracles, etcetera. So I just then began to love, love the innovation, always being on the sort of bleeding edge. Um, and I guess it was a little bit just fascinating for me not being an engineer to learn how technology had all these applications in terms of how businesses advanced. So I guess, Yeah, that's kind of why I still think it around with it. It's interesting >>how you mentioned how you at that time you pipeline into economics, which is math. Of course. Uh, math is needed for economics, but also the big picture and This is one of the conversation we're having, Uh, this year, the breaking down the barriers for women in tech. Now there's more jobs you don't You don't need to have one pathway into into science or, you know, we're talking stem versus steam arts are super important, being creative. So the barriers to get in are being removed. I mean, if you think about the surface area for technology. So I got to ask you, what barriers do you think Stop girls and young women the most in considering a career in Tech? >>I've got to start with role models, John. Right? Because I think a number of us grew up, by the way, being the only not having the allies in the business, right? All of us, all the all the managers and hiring people are males rather than females. And the fact of the matter is, we didn't have this sort of he for she movement. And I think that's the biggest barrier is not having enough role models and positive role models in the business. I can tell you that research shows that actually, when you have female role models, you tend to hire more and actually what employees say is they feel more supportive when they have actually female managers. So I think there are lots of goodness, but we just need to accelerate how many role models we have. I think the other things I will say to you as well is, if you look at just the curriculum and the ability to get women into stem, right, I mean, we need to have colleges, universities, schools also encouraging women into stem. And you've probably heard about our programme. You know, it's something we do to encourage girls into stem. I think it's really important that teachers and others are actually encouraging girls to do math, for example, right? It's not just about science. Math is great. Logic is great, by the way. Philosophy is great. I just love what you said. I think increasingly, the EQ and EQ parts have to come together, and I think that's what women excel at. Um, so I think that's another very, very big carrier, and then the only other thing I will say is we're gonna watch the language we use, like when I think about job descriptions, they tend to be very male oriented languages we look at CVS now, if you haven't been a female in tech for a long time, your CV isn't going to show a lot of tech, is it? So for recruiters out there, look for competencies. Look for capabilities. You mentioned strategy and arts earlier. We have this leadership principles, As you know, John, really well, think big and dive deep, right? That strategy and operations. And so I think we we need to recruit for that. And we need to recruit for culture. And we need to recruit for people with ambition, an aspiration and not always Just look at 20 years of experience because you're not gonna find it. So I think those are some of the big barriers. Um, that I that I at least think, is stopping women from getting into town. But the biggest one is not enough women at the top hiring women. >>I think people want to see themselves, or at least an aspirational version of what they could be. And I think that's only gonna get better. Lots changed. A lot has happened over the years, but now, with technology in everyone's life, covid pulled forward a lot of realities. You know, the current situation in Europe where you're you are now has pulled forward a lot of realities around community, cyber, digital, our lives. And I think this opens up new positions, clearly cybersecurity. And I'm sure the job boards in every company is hiring people that didn't exist years ago, but also this new problems to solve. So the younger generation coming up, um, is gonna work on these problems, and they need to have role models. So what's your reaction to that? You know, new problems are opportunities their new so usually solved by probably the next generation. Uh, they need mentors. All this kind of works together. What's your reaction? >>Yeah, and, you know, let me pick up on something we're doing that I think is really important. I think you have to address age on the pipeline problem, you know, because they're just is a pipeline problem, you know, at the end of the day, And by that, what I mean is, we need to have more and more people with the and I'm not gonna use the word engineering or science. I'm going to use the word digital skills, right? And I think what we've we've committed to doing, John, you know, I'm very proud of this is we said we're gonna train 29 people 29 million people around this world on digital skills for free by 2025. Right, That's gonna help us get that pipeline going. The other thing we do is something called Restart where we actually do 12 weeks of training for the under, employed and under served right and underrepresented communities. And that means in 12 weeks we can get someone. And you know, this case I talk to you about this before I love it. Fast food operator to cloud, right? I mean, that's that's what I call changing the game on pipeline. But But here's the other stand. Even if the pipeline is good and we often see that the pipeline can be as much as 50% at the very early career women, by the time you get into the C suite, you're not a 50 anymore. You're less than 20%. So the other big thing John there, and this comes back to the types of roles you have an opportunities you create. We've got to pull women through the pipeline. We've really got to encourage that there are sponsors and not just mentors. I think women are sorry to say this over mentored and under sponsored. We need more people say I'm gonna open the door for you and create the opportunity I had that advantage. I hit people through my career. By the way, they were all men, right? Who actually stood out there and bang on the door and said, Okay, Tunisia is gonna go do this. And my first break I remember was having done strategy all my life when the CEO come into the room and you said, You're gonna better locks and you're gonna go run the P and L in Benelux and I almost fainted because I thought, Oh, my God, I've never run a PNR before But it's that type of risk taking that's going to be critical. And I think we've got to train our leaders and our managers to have those conversations be the sponsors, get that unconscious bias training. We all have it. Every single one of us has it. I think those are the combinations of things that are going to actually help open the door and make a see that Actually, it's not just about coding. It's actually about sales. It's about marketing. It's about product management. It's about strategy. It's about sales operations. It's about really, really thinking differently about your customers, right? And that's the thing that I think is attractive about technology. And you know what? Maybe that leads you to eventually become a coder. Or maybe not. Maybe you enter from coding, but those are all the range is available to you in technology, which is not good at advertising, >>that there's more applications than ever before. But I love your comment about over mentoring and under sponsored. Can you quickly just define the difference between those two support elements sponsoring versus, uh, mentoring sponsoring >>So mentors And by the way they can range from my son is my mentor, you know, is a great reverse mentor. By the way, I really encourage you to have the reverse mentoring going. So many mentors are people from all walks of your life, right? And you should have, you know, half a dozen of those. At least I think right who are going to be able to help you deal with situations, help coach you give you feedback respond to concerns You're having find ways for you to navigate all the stuff you need, by the way. Right? And feedback the gift we need that sponsors. It's not about the feedback. Necessarily. It's people who literally will create opportunities for you. Mentors don't necessarily do that. Sponsors will say you You know what? We got the phone. Call John and say, John, I've got the perfect person for you. You need to go speak to her. That's the big difference. John and a couple of sponsors. It's not about many, >>and that's where the change happens. I love that comment. Good call. I'm glad I could double down on that. Now that you have the environment, pipeline and working, you have the people themselves in the environment getting better sponsors and mentors, hopefully working more and more together. But once they're in the environment, they still got to be part of it. So as girls and young women and to the working sector for tech, what advice would you give them? Because now they're in the game there in the arena. So what advice would you give them? Because the environments they are now >>yeah, yeah. I mean, Gosh, John, it's you know, you've lived your career in this space. It's an exciting place to be right. Um, it's a growth opportunity. And I think that's a really important point because the more you enter sectors where there's a lot of growth and I would say hyper right growth, that's just gonna open the doors to so many more things. If you're in a place where it's all about cost cutting and restructuring, do you know what? It's super hard to really compete and have fun, right? And as we say, make history. So it's an exciting place. Today's world transformation equals digital transformation, right? So tech is the place to be, because tech is about transformation, Right? So coming in here, the one advice I would give you is Just do it because believe me, there's so much you can do, like take the risk, find someone is going to give you that entree point and get in the door right? And look, you know what's the worst that could happen? The worst that could happen is you don't like it. Fine. There's lots of other things than to go to. So my advice is, you know, don't take the mm. The really bad tips I've received in my career, right? Don't let people tell you you can't do it. You're not good enough. You don't have the experience, right? It's a male's world. You're a woman. It's all about you and not about EQ. Because that's just rubbish, Frankly, right. The top tip I was ever given was actually to take the risk and go for it. And that was my father. And then all these other sponsors I've had around the way. So that's that's the one thing I would say. The other thing I will say to you is the reason I advise it and the reason you should go for it. It's purposeful. Technology is changing our lives, you know, And we will all live to be no longer. 87 I think 100 right? And so you have the opportunity to change the course of the world by coming to technology. The vaccine deployment John was a great example, right? Without cloud, we couldn't have launch these vaccines as fast as we did. Right? Um, so I think there's a tonne of purpose. You've got to get in and then you've got to find. As I said, those sponsors, you've got to find those mentors. You've got to not worry about vertical opportunities and getting promoted. You gotta worry about horizontal opportunities, right? And doing the things that I needed to get the skills that you require, right? I also say one thing. Um, don't Don't let people tell you not to speak up, not to express your opinion. Do all of the above be authentic, Be authentic style. You will see more role models. Many, many more role models are gonna come out in tech that are going to be female role models. And actually, the men are really stepping up to the role models. And so we will be better together. And here's the big thing. We need you. We can do this without women. There's no possible way that we will be able to deliver on the absolute incredible transformation we have ahead of us without you. >>Inclusion, Diversity equity. These are force multipliers for companies. If applied properly, it's competitive advantage. And so breaking the bias. The theme this year is super super important. It sounds like common sense, but the reality is you break the bias It's not just women as men, as all of us. What can we do? Better to bring that force multiplier capabilities and competitive advantage of inclusion, diversity, equity to business. >>So the first thing I would say and my doctor used to always tell me this if it hurts, don't do it right. I would say to you just do it. Get diverse teams in place because if you have diverse teams, you have diversity of thought. You don't have to worry as much about bias because, you know, you've got the people around the table who actually represent the world. We also do something really cool. We have something called biassed busters. And so in meetings we have bias borders. People are going to, like, raise their hand and say, I'm not sure that that was really meant the way it was supposed to be, So I think that's just a nice little mechanism that we have here, Um, in a W s that helps. The other thing I would say to you is being your authentic self. You can't be a man and mentioned be women, and you're not gonna replicate somebody else because you're never gonna succeed if you do that, you know? So I would say be your authentic self all of the time, You know, we know. We know that women are sometimes labelled as aggressive when they're really not. Don't worry about it. It's not personal. I think the main thing you have to do is and I advise women all the time Is calibrate the feedback you're getting okay? Don't catastrophizing it right. Calibrate it. Taken in, you don't have to react to every feedback in the world, right? And make sure that you're also conscious of your own biases, right? So I think those are my Those are my two cents John for what they were for breaking device. I love the thing. >>Be yourself, You know, Don't take it too personal. Have some fun. That's life. That's a life lesson. Um, Final question, while I got you here, you're a great inspiration, and you're a great role model. You're running a very big business for Amazon web services. Europe, Middle East and Africa is a huge territory. It's its own thing. It's It's like you're bigger than some companies out there. Your role in your organisation. What's the hot area out there you were talking before camera. That's emerging areas that you're focused on. People are watching this young women, young ladies around the world. We're gonna look at this and say, What wave should I jump on? What's the hot things happening in in Europe? Middle Eastern Africa? >>I think the three things I would mention and I'm sure there's I'm sure, John, as we've spoken to my peers across the other gos, right, there are some similarities. The very, very hot thing right now is sustainability. Um, and you know, people are really building sustainability into their strategy. It's no longer sort of just an E S G goal in itself. It's actually very much part of changing the way they do business. So I think that's the hard part. And that's why again, I think it's a phenomenal place to be. I think the other big thing that we're absolutely talking about a lot is, and you know, this is getting even more complicated right now is just around security and cyber security and where that's going and how can we be really thinking about how we address some of these concerns that are coming out and I think there's There's something. There's a lot to be said about the way we build our infrastructure in terms of that context. So I think that's the second one. I think the third one is. People are really looking at technology to change the way businesses operate. So how does HR operate? How do you improve your employee value proposition? How do you do marketing in the next generation? How do you do finance in the next generation? So across the business is no longer the place of I t. It really is about changing the way we are as businesses and all of us becoming tech companies at the core. So the big thing there, John, is data data at the heart of everything we do data not because it's there in front of you, but data because you can actually make decisions on the back of it. So those are the things, Um, I seem to come across a lot more than anything else. >>It's always great to talk to you, your senior leader at AWS, um, inspirational to many. And thank you for taking the time to speak with us here on this great event. Women in text. Global Celebration of International Women's Day. Thank you so much for your time. >>Thank you, John. Always great to talk to you. >>We will definitely be keeping in touch More storeys to be had and we're gonna bring it to you. This is the cubes continuing presentation of women in tech. A global event celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>>Hey, welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of eaters reinvent 2021. So our third day wall-to-wall coverage. I'm my coach, Dave Alonzo. He we're getting all the action two sets in person. It's also a virtual hybrid events with a lot of great content online, bringing you all the fresh voices, all the knowledge, all the news and all the action and got great guests here today. As your renderer, managing director of AWS is Europe, middle east, and Africa also known as EMIA. Welcome to the cube. Welcome, >>Welcome. Thanks for coming on. Lovely to be here. >>So Europe is really hot. Middle east Africa. Great growth. The VC culture in Europe specifically has been booming this year. A lot of great action. We've done many cube gigs out there talking to folks, uh, entrepreneurship, cloud, native growth, and then for us it's global. It's awesome. So first question got to ask you is, is you're new to AWS? What brought you here? >>Yeah, no, John, thank you so much. I've been here about three and a half months now, actually. Um, so what brought me here? Um, I have been in and around the tech world since I was a baby. Um, my father was an entrepreneur. I sold fax machines and microfilm equipment in my early days. And then my career has spanned technology in some form or the other. I was at EMC when we bought VMware. Uh, I was a Colt when we did a FinTech startup joined Schneider in my background, which is industrial tech. So I guess I'm a bit of a tech nerd, although I'm not an engineer, that's for sure. The other thing is I've spent a huge part of my career advising clients. And so while I was at McKinsey on business transformation and cloud keeps coming up, especially post pandemic, huge, huge, huge enabler, right of transformation. So when I got the call from AWS, I thought here's my opportunity to finally take what companies are wrestling with, bring together a pioneer in cloud with our enterprise and start-up and SMB clients connect those dots between business and technology and make things happen. So it real magic. So that's what brought me here. And I guess the only other thing to say is I'd heard a lot of other culture, customer mash, obsession, and leadership principles. >>That's why I'm here. It's been a great success. I got to ask you too, now that your new ostium McKinsey, even seeing the front lines, all the transformation, the pandemic has really forced everybody globally to move faster. Uh, things like connect were popular in EMEA. How, how is that going out? There's at the same kind of global pressure on the digital transformation with cloud? What are you seeing out there? >>I've been traveling since I joined, uh, around 10 of the countries already. So Ben planes, trains, automobiles, and what you definitely see is massive acceleration. And I think it's around reinvention of the business. So people are adopting cloud because it's obviously there's cost reasons. There's MNA reasons. There's really increasingly more about innovating. How do I innovate my business? How do I reinvent my business? So you see that constantly. Um, and whether you're a enterprise company or you're a startup, they're all adopting cloud in different, different ways. Um, I mean, I want to tell a core to stack because it's really interesting. And Adam mentioned this in his keynote five to 15% only of workloads have moved to the cloud. So there's a tremendous runway ahead of us. Um, and the three big things on people's minds helped me become a tech company. So it doesn't matter who you are, you're retail, whether you're life sciences or healthcare. You've probably heard about the Roche, uh, work that we're doing with Roche around accelerating R and D with data, or if you're a shoes Addie desk, how do you accelerate again, your personalized experiences? So it doesn't matter who you have helped me become a tech company, give me skills, digital skills, and then help me become a more sustainable company. Those are the three big things I'm thinking of. >>So a couple of things to unpack there. So think about it. Transformation. We still have a long way to go to your point, whatever 10, 15%, depending on which numbers you look at. We've been talking a lot in the cube about the next decade around business transformation, deeper business integration, and the four smarts to digital. And the woke us up to that, accelerated that as you say, so as you travel around to customers in AMEA, what are you hearing with regard to that? I mean, many customers maybe didn't have time to plan. Now they can sit back and take what they've learned. What are you hearing? >>Yeah. And it's, it's a little bit different in different places, right? So, I mean, if you start, if you look at, uh, you know, our businesses, for example, in France, if you look at our businesses in Iberia or Italy, a lot of them are now starting they're on the, at least on the enterprise front, they are now starting to adopt cloud. So they stepping back and thinking about their overall strategy, right? And then the way that they're doing it is actually they're using data as the first trigger point. And I think that makes it easier to migrate because if you, if you look at large enterprises and if you think of the big processes that they've got and all the mainframes and everything that they need to do, if you S if you look at it as one big block, it's too difficult. But when you think about data, you can actually start to aggregate all of your data into one area and then start to analyze and unpack that. >>So I think what I'm seeing for sure is in those countries, data is the first trigger. If you go out to Israel, well that you've got all, it's really start up nation as you know, right. And then we've got more of the digital natives and they want to, you know, absorb all of the innovation that we're throwing at them. And you've heard a lot here at reinvent on some of the things, whether it's digital twins or robotics, or frankly, even using 5g private network, we've just announcement. They are adopting innovation and really taking that in. So it really does differ, but I think the one big message I would leave you with is bringing industry solutions to business is critical. So rather than just talking it and technology, we've got to be able to bring some of what we've done. So for example, the Goldman Sachs financial cloud, bring that to the rest of financial services companies and the media, or if you take the work we're doing on industrials and IOT. So it's really about connecting what industry use cases with. >>What's interesting about the Goldman Dave and I were commenting. I think we coined the term, the story we wrote on Thursday last week, and then PIP was Sunday superclouds because you look at the rise of snowflake and Databricks and Goldman Sachs. You're going to start to see people building on AWS and building these super clouds because they are taking unique platform features of AWS and then sacrificing it for their needs, and then offering that as a service. So there's kind of a whole nother tier developing in the natural evolution of clouds. So the partners are on fire right now because the creativity, the market opportunities are there to be captured. So you're seeing this opportunity recognition, opportunity, capture vibe going on. And it's interesting. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that, because certainly the VCs are here in force. I did when I saw all the top Silicon valley VCs here, um, and some European VCs are all here. They're all seeing this. >>So pick up on two things you mentioned that I think absolutely spot on. We're absolutely seeing with our partners, this integration on our platform is so important. So we talk about the power of three, which is you bring a JSI partner, you bring an ISV partner, you bring AWS, you create that power of three and you take it to our customers. And it doesn't matter which industry we are. Our partner ecosystem is so rich. The Adam mentioned, we have a hundred thousand partners around the world, and then you integrate that with marketplace. Um, and the AWS marketplace just opens the world. We have about 325,000 active customers on marketplace. So sassiphy cation integration with our platform, bringing in the GSI and the NSIs. I think that's the real power to, to, to coming back to your point on transformation on the second one, the unicorns, you know, it's interesting. >>So UK France, um, Israel, Mia, I spent a lot of time, uh, recently in Dubai and you can see it happening there. Uh, Africa, Nigeria, South Africa, I mean all across those countries, you're saying huge amount of VC funding going in towards developers, towards startups to at scale-ups more and more of a, um, our startup clients, by the way, uh, are actually going IPO. You know, initially it used to be a lot of M and a and strategic acquisitions, but they have actually bigger aspirations and they're going IPO and we've seen them through from when they were seed or pre-seed all the way to now that they are unicorns. Right? So that there's just a tremendous amount happening in EMEA. Um, and we're fueling that, you know, you know, I mean, born in the cloud is easy, right? In terms of what AWS brings to the table. >>Well, I've been sacred for years. I always talked to Andy Jassy about this. Cause he's a big sports nut. When you bring like these stadiums to certain cities that rejuvenates and Amazon regions are bringing local rejuvenation around the digital economies. And what you see with the startup culture is the ecosystems around it. And Silicon valley thrives because you have all the service providers, you have all the fear of failure goes away. There's support systems. You start to see now with AWS as ecosystem, that same ecosystem support the robustness of it. So, you know, it's classic, rising tide floats all boats kind of vibe. So, I mean, we don't really have our narrative get down on this, but we're seeing this ecosystem kind of play going on. Yeah. >>And actually it's a real virtuous circle, or we call flywheel right within AWS because a startup wants to connect to an enterprise. An enterprise wants to connect to a startup, right? A lot of our ISV partners, by the way, were startups. Now they've graduated and they're like very large. So what we are, I see our role. And by the way, this is one of the other reasons I came here is I see our role to be able to be real facilitators of these ecosystems. Right. And, you know, we've got something that we kicked off in EMEA, which I'm really proud of called our EMEA startup loft accelerator. And we launched that a web summit. And the idea is to bring startups into our space virtually and physically and help them build and help them make those connections. So I think really, I really do think, and I enterprise clients are asking us all the time, right? Who do I need to involve if I'm thinking IOT, who do I need to involve if I want to do something with data. And that's what we do. Super connectors, >>John, you mentioned the, the Goldman deal. And I think it was Adam in his keynote was talking about our customers are asking us to teach them how to essentially build a Supercloud. I mean, our words. But so with your McKinsey background, I would imagine there's real opportunities there, especially as you, I hear you talk about IMIA going around to see customers. There must be a lot of, sort of non-digital businesses that are now transforming to digital. A lot of capital needs there, but maybe you could talk about sort of how you see that playing out over the next several years in your role and AWS's role in affecting that transfer. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you're right actually. And I, you know, maybe I will, from my past experience pick up on something, you know, I was in the world of industry, uh, with Schneider as an example. And, you know, we did business through the channel. Um, and a lot of our channel was not digitized. You know, you had point of sale, electrical distributors, wholesalers, et cetera. I think all of those businesses during the pandemic realized that they had to go digital and online. Right. And so they started from having one fax machine in a store. Real literally I'm not kidding nothing else to actually having to go online and be able to do click and collect and various other things. And we were able with AWS, you can spin up in minutes, right. That sort of service, right. I love the fact that you have a credit card you can get onto our cloud. >>Right. That's the whole thing. And it's about instances. John Adam talked about instances, which I think is great. How do businesses transform? And again, I think it's about unpacking the problem, right? So what we do a lot is we sit down with our customers and we actually map a migration journey with them, right? We look across their core infrastructure. We look at their SAP systems. For example, we look at what's happening in the various businesses, their e-commerce systems, that customer life cycle value management systems. I think you've got to go business by business by business use case by use case, by use case, and then help our technology enable that use case to actually digitize. And whether it's front office or back office. I think the advantages are pretty clear. It's more, I think the difficulty is not technology anymore. The difficulty is mindset, leadership, commitment, the operating model, the organizational model and skills. And so what we have to do is AWS is bringing not only our technology, but our culture of innovation and our digital innovation teams to help our clients on that journey >>Technology. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time coming on the cube. We have a couple more minutes. I do want to get into what's your agenda. Now that you're got you're in charge, got the landscape and the 20 mile stare in front of you. Cloud's booming. You got some personal passion projects. Tell us what your plans are. >>So, um, three or four things, right? Three or four, really big takeaways for me is one. I, I came here to help make sure our customers could leverage the power of the cloud. So I will not feel like my job's been done if I haven't been able to do that. So, you know, that five to 15% we talked about, we've got to go 50, 60, 70%. That that's, that's the goal, right? And why not a hundred percent at some point, right? So I think over the next few years, that's the acceleration we need to help bring in AMEA Americas already started to get there as you know, much more, and we need to drive that into me. And then eventually our APJ colleagues are going to do the same. So that's one thing. The other is we talked about partners. I really want to accelerate and expand our partner ecosystem. >>Um, we have actually a huge growth by the way, in the number of partners signing up the number of certifications they're taking, I really, really want to double down on our partners and actually do what they ask us for, which is join. Co-sell joined marketing globalization. So that's two, I think the third big thing is when you mentioned industry industry industry, we've got to bring real use cases and solutions to our customers and not only talk technology got to connect those two dots. And we have lots of examples to bring by the way. Um, and then for hire and develop the best, you know, we've got a new LP as you know, to strive to be at its best employer. I want to do that in a Mia. I want to make sure we can actually do that. We attract, we retain and we grow and we develop that. >>And the diversity has been a huge theme of this event. It's front and center in virtually every company. >>I am. I'm usually passionate about diversity. I'm proud actually that when I was back at Schneider, I launched something called the power women network. We're a network of a hundred senior women and we meet every month. I've also got a podcast out there. So if anyone's listening, it's called power. Women's speak. It is, I've done 16 over the pandemic with CEOs of women podcast, our women speak >>Or women speak oh, >>And Spotify and >>Everything else. >>And, um, you know, what I love about what we're doing is AWS on diversity and you heard Adam onstage, uh, talk to this. We've got our restock program where we really help under employed and unemployed to get a 12 week intensive course and get trained up on thought skills. And the other thing is, get it helping young girls, 12 to 15, get into stem. So lots of different things on the whole, but we need to do a lot more of course, on diversity. And I look forward to helping our clients through that as well. >>Well, we had, we had the training VP on yesterday. It's all free trainings free. >>We've got such a digital skills issue that I love that we've said 29 million people around the world, free cloud training. >>Literally the th the, the gap there between earnings with cloud certification, you can be making six figures like with cloud training. So, I mean, it's really easy. It's free. It's like, it's such a great thing. >>Have you seen the YouTube video on Charlotte Wilkins? Donald's fast food. She changed her mind. She wanted to take Korea. She now has a tech career as a result of being part of restock. Awesome. >>Oh, really appreciate. You got a lot of energy and love, love the podcast. I'm subscribing. I'm going to listen. We love doing the podcast as well. So thanks for coming on the >>Queue. Thank you so much for having me >>Good luck on anemia and your plans. Thank you. Okay. Cube. You're watching the cube, the leader in global tech coverage. We go to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier with Dave, a lot to here at re-invent physical event in person hybrid event as well. Thanks for watching.

>> Viewers of our breaking analysis series know that we've been following the developments in cybersecurity for a number of years and of course, throughout the pandemic. Focusing on the permanent shifts that we see in cyber from remote work, distributed computing and technology advancements. We've reported how the adversaries are highly capable they're well-funded and they're motivated. And how they're constantly upping their game on defenders, island hopping, stealthily living off the land, planting self forming malware at various points in the digital supply chain, offering advanced ransomware as a service of the dark web to any disreputable individual with or without a high school diploma that may have access to a server and is brazen enough to steal from their company. We've also shared this chart from Optiv many, many times, it's a taxonomy of the cybersecurity landscape, and it is meant to make your eyes bleed, ask any CSO and they'll tell you they're drowning in fragmented tooling, technical debt, and their number one challenge is lack of talent. Not that their people aren't capable, they are, but CSOs just don't have enough of them. They can't hire fast enough or they can't retain qualified people with the talent war that's going on. Or they can't train people fast enough, or they just don't have the budget. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this video exclusive with Nick Schneider, president and CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, Nick, so good to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> That's our pleasure. So Arctic Wolf networks, let's talk about the company, the problem, you heard my little narrative upfront. What are you guys all about? >> Yeah, so at its core, we're a cybersecurity technology company. You know, it's our belief that we've really pioneered the first full scale cloud native security operations platform and at its core, what we're trying to do as a business is make security operations something that's fast, easy and economical for really a company of any size and scale to implement with really two key components, one we're agnostic to the technology and the landscape of the technology that they have already implemented within their environment, and two, we can feather into really any organization, regardless of the skill set they have from a cybersecurity standpoint in house. And really the problem that we're setting out to solve, I think you illustrated well at the beginning of the show here is that it's our belief that the cybersecurity industry in a sense has failed the end user or failed the customer by throwing, you know, a myriad of different tools at them. And it's really, you know, our mission here as a company to end cyber risk. And it's our belief that through the cloud native platform that we've bought in the cybersecurity security operations cloud that we've built, that we can deliver the outcomes that have been promised over time to these customers, which at the end of the day, is really just to be safe and have their customer and have their business protected. >> So you guys are the experts. You can kind of provide a white glove service that essentially plugs in to my business. Is that right? And how easy is that to do, what do I have to do to, to set it up? How complicated is that for me, the customer? >> Yeah, so it's, it's very straightforward. We can implement our security operations platform, you know, in as short as a week and generally speaking, you know, about a month and we plug in really to the infrastructure that the customer has in place. And for some of our customers, that's very little and for some of our customers, most of our customers, that's quite a bit of technology. And the beauty of the way that we've built the platform is that we're really agnostic to that tech. So, we can take feeds from kind of any technology that are in place, that helps to augment the platform that we've built. And then we feather in kind of the technologies that we've built within the platform, into their existing infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is give the customer visibility, you know, into the tools that they have, the gaps that they might have as a result of the tools, you know, in some cases, the duplication of efforts that they have, you know, between these tools and then deliver a security outcome or a protection that maybe they haven't otherwise felt as a business. And then outside of kind of the technology platform, we add what we call our concierge security team as a layer to the deliverable that we give to the customer. And why that's important is that not all customers are created equal and with regard to the skillset that they have in house, in that that concierge security platform allows us to kind of work with a customer at any kind of, you know, point along their security journey, regardless of the in-house technology talent that they have. >> Now, so I got to ask you, our largest footprint for the cube is in the heart of Silicon Valley. We love the valley, but I also love stories of high growth companies that are outside of Silicon Valley. You guys are in the Midwest in Minnesota, it's got some Compellent DNA in there. And I remember my, so my business friends, Phil Soren, and Larry Yasmin, you know them, Phil used to tell me, Dave, this is actually an advantage for us to be in the middle of the part of the country. There's a talent war going on, which back then was a lot less than it is today, even. So how do you see that? Are there advantages to you and being in that part of the country, or does it not matter because you're so distributed around the world? >> Yeah, I mean, I would follow a similar tune to Phil, right. I, you know, obviously worked at Compellent early and, you know, historically I've worked at other Minneapolis based technology companies and the reality is there's a really strong technology ecosystem in Minneapolis. And a lot of the, of the talent, you know, is not just in sales and marketing or just on the technical side, but it's in building high growth technology companies kind of from the ground up into, you know, large scale. And now we've seen not only the fortune 500 kind of base that we have here in Minneapolis, but also a growing contingency of larger technology companies using Minneapolis as at least, you know, one of the spokes against their hub, if not the hub themselves. And clearly my pedigree in history was out of Minneapolis based tech, you know, and I've moved to other locations throughout the country, but as we started to build out, you know, Arctic Wolf and what we wanted Artic Wolf's culture to look like, and as we started to lay out the foundation for what we wanted our growth to look like, it became very clear to myself, you know, our chairman and co-founder Brian Nesmith, that Minneapolis would be a great home for us as Arctic Wolf. And then we would continue to invest in some of the locations that we have, you know, both across the country and now across the globe. >> So there are a lot of companies that are doing managed security services, but if I got it right, you guys specifically target smaller and midsize companies, is that correct? And why is that? >> Yeah, so I would say that that would be correct as of a few years ago, the dynamic has changed quite a bit. And I think it's a result of the dynamic of the market. First and foremost, we are a technology company. We have this concierge layer on top, which is really what the customers are looking for, but it's all powered by the platform. So the platform kind of allows us to do what we've done as a business, into both small organizations, which is, you know, where we probably got our start, but over the last few years, we've seen tremendous growth up market, you know, so for example, we as a business have grown, you know, over a hundred percent now for eight years in a row and now on a much larger denominator, but our upmarket business is growing at four to 500%. And I think that's a result of really two things. I think, A, customers of that size and scale have realized that cyber security and cybersecurity operations as a problem is something that's really hard to accomplish in-house regardless of your size and complexity. And then two, I think what happened over the past year, year and a half is that we saw a lot of organizations move from a centralized I.T or a centralized, you know, security function where they could all operate within an office and all operate in a centralized environment, all of a sudden becoming very disparate in their geography. And that led to a lot more interest in what we did with larger customers, because we could deploy a security operation effectively, remotely in a really short amount of time. And we could do it more effectively and economically than, than they could do on their own. And then we also solve for a component of the human aspect of what a security operation means, right. And what I mean by that is these larger organizations can take their highly skilled cybersecurity talent and focus them on the strategic initiatives within the company. Whereas a lot of the security work or risk is in kind of the day to day, right? The dieting that takes place within an organization. And that's where a lot of the breaches take place is in making sure that you're actually paying attention to, you know, the alerts that you're getting and paying attention to the telemetry and the tools that you've made investments in. And we augment that portion of a cybersecurity operation really, really well for larger organizations and for smaller organizations, we are that security operation. So it's kind of dependent on the way in which they're set up. >> Okay. So it's a mix of both well augmenting, and basically you take the whole thing and so, so your ideal customer profile, your ICP is anybody with a security problem. I mean, that's everybody, well, maybe you could describe paint a picture of your perfect customer, if you would. >> Yeah, so, and you, I know you said that somewhat jokingly, but it, but it is true. We have customers of all sizes, you know, so I, I bet our smallest customer is under 10 employees. Our largest customer is over 50,000 employees. We have customers in every vertical of the market, you know, mostly centralized in healthcare, financial organizations, manufacturing, but, you know, the largest swath of customers by industry would probably not top 10%. So, we service really any account that's looking to develop and invest in a security operation and has the support of their organization and the support of their board and their leadership teams to make that investment. And then where we, where we fall within the account is really dependent on the way in which their current operation is set up. And certainly, you know, the massive organizations that have, you know, 50 people within their cybersecurity team, and they have a hundred different tools. They're probably not the best target for us, but if they have security awareness, if they have a security as a top need or a top priority within their business, and they're looking for a way to build out a true security operation within their account, whether that be wholesale through a third-party or in part through a third-party, we're a perfect fit for all those accounts, which makes our addressable market massive. >> Yeah, so what's unique about you guys, I mean, this may be not the right analogy, but you're kind of like the easy button for cyber. I mean, there's nothing easy about cyber., I get that, but you, you do make it easy, especially for companies that don't have any cyber expertise to engage and get up to speed fast, and certainly be more protected. That's one aspect of your uniqueness. The other is, I think, is your tech stack. I'm hearing, you've got a platform. I know you're focused on network detection and fast response. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's unique about Arctic Wolf. >> Yeah, so the platform itself is really what we founded the company on. So we spent the first few years of our organization in really building out this cloud scale, multitenant cloud, native platform, understanding that the volume of data and the amount of sophistication that we would need to deliver the security operation in the long run was going to be massive. So the platforms really kind of, you know, set on a few different founding principles. One, the platform needs to work for any organization regardless of their size, regardless of their underlying tech and regardless of the skill set within their account. And that's really important. A lot of the tools in the market today require certain things of the, of the customer. And it's our premise, regardless of the customer that we won't require anything from the customers themselves. It's up to them to tell us which portions of the experience they want to own, verse Artic Wolf owning. The second would be that we need to be able to ingest a vast amount of data, and we need to be able to make intelligent decisions with that data, in a short amount of time. And as we've built out our machine learning and our AR algorithms, what we've been able to do is leverage a tool set that allows us to ingest. I think we're up to now 1.5 approaching 2 trillion observations a week, right. Which might equate to a few hundred alerts within our SOC on a per customer basis. But we're only bringing one or two things to a customer on a weekly basis that really need attention. And that's all about the platform kind of curating, cultivating the vast amount of data that we've brought into it. And then, how do we explain and how do we sell that platform with this concierge later into the customer base is also important. And we've done that through what we call modules. So we kind of founded the company on MDR managed detection and response, but we are not a managed detection and response company. It's one of our modules. We've then added manage risk, which competes kind of in the vulnerability management space. We've added a SAS and IAS monitoring, which is really cloud security. We've added what we call log search, which is really our first foray into collaboration. And then we just recently launched a quarter ago, what we call managed security awareness training, which is, you know, training the human aspect of the company on the threats of cybersecurity. And we actually just announced another acquisition in the managed security space today with habituate, which is going to give us, you know, kind of a Hollywood style approach to content within managed awareness training. But tying all those together is very unique in the market. So generally speaking, you'll see a company focused on a specific attack surface, or a specific threat. And what we're trying to say is, look, you're not a hundred percent protected as a business, or you don't have a robust security operation unless you're bringing together all aspects of cybersecurity under one umbrella. And that's really our goal as a company. >> Okay. So you got all these different modules and you may not want to go here cause you're in the cyber business and you're, you're prudently secretive, but, but I'm interested in kind of what's underneath. I presume you're using best of breed tooling underneath, but unlike, you know, the hosting company of the past or those, you know, a big, you know, integrator who could do this, but they've got one of everything and it's sort of, kind of a mess. You're building a scalable business, but you're not, you're not developing, you know, best of breed, identity access products for the marketplace. You're I presume you're buying those in integrating them and working through whatever APIs and making it all work across your stack. Can you talk a little bit about your tech stack? >> Yeah, so the technology stack has been built from the ground up by Arctic Wolf. So certainly we're using, you know, various technologies or open source technologies from within the ecosystem, but the technology and the platform itself is Arctic Wolf. So we're not beholden to any third parties for what we deliver to the customer. And that makes us very nimble in a few areas. One, it makes us very nimble in the way that we price the solution to the customer, which for us is a very predictable model. And then two, it allows us to be nimble with customer needs as to what they want from us, both of the existing modules that we have, but also additional modules or, you know, additional solutions that we might bring to the market. So a lot of vendors that have historically kind of lived within the MDR space and certainly vendors that have lived in the managed, you know, the MSSP or MSP space, which we are certainly not, they're generally leveraging third-party technologies. They're generally buying and implementing or white labeling third-party technologies. And then they're layering kind of a services component on top. And we are not doing that. We've built the technology ourselves and don't get me wrong. That was a massive investment in both time and resources. But I think in the end, what it'll allow us to do is be very nimble with the market and most importantly, be very nimble with the customer's requirements and requests. >> Right. Okay. So let's talk about your market opportunity. I mean, the cyberspace, I mean, I got it well over a hundred billion, I don't know, maybe it's 110, 120 billion. That's kind of your tan, you may be not serving that entire market today. Although you said you started in small and mid-size, you're targeting now your enterprise, your higher end businesses growing, you talked about, I think you said a hundred percent growth, like eight quarters in a row. And so there's no shortage of opportunity for you. How do you think about your total available market? Maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's been eight years of a hundred percent growth. >> Eight years, not eight quarter, I apologize. >> It's been going really well for us. And it's a reflection on the market itself and the approach we're taking. So in our view, security operations is really the opportunity to unify all these disparate markets in cybersecurity. And, when I walk into a customer account, if I had to use two words to describe how they're feeling, one would be confused, the other would be frustrated. Sometimes they're both. Sometimes they're only one, but generally speaking, one of those two words comes out of their mouth. And the reason for it is at the end of the day, they just want to be protected. They want the outcome. And all of these disparate markets are promising the same outcome, but they're just promising it on the endpoint or just on the network or just in cloud or just an IOT or just an OT, or just in fill in the blank. And it's our view that it's our opportunity as a company to really fill that void for the customer, which is to unify all of these different technologies and spaces into one security operation. And sometimes that means that we're delivering our own end point. And sometimes that means that we're leveraging an end point or an end point solution that the customer has in house. And we're ingesting that data into our platform and we're making sense of it to the end user. But when you put that market together, you know, it's a hundred, I think Gartner's recent numbers there are 150 plus billion dollar market. And in 2021, I think it's growing at, you know, 12 to 15%. And it's our view that we can service the majority of that market, you know, I think on a conservative measure, you know, 90 to a hundred billion is the, is the Tam that we're addressing. And we're now starting to go, not only scaling out from the number of products for the markets that we service, and you can see that through managed security awareness training, but also the geographies we service, the segments of the market we service, specialization within verticals. And, for us, that is the opportunity at the end here. >> I wonder if you could help us squint through some of the data you hear in the industry, some of the trends you see in the press, certainly this came up in the, in the solar winds hack. We were seeing, I mentioned upfront, the adversaries are very capable. They're able to get in, live off the land, live stealthily, they're island hopping into the supply chain. You know, oftentimes you don't know, more than often, you don't know they're there, I've heard stats like, and we look at the solar winds hack, we saw that it was, you know, 300 days or over a year that they were inside the company. And you've heard, you know, average statistics from, you know, whatever that it's hundreds of days are those, are you able to compress those? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of where you see your customers and how you're helping them, you know, respond? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day, you know, cybersecurity, the industry is really about limiting the volume of incidents within a customer account and then limiting the impact. And what you're talking about is the impact. And the impact as these threat actors have become, you know, more sophisticated is larger as they're in the environment for a longer period of time. So the faster you can get to an attack or the faster you can detect an attack, the better off you'll be as a business. And that is the core of what we do as a company. And, and certainly, you know, managed detection response or MDR, our first offering was all about that. It's all about detecting early and responding early to a threat so that you can get anything that has gotten through your perimeter defenses out of your systems, as fast as humanly possible. And then we feathered in, you know, manage risk, which is more about the front end. So how do we make sure that we have everything configured properly? How do we make sure that we, you know, fill any holes that are in the current environment so that we don't even get to a point where we have to manage the time with which an attack has had to live within your environment? So, it's all about kind of those two things, reduce the frequency and reduce the impact. And we're, we're focused on both, both the, kind of the proactive measures, which would be more on the front end and then the reactive measures, which is what do you do and how can you act as quickly as possible within your environment to ensure that, you know, they're not getting into the crown jewels of the business. >> We've seen lately where the, the attackers have. I mean, it's really insidious, right Nick, they, they will exfiltrate, they'll get in they'll exfiltrate stealthily and they'll be ready to attack from a ransomware standpoint. And then they, you know, maybe they're hitting the bank and they're scouring to see what the Chief Information Officer is going to invest in. And they're actually making trades ahead of that. They're making more money, you know, snooping than from the ransomware. And then when the company realizes and they respond, then they get them in a headlock and say, okay, now, now that you're going to stop us from making all this money through exfiltration, we're going to hit you with ransomware. So it's just, it's a really awful situation. So my point being that, or we've said, organizations have to be stealthy in their response. Have you seen that as a trend? Am I overstating that? >> No, no. I mean, customers are, you know, good news, bad news customers are very aware of the threats in particular ransomware, data exfiltration and all the other trends in the market. And I think they become more sophisticated in the way in which they respond. And I think as a result, we've seen both changes in the way customers kind of set up their environment technologically, but we've also seen a pretty dramatic shift recently with the way in which they view insurance and the way in which, you know, carriers, view insurance, and how that plays a role in, you know, cybersecurity in their cybersecurity operation. And for a lot of customers, I think recent trends are that the carriers are struggling to, you know, make money on their cyber books. And the reason for that is because they need to make sure that the customer's environment is truly secure, or they're kind of flying blind on what their book looks like. And we've started to see that both on the end-user side, we've seen that through the carriers themselves, and that also has played an integral role in the way in which the customer views risk. And I think that dynamics changing. And I think what the result of that will be is that customers are going to be looking more and more towards how they solve this problem by alleviating risk in-house, as opposed to transferring some of that risk to an insurance carrier or a third party. And what I hope that means for customers is that they'll have the proper investment. They'll have the proper tooling, they'll have the proper operations around how to react and how to respond in the quickest possible manner, which at the end of the day, the faster you can react to an incident, the smaller the impact will be and the smaller of a financial burden it will be. And they'll do that through vendors like Arctic Wolf, you know, tools that are best of breed within their infrastructure. And then a really well thought out plan about how to respond to anything that, that you know, happens within their environment. >> Yeah. I mean, if I'm an insurance company, I give a discount to somebody who's got an alarm in their house and they use it. Maybe I'll give a discount if they're working with a company like Arctic Wolf. >> Exactly. >> What percent, do you have a census to what percent of enterprises actually have a SOC? >> Yeah, we actually did a, some homework here and there's kind of two stats that jump out. And these are through a few different surveys through very well-known organizations in the cybersecurity market. But one is that last year, which would have been, you know, 2020, about 60% of organizations said that they suffered some semblance of a breach, 60%, you know, think about how many tools and how much money these organizations are investing in protecting their businesses. And over half are suffering some semblance of a breach. When those same customers are asked whether or not they felt like they have a security operation, over 99% answered no. >> Wow. >> Right. So they have a bunch of tools they're investing a ton of money, but at the end of the day, when asked, hey, do you feel like you have an operation that can protect your business? Their answer is no. And that's really the void we're trying to. >> And you and I both know that 60%, okay. But then the other 40%, they've been hacked. They just don't know it. So, all right. Let's wrap with the sub stats on the company. I think you've raised nearly half a million, half a billion dollars to date $500 million to date. So that's, I can infer from that some pretty lofty numbers, but where are you in funding with that kind of growth? I got to believe IPO is and you and your future. What can you tell, what metrics can you share? What can you tell us about where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a few metrics on the platform and a few metrics on the company. So the platform itself, you know, we're observing over 1.5 trillion observations a week, we have 10,000 plus sensors in the field. You know, we're ingesting coming from a, you know, Compellent infrastructure guy. You know, we're in ingesting over a petabyte and a half a data week. I would have loved to have been that sales guy in the glory days, you know, but the platforms, you know, operating at massive scale, we've grown the business eight years in a row, over a hundred percent. We've talked about that. Our subscription gross margins are very software-like. We have over 2000 customers. You know, our customers are really happy with an NPS score, you know, approaching 70, you know, over a million licensed users. So we're, we're doing very, very well as a business. And as a result, we've raised money to invest in that growth, which is to the tune of about a half a billion dollars and our path here, and we've stated this publicly now is that, you know, next summer give or take a quarter is really the timeframe that we're marching towards for an IPO. If I'm being honest, given the metrics that we have as a business, we could be a publicly traded company today, especially with the way the market's operating in the valuations of some of the businesses that have gone out. There might be some, even some pressure to do so, but we want to make sure that we are ready to go from a systems and an operation standpoint to not just be, you know, a flashing the pan awesome IPO, but a company that's really kind of the backbone of cybersecurity for years to come. >> Well, obviously a hot space. What we've been covering for a couple of years now, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, we've seen what's happened in the action in the market there. I mean, what are your comps? I mean, I know, I think dark trace is getting ready to go. I don't think they've gone yet. I know Sentinel One went out. How should we think about you? You're not an Okta or I don't think well, CrowdStrike, but you know, those are pure play product companies. How should we think about you guys? >> Yeah, I mean, companies that were on a similar trajectory as us at our size, Sentinel One's a very good example. And you can kind of look across all the core business metrics on that. And clearly those will all be public here in under a year. CrowdStrike's a great example. If you go, you know, reel back the tape to when they were, you know, our size we're right in line with them Zscaler, Okta, you know, I joke with our board and investors and our CFO, that the number of companies that we benchmark ourselves against is starting to become a very small number, given you know, our growth at the scale that we're at. >> Well, that's an awesome story, Nick. We're really excited that you could make some time to come on the Cube and we want to follow your progress. Welcome you back anytime. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me, Dave, and looking forward to continuing the conversation at some point. >> Excellent and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube and we'll see you next time.

>>Hello, and welcome to this special presentation. This is the cube on cloud startups, our special event of Amazon web services, startup showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube, and excited to be here to talk about the hottest startups around cloud cloud computing data and the future of the enterprise. We've got Rob Harris, vice president of solutions consulting for star dog. Great company, Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. So this is a showcase presentation with AWS showcase startup showcase. You guys are a fast growing startup knowledge graph. We did a video explaining kind of what we did in the cube conversation. Um, really interesting category this, uh, eight hubs cloud startups with you guys. Talk about what you got. Take a minute to explain star dog and what you got. >>Sure. Yeah, here at startup, we are really a knowledge graph platform company. So we help build a knowledge graph for our customers tying together the data inside the organization and with data on the cloud in order for them to be able to find search and understand the context and relationship of all that data within their own organization. So that's really what we try to facilitate and make successful for our customers. >>Awesome. What market are you guys targeting? What's the market opportunity. Can you explain the market space that you're building product value in and what's your focus? >>Sure. Yeah, it's, it's pretty exciting. We do a lot from an industry perspective, we target a lot, uh, life sciences or financial the services, and it just tends to be, those are the ones that are most excited and getting started with this, but we certainly have a much broader set of customers in government or in manufacturing. What we really look for is the horizontal type solution, where you have a lot of systems that you want to tie together, or you want to have that understanding of your data all within context throughout your organization. So anybody struggling with that kind of tying of your data together, whether it's on the cloud or on prem, that's what we really go after >>Disruption. Who are you disrupting as you come into the marketplace? I love Amazon so hot startups because they got an eye clean take on something, but someone usually is being impacted. Who is, who are you guys disrupting as you come into? >>Yeah, a lot of times we find we're disrupting traditional ETL, right? So centralizing of all your data into one big platform, a lot of people have gone down this path of trying to create these large repositories data lakes, data warehouses. Yeah. We try to provide the additional value on top of them by not forcing you to continue to invest in moving and centralizing all your data together, but connecting it and providing context, um, while leaving and leveraging the mid worries. >>Awesome. Cause there's a big market opportunity as data warehouses becomes modernized and horizontal control planes and cloud computing is data is the key competitive advantage. Uh, great disruption. Great opportunity. So let's talk about the business star dog. What do you guys, uh, talk about the company, uh, where the headquarters is? The, how many employees what's the business model? How do you guys make money? Yeah, >>Well, a headquarters is always a little bit tricky nowadays is we were also distributed, but officially it is in Arlington Virginia. Uh, although we are all over the globe, uh, mostly in the United States and Europe, certainly as we look at, uh, how, how do we go to market and what do we do related to that? We have a subscription-based model where we help our customers get started usually small, um, by leveraging a package that they can run either on prem or in the cloud or directly from the AWS marketplace and letting them connect to the data and then growing out as they grow within their organization, larger, more interplay enterprise wide type of installations. So that's how we kind of go after it, uh, from, from our company perspective. >>So your go to market then for the company, is it bottoms up organic growth, kind of a freemium get in there? Or is it kind of a mid, mid tier or how do you guys look at that, that entry? >>It's a great question. That's exactly right. A lot of times we do start with a freemium type of model. We do have free trials and use usability to get started very quickly without having to talk to a salesperson or without having to pay up front in order to see the value, because we want you to be able to understand the value you're going to get out of our platform right off the bat and get started. Then after you've really tried it out and you see where it could apply within your organization, we help make it enterprise. >>I have to ask you how the business model of SAS, obviously clouds. Great. Are you guys leveraging Amazon web services marketplace at all? >>We are we're on the marketplace today, um, with the, both the free trial, as well as the ability through, you know, private offers to do whole production instances. So we're really excited about being a part of the marketplace. What we found is that sometimes customers want to run on the cloud. Sometimes they want to run on prem, wherever they want to run. We want to be sure that we're there. >>Yeah. Alex, let's pull up that slide on the hybrid, uh, architecture for these guys. So I want to bring this up since you brought up the business model and you talk about hybrid. This is interesting. This gets into the business model and this is kind of transitions into kind of the technology architecture. Could you walk me through this slide, the knowledge graph and the hybrid cloud. Why is this important for you guys and why is it important for customers? >>This is great. Thank you for, uh, for pulling this up. What this is really showing is as we look toward the future, as we really look at how people are deploying knowledge, graphs, and managing their data, we see that one of the big problems they're trying to address is what about cloud, uh, data that's on the cloud would a bit dated it's on prem. Maybe it's in multiple VPCs that you have within the Amazon environment. How do you tie all this together? And we all know that moving data around between all of these zones can be expensive and time consuming and difficult. And so we've come up with an architecture that allows you to run the knowledge, graph an agent of the knowledge graph in each of these zones. And they can all talk to each other and coordinate with each other. So they can see data that exists within that zone and pass it on to the other pieces as required or as needed to minimize your kind of in and out fees. And to leverage that all that data in one, in one place >>I asked you because this comes up a lot in our coverage, um, data mobility, uh, moving data is expensive. Um, how does that impact you guys in customers? A lot of people have been looking at, Hey, you know, the economics of the cloud are phenomenal, but at some point, if you've got a lot of data, you move compute to the data or you kind of think differently, how do you guys look at that? That trend? >>Yeah, that's, that's really our key value prop is people struggle with this. As people try to figure out how do I handle this large amount of data without having to generate all this additional costs about moving it around. We really look about how do I push that compute down to the storage layers, where the data already exists. And so if you think about our product architecture and you know, we, I know we have a slide on how our product is really built and how it's pulled together. When you look at our core core architecture, we have the graph that represents that connected data, but the exciting part of our architecture, what we do differently than everyone else is by allowing you to keep the data in its existing data silos, whether it's applications or repositories documents that you already have out there, we allow you to connect to that data where it is cross zone, whether it's on prem or on the cloud. >>And by leveraging the power of start on the virtualization engine, you can connect that data and be able to represent it from one source without having to move it around. But because we also have a persistence layer that's built into our product, you can really determine where's the best home. Is it data that you're going to use a lot and thereby should be really close to where the query engine is? Or is it something where you want to federate it out and leverage that compute at that storage layer itself? That flexibility is really why our customers come to us and are excited to use, start off. >>That's awesome. Great, great stuff. Love, love. The slides. Love to look at some pictures that describe the architecture both as well as the product. I love how you got the enterprise high-grade applications and then you're integrating with other partners. I think that's a really key, uh, value. And I think if you're not integrating well in this modern era, you probably won't be surviving much longer. It's pretty much a game changer at this point when knows that a question on the technology and product. Now keeping it on this theme. What's your secret sauce. Every company's got a secret sauce. What is star dog's secret sauce? >>Our secret sauce is really how do we coordinate across all of those applications? So if you can imagine you have, you know, Oracle database or Redshift repository, and you're trying to be able to unify that data in real time across those applications. There's a lot of thought and needs to go about how to do that efficiently. You don't want to take all the database from both repositories, move them, all that data into one place and then figure it out. And so our query planner, how do we coordinate across the multiple applications is really what makes us different and special >>On the Symantec modeling that you're doing? Because I see there's a lot of data there. You got to kind of get an understanding context. Um, how do you guys look at reusability metadata on data? This has become a very key point on not just data warehouse, but it's becoming much more about addressability and discoverability in as fast as possible, low latency, uh, with intelligence, this has been a big discussion. How do you guys look at that aspect of the reusability of the data? >>Yeah, it's, it's one of the exciting parts about starting with a semantic graph and then extending into these capabilities around virtualization and reasoning and inference by starting with the semantic graph, we allow you to, you know, incrementally invest in building out your model and then being able to reuse that model as you, as you go through your implementations. Yeah. That's been a, a big failing as people have looked at the analytical movements recently is so many times people spin up a repository, they answer a particular question and they do an absolutely fine job, but then we have your next question. You have to spin up another repository, build more views, re ETL the data. And then the semantic technology is what allows you to create that common understanding and reuse it over and over and over again. And I think it's time for that to hit mainstream. You know, it's been around a while. It's something that has taken some time to get some adoption around, but now that we really have build up awareness around it and we've shelled, the technology can scale the large volumes. Uh, I think it's time to be able to leverage the value that reasonability brings. Yeah. >>One final question on the product and the technology and kind of the architecture is how do you guys connect the dots going forward as more and more edge nodes become available in the network as that architecture of hybrid that we talked earlier about becomes so complex and so connected. I mean, you could have more connectedness than ever before. Um, it's very complex networks graph theory, right? You're talking about a lot of edges and a lot of traversal it's billions and billions of edges. I mean, this is it's complicated. How do you guys create, how do you guys see that unfolding and how and why the star dog remained relevant in that configuration? >>Yeah. And the simple fact is that people need help, right? It can't be that you're going to define all those edges and connections by hand yourself through some systems or keys. It's a great way to get started, but it's not sufficient in order to really get the value out of that graph that you expect. And the ways we do that is twofold. The first bit is really an influencing or reasoning capability. Being able to look at this structure of the data, how it's composed and create connections between that data based on, you know, logical, logical rules. The second is machine learning, right? Machine learning is high. We use things like linear regression algorithms or other types of community detection algorithms in order to build more connections in the data so that you can get really unlock that value that you're looking for. When you're leveraging graph technology, >>A lot of secret sauce here, a lot of technology graph, super exciting. Let's get into the final segment around customer traction and what you guys have seen with customers. Um, what are some of the use cases that are popular and what happens if customers aren't going down this road? What are they missing out on? Um, I mean, it's the classic fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed over right. Are going out of business. I mean, that's, that's motivational at some level, but you know, there are the, do I wait and people who waited on cloud computing by the way were left behind and some never survived. So we're almost in this same dynamic with customers. At some point you got to put the toe in the water, so to speak or get going to take us through some customer examples and use cases where, >>Or this is working. Yeah. I think both of those areas are, are, uh, great ones to hit on. So when you think about what are we missing out on one of our largest customer bases really in pharmaceuticals. Yeah. And they're using this technology in order to find more connections in the data so that they can really decrease the amount of time for getting a drug to market on the research and development. They can look more at leveraging the data they've already connected using related items to be able to accelerate their investments and waiting costs them hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So there are certainly ones where being able to adopt this technology early and get value out of early, really pays off in. And they're not the only ones. That's the only, that's the only the life sciences space. But there's also the idea to use it, as you said, really about what else am I missing out on? >>And the data fabric movement, this movement around, how do I lower the cost in my organization about moving data around creating more ETL jobs, leveraging all these data assets already have that the data fabric movement is the idea of how do we really automate that? How do we accelerate that? How do we make that an easier process so that it just doesn't cost as much to manage all this data in an organization. And I've observed that more and more. We have customers coming to us, really interested in this type of use cases that relates to our technology and they are getting ahead of their competitors by really lowering their, it costs in line to focus on these higher value activities. >>Life of the customers is what for you with, with startup? Why, how do they win? What's the reason why they buy and take the freemium. And when do they convert over? Well, take me through the progression of value. When do they see something and why do they increase their sure. >>Assumption? Yeah. That, I mean, the bottom line is you want to try to get more value out of your data at a lower cost and make it easier and faster to do. And so getting started in a single use case, trying out our free version, representing your data and taking a look at what it could look like under a common model, connecting it up with our virtualization services is a great way to try out the technology and really, you know, put your toe in the water to see is this something that would be a value to organization as you see that value unlock is you really understand that you can leverage these days assets with this lower time to value, you know, days in order to unlock a whole repository and connected to another repository. That's where we love to engage with you and help show you how you can make that successful in a more production environment. >>I like about some of the things you're talking about star dog has kind of that aspirin aspect, but also a growth, um, uh, vitamin E as well, in terms of the value proposition, a lot of companies are overwhelmed with the data, but yet you have this path towards more creation of value through the knowledge graph and reasoning and other other value. When does a customer, and this is kind of comes back to the customers who are out there potentially watching prospects or future customers. When do they know they need to call you guys up? Is it because they have too many sources? Could you take me through what it, what it looks like in a prospect's environment where they would really win with start a what's it look like? What are some of the signs that they need to engage, start out? >>Yeah. The two big things that we've seen repeated in our customer base over and over again, is if you have a large number of systems out there that aren't connected, that you don't see how all the data it can be pulled together between those systems, because the different data formats or different languages or different ways that the data is created in those systems start off, can certainly help. The second is if you have a large data warehouse or a data Lake, and you don't see the value being generated out of that, because people don't understand where the data is or what context it has with other data within those repositories, both of those situations are one where we think you'd get a lot of value out of start off. And we'd love to talk to you. >>So would, so just secondly, understand this. So if you have a lot of systems that either are not connected or connected, whatever, that's great, a lot of sources sitting around, you know, whether it's spreadsheets or Oracle or >>Red shift, whatever it is, we've loved it that's right. >>Ingest as much as possible from sources >>That's right. Ingest or connect. I mean, that's really the value that we bring is you don't have to pull it all in. You can just map and leverage the data where it lives. We have customers that have petabyte repositories that just mapped that data in to start off, and we can really facilitate pulling out the value of those systems without you having to move it around again, to another request, >>Ingest, connect, and visually see value. That's right. It sounds, it sounds like a tagline, um, great stuff. So just give some examples of who's using it. What big names? Um, obviously you guys, aren't hot startup coming out of the Amazon cloud showcase. Uh, congratulations. What are some names that have worked with you guys that can give an indicator of the company that you're keeping right now in terms of, >>Yeah, I mean our largest customer by far right now, our longest customer has been NASA. Um, so they've been a really exciting user of the platform we've been really to see them leverage the platform. Schneider electric has been a long time user, uh, Bayer FINRA in the U S which is a financial services watchdog organization. These are customers that are getting a lot of value out of our platform today, and we're excited to work with them. >>Awesome, Rob, great to see you. Congratulations. Uh, take a minute to just give the plug for the commercial. How do we engage? What's the culture like, um, you guys hiring, what's the, what's the state of that? What's the state of the company. >>Yeah, no, it's a, it's a great thank you for, uh, for bringing that up where, you know, we're an exciting growing company. Um, as we really reach out more and more to connect more people's data, we find that we're always looking at more resources on building out more conductivity between the individual data sources. So more understanding on that front, as well as more, a professional services type folks to help people through the process. We've really been trying to minimize the amount of effort that you have to have in order to get started, but we know that people like a helping hands. So we're always looking for people we're always growing and we're excited to have the chance to, you know, bring this technology out beyond just the semantic group that is historically been here. >>You know, you've got a great job. Vice-president solutions consulting, essentially you're in a product role, but more like a solution architect meets products, uh, customer facing, and also product century. You're kind of the center of all the action. So what's the coolest thing you've seen, um, from a customer standpoint or an architecture or, um, a deployment or an engagement that you've been involved with. That's been kind of like, Oh, wow, that's cool. That's game. That's something new that we've been, we wouldn't have seen a few years ago. Take us through just an example, anecdotal, you don't have to share the company name or you. >>That's a great question. Um, there is a company that is working on self-driving cars and being able to leverage the knowledge graph to pull together all of the videos and material they get from the vehicles themselves, as well as static information about the sensors. Uh, that's been pretty exciting to see. I, I, I just recently purchased the festival myself. So I'm excited about the whole self-driving car world and to be able to help them participate with these companies is, is pretty exciting. Um, we, we just help one of the large drug manufacturers come to market with one of their drugs earlier than expected. You know, that's a, that's a pretty exciting feeling to know that you can really help people, um, by just connecting the data they already have and letting them leverage those resources, uh, that that really is something that we're going to be very calm >>And the bridge to the future that the customers have to cross with you is also pretty compelling. You got industrial IOT and more and more data to take a quick minute to describe what that future looks like. >>Yeah. You know, as we see more and more automation in this process, we see a couple of different really, you know, exploding areas. The first off, you know, you hit the nail on the head is data being able to bring in more edge devices, being able to really process that data on the fly and be able to help answer questions as these changes in data are occur within these sources. Um, that's certainly part of the future. And the other thing that we're really excited about is this more automatic data discovery with an organization. How can we have an agent that goes out and kind of can infer really even what your data is about in the structure of your data without a lot of input for you. And so we've been working a lot with building up these models automatically and letting you have the foundation for integrating your data, um, and just the push of a button. So we're excited about walking, Alexa, our customers in this journey as well. >>It's, it's a fun area. You talk about reasoning. That's one of the key value propositions that you guys have. You talk about AI, you talk about bots and soon it's going to be thinking machines for us. They're going to be doing all the work. >>I hope they're not too soon, but I am excited about that idea as well. I can go. I do think that, uh, you know, if you look at organizations today, it's fascinating how it's not, that the problems are different, but we're trying to automate as much of it as possible so that we can work on that, the real value clumps of our organizations. And it's not that kind of drudgery work. I started as a DBA back in my career, um, just trying to keep the database up and running, you know, nowadays, you know, all these autonomous databases and self indexing, and self-correcting, it's just not a passive lead as much anymore. You know, we hope we can bring that to the data infrastructure automation. >>It's a double-edged sword gun, right. It's amazing, done wrong. It could cause some damage and flipped some, some pain and hurt. And so you got to figure it out, got to have the right data sets, gotta have the right software, um, and a great future. Rob Harris, congratulations for being a cannabis startup showcase here on the cube on cloud startups, uh, with AWS, uh, led partnership. Thank you for coming on and being part of this event. Thank you again. Okay. Rob Harris, vice president solutions consulting at star dog here for the coupon cloud. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah.

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the Cubes Coverage Cube Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 which is also virtual. We're not in person this year. We're doing the remote interviews. But of course, getting all the stories, of course, reinvented, full of partnerships full of news. And we've got a great segment here with Salesforce and AWS. Eileen Schneider Win, who is the senior vice president of strategic partnerships, and Maureen Lundergan, director of worldwide training and certification address. Maureen Eileen. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. And nice keynote. What's up with the partnership? Give us a quick over your lien. What's what's the Salesforce? A day was partnership. Take a minute to explain it. >>Sure, thank you. I think I'll start out by talking about how sales were thinks about strategic partnerships. So for us, it's really it starts with the customer and being where they want us to be. And we've been so fortunate to be in this relationship with AWS for over five years now. It really started out as an infrastructure based partnership as we were seeing customers start their digital transformation journeys and moved to the cloud. But what has been really exciting as we've spent more time working together and working with our customers, we have now started to move into emotion of really bringing some differentiated solutions between the number one CRM and the most broadly adopted cloud platform to market for customers, uh, in areas like productivity, security and training and certification which will talk more about in a bit Onda. Specifically, some of those solutions are service Cloud Voice Product, which we launched this summer, announced last fall, a dream force as well as our private connect product which creates great security between the AWS platform and Salesforce. >>What? Some of the impact area is actually the two clouds you mentioned CRM and Amazon. We're seeing data obviously being a part of the equation ai machine learning. Um, what's been the impact I lean to your customer specifically >>Yeah, so specifically I'd call out to areas what one is really that foundation of security. Specifically, as government regulations and data security has become more critical, we've really been able to partner together there and and that's been crucial for certain customers in certain regions as well a certain industries like government. Uh, in addition, I would call out again that service cloud voice partnership, a zoo. We see the world moving more digital. This really allows customers to go quickly and, uh, turn on. There are solutions from anywhere at any time. >>You know, I love that any time, anywhere kind of philosophy. Now more than ever. With the pandemic collaborations required more than ever, and some people are used to it. You know, I've seen more technical developers have used to working at home, but not everyone else. The workforce still needs to get the job done. So this idea of collaboration, what is the impact in for your customers and how are you guys helping them? Because I think this is a big theme of this year That's gonna not only carry over, even when the pandemics over this idea of anywhere is all about collaboration. >>Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the exciting thing about the partnership is we've been talking digital transformation with customers for years, but I think what we saw at the beginning of this year, as we were all thrown home and forced Thio, you know, fire up our jobs from our bedrooms or our garages. It really came down to our ability to work quickly and turn on our solutions. It's and these unprecedented times, while we're going through this now, everything we're building really is the future. So it's not just the tools and technology, it's also the processes and how work is getting done that's really come into play. But again, I'll anchor back to that service blood voice solution. So for us, call centers were completely disrupted. You think of call centers and you know, pre 2020 everyone sitting in a room together, agent side by side managers, having the ability to pop over and assist with a call or managing escalation. Now that's been completely disrupted. And it's been very exciting for us to work with our customers, to reimagine what that looks like again both from a technology perspective but also from a process perspective. And along with that, you had to reimagine how employees are learning these solutions and being trained. So we're very grateful for the partnership with AWS, and we're doing some really amazing things together. >>You know this is one of my favorite things about the enablement of Cloud. But in Salesforce has been a pioneer. As you pointed out, this connectedness feature has always been there. Now more than ever, it's highlighted with call centers, not the call center more. It's the connected center. People are connecting. And I think, Maureen, I think last time you're in the Cube. A few years ago, we were talking about virtual training online, and that was pre pet pandemic. Now you're seeing surge of online training not only because people's jobs are changing and being displaced or even shut down. New roles are emerging, right? So the virtual space Virtual world digital world, there's everyone's getting more digital faster now. How has the cove in 19 changed the landscape for training and skills demand? From your perspective, I >>mean at AWS, we've been working on our virtual capabilities for a while, so we had a digital platform out. We had a great partnership, have a great partnership with Salesforce and putting content on trailhead. We had to pivot very rapidly to virtual instructor led training and also our certifications right. We were lucky that our vendors partnered with us rapidly to pivot certification toe proctor environment. And this actually has helped to expand our ability to deliver the both training and certification in locations that we may not have been able to do before. And we have seen while it slowed. Initially, we have seen such an uptake and training over the last, um, 6 to 8 months. It's been incredible. We've been working with our customers. We've been working with our partnerships like Salesforce. We've been pushing more content out. I think customers and partners air really looking for how toe upscale their employees, uh, in a in a way, that is easy for them. And so it's actually been a great surprise to see the adoption of all of our curriculum over the last couple months. >>Well, congratulations knows a lot more work to do. It's gonna get more engaging, more virtual, more rich media. But this idea of connecting lean I wanna get back to the your your thoughts earlier, um, mentioned trailhead. Maury mentioned trailhead. You guys were doing some work with the virtual training there. What? Can you tell us more about that? And how that's going so far? >>Sounds great. So trailhead is our free online learning platform. And it really started because we have a commitment to democratizing anyone's ability to enter our industry s so you could go there and both online or with our trail head go app and experience what we call trails, which our paths for learning again on different areas of knowledge and skills and technology. And late last year, we announced an incredible partnership with AWS, where we're bringing the AWS learning content and certification to trailhead. And this is really again driven by our customers to are asking us to do our part in bringing mawr of these skilled resource is into the ecosystem. But something I also wanna highlight is I feel like this moment that we're in right now has also forced everyone to reimagine how they're doing learning even businesses, how they're training their employees and again having this free platform. And the partnership with AWS has really helped us go very quickly and create a lot of impact with customers. >>I just want to say I love the trailhead metaphor because, you know, learnings nonlinear. It's asynchronous. You've got digital. So you want to take a shortcut? You gotta know the maps And I think that's, you know, people wanna learn versus the linear, you know, tracks on. And I think that's how people have been learning online. And AWS has got a data driven strategy. Marine, I want to get your take on this because as you bring content on the trailhead, can you talk about how that works? And how you working with Railhead? >>Yeah. I mean, we started conversations a couple of years ago, and I think the interesting thing is that Salesforce and AWS have a very similar philosophy about bringing education to anybody who wants it. You'll hear me talk a lot about that in my leadership talk at reinvent, but, um, we really believe that we wanna provide content where learners learn and salesforce and trailhead have this amazing captured audience. And, um, you know, we're really looking at exploring. How do we bring education to people that might not otherwise have access to it? On DSO, we started with really foundational level content, a ws Cloud, Practitioner Essentials and AWS Cloud for technical professionals. And the interesting thing is, both of those courses have been consumed. ITT's not enough to just put it out there you want people to complete the trails and we've seen such an amazing uptake on the courses with, like 85% completion rate on one of the trails and 95% completion rate on the other one. And to keep customers engage is really a credit toe. How trailhead is designed. >>You know, it's interesting. The certification people don't lose sight of the fact that that's kind of the in the end state. Then you start a new trail. I mean, this >>is >>the this is really what it's all about. Can you just share some observations that you've seen for people that are coming into this now to say, Hey, okay, what do I expect? And what are some of the outcomes? >>Yeah, I mean, first, what we're seeing is our customers are being very clear that they need more of these skills. So we're also seeing the need for Salesforce administrators out in our ecosystem. And I think with everything going on this year, it's also an opportunity for people who are looking to pivot. Their careers were moving to tech and again, this free learning platform and the content that we're bringing has been really powerful and again for us. The need for salesforce administrators and cloud practitioners out in our ecosystem are in more demand than ever. >>Maureen. From your perspective on AWS, you see a lot of the new new jobs cybersecurity, Brazilian openings. Where do you see the most needs on for training and certification? Can you highlight some of the areas that are emerging and trending, if you will? >>I would say it's interesting because what we're seeing is is both ends of the spectrum. People that are really trying to just really understand who cloud is, whether it's, ah, business leader within an organization, a finance person, a marketing person. So cloud practitioner, you know, we're seeing huge adoption and consumption on both our platform in on Salesforce. But also some other areas are security and machine learning machine learning. We have five learning paths on our digital platform. We've also extended that content out to other platforms and the consumption rate is significant. And so, you know, I think we're seeing, uh, customers consume that. But the other thing that we're doing is we're really focused on looking at who doesn't have access to education and making sure that's available. So I think the large adoption of Cloud Practitioner in Practitioner is is largely due to the other things that we're doing with programs like Restart our academic programs >>to close it out, Alina want to get your thoughts and final thoughts on the relationship and how people can find more information about this partnership and what it means. Take, take it home. >>Thank you for asking. So just like everything else we've been talking about today, we've had to reimagine how we're showing up at this event together and very exciting thing that my team has created is the AWS Virtual Park. And anyone can access that at salesforce dot com slash aws. So please go check it out. You can experience our products here from our experts and experience its innovation on your own. >>Great insight. Thanks for coming on and participating. Really appreciate Salesforce and AWS two big winning leading clouds working together Trail had great great offering. Thanks for coming on sharing the news. Appreciate >>it. Thank you. >>It's the Cube virtual covering. It was reinvent virtual. Of course. Check out all the information here All three weeks. Walter Wall coverage. I'm John Fury with the Cube. Thanks for watching

>>Data is at the heart of transformation and the change. Every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for thought leaders. >>Welcome to thought leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Volante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. >>And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my cohosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer, the ThoughtSpot is Cindy Hausen. Cindy is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of successful business intelligence unlock the value of BI and big data. Cindy was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindy. Great to see you welcome to the show. Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO, sedition air. Hello. Sudheesh how are you doing today? I am validating. It's good to talk to you again. That's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here now Sateesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. >>Thanks, Dave. >>I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Um, look, since we have all been, you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up know sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time. Then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. >>And number three, has we planned through this? You know, we are living through these difficult times. You want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because teens can, as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like through the VA. I think of it changes sort of like if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, uh, you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, most businesses, it is somewhat scary. >>Change becomes all the more difficult, ultimately change requires courage, courage. To first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they've may feel that I'm, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about, you know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. >>So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force. Sometimes it could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessarily the group of people that we are brought in. The four people, including Cindy, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope, that you will be safe. And you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. >>So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Ternopil Chernobyl. What went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, no, we're perfect. Hide it. Don't dare tell anyone which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands, getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. >>So I'll talk about culture and technology. Isn't really two sides of the same coin, real world impacts. And then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, you know, Cindy, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other. What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on premises, data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise, nice data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. >>And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and it or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse, the collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. >>It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. None of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still proud of that ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and double monetized, not just for people, how are users or analysts, but really at the of impact what we like to call the new decision makers or really the front line workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. >>Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor, 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology. How did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. >>And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody's hard coding of report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. >>You use to be able to create an investment place. A bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier the data science, tier data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So thoughts about was the first to market with search and AI driven insights, competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. >>They re require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate the pace of change. It's acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gardner it score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data driven. As Michelle spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. >>And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, Hey, we're not doing good cross selling customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage. >>They opened fake accounts, basing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker spinal implant diabetes, you know, this brand and at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the us federal government said, well, you can't turn them off. >>He said, we'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, you know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it with them and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics, officer chief, digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that. Oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of just eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, national Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. >>So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is with them, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor, okay. We could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your seventies or eighties for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is with them. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change. Management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data driven insights. >>The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead to the year ahead and exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture. That's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Masa, Pharaoh, chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. >>Very happy to be here and, uh, looking forward to, uh, to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, uh, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how did it connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across, uh, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. >>And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our, that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to being, you gone to Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find an answer ThoughtSpot for us, it's the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. >>Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action needed to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place on top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our Elequil environments. And as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So the portion of us though, is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the, the, the it teams together to really hit the drive, these holistic end to end solution, the capabilities to really support the actual business into the future. >>That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, as upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that, uh, that become crucial as you move forward, right, uh, into this, uh, into this new age, especially with COVID with COVID now taking place across the world, right? >>Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers. And these, these very difficult times as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those, those capabilities. And those solutions forward as we go through this journey, uh, boasted both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change has only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what our customers want, what our customers need and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. >>This is all around becoming a more data driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data, to actually better support your customers and to support your business there's important, your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when he talked to get large dividends from his investments into the future. But that being said, uh, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data driven organization. And I'm looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you, >>Tom. That was great. Thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent. You've come in this rusted. And how long have you been at Western union? >>Uh, well in nine months. So just, uh, just started this year, but, uh, there'd be some great opportunities and great changes and we were a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >>Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent most recently, Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs. Gustavo. Welcome. >>So hi everyone. My name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindy, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is a high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment transformations and I have less many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. >>And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening, society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the Koresh. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about Nadina afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes in your swimming upstream. >>But what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, eh, you know, workforce? So the bigger, good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication. So my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seeing politically speaking, what are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. >>And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindy has mentioned, these topic about culture is sexually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and he wants about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation in set us state, eh, deadline to say, Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. Why do we need to do, to empower and enable this change engines to make it happen? >>You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through. As I think the transformations most recently, as Cindy mentioned in Schneider, there are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time. And here is how having successful while working the past is not going to work. Now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a, in a way that is super fast, the second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? >>We went on implementation and a lot of the way the it team function. So the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prison of the prior auth success criteria for the traditional BIS. And that's not going to work again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as this experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. >>We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest. And these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by your organization. >>Maturity is going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work. When you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do a hundred things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a hundred dollars. >>But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flow data by using this assumption that Florida is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to a hundred dollars. This just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CSRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really close in the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see this snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and, and, and love modeling and, you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff. >>That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. >>They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data driven culture, that's where you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, it, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tablo to other tools like, you know, you need to really explain them. >>What is the difference in how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools? Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindy's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership in shape the culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest, but I meant analytics. >>And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, our safe user experience and adoption. So for our safe or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption, 80% in just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%, really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from it, legal communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, eh, basically stakeholders in this whole process. >>So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You hire a change agent, you need to have the courage to make this decision and understand that. I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it says to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody wants to believe in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know, workforce or customers that in community better, as you can tell, there is a lot of effort. >>There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. We, the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just, I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, what would mentors, where we, people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort bodies, well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well. And it's been a pleasure talking to you. Take care. Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. >>I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage employees on the front lines. And of course the data, as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward. So let's get right into, so Gustavo, let's start with you. If, if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a, I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >>I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's club, Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, different certain transformations that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do. So I can help to inform the functions organizations and do the change management decision of mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. A thank you for that, that is inspiring. And, and Sydney, you love data. And the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspective to this conversation. >>Yeah. So Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible, >>Great perspectives. Thank you, Tom. I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans. We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last 12 months, really, uh, even in celebration, right? Once, once COBIT hit, uh, we really saw that, uh, that, uh, in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers. And today that, uh, been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, uh, friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, uh, we, you know, we we're, we are, uh, very, uh, honored to get to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. >>So as part of that, uh, we, we did do some, uh, some the pivots and we did, uh, a solo rate, some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in there to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those, those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, uh, really our part that our services come into play that, you know, we really support those families. So it was really a, a, a, a, a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. Awesome. Thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom. I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in, in doing things with, with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was, it was, it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >>Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform. And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know, the varying points or making repetitive business cases onto people, connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, Hey, the CEO is making a one two year, you know, efficiency goal. >>The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo. We need to find a way to accelerate it's information. That's the way, how, how about Utah? We were talking earlier was sedation Cindy, about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? Yeah. You know, I think you hit upon, uh, right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team. This is that you need to be, need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically, uh, scale, right, expand and support that the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening. >>Right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at what, uh, how you're operating today and your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align and to drive the actual transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that is what we're putting in place here, right. Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindy, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >>Yeah. Well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago. I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, um, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, um, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know, what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are gonna happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not, do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish gonna go on to junk >>Guys. Fantastic discussion, really, thanks again, to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service is sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament, tremendous results. Know what does that mean? Getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. >>And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. So these please bring us home. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. The cube team, and thanks. Thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. >>Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to make the positive change that you want to see happen when you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk, Cindy talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force and apply that force, make sure your ideas are we start with talking about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone, sometimes building the importance of building the Koran. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it, Tom, instead of a single take away. >>What I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years sold 200 companies, 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle stock. And the last thing is these go to topspot.com/beyond our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year, we, we have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. You'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas or engineers. All of those things will be available for you at hotspot beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

>>so, everyone. My name is Gustavo Canton. And thank you so much, Cindy, for the intro, as you mentioned doing transformations, Uh, it's ah, you know, high for Harry word situation. I have in power many transformations and I have let many transformations, And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future. But if you have ah, North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be evolved to evolve. And so in today, I'm gonna be talking about culture and data, and I'm gonna break this down in four areas. How do we get started? A barriers or opportunities, as I see it, the value of a I And also, how do you communicate? Especially now in the workforce off today, with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes, And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that I mean you need to understand the only what is happening in your function or your field. But you have to be very into what is happening. Society, socioeconomically speaking well being, you know, the common example is a good example, and for me personally is an opportunity, because the number one core value that I have is well being. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow well being should be at the center off every decision >>and, as somebody mentioned, is great to be, you know, staying tuned and have to excuse it and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest toe have this courage. It's not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes in your swimming upstream. But what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think, empathy is a huge component because every time I go into organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make >>change for the bigger you know, workforce. So the bigger, good >>despite the fact that this might have, perhaps implications of my own self interest in my career, right, because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices. There are no well saying, politically speaking, what are the right thing to do, >>and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen studies in the past. And what they show is that if you look at the forming barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget inability to act cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindy has mentioned, this topic about culture is actually getting getting more and more traction. And in 2018 there was a study from HBR, and it was about 45%. I believe today is about 55%. 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to be focusing on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives >>who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and said a stay deadline to say, Hey, in two years, we're gonna make this happen. What do we need to do to empower and enable descent engines to make it happen? You need to make the tough choice. And so to me, when I speak about being bald, it's about making the right choices now. So I'll give examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through a side in the transformations, most recently a sin dimension, each neither. There are three main areas legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time, and here is how we have been successful. We'll work in the past is not gonna work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a detail mindset, and they're open coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these telling, including young talent. >>We cannot be thinking in the past and just way for people you know, 3 to 5 years for them to develop because the world is going >>toe in a way that is super fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation off a I. It is very interesting to me because just example that I have with gospel, right, we went on implementation and a lot of the way is the team functions of the leaders. Look at technology. They look at it from the prison, off the prior off success criteria for the traditional, the ice. And that's not gonna work again. The opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success looks like. In my case. I want the user experience off for work force. To be the same as user experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes and technology to enable that and finally and obviously with covet, ah, lot of pressuring organizations and companies toe, you know, do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize cause. Sometimes in cut budget, we have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest in growth areas. But do it by business. Question. Don't do it by function if you actually invest and these kind of solutions if you actually invest on developing, you're telling your leadership to Seymour digitally. If you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's Actually this investment is gonna upset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard. But it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the weather. You might wanna work. So there is a lot of opportunity there just to put interest of perspective. They have in some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data and obviously this is gonna vary by organization. Maturity is gonna is gonna be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean good data to work with, and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch, so it all depends on your maturity level. But in this told him what I think it's interesting is they try to put attack line or attack price to what is the cause off? Incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit for work when you have data that is flawed as supposed to have in perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective. Just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something is going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project maybe $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flow data by using this assumption that flow data is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total cost now becomes $280 supposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CEO CEO, you know C h r o C E o. Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have former their infrastructure? If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to >>see this noble effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell, the price that goes up very, very quickly. So now if I were to to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various Right? I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics, obviously, and a love modeling and, you know, data and optimization here and >>all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics. But now, as a leader in a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was a spackling call, three of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team waas actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how they're connected to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the the right leaders because you need toe, you know, focus on the leaders that you're gonna make the most progress. You know, again. >>No effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make a super simple for the, You know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams in other areas so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars obviously under the guise of having a data driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, he waas about three years total transformation. But it waas two years for this component. Off augmented Alex. It took about two years to talk to, You know, I t get leadership, support, banking, budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure this is sex criteria was correct. And we call this initiative people hundreds. I porta. It was actually launched in July of this year, and we were very excited, and the audience was very excited to do this in this case, we did or pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers, but One thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know you're going from excel, you know, in some cases or tableau to others just like you know, those. But you need to really explain them. What is the difference and how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, tableau. I think it's a really good to. There are other many tools that you might have in your took it. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need tohave one portal going back to see this point that really, truly enabled the >>end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and >>I will tell you why, because he took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage. And like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lady foundation, get the leadership and chasing cultures. So people can understand why you truly need to invest fundamental politics. And so what I'm showing here is an example off. How do we use basically, you know at all to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have? So in this case or preliminary results, based on our ambition for three main metrics our safe user experience and adoption. So for our safe or ambition was to have 10 hours to be for employees safe on average, user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption, 80% in >>just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours. Can we? Per employee >>savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 50% really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to this stage from I t Legal communications. Obviously the operations things and the users, uh, in HR safety in other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So, just to summarize, this kind of effort takes ah lot off energy. You are a change, >>agent, you need to have a courage to make the decision and understand that I feel that in this day and age, with all this destruction happening, we don't have a choice. We have to >>take the risk, right. And in this case, I feel a lot off satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization and acting me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it says to say thank you for everybody who has believed obviously in our vision, everybody who has believed in, you know, the world that we were trying to do and to make the life off are, you know, workforce or customers and community. Better as you can tell, there is a lot off effort. There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just I just wanna tell for you If you are going right now, in a moment that you feel that you have to seem upstream. You know what With mentors. What with people in this in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kindof transformation is not easy to do is high effort, but it is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you activism tega.

>> Voice Over: Data is at the heart of transformation, and the change every company needs to succeed. But it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you, it's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. (soft upbeat music) >> Welcome to Thought.Leaders a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot, my name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers, and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not, ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics, by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology but leadership, a mindset and a culture, that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action? And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights, and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, chief data strategy officer of the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson, Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience, and the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics Magic Quadrant. In early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CEOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you Dave, nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I'm well, good to talk to you again. >> That's great to see you, thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course to our audience, and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with, invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one, that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time, we want to make sure that we value your time, then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people, that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know we are living through these difficult times we want this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents, because teens and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, changes sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping, and it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step today. Change requires a lot of courage, and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation most businesses, it is somewhat scary, change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage, courage to first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs, sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills, sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract, they know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap, this sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun, you will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump, all four of them are exceptional, but my owner is to introduce Michelle. And she's our first speaker, Michelle I am very happy after watching our presentation and reading your bio that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool parents, because she will beat all of us. Because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL, what a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen this slides, a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it, I'm very thrilled to make that client so far, Michelle, I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one, and I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights data, and of course as you said, leadership. First a little bit about myself, a little background as I said, I always wanted to play football, and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child, but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines, and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football, I grew up in the South, you can tell from the accent and in the South is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the Athletic Department, so I'm testament to you can start the journey can be long it took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football you know, this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided, so it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands. Delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team, that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes, doing just that, assembling teams to execute these plans, and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels, is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data, so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world-class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney, in the 90s I was at Disney, leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project, it was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, just these magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around, and it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team, asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems, all of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems, and so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT, and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s I was at Universal Studios Theme Park as their CIO, preparing for and launching the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wine shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data, actually enabling your business without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform, and collaboration with video message and phone, all in one solution in the cloud. And Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at quotient is the result in knowing. I think that's really important, because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data. But we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about, as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change, how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company, and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate, and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it, and thankfully for the most part knock on wood we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved, all the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others, were suddenly called to the forefront. Because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 Draft. We went from planning, a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee dress jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable, because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky but it ended up being Oh, so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at this level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact, those with the best stats, usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats, since the beginning of time, here at the NFL a little this year as our 100 and first year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us, is both how much more we can measure, and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business, it's the same, the amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it, is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level, it's powered by Amazon Web Services, and we gathered this data real time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast, and of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns speed, matchups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that we'll gather more and more information about player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies or small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way, and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course, that is no longer just small teams the next big wave of change, and we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%, we made a decision, we implemented it, we were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it, and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture, our attractions and entertainment was licensed, our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top down decision making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to coexist. I mean the NFL is a great example of what we call coopertition, which is cooperation and competition. When in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough, you must be able to turn it to insights, partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data, and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave, and drive, don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive, driving can be high risk but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen, is how you become brave, get more and more comfortable with uncertainty be calm and let data be your map on your journey, thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data, and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback, I'm more an old wine person. (Michelle laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great, and I'm getting the feeling now you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My boat is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> You'll watch, okay, so Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices, you have the players, you have the owners you have the league, as you mentioned to the broadcasters your, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread ties them all together you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work, and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL, and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known, and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it, is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So I thank you for your metership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (soft upbeat music) >> So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl, Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone," which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure the additional thousands getting cancer, and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with, and this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard, I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, isn't really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology, and recently a CDO said to me, "You know Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other, what do you think?" Let me walk you through this, so let's take a laggard. What is the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports, at best one enterprise data warehouse very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to. Or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency and sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy, it's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded, let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI-driven insights not on-premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data lake, and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust, there is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, oh, well, I didn't invent that, I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized, knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision makers. Or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? They've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools, the sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this, these are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises, and state of the art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual based data discovery vendors, disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics, at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI-driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses, and I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights, and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot I'll just show you what this looks like, instead of somebody's hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom getting to a visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard, because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years, and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI-driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift or Azure Synapse or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. The pace of change, it's acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI, and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven, as Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources. It's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes, and often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar, and in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is, as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is, and let's take an example of where you can have great data but if you don't have the right culture there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, that said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts, facing billions in fines, change in leadership, that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying that culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world, they may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes you know, this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients, they took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available, that is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization, looking at late payments of their customers, and even though the US federal government said "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIIFM, and organize for collaboration. So the CDO whatever your title is, chief analytics officer chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear, that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat takeout food delivery organization, coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt, it's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus, I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL they want to perform better, and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services this may be a wealth management advisor, okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true whether it's putting their children through college, or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers, you asked them about data, they'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better that is WIIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review Study, found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI Competency Center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model, centralized for economies of scale, that could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future, within every business unit, every functional domain, and as you see this top bar, all models are possible but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy lock in the customer loyalty, and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders, and next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent Thomas Mazzaferro, chief data officer of Western Union, and before joining Western Union, Tom made his mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (soft upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable, different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that, as part of that partnership, and it's how we've looked to integrated into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to Bing, or go to Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company, to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right? Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that action needed, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our (indistinct) environments, and as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So big portion of us though is culture, so how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked, and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does is be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward right into this new age, especially with COVID, with COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating, and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities, and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what our customers want, what do our customers need, and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services, to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines. But how do you actually use your information your data, to actually better support your customers better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon, thank you. >> Tom, that was great, thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second, as a change agent you've come in disrupted, and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, I just started this year, but there'd be some great opportunities and big changes, and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams, and our colleagues to support those customers forward. >> Tom, thank you so much that was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric, but even going back to Sam's Club, Gustavo welcome. (soft upbeat music) >> So hi everyone my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much Cindi for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is a you know, high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment in transformation and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today, is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is, you have to start for you, yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing, you know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and your swimming upstream. But what gives me the courage is the empathy part, like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business, and what the leaders are trying to do, what I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, you know workforce so the bigger good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication, so my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices, that are not well seeing politically speaking what are the right thing to do, and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past, and what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers, that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add, cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, this topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction, and in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was for about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand, and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set us deadline to say, "Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen, what do we need to do to empower and enable these search engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through, as I think the intro information most recently as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset, and what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time, and here is how we have been successful. We're working the past is not going to work now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset, and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people you know, three to five years for them to develop, because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me, because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went to an implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions, so the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like, in my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as your experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept, and so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools, and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with COVID a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less, and the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize cost sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite, we have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function, if you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership, to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform is not just an incremental cost, it's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there, and you just to put it into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by organization, maturity there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with, and I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study what I think is interesting is, they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is a cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work, when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flow data, by using this assumption that flow data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100, this just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CSRO, CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our infrastructure? If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff, that's what I can do analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value, and in this case, for example for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value, you need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution, and finally you need to make it super simple for the you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers, but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know in some cases or Tableau to other tools like you know, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them, what is the difference, and how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool, there are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally I feel that you need to have one portal going back to seeing these points that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to these stations. Like I said it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership and chasing culture, so people can understand why you truly need to invest what I meant analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average, user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot we were able to achieve five hours, per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five, and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications obviously the operations things and the users, in HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy, you are a change agent, you need to have a courage to make these decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization, and that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done, and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me it safe to say, thank you for everybody who has believed obviously in our vision, everybody who has believed in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know workforce or customers that are in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream you know, what would mentors what people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you, talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (soft upbeat music) >> I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners, and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community, and one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top, why? Because it directs the middle, and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard, is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations, and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that, and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. That was rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID's broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent, and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club Walmart retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is and that's what I tried to do is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations that make me, you know stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions organizations, and do these change management and decisions mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. >> Thank you for that is inspiring and Cindi, you love data, and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation. >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice, I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment. But why I think diversity matters more now than ever before, and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority, you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible >> Great perspectives thank you, Tom, I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually you know, in a digital business over the last 12 months really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers and today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, you know, we are very honored to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that celebration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did celebrate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in, and to support our customers going forward. Because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time, and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And in doing that, it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really are part of that our services come into play that, you know, I really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level, and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much and doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you pushing your people too hard, can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way, so to me it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster. But make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know debating points or making repetitive business cases onto people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal, the only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate transformation... >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier was Sudheesh had said about that bungee jumping moment, what can you share? >> Yeah you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right? That's what I tell my team is that you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support that the ever changing needs the marketplace and industry and our customers today and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for, and the competition the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as we look at what how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align, to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So as part of that, so we're putting in place here, right? Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> We're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now, but knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy how would you say that advice has changed, has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago, I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable, and now I think it's, you know what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud, have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's Sudheesh going to go on bungee jumping? (all chuckling) >> That's fantastic discussion really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before lip service. And sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today, is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you Dave, thank you theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it, she said it really well, that is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along, that is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen. But you wait for someone else to do it, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard and if it requires some force then apply that force, make sure your ideas are good. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the courtroom. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom instead of a single take away, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in, and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to thoughtspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond, our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere, we are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we would have been up to since the last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing, you'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas for engineers I've been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond, thank you, thank you so much.

(speaks in foreign language) >> Narrator: Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent, and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. >> Welcome to Thought Leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis, and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today, we're going to hear from experienced leaders, who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital-first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, Chief Data Strategy Officer for ThoughtSpot is Cindi Hausen. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of Successful Business Intelligence Unlock The Value of BI and Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair. Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I am well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today? (gentle music) >> Thanks, Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our, you know, sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting way more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time, and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, and generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know, we are living through these difficult times, we want an event to be, this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is, how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, change is sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping. You know, it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step. You know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, in most businesses it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to to, first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, "You know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the skills." Sometimes they may feel that, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, there are people in the company, who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is this silo of people with the answers and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap. These sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all I know the business needs, and the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is. You may need to bring some external stimuli to start that domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we have brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading her bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patents, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, you know, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age, where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides with a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle. I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle. It's over to you. (gentle music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. This is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So, I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights, data and of course, as you said, leadership. First, a little bit about myself, a little background. As I said, I always wanted to play football and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent and in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the athletic department, so I'm testament. Till you can start, a journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football, you know this is a really big rivalry, and when you choose sides your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight. From Universal Studios, Disney, to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job, I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with a team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often, I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests or customers. But today, I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment, is execution. Precise, repeatable execution and most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that. Assembling teams to execute these plans and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions, at the right time and based upon data. So that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves, and it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kind of world class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney. In '90s I was at Disney leading a project called Destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool and then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today. Like the MagicBand, Disney's Magical Express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data, more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately, leading to moving into IT and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s, I was at Universal Studio's theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wand shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything, from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contact tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data actually enabling your business. Without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First, RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone, all-in-one solution in the cloud and Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is The Result in Knowing. I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First, just hit on it, is change. how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First, let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it. And thankfully, for the most part, knock on wood, we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, The 2020 Draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage, to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately, to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements and we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time, being in the live broadcast event space. Talking about bungee jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky, but it ended up being also rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at its level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact. Those with the best stats usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats. Since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little... This year is our 101st year and athlete's ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured and I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently. And how fast do you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to the next level. It's powered by Amazon Web Services and we gather this data, real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course, it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns, speed, match-ups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about, for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know, more than 10 years ago agile practices began sweeping companies. Where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change and we've seen it through this pandemic, is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties, so influence and collaboration, and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL an even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses, 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies, that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-oppetition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units, who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with, first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an a line person. >> Well, then I can't do my job without you. >> Great and I'm getting the feeling now, you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take him to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> Oh that sounds good, I'll watch your watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders, when you're trying to prioritize the different voices you have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there are so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission and if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together. You sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known and when anything challenges that, we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent and that means listening to every single stakeholder. Even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic, and having a mission, and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling, so thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. >> (gentle music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, "This is going to be catastrophic," and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again. This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with and this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, is it really two sides of the same coin? Real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "You know, Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin, one reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting, largely parametrized reports, on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports. At best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change, complacency. And sometimes that complacency, it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, "No, we're measured on least to serve." So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm, so data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with the leader, a data and analytics leader, what does their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI driven insights, not on-premises but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place but it's in a data lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or Teams, allowing for that real-time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals. Whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers, it's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, "Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that." There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact, what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard Business Review partnered with us to develop this study to say, "Just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years, why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor." 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises and state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state-of-the-art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics. At ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics, and this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point, oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately. But you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lock-step with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non-analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years. Now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization but I would also say, equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful, if you look at products like Power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse, or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in-memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter-operate. The pace of change, its acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture and if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT Score that I worked on or the Data Warehousing Institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders. You have told me now culture is absolutely so important, and so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data. It said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross-selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture and they're trying to fix this, but even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples. Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers and even though the U.S. Federal Government said, "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, They said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions. Bring in a change agent, identify the relevance or I like to call it WIIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Digital Officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe you have the CDO of Just Eat, a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in, disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM What's In It For Me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So, if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers you ask them about data. They'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIIFM and sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then embed these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next, I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro Chief Data Officer of Western Union and before joining Western Union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (gentle music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and the technology teams into the future? As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms, and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that. As part of that partnership and it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at, how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go onto Bing or you go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us is the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone, or an engineer to go pull information or pull data. We actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that they actually need it, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on a journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, our... The local environments and as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and to GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So a big portion of it though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together, to really help to drive these holistic end-to-end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what decisions need to be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization and as part of that, it really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, Especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both in my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes, both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what do our customers want, what do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform, and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support your current business lines, but how do you actually use your information and your data to actually better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth. And really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom, that was great. Thanks so much and now going to have to drag on you for a second. As a change agent you've come in, disrupted and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but there have been some great opportunities to integrate changes and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now, I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric but even going back to Sam's Clubs. Gustavo, welcome. (gentle music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is, you know, a high reward situation. I have been part of many transformations and I have led many transformations. And, what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so, in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started, barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI and also, how you communicate. Especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so, how do we get started? So, I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand, not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very in tune what is happening in society socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example and for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. But I do it thinking about the mission of, how do I make change for the bigger workforce or the bigger good despite the fact that this might have perhaps implication for my own self interest in my career. Right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seen, politically speaking, but are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think we're they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is, I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past and what they show is that, if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act, cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a deadline to say, "Hey, in two years we're going to make this happen. What do we need to do, to empower and enable these change agents to make it happen? You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So, I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I've been doing transformations, most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset and what that means is that, we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful. What worked in the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders, who have a digital mindset and they're up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going in a way that is super-fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI. It's very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went on implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions or the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, the opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same user experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept and so we need to think about, how do we gain that user experience with these augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes, and technology to enable that. And finally and obviously with COVID, a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest on growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent and your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard but it's not efficient and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there and just to put in terms of perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously, this is going to vary by organization maturity, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level. But in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or a tag price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to having perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flawed data. By using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CHRO, CEO, "Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure?" If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is, I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously and love modeling, and, you know, data and optimization theory, and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value and in this case, for example, for Schneider. There was this tagline, make the most of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the right leaders because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress, you know. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make it super-simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal. It was actually launched in July of this year and we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many, many factors but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know. You're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tableu to other tools like, you know, ThoughtSpot. You need to really explain them what is the difference and how this tool can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit but in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal. Going back to Cindi's points, that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage and like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, initiating culture so people can understand, why you truly need to invest on augmented analytics. And so, what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know, a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics. Hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week for employee to save on average. User experience, our ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings, a user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations things and the users. In HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize, this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent, you need to have courage to make this decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these great resource for this organization and that give me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it's just to say, thank you for everybody who has belief, obviously in our vision, everybody who has belief in, you know, the work that we were trying to do and to make the life of our, you know, workforce or customers and community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, work with mentors, work with people in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of transformation. It's not easy to do, it's high effort, but it's well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon. Take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (light music) Now I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. Now one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations. And you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. Now as as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID has broken everything and it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you. If I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader, what do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long-lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I said, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I've been doing it for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing of the areas across not only a specific business. As you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club, Walmart retail. I've been in energy management, technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to just continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do, is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations, that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions, organizations, and do the change management, the essential mindset that's required for this kind of effort. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring and Cindi you love data and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can, you know, add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine and it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking, is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data, and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are, finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important and as Michelle said, more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom, I want to go to you. So, I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses is in some way, shape, or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth, actually, in our digital business over the last 12 months really, even acceleration, right, once COVID hit. We really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers in today, that there's been a huge need, right, to send money to support family, to support friends, and to support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very honored to be able to support those customers that, across all the centers today, but as part of the acceleration, we need to make sure that we have the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because during these times, during this pandemic, right, this is the most important time and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And doing that some of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really our products and our services come into play that, you know, and really support those families. So, it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo. Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that it was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you're pushing your people too hard? Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, "Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right, it forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension or you need to be okay, you know, debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand and you are seeing that, "Hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal. The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We can not just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about Utah, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? >> Yeah, you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, this is what I tell my team, is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. Meaning that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan and to align and to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So it's part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right? It's how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which was pre-COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, not my watch or for whatever, variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that, you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well first off, Tom, just freaked me out. What do you mean, this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable and now I think it's, you know what, you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So, if you really want to survive, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable. The power and politics are going to happen, break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where Sudheesh is going to go bungee jumping. (all chuckling) >> Guys, fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really, virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things. Whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise-wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service. You know, sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament results. You know, what does that mean? Getting it right. Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization, data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. Thank you, theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I heard from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it, she said it really well. That is be brave and drive, don't go for a drive alone. That is such an important point. Often times, you know the right thing that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen, but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding, the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voice is heard and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes. The importance of building the quorum, and that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time in a matter of months. If they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway, that is I would like you to go to ThoughtSpot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to ThoughtSpot.com/beyond. Our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us, it's, again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we have been working to release, something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond. Thank you, thank you so much.

>> Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for Thought leaders. >> Welcome to "Thought Leaders" a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer at the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of "Successful Business Intelligence "Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data." Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello, Sudheesh how are you doing today? >> I'm well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks, Dave. I wish you were there to introduce me into every room and that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. Makes me feel all so good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, we are living through these difficult times. We want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like to do. The way I think of it sort of like a, if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation in most businesses, it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to first of all challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. There are people in the company who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping, for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading our bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patterns, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney. She was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom? I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides, tons of amazing pictures. I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle and looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. And I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking, our digital revolution using insights data. And of course, as you said, leadership, first a little bit about myself, a little background, as I said, I always wanted to play football. And this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child. But when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent. And in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn university working in the athletic department. So I'm Testament to you can start the journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little. He played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SCC football, you know this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL. He just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise, repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that assembling teams to execute these plans. And the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world casts experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next-generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute a little bit first about Disney in the 90s, I was at Disney leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up, but way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, Disney's magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT. And I haven't looked back since. In the early two thousands, I was at universal studios theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wan selects you at a wan shop. As today at the NFL? I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events with this year being the most challenging yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data, talk about data, actually enabling your business without it w wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone all in one solution in the cloud and Quotient technologies whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is the result in knowing I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how do you use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company? Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate. And finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it and thankfully for the most part, knock on what we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches GM's prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee jumping. This is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary. It was certainly very risky, but it ended up being all so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at it's level. Highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field. You can see points being scored in stats, and you immediately know that impact those with the best stats usually when the games. The NFL has always recorded stats since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little this year is our 101 year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys, to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level. It's powered by Amazon web services. And we gathered this data real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize route patterns, speed match-ups, et cetera. So much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive, and innovative way. And it proved to be transformational. However, today, of course, that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change. And we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture, but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you've got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem, we have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses. 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-op petition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be. Data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask it's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program. It's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, tank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an old line person. (Michelle and Cindi laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great. And I'm getting the feeling now, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware water gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices. You have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with, aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together, you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work. And I think that's very important. So for us, at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose, is so well known and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic. And I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder, even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So, thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (upbeat music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, "no, we're perfect, hide it. "Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology. Is it really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "Cindi, I actually think this is two sides "of the same coin. "One reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parametrized reports, on premises data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized. And democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. Everyone said that if our 87% said, they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality, only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture in technology. How did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first-generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual-based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale datasets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding, a report it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You use to be able to create an investment place a bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. the pace of change, its acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the money surety model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle, I spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people and the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for Thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven it's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, "hey, we're not doing good cross selling, "customers do not have both a checking account "and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the U.S federal government said, "well, you can't turn them off. They said, "we'll extend that even beyond "the mandated guidelines." And facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, they said, you know what? "We will spend the time up skilling our people, "giving them the time to learn more "about the future of work, the skills and data "and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics officer, chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIFM. What is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state-of-the-art. Now for the biggest impact what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JPMorgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As you look across, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive and over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future, that includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot, to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go on to Bing we go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find and answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability it's allowed us to actually, enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end-users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action need it to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, or our Eloqua environments. And as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So they portion of us though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities to really support the actual business into the future? That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon, industries based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are accelerating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times, as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what do our customers want? What do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data to actually put a better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from this investments into the future. But that being said, hope you enjoy the segment on how to become and how to drive it data driven organization. And, looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom that was great thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent you've come in disrupted and how long have you been at Western union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but, doing some great opportunities and great changes. And we have a lot more to go, but, we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent, most recently with Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs, Gustavo welcome. (upbeat music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is high effort, high reward situation. I have empowered many transformations and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be varying into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking wellbeing. The common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the one core value that I have is well-being, I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes when you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, workforce? for the bigger good. Despite this fact that this might have a perhaps implication on my own self-interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that I know we'll see in politically speaking, what are the right thing to do? And you have to push through it. And you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topics culture is actually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a state, deadline to say, "hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. "What do we need to do to empower and enable "this change engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I think transformation most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful what was working the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and there're up and coming leaders that are not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talent, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right, we went to implementation and a lot of the way is the IT team function of the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior all success criteria for the traditional Bi's. And that's not going to work. Again the opportunity here is that you need to really find what successful look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as user experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain the user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations, and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs, sometimes in cut budget, we have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have studies in the past about, how do we kind of measure the impact of data. And obviously this is going to vary by your organization maturity, is going to, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put attack line or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flawed data by using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This is just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CHRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell the price that goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and data and optimization theory and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline called free up your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the, the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, in this case, I was working with the HR teams in other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused in looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to IT get leadership support, find the budgeting, get everybody on board, make sure the safe criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you're going from Excel, in some cases or Tableau to other tools like, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them what is the difference and how these tools can truly replace, some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindi's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, and shaping culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest on (indistinct) analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, a tool to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved user experience and adoption. So for hours saved or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience, or ambition was 4.5. And adoption, 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. Our user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent. You need to have a courage to make the decision and understand that I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very source for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody who has believe in the word that we were trying to do and to make the life of four workforce or customers or in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort. There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. With the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream what would mentors, what would people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort, but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (air whooshing) >> Okay, now we're going to go into the panel and bring Cindi, Michelle, Tom, and Gustavo back and have an open discussion. And I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision-making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines. And of course the data. And as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. The old saying, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Well COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, how to move forward. So let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know I come from, Sam's club Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, businesses, and transformation that make me stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do so I can help transform the functions organizations and do the change management, change of mindset required for these kinds of efforts. >> Michelle, you're at the intersection of tech and sports and what a great combination, but they're both typically male oriented fields. I mean, we've talked a little bit about how that's changing, but two questions. Tell us how you found your voice and talk about why diversity matters so much more than ever now. >> No, I found my voice really as a young girl, and I think I had such amazing support from men in my life. And I think the support and sponsorship as well as sort of mentorship along the way, I've had amazing male mentors who have helped me understand that my voice is just as important as anyone else's. I mean, I have often heard, and I think it's been written about that a woman has to believe they'll 100% master topic before they'll talk about it where a man can feel much less mastery and go on and on. So I was that way as well. And I learned just by watching and being open, to have my voice. And honestly at times demand a seat at the table, which can be very uncomfortable. And you really do need those types of, support networks within an organization. And diversity of course is important and it has always been. But I think if anything, we're seeing in this country right now is that diversity among all types of categories is front and center. And we're realizing that we don't all think alike. We've always known this, but we're now talking about things that we never really talked about before. And we can't let this moment go unchecked and on, and not change how we operate. So having diverse voices within your company and in the field of tech and sports, I am often the first and only I'm was the first, CIO at the NFL, the first female senior executive. It was fun to be the first, but it's also, very challenging. And my responsibility is to just make sure that, I don't leave anyone behind and make sure that I leave it good for the next generation. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring. And Cindi, you love data and the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last, 12 months, really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers, today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, friends and support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very, honored to get to support those customers that we, across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, really our part of that our services come into play that we really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, hey, how fast you would like transform. And, based on the agreements from the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right. It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, "hey, the CEO is making a one two year, efficiency goal. "The only way for us to really do more with less "is for us to continue this path. "We cannot just stay with the status quo. "We need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi, about that bungee jumping moment. What could you share? >> Yeah, I think you hit upon it, right now, the pace of change with the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right, expand and support that the ever-changing needs in the marketplace and industry our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, as you look at what, how you're operating today in your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into a line into drive the agile transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right, is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. They're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know what you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish going to go bungee jumping. >> Guys fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the Cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just, as I said before, lip service. Sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, the Cube team, and thank goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Oftentimes, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I've picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the quorum. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in. And they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we've have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at the Thought Spot Beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. >>I path Hi. Welcome back to this special R p A drill down with support from you. I path You're watching The Cube. My name is Dave Volante and Bobby CMO. You know I passed Bobby. Good to see you again. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, Dave. It's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the Cube and even in the virtual format, this is really exciting. >>So, you know, last year at forward, we talked about the possibility of a downturn. Now nobody expected this kind of downturn. But we talked about that. Automation was likely something that was going to stay strong even in the downturn. We were thinking about potential recession or an economic downturn. Stock market dropped, but nothing like this. How are you guys holding up in this posted 19 pandemic? What are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah, we certainly we're not thinking of a black swan or rhino or whatever we call this, but, you know, it's been a pretty crazy couple of months for everybody. You know, when When this first started, we were like everybody else. Not sure how it impact our business. The interesting thing has been that you're in code. It actually brought a reality check through. A lot of companies and organizations realize that it's very few tools to respond quickly, right? Bond with, you know, cost pressures that we're urgent or preserving revenue, perhaps, or responding to Ah, strange resource is, you know, in all centers, or or built to support. You know, the surge in in, um, in the healthcare community. And so r p a became one of those tools that quickly waas knowledge and adopted. And so we went out two months ago to go find those 1st 1st use cases. Talk about him, then. You know, 1st 30 days we had 50 in production, right? Companies, you know, great organizations like Cleveland Clinic, right? You know where they use their parking lot? Give the first tests the swab tests, right of, uh, well, who have proven right? You know, they had a line of 88 hours by, you know, putting a robot in place in two days. They got that line down by 80 or 90% right? It is a huge hit as we see that kind of a kind of benefit all across right now in the world. Right now we have. We were featured in The Wall Street Journal recently with nurses and a large hospital system in Ireland called Matter. The nurses said in the interview that, you know they have. They were able to free up time to be a patient's right, which is what they're there for, anyway, thanks to robots during this during this emergency. So I think you know, it's it's definitely raise The awareness that that this technology is provides an amazing time to value, and that's it's pretty unprecedented in the world of B two B software. >>I want to share some data with you in our community is the first time we've we've shown this. Guys would bring up the data slide, and so this is ah, chart that e. T are produced. There's enterprise technology research. They go out of reporter. They survey CIOs and I T practitioners and a survey in different segments and the use of methodology Net score. And this is sort of how method how Net scores derived. And so what this chart shows is the percent of customers that responded there were about 125 You I path customers that responded. Are you adopting new U I path? Are you increasing spending in 2020? Are you planning on flat spending or decreasing spending? Are you replacing the platform of beacons? And so basically, we take the green, uh, subtract the read from the green, and that gives us net score. But the point is that Bobby abouts about 80% of your customers are planning to spend Maurin 2020 than they spent in 2019 and only about 6% of planning on spending less, which is fairly astounding. I mean, we've been reporting on this for a while in the heat nous in the in the automation market generally and specifically. But are you seeing this in the marketplace? And maybe you could talk about why? >>Well, we just finished our first fiscal quarter into the end of April, and we're still privately held, so we can be, uh, find some insights of our company, but yeah, the the pace of our business picked up actually in in the mark. April timeframe. Um, customer adoption, large customer adoption. Um, the number of new new companies and new logos were at a record high. And, you know, we're entering into this quarter now, and we have some 20 plus $1,000,000 deals that are like that. It closed, right? I mean, that's probably a 30% increase Versus what? How many we have today alone. Right? So our business, you know, is is now well over 400 million and air are we ended last year, 3 60 and the growth rate continues fast. I think you know what's interesting is that the pace of the recode world was already fast, right? The the luxury of time has kind of disappeared. And so people are thinking about, you know, they don't have they can't wait now, months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and days and days and weeks. And and that's where our technology really comes into play. Right? And and and it actually is also coming to play well in the world of the remote workforce. Reality two of the ability for remote workers to get trained while they're home on automation to build automation pipelines to to build automation. Now, with our latest release, you can download our podcast, capture and report what you're doing, and it basically generates the process definition document and the sample files, which allow for faster implementation by our center of excellence. So what's really happening here? We see it is a sense of urgency coming out of this. Prices are coming down the curve. Hopefully, now this is of urgency that our customers are facing in terms of how they respond, you know, and respond digitally to helping their business out. And it varies a lot by industry, our state and local business was really thinking was not going to be the biggest laggard of any industry picked up in a significant way in the last couple of months, New York State, with Governor Cuomo, became a big customer of ours. There's a quote from L. A County, see Iot that I've got here. They just employed us. It's public, this quote, he said. Deputy CIO said Price is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things they're coming out of this crisis situation. He's referring to our P A is being a lesson. They learned hearing this, that they're going to carry forward. And so we see this state of Oklahoma became a customer and others. So I think that's that's what we're seeing kind of a broad based. It's worldwide. >>You're really organizations can't put it off anymore. I think you're right. It sort of brought forward the future into the present. Now you mentioned 360 million last year. We had forecast 350 million was pretty good for you guys released, so it's happy about that. But so obviously still a strong trajectory. You know, it might have been higher without without covert. We'll never know, but sort of underscores the strength of the space. Um, and February you guys, there was an article that so you're essentially Theo Dan, Daniel Hernandez was quoted. Is that on hold now? Are you guys still sort of thinking about pressing forward or too early to say right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I think the reality is we have a very, very strong business. We've raised, you know, significant money from great investors, some of which are the leading VCs in the world. and also that the public company investors and, you know, we have, ah, aggressive plan. We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyper automation to continue. The growth path is now becoming the center of companies of I, T and Digital Strategies, not on the side. Right. And so to do that, you know, we're gonna want capital to help fuel our our our ambitions and fuel Our ability to serve our customers and public markets is probably a very, very logical one. As Daniel mentioned in a in a A recent, uh, he's on Bloomberg that he definitely sees. That is ah, maybe accelerating that, You know, we're late Last year, we started focusing on sustainable growth as a company and operational regular. These are important things in addition to having strong growth that, you know, a long term company has to have in place. And I can tell you, um, I'm really excited about the fact that we, you know, we operate very much like a public company. Now, internally, we you know, we do draft earnings releases that aren't public yet, and we do mock earnings, earnings calls, and we have hired Thomas Hansen is runs our chief revenue officer with storage backgrounds. And so you're gonna interview as well. These are these are these are the best of the best, right? That joint, they're joined this company, they're joining alongside the arm Kalonzo the world that are part of this company. And so I think, Yeah, I think it's an AR It's likely. And and it's gonna We're here to be a long term leader in this decade of automation. >>Well, and one of the other things that we forecast on our breaking analysis we took a look at the total available market kind of like into it. Early days of service Now is you know, people were really not fully understanding the market and chillin C it is is quite large, so video. So when we look at the competition, you know, you guys, if I showed you the same wheel with automation anywhere, it would also look strong. You know, some of the others, maybe not a strong but still stronger than many of the segments. I mean, for instance, you know, on Prem hardware. You know, compared with that and you know the automation space in general across the board is very, very strong. So I wonder if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys differentiate from the competition. How you see that? >>Yeah, I think you know, we've We've come a long way in the last three years, right? In terms of becoming the market leader, having the highest market share, we're very open and transparent about our numbers with We've long had the vision of a robot. Every person, uh, and and we've been delivering on that on on that vision and ah, building out a platform that helps companies, you know, transform digitally enterprise wide. Right. So, you know, I don't see any of our competitors with a platform for hyper automation like this. We have an incredible focus on the ability to help people actually find the ideas, build the pipeline, score the pipelines and integrate those with the automation center of excellence. Right? We have the ability now with our latest release to help test automation testers now not only in the world of art A but actually take robotic robots and and architecture into doing test automation. The traditional test automation market in a much better and faster way So you know, we're innovating at a pace that that it is, I think, much faster than I don't. I don't know automation anywhere. I won't share any their numbers. You know, who knows what the numbers are. We have guesses, but I'm fairly certain that we continue to gain share on them. But you know, what's most important is customer adoption, and we've also seen a number of customers switch from some of our competitors to us. Our competitors are undercapitalized and middle. Invest in R and D. This is an investment area, really build a platform out from our competitors have architectures that are hard to upgrade, right? This has been a big source of pain for companies that have been on our competitors. Where upgrades are difficult requires them to retest every time where our upgrades are very rolling, you know, are very smooth. We have an insider program which you know, I don't think any of our competitors have. If you go inside that you had pat that your customer every single bit every single review betting, private preview, public preview and general availability, you can provide feedback on and the customers can score up new ideas. They drive our our roadmap. Right. And this is I think we operate differently. I think our growth is a is a good indication of that. And, you know, and there are new competitors like Microsoft. But I think you know, you know, medium or long term, you know, they're gonna make effort around our, um and you know, they're behind the, um, automation is really hard. The buried entry here is not it's not. Not easy. And we're going to keep me on that platform, play out, and I think that's ah, that's what makes us so different. Um and ah, you know, we have the renewal numbers, retention numbers, expansion numbers and and the revenue numbers to improve that, uh, you know, we're number one. >>Well, so I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, and you're right. You guys are really focused, you know, you automation anywhere really focused on this space, and you shared with us how you differentiate there. But as you point out Microsoft, they sort of added on I had talked to Allan, preferably the day from paga. You know, those guys don't position themselves as our PC, but they have r p A. I talked to, you know, our mutual friend Robert Young John the other day, right? They're piling onto this this trend, right? So why not? Right, It's it's ah, it's hot. But so, you know, clearly you guys are innovating there. I want to talk about your vision before we get into the latest product release two things that I would call out the term hyper automation with, I think is the Gartner term. And then it will probably stick. And then this this idea of a robot for every person How would you describe your vision? >>Yeah, I mean, we think that robots can and improve, you know, the the lives of of or pers everywhere, right? We think in every every function, every role. And we see that already, the job satisfaction and the people don't want to do the mundane, repetitive work, right? The new hires coming out of college, you know, they're gonna be excel and sequel server. We're no longer the tools of productivity. For them, it's it's your path. We have business. Schools that have committed top tier business schools have committed to deploying your path or to putting you're passing every force in the school these students are graduating with the right path is their most important skill going into companies. And they're gonna expect to be able to use robots within their companies in their daily lives. A swell. So, you know, we have customers today that are rolling out a robot for every person you know. We had Ah, Conoco Phillips on just earlier in our launch, talking about citizen developers, enabling says, developer armies of developers and growing enterprise wide. See, Intel was on as well from Singapore, the large telco. They're doing the exact same thing. So I think you know, I think this is this is this is this is about broad based digital transformation. Everybody participating And what happens is the leading companies to do this, you know, they're going to get the benefit of benefits out of it. It can reinvest that productivity, benefits and data science and analytics and serving customers and in, you know, and and, ah, new product ideas. And so, you know, this is this. You know, automation is going to fuel now the ability for companies to really differentiate and serve their customers better. And it's only needed enterprise wide view on it that you really maximizing. Take Amazon, for example, a great customer during during this prices. You know, they're trying to hire hundreds of thousands of people, right? Help in the fact that in their in their distribution centers elsewhere, this all served demand to help people who like you and I home or ordering things that we need, right? Well, they're use your path robots all throughout their HR hr on boarding HR recruiting HR administration And so helping them has been a big during this prices surge of robots is helping them actually hire workers. You know another example of Schneider Electric and amazing customer of ours. They're bringing their plants, their manufacturing facilities, implants back online faster by using robots to help manage the PPE personal protective equipment in the plant allow people workers to get back to work faster. Right? So what's happening is is, you know in that in those cases is your different examples of robots and different functions, right? In all cases, it's about helping grow a company faster. It's about helping protect workers. It's about helping getting revenue machines back up and running after Kobe is going to be critical to get back to work faster. So I'm I'm really excited about the fact that as people think about automation across the organization, the number of ideas and Aaron opportunities for improvement are are we're just starting to tap that potential. >>Well, this is why I think the vision is so important because you're talking about things that are transformative. Now, as you well know, one of the criticisms of RPS. So you have people, the suppliers and just yeah, we, you know, looking at mundane tasks, just automating mundane tasks like sometimes paving the cow path and say, you're very much aware of that criticism. But if I look at the recent announcements, you're really starting to build out that vision that you just talked about. They're really four takeaways. You sort of extending the core PAP platform, injecting AI end some or and more automation end to end automation really taken that full lifestyles lifecycle systems view and the last one is sort of putting it talks to the robot. For every person that sort of citizen automation, if you will, that sort of encompasses your product announcements. So it wasn't just sort of a point Announcement really is a underscores the platform. I wonder if you could just What do we need to know about you guys? Just that out. >>So we think about how we think about the rolls back to a division of robots person how automation can help different roles. And so this product launch $20 for this large scale launch that you just articulated, um, impacts in a fax and helps many different kinds of new roles Certainly process analysts now who examined processes, passes performance improvements. You know, they're a user of our process mining solution in our past. Find a solution that helps speed on our way. Arpaio engine, no testers and quality engineers. Now they can actually use studio pro and actually used test robots are brand new, and our new test manager is sort of the orchestration and management of test executions. Now they can participate in in leveraged power of robots and what they do as well. And we kind of think about that, you know, kind of across the board in our organization across the platform. They can use tools like you have path insights in Europe. If you're an analyst or your, uh ah. B I, this intelligence person really know what's going on with robots in terms of our wife for my organization and provide that up to the, you know, sea levels in the board of directors in real time. So I think that's that's the big part. Here is we're bringing, and we're helping bring in many, many different kinds of roles different kinds of people. Data scientist. You mentioned AI. Now data scientists can build a model. The models applied to ai fabric an orchestrator. It's drag and drop by our developer in studio, and now you can turn, you know, a a mundane, rules based task right into an experience based ones where a robot can help make a decision right. Based on experience and data, they can tweak and tune that model and data scientists can interact, you know, with the automation is flowing through your path. So I think that's how we think about it, right? You know, one of the great new capabilities, as well as the ability to engage line workers, dispatch out workers If you're a telco or or retail story retail store workers you know the robots can work with humans out in the field. We've got one real large manufacturer with 18,000 drivers in a DST direct store delivery scenario. And you know the ability for them to interact with robots and help them do their job in the field. Our customers better after the list data entry and data manipulation, multiple systems. So I this is this makes us very unique in our vision and in our execution. And again, I don't I have not heard of a single ah example by competitors that has any kind of a vision or articulation to be able to help a company enterprise wide and, you know, with the speed and the and the full, full vision that we have. >>Okay, so you're not worried about downturns. You can't control black swans Anyway, you're not worried about the competition. It feels like you know, you're worried about what you're worried about. You want about growing too fast. Additionally, deploying the the capital that you've raised. What worries you? >>Yeah. You know, we're paranoid or paranoid company, right? And when it comes to the market and and trying to drive, I think we've done a lot to help actually push the rock up the hill in terms of really, really driving our market, building the market, and we want to continue that right and not let up. So there's this kind of desire to never let up, right? Well, we always remind ourselves we must work harder, must work harder. We must work harder. And that's that's That's sort of this this mentality around ourselves, by the smartest people. Hire the smartest people you work with our customers, our customers are priority. Do that with really high excellence and really high sincerity that it comes through and everything that we do, you know, to build a world class operation to be, you know, Daniel DNS. When I first met him, he said, You know, I really want to be the enemy of the great news ecology company that serve customers really well. And it was amazing things for society, and and, you know, we're on that track, but we've got, you know, we're in the in the in the early innings. So, you know, making sure that we also run our business in a way that, um, you know, uh, is ready to be Ah, you know, publicly successful company on being able to raise new sources of capital to fund our ambitions and our ideas. I mean, you saw the number of announcements from our 24 release. It reminded me of an AWS re invent conference, where it's just innovation, innovation, innovation, innovation. And these are very real. They're not made up mythical announcements that some of our competitors do about launching some kind of discovery box doesn't exist, right? These are very real with real customers behind them, and and so you know, just doing that with the same level of tenacity. But being, you know, old, fast, immersed and humble, which are four core culture values along the way and not losing that Azeri grow. That's that's something we talk about maintaining that culture that's super critical to us. >>Everybody's talking about Okay, What What's gonna be permanent? Postpone it. I was just listening to Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, and she was saying that, you know, prior to Covic, they had data that showed that the top 25% of companies that have leaned into digital transformation were outperforming. You know, the balance of their peers, and I know question now that the the rest of that base really is going to be focused on automation. Automation is is really going to be one of those things that is high, high priority now and really for the next decade and beyond. So, Bobby, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and supporting us in this in this r p. A drill down. Really appreciate it, >>Dave. It's always a pleasure as always. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Alright. And thank you for watching everybody. Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching the cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(energetic electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special Cube interview here at the Schneider Electric offices in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Hervé Coureil, who is the Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. Thank you so much for having us-- >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> It's a little rainy, but that's what we can expect in Boston-- >> Don't say that. >> But, lovely view. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Great, so first of all, give us a little bit about your background. You're the Chief Digital Officer today, we love talkin' to the CDOs, you've been a CIO, you've been a CFO, and we'll definitely get into some of the organizational dynamics as to who reports to whom and who owns what and the like. >> Sure, so, you know, in the day, I started in finance, actually, I did a lot of work in M&A. After a while, we are quite a pretty large company called APC and I became the CFO, and really, working essentially on post-modular integration, right? So how do we put all those pieces together? And when you do that, you quickly realize that actually technology is on the critical path all the time, so you know, I developed quite a keen interest at that time for technology, and that's when Schneider decided, really, to change its setup, to evolve its organization with a program called One Schneider. We created the CFO position and that's where, basically, I took the helm as the CIO for Schneider Electric. And you know, over time, when digital became a thing, it was not just about, you know, how you digitize the company, it was also how you create a digital business, so that's how we created Schneider Digital and I became the CDO. So all of this sounds like super logical right now, of course it was more complicated than that. But that's a view of the whole arc of the story. >> Yeah, lots of politics, we understand, organizations, large M&As, we understand that there's challenges, things to work through. If you could, for our audience, just frame Schneider Electric. I actually, you know, disclaimer, I worked for American Power Conversion way back longer than I'd like to even admit, but you know, uninterrupted power supplies, they really helped create a market, and had some excellent technology, strong engineering background, which is what led me to that company, but Schneider Electric today, of course, much bigger than just APC, give us a little bit of a frame. >> So, Schneider Electric is a pretty large global corporation, I think we employ something like 140,000 people, so pretty large multi-billion company. We basically are in the business of energy management and industry automation, we are specialists of that. Our core value proposition is really bringing efficiency and sustainability to our customer. We do that in a number of areas, whether it's buildings, whether it's, you know, large infrastructures, data centers, factory floors, and industry all processes, but sort of a core common thread, if you will, is how you bring efficiency, sustainability to our customers. >> Great, you talked a little bit about your background as a CFO was to help with the merger. Bring us up to what is your role as a Chief Data Officer, what is the mandate you have? We're going to spend some time unpacking digital transformation. We always say the difference between a company before and after that digital transformation is, you know, data is so important, you must be data driven, you must understand it, and therefore often there is a CDO involved. So, what led to this role? And what is that specific mandate that you have? >> Sure, so, you know, I did mention just before that, you know, we had the concept of efficiency, right? We try really, we have a value prop about, you know, safety, reliability that over time evolves towards efficiency and sustainability. And in order to provide efficiency, whether it's in a building, whether it's an industry, or building a process, what needs to happen is not just with hardware, right? You need to be able to extract data from products, from systems, you need to be able to make sense of that data, to analyze it and then to act on it, right? To sort of close the loop from data to insight, insights to action, so that's where for us, the digital transformation was not just about digitizing ourselves, but it was also about augmenting the value proposition that we have for our customers, augmenting what we can offer our customer base. We offer services that could push the boundaries of, you know, efficiency and sustainability and then we're all about adding an information component, right? A data component on top of, you know, the best hardware and software. So that's sort of of the evolution and you were speaking about the mandate. So the mandate is really around four things. First is really, is of a digital business so how we create digital offers that are going to augment to complement our existing offers, making, you know, taking advantage of cloud, taking advantage of analytics, AIs, and providing, you know, predictive maintenance, providing optimization services, right? That can augment our value prop. It's also about bringing the ecosystem of partners that can really reinforce those value props for those digital affairs. So it's really first about that digital business, then it's about digitizing our sales and it's three things. It's first how we engage customers, so customers and partners who're thinking about what's our digital footprint? How we create basically a digital experience for our customers and partners that is even better than the one we're having in the physical world. Then it's about operation, so our backend systems, you know, making sure that we have a backend system that scales. And the last mandate is security. >> Okay, it's a pretty broad mandate. A lot of things going on, 140,000 people working for Schneider, not to mention you talked about your customers, your partners, all of these things. >> Hervé: Absolutely. >> You know, what's the scope of this, how many years ago did this start? Is there a phased rollout that you're looking, is there, you know, was there just a budget assigned to it? Bring us a little bit as to how this all rolls out. >> So, sure, a couple of things. I would say, so we started three years ago, really, with digital mandate. Only that started well before because actually, you know, if you're in the business of industrial automation, you haven't waited the advent of IOT to connect machines to a supervisor regulator to controls, etc. Now what happened is, of course, the power of a cloud, the power of analytics, and you could take things even further. So really three years ago was when we started thinking about Schneider Digital, and the way we thought about it is we didn't want it to be something totally on the side of the business, so it's not a separate P&L, it's not, you know, a separate organization, we're serving the businesses, we're augmenting the businesses, we're providing them with transversal capabilities, we're providing our businesses with digital services platform-level component that they can reuse, etc. So that they can go faster in addressing their customers. And it was critical for us to find that sort of appropriate distance, if you will, because you need to incubate a digital business, but at the same time, if it just happens on the side, you never augment the core. And so you kind of lose, right? The main benefit out of it. >> Yeah, it's nice that you have the background of also being a CIO. Everything that I'm hearing you talking about is what we hear from many leading companies out there, that it's, right, it's not just doing what the business asks, it's helping to often create new products or, you know, in many cases, even, you know, it's innovation helping to drive the business. I want to, you mentioned at the end of one of your last pieces, talked about security. That's something critical when you're talking about data, and in your CDO role, tell us a little bit about the security of how that's involved in this total solution. >> Sure, so far as you know, it's of course became, you know, more and more important over time. And we're really here to rethink how we're approaching security, right? Going away from this idea of defending the perimeter, moving to concepts much more like a zero trust approach because the world has changed with employees that like to work from, you know, their taxis and planes, and we had really to rethink the posture, right?, of Schneider Electric, and also how we work with customers, and we can help, how we can help our own customers improving the cybersecurity of their building or industrial operations, right? So we have, we see it as a pretty broad mandate, actually, quite end-to-end, it's not just about, you know, building thick walls, I think the times of perimeter defense are long gone, but it's really about thinking about it as a full cycle from identification to recovery and putting a risk-based approach and some, you know, continuous improvement approach into it. A lot of discipline, basically. >> All right, and Hervé, are there some partners that were important in this digital transformation? >> So overall or specific in security? >> Both, yeah. >> So yes, I mean, we have big partners, and you know, you wouldn't, you could guess, right? I mean, of course you know we are working a lot with Amazon, we're working a lot with Microsoft, we're working a lot with Salesforce, on the system integration side, you know, we work with Cap Gemini, with Accenture, so we have, of course, a bunch of yeah, of traditional partners, you know, you would expect. I mean, we try to be more and more very considerate about what we want to do ourselves and when we basically, you know, delegate some functional points to partners. And then we also created an ecosystem of partners around security and Schneider is a very partner-centric company because we actually work with through partners most of the time. So, you know, working as an ecosystem is actually something that's pretty natural to us, we just had to learn how to do it in the digital age. >> Yeah, that's great, a company of your size, right? It's not only the suppliers there, but building that ecosystem, yeah. Anything more on the security side that you want to call out, regarding that journey? >> So, you know, we've been working, we've developed a lot. I mean, we felt that security was, it takes a village, right? And the ecosystem approach was even more important, so we've been working with Zscaler on a network-level security, we've been working with IBM and Deloitte, on other areas, we've been working with Cylance as well, I mean, I wouldn't, there's a long list, right? But we've tried to build an ecosystem both at a surface level and at a solution level 'cause the problem often with security is that, you know, you can have a lot of point solutions that would solve a very narrow problem, but it's really, you know, what really makes a difference is your ability to integrate, is your ability to have a pane of glass where you can figure out correlations and then pretty quickly take action, so it's striking that balance between adding solution that would add you a new source of information, you understanding of your context with the ability to act on this information. >> Yeah, and Hervé, what lessons have you learned going through this? You talked about the balance between what you do in-house versus what you look to outside, that's a general trend we've seen in cloud for the last 10 years or more, so, you know, looking back at what you've done so far in three years, any advice that you'd give to your peers? >> Probably three things. So the first thing you mentioned is the ecosystem, right? Is that it's not us versus them, it's how you embark an ecosystem of partners and how you bring some logic in that ecosystem. So that's really key. The second thing is really scale. I think I always say that in digital, it's always super easy, you know, to come with the latest shiny object, do a proof of concept, etc. But usually, that doesn't matter. The key sauce, the secret sauce is how you scale. Often and in particular in today's world, people tend to have a misconception of scale, that this is just size. Actually, very often in, you know, in digital, scale is about replicability, it's how easy can you replicate? Which is a slightly different concept when you think about it. But thinking scale first, I mean, you know, is so critical to us. And the third point would be performance management, actually, we've spent a lot of time defining, or maybe that's my roots as a finance person a long time ago, but it's, you know, what does success mean, right? What are the metrics of success? We'll call them the true north. What true norths are we pursuing? And how do we allocate resource? Because at the end of the day, you'll only scale if you're able to allocate resource, so if you want to have a sophisticated digital organization, you need to start by having a sophisticated resource allocation process. >> Yeah, how about the outcomes? You know, what if ultimately your end user customers, what do they see out of this digital transformation? And also would love if there's any commentary on the employees, we understand, you know, getting them involved in training and the like can be challenging, but you know, ultimately, you know, how does digital impact both your external and internal customers? >> Sure, so, let me unpack that, right? In terms of true north or outcomes, the key thing we look at first is how we create the digital business, on how much are we creating adoption, right? With our customers. So we really track, you know, how many new things we and our ecosystem, how much more value are we creating to our customers? Are those customers adopting those new value points? Those new solutions? Those new ideas? So, and of course, you know, how much are we growing behind that, etc.? But it's really this idea of value and adoption to start with. When we look at the engagement, the customer side, we look at the customer satisfaction in the physical world and we compare it with the customer satisfaction in the digital world. And we want the two to be at par. When it comes to the backend, we look at how much we're simplifying that backend, so we're tracking technical depth and so forth. And then on security, we look at external scoring so that we always, you know, keep ourselves (laughs) right next to the external assessment and how we're doing. So that's basically, you know, how we look at the four dimensions that I was mentioning at the beginning. To answer the second part of your question, which was more about employees, I mean, it's a huge effort, of course, you know, creating the organization, a lot of recruitments, a lot of training, we've been working a lot on, you know, providing you with a digital citizenship course on up to very technical course we found completely our approach to learning, and there are many, many aspects of the employee experience that we've been working on, I mean, providing mobility, providing, you know, on finding that balance, right? Between security and enabling the new world of work where people are going to work on the go and offering them a much better level of access basically to the corporate resources, mobile, and so forth. This has been a massive transformation over a year. >> Hervé, the last thing I'd like to ask you, Just, you know, the changing dynamics of organizations today, as we started out talking, you know, CDO is still a relatively new role out there. The role of the CIO has changed an awful lot, you know, over the length of our careers, so, you know, what are you seeing in those dynamics? You've worn both of those hats and you know, where do you see things going and any feedback you'd give to the industry to make the lives easier of the CDOs and CIOs out there? >> Well, I think it's, you know, I would say I've seen the roles held very differently from an industry to another. So, you know, it's probably hard to replicate from, you know, the energy management and industrial automation industry to others, but in an industry like ours, where the products are becoming digital because basically, you know, you want to create data in the real world, you want to be able to process that data, create insights from that data, and then you want to be able to act in the real world based on those data. You really need to look at those two aspects, and there was a great, actually, paper from MIT a while ago about digitized on digital, so really, I really like to say digital is really about creating this digital business, you know? Real world data, transforming this real world data in insights and action and then acting in the real world, while CIO is mostly being about how you are digitizing the company, right? So, the employee experience, the customer experience, the partner experience, having transforming your backend into a machine that scales, and both equally share that last mandate that's even a broader mandate, at the level of the enterprise that goes with security. So that's how I would roughly, if you will, you know, define the space. >> Hervé Coureil, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, it's been a pleasure talking with you. >> Hervé: Thanks for having me. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at Schneider Electric's office in Boston, Massachusetts, and as always, thanks for watchin' theCUBE. (energetic electronic music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special cube in size powered by ET our enterprise Technology Research our partner who's got this database to solve the spending data and what we're gonna do is a braking analysis on the analytic database market we're seeing that cloud and cloud players are disrupting that marketplace and that marketplace really traditionally has been known as the enterprise data warehouse market so Alex if you wouldn't mind bringing up the first slide I want to talk about some of the trends in the traditional EDW market I almost don't like to use that term anymore because it's sort of a pejorative but let's look at it's a very large market it's about twenty billion dollars today growing it you know high single digits low double digits it's expected to be in the 30 to 35 billion dollar size by mid next decade now historically this is dominated by teradata who started this market really back in the 1980s with the first appliance the first converged appliance or coal with Exadata you know IBM I'll talk about IBM a little bit they bought a company called mateesah back in the day and they've basically this month just basically killed the t's and killed the brand Microsoft has entered the fray and so it's it's been a fairly large market but I say it's failed to really live up to the promises that we heard about in the late 90s early parts of the 2000 namely that you were going to be able to get a 360 degree view of your data and you're gonna have this flexible easy access to the data you know the reality is data warehouses were really expensive they were slow you had to go through a few experts to to get data it took a long time I'll tell you I've done a lot of research on this space and when you talked to the the data warehouse practitioners they would tell you we always had to chase the chips anytime Intel would come out with a new chip we forced it in there because we just didn't have the performance to really run the analytics as we need to it's took so long one practitioner described it as a snake swallowing a basketball so you've got all those data which is the sort of metaphor for the basketball just really practitioners had a hard time standing up infrastructure and what happened as a spate of new players came into the marketplace these these MPP players trying to disrupt the market you had Vertica who was eventually purchased by HP and then they sold them to Micro Focus greenplum was buy bought by EMC and really you know company is de-emphasized greenplum Netezza 1.7 billion dollar acquisition by IBM IBM just this month month killed the brand they're kind of you know refactoring everything par Excel was interesting was it was a company based on an open-source platform that Amazon AWS did a one-time license with and created a redshift it ever actually put a lot of innovation redshift this is really doing well well show you some data on that we've also at the time saw a major shift toward unstructured data and read much much greater emphasis on analytics it coincided with Hadoop which also disrupted the market economics I often joked it the ROI of a dupe was reduction on investment and so you saw all these data lakes being built and of course they turned into the data swamps and you had dozens of companies come into the database space which used to be rather boring but Mike Amazon with dynamodb s AP with HANA data stacks Redis Mongo you know snowflake is another one that I'm going to talk about in detail today so you're starting to see the blurring of lines between relational and non relational and what was was what once thought of is no sequel became not only sequel sequel became the killer app for Hadoop and so at any rate you saw this new class of data stores emerging and snowflake was one of the more interesting and and I want to share some of that data with you some of the spending intentions so over the last several weeks and months we've shared spending intentions from ETR enterprise technology research they're a company that that the manages of the spending data and has a panel of about 4,500 end-users they go out and do spending in tension surveys periodically so Alex if you bring up this survey data I want to show you this so this is spending intentions and and what it shows is that the public cloud vendors in snowflake who really is a database as a service offering so cloud like are really leading the pack here so the sector that I'm showing is the enterprise data warehouse and I've added in the the analytics business intelligence and Big Data section so what this chart shows is the vendor on the left-hand side and then this bar chart has colors the the red is we're leaving the platform the gray is our spending will be flat so this is from the July survey expect to expectations for the second half of 2019 so gray is flat the the dark green is increase and the lime green is we are a new customer coming on to the platform so if you take the the greens and subtract out the red and there's two Reds the dark red is leaving the lighter red is spending less so if you subtract the Reds from the greens you get what's called a net score so the higher the net score the better so you can see here the net score of snowflake is 81% so that very very high you can also see AWS in Microsoft a very high and Google so the cloud vendors of which I would consider a snowflake at cloud vendor like at the cloud model all kicking butt now look at Oracle look at the the incumbents Oracle IBM and Tara data Oracle and IBM are in the single digits for a net score and the Terra data is in a negative 10% so that's obviously not a good sign for those guys so you're seeing share gains from the cloud company snowflake AWS Microsoft and Google at the expense of certainly of teradata but likely IBM and Oracle Oracle's little for animal they got Exadata and they're putting a lot of investments in there maybe talk about that a little bit more now you see on the right hand side this black says shared accounts so the N in this survey this July survey that ETR did is a thousand sixty eight so of a thousand sixty eight customers each er is asking them okay what's your spending going to be on enterprise data warehouse and analytics big data platforms and you can see the number of accounts out of that thousand sixty eight that are being cited so snowflake only had 52 and I'll show you some other data from from past surveys AWS 319 Microsoft the big you know whale here trillion dollar valuation 851 going down the line you see Oracle a number you know very large number and in Tara data and IBM pretty large as well certainly enough to get statistically valid results so takeaway here is snowflake you know very very strong and the other cloud vendors the hyper scale is AWS Microsoft and Google and their data stores doing very well in the marketplace and challenging the incumbents now the next slide that I want to show you is a time series for selected suppliers that can only show five on this chart but it's the spending intentions again in that EDW and analytics bi big data segment and it shows the spending intentions from January 17 survey all the way through July 19 so you can see the the period the periods that ETR takes this the snapshots and again the latest July survey is over a thousand n the other ones are very very large too so you can see here at the very top snowflake is that yellow line and they just showed up in the January 19 a survey and so you're seeing now actually you go back one yeah January 19 survey and then you see them in July you see the net score is the July next net score that I'm showing that's 35 that's the number of accounts out of the corpus of data that snowflake had in the survey back in January and now it's up to 52 you can see they lead the packet just in terms of the spending intention in terms of mentions AWS and Microsoft also up there very strong you see big gap down to Oracle and Terra data I didn't show I BM didn't show Google Google actually would be quite high to just around where Microsoft is but you can see the pressure that the cloud is placing on the incumbents so what are the incumbents going to do about it well certainly you're gonna see you know in the case of Oracle spending a lot of money trying to maybe rethink the the architecture refactor the architecture Oracle open worlds coming up shortly I'm sure you're gonna see a lot of new announcements around Exadata they're putting a lot of wood behind the the exadata arrow so you know we'll keep in touch with that and stay tuned but you can see again the big takeaways here is that cloud guys are really disrupting the traditional edw marketplace alright let's talk a little bit about snowflakes so I'm gonna highlight those guys and maybe give a little bit of inside baseball here but what you need to know about snowflakes so I've put some some points here just some quick points on the slide Alex if you want to bring that up very fast-growing cloud and SAS based data warehousing player growing that couple hundred percent annually their annual recurring revenue very high these guys are getting ready to do an IPO talk about that a little bit they were founded in 2012 and it kind of came out of stealth and hiding in 2014 after bringing Bob Moog Leon from Microsoft as the CEO it was really the background on these guys is they're three engineers from Oracle will probably bored out of their mind like you know what we got this great idea why should we give it to Oracle let's go pop out and start a company and that NIN's and as such they started a snowflake they really are disrupting the incumbents they've raised over 900 million dollars in venture and they've got almost a four billion dollar valuation last May they brought on Frank salute Minh and this is really a pivot point I think for the company and they're getting ready to do an IPO so and so let's talk a little bit about that in a moment but before we do that I want to bring up just this really simple picture of Alex if you if you'd bring this this slide up this block diagram it's like a kindergarten so that you know people like you know I can even understand it but basically the innovation around the snowflake architecture was that they they separated their claim is that they separated the storage from the compute and they've got this other layer called cloud services so let me talk about that for a minute snowflake fundamentally rethought the architecture of the data warehouse to really try to take advantage of the cloud so traditionally enterprise data warehouses are static you've got infrastructure that kind of dictates what you can do with the data warehouse and you got to predict you know your peak needs and you bring in a bunch of storage and compute and you say okay here's the infrastructure and this is what I got it's static if your workload grows or some new compliance regulation comes out or some new data set has to be analyzed well this is what you got you you got your infrastructure and yeah you can add to it in chunks of compute and storage together or you can forklift out and put in new infrastructure or you can chase more chips as I said it's that snake swallowing a basketball was not pretty so very static situation and you have to over provision whereas the cloud is all about you know pay buy the drink and it's about elasticity and on demand resources you got cheap storage and cheap compute and you can just pay for it as you use it so the innovation from snowflake was to separate the compute from storage so that you could independently scale those and decoupling those in a way that allowed you to sort of tune the knobs oh I need more compute dial it up I need more storage dial it up or dial it down and pay for only what you need now another nuance here is traditionally the computing and data warehousing happens on one cluster so you got contention for the resources of that cluster what snowflake does is you can spin up a warehouse on the fly you can size it up you can size it down based on the needs of the workload so that workload is what dictates the infrastructure also in snowflakes architecture you can access the same data from many many different houses so you got again that three layers that I'm showing you the storage the compute and the cloud services so let me go through some examples so you can really better understand this so you've got storage data you got customer data you got you know order data you got log files you might have parts data you know what's an inventory kind of thing and you want to build warehouses based on that data you might have marketing a warehouse you might have a sales warehouse you might have a finance warehouse maybe there's a supply chain warehouse so again by separating the compute from that sort of virtualized compute from the from the storage layer you can access any data leave the data where it is and I'll talk about this in more and bring the compute to the data so this is what in part the cloud layer does they've got security and governance they got data warehouse management in that cloud layer and and resource optimization but the key in in my opinion is this metadata management I think that's part of snowflakes secret sauce is the ability to leave data where it is and have the smarts and the algorithms to really efficiently bring the compute to the data so that you're not moving data around if you think about how traditional data warehouses work you put all the data into a central location so you can you know operate on it well that data movement takes a long long time it's very very complicated so that's part of the secret sauce is knowing what data lives where and efficiently bringing that compute to the data this dramatically improves performance it's a game changer and it's much much less expensive now when I come back to Frank's Luqman this is somebody that I've is a career that I've followed I've known had him on the cube of a number of times I first met Frank Sloot when he was at data domain he took that company took it public and then sold it originally NetApp made a bid for the company EMC Joe Tucci in the defensive play said no we're not gonna let Ned afgan it there was a little auction he ended up selling the company for I think two and a half billion dollars sloop and came in he helped clean up the the data protection business of EMC and then left did a stint as a VC and then took over service now when snoop and took over ServiceNow and a lot of people know this the ServiceNow is the the shiny toy on Wall Street today service that was a mess when saluteth took it over it's about 100 120 million dollar company he and his team took it to 1.2 billion dramatically increased the the valuation and one of the ways they did that was by thinking about the Tam and expanding that Tim that's part of a CEOs job as Tam expansion Steuben is also a great operational guy and he brought in an amazing team to do that I'll talk a little bit about that team effect uh well he just brought in Mike Scarpelli he was the CFO was the CFO of ServiceNow brought him in to run finance for snowflake so you've seen that playbook emerge you know be interesting Beth white was the CMO at data domain she was the CMO at ServiceNow helped take that company she's an amazing resource she kind of you know and in retirement she's young but she's kind of in retirement doing some advisory roles wonder if slooping will bring her back I wonder if Dan Magee who was ServiceNow is operational you know guru wonder if he'll come out of retirement how about Dave Schneider who runs the sales team at at ServiceNow well he you know be be lord over we'll see the kinds of things that Sluman looks for just in my view of observing his playbook over the years he looks for great product he looks for a big market he looks for disruption and he looks for off-the-chart ROI so his sales teams can go in and really make a strong business case to disrupt the existing legacy players so I one of the things I said that snoopin looks for is a large market so let's look at this market and this is the thing that people missed around ServiceNow and to credit Pat myself and David for in the back you know we saw the Tam potential of ServiceNow is to be many many tens of billions you know Gartner when they when ServiceNow first came out said hey helpdesk it's a small market couple billion dollars we saw the potential to transform not only IT operations but go beyond helpdesk change management at cetera IT Service Management into lines of business and we wrote a piece on wiki Vaughn back then it's showing the potential Tam and we think something similar could happen here so the market today let's call 20 billion growing to 30 Billy big first of all but a lot of players in here what if so one of the things that we see snowflake potentially being able to do with its architecture and its vision is able to bring enterprise search you know to the marketplace 80% of the data that's out there today sits behind firewalls it's not searchable by Google what if you could unlock that data and access it in query at anytime anywhere put the power in the hands of the line of business users to do that maybe think Google search for enterprises but with provenance and security and governance and compliance and the ability to run analytics for a line of business users it's think of it as citizens data analytics we think that tam could be 70 plus billion dollars so just think about that in terms of how this company might this company snowflake might go to market you by the time they do their IPO you know it could be they could be you know three four five hundred billion dollar company so we'll see we'll keep an eye on that now because the markets so big this is not like the ITSM the the market that ServiceNow was going after they crushed BMC HP was there but really not paying attention to it IBM had a product it had all these products that were old legacy products they weren't designed for the cloud and so you know ServiceNow was able to really crush that market and caught everybody by surprise and just really blew it out there's a similar dynamic here in that these guys are disrupting the legacy players with a cloud like model but at the same time so the Amazon with redshift so is Microsoft with its analytics platform you know teradata is trying to figure it out they you know they've got an inertia of a large install base but it's a big on-prem install base I think they struggle a little bit but their their advantages they've got customers locked in or go with exudate is very interesting Oracle has burned the boats and in gone to cloud first in Oracle mark my words is is reacting everything for the cloud now you can say Oh Oracle they're old school they're old guard that's fine but one of the things about Oracle and Larry Ellison they spend money on R&D they're very very heavy investor in Rd and and I think that you know you can see the exadata as it's actually been a very successful product they will react attacked exadata believe you me to to bring compute to the data they understand you can't just move all this the InfiniBand is not gonna solve their problem in terms of moving data around their architecture so you know watch Oracle you've got other competitors like Google who shows up well in the ETR survey so they got bigquery and BigTable and you got a you know a lot of other players here you know guys like data stacks are in there and you've got you've got Amazon with dynamo DB you've got couch base you've got all kinds of database players that are sort of blurring the lines as I said between sequel no sequel but the real takeaway here from the ETR data is you've got cloud again is winning it's driving the discussion and the spending discussion with an IT watch this company snowflake they're gonna do an IPO I guarantee it hopefully they will see if they'll get in before the booth before the market turns down but we've seen this play by Frank Sluman before and his team and and and the spending data shows that this company is hot you see them all over Silicon Valley you're seeing them show up in the in the spending data so we'll keep an eye on this it's an exciting market database market used to be kind of boring now it's red-hot so there you have it folks thanks for listening is a Dave Volante cube insights we'll see you next time