>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. (techy music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Joep Piscaer, and this is Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Always happy to have a customer on the program, and even more when we've got a CIO, the ones that are sitting in the hot seat. Bob Brown, who's the CIO of information, communication, and technology with Manchester Gov. Thank you for having, you know, the show in your home country, and a pleasure to talk with you. >> Great, thanks for letting me be joining your panel today. >> So, Bob, you know, I've been an analyst for about, coming up on nine years now, and the role of the CIO is something that just gets, you know, looked at under a microscope. It's, you know, how's the role changing, you know, is there a future for the CIO? Does everything does just go away? Does the CMO take it, who takes your budget? So, I'm sure in your role things are, you know, nice and mellow. You kind of sit in a comfy chair, everybody comes and asks you for things nicely and throws money at you, did I get things right? >> That's completely at the different end of the scale of where my business is. >> Yeah. >> Completely untrue. >> Yeah. >> There's no comfy chair, to start with. Let's be honest, right? (chuckling) Our business is 24 by seven, so within the context of what most people think of local government, we're providing critical services that are fundamentally helping our entire 600,000 residents in Manchester to interact with our council services, and they need to do that at a time that's convenient for them. >> Yeah. >> So, it's constantly evolving, constant challenges, and inevitably public sector life, financially, hugely difficult for us to balance the books. >> You know, bring us insight to this. You've got 600,000 customers, you know. >> Yeah. >> Are they all stopping you at the, you know, local grocery and being, like, you know, "Hey, I need this done," or "This isn't working right?" What are, you know, some of the big things that are, you know, impacting you? What's happening in your space? >> Yeah, okay, well look, we've got 7,500 colleagues that work at the council, and we're supporting 600,000 people, nearly 600,000 people that live in the area, and they live in the area for all sorts of reasons, okay. Some of them are part of the digital transformation that is going on, some of them are moving to the area because of the economic buoyancy that we have within the region. I think outside of London, Manchester is the place that people want to be, and they're seeing a big explosion of new jobs and innovation, and we've got big brands, Google are there, Amazon have just launched new services that they're bringing, 600 new, high quality digital jobs into the area. We've got Microsoft there, this is an enormous digital economy that's constantly evolving, and inevitably, those people that are studying at our big universities want to live and work in an environment that is conducive for their personal development, their career direction, but they live in the city, they want to be using services in a way that is more modern than ever before, and they want to take the experiences that they perhaps had in different cities and different countries and know that they can get those, and beyond, in Manchester. >> And so, you know, if people... You know, I'm betting they have different expectations now. So, you know, it used to be you go up to an office, you get a ticket, and you ask your question, right? I'm assuming that experience has changed as well for Manchester, for the government, so servicing your customers in a more digital way, basically? >> Yeah, very much so. Look, I've been at Manchester City Council now just over three years, and in that time I think it's true to say that the services weren't quite where they needed to be. There was some element of investment that was needed, and we've had to pull, really, a good transformation approach together. We've had to up skill many of the team. We've had to look to attract some new people with some new experiences into the group, and we've had to fundamentally change the relationship between what was the technology function, and somewhat isolated from frontline business into it being a critical enabler of transformation for our entire council. That's really what we've had to do. >> I love that, Bob, you've kind of teed up the digital transformation story, which has been, you know, at the heart of a lot of the discussions we've been having for the last couple of years. I wonder if you can help us walk through that a little bit, you know, what have you done kind of on the, you know, foundational platform infrastructure layer to change-- >> Yeah. >> What's happening on the applications on top of that, and then the people side, of course, is you know, immensely-- >> Yeah, of course. >> Important that you raise. >> Look, in our world I think it's helpful, I think, to firstly, set the agenda, and our agenda is predicated on service and availability of our services being our number one priority, so therefore, any down time, any lack of availability, any service failure has a core direct relationship impact with the people who are using our services. When you work in local authority terms, some of your others may be aware of this, or maybe others that are listening to this today, we're not dealing with inconvenience factors if services fail. This isn't an ATM card not working to give you £20 from the hole in the wall. Whilst that's hugely frustrating, I get that, in my world, if certain services aren't available, we're not helping some of the most vulnerable people that need our services to work. We could be making decisions that affect their lives. We could be making decisions that are also helping people to process, unfortunately, those that have passed away. Our coroner's service, a critical service that we provide at the council. You must remember, we're dealing with, truly, the lives of the people who use our services, and those, not just that emotional connection that we therefore have as residents, it really extends beyond technology. Technology, for me, is an enabling function for us that has got to be always available, hence why we make some of the decisions that we do around the core infrastructures that we have. So, for me, the core infrastructure is our foundation level, of which we build our reputation, we build our services on, we build the reliance that we have as an organization. Our use of Nutanix as a technology enables us to be able to build greater levels of resilience, also, so that if we do have a failure, the reality is that our user base will likely never know it's happened, only my team may, but for us, that foundation level gives us the ability to then start more strategic conversations with our business. It's very difficult to have a strategic relationship about change when you fundamentally can't provide the core service, so you've got to start there. >> So, tell us a little about, you know, what is your use of Nutanix. How do you use it and how does it improve that foundational level to actually deliver those services to your customers? >> Well, for us, our journey started about six months ago, and we're already transitioning, in fact, nearly getting to the end of the first stage of our journey of transitioning into the hyperconverged infrastructure, which is critical for us for many, many different reasons. Our fundamental business case was around our ability to be able to clearly change our whole dynamics around resilience, but also reduce our carbon footprint, reduce the number of servers that we have to power so our power consumption has changed. We're already delivering on some of those business case values in a very, very short space of time, so for us, the ability to pick up our infrastructure and be able to now put that in a new environment has created, already, a significant change for our organization, and one that we can build on. >> Okay, yeah, Bob, since it's so recent, you know, give us, paint us a little picture kind of the before and after, like did it reduce the amount of people that needed to focus specifically on infrastructure? Did you have to do some rescaling? You said you've done some, you know, changes in personnel and hiring and training recently. Help us understand. >> Yeah. Yeah, look, in our case, we needed to look at technology enabling us to be able to demonstrate and deliver on our core strategic objectives. So, for me, our data center is very much about how we house and how we service with keeping our data safe and secure and always available. That enables us to be able to also support some elements of our social value, so for us, the ability to be working with a partner who are absolutely strategically aligned with where our strategic direction is as an organization is fundamental for us, and our ability to be able to therefore then no longer need some of those personnel who were providing day-to-day services around the data center, because those skills now can be used elsewhere within my service. We've got a situation where we can now be confident that the resilience of that new infrastructure is such that we no longer need to have an individual babysitting those services, now where that technology enables us to be able to do it automatically. >> All right, you mentioned that you're finishing phase one, so maybe can you step back and whatever you're allowed to share, a little bit of-- >> Sure. >> What is the phased approach, you know, where do you go with Nutanix and the surrounding solutions with it? >> Well, look, our use of Nutanix and our ability to be able to partner with what is clearly a recognized Gartner Magic Quadrant, top right organization, enables us to be able to get access to some further elements of innovation. The difficulty in the public sector of having an R&D function is frankly, it's impossible. Our relationship with our partners is how we leverage, frankly, innovation, and where we get some of that from. So, the first stage for us was very much about getting some of the core foundations there, but beyond that it's about how they can help us also unlock other elements of our strategic goals and objectives, and one of those is about how we can use our new relationships. In Manchester we have devolved budgets from central government, enabling our health colleagues and our local authority colleagues come closer together, for us to share information, share data, and for us to be able to make even greater, richer decisions about the care and support of people. In some cases, that is going to enable us to be able to use assisted living technology that's going to be housed and run in our new data center environment that is going to fundamentally change the way that we provide healthcare services in the future. That's a real strategic aim for us. >> You know, how does IoT fit into your future plans? I don't know if it's tied with, if you've talked to Nutanix about what they're doing there. >> Yeah. >> But it's been something I've found a lot of governments similar to yours are looking in that space. >> Look, I think IoT is inevitably something that people like me have to consider and think about. I guess I would say that IoT is, at one level, a whole bunch of individual devices that work on their own platforms that don't talk to each other, and in the healthcare space, that ain't going to work for us. That's just not going to be it. We're going to have to have a platform by which those that are providing the healthcare services, using technology that's deployed in a patient, and now a resident scenario, to fundamentally change that dial from it's providing what is a reactionary healthcare service and being much more proactive, so those data sets have got to come together, and that ability for us, then, to be able to use that data to help us do predictive analytics in the future, and for us to be able to stop the ability for somebody to get so ill they have to go back into the acute care scenario is crucial, and that's, again, for us is how we think IoT has to, for us, develop a relationship with our various partners who discretely provide those services by bringing those things together, and that's where I think our relationship with Nutanix will help us unlock, and really discover, how we might be able to manage that and deliver some of those things quickly. >> So, one of the things that you do as a CIO is, you know, think about the hybrid cloud strategies, right? So, you're talking about these separate data silos that you and your partners have now, so what is your strategy to, you know, combine those data sets, or open them up so that you as a government can actually leverage that data from, you know, no matter where it runs, no matter where it is stored? >> Yeah, I think we're at early stages of our data strategy for the council. We certainly have a federated business model that is evident for all to see, and most local authorities are somewhat similar. I think the challenge for us in the future's going to be how we unlock the power of the data that we capture and the relationships that we have today. At the council, one of the key strategic objectives over the next few years is for us to deliver a new customer relationship management function. That will fundamentally enable us to change the way that we are structured internally, the way our organization responds to the way that the different interactions are going to come. Roughly, today, about 50% of our interactions with our customers, with our residents of Manchester, are through a digital channel. That means there's about 50% that have a different experience, and we know we need to change that. So, you know, for us, by really having a strategic vision in terms of where our data strategy needs to be is it enables us to think about that technology that's going to enable us to get there in the future. >> All right, Bob, last thing I want to ask you is it sounds like you've got a lot of moving pieces. If you could go to kind of the vendor ecosystem, so not just Nutanix, but you know, other companies you work with, you know, what could they be doing to make your life easier? >> Look, I think that's a double-edged sword, right? I think the first thing as a public sector, we've got to learn how to get the best from our partners. I think we've got to also create that situation where our partners meet with leadership on a regular basis, and that they've got the opportunity to then talk about, not just the contracts and the SLA and the regular series performance stuff, but much more beyond that. I think as a public sector we've got to open ourselves up to having those conversations more, and I would like our partners to push us to deliver that, if I'm honest. I had our partner event yesterday. We shared a lot about what's going on in the city, a lot about the challenges, but it's true to say today that I'm probably one of, if not the only, local authority doing that. I think I'd like more local authorities to be doing that, and I'd like our partners to be pushing us. It's true in that environment I saw yesterday Nutanix mixing with people from Google, mixing with people from Dell, mixing with people from other brands, for them to be able to also recognize how they can collaborate to bring solutions through to us. >> Well, Bob, really appreciate you sharing with our community what's going on. Congratulations on what you're doing, and wish you the best of luck. >> Many thanks, great tea time, thank you. >> All right, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techy music)

>>Hello from Las Vegas. It's the cube live at AWS reinvent 2021, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We're in our fourth day, Dave, we have two live sets of the kid. There's a dueling set right across from us, kind of like dueling pianos, only a little bit louder. We have had about a hundred guests on the program at AWS reinvent this year. And we're pleased to welcome back. One of our alumni, Richard Potter joins us the CEO of peak. Richard. Welcome back to the cube. >>Great to be here. Talk to >>Us. So we haven't seen you in a couple of years. Talk to us about what's going on at pink. I know there's some news. >>Yeah, yeah. Loads of things going on at peak. I mean, we've been growing really quick. So since the last time you saw us, which was yeah, in London a few years ago, uh, we've grown to be the, sort of essentially the global leader in decision intelligence systems. Um, us as an AI company, we specialize in putting artificial intelligence right into the heart of how companies run their businesses and make their day-to-day decisions, which is why we call it decision intelligence. We think it's the biggest thing in software and, uh, probably the biggest new category of software. Um, we will see this decade. So it's super exciting to be in that position and great to be back chatting to you guys on the cube. When were you based founded? We were founded in 2016. Uh, and, uh, yeah. And you can probably tell by my accent English company headquartered in Manchester, but we're global. Now we have operations in India. We have a couple of development centers in India. We have a growing customer base in Asia and a growing customer base in the U S as well. Uh, so yeah, we're kind of international, but born out of, uh, Northern English roots. >>I like it. Talk to me about back in 2016, what were some of the gaps in the market that you saw from a, because you know, as, as here we are in almost 20, 22, every company is a data company. They have to be being able to extract intelligence timely hard. What gaps did you see back in 2016 >>Back then a read on the market was really simple, which was the companies that are going to harness data to run themselves well, we'll win, but the most companies were struggling to make that change to be data-driven. So our rich was, you know, as founders, there's three of us who started the business was trying to explore that problem. Like what, what, what stops companies running on data? And there's loads of reasons, right? Tech ones, uh, skills, ones, even just like business people using data in their day-to-day decision-making rather than say their gut-feel, which I think is also a data-driven decision. They just don't understand that necessarily. Uh, so we really honed in on that problem and we grew quite quickly to be the leading business in that sort of applied data space in the UK, you know, a market leader in, uh, helping companies perform better with data. And over time that has taken us on this journey to be the sort of global leader in decision intelligence, which is really cool. But the itch we were scratching was that, Hey, you know, there's something in this, we think companies that do this and do it well are gonna win, but no one's doing it. So why is that? And then, and then we've built software that effectively responds to that opportunity. >>You mentioned harnessing data. Yeah. How do you balance the harnessing of data successfully with being harnessed by data? Because, because if you're talking about the concept of Dai yeah. Who's making the decision. If the machine is making the decision, I better trust it. Why should I trust it? So how do you, how do you strike that balance to get people to trust what you're doing? The work you're doing for them behind the scenes? Yeah, >>I think it's, it's really important that humans trust the machines that they're working alongside. And I think that's the big change we're seeing, right? So this is a new industrial revolution, the intelligence era that we're in, but all previous industrial revolutions have all amplified human potential. They've amplified like a physical potential, whether it was, you know, machinery, steam, power and so on, or computers have amplified our cognitive capability, but humans have always controlled those machines. If you think about it now in the intelligence era, our machines can think with us, they can think alongside us. So we have to learn how to, as people, how to co-exist with those machines and then let those machines amplify us and essentially make us superhuman and what we do. And that's a part of the challenge we face at peak as to how do we make, how do we humanize that? >>How do we make it such that everyone trusts the machine? Uh, and we always have that human in the loop is the way we think about it. Uh, decision intelligence empowers us to be awesome at our jobs, make the great decisions all the time. If we trust the machine so much that we just want it to make the decision for us, we can let it, but we're always in control and we're in control of how it thinks and what it does. And it's our job as a software company to build software that lets you understand why that recommendation or that decision is being suggested to you. So I think, I think the coexistence of our machines alongside people in a new way that a human to machine interface is going to completely change with artificial intelligence and decision intelligence and, and us as people we're going to have to relearn how we, how we work with our technology. >>You just mentioned a couple of really good words in terms of, of the people, part of people, process and technologies, amplify and empower. Those are two things that stuck out at me is that's what you're giving people in any, whether they're an operations or finance or marketing, it's the amplification to do their jobs, empowering them to do their jobs with data that will help make them more skilled and better able to make decisions that benefit themselves, the company. >>That's exactly right. Yeah, because if you, if you redact doing business to its basics, it's, it's actually just making decisions, right. Companies are make great decisions. They win and those decisions could be anything, you know, they could be product decisions, they could be pricing decisions, operational supply chain decisions, but it's a sequence of decisions that creates value for my company. And so that's why I believe this technology is so empowering because as people we're, we're actually great at making those decisions. What we're not great at is making those decisions 24 by seven really, really quickly, very consistently. So, you know, humans are awesome at forecasting. They're awesome at choosing pricing that would appeal to other people, but alongside this technology, we can have machines that do a lot of that thinking for us, speed us up and help us make more, um, quick, great consistently awesome decisions. And then that just makes us great at our jobs. If you're a marketeer or in finance or in supply chain, you, you become awesome. And I think that that, that empowerment is key to the sort of humanization of AI in business. And actually that's what it means in practice. It isn't AI coming for peoples' jobs or replacing jobs. It's it's AI helping us all be gray. And our companies grow faster with wider profit margins when we do that, which creates more jobs for people, which is really cool. >>So, um, we talk about people trusting machines to do things for them. Uh, it's, it's not necessarily a new concept. We just sort of take some of those things for granted. Um, I trust my refrigerator at home to measure the internal temperature and make adjustments as necessary. Turn the compressor on, turn the compressor off. And I'm sorry, I you're from England refrigerators, this thing, it's a box. We use it to refrigerate our beer, which I took to make it >>Cold, which I know. >>So it's kind of a, you know, got to love those cliches, but so can you give us an example of a situation where a customer is trusting something that it's gotten from DEI from peak, where if you, as the CEO heard that anecdotal story, you would be absolutely delighted. >>Well, I think the earth is loads of great examples of that. So, um, the reason we call it decision intelligence decision intelligence is because it's the, it's applying AI into the active decision making, right? Uh, artificial intelligence or machine learning is making a prediction or a categorization over a huge data set. Right? But that on its own is kind of useless. You need to take that prediction that forward looking view and then effectively infuse it with business logic constraints and like knowledge of how your company works to give you a recommendation. Right? So let's just say I'm a marketeer and I'm trying to work out who I should send a particular offer to on black Friday over email, or even not even over email over any channel. When, if I, if I was CEO and I heard one of my teams say, Hey, what I've done is I've used the decision intelligence platform to tell me who buy, who are my customers that are in market for X type of products at why kind of price and what channels do they like to be communicated to over? >>Uh, I would think that's awesome. And then that market here, we're typically infuse that message with the sort of language and content that would appeal to that customer. But they're using the artificial intelligence to be super targeted and really like deliver the message to that person in the way they want to consume it, which creates a really enjoyable experience as a customer. You don't feel spammed or you don't feel like it's effectively used. You feel like you're having a direct one-to-one personal communication with the brand or retailer. That's talking to you, which in itself creates loyalty and like increases the lifetime value of that relationship, which is great for the retailer. But I think using AI for those kinds of decisions is essentially like a great example of like amplifying the human potential of a marketing team for this. >>Absolutely. Because what we expect as consumers, regardless of what the product or service is, is that we want brands to know who we are, what we want. Don't if I just bought a tent on Amazon, don't show me more tests, show me other things that go with it. I want you to know that. And so we have this expectation that brands when whatever industry they're in, no, oh, Richard bought this. >>Exactly, exactly. So, and I think that it starts to really jar. Now you've got some retailers and brands doing this really well, and you get really enjoyable, uh, communications at the frequency you want with the offers and the promotions that were irrelevant to you. When you just start to get trapped, you know, effectively stalked around the internet for something you've already bought, it becomes really jarring and frustrating. And then that actually creates a negative brand effect for that particular brand. So it's super important that these retailers, CPG com everyone really moves to this way of thinking and tries to have a direct. And that's the beauty of AI and decision intelligence. I think for retail, if we get into retail specifically, it allows us to treat every individual customer individually because we can use the machine to make decisions on a per customer basis. And then our marketing can be amplified by that. Whereas in the past, we bucketed customers into groups and just treated them all the same, which does create a rather impersonal experience. >>Yeah. Which can be a negative for a brand, as you mentioned, but give them the ability to treat people individually, but at scale, and in real time, one of the things we learned in the pandemic is that real-time data access isn't no is not a nice to have. It's an essential one of the themes too, that Dave and I have been talking about the last few days is that we're hearing at re-invent is every company has to be a data company. Yep. Talk to me about with that in mind, are you talking to more chief data officers, chief digital officers, where are your customer conversations as we've we're in this explosion of data? >>It's a great question though. So if every company has to be a data company and a company that's powered by AI, that means you have to be talking to everyone really. So your chief data, chief chief information officers, chief data officers, CEO, CFOs, and every sort of head of business, head of line of business, it's really important. So what we do at peak is as a decision intelligence platform, peak itself, unifies everything you need in one cloud platform, into a single software product that gives you all the infrastructure for your technical teams to process data for your data scientists to create the intelligence, but then it gives you a place to work for your business teams. So unifies your whole business around a platform. And then that means our conversations. As you know, as the provider of that technology are with technical teams, they're with business teams, they're with business leaders because it has to permeate everything. So I think it's, I think that's the future companies will have to effectively run alongside they'll create their own intelligence, basically on a dedicated platform like peek. And that intelligence will then be distributed across the whole business, um, with w w you know, in the way we do it. So I think it's really cool and exciting. Yeah. >>Let let's say hypothetically, now this is something that would never happen, but just hypothetically say I'm an American goes to England to take over coaching, a British soccer, soccer, or football. Okay. I sounds crazy, but how would I, how would I use peak and Dai and BI to help improve my winning percentage if I cared about winning? Because it's possible that I would, I I'm really only interested in the personal development of my, of my team as individuals, but, but, but what would in athletics? Is that something that is a, >>I think possible? Yeah, for sure. I mean, you're seeing an explosion of data science and analytics and AI techniques being used in sport. Right. I mean, peak we're very much focused on the commercial application of AI with our platform. So we, we work with, uh, commercial businesses and so on, but in that space, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, if you think about it, what do you need to create that intelligence? You need data and you can see it on the back of every players share. They've got the little devices that are gathering data in training in matches, constantly monitored. Those data points, feed algorithms. Those algorithms can show us if a player is fatigued, you know, where they are, or they can even show us, uh, deep learning techniques can help us see patterns of play and understand like how should we better set our teams up? How should we get players to interact in for, you know, on a soccer field? Um, and yeah, and you're seeing premier league clubs use those sort of techniques all the time. We don't do that at peak, but yeah, I mean, I think, uh, I think those sort of things are readily available now for, uh, those kinds of clubs to do that kind of stuff. >>I think Dave is angling to be a consultant on Ted last. So I think what I'm hearing last question for you, you guys are from an AWS relationship perspective. Richard, you guys were announced just yesterday, you're named by AWS as an ISB partner, APN partner of the year for 2021 for UK. And I, congratulations. Talk to us a little bit about that. >>Yeah, it was really, I kind of, yeah, it's super exciting for us. It's a great recognition. Obviously they give one of those awards out every year, uh, as a global company, it's nice to have that sort of stamp of approval that AWS sees us as their independent software vendor partner of the year. It's a, it's a great recognition for us because we come from a heritage of, uh, starting peak as a consulting company, actually just to do whatever it took to help our customers be successful. And in doing that, we had an idea for a software platform. Uh, we got some venture funding to do that, and we've turned into a, you know, we became a software company a couple of years after we founded, uh, and to get to this point now a few years later where AWS are recognizing us as their software vendor partner of the year is, um, a huge team. Fantastic. It's a huge Testament to, uh, to our engineering teams and the, and the, and the technical teams at peak that we've built something so impactful. Yeah, >>Absolutely. That validation is really, really critical. And last question in our last 30 seconds or so what are some of the things on the roadmap that you're excited for for, for peak for 20 22, 22 >>Is going to be a huge year for us. Cause I think it's the year that, uh, our platform goes out there into the wild, into the mainstream. So we made a couple of big announcements in the last few weeks. Uh, we've launched some new products on the pig platform. So there's three big platform, product sets. Now, one very much geared around creating your AI ready data set. That's called doc, uh, one that's very much geared around creating your intelligence, which is factory. And then an area where our business like the business teams of our customers go to work, which is called work actually. So those three big feature sets are going to be available from January. And the platform is being totally opened up as a self-serve platform for anyone anywhere to build upon. So I think it's a huge moment for decision intelligence. Garner is saying decision intelligence is the big tech trend of next year. And we feel as the market leader, we've got the platform that can help everyone get on, get on that trend really. So I think we're really looking forward to 2022 and what it brings. And, um, we think that our platform and our company is in a great shape to help more and more businesses take that leap into being powered by decision Intel. >>It sounds exciting, Richard, so we'll have to follow up with you next year and see what's going on. We appreciate you joining us on the cube, talking about peep, what you're doing, your relationship with AWS and how impactful decision intelligence can be for everybody. We appreciate it. Thanks for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path >>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube. We are here with UI path at forward for I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is our jet guard group financial officer at landmark group, or just welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>You. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about landmark. >>Absolutely. So landmark is one of the largest, uh, non-food primarily retailer in the middle east and Asia, India, and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, uh, more than half of them, which are homegrown our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores, uh, across 20 countries, 55,000 employees. Um, so 30 million square feet of retail space >>They company. When was the company founded, >>Uh, 48 years ago, >>Legacy institution you were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UI path since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution, embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as a, from a visionary strategic perspective. >>Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say you have packed or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, Hey, this is cool. You know, in the, in the back office, when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, Hey, this, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we've amongst things in the early part of your parts customers and, and it's been phenomenal, you know, what, uh, what we're able to do with, uh, with, uh, robotic process automation. Uh, I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers, like Proctor and gamble and Cadbury, Schweppes, and all, and essentially we used to follow the part of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add you, then try and automate whatever your ERP system, then all allowed you to automate. >>Then what's left, you consolidate, and then you find the right shore, right. It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered and you have a mosaic of systems, every company will have. Right. Um, and then we would end up doing lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics, but then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can do, or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's, so that's very, I, you know, we've now got a pretty large, uh, robotic process automation practice. And, and, you know, we are touching started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise wide. So all the, >>These technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits and all, there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon, maybe some do. And they say, Hey, we've, we've we compete in other ways, what's your posture in that? >>So we've also been an early adopter of cloud, both. If I talk within the UI path thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud, because we just saw, even before you are part, uh, we saw how people could tamper with it, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good, uh, way back. But overall, the company also has a very pro you know, Val defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all a large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. >>Yeah. So, which makes sense, right. As a retailer, go, go with Azure, plus somebody, Microsoft, you know, X, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you because everybody's freaked out on wall street about power automate, you know, competing with UI path. And I've told people they kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week. So yeah, we use both. We use UI path for end-to-end automation. We use power automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use, uh, the power automate? How do you see those two? Yeah, >>No, I think, look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams right in time, you know, and pretty, always hit, uh, a year before COVID hit teams was not ready, you know? So I think I know power automate is good. We use it, but not as you know, it's not ready for enterprise wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in power automate yet. Um, you know, what, it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise wide or >>Which is really where you're headed. Yeah. Talk about the results that you've seen, the higher you're measuring the return and the whole business case. When you evaluate it as CFO, >>See it being a CFO, I wear two hats. Right. I'm trying to help digital transformation. Although I must say I'm not the only one our company has. Every function is these days talking digital. Right. Because it's almost like table stakes. Yeah. Uh, you, you can't be in business a leader and we are like a leader in all the markets we are, and there's no choice, but to be fully digital. Right. Uh, but being a CFO absolutely. You know, you do look at the hard dollars. Right. Um, and initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. Um, I think they gotta pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right. >>Or I think employee, uh, work work-life balance, right. I mean, in, in, uh, we are, uh, in a growing company we've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we've, we are proudly talking, you know, that, Hey, we've got a lot of people, um, we've hired them. But what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, Hey, it's a freebie. You got so many people let's start using the gray matter. And that's, I think what this technology does, it takes away the Gronk and you can then tell them, Hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes. And I think that's where the real value is. >>That is, so we've heard a lot about time saved hours saved. That's kind of the key, a key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars. How, how do you translate that to the income statement? >>So, so let's put it, uh, you know, I was looking at applied science, applied materials presentation, and they had a 150,000 hours saved. Uh, I just did our math. I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum removed out of the system. Right. But I would say not all I can say, I took them to the bottom line. So probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. >>So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings or savings reduction in >>Yeah. Or are you don't hire as many as you needed to? Uh, >>Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire or what 1,100 people hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now I'm sorry. Does that, is that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to, you know, and then as a CFO, you might say let's defend that a little bit. >>Seek cost avoidance is always debated. Yep. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to do, you know, kind of say, Hey look, all this soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the, the, the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided, and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Are there, there is no doubt because you try and what we do is we tell people if they're in a cell, okay, we'll shut, shut it down. >>I say, Hey, wait, well, right then, you know, but so you have four years of data on this, so you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFO's like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars or telephone numbers. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right. Because speed is actually a big thing, which is very difficult to measure. Right? I mean, I'll give you an example in none of our largest markets, right. In the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, um, uh, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you'll get an army of 20, 30 people train them. We did nothing. We built the barns and we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people. And he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and, and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a >>Great example. >>I think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning, looking at, you know, the positive outlook as, as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. >>I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt, you know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all, I mean, if you add all the soft dollars. Yes. But in reality, you know, I lose joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the MPVs and that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. >>It's true. All the projects add up to more value. >>I think, I think, you know, we don't get carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines game in, in Northern England, near Manchester and these Luddites, they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable. It will happen. But over time I would say yes, there have been lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. Um, but yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, Hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life. Copy pasting and just doing data entry. Uh, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much >>Of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? >>I think years ago we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple. When you have hundreds of people in a, in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slate or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. Okay. Uh, if you start, uh, deep down because I, I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it, it would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation. Right. Which is coming for us. It's we are able to see it, you try and sell that as the lead in and people shut down >>Because they're seen by intelligent process automation. W what do you mean? And, and >>So it's look, if I've got, uh, my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing whole bunch of transactions right now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI, or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns I can, for example, you know, we, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems. If you've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags, if it's V out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. We're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or, or doing a transaction >>Because why that's their job or because they it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. Or >>I think a lot of these have been sold previously similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced water and people have lost fit. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it, it turns them off. >>It's one of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can, I can rattle many off >>Cultural shift. It is. It is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, uh, you know, the top down was, uh, I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bonds a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, uh, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, um, send, send an email to yourself. So as simple as that, or download the electricity bill and, and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it, and obviously are, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of it's aha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. Um, for some people it was like, oh, they taught these metallic 10 bots are going to walk into the room. >>I love it. The bottom who's responsible for governance. >>So we've got a, we've got a team across it and finance. Um, I mean, somehow I have kind of, you know, created the skunkworks team. The S the center of excellence sits with me. Um, uh, but overall it's a combination and they now run governance, uh, you know, 24 7, >>Uh, you know, sorry, I got to get my crypto question. I ask every CFO's, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know I'm teasing, but what you see companies doing this? Has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue in cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto? >>Yeah, I think personally I'm a big believer, uh, but not for, uh, for a company. I think the, the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other face too, you know? Um, uh, I think, uh, it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet position because that's then a speculation, right? Because, so I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods, uh, from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain to, um, so we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives, but I think on the balance sheet sounds like speculation and use of capital. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, uh, I think absolutely it's, it is here to stay >>Last question. And then the last 30 seconds, or so for your peers in any industry who are it was, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automateable that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? >>I think, um, digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put RPLs, because that is the layer, which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because they will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation, rather than just a part of it. >>Got it. A predecessor, or just thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what you're, how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. >>Thank you so much. It's been >>Great. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas UI path forward for it. We'll be right back after a break.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a couple of guests joining me next to talk about AWS and Druva. From Druva, Chris White is here, the chief revenue officer. Hey Chris, nice to have you on the program. >> Excellent, thanks Lisa. Excited to be here. >> And from AWS Sabina Joseph joins us. She is the general manager of the Americas technology partners. Sabina, welcome. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> So looking forward to talking to you guys unfortunately, we can't be together in a very loud space in Las Vegas, so this will have to do but I'm excited to be able to talk to you guys today. So Chris, we're going to start with you, Druva and AWS have a longstanding partnership. Talk to us about that and some of the evolution that's going on there. >> Absolutely, yeah. we certainly have, we had a great long-term partnership. I'm excited to talk to everybody about it today and be here with Sabina and you Lisa as well. So, we actually re architect our entire environment on AWS, 100% on AWS back in 2013. That enables us to not only innovate back in 2013, but continue to innovate today and in the future, right. It gives us flexibility on a 100% platform to bring that to our customers, to our partners, and to the market out there, right? In doing so, we're delivering on data protection, disaster recovery, e-discovery, and ransomware protection, right? All of that's being leveraged on the AWS platform as I said, and that allows uniqueness from a standpoint of resiliency, protection, flexibility, and really future-proofing the environment, not only today, but in the future. And over this time AWS has been an outstanding partner for Druva. >> Excellent Chris, thank you. Sabina, you lead the America's technology partners as we mentioned, Druva is an AWS advanced technology partner. Talk to us from through AWS lens on the Druva AWS partnership and from your perspective as well. >> Sure, Lisa. So I've had the privilege of working with Druva since 2014 and it has been an amazing journey over the last six and a half years. You know, overall, when we work with partners on technical solutions, we have to talk in a better architect, their solution for AWS, but also take their feedback on our features and capabilities that our mutual customers want to see. So for example, Druva has actually provided feedback to AWS on performance, usability, enhancements, security, posture and suggestions on additional features and functionality that we could have on AWS snowball edge, AWS dynamoDB and other services in fact. And in the same way, we provide feedback to Druva, we provide recommendations and it really is a unique process of exposing our partners to AWS best practices. When customers use Druva, they are benefiting from the AWS recommended best practices for data durability, security and compliance. And our engineering teams work very closely together. We collaborate, we have regular meetings, and that really sets the foundation for a very strong solution for our mutual customers. >> So it sounds very symbiotic. And as you talked about that engineering collaboration and the collaboration across all levels. So now let's talk about some of the things that you're helping customers to do as we are all navigating a very different environment this year. Chris, talk to us about how Druva is helping customers navigate some of those big challenges you talked about ransomware for example, this massive pivot to remote workforce. Chris (mumbles) got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the, one of the things that we've seen consistently, right, it's been customers are looking for simplicity. Customers are looking for cost-effective solutions, and then you couple that with the ability to do that all on a single platform, that's what the combination of Druva and AWS does together, right? And as you mentioned, Lisa, you've got work from home. That's increased right with the unfortunate events going across the globe over the last almost 12 months now, nine months now. Increased ransomware that threats, right? The bad actors tend to take advantage of these situations unfortunately, and you've got to be working with partners like AWS like Druva, coming together, to build that barrier against the bad actors out there. So, right. We've got double layer of protection based on the partnership with AWS. And then if you look at the rising concerns around governance, right? The complexity of government, if you look at Japan adding some increased complexity to governance, you look at what's going on across, but across the globe across the pond with GDPR, number of different areas around compliance and governance that allows us to better report upon that. We built the right solution to support the migration of these customers. And everything I just talked about is just accelerated the need for folks to migrate to the cloud, migrate to AWS, migrate to leveraging, through the solutions. And there's no better time to partner with Druva and AWS, just because of that. >> Something we're all talking about. And every key segment we're doing, this acceleration of digital transformation and customers really having to make quick decisions and pivot their businesses over and over again to get from survival to thriving mode. Sabina talk to us about how Druva and AWS align on key customer use cases especially in these turbulent times. >> Yeah, so, for us as you said Lisa, right. When we start working with partners, we really focus on making sure that we are aligned on those customer use cases. And from the very first discussions, we want to ensure that feedback mechanisms are in place to help us understand and improve the services and the solutions. Chris has, he mentioned migrations, right? And we have customers who are migrating their applications to AWS and really want to move the data into the cloud. And you know what? This is not a simple problem because there's large amounts of data. And the customer has limited bandwidth Druva of course as they have always been, is an early adopter of AWS snowball edge and has worked closely with us to provide a solution where customers can just order a snowball edge directly from AWS. It gets shipped to them, they turn it on, they connect it to the network, and just start backing up their data to the snowball edge. And then once they are done, they can just pack it up, ship it back. And then all of this data gets loaded into the Druva solution on AWS. And then you also, those customers who are running applications locally on AWS Outposts, Druva was once again, an early adopter. In fact, last reinvent, they actually tested out AWS Outposts and they were one of the first launch partners. Once again, further expanding the data protection options they provide to our mutual customers. >> Well, as that landscape changes so dramatically it's imperative that customers have data center workloads, AWS workloads, cloud workloads, endpoints, protected especially as people scattered, right, in the last few months. And also, as we talked about the ransomware rise, Chris, I saw on Druva's website, one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. And so, now you've got to be able to help customers recover and have that resiliency, right. Cause it's not about, are we going to get hit? It's a matter of when, how does Druva help facilitate that resiliency? >> Yeah, now that's a great point Lisa. and as you look at our joint customer base, we've got thousands of joint customers together and we continue to see positive business impact because of that. And it's to your point, it's not if it's when you get hit and it's ultimately you've got to be prepared to recover in order to do that. And based on the security levels that we jointly have, based on our architecture and also the benefits of the architecture within AWS, we've got a double layer of defense up there that most companies just can't offer today. So, if we look at that from an example standpoint, right, transitioning offer specific use case of ransomware but really look at a cast media companies, right? One of the largest media companies out there across the globe, 400 radio stations, 800 TV stations, over a hundred thousand podcasts, over 4,000 or 5,000 streams happening on an annual basis, very active and candidly very public, which freaks the target. They really came to us for three key things, right? And they looked for reduced complexity, really reducing their workload internally from a backup and recovery standpoint, really to simplify that backup environment. And they started with Druva, really focused on the end points. How do we protect and manage the end points from a data protection standpoint, ultimately, the cost savings that they saw, the efficiency they saw, they ended up moving on and doing key workloads, right? So data protection, data center workloads that they were backing up and protecting. This all came from a great partnership and relationship from AWS as well. And as we continued to simplify that environment, it allowed them to expand their partnership with AWS. So not only was it a win for the customer, we helped solve those business problems for them. Ultimately, they got a (mumbles) benefit from both Druva and AWS and that partnership. So, we continue to see that partnership accelerate and evolve to go really look at the entire platform and where we can help them, in addition to AWS services that they're offering. >> And that was... It sounds like them going to cloud data production, was that an acceleration of their cloud strategy that they then had to accelerate even further during the last nine months, Chris? >> Yeah, well, the good news for cast is that at least from a backup and recovery standpoint, they've been ahead of the curve, right? They were one of those customers that was proactive, in driving on their cloud journey, and proactive and driving beyond the work from home. It did change the dynamics on how they work and how they act from a work from home standpoint, but they were already set up. So then they didn't really skip a beat as they continue to drive that. But overall, to your point, Lisa, we've seen an increase and acceleration and companies really moving towards the cloud, right. Which is why that migration strategy, joint migration strategy, that Sabina talked about is so important because it really has accelerated. And in some companies, this has become the safety net for them, in some ways their DR Strategy, to shift to the cloud, that maybe they weren't looking to do until maybe 2022 or 2023, it's all been accelerated. >> Everything's, but we have like whiplash on the acceleration going on. >> Sabina, talk to us about some of those joint successes through AWS's lens, a couple of customers, you're going to talk about the University of Manchester, and the Queensland Brain Institute, dig into those for us. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I thank Chris sharing those stories there. So the two that kind of come into my mind is a University of Manchester. They have nearly 7,000 academic staff and researchers and they're, part of their digital transformation strategy was adopting VMware cloud on AWS. And the University actually chose Druva, to back up 160 plus virtual machine images, because Druva provided a simple and secure cloud-based backup solution. And in fact, saved them 50% of their data protection costs. Another one is Queensland Brain Institute, which has over 400 researchers who really worked on brain diseases and really finding therapeutic solutions for these brain diseases. As you can imagine, this research generates terabytes critical data that they not only needed protected, but they also wanted to collaborate and get access to this data continuously. They chose Druva and now using Druva solution, they can back up over 1200 plus research papers, residing on their devices, providing global and also reliable access 24 by seven. And I do want to mention, Lisa, right? The pandemic has changed all of humanity as we know it, right? Until we can all find a solution to this. And we've also together had to work to adjust what can we do to work effectively together? We've actually together with Druva shifted all of our day-to-day activities, 200% virtual. And we, but despite all of that, we've maintained regular cadence for our review business and technical roadmap updates and other regular activities. And if I may mention this, right, last month we AWS actually launched the digital workplace competency, clearly enabling customers to find specialized solutions around remote work and secure remote work and Druva, even though we are all in this virtual environment today, Druva was one of the launch partners for this competency. And it was a great fit given the solution that they have to enable the remote work environments securely, and also providing an end-to-end digital workplace in the cloud. >> That's absolutely critical because that's been one of the biggest challenges I think that we've all been through as well as, you know trying to go, do I live at work or do I work from home? I'm not sure some of the days, but being able to have that continuity and you know, your customers being able to access their data at 24 by seven, as you said, because there's no point in mapping up your data, if you can't recover it but being able to allow the continuation of the relationship that you have. I want to move on now to some of the announcements. Chris, you mentioned actually Sabina you did, when you were talking about the University of Manchester, the VMware ready certification Chris, Druva just announced a couple of things there. Talk to us about that. >> Thank you. Yeah, Lisa you're right. There's been a ton of great announcements over the past several months and throughout this entire fiscal year. To be in this touch base on a couple of them around the AWS digital workplace, we absolutely have certification on AWS around VMware cloud, both on AWS and Dell EMC, through AWS. In addition to continuing to drive innovation because of this unique partnership around powerful security encryption and overall security benefits across the board. So that includes AWS gov cloud. That includes HIPAA compliance, includes FedRAMP, as well as SOC two type two, certifications as well and protection there. So we're going to continue to drive that innovation. We just recently announced as well that we now have data protection for Kubernetes, 100% cloud offering, right? One of the most active and growing workloads around data, around orchestration platform, right? So, doing that with AWS, some of my opening comments back when we built this 100% AWS, that allows us to continue to innovate and be nimble and meet the needs of customers. So whether that be VMware workloads NAS workloads, new workloads, like Kubernetes we're always going to be well positioned to address those, not only over time, but on the front end. And as these emerging technologies come out the nimbleness of our joint partnership just continues to be demonstrated there. >> And Sabina, I know that AWS has a working backwards approach. Talk to me about how you use that to accomplish all of the things that Chris and you both described over the last six, seven plus years. >> Yes, so the working backwards process we use it internally when we build our own services, but we also worked through it with our partners, right? It's about putting the customers first, aligning on those use cases. And it all goes back to our Amazon leadership principle on customer obsession, focusing on the customer experience, making sure that we have mechanisms in place, to have feedback from the customers and operate that into our services solutions and also with our partners. Well, one of the nice things about Druva since I've been working with them since 2014 is their focus on customer obsession. Through this process, we've developed great relationship, Druva, together with our service team, building solutions that deliver value by providing a full Saas service for customers, who want to protect their data, not only in AWS, but also in a hybrid architecture model on premises. And this is really critical to us cause our customers want us to work with Druva, to solve the pain points, creating a completely maybe a new customer experience, right. That makes them happy. And ultimately what we have found together with Druva, is I think Chris would agree with this, is that when we focus on our mutual customers, it leads to a very longterm successful partnership as we have today with Druva. >> It sounds like you talked about that feedback loop in the beginning from customers, but it sounds like that's really intertwined the entire relationship. And certainly from what you guys described in terms of the evolution, the customer successes, and all of the things that have been announced recently, a lot of stuff going on. So we'll let you guys get back to work. We appreciate your time, Chris. Thank you for joining me today. For Chris white and Sabina Joseph, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE. (soft music fades)

>>Hello. I'm Professor Toru Suzuki Cherif cardiovascular medicine on associate dean of the College of Life Sciences at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, where I'm also director of the Lester Life Sciences accelerator. I'm also honorary consultant cardiologist within our university hospitals. It's part of the national health system NHS Trust. Today, I'd like to talk to you about our Lester Clinical Data Science Initiative. Now brief background on Lester. It's university in hospitals. Lester is in the center of England. The national health system is divided depending on the countries. The United Kingdom, which is comprised of, uh, England, Scotland to the north, whales to the west and Northern Ireland is another part in a different island. But national health system of England is what will be predominantly be discussed. Today has a history of about 70 years now, owing to the fact that we're basically in the center of England. Although this is only about one hour north of London, we have a catchment of about 100 miles, which takes us from the eastern coast of England, bordering with Birmingham to the west north just south of Liverpool, Manchester and just south to the tip of London. We have one of the busiest national health system trust in the United Kingdom, with a catchment about 100 miles and one million patients a year. Our main hospital, the General Hospital, which is actually called the Royal Infirmary, which can has an accident and emergency, which means Emergency Department is that has one of the busiest emergency departments in the nation. I work at Glen Field Hospital, which is one of the main cardiovascular hospitals of the United Kingdom and Europe. Academically, the Medical School of the University of Leicester is ranked 20th in the world on Lee, behind Cambridge, Oxford Imperial College and University College London. For the UK, this is very research. Waited, uh, ranking is Therefore we are very research focused universities as well for the cardiovascular research groups, with it mainly within Glenn Field Hospital, we are ranked as the 29th Independent research institution in the world which places us. A Suffield waited within our group. As you can see those their top ranked this is regardless of cardiology, include institutes like the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute. Mitt Welcome Trust Sanger, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Kemble, Cold Spring Harbor and as a hospital we rank within ah in this field in a relatively competitive manner as well. Therefore, we're very research focused. Hospital is well now to give you the unique selling points of Leicester. We're we're the largest and busiest national health system trust in the United Kingdom, but we also have a very large and stable as well as ethnically diverse population. The population ranges often into three generations, which allows us to do a lot of cohort based studies which allows us for the primary and secondary care cohorts, lot of which are well characterized and focused on genomics. In the past. We also have a biomedical research center focusing on chronic diseases, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health Research, which funds clinical research the hospitals of United Kingdom on we also have a very rich regional life science cluster, including med techs and small and medium sized enterprises. Now for this, the bottom line is that I am the director of the letter site left Sciences accelerator, >>which is tasked with industrial engagement in the local national sectors but not excluding the international sectors as well. Broadly, we have academics and clinicians with interest in health care, which includes science and engineering as well as non clinical researchers. And prior to the cove it outbreak, the government announced the £450 million investment into our university hospitals, which I hope will be going forward now to give you a brief background on where the scientific strategy the United Kingdom lies. Three industrial strategy was brought out a za part of the process which involved exiting the European Union, and part of that was the life science sector deal. And among this, as you will see, there were four grand challenges that were put in place a I and data economy, future of mobility, clean growth and aging society and as a medical research institute. A lot of the focus that we have been transitioning with within my group are projects are focused on using data and analytics using artificial intelligence, but also understanding how chronic diseases evolved as part of the aging society, and therefore we will be able to address these grand challenges for the country. Additionally, the national health system also has its long term plans, which we align to. One of those is digitally enabled care and that this hope you're going mainstream over the next 10 years. And to do this, what is envision will be The clinicians will be able to access and interact with patient records and care plants wherever they are with ready access to decision support and artificial intelligence, and that this will enable predictive techniques, which include linking with clinical genomic as well as other data supports, such as image ing a new medical breakthroughs. There has been what's called the Topol Review that discusses the future of health care in the United Kingdom and preparing the health care workforce for the delivery of the digital future, which clearly discusses in the end that we would be using automated image interpretation. Is using artificial intelligence predictive analytics using artificial intelligence as mentioned in the long term plans. That is part of that. We will also be engaging natural language processing speech recognition. I'm reading the genome amusing. Genomic announced this as well. We are in what is called the Midland's. As I mentioned previously, the Midland's comprised the East Midlands, where we are as Lester, other places such as Nottingham. We're here. The West Midland involves Birmingham, and here is ah collective. We are the Midlands. Here we comprise what is called the Midlands engine on the Midland's engine focuses on transport, accelerating innovation, trading with the world as well as the ultra connected region. And therefore our work will also involve connectivity moving forward. And it's part of that. It's part of our health care plans. We hope to also enable total digital connectivity moving forward and that will allow us to embrace digital data as well as collectivity. These three key words will ah Linkous our health care systems for the future. Now, to give you a vision for the future of medicine vision that there will be a very complex data set that we will need to work on, which will involve genomics Phanom ICS image ing which will called, uh oh mix analysis. But this is just meaning that is, uh complex data sets that we need to work on. This will integrate with our clinical data Platforms are bioinformatics, and we'll also get real time information of physiology through interfaces and wearables. Important for this is that we have computing, uh, processes that will now allow this kind of complex data analysis in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning based applications to allow visualization Analytics, which could be out, put it through various user interfaces to the clinician and others. One of the characteristics of the United Kingdom is that the NHS is that we embrace data and captured data from when most citizens have been born from the cradle toe when they die to the grave. And it's important that we were able to link this data up to understand the journey of that patient. Over time. When they come to hospital, which is secondary care data, we will get disease data when they go to their primary care general practitioner, we will be able to get early check up data is Paula's follow monitoring monitoring, but also social care data. If this could be linked, allow us to understand how aging and deterioration as well as frailty, uh, encompasses thes patients. And to do this, we have many, many numerous data sets available, including clinical letters, blood tests, more advanced tests, which is genetics and imaging, which we can possibly, um, integrate into a patient journey which will allow us to understand the digital journey of that patient. I have called this the digital twin patient cohort to do a digital simulation of patient health journeys using data integration and analytics. This is a technique that has often been used in industrial manufacturing to understand the maintenance and service points for hardware and instruments. But we would be using this to stratify predict diseases. This'll would also be monitored and refined, using wearables and other types of complex data analysis to allow for, in the end, preemptive intervention to allow paradigm shifting. How we undertake medicine at this time, which is more reactive rather than proactive as infrastructure we are presently working on putting together what's it called the Data Safe haven or trusted research environment? One which with in the clinical environment, the university hospitals and curated and data manner, which allows us to enable data mining off the databases or, I should say, the trusted research environment within the clinical environment. Hopefully, we will then be able to anonymous that to allow ah used by academics and possibly also, uh, partnering industry to do further data mining and tool development, which we could then further field test again using our real world data base of patients that will be continually, uh, updating in our system. In the cardiovascular group, we have what's called the bricks cohort, which means biomedical research. Informatics Center for Cardiovascular Science, which was done, started long time even before I joined, uh, in 2010 which has today almost captured about 10,000 patients arm or who come through to Glenn Field Hospital for various treatments or and even those who have not on. We asked for their consent to their blood for genetics, but also for blood tests, uh, genomics testing, but also image ing as well as other consent. Hable medical information s so far there about 10,000 patients and we've been trying to extract and curate their data accordingly. Again, a za reminder of what the strengths of Leicester are. We have one of the largest and busiest trust with the very large, uh, patient cohort Ah, focused dr at the university, which allows for chronic diseases such as heart disease. I just mentioned our efforts on heart disease, uh which are about 10,000 patients ongoing right now. But we would wish thio include further chronic diseases such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, renal disease and further to understand the multi modality between these diseases so that we can understand how they >>interact as well. Finally, I like to talk about the lesser life science accelerator as well. This is a new project that was funded by >>the U started this January for three years. I'm the director for this and all the groups within the College of Life Sciences that are involved with healthcare but also clinical work are involved. And through this we hope to support innovative industrial partnerships and collaborations in the region, a swells nationally and further on into internationally as well. I realized that today is a talked to um, or business and commercial oriented audience. And we would welcome interest from your companies and partners to come to Leicester toe work with us on, uh, clinical health care data and to drive our agenda forward for this so that we can enable innovative research but also product development in partnership with you moving forward. Thank you for your time.

>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the cube covering a Cronus global cyber summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >>So Ron, welcome back to the keeps coverage of kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier here in Miami beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, vice president, general manager of the Americas in sales and customer relationships. Get Debbie Juan. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami beach. Lovely place to have an event. So I hear ya. You got a lot of competition going on between the U S America's in the AMIA teens and it's very competitive group. >> The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruited very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a finger too. You've got a big soccer story there. We do. Yeah. We've, uh, we've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Uh, some of the first partnerships we had were actually within formula one. >>And we really try to correlate the story of the importance of, uh, data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A formula one car generates between, you know, two and three terabyte through three gigabytes of data on every lap, tons of telemetry devices that are kicked, collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the, the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, uh, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, 10th in a qualifying session. On the soccer side. We do have some partnerships with uh, arsenal, Manchester city, inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. >>So we are very popping in that space here in the U S we have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big Boston red Sox fan, being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the red Sox, which has been an unbelievable partnership with them. And learning more about the use cases that they solve and using our technology has been really cool. >> You know, Patty, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we on camera around the trading, you know how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, merchandise for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind. But now with the consumerization of it and digital can go back to 2007 since the mobile phone. >>Really, I mean it's iPhone. Yeah. Since that time, sports and capsulates every aspect of it, consumer business fan experience. And it really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IOT problem opportunity. So it really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's, that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of, uh, of data in the, in the world today, sports have different unique challenges. So obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Um, for us it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas of, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. >>So, you know, the red Sox for example, they've got Fenway park and iconic stadium, you know, the Mecca of baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out, give me a call, we'll try and get you set up there. But, um, you know, the, the, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experienced there. Right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games that Fenway park, it could be a concert that they're having. A phone buys a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talked to their I-Team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about uh, different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. >>Obviously with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity or helping them to address other challenges that they face. Um, as an organization, these are realtime challenges in their physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks could happen. There are venues, there are public gathering places too. Absolutely. We announced our partnership with them back in may and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Kronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. They started talking about drone technology and I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies in the stadium. Maybe at breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pitchers to be out there on the Hill or an interest, a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out. >>And that's red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cybersecurity threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lightened incendiary device in the, in the stadium and that to them as a real security server. And that's frontline for the it guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah. And that's really an attack take time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers, cause you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform as an end to end component too. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out, but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you've seen in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view of the data? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backups dead, right? We have, we've combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world of cybersecurity and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. Uh, you need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call 'em, the Kronos cyber platform. And what this is, is a unique, multi-tiered multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 servers, providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for are for a multiple different aspects. And usually the beachhead has something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solutions, a lot of different players in the game out there, but they take it a step further, use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. >>They can do files, they can share, they can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now, this whole suite of cybersecurity solutions, all of this is with a single pane of glass, one platform that of a service provider can go in and work with their customers and make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines are virtual machines, they're PCs, their Macs are all protected, that data's protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of you can take your data wrapping a nice bow buried a hundred feet underground, but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually, uh, leverage the technology there. Um, we've seen explosive growth, especially in, in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the U S has served in some capacity by a service provider. >>And this could be a small to medium size business that's served by local service fire to those really big guys that are out there. Let's on with how large your target audience, you mentioned search probably multiple times when you're out selling your target persona, your target audience, and you're trying to reach into, so we touch, everybody know, you equate it to kind of what we do with the red Sox, right? You walk into that city and the 38,000 people that, well, some of those people are just, you know, regular Joe's, right? They, they go to work every day. They have a computer at home, they have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them a consumer. Slash. Prosumers. We work at a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. >>You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it and you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. You work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the, you know the, the explosion of IOT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises, so some of the, the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standing up standardizing on Acronis process control process automation vendors are using our Chronis and we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees so we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. >>They might not want to be in an Uber cloud, they might not want to work with Chrome OS data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality and then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give you an example of a service provider. You mentioned the red size, I'm assuming is that a vendor that might be working within that organization, but still it sounds like that's a supplier to the red Sox. How, how broad is that definition? It gives us many points. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. Look, can be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you've, you're probably familiar with. >>We work with, uh, we work with, uh, telco providers who work with ISV providers or sorry, ISP providers, um, kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services all the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business, maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees, they're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers and they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use complete solution to their customers. Uh, those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. Um, we have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctor's offices. Uh, and the, the beauty of that, and I was getting the partners earlier, is we have partnerships with companies like ConnectWise where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. >>So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's the typical typical platform. So you have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or can ISV or someone within your ecosystem is that they get that. Right? Absolutely. And that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that plat, into our platform, into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. Um, the integrations that we have with these partners like ConnectWise, like Ingram micro, really differentiate us because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. >>You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on premise has changed to a much more agile dev ops kind of mindset that forced it to think like a service provider. I think like an operating system, it's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity to just integrate solution because you could get into anything and you got ISV to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation, or it could be a large enterprise, it has a huge IOT opportunity or challenge or a service provider is looking at having a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm the one of those customers? >>Say, Hey Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a, you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets that Kronos has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back room. Was building good technologies that our partners were able to use. Um, we look at it a lot of different ways. I mentioned our go to market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different um, kind of routes for those. The way we deliver our solution. It provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to um, you know, a VAR or a service, right? It's delivering services. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. >>So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any colo capabilities. We provide data centers so they could have a very quick turnkey solution, allows them to get up and running with their business, selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises where we can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America and they're starting to look at their businesses differently. Say, I gotta adapt or die here. I gotta figure out what my next business model is. >>How am I going to be the next one that's in the news flash that says, Hey, they've been acquired, or Hey Thoma Bravo made a big investment in me. Right? They need to convert to this services business or Kronos enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer, they want to maybe add something they could bring into it or have high service gross profits around services. Absolutely. So, yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that allows partners to sell multiple offerings to, you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your it team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. Um, you're reducing the amount of churn for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you. >>That's a good thing. Uh, and beyond that, your increasing ARPU, average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at. And these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, it gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment look at at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things, money, profit and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps to have them want to have a lot of one offs and a lot of, you know, training, you know, anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources, they're not going to like a, it's also great to have events like this where you're able to, to press the flesh with these guys and, and being face to face and understand their real world challenges that they're dealing with on a daily basis. >>How has the sport's a solution set that you've been involved in? How has that changed the culture of Acronis? Is that, has that, has that changed as, you know, sports is fun. People love sports, they have real problems. It's a really great use case as well. How's that change the culture? It's been amazing. I, so one from a branding perspective, we are a lot more recognized, right? Um, the most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So, you know, we've got the red Sox here with us today. We've got arsenal represented, we've got Williams, we've got Roush racing, we've got a NASCAR car back here. Um, they use our technology on a daily basis and for each one of them we solve different types of use cases. Whether it's sending them large amount of video data from an essence studio over to Fenway park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? >>A lot of these different use cases, you can call them right back to a small business owner. You don't have to be a multibillion dollar sports organization with the same challenge. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of tech to they bring our set. We do let the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you in all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there and that, that's a big part of it. You mentioned one of ours looking for what our partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a, of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen and they're very anything, I don't know anything about cars. >>We started partnering with formula one. All of a sudden I know everything about 41 I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars and I ended up being the, the subject matter export for him over over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We'd love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us, it really is something that, um, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles. It's not traveling as a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people owning away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Just the cube coverage here at the Chronis global cyber summit 2019 I'm John furry. More coverage after this short break.

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of dot. Next Nutanix. We are here in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Karen Openshaw. She is the head of engineering at Zen intranet and Justin fielder, the CTO at Zen internet. Thank you both so much for your first timers on the cube. So welcome. We're gonna. We're really excited to have you. Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about Zen internet, who, who you are, what you're all about. >>Yeah, sure. So, um, Zen is um, a UK based where up in near Manchester, um, managed service provider. Um, we turned over this year about 76 million pounds, um, which is, um, a great achievement for us that spout. Um, that's double digit growth we've had for the last few years. So we're really starting to motor as a business. Um, we employ about 550 people. Um, we have about 150,000 customers split across retail, um, indirect. So we have a very big channel business. We have a wholesale business where we sell our infrastructure, um, that then other people productize and put into, um, solutions for their customers. And then we have a corporate business, which is where Nutanix really comes in. Um, so we offer managed services both in networking, um, hosting the value added services that are required to make all of that safe and secure and, um, a solution for a corporate. Great. >>So managed service provider, uh, your company has been around for quite awhile. Predates when everyone was talking about cloud. Maybe give us a kind of the update today as to where you really see yourself fitting. What differentiates your, uh, your, your company in the marketplace? >>So I suppose, um, I mean Karen can add sort of what her team does, but I suppose the, the big difference is Zen is a very people first company. So Richard Tang, our founder, he founded the company nearly 25 years ago. Um, he stated publicly, he's never going to sell it. It's, it's, it's a, it's a very, very people orientated company, which of course has great, um, affinity to Newtanics his own, um, people first values. And fundamentally we believe that we always want to do the right thing for the customer even if that is difficult. Um, and so I still do whatever you want to say about, you know, how you pick up some of the, the, the hardness about keeping up with customers. >>Yeah. So we have customers that come to us asking for things that we don't necessarily sell at the time. And uh, we, we put quite a lot of effort into adapting our products at the time to deliver them what they need. Um, some of those challenging conversations can be about making sure the customer is getting the right product for what they want. So understanding what they need, making sure that we can support them not only in taking that product, but coming onto the product in the first place. And that's what we use a lot of our Nutanix infrastructure for. >>Good. Can you maybe, can you dig us in a little bit? Do you know, what does Nutanix enable for your business that ultimately then has an impact on your ultimate end user? >>It's done two things for us. So the first is our it operations. So we've been on a journey, I guess over the last three, four years, consolidating all our legacy and um, physical 10 onto virtual, uh, services. We've used Nutanix to do that. So with, with collated all of our services, we've got about 90 odd percent of all our legacy services on that it infrastructure now. So operationally it saves us a lot of time, effort, uh, costs, et cetera, much more reliable as well. But conversely to that, we also use it for our, our products offerings as well. So we used to be, um, managed hosting where a customer would come, give us a spec and we'd, we'd go and build a physical server hosted in our data center, host their applications on there, support them with that. We don't really do that anymore. We now use Nutanix as our hosting environment. So we've reduced our environmental footprint, we've reduced the amount of space that we need in a data center. And the power that we put through there again, operating that is, is it's easier for us because we can consolidate where the skills are from in terms of both it ops and in terms of the infrastructure for the managed services as well. >>One of the things that you said Justin, is that you're very people first company and that really fits in well with the culture at Nutanix. Can you, can you riff on that a little bit and just describe what it is to be working so closely with a company like Nutanix and how important it is that your cultures mesh? >>Yeah, sure. Um, I mean Nutanix has been part of Zen for, for many, many years. Um, and you know, we work in Israel, watched this industry for 25 years. Nothing stands still, literally nothing stands still. And therefore whatever you fought was a good idea last year, probably is now the worst possible idea because there's some great new idea. And I think it's that pace of change. And so what we've really found with Nutanix is as, as they've got to know us and we've got to know them and they can see that we're starting to really be able to take some solutions to the market that really resonate the, what they've done is they've literally embedded their people in our company. So we have, um, our systems engineers or account managers, they come up to our offices, they sit down, they understand our people, they understand where we're trying to go, they understand our propositions. >>And this is a journey for Nutanix. I mean Nutanix in the MSP land is not where it really, where they started. They started like Karen just said like we use them. That's actually where we started was Oh my God, I've got a thousand servers or this is just too much. Yeah, it's too much hassle to try and segment it yourself. Um, and it, it, it's that, it's that sort of hypervisor of hypervisors of hypervisors type approach. It just makes it easier. But conversely, it's therefore really important that you work out how take that value proposition to a customer. Because if you can't explain it, cause it's so easy, how do they know where, whether this is going to solve their problems. So that's been a fantastic part. Nutanix, it's really the Nutanix team felt like the Zen team and they're saying that they also feel the same. >>So you know, things like nothing ever goes 100% right. But it's always, you know who to call. They're all work because you've got that personal relationship and that's really important to us. >> It's more than that. So what we found with the Nutanix guys is that they'll help us fix problems that aren't necessarily Nutanix problems as well. So that's something we don't get from any of the, uh, of our suppliers. It's normally, no, that's nothing to do with me. You need to phone someone else, get support on that. It's done. It's guys will, they'll bring in their own experts on that particular combo and they'll support us through that. So that's good. >> At six speaks very much to the partnership that you're saying. They're not just a supplier of a product to you. Um, no, no. When I talked to the customer base, one of the biggest challenges and you know, any company has these days is a really understanding their application portfolio. >>What needs to change, what needs to stay the same, you know, Microsoft pushing everybody to office three 65, you know, changed a lot of companies out there. You know, what do I Salsify, what do I put in managed service provider? What do I just, you know, build natively in the public cloud. Can you bring us through kind of, you know, what you're seeing at your customer base and you know, where, where that does interact with the journey that Nutanix is bringing people on? Yeah, I mean maybe I can say that like the, all of our customers are on a journey, um, and they need help. They seriously need help for the, exactly. That reason that you've said. Um, I mean, this is, this is my, this is my job to understand this stuff. That's, that's what a CTO of an MSP is required to do. Um, the problem is is if you're a CIO of, we were really good in construction, you can revolutionize the construction in C by the application of it, particularly during the sales cycle. You know, the ability to VR walk through, you know, argument or, all of that sort of really cool stuff. >>And then you've got a thousand sub-contractors that you're trying to manage from an it perspective. And that juxtaposition of the problem is really problematic I think for a lot of people. And so what we've done is we said the first step you can do is just take what you've got and get rid of the management overhead. That's the easiest, simplest, straightforward. And some of the Nutanix, the sort of lift and shift capability that has got that, they will go and inspect a work load somewhere else. They will work out what resources are required for it. They will pick it up and then we'll move it. And we've had some fantastic success of our customers. They're, they're, they're our greatest advocates. They just say, Oh my God, it just happened one day it was over that and next day it was over there. Um, and then you can start to analyze what that is, what's happening. >>And that's where we can really add value because this is not as simple as just an application because it's about your security posture. It's about your Dar requirements. It's about what, what your appetite for risk versus reward versus cost. And that's really hard to do when you don't have the simple thing which is there, which is, Oh, that serve, that piece of tin costs me $10,000 and therefore you can work that out yourself. So I think the key to all of this is giving tools to the end users so that the CIO in that company and their it team so that they can make those choices in collaboration with an MSP like us. Um, and that goes back to what you were saying. It's about, you know, when we hit problems, we might not even know there's a problem before we've hit it. And therefore having Nutanix deeply embedded within us is really important to them. Being able to go back to the customer and sometimes to the customer, you actually have to go, what are you doing that isn't going to work in the longterm? >>And, and, and as you said, you also have to provide the value so that the customer understands what they're actually getting to in terms of a customer's future needs are we are living in this multicloud world. How are we, how would you describe the customer mindset and how are you coming in with solutions that work for the customer and then having to break that, break the news to them on occasion that what on earth are you trying to do here? This is not gonna work. >>Yeah, we have a few, um, interesting. I sort of like, okay, are you going or am I going to tell them? You know, and I actually can tell, I always send Karen, I'll be going. He doesn't. Um, I, I think it, it's, and, and this is where I think we weren't really, well, you know, it is about what is going on. Karen. Work with your engineering teams. Try and understand deeply actually what is going, why is it not a good idea to do that? And that's the, that's the thing. Once you're going to explain why most of it, Oh God, thank God for that. Finally someone's telling me why what I'm trying to achieve isn't the best way to do it. Because I think a lot of, a lot of people's just sort of, you know, it's a bit buzzwordy and they just think that they need to do this. And you know, it's, I mean, talk about, you know, the journey we've been through. Just sort of how do we move stuff onto there? What's that for years. I mean, you know, it's a huge amount of work. Carry any, any lessons learned maybe that you could do it for one 50 years. >>Are there any that I could repeat here as practices? Okay. It is, I think one of the biggest challenges is the, the reskilling of your teams. So I'm guessing everybody, first of all, to understand this, this bright new future that you're moving into. And then getting them trained upon it and training is >>not just going and sitting in a classroom. It's going and working on this thing and seeing problems occur and understanding how to fix them. That's the, that's the biggest problem that we, that we probably went through. I guess we want our customers to not have that though. So we, we want them to give us the, their work loads in there. It will solve that for them and that that's where we wanna we want to take it, I think in the future, helping them understand what they can do with cloud. So we, we don't just do private cloud, we do public cloud as well. So we could introduce um, opportunities and concepts from a public cloud perspective as well. Um, that will, that will, AWS is a, is a really good one and we are looking at other providers as well, so we help customers solve their problems, whatever that problem is. >>One of the things that's so salient about Zen internet is that it has a really strong culture. You said it's a people, people first culture, but it's also a very diverse culture. Uh, bringing in multiple perspectives, uh, women in technology, LGBTQ, uh, other races. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to work at a diverse company and how it changes how you think about problems and go about solving, >>solving them? Yeah, I guess it's a good question. I guess working in a company we're not as diverse as we'd like to be. We were not where we're at in terms of balancing out the number of women in the tech roles in particular. Um, and, and the diversity. If we give everybody a voice, which is the main thing, then uh, we will see a more, a more wide range in set of inputs there. So, um, developing our teams, high performing teams, you need that mixture of input there, not just about women by the way. It's about, it's about, we have a private zone network for example, where we try to ensure that diverse diversity and diverse people feel included in what we do as a business and work as well and have an opportunity to have an input into that. So where does it add for us? >>I guess people just think differently when they're from different cultural backgrounds. They're from different, um, different nationalities, different, um, races I guess different sexuality, different gender. They've all got different life experiences. So solving problems is probably the main thing that you get the benefit from that. And this industry is full of people trying to solve problems, um, and bring in diverse teams, not just about women in tech. Cause w we saw three women speaking this morning or the keynote, which was fantastic to see. Um, but it is about the diversity as well. So, uh, innovation is the key there, I guess. And I think, I think it's, it's not just about your staff. Um, if you've got the ability to think differently, that applies for out >>the entire ecosystem. Um, and you, you know, you can, you can take a different view. So we work very closely with the TM forum because you know, that that's sort of our industry and it's the sort of the, the, the whole application stack about how you approach that. And the TM forum of have really done some fantastic research that that now proves that the output is different if you have a diverse input. And that I think for our customers is really different. It's really important because then it's different. We're not one of the big guys. We're not BT, we're not Deutsche Telekom, we're not, you know, we're not one of these people. We think differently. We act differently, we behave differently. We have a different approach and the people first, I mean, you know, that doesn't mean we're, you know, we're, we're just here for a good fun time. >>We're here to drive this business forward, to try to generate profitability that we can reverse back in the business to enable us to get onto bigger and greater things. And we've got a five year plan which will see us, you know, at least double revenues quite happily. And we've very confident now that we can execute that. Assuming we can get that diversity in the business. And it's a huge challenge. It's how do you reach out to those people? How do you use the right language? How do you overcome unconscious bias? Yeah, that's a massive thing and it's great. Again, it Newtanics just resonates with us. Just some of the little stickers around that they are diverse, they've got different representations of people and it shows that someone has fought about that and that will resonate. And it's always the classic thing that, you know, you do something wrong once people remember it forever. You do a hundred things right. People won't even notice it. And that's the, that's the type of approach. So, um, for us, we, you know, we think it's a really exciting bear and it's something that the entire executive at Zen are absolutely focused on is getting this right because we know it will secure off. >>It'll make all the difference. Great. Justin and Karen, thank you so much for coming on the cube. That's great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of.next from Copenhagen.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by the M Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. Live Cube coverage of the emerald 2019 were here in San Francisco, California Mosconi North Lobby. Two sets Our 10th year covering the emerald in our 20th year of Of of our seasons of covering Me to be enterprised Tech. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte student Justin Warren breaking down day to Cube insights segment. Dave's Do You Do You're on Set Valley set this the meadow set because it's got the steamboat chirping birds behind us. Justin, you've been doing some interviews out on the floor as well. Checking the story's out. All the news is out. Day one was all the big corporate stuff. Today was the product technology news stew. I'll go to you first. What's the assessment on your take on the M, where obviously they're reinventing themselves? Jerry Chen, who we interviewed, said this is Act three of'em where they keep on adding more and more prostitute their core, your thoughts on what's going on. >> So the biggest whore I've seen is the discussion of Tom Zoo, which really talking those cloud native applications. And if you break down VM wear, it's like many companies that said, There's the, you know, core product of the company. It is vey sphere. It is the legacy for what we have and it's not going anywhere, and it's changing. But, you know, then there's the modernization project Pacific howto a bridge to the multi cloud world. How do I bridge Kubernetes is going to come into the sphere and do that? But then there's the application world into the thing I've been. You know, the existential threat to VM, where I've been talking about forever is if we sas if I and cloud If I and all the APS go away, the data centers disappear in Vienna, where dominant, the data center is left out in the cold. So, you know, Pivotal was driving down that that path. They've done a lot of acquisitions, so love directionally where towns who's going time will tell whether they can play in that market. This is not a developer conference. We go to plenty of developer events, so, you know, that's you know, some of the places. I see you know, and and still, you know, >> narrator conference. You're right. Exactly Right. And just I want to get your thoughts, too, because you've been blocking heavily on this topic as well. Dev Ops in general, commenting on the Cube. You know, the reality and the reality, Uh, and the reality of situation from the the announcement. That's a vapor. They're doing some demos. They're really product directions. So product directions is always with VM. Where does it? It's not something that their shameful love, that's what they do. That's what they put out. It's not bakery >> company. It's a statement, A statement of >> direction. We were talking hybrid cloud in 2012 when I asked Pet guess it was a halfway house. He blew a gasket. And now, five years later, the gestation period for hybrid was that. But the end was happy to have the data center back in the back. In the play here, your thoughts on >> Yeah. So this conference is is, I think, a refreshing return to form. So, Vienna, where is as you say, this is an operators conference in Vienna. Where is for operators? It's not Four Dev's. There was a period there where cloud was scary And it was all this cloud native stuff in Vienna where tried to appeal to this new market, I guess tried to dress up and as something that it really wasn't and it didn't pull it off and we didn't It didn't feel right. And now Veum Way has decided that Well, no, actually, this is what they and where is about. And no one could be more Veum where than VM wear. So it's returning to being its best self. And I think you >> can software. They know software >> they know. So flick. So the addition of putting predict Enzo in and having communities in there, and it's to operate the software. So it's it's going to be in there an actual run on it, and they wanna have kubernetes baked into the sphere. So that now, yeah, we'll have new a new absent. Yeah, there might be SAS eps for the people who are consuming them, but they're gonna run somewhere. And now we could run them on van. Wait. Whether it's on Silent at the edge could be in the cloud your Veum wear on eight of us. >> David David so I want to get your thoughts just don't want to jump into because, you know, I love pivotal what they've done. I've always felt as a standalone company they probably couldn't compete with Amazon to scale what's going on in the other things. But bring it back in the fold in VM, where you mentioned this a couple of our interviews yesterday, Dave, and still you illuminate to to the fact of the cloud native world coming together. It's better inside VM wear because they can package pivotal and not have to bet the ranch on the outcome in the marketplace where this highly competitive statements out there so you get the business value of Pivotal. The upside now can be managed. Do your thoughts first, then go to date >> about Pivotal. Yeah, as >> an integrated, integrated is better for the industry than trying to bet the ranch on a pier play >> right? So, John, yesterday we had a little discussion about hybrid and multi cloud and still early about there, but the conversation of past five years ago was very different from the discussion. Today, Docker had a ripple effect with Containers and Veum. Where is addressing that and it made sense for Pivotal Cut to come home, if you will. They still have the Pivotal Labs group that can work with customers going through that transformation and a number of other pieces toe put together. But you ve m where is doing a good enough job to give customers the comfort that we can move you forward to the cloud. You don't have to abandon us and especially all those people that do VM Where is they don't have to be frozen where they are >> a business value. >> Well, I think you've got to start with the transaction and provide a historical context. So this goes back to what I used to call the misfit toys. The Federation. David Golden's taking bits and pieces of of of Dragon Pearl of assets in side of E, M. C and V M wear and then creating Pivotal out of whole cloth. They need an I P O. Michael Dell maintained 70% ownership of the company and 96% voting shares floated. The stock stock didn't do well, bought it back on 50 cents on the dollar. A so what the AIPO price was and then took a of Got a Brit, brought back a $4 billion asset inside of the M wear and paid $900 million for it. So it's just the brilliant financial transaction now, having said all that, what is the business value of this? You know, when I come to these shows, I'd liketo compare what they say in the messaging and the keynotes to what practitioners are saying in the practitioners last night were saying a couple of things. First of all, they're concerned about all the salmon. A like one. Practitioners said to me, Look, if it weren't for all these acquisitions that they announced last minute, what would we be hearing about here? It would have been NSX and V san again, so there's sort of a little concerns there. Some of the practitioners I talked to were really concerned about integration. They've done a good job with Nasasira, but some of the other acquisitions that they may have taken longer to integrate and customers are concerned, and we've seen this movie before. We saw the DMC. We certainly saw the tell. We're seeing it again now, at the end where Veum where? Well, they're very good at integrating companies. Sometimes that catches up to you. The last thing I'll say is we've been pushing You just mentioned it, Justin. On Dev's not a deaf show. Pivotal gives VM where the opportunity to whether it's a different show are an event within the event to actually attract the depths. But I would say in the multi cloud world, VM wears sitting in a good position. With the exception of developers pivotal, I think it's designed to solve that problem. Just tell >> your thoughts. >> Do you think that Veum, where is, is at risk of becoming a portfolio company just like a M A. M. C. Watts? Because it certainly looks at the moment to me like we look at all the different names for things, and I just look at the brand architecture of stuff. There are too many brands. There are too many product names, it's too confusing, and there's gonna have to be a culottes some point just to make it understandable for customers. Otherwise, we're just gonna end up with this endless sprawl, and we saw what the damage that did it. At present, I am saying >> it's a great point and Joseph Joe to cheese used to say that overlap is better than gaps, and I and I agree with him to appoint, you know better until it's not. And then Michael Dell came in and Bar came and said, Look, if we're gonna compete with Amazon's cost structure, we have to clean this mess up and that's what they've been doing it a lot of hard work on that. And so, yeah, they do risk that. I think if they don't do that integration, it's hard to do that. Integration, as you know, it takes time. Um, and so I have Right now. All looks good, right? Right down the middle. As you say, John, are >> multi cloud. Big topic gestation period is going to take five years to seven years. When the reality multi cloud a debate on Twitter last night, someone saying, I'm doing multi cloud today. I mean, we had Gelsinger's layout, the definition of multi cloud. >> Well, he laid out his definition definition. Everyone likes to define its. It's funny how, and we mentioned this is a stew and I earlier on the other set, cloud were still arguing about what cloud means exit always at multi cloud, which kind of multi cloud is a hybrid bowl over. And then you compare that to EJ computing, which computing was always going on. And then someone just came along and gave it a name and everyone just went, huh? OK, and go on with their lives. And so why is cloud so different and difficult for people to agree on what the thing is? >> There's a lot of money being made and lost, That's why >> right day the thing I've said is for multi cloud to be a real thing, it needs to be more valuable to a customer than the sum of its pieces on. And, you know, we know we're gonna be an Amazon reinvent later this year we will be talking, you know? Well, they will not be talking multi cloud. We might be talking about it, but >> they'll be hinting to hybrid cloud may or may not say >> that, you know, hybrid is okay in their world with outpost and everything they're doing in there partnering with VM wear. But you know, the point I've been looking at here is you know, management of multi vendor was atrocious. And, you know, why do we think we're going to any better. David, who hired me nine years ago. It was like I could spend my entire career saying, Management stinks and security needs to be, >> you know, So I want to share lawyers definition. They published in Wicked Bon on Multiply Multi Cloud Hybrid Cloudy, Putting together True Hybrid Cloud Multiply Any application application service can run on any node of the hybrid cloud without rewriting, re compiling or retesting. True hybrid cloud architectures have a consistent set of hardware. Software service is a P I is with integrated network security data and control planes that are native to and display the characteristics of public cloud infrastructure is a service. These attributes could be identically resident on other hybrid nodes independent of location, for example, including on public clouds on Prem or at the edge. That ain't happening. It's just not unless you have considered outposts cloud a customer azure stack. Okay, and you're gonna have collections of those. So that vision that he laid out, I just I think it's gonna >> be David. It's interesting because, you know, David and I have some good debates on this. I said, Tell me a company that has been better at than VM wear about taking a stack and letting it live on multiple hardware's. You know, I've got some of those cars are at a big piece last weekend talking about, you know, when we had to check the bios of everything and when blade Service rolled out getting Veum whereto work 15 years ago was really tough. Getting Veum were to work today, but the >> problem is you're gonna have outposts. You're gonna have project dimensions installed. You're gonna have azure stacks installed. You're gonna have roll your own out there. And so yeah, VM where is gonna work on all >> those? And it's not gonna be a static situation because, you know, when I talk to customers and if they're using V M where cloud on AWS, it's not a lift and shift and leave it there, Gonna modernize their things that could start using service is from the public cloud and they might migrate some of these off of the VM where environment, which I think, is the thing that I am talking to customers and hearing about that It's, you know, none of these situations are Oh, I just put it there and it's gonna live there for years. It's constantly moving and changing, and that is a major threat to VM wears multi clouds, >> Traffic pushes. Is it technically feasible without just insanely high degrees of homogeneity? That's that's the question. >> I I don't think it is and or not. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect anyway, because any enterprise you have any M and a activity, and all of a sudden you've got more than one that's always been true, and it will always be true. So if someone else makes a different choice and you buy them, then we'll have both. >> So maybe that's not a fair definition, but that's kind of what what? One could infer that. I think the industry is implying that that is hybrid multi club because that's the nirvana that everybody wants. >> Yeah, the only situation I can see where that could maybe come true would be in something like communities where you're running things on as an abstraction on top off everything else, and that that is a common abstraction that everyone agrees on and builds upon. But we're already seeing how that works out in real life. If >> I'm >> using and Google Antos. I can't easily move it to P. K s or open shift. There's English Kubernetes, as Joe Beta says, is not a magic layer, and everybody builds. On top of >> it, is it? Turns out it's actually not that easy. >> Well, and plus people are taken open source code, and then they're forking it and it building their own proprietary systems and saying, Hey, here's our greatest thing. >> Well, the to the to the credit of CNC, if Kubernetes. Does have a kind of standardized, agreed to get away away from that particular issue. So that's where it stands a better chance and say unfortunately, open stack. So because we saw a bit of that change of way, want to go this way? And we want to go that way. So there's a lot of seeing and zagging, at least with communities. You have a kind of common framework. But even just the implementation of that writing it, >> I love Cooper. I think I've been a big fan of committed from Day one. I think it's a great industry initiative. Having it the way it's rolling out is looking very good. I like it a lot. The comments that we heard on the Cube of Support. Some of my things that I'm looking at is for C N C s Q. Khan Come coop con Coming up is what happened with Kay, native and SDO because that's what I get to see the battleground for above Goober Netease. You see, that's what differentiates again. That's where that the vendors are gonna start to differentiate who they are. So I think carbonates. It could be a great thing. And I think what I learned here was virtualization underneath Kubernetes. It doesn't matter if you want to run a lot. Of'em Furat scale No big deal run Cooper's on top. You want to run in that bare metal? God bless you, >> Go for it. I think this use cases for both. >> That's why I particularly like Tenzer is because for those customers who wanna have a bit of this, cupidity is I don't want to run it myself. It's too hard. But if I trust Vienna where to be able to run that in to upgrade it and give me all of the goodness about operating it in the same way that I do the end where again we're in and I'll show. So now I can have stuff I already know in love, and I can answer incriminating on top of it. >> All right, But who's gonna mess up Multi clouds do. Who's the vendor? I'm not >> even saying it s so you can't mess up something that >> who's gonna think vision, this vision of multi cloud that the entire industry is putting forth who's gonna throw a monkey? The rich? Which vendor? Well, screw it. So >> you know, licensing usually can cause issues. You know, our friend Corey Crane with a nice article about Microsoft's licensing changes there. You know, there are >> lots of Amazon's plays. Oh, yeah. Okay. Amazon is gonna make it. >> A multi clock is not in the mob, >> but yet how could you do multi cloud without Amazon? >> They play with >> control. My the chessboard on my line has been Amazon is in every multi cloud because if you've got multiple clouds, there's a much greater than likely chance >> I haven't been. You know, my feeling is in looking at the history of how multi vendor of all from the I T industry from proprietary network operating systems, many computers toe open systems, D c P I P Web, etcetera. What's going on now is very interesting, and I think the sea so ce of the canary in the coal mine, not Cee Io's because they like multi vendor. They want multiple clouds. They're comfortable that they got staff for that si sos have pressure, security. They're the canary in the coal mine and all the seasons lights, while two are all saying multi clouds b s because they're building stacks internally and they want to create their own technology for security reasons and then build a P eyes and make a P. I's the supplier relationship and saying, Hey, supplier, if you want to work with me, me support my stack I think that is an interesting indication. What that means is that the entire multi cloud thing means we're pick one clown build on, have a backup. We'll deal with multiple clouds if there's workloads in there but primary one cloud, we'll be there. And I think that's gonna be the model. Yes, still be multiple clouds and you got azure and get office 3 65 That's technically multi cloud, >> but I want to make a point. And when pats on we joke about The cul de sac is hybrid cloud a cul de sac, and you've been very respectful and basically saying Yap had okay, But But But you were right, Really. What's hybrid would show me a hybrid cloud. It's taken all this time to gestate you where you see Federated Applications. It's happening. You have on prim workloads, and you have a company that has public cloud workloads. But they're not. Hybrid is >> the region. Some we'll talk about it, even multi. It is an application per cloud or a couple of clouds that you do it, but it's right. Did he follow the sun thing? That we might get there 15 years ago? Is >> no. You're gonna have to insist that this >> data moving around, consistent >> security, governance and all the organizational edicts across all those platforms >> the one place, like all week for that eventually and this is a long way off would be if you go with Serverless where it's all functions and now it's about service composition and I don't care where it lives. I'm just consuming a service because I have some data that I want to go on process and Google happens to have the best machine learning that I need to do it on that data. Also use that service. And then when I actually want to run the workload and host it somewhere else, I drop it into a CD in with an application that happens to run in AWS. >> Guys wrapping up day to buy It's just gonna ask, What is that animal? It must be an influence because hasn't said a word. >> Thistles. The famous blue cow She travels everywhere with me, >> has an INSTAGRAM account. >> She used to have an instagram. She now she doesn't. She just uses my Twitter account just in time to time. >> I learned a lot about you right now. Thanks for sharing. Great to have you. Great as always, Great commentary. Thanks for coming with Bay three tomorrow. Tomorrow. I want to dig into what's in this for Del Technologies. What's the play there when I unpacked, that is tomorrow on day three million. If there's no multi cloud and there's a big tam out there, what's in it for Michael Dell and BM where it's Crown Jewel as the main ingredient guys, thanks for coming stupid in Manchester words, David Want them? John, Thanks for watching day, too. Inside coverage here are wrap up. Thanks for watching

(upbeat digital music) >> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019, day one, continues. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're pleased to welcome the SVP of Sales and Services from Citrix APJ, Colin Brookes. Colin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa, great to be here. >> So Keith and I, excited to have you here, as well. This has been a really exciting start to our day. >> Colin: Yes. The keynote this morning kicked off with David, PJ was there, Microsoft was there, there were some customers featured. Employee experience is so critical to a business's digital transformation, but we often, and theCUBE covers tech innovation all over the world, we don't hear it as a leading edge for companies who really can't transform digitally and be competitive, and identify new products and new services, if the employees don't have access to the apps they need, whether they're SaaS, mobile, web. Talk to us about employee experience, and particularly as it relates to customers down in APJ, as a critical factor in businesses success. >> Yeah sure, it's a great question, and the employee experience is just as you described, it's almost overwhelming the amount of technology that's thrown at people. Which initially is all there to try and make life easier, but it's just adding on top of existing applications and existing systems, and it isn't really making life easier. So what we found is that the employee experience is actually getting more and more frustrating, which means less productivity, which doesn't help the bottom line and the production of the organization, obviously. So our solutions are all around trying to enhance that employee experience, making sure that people have got absolute choice of anything they need, such as the applications that you mentioned on any device that they're using, and also, wherever they happen to be. So it's normally around the future of work, when we're talking about employee experience. And we're trying to make sure that no matter where you are, not just the office which is the traditional workplace of the past, if you're at home, if you're in the library, if you're on a plane, in the car, you should be able to work exactly the same way. And those are the types of solutions that we're bringing to market, to make just that thing happen. >> So Colin, talk to us about, your team is the tip of the spear. They are the first to hear the customer's success stories, they are the first to hear the frustrations. We're in an environment that Citrix is trying to solve a $7,000,000,000,000 challenge of becoming more efficient. IT is a huge part of that. Your frontline, your Sales Engineers, your AEs are having these kind of conversations. Talk to us about their experience of moving the conversation beyond IT into these new areas that Citrix is entering. >> Yeah, again, another great, great question, and that's one of the pitfalls that we normally fall into talking about products all of the time rather than the outcome, which is what we're trying to help our customers with. So perhaps, if I give you an example of some of the places that I travel around in APJ. So, I look after the APJ region, Asia, Pacific, and Japan. It's a huge, vast geography, with multiple cultures, obviously, very heterogenous. An example, say, for Japan, where I was in Japan last week, the Olympics are coming there in 2020. People who have seen Japan, or been to Japan, you'll know about the huge commute that people have to do. There's millions of people in Tokyo, for example, and their business day is long anyway, but when you add on to that one to two hours commute in the morning, and then the same at the end of the day, the normal everyday stressors are just magnified exponentially. And then with the Olympics coming along, you can imagine an extra few hundred thousand, or an extra couple of million people being in Tokyo, that commute is just going to get worse. So the government have actually launched something, I think it was actually in 2017, whereby we're trying to enable employees to work more remotely, which might not sound too new, but it's amazing how many organizations still feel the employees need to be in the office to work. So we're helping them to make sure that people can work just as efficiently at home as they can in the office. And it doesn't just have to be at home. We were talking earlier, Lisa, that traditional office used to be a place, and work, a place you went to, whereas now it can be at home, in the library, traveling in the car. It can be on the plane on the way to countries. I'm in a plane most of the time, every other week at least, but I'm still able and lucky enough to work extremely productively no matter where I am, and on any device. So that's the other thing that we're trying to bring to our customers. it's the ability to have access to any application that we want, so we have complete choice, on any device that we want. So whether I'm on my phone, whether I'm on my tablet, or I'm on my iPad, it should look and feel the same, and I should be able to get the same types of productivity levels. And now you can, with the solutions that we provide. So, in answer to you question, our customers are trying to find solutions to enable their employees to feel they have the best possible experience, and stay productive anywhere they are in the world. >> Well, and really, Citrix is taking it farther than that. It isn't just delivering the same experience on mobile versus desktop, versus tablet, and ensuring that you can do your job, Colin, from anywhere in the world in an airline seat, whatnot. It's also making that experience, the productivity apps, so much more connected. And the video example that David Henshall showed this morning, I thought, was fantastic. >> Colin: Right, wasn't it, yeah? >> It was showing a Senior Marketing Manager, whose a Marketing Manager, whose responsible for Rockstar marketing campaigns, who might be a people manager, and she logs in and goes to check email, and then all these other things pop up over the course of a couple of minutes, and she's in and out of seven to 10 apps, not connected. >> Colin: Exactly. >> Tell our audience a little bit more about how Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience is really transforming that experience, allowing those workers to get back to their daily responsibilities. >> You need to come in work in APJ, that was perfect. (laughing) >> Lisa: Okay! (chuckling) >> I've got job just for you. Yeah, so, the day to day activities that we all go through, the lady in the video was the Head of Marketing, I believe it was, but most of her day is spent being distracted. I think the statistics that David gave was that something like 85% of the workforce are distracted throughout the day. You flip that around, that means only 15% or so are actually being productive. It's frightening, isn't it? So the examples that you saw were her signing some simple expenses, but that isn't as simple as it sounds. She needs to be almost an expert in the application that signs off the expenses. What we do with the Intelligent Workspace from Citrix is we pick out the bit's that actually she only every really needs to use, which are probably a small percentage, one, two, three, maybe five percent of the full, wonderful application that that expense report may be, she doesn't need to use all of that. so what we do with the Intelligent Workspace is we just bring forward onto her workspace the buttons that she needs, a summary of the expense, an accept or an approve, or a reject, and she can carry on straight away. And what you saw was about a 10 minute session within an application to approve an expense, reduced to less that 30 seconds. When you do that across the whole day, I think the numbers that David gave was our ambition, is to probably give people one day back of their week. That's 20%, that's a huge amount that we'll be able to find. Almost thinking of it like a time machine. We're going to give you some of your time back to actually be productive and do the things that you've been employed to do. She'd been employed to be creative in marketing, and now she can. >> So, you gave us the use case of the remote worker in Japan, great use case, but APJ, huge region. >> Colin: Yes. >> And you're not IT, and IT Vanders are not the only ones that have APJ regions, so talk to us about the importance of the relationship with Ajour and Google. David shared one stat, he said we're entering the yoda bite, which was a new word for even me... >> Lisa: Yeah! >> I'm a geek, the yoda bite era, and as data sets grow and the need to perform analysis against that data, but yet, we're in a very dispersed region. >> Colin: Sure. >> Keith: How important is the relationships with Microsoft and Google to enable that type of analysis of data? >> Yeah, sure. So look, the relationship with all of our partners is extremely important, especially within the APJ region. As you mention, it's such a vast geography, and I think people that have not actually lived in the APJ region just don't realize how vast it is. I'm often asked if I can go from where I am, where I'm based in Singapore, to nip over to Japan or down to Sydney to go and sort out some problems. >> Keith: It's only an eight hour flight. >> It's 10, 12 hours, but it's also a different time zone, and you know, then you talk back to the UK or the States, you lose a day with the time zone there. So, I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but it is a vast, and it's not just the geography, it's such a diverse culture area, as well. So everybody behaves slightly differently. Coming back to your Microsoft and Google, we're not a database company, we're not a data center organization, our solutions are going to provide these wonderful experiences for people. But we need the help and support, and we're very lucky to have it of the likes of the Microsoft, and the Google, and all of our other partners that have this infrastructure in place, and that effectively, shrink that geography for us, does that make sense? >> It does. >> So let's dig into the Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience a little bit further, 'cause you talked about something that really struck me, saying with this video example that which David shared, and we were both talking about it here. So for our audience, it was this great video of a Marketing Manager's daily activities, I kind of mentioned on it a minute ago, but you mentioned that with Intelligent Experience, you're going to surface. Say, I'm a marketing person... >> Colin: Yep. >> And I need to get into Sales Force, 'cause like in this video, my boss has asked me the status of a deal that maybe marketing influenced, and I don't want to have to know a ton about Sales Force. What, how is Citrix using AI and data to evaluate per user what components of each of those applications should be shown to say, me, that Marketing Manager? >> Yeah, I think he gave the great example of the photocopier, didn't he? Whereby you walk up to these machines these days and they've a hundred different buttons on them. (laughs) >> Yes. >> And we basically just want to take a photocopy, and they make it simply one large, green button, and that's probably the one that we always use. It's the one percent of the functionality on the photocopier, and it's the same with the applications. That you and I are not super users, but these applications are wonderful applications, but they're built for the super user a lot of the times, with every part of the functionality within them, which makes it quite complicated for you and I to use when we want very simple tasks. So the Artificial Intelligence of the machine learning is used to, each time we go into one of the applications, to figure out what do we do on a day to day basis, what's normally the thing that we're trying to process? And the more and more that we do that, the smarter and smarter the application becomes. And it also, instead of just guiding us along the way, it's almost starting to think for us, and put the things in front of us that we only need for that day, which is great. So rather than me having to now look at my to do list, it's there for me already in the the Intelligent Workspace, and I can just go through things, skim across the applications where I need to be without going deep, four, five, six different layers, and I'm wasting time on things that I'm not really being paid to do. So, that's how it works. The more I go in, the more it learns about me and my behaviors, and if I go in one particular application, it probably means that I'm also going to be looking at another application that's connected, moving forward, and that's the sort of intelligence that we've built into the system. >> So going from that marketing person being reactive or staring at the copier, that brought back some memories today, I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen one of those in a while, but being reactive, to proactive, to eventually predictive. >> Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. You definitely need to come to APJ. (laughs) >> Okay! >> Need to start writing these sound bites down. Yeah, that's exactly it, and not only, like, she's using the example of the lady, she's feeling less stressed, she's able to have more time being creative, which is what she's been employed for. So this is what turns 'round into the employee experience, which equates to better productivity, which is the bottom line for the organizations. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day. The organizations want to be more efficient, and they want to be more productive, and they want to make more profit. And we're enabling them to do that via enabling the user experience to be the absolute best that it can possibly be, whilst at the same time, making sure that everything is extremely secure. (crosstalk) >> Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead. >> I want to get into a question around culture when it comes to APJ. You know, we have, to your point, very different cultures. There's Japan, whose embracing the concept of robots, so we've seen, like, software robots in different industries, and Japan embracing that idea of automating and making these tasks simpler. But yet, culturally, Australia's very different. There's maybe a little bit more hesitation to embrace robotics. How is your Sales Force bringing along the two different cultures so that, you know, you can have full experiences from one region, and bring that to, bring the best of class to...? >> Yeah, that's another great question. I think we have 57 different nationalities in our Australia and New Zealand team. The culture within Australia is multinational, as well, because of that. So although it's Australia, it's not just Australians that are there, and you find that across the whole of APJ, every office that I happen to work into has got a multitude of different nationalities. A bit less so in Japan and South Korea, but all of the others are very very mixed. So it helps that you're bringing people from different parts of the organization, even from the States or from the Mir, into the APJ region, so that they can cross culture and learn from other people. But it is one of the fascinating things of living in APJ that they're diverse cultures, and one of the reasons why I choose to live down in that part of the world. I have to act, sometimes, as the buffer between the North American mentality of everything's the same, and everybody speaks the same language, and why can they do it this way? And how I then have to translate that for the boys and girls in Japan, and the same in Australia and New Zealand. So it's a thing that's you're learning about every single day, and every single year. It is a fascinating place to live, fascinating place to live. >> Well, I imagine that really can be used as an internal engine for Citrix in the APJ region, because you mention, what, 57 nationalities in two countries alone represented on your team? About leveraging that as an opportunity for even maybe the rest of Citrix and your partners, too, to understand the nuances, why it's important to understand cultural differences as they relate to how technology is used, different security and compliance regulations. It's got to be an advantage. >> It is an advantage, and you also find that depending on the country that you're working, when they're at different stages of their journey, so moving to the cloud, for instance, it's as people have been moving to the cloud for many, many years, but you'll be amazed how many of the largest organizations in the world are still on that journey. And it's not a journey of you're suddenly have an unpremixed application on a Friday, and now we're in the cloud on a Monday, it just carries on going. I think there was a statistic that David mentioned this morning, that something like 95% of the applications that we currently have today are still going to be here in four or five years, plus all of the new applications that we're building every single day. So it is an advantage to be in such a melting pot of cultures and different personalities, you're absolutely right. >> And I'm sure having a boy from Manchester is a facilitator of all of that, right? >> There you go, there you go, I slot straight in. I think I'm the 58th nationality to go in there from Manchester. (laughs) >> There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy. We're excited to hear about what you guys are doing down in APJ, and excited to hear more of what's to come from Synergy 2019. >> Thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. So, for Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching us on theCUBE live, day one of our two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technology's World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas with about 15,000 or so other people. There's about 4,000 of the Dell Technologies community of partners here as well. Day one as I mentioned, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our cube alumni, Karen Quintos, EVP and Chief Customer Officer from Dell Technologies, Karen, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. Always great to be with you all. >> So one of the things you walk down on stage this morning with Michael Dell and and the whole gang and you started to share a story that I'd love for you to share with our audience about this darling little girl, Phoebe from Manchester, England that has to do with this Dell Technologies partnership with Deloitte Detroit and 3D prosthetics. Can you share this story and what it meant about this partnership. >> Well we wanted to tell this story about Phoebe because we really wanted the audience to understand the innovation and all of what's done it with social good is really about the individual, You know, technology plays a key role but the face behind the technology and the innovation are people and you know, as you mention Phoebe is from Manchester, U.K. Her father wrote this blog about Phoebe's experience. Phoebe's aunt, Claire works for Deloitte. She had access to a lot of what they could do in terms of 3D printing and basically came to Dell and we were able to take it and scale it and accelerate it and speed it up with a engineer by the name of Seamus who saw what the precision workstation could do. So it was this small idea to help an amazing little girl like this that has now turned into this movement around how do we more rapidly, quickly scale 3D prosthetics so these children and adults can have a chance at a normal life so. >> What kind of prosthetics did you guys build for her? >> It's an arm, so the very first arm that we built for her when she was about five years old had the frozen Disney theme painted on it. I asked her father Keith what is the one that she's wearing now because she's now this like really super cool seven-year-old that goes to school and all of her classmates and friends around her see her as this rock star and the one that she has today is printed with unicorns and rainbows. So if you know anything about seven-year-old girls, it's all about unicorns and rainbows and she's done an amazing thing and she's inspired so many other people around the world, individuals, customers, partners like Deloitte and others that we're working with to really take this to a whole new level. >> Karen, I think back to Dell you know, if you think back a couple of decades ago you know, drove a lot of the some of the waves of technology change you know, think back to the PC, but in the early days it was you know supply chain and simple ordering in all these environments and when I've watched Dell move into the enterprise, a lot of that is, I need to be listening to my customer, I need to be much closer to them because it's not just ordering your SKU and having it faster and at a reasonable price but there's a lot more customization. Can you talk about how you're kind of putting that center, that customer in the center of the discussion and that feedback loops that you have with them, how that's changed in Dell. >> Yeah sure, so all of the basic fundamentals around you got to order, deliver, make the supply chain work to deliver for our customers still matters but it's gone beyond that to your point and probably the best way to talk about it is these six customer award winners that we recognized last night. I've gotten to know all six of those over the last year and while they are doing amazing things from a digital transformation using technology in the travel business, the automotive business, banking, financial services, insurance, kind of across the board, the thing that they say consistently is look, we didn't always have the answer in terms of what we needed but you came in, you listened, you rolled up your sleeves to try to figure out how you could design a solution that would meet the needs that we have and they said, that's why you're one of the most strategic partners that we have. Now you can do all those other things, right? You can supply chain ride and build and produce and all that but it's the design of a solution that helps us do the things that will allow us to be differentiated and you look at that list of six customers and brands that they represent, right, Carnival Cruise Lines, USAA, Bradesco, McLaren I mean, the list kind of goes on, they are the differentiators out there and we're really honored to be able to be working with them. >> So we're only a day one and it's only just after lunchtime but one of the things I think somatically that I heard this morning in the keynote with Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya and yourself is, it's all about people. A couple interviews I did earlier today, same sort of thing, it's like we had the city of Las Vegas on. This is all driven by the people in for the people so that sense of community is really strong. I also noticed this year's theme of real transformation, parlays off last year's theme of make it real, it being digital transformation, IT, security, workforce transformation, what are some of the things that were like at Dell Technologies. Cloud this morning for example, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC that you guys specifically heard say from last year's attendees that are manifesting in some of the announcements today and some of the great things the 15 or so thousand people here are going to get to see and feel and touch at this year's event? >> Well, Lisa you nailed it. What you heard on stage today is what customers have been telling us over the last year. We unveiled about a month ago with a very small group of CIOs in Amia, our cloud strategy, our portfolio, the things that we're going to be able to do and one customer in particular immediately chimed in and said, we need you in the cloud and we need you in there now because you offer choice, you offer open, you offer simplicity, you offer integration and they're like, there's just too many choices and a lot of them are expensive. So what you heard on stage is absolutely a manifestation of what they told us. The other pieces, look, I think I think the industry and CIOs are very quickly realizing their workforce matters, making them happy and productive matters having them enabled that they can work flexibly wherever they want to really, really matters and you know, our Unified Workspace ONE solution is all about how we help them simplify, automate, streamline that experience with their workforce so their employees stick around. I mean, there's a war on talent and everybody's dealing with it and that experience is really, really important in particular to the gensies and the millennials. >> Karen, I love that point. Actually, I was really impressed this morning. In the press and analyst session this morning, there was a discussion of diversity and inclusion and the thing that I heard is, it's a business imperative, it's not, okay it's nice to do it or we should do it but no, this is actually critical to the business. Can you talk about what that means and what you hear from your customers and partners. >> Yes, yes, well, we're seeing it in spades and all of these technology jobs that are open, right. So look, all the research has shown that if you build a diverse team, you'll get to a more innovative solution and people generally get that but what they really get today is here in the U.S. alone, there's 1.1 million open technology jobs by the year 2024, half of them, half of them are going to be filled by the existing workforce. So there is this war in talent that is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and I think that's what really has given a wake-up call to corporations around why this matters. I think the other piece that we're starting to see, not just around diversity but in our other social impact priorities around the environment as well as how we use our technology for good, look, customers want to do business with a corporation that has a soul and they stand for something and they're doing something, not just a bunch of talking heads but where it's really turning into action and they're being transparent about the journeys and where they're at with it. So it matters now to the current generation, the next generation, it matters to business leaders, matters to the financial services community, which you start to see you know, some of the momentum around you know, the black stones and state street. So it's really exciting that we're part of it and we're leading the way in a lot of number of areas. >> And it's something to that we talked about a lot on theCUBE, diversity and inclusion from many different levels, one of them being the business imperative that you talked about, the workforce needing to compete for this talent, but also how much different products and technologies and apps and APS and things can be with just thought diversity in and of itself and I think it's refreshing to what Stu was saying, hey, we're hearing this is a business imperative but you're also seeing proof in the pudding. This isn't just, we've got an imperative and we're going to do things nominally, you're seeing the efforts manifest. One of the, Draper Labs who was one of the customer award winners. That video that was shown this morning struck probably everyone's heart with the campfire in Paradise California. >> Tragic. >> I grew up close to there and that was something that only maybe, I get goosebumps, six months ago, so massively devastating and we think you know, that was 2018 but seeing how Dell Technologies is enabling this laboratory to investigate the potential toxins coming from all of this chart debris and how they're working to understand the social impact to all of us as they rebuild, I just thought it was a really nice manifestation of a social impact but also the technology breadth and differentiation that Dell has enabling. >> That was also why this story today was so great about Phoebe, right because it's where you can connect the human spirit with technology and scale and have an even bigger impact and there's so much that technology can help with today. You know, that that story about Phoebe. From the time that her aunt from Deloitte identified, you know, what we could do, all the way to the time that Phoebe got her first arm was less than seven months, seven months and you think about you know, some of the other prototypes that were out there, times would take years to be able to do it. So I love that you know, connection of human need with the human spirit and connecting and inspiring and motivating so many children and adults around the world. >> And what what are some of the next, speaking of Phoebe and the Deloitte digital 3D prosthetics partnership, what are some of the other areas we're going to see this technology that this little five-year-old from Manchester spurned. >> Well, I'll give you another example. So we, there was an individual in India, actually an employee of ours that designed an application to help figure out how to deploy healthcare monitoring in some of the remote villages in India where they don't have access to basic things that we take for granted. Monitoring your blood pressure, right, checking your cholesterol level and he created this application that a year later now, we have given kind of the full range of the Dell portfolio technology suite. So it is you know our application plus Pivotal plus VMware plus Dell EMC combined with the partnering that we've done with Tata Trust and the State of India, we've now deployed this healthcare solution called Life Care Solution to nearly 37 million rural residents, citizens in India. >> Wow 37 million. >> 37 million, so a small idea, you take from a really passionate individual, a person, a human being and figure out how you can really leverage that across the full gamut of what Dell can do, I think the results are incredible. >> Awesome, you guys also have a Women in Technology Executive Summit that you're hosting later this week. Let's talk about that in conjunction of what we talked a minute ago about, it's a business imperative as Stu pointed out, there are tangible, measurable results, tell us about this. >> Well, I'm kind of done honestly with a lot of the negativity around, oh, we're not making any progress, oh, we need to be moving fast and if you look at the amount of effort, energy and focus that is going into this space by so many companies and the public sector, it's remarkable and I've met a number of these CIOs over the last year or two, so we basically said let's invite 20 of them, let's share our passion, have made progress, care about solving this across their organization. A lot of us are working on the same things so if we simply got in a room and figured out, are their power in numbers and if we worked collectively together, could we accelerate progress. So that's what it's all about. So we have about 15 or 20 CEOs, both men and women and we'll be spending you know, six or seven hours together and we want to walk away with one or two recommendations on some things that we could collaborate on and have a faster, bigger impact. >> And I heard that, you mentioned collaboration, that's one of the vibes I also got from the keynote this morning when you saw Michael up there with Pat and Jeff and Satya, the collaboration within Dell Technologies, I think even talking with Stu and some of the things that have come out and that I've read, it seems to be more symbiosis with VMware but even some the, like I said, we're only in, I wouldn't even say halfway through day one and that is the spirit around here. We talk about people influence, but this spirit of collaboration is very authentic here. You are the first chief customer officer for Dell, if you look back at your tenure in this role, could you have envisioned where you are now? >> No, because it was like the first ever chief customer officer at Dell and you know, it really gave me a unique opportunity to build something from scratch and you know, there's been a number of other competitors as well as other companies that have announced in the last year or so the need to have a chief customer officer, the need to figure out how, which is a big remit of mine across Dell Technologies, how do we how do we eliminate the silos and connect the seams because that's where the value is going to be unlocked for our customers. That's what you saw on stage today. You saw the value of that with Jeff, with Pat, with Satya, some you know, one of our most important partners out there. Our customers don't want point solutions, they want them to be integrated, they want it to be streamlined, they don't be automated, they want us to speed time to value, they want us to streamline a lot of the back-office kind of mundane things that they're like, I don't want my people spending their time anymore and doing that and that's where we see Dell Technologies being so much more differentiated from other choices in the market. >> Yep, I agree with you. Well Karen, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, sharing some of the stories, look forward to hearing next year what comes out of this year's as Women in Tech Exec Summit. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> with Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live day one of Dell Technology World from Las Vegas, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from the Moscone Center it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. This is Amazon Web Services, AWS Summit 2018. We got two great guests, Dave McCann the vice president general manager of AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog and Matthew Scullion is a CEO of Matillion, partner of Marketplace. Guys thanks for coming on good to see you again >> Thank you. >> Thanks for havin' us. >> Alright, so Dave, Marketplace is doing phenomenal, well, we talked with Lew Cirne from New Relic at Reinvent, and was talking about how successful they've been on the Marketplace, so clearly it's working, 170 thousand active customers on stage, we saw the keynote today, What's going on with the Marketplace? Take a minute to explain how the Marketplace is set up now and how it's evolved to this point. >> Thank you, so, great to be back. Can't believe it's four months since Reinvent. So Marketplace is a digital library, of software. You know the cloud is helping our customers innovate faster but you need to be able to innovate with the software not just with the compute and the storage, and so our purpose is to stand up a digital library of software for our customers to subscribe and launch, and we're continuing to grow on multiple dimensions. We've deployed out to all the new standard regions, so we're now up in Korea, we're clearly in LHR so in all the standard regions we've fit Marketplace. And then we continue to expand the library of software, so more and more companies, like a Matillion, publish into the library. We're over 1,300 software companies now, and we're over 4,000 different software titles and you know, our customers show up, they're typically a developer or a manager, with a project with a budget, and they're looking for the best tool that they can keep the project going on schedule. >> And just to make clarification nuances, I know it's commercial and is there a public sector version or is it all one? >> That's a really good question. We actually launched Marketplace last August in our GovCloud Region, so we do actually operate a GovCloud Region for our US government customers and we actually offer a separate Marketplace for the US intelligence agencies. So that's the library of what were doing and we continue tho grow and as Werner said this morning, bunch of new stats. >> The business, the business model obviously people see, um, two things happening. I want to get your reaction to, one is Werner Vogels laid out how services are going to be laid out all over the place and it's not, you know, monolithic as he says. They're all a bunch of services. Scale is a huge factor in enabling that, and also the business model changes are going on, we're seeing people be successful. How are your customers and partners using Marketplace today, how does it work, I mean, do they just call up and say, "Hey! Dave I want to get in the Marketplace." I mean what, I mean, obviously downloading services, enabling services makes sense. How is it working? Like what do they do? Like what's the model? >> So, let's start from the customer and walk backwards. You know Amazon talks about working backwards from the customer. So typically in a company will be a set of developers who are building on us and they'll have a set of architects very often they've a few cloud architects and across the set of software, networking, security, database, dealer analytics, BI, DevOps, all the way to business apps. There'll be a set of architects saying, "What's the best software as we move to the cloud? "Do we bring what we had, or do we buy new?" So the architects are recommending to the developers, "Hey, for your project, here's a good tool." So in the buyer, architects are recommending, and then the developer gets told you can use these vendors. On the seller side of things, software companies like Matillion have to decide "How do we reach the AWS customer?" and then they have to package up their software, put it in our library, and make a bunch of decisions that he can talk about, and then they make it available. >> Yeah Dave it's been interesting to watch kind of the maturation in the Marketplace. It's been large for a number of years but how your partners have changed how they package software, last year there was a discussion that you know, it changed how billing is done, so that Amazon can help make it just seamless for customers, whether they buy service from, you know, AWS or beyond. You know, give us, you used to talk about the customer and the partner, walk us through a little bit of that maturation and how that's that's gone. >> So, we're a six year old service and so we you know we're agile, we keep releasing features. So last year in April, at San Francisco, with Splunk we launched something called SaaS Contracts, which was a new API for SaaS vendors and now we have over 300 SaaS companies in the last year that have developed to that API. So a software vendor can decide they want to deliver as a software package or as an AMI so it could be SaaS or AMI. And we also provision APIs. So we're constantly introducing flexibility on how that vendor can price and package and the more we innovate, the more software companies use our features. >> Yeah, I'm sure you get asked, you know, what's the concern, is there concern, from some of the SaaS players that, "Oh, I'm going to go in there, "I'm going to price and package the way Amazon does, "what's to stop them from just kind of "duplicating what I'm doing and becoming a competitor?" >> You know, that question comes up a lot, and you know look, the software industry is $550 billion. It's growing at 6% a year which is $30 billion and AWS all late last year did about $18 billion. So the software industry is growing by an AWS a year, and the reality is there's so much innovation going on that whatever innovation we're doing, you know, there's lots of room for other software vendors to innovate on top of our stack, 'cause we live in an expanding universe. >> Stu and I always joke, it's like so funny, we look at the, we watch all the cloud, of your competition, you Google Microsoft and Oracle, IBM, whatever, and they all quote numbers. If you factored in the ecosystem, in your number, the cloud revenues would be, I mean trillions. So you know, you guys I know you don't include that, in the numbers and like Microsoft does put Office in there, so it's kind of apples and oranges and so you know, Matthew I want to ask you, 'cause you're a partner. You're doing business on that, so, this is the formula we've been seeing that's been working where, the ecosystem growth, rising tide floats all boats, clearly that's Amazon's strategy. And they're opening up their platform to partners. So talk about what you guys are doing. First, take a minute to explain your company and then talk about your relationship to the Marketplace, and how that's working, and the relationship, how you make money, and the business model behind it. >> Yeah sure, and thanks for the question and for having me. So first of all Matillion, we're a software company, an ISV we make cloud-native data integration technology, purpose-built for this new generation of cloud data warehouses. For us that's Amazon Redshift, it's also Snowflake, and we sell both of those products on the AWS Marketplace, So customers are using us any time when they want to compete with data, so drive product development, or service their customers better, or in fact, become more efficient in the way they run their IT infrastructure. Perhaps migrating an on-premise warehouse into the cloud. So we developed that product through 2014-15, and we were looking for a route to market. Being honest, originally we were going to set it up as a SaaS business, and I saw a pitch from one of Dave's reports, a guy called Barry Russell, talking about AWS marketplace. We're like, okay here's a platform that's going to allow me to deliver my software anywhere in the world to any AWS customer pretty much instantly. More to the point, it's going to deliver my customer a really excellent experience around doing that, from a performance point of view, my software's going to go to go into their VPC sat right next to their data sources, in their Redshift cluster. From a security point of view, that question, very important in data integration, just taken totally off the table, so inside that firewall inside their VPC and of course super convenient and simple to buy. You just access AWS Marketplace, pay with Genuine Cloud Economics by the hour and stand it up pay a few AWS bills. So a really compelling way to deliver the software. >> Was there a technical integration required on your end? I mean like, there's some clients that are born in the cloud Amazon, some are, have built their own stuff. Do you have to, I mean, where are you guys fit into that? One, are you using Amazon? If not, was there any integration piece that you had to do? And if so, what was the level of work required to integrate? >> Yeah, and to be honest, I think this is, you know, the key question on how to be successful selling in this this kind of landscape of public cloud vendor marketplaces and, and the public cloud. So, I mean we're a born on AWS and in fact are born on AWS Marketplace products, and that intersection of product engineering with the route to market, and it's not just the software, it's also the things you surround it with, like great quality content, online support portals, videos, a really great launch experience, that means you're going to be clicked to running our software, commercial-grade ETL tool in under five minutes, free for the first 14 days and then by the hour billing, you know, there's a lot of different angles that go into that and you've absolutely got to be thinking about it. Other people are being successful just kind of sticking their products on the Marketplace and using it just as a billing mechanism but I think for us one of the reasons we've been able to drive great customer resonance and growth, is having that intersection of engineering, content and the Marketplace, together. >> Matthew I wanted have you talk to me a little bit about Matillion, 'cause when I think about kind of customer acquisition, you know Data Warehousing Market's been around for a long time. Redshift's been doing phenomenal, I mean for a while it was the largest, you know, fastest growing product in the AWS you know, portfolio. Being only through the Marketplace, does that, you know, how does that help you get customers, how do they learn about you? Do you ever worry about, like, oh well they just think I'm an Amazon service? Maybe that's a good thing. You know, I'm just curious about kind of that whole go-to-market and relationship with the customers being, you know, super tight, with AWS, you said Snowflake's in there too, so yeah, I'm just curious about that dynamic. >> Yeah, I mean the, the AWS only service thing that historically was a pro and a con. So back in the day we were just Redshift. We're now a couple of other data warehouses as well, you mentioned Snowflake, that's quite right. So that's allowed us to kind of move up the value chain with our customers and give them some choice, which they wanted. Yeah, I think in terms of the go-to-market economics, I mean, we all say this, sometimes its glib, here I think it's authentic. You want to start with what's best for the customer, right. And so we're delivering with genuine cloud economics. Our product starts at $1.37 an hour and yet it'll scale to the world's largest enterprises, and if they don't like it they can turn it off. Typical SaaS products, you're actually signing up for 12 months. So you're not that focused on keeping your customer happy for 11 of those months. Me, I need to keep that customer happy 100% of the time, because he can turn it off any time he likes. >> Yeah, yeah, I always wonder sometimes as an analyst, you know, should it be called a SaaS product if I'm signed into a year or multi-year contract. >> Yeah, so really interesting dynamic of our business is our entire revenue drops by 15% Saturday, Sunday, and it's cause people are turning off dev instances. They come back on Monday morning. Now, as a CEO I could worry about that and say, "Where's my 15% gone Saturday, Sunday?" Actually I'm delighted, 'cause it means my customers are only paying for value they're getting out of the product. >> And then, so about the business model, I wanted to drive into that. I want you to explain and give some color commentary to what your choice was if you didn't have the Marketplace. Hire a sales force? That's going to cost you some money. First you got to find people. >> Yeah. >> Push it to about a thousand customers, run ad campaign. Did you guys do the analysis and say, "Whoa, this is like A,B"? >> Well, so when we launched this product, we were a 12 man company, so I'm not going to say that we rolled in a management consultancy to work that stuff out for us, being honest. But we took a view. I think there have been two big things. First of all, in those very early days when you're trying to find some product market fit, you're trying to find some customers. That global reach instantly delivered by the Marketplace is amazing. So I'm from Manchester UK, apologies for the accent, that's where a good part of our business is still based, although we have offices now in New York and Denver and Seattle as well. If you drill a vertical hole downwards from Manchester, UK, you pop out in Melbourne, Australia that's the first customer we picked up on AWS Marketplace, still a customer today. So in those early guerrilla days, >> No travel, instant global footprint. >> And they were spending money with us before we spoke to them for the first time as well. Now today, we do have a sales force, of course, but it's not a sales force that's closing big deals. They're being value-added, and additive, they are escorting customers through the buying journey, and we've got just as many pre-sales guys as we have sales guys just helping the customer 'cause that's what we want to do. They're going to use the products and consume it 'cause it's easy to do and to turn it off. >> So you focus the high-value activities with the high value employees on the right customer mix, while the rest is just kind of working through the cloud economics. >> Yeah, that's it. Hey, we have to do marketing, of course. We're here doing an event, it's going great. We were lucky enough to be mentioned in the, in the keynote this morning, so our booth's been swamped, >> And now you're on theCUBE, you're a CUBE alumni. >> Exactly. >> The world's going to see, going public next. >> One of the things we do on the marketing front, is when you come into Marketplace and you talk about how we onboard a seller, we have a whole team who we call category managers and so there's an expert over each subject area such as data analytics or networking or security and we not only give them the engineering advice on how to package, on how to onboard and by the way we didn't curate manage so we publish his AMI and he tells us what regions he wants it to go to. And so he may say, clone to Korea, but I don't want it over here, so the seller could decide geography but then we lay on a business go-to-market plan and we actually develop a joint go-to-market. And so we'll do co-marketing with our sellers, and they can choose whether it's by country, by territory, is it large enterprise, is it small business. So there's a set of business advice that we lend. >> So you apply some best practices and some market intelligence on the portfolio side. >> Exactly. >> And the sector. And then we have all the data right? We provide these guys with a real time API they're pulling data off the API every day and what's happening, and so were monitoring that data and everything's measured so this is a digital channel. And then of course the ultimate thing we do when I ran my last SaaS company, we provide the billing platform. And so the buyer comes in on the AWS account, uses the AWS account, so now we bill on behalf of, we do the collection from the buyer, and then we disperse the funds back to the vendor. >> You're making the market for 'em, and they're still doing their blocking and tackling. >> The customer gets a really good experience on their bill and then the customer spend actually becomes visible in Cost Explorer, so we've tagged everything, so we also tagged it so that it's "this is Matillion", and so the customer knows "I'm spending X much on, "X amount of dollars on Matillion on that stack." >> So you're a sales channel and you're adding more value, Matthew, if someone asks you, just say I say, "Hey Matthew, look I got a great product and it's kickin' ass, I want to get into Marketplace" what do I do, what advice would you give me, what would you say? "Oh, I'm skeptical of Amazon's Marketplace" or, "Hey, I really want it". How would you talk to those two tubes of audiences? >> Yeah, so I think the first thing, and we alluded to it earlier, is I think really hard about that 360 experience of packaging the product and how it's launched, that's engineering in the software itself. You need to think about how the customer's going to interact with it, but you also need to clothe that software with great quality content and support, and finally the right type of go-to-market motion around that. And one of the big benefits for us in terms of the AWS Marketplace has been the efficiency of the sales model. So we've got really efficient go-to-market economics and also the types of customers that we sell to and we've, for a company of our stage, you know, we're a post series B, high-growth software company, but for a company of that stage, we are, have a disproportionately high number of global 8,000 global 2,000 customers, that are because Marketplace takes away the barrier of selling into those guys. So as advice on how to be successful, I'd focus on that packaging side and advice as to why to do it, you've got instant worldwide reach into the traditional stomping ground of the the startup other tech vendors but also into the world's biggest software users. >> A virtuous circle, faster to the customers, at a lower cost structure, you still make money, everyone's happy, sounds like a, the Amazon business model. >> It is. >> Great customer experience, great selection, and you know, adoption by the customer, and then continued innovation. Another thing that we do is we have a portal where these guys are publishing new versions, so it's not a one-and-done model. So as these guys update their models, their engineers just publish into seller portal and then that new version comes in, and then we publish that new version out to the customer. So there's a refreshing of the AMI so the latest version is up there. >> And Werner's keynote today really highlighted it's not just about developers anymore, it's about the business teams coming together, pushing stuff real time to the Marketplace is now a business ops model and it's really kind of coming together with entrepreneurial traction and the footprint's a gateway to the world. You have a world footprint. >> Yes, it's 21st century software distribution and really the buyer gets the ultimate choice and you know the buyer can go for an annual contract or for by the hour, so economically, lots of choice. >> Alright, so I'll put you on the spot to end this segment. I'll be a naysayer. Dave you got competition out there, what, what's in it for me? How do you compare vis-a-vis the competition? >> Dave: You're a software vendor? >> Yeah. >> As, you're playin' the persona? >> Yeah, I'm a software guy, I'm looking at marketplaces, you know, why you guys? >> You know, you have to go where the customer is, ultimately you have to decide who your customer is. You know, Werner talked this morning about the tens of thousands of companies that are up on AWS, and so, if I've got 170 thousand buyers showing up on my marketplace, and they're intentional on their budget, and you're a software vendor you get reach, and given what Gartner says on where we are, on fulfilling share in cloud, is where the customer is. >> And if you're a service too, software service APIs, it's even better goodness there. >> Yeah we have thousands of consulting partners also use Marketplace as a library so if you're an SI, and we have tens of thousands of SIs, those SIs also view Marketplace as a good place to find software for the project. >> You've been in this business for a while. I mean, we've always talked about this on theCUBE, I want to ask you real quick, I mean more than ever now, ecosystems and communities are paramount, priority. Especially with this kind of dynamic 'cause that ecosystem is that fabric to enable, you know, go-to-markets that are seamless with economic scale, visibility into the numbers, what's your reaction when someone says that comment to you about community and an ecosystem? >> Well you know, an ecosystem is a collection of software companies that inter-operate. And the reality is that our customers are rewriting all the software. The world is rewriting its software portfolio. You know, a large customer I went to see recently has a thousand software applications. Now as they move them all to the cloud, they're either rewriting or they're modernizing, but as they rewrite them, they're going to use distributed services, they're going to use micro-services. And so they're refreshing their entire stack. >> Yeah, it's a re-platforming of the internet. >> Transformational. >> Dave McCann, who runs the Marketplace for AWS. Really kickin' butt out there. Congratulations on all your success, and I know there's a lot more to do, I wish we had more time, I'd love to do a follow-up with you and find out what's going on the Marketplace. and Matthew a partner, congratulations, hyper-growth, hittin' that trajectory. Congratulations, we'll come visit you in Manchester and then we'll drill a hole, we'll go to Melbourne right down there. Appreciate, thanks for coming on theCUBE, thanks. >> Thank you. >> I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. More live coverage after this short break. We are in San Francisco, live for AWS Summit 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Fortinet Accelerate 18. Brought to you by Fortinet. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. We're excited to be here. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris, and we're excited to talk to one of the Keynotes the big cheese from the main stage session this morning, John Maddison. >> I say, small cheese I would say. >> SVP of Products and Solutions at Fortinet. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here again. >> So two things I learned about you when you started off your Keynote. One you're a Man City Fan, Manchester City. >> Manchester City Blue. >> Okay. >> Through and through, for many years. >> Premier League all the way. And you have the best job at Fortinet. >> I do indeed. >> Wow. >> That is to announce the new products of course. >> So let's talk about that. So you talked about some exciting announcements today. Tell us about, start with a Security Fabric. What's new there, what's going on, what's exciting? >> Well the core of the Security Fabric is FortiOS 6.0, that's our network operating system. That's the core of he Fabric and when we do a big release like this, many different features, new functionalities. Also we have tighter integration now between all our products in the Fabric. Bus, as I said, new features as well. Things like SD-WAN has been improved, we now have probably estimate of breed SD-WAN security. The Fabric integration itself is going on. We built out some new connectors with cloud. Now we have connectors for all the public clouds. All the public clouds. We have a new CASB connector, acronym city, of course, as usual, CASB is cloud access security broker, API access the SaaS clouds. And so we've got that not only in it's standalone form but also very much integrated inside the Fabric. We've also introducing some new FortiGuard service as part of FortiOS 6.0, a new security rating which is based on a bunch of new practices or best practices that all our customers have said this is great best practices, can you put this together and apply these to our network overall. That's just skimming the surface as I say, I think I said there's 200 plus new services I could have stood up there for like six hours or whatever. But great new services are 6.0 big announcement for us. >> We just chatted with your America's Channel Chief Jon Bove, talk to us about. >> Who's an Arsenal fan by the way. >> What. >> And we beat him Sunday three nil in the Cup final. >> Excellent. >> Just to make sure you get this. >> I'm sure. >> Write that down. >> Jot that down. >> So what excitement are you hearing in, from your perspective, in the channel with respect to all of the new announcements that you made today? >> Great feedback, so this obviously is a big channel partner event here. You know what a lot of channel partners are saying is that I need to make sure I provide more of a solution to the customers. In the past, you know maybe they sell a point product, it's hard to kind of keep that relationship going with that customer. But if they sell a solution with one or two products that's part of that solution or managed and some services as part of that, it's much stickier for the partners and gives them a bit more of an architectural approach to their customers network. They really like the Fabric as I said. The Fabric doesn't have to be everything inside the Fabric, they can be components. It's what we've seen far from a Fabric components. Our partners really latched on to the network plus the advanced threat protection, plus the management or plus the access points. But they definitely prefer to sell a complete solution. It's hard for them to manage 40 different security vendors, the skill sets, the training and everything else. Now they're not saying there needs to be one security vendor, much as we would like it to be Fortinet, but they need to be reduced to maybe a set of 10 or 12 and really, our Fabric allows them to do that. >> That's a key differentiator. >> Absolutely key differentiator and as I said, you know it's very hard to build a Fabric. It's a mesh network, all these products talk to each other. You can only really do that if you build those products organically, step-by-step, alongside the network operating system. It's no good acquiring lots of bits and pieces and trying to bolt it together, it's not going to work. We spent a long time, 10 years, building out this Fabric organically to make sure it integrates but also putting the best of breed features and things like SD-WAN and CASB. >> What is the product? In this digital world what is a product? >> A security product? >> Any kind of product. As a guy who runs product management, what's a product, can we talk about what is a security product? >> I think in the past you know product management used to be very focused on I've got a box that comes out, or I've got a piece of software that comes out, these days it could be virtual machine or cloud, but it's doing a single instance, there's a single thing that it's doing inside, inside the network from a security perspective. What we believe in is that multifunction, now consolidation, multiple threat vectors I refer to this that like the digital attack surface. The digital transformation, security transformation. The biggest issue though, is that digital attack surface. That's just expanded enormously, it's very dynamic. Things are coming on on off the network was spinning up virtual machines and applications here and there. A point product these days just can't cope, can't cope. You need solutions against specific threat vectors that are applied in a dynamic way using the Fabric. >> But arguably it's even beyond solutions. You need to be able to demonstrate to the customer that there is an outcome that's consistent and that you will help achieve that outcome, You'll take some responsibility for it. In many respects, we move from a product to a solution, to an outcome orientation. Does that resonate with you and if so, how does that influence the way you think and the way that you're guiding Fortinet and partners? >> Yes, definitely. You know one of the first things they're very worried about is you know can they see that digital attack surface. It's very large now and it's moving around. Their outcome, first outcomes to say, do I know my risk on my attack surface? That's the very first out. Is it visible, can I see it, or can I protect it or can I apply the right threat protection against that. That outcome to them is they can see everything, protect everything, but as I said also, now they're moving into this more detection environment. Where you've got machine learning, artificial intelligence because you need to apply that. The bad guys these days are very smart in that they know they can morph things very quickly and provide you know targeted attacks, zero-day attacks, we probably haven't seen it before. I hate this analogy where we say somebody else got to get infected before everyone else gets protected. It shouldn't be that way. With, you know, with technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, we should be able to protect everybody from day one. >> Kind of pivoting on, you brought up the word outcome, and I want to go off that for a second. When you're talking with customers and you mentioned, I think, before we went live that you visited, talked to over 300 customers last year. Who is at the table, at a customer, in terms of determining the outcome we need to have? Are we talking about the CSO's team, what about folks in other organizations, operational technology departments. Who are you now seeing is in this conversation of determining this outcome. >> A new job role which I think been coming for a while, it's the security architect. Two years ago, I'll go into a room and there would be the networking team on one side of the table, this InfoSec team security side, on this side of the table, the CIO over here and the CSO over here and they be debating. I would be almost invisible in the room. They'll be debating what's going to happen because you know the CIO wants to build out more agile business applications, wants to move faster. The security team has got to answer to the Board these days, and they got to make sure everything's secure. What's their risk factor? And what I see is a new job function called the security architect, that kind of straddles a bit the networking team, understands what they're building out from an SDN, architecture, cloud perspective, but also understands the risks when you open up the network. The security architect provides more holistic, long-term architecture view for the customer, versus, I've got to fix this problem right now I've got a hold of a bucket, I've got to fix it, then we move on to the next. They're building a system on architecture long term. We have something called a Network Security Expert, it's our training education capability. We have an NSC eight, we have around 100 thousand people certified in the last two years on NSC between one and eight. And about 100 people on eight, because eight's a very high level architect level across all the security technologies. But we definitely see a lot of partners who want to get their people trained to NCE level eight because they would like to provide that security architect that's in the customer now, that advice on what should be that holistic security architecture. The big change to me is that the networking team and the security team have realized they can't just keep fixing things day to day, they need a more holistic long-term architecture. >> Let's talk about that holistic approach. At Wikibon we talk a lot about SiliconANGLE Wikibon, we talk a lot about how the difference between business and digital business is the role that data assets play in the digital business. I think it's a relatively interesting, powerful concept, but there's not a lot of expertise out there about thinking how is a data asset formed. I think security has a major role to play in defining how a data assets structured because security in many respects is the process of privatizing data so that it can be appropriated only as you want it to. What does the security architect do? Because I could take what you just said and say the security architect is in part responsible for defining and sustaining the data asset portfolio. >> Yes and you know, if you go back a few years, there's data leakage prevention was a big area, big marketplace, DLP is the best thing. Their biggest problem that they did was they couldn't tag the assets. They didn't know what assets were so then when it came to providing data protection they go well, what is it, I don't know where it's from, I don't know what it is. And so that a whole marketplace kind of just went away. We're still there a bit, but everyone's really struggling with it still. The 6.0 introduced something called tagging technology. It's inherent already inside routing systems and switching systems, SDN systems. The tagging technology allows you to look at data or devices or interfaces or firewalls from a higher level and say this is the business relationship between that device, that data and what my business objectives are. We talked about intent based network security and the ability long term is to say, hey, if I've got a user and I want to add that user to this network at security level six to that application, I say that, then it gets translated into bits and bytes and network comport and then gets translated end-to-end across the network. The tagging technology from my mind is the first step in a to be able to kind of tag interfaces and data and everything else. Once you've got that tagging done then you can apply policies as a much higher level which are data centric and business aware centric. >> I'm going to ask you a question related to that. Historically, networks in the IT world were device was the primary citizen right. Then when we went to the web the page became a primary citizen. Are we now talking about a world in which data becomes the primary citizen we're really talking about networks of data? >> I think to some extent. If you look at the users today, they have like maybe three or four devices. Because students, universities, there's something on with those lectures, they've got an iPad, their iPhone, three devices attaching there. I think the definition of one user and one device has gone away and it's multiple devices these days. And you know a lot of devices attaching that no one has any clue about. I don't think it's going to be completely data centric because I still think it's very very hard to tag and classify that data completely accurately as it's moving around. I think tends to be a part of it, I think devices going to be part of it, I think the network itself, the applications, are all going to be part of this visibility. In our 6.0 we provide this topology map where you can see devices users. You can see applications spin up, you can see the relationship between those things and the policies, the visibility is going to be extremely important going forward and then the tagging goes along with that and then you can apply the policy. >> With respect to visibility, I wanted to chat about that a little bit in the context of customers. One of the things that Ken talked about in his keynote was. >> Ken? >> Ken. >> Ken Xie. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Ken who? >> That guy? The guy that steals slides from you in keynotes. >> He did as usual. >> I know, I saw that. >> Tells me like two minutes before tells me John, I need that slide. (Peter laughing) >> That's why you have the best job. Everybody wants to copy you. In terms of what what the CEO said, that guy, that Fortinet protects 90% of the global S&P 100. There were logos of Apple, Coca-cola, Oracle, for example. In terms of visibility, as we look at either, a giant enterprise like that or maybe a smaller enterprise where they are, you mentioned this digital tax surface is expanding because they are enabling this digital business transformation, they've got cloud, multi-cloud, mobile, IoT, and they also have 20, north of 20, different security products in their environments. How did they get visibility across these disparate solutions that don't play together. How does Fortinet help them achieve that visibility, so they can continue to scale at the speed they need to? >> Well I think they use systems like SIM systems we have a Forti SIM as well where you can use standard base sys logs and SNMP to get information up there so they can see it that way. They're using orchestration systems to see parts of it, but I think long term, I think I speak to most customers they say, although there's specific, new vendors maybe for specific detection capabilities, they really want to reduce the number of vendors inside their network. You say 20, I sometimes I hear 30 and 40. It's a big investment for them. But they also realize they can't maintain it long term. Our recommendation to customers is to, if you've got some Fortinet footprint in there, look at what's the most obvious to build out from a Fortinet perspective. Sometimes we're in the data centers or sometimes we expand into the WAN and sometimes we expand into the cloud. Sometimes we'll add some advanced threat protection. We're not saying replace everything obviously with Fortinet, we're saying build what's most obvious to you and then make sure that you've got some vendors in that which are part of our Fabric alliance. We have 42 vendors now, security vendors, from end point to cloud to management that can connect in through those different APIs. And when we click them through those APIs they don't get you know the full Fabric functionality in terms of telemetry and visibility but they apply a specific functionality. A good example would be an endpoint vendor connecting through our sandbox not quite sure about files, entered our sandbox we'll give them a recommendation back. As soon as we know about that, all the Fabric knows about it instantly across the whole network because time is of the essence these days. When something gets hacked, it's inside a network. It's less than 60 seconds for something for the whole network. That's why segmentation, interim segmentation, is still a very important project for our customers to stop this lateral movement of infections once they get inside the network. >> But, very quickly, it does sound as though that notion of the security architect, this increasing complexity inside the network and I asked the question about whether data is going to be the primary decision, you get a very reasonable answer to that. But it sounds like increasingly, a security expert is going to have to ask the question how does this data integrate? How am I securing this data? And that, in many respects, becomes a central feature of how you think about security architecture and security interactions. >> Yeah but I think people used to build a network and bolt on security as an afterthought. I think what they're saying now is we need for the networking people and security people to work together to build a holistic security architecture totally integrated day one, not some afterthought that goes on there. That's why we know, we've been building the Fabric all these years to make sure it's a totally integrated Fabric end-to-end segmentation architecture where you can also then connect in different parts of the network. It has to be built day one that way. >> Last question, is sort of, I think we asked your CSO this, the balance between enabling a business to transform digitally at speed and scale. I think it was one of you this morning, that said that this is going to be the year of security transformation. Could've been that guy, that other guy, that you know, steals your slides. But how do how does a company when you're talking with customers, how do they get that balance, between we are on this digital transformation journey. We've got a ton of security products. How do they balance that? It's not chicken and egg to be able to continue transforming to grow profit, you know be profitable, with underpinning this digital business with a very secure infrastructure. >> As I said, I think most of them got that now. They kind of go, they've got this five-year plan versus a one-year plan or a six-month plan on the security side. It's integrated into the network architecture plan long term and that's the way they're building it out and that's the way they've got a plan to get, you know, you look at financial organizations who want to provide internet access or branch offices. They've got a plan to roll it out, that's safe going forward, or they want to add broadband access to their internet, like 5G or broadband interconnection, they've got a plan for it. I think people are much more aware now that when I build something out whether it be on the data side on the network side, it has to be secure from day one. It can't be something I'll do afterwards. I think that's the biggest change I've seen in my customer interactions is that they absolutely, essential is absolutely essential that they build out a secure network from day one, not an afterthought going forward. >> Well, we'll end it there, secure network from day one. John, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, congratulations on the announcements and we hope you have a great show. >> Great thanks. >> Thank you for watching, we are theCUBE, live from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. Stick around, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from New York City It's TheCube. Covering CyberConnect 2017. Brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> It got out of control, they were testing it. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in New York City for CyberConnect 2017. This is Cube's coverage is presented by Centrify. It's an industry event, bringing all the leaders of industry and government together around all the great opportunities to solve the crisis of our generation. That's cyber security. We have Cricket Liu. Chief DNS architect and senior fellow at Infoblox. Cricket, great to see you again. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, nice to be back John. >> So we're live here and really this is the first inaugural event of CyberConnect. Bringing government and industry together. We saw the retired general on stage talking about some of the history, but also the fluid nature. We saw Jim from Aetna, talking about how unconventional tactics and talking about domains and how he was handling email. That's a DNS problem. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You're the DNS guru. DNS has become a role in this. What's going on here around DNS? Why is it important to CyberConnect? >> Well, I'll be talking tomorrow about the first anniversary, well, a little bit later than the first anniversary of the big DDoS attack on Dyn. The DNS hosting provider up in Manchester, New Hampshire. And trying to determine if we've actually learned anything, have we improved our DNS infrastructure in any way in the ensuing year plus? Are we doing anything from the standards, standpoint on protecting DNS infrastructure. Those sorts of things. >> And certainly one of the highlight examples was mobile users are masked by the DNS on, say, email for example. Jim was pointing that out. I got to ask you, because we heard things like sink-holing addresses, hackers create domain names in the first 48 hours to launch attacks. So there's all kinds of tactical things that are being involved with, lets say, domain names for instance. >> Cricket: Yeah, yeah. >> That's part of the critical infrastructure. So, the question is how, in DDoS attacks, denial-of-service attacks, are coming in in the tens of thousands per day? >> Yeah, well that issue that you talked about, in particular the idea that the bad guys register brand new domain names, domain names that initially have no negative reputation associated with them, my friend Paul Vixie and his new company Farsight Security have been working on that. They have what is called a -- >> John: What's the name of the company again? >> Farsight Security. >> Farsight? >> And they have what's called a Passive DNS Database. Which is a database basically of DNS telemetry that is accumulated from big recursive DNS servers around the internet. So they know when a brand new domain name pops up, somewhere on the internet because someone has to resolve it. And they pump all of these brand new domain names into what's called a response policy zone feed. And you can get for example different thresh holds. I want to see the brand new domain names created over the last 30 minutes or seen over the last 30 minutes. And if you block resolution of those brand new domain names, it turns out you block a tremendous amount of really malicious activity. And then after say, 30 minutes if it's a legitimate domain name it falls off the list and you can resolve it. >> So this says your doing DNS signaling as a service for new name registrations because the demand is for software APIs to say "Hey, I want to create some policy around some techniques to sink-hole domain address hacks. Something like that? >> Yeah, basically this goes hand in hand with this new system response policy zone which allows you to implement DNS policy. Something that we've really never before done with DNS servers, which that's actually not quite true. There have been proprietary solutions for it. But response policy zones are an open solution that give you the ability to say "Hey I do want to allow resolution of this domain name, but not this other domain name". And then you can say "Alright, all these brand new domain names, for the first 30 minutes of their existence I don't want-- >> It's like a background check for domain names. >> Yeah, or like a wait list. Okay, you don't get resolved for the first 30 minutes, that gives the sort of traditional, reputational, analyzers, Spamhaus and Serval and people like that a chance to look you over and say "yeah, it's malicious or it's not malicious". >> So serves to be run my Paul Vixie who is the contributor to the DNS protocol-- >> Right, enormous contributor. >> So we should keep an eye on that. Check it out, Paul Vixie. Alright, so DNS's critical infrastructure that we've been talking about, that you and I, love to riff about DNS and the role What's it enabled? Obviously it's ASCII, but I got to ask you, all these Unicode stuff about the emoji and the open source, really it highlight's the Unicode phenomenon. So this is a hacker potential haven. DNS and Unicode distinction. >> It's really interesting from a DNS standpoint, because we went to a lot of effort within the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, some years ago, back when I was more involved in the IETF, some people spent a tremendous amount of effort coming up with a way to use allow people to use Unicode within domain name. So that you could type something into your browser that was in traditional or simplified Chinese or that was in Arabic or was in Hebrew or any number of other scripts. And you could type that in and it would be translated into something that we call puny code, in the DNS community, which is an ASCII equivalent to that. The issue with that though, becomes that there are, we would say glifs, most people I guess would say characters, but there are characters in Unicode that look just like, say Latin alphabet characters. So there's a lowercase 'a' for example, in cyrillic, it's not a lowercase 'a' in the Latin alphabet, it's a cyrillic 'a', but it looks just like an 'a'. So it's possible for people to register names, domain names, that in there Unicode representation, look like for example, PayPal, which of course has two a's in it, and those two a's could be cyrillic a's. >> Not truly the ASCII representation of PayPal which we resolve through the DNS. >> Exactly, so imagine how subtle an attack that would be if you were able to send out a bunch of email, including the links that said www.-- >> Someone's hacked your PayPal account, click here. >> Yeah, exactly. And if you eyeballed it you'd think Well, sure that's www.PayPal.com, but little do you know it's actually not the -- >> So Jim Ruth talked about applying some unconventional methods, because the bad guys don't subscribe to the conventional methods . They don't buy into it. He said that they change up their standards, is what I wrote down, but that was maybe their sort of security footprint. 1.5 times a day, how does that apply to your DNS world, how do you even do that? >> Well, we're beginning to do more and more with analytics DNS. The passive DNS database that I talked about. More and more big security players, including Infoblox are collecting passive DNS data. And you can run interesting analytics on that passive DNS data. And you can, in some cases, automatically detect suspicious or malicious behavior. For example you can say "Hey, look this named IP address mapping is changing really, really rapidly" and that might be an indication of let's say, fast flux. Or you can say "These domain names have really high entropy. We did an engram analysis of the labels of these". The consequence of that we believe that this resolution of these domain names, is actually being used to tunnel data out of an organization or into an organization. So there's some things you can do with these analytical algorithms in order to suss out suspicious and malicious. >> And you're doing that in as close to real time as possible, presumably right? >> Cricket: That's right. >> And so, now everybody's talking about Edge, Edge computing, Edge analytics. How will the Edge effect your ability to keep up? >> Well, the challenge I think with doing analytics on passive DNS is that you have to be able to collect that data from a lot of places. The more places that you have, the more sensors that you have collecting passive DNS data the better. You need to be able to get it out from the Edge. From those local recursive DNS servers that are actually responding to the query's that come from say your smart phone or your laptop or what have you. If you don't have that kind of data, you've only got, say, big ISPs, then you may not detect the compromise of somebody's corporate network, for example. >> I was looking at some stats when I asked the IOT questions, 'cause you're kind of teasing out kind of the edge of the network and with mobile and wearables as the general was pointing out, is that it's going to create more service area, but I just also saw a story, I don't know if it's from Google or wherever, but 80% plus roughly, websites are going to have SSL HTBS that they're resolving through. And there's reports out here that a lot of the anti virus provisions have been failing because of compromised certificates. And to quote someone from Research Park, and we want to get your reaction to this "Our results show", this is from University of Maryland College Park. "Our results show that compromised certificates pose a bigger threat than we previously believed, and is not restricted to advanced threats and digitally signed malware was common in the wild." Well before Stuxnet. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so breaches have been caused by compromising certificates of actual authority. So this brings up the whole SSL was supposed to be solving this, that's just one problem. Now you've got the certificates, well before Stuxnet. So Stuxnet really was kind of going on before Stuxnet. Now you've got the edge of the network. Who has the DNS control for these devices? Is it kind of like failing? Is it crumbling? How do we get that trust back? >> That's a good question. One of the issues that we've had is that at various points, CAs, Certificate Authorities, have been conned into issuing certificates for websites that they shouldn't have. For example, "Hey, generate a cert for me". >> John: The Chinese do it all the time. >> Exactly. I run www. Bank of America .com. They give it to the wrong guy. He installs it. We have I think, something like 1,500 top level certification authorities. Something crazy like that. Dan Komenski had a number in one of his blog posts and it was absolutely ridiculous. The number of different CA's that we trust that are built into the most common browsers, like Chrome and Firefox and things like that. We're actually trying to address some of those issues with DNS, so there are two new resource records being introduced to DNS. One is TLSA. >> John: TLSA? >> Yeah, TLSA. And the other one is called CAA I think, which always makes me think of a California Automotive Association. (laughter) But TLSA is basically a way of publishing data in your own zone that says My cert looks like this. You can say "This is my cert." You can just completely go around the CA. And you can say "This is my cert" and then your DNS sec sign your zone and you're done. Or you can do something short of that and you can say "My cert should look like this "and it should have this CA. "This is my CA. "Don't trust any other one" >> So it's metadata about the cert or the cert itself. >> Exactly, so that way if somebody manages to go get a cert for your website, but they get that cert from some untrustworthy CA. I don't know who that would be. >> John: Or a comprimised-- >> Right, or a compromised CA. No body would trust it. No body who actually looks up the TSLA record because they'll go "Oh, Okay. I can see that Infoblox's cert that their CA is Symantech. And this is not a Symantech signed cert. So I'm not going to believe it". And at the same time this CAA record is designed to be consumed by the CA's themselves, and it's a way of saying, say Infoblox can say "We are a customer of Symantech or whoever" And when somebody goes to the cert and says "Hey, I want to generate a certificate for www.Infoblox.com, they'll look it up and say "Oh, they're a Symantech customer, I'm not going to do that for you". >> So it creates trust. So how does this impact the edge of the network, because the question really is, the question that's on everyone's mind is, does the internet of things create more trust or does it create more vulnerabilities? Everyone knows it's a surface area, but still there are technical solutions when you're talking about, how does this play out in your mind? How does Infoblox see it? How do you see it? What's Paul Vixie working on, does that tie into it? Because out in the hinterlands and the edge of the network and the wild, is it like a DNS server on the device. It could be a sensor? How are they resolving things? What is the protocol for these? >> At least this gives you a greater assurance if you're using TLS to encrypt communication between a client and a web server or some other resource out there on the internet. It at least gives you a better assurance that you really aren't being spoofed. That you're going to the right place. That your communications are secure. So that's all really good. IOT, I think of as slightly orthogonal to that. IOT is still a real challenge. I mean there is so many IOT devices out there. I look at IOT though, and I'll talk about this tomorrow, and actually I've got a live event on Thursday, where I'll talk about it some more with my friend Matt Larson. >> John: Is that going to be here in New York? >> Actually we're going to be broadcasting out of Washington, D.C. >> John: Were you streaming that? >> It is streamed. In fact it's only streamed. >> John: Put a plug in for the URL. >> If you go to www.Infoblox.com I think it's one of the first things that will slide into your view. >> So you're putting it onto your company site. Infoblox.com. You and Matt Larson. Okay, cool. Thursday event, check it out. >> It is somewhat embarrassingly called Cricket Liu Live. >> You're a celebrity. >> It's also Matt Larson Live. >> Both of you guys know what you're talking about. It's great. >> So there's a discussion among certain boards of directors that says, "Look, we're losing the battle, "we're losing the war. "We got to shift more on response "and at least cover our butts. "And get some of our response mechanisms in place." What do you advise those boards? What's the right balance between sort of defense perimeter, core infrastructure, and response. >> Well, I would certainly advocate as a DNS guy, that people instrument their DNS infrastructure to the extent that they can to be able to detect evidence of compromise. And that's a relatively straight forward thing to do. And most organizations haven't gone through the trouble to plumb their DNS infrastructure into their, for example, their sim infrastructure, so they can get query log information, they can use RPZs to flag when a client looks up the domain name of a known command and control server, which is a clear indication of compromise. Those sorts of things. I think that's really important. It's a pretty easy win. I do think at this point that we have to resign ourselves to the idea that we have devices on our network that are infected. That game is lost. There's no more crunchy outer shell security. It just doesn't really work. So you have to have defensive depth as they say. >> Now servs has been around for such a long time. It's been one of those threats that just keeps coming. It's like waves and waves. So it looks like there's some things happening, that's cool. So I got to ask you, CyberConnect is the first real inaugural event that brings industry and some obviously government and tech geeks together, but it's not black hat or ETF. It's not those geeky forums. It's really a business community coming together. What's your take of this event? What's your observations? What are you seeing here? >> Well, I'm really excited to actually get the opportunity to talk to people who are chiefly security people. I think that's kind of a novelty for me, because most of the time I think I speak to people who are chiefly networking people and in particular that little niche of networking people who are interested in DNS. Although truth be told, maybe they're not really interested in DNS, maybe they just put up with me. >> Well the community is really strong. The DNS community has always been organically grown and reliable. >> But I love the idea of talking about DNS security to a security audience. And hopefully some of the folks we get to talk to here, will come away from it thinking oh, wow, so I didn't even realize that my DNS infrastructure could actually be a security tool for me. Could actually be helpful in any way in detecting compromise. >> And what about this final question, 'cause I know we got a time check here. But, operational impact of some of these DNS changes that are coming down from Paul Vixie, you and Matt Larson doing some things together, What's the impact of the customer and they say "okay, DNS will play a role in how I role out my architecture. New solutions for cyber, IOT is right around the corner. What's the impact to them in your mind operationally. >> There certainly is some operational impact, for example if you want to subscribe to RPZ feeds, you've got to become a customer of somebody who provides a commercial RPZ feed or somebody who provides a free RPZ feed. You have to plumb that into your DNS infrastructure. You have to make sure that it continues transferring. You have to plumb that into your sim, so when you get a hit against an RPZ, you're notified about it, your security folks. All that stuff is routine day to day stuff. Nothing out of the ordinary. >> No radical plumbing changes. >> Right, but I think one of the big challenges in so many of the organizations that I go to visit, the security organization and the networking organization are in different silos and they don't necessarily communicate a lot. So maybe the more difficult operational challenge is just making sure that you have that communication. And that the security guys know the DNS guys, the networking guys, and vice versa. And they cooperate to work on problems. >> This seems to be the big collaboration thing that's happening here. That it's more of a community model coming together, rather than security. Cricket Liu here, DNS, Chief Architect of DNS and senior fellow of Infoblox. The legend in the DNS community. Paul Vixie amongst the peers. Really that community holding down the fort I'll see a lot of exploits that they have to watch out for. Thanks for your commentary here at the CyberConnect 2017 inaugural event. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)