(upbeat music) >> Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier are live with theCUBE at AWS Summit 22, here in The Big Apple. We're excited to be talking about security next. James Arlen joins us, the CISO at Aiven. James, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Absolutely, it's good to be here. >> Tell the audience a little bit about Aiven, what you guys do, what you deliver, and what some of those differentiators are. >> Oh, Aiven. Aiven is a fantastic organization. I'm actually really lucky to work there. It's a database as a service, managed databases, all open source. And we're capital S, serious about open source. So 10 different open source database products delivered as a platform, all managed services, and the game is really about being the most performant, secure, and compliant database as a service on the market, friction free for your developers. You don't need people worrying about how to run databases. You just want to be able to say, here, take care of my data for me. And that's what we do. And that's actually the differentiator. We just take care of it for you. >> Take care of it for you, I like that. >> So they download the open source. They could do it on their own. So all the different projects are out there. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What do you guys bringing to the table? You said the managed service, can you explain that. >> Yeah, the managed service aspect of it is, really, you could install the software yourself. You can use Postgres or Apache Kafka or any one of the products that we support. Absolutely you can do it yourself. But is that really what you do for a living, or do you develop software, or do you sell a product? So we take and do the hard work of running the systems, running the equipment. We take care of backups, high availability, all the security and compliance things around access and certifications, all of those things that are logging, all of that stuff that's actually difficult to do, well and consistently, that's all we do. >> Talk about the momentum, I see you guys were founded in what? 2016? >> Yes. >> Just in May of '22, raised $210 million in series D funding. >> Yes. >> Talk about the momentum and also from your perspective, all of the massive changes in security. >> It's very interesting to work for a company where you're building more than 100% growth year over year. It's a powers of two thing. Going from one to two, not so scary, two to four, not so scary. 512 to 1024, it's getting scary. (Lisa chuckles) 1024 to 2048, oh crap! I've been with Aiven for just almost two years now, and we are less than 70 when I started, and we're near 500 now. So, explosive growth is very interesting, but it's also that, you're growing within a reasonable burn rate boundary as well. And what that does from a security perspective, is it leaves you in the position that I had. I walked in and I was the first actual CISO. I had a team of four, I now have a team of 40. Because it turns out that like a lot of things in life, as you start unpacking problems, they're kind of fractal. You unpack the problem, you're like oh, well I did deal with that problem, but now I got another problem that I got to deal with. And so there's, it's not turtles all the way down. >> There's a lot of things going on and other authors, survive change. >> And there's fundamental problems that are still not fixed. And yet we treat them like they're fixed. And so we're doing a lot of hard work to make it so that we don't have to do hard work ongoing. >> And that's the value of the managed service. >> Yes. >> Okay, so talk about competition. Obviously, we had ETR on which is Enterprise Research Firm that we trust, we like. And we were looking at the data with the headwinds in the market, looking at the different players like got Amazon has Redshift, Snowflake, and you got Azure Sequence. I think it's called one of those products. The money that's being shifted from on premise data where the old school data warehouse like terra data and whatnot, is going first to Snowflake, then to Azure, then to AWS. Yes, so that points to snowflake being kind of like the bell of the ball if you will, in terms of from a data cloud. >> Absolutely. >> How do you compete with them? What's the pitch 'Cause that seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction from the industry. 'Cause snowflake is hot. They have a good value product. They have a smart team, Databrick is out there too. >> Yeah I mean... >> how do you guys compete against all that. >> So this is that point where you're balancing the value of a specific technology, or a specific technology vendor. And am I going to be stuck with them? So I'm tying my future to their future. With open source, I'm tying my future to the common good right. The internet runs on open source. It doesn't run on anything closed. And so I'm not hitching my wagon to something that I don't control. I'm hitching it to something where, any one of our customers could decide. I'm not getting the value I need from Aiven anymore. I need to go. And we provide you with the tools necessary, to move from our open source managed service to your own. Whether you go on-prem or you run it yourself, on a cloud service provider, move your data to you because it's your data. It's not ours. How can I hold your data? It's like weird extortion ransoming thing. >> Actually speaking, I mean enterprise, it's a big land grab 'cause with cloud you're horizontally scalable. It's a beautiful thing, open source is booming. It's going in Aiven, every day it's just escalating higher and higher. >> Absolutely. >> It is the software business. So open is open. Integration and scale seems to be the competitive advantage. >> Yeah. >> Right. So, how do you guys compete with that? Because now you got open source. How do you offer the same benefits without the lock in, or what's the switching costs? How do you guys maintain that position of not saying the same thing in Snowflake? >> Because all of the biggest data users and consumers tend to give away their data products. LinkedIn gave away their data product. Uber gave away their data product, Facebook gave away their data product. And we now use those as community solutions. So, if the product works for something the scale of LinkedIn, or something the scale of Uber. It will probably work for you too. And scale is just... >> Well Facebook and LinkedIn, they gave away the product to own the data to use against you. >> But it's the product that counts because you need to be able to manipulate data the way they manipulate data, but with yours. >> So low latency needs to work. So horizontally, scalable, fees, machine learning. That's what we're seeing. How do you make that available? Customers want on architecture? What do you recommend? Control plane, data plane, how do you think about that? >> It's interesting. There's architectural reasons to think about it in terms like that. And there's other good architectural reasons to not think about it. There's sort of this dividing line in the cloud, where your cloud service provider, takes over and provides you with the opportunity to say, I don't know. And I don't care >> As long as it's secure >> As long as it's secure absolutely. But there's sort of that water line idea, where if it's below the water line, let somebody else deal. >> What is in the table stakes? 'Cause I like that approach. I think that's a good value proposition. Store it, what boxes have to be checked? Compliance, secure, what are some of the boxes? >> You need to make sure that you've taken care of all of the same basics if you are still running it. Remember you can't absolve yourself of your duty to your customer. You're still on the hook. So, you have to have backups. You have to have access control. You have to understand who's administering it, and how and what they're doing. Good logging, good comprehension there. You have to have anomaly detection, secure operations. You have to have all those compliance check boxes. Especially if you're dealing with regulated data type like PCI data or HIPAA health data or you know what there's other countries besides the United States, there's other kinds of of compliance obligations there. So you have to make sure that you've got all that taken into account. And remember that, like I said, you can't absolve yourself with those things. You can share responsibilities. But you can't walk away from that responsibility. So you still have to make sure that you validate that your vendor knows what they're talking about. >> I wanted to ask you about the cybersecurity skills gap. So I'm kind of giving a little segue here, because you mentioned you've been with Aiven for about two years. >> Almost. >> Almost two years. You've started with a team of four. You've grown at 10X in less than two years. How have you accomplished that, considering we're seeing one of the biggest skills shortages in cyber in history. >> It's amazing, you see this show up in a lot of job Ads, where they ask for 10 years of experience in something that's existed for three years. (John Furrier laughs) And it's like okay, well if I just be logical about this I can hire somebody at less than the skill level that I need today, and bring them up to that skill level. Or I can spend the same amount of time, hoping that I'll find the magical person that has that set of skills that I need. So I can solve the problem of the skills gap by up-skilling the people that I hire. Which is strangely contrary to how this thing works. >> The other thing too, is the market's evolving so fast that, that carry up and pulling someone along, or building and growing your own so to speak is workable. >> It also really helps us with a bunch of sustainability goals. It really helps with anything that has to do with diversity and inclusion, because I can bring forward people who are never given a chance. And say, you know what? You don't have that magical ticket in life, but damn you know what you're talking about? >> It's a classic pedigree. I went to this school, I studied this degree. There's no degree if have to stop a hacker using state of the art malware. (John Furrier laughs) >> Exactly. What I do today as a job, didn't exist when I was in post-secondary at all. >> So when you hire, what do you look for? I mean obviously problem solving. What's your kind of algorithm for hiring? >> Oh, that's a really interesting question. The quickest sort of summary of it is, I'm looking for not a jerk. >> Not a jerk. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Because it turns out that the quality that I can't fix in a candidate, is I can't fix whether or not they're a jerk, but I can up-skill them, I can educate them. I can teach them of a part of the world that they've not had any interaction with. But if they're not going to work with the team, if they're going to be, look at me, look at me. If they're going to not have that moment of, I have this great job, and I get to work today. And that's awesome. (Lisa Martin laughs) That's what I'm trying to hire for. >> The essence of this teamwork is fundamental. >> Collaboration. >> Cooperation. >> Curiosity. >> That's the thing yeah, absolutely. >> And everybody? >> Those things, oh absolutely. Those things are really, really hard to interview for. And they're impossible to fix after the fact. So that's where you really want to put the effort. 'Cause I can teach you how to use a computer. I mean it's hard, but it's not that hard. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Well I love the current state of data management. Good overview, you guys are in the good position. We love open source. Been covering it for, since theCUBE started. It continues to redefine more and more the industry. It is the software industry. Now there's no debate about that. If people want to have that debate, that's kind of waste of time, but there are other ways that are happening. So I have to ask you. As things are going forward with innovation. Okay, if opensource is going to be the software industry. Where's the value? >> That's a fun question wow? >> Is it going to be in the community? Is it the integration? Is it the scale? If you're open and you have low switching costs... >> Yeah so, when you look at Aiven's commitment to open source, a huge part of that is our open source project office, where we contribute back to those core products, whether it's parts of the Apache Foundation, or Postgres, or whatever. We contribute to those, because we have staff who work on those products. They don't work on our stuff. They work on those. And it's like the opposite of a zero sum game. It's more like Nash equilibrium. If you ever watch that movie, "A beautiful mind." That great idea of, you don't have to have winners and losers. You can have everybody loses a little bit but everybody wins a little bit. >> Yeah and that's the open the ethos. >> And that's where it gets tied up. >> Another follow up on that. The other thing I want to get your reaction on is that, now in this modern era of open source, almost all corporations are part of projects. I mean if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get funding it's pretty simple. You start open source project. How many stars you get on GitHub guarantees it's a series C round, pretty much. So open source now has got this new thing going on, where it's not just open source folks who believe in it It's an operating model. What's the dynamic of corporations being part of the system. It used to be, oh what's the balance between corporate and influence, now it's standard. What's your reaction? >> They can do good and they can do harm. And it really comes down to why are you in it? So if you look at the example of open search, which is one of the data products that we operate in the Aiven system. That's a collaboration between Aiven. Hey we're an awesome company, but we're nowhere near the size of AWS. And AWS where we're working together on it. And I just had this conversation with one of the attendees here, where he said, "Well AWS is going to eat your story there. "You're contributing all of this "to the open search platform. "And then AWS is going to go and sell it "and they're going to make more money." And I'm like yep, they are. And I've got staff who work for the organization, who are more fulfilled because they got to deliver something that's used by millions of people. And you think about your jobs. That moment of, (sighs) I did a cool thing today. That's got a lot of value in it. >> And part of something. >> Exactly. >> As a group. >> 100%. >> Exactly. >> And we end up with a product that's used by millions. Some of it we'll capture, because we do a better job running than the AWS does, but everybody ends up winning out of the backend. Again, everybody lost a little, but everybody also won. And that's better than that whole, you have to lose so that I can win. At zero something, that doesn't work. >> I think the silo conversations are coming, what's the balance between siloing something and why that happens. And then what's going to be freely accessible for data. Because the real time information is based upon what you can access. "Hey Siri, what's the weather. "We had a guest on earlier." It says, oh that's a data query. Well, if the weather is, the data weathers stored in a database that's out here and it can't get to the response on the app. Yeah, that's not good, but the data is available. It just didn't get delivered. >> Yeah >> Exactly. >> This is an example of what people are realizing now the consequences of this data, collateral damage or economy value. >> Yeah, and it's understanding how data fits in your environment. And I don't want to get on the accountants too hard, but the accounting organizations, AICPA and ISAE and others, they haven't really done a good job of helping you understand data as an asset, or data as a liability. I hold a lot of customer data. That's a liability to me. It's going to blow up in my face. We don't talk about the income that we get from data, Google. We don't talk about the expense of regenerating that data. We talk about, well what happens if you lose it? I don't know. And we're circling the drain around fiduciary responsibility, and we know how to do this. If you own a manufacturing plant, or if you own a fleet of vehicles you understand the fiduciary duty of managing your asset. But because we can't touch it, we don't do a good job of it. >> How far do you think are people getting into the point where they actually see that asset? Because I think it's out of sight out of mind. Now there's consequences, there's now it's public companies might have to do filings. It's not like sustainability and data. Like, wait a minute, I got to deal with these things. >> It's interesting, we got this great benefit of the move to cloud computing, and the move to utility style computing. But we took away that. I got to walk around and pet my computers. Like oh! This is my good database. I'm very proud of you. Like we're missing that piece now. And when you think about the size of data centers, we become detached from that, you don't really think about, Aiven operates tens of thousands of machines. It would take entire buildings to hold them all. You don't think about it. So how do you recreate that visceral connection to your data? Well, you need to start actually thinking about it. And you need to do some of that tokenization. When was the last time you printed something out, like you get a report and happens to me all the time with security reports. Look at a security report and it's like 150 page PDF. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Print it out, stump it on the table in front of you. Oh, there's gravitas here. There's something here. Start thinking about those records, count them up, and then try to compare that to something in the real world. My wife is a school teacher, kindergarten to grade three, and tokenizing math is how they teach math to little kids. You want to count something? Here's 10 things, count them. Well, you've got 60,000 customer records, or you have 2 billion data points in your IOT database, tokenize that, what does 2 billion look like? What does $1 million look like in the form of $100 dollars bills on a pallet? >> Wow. >> Right. Tokenize that data, create that visceral connection with it, and then talk about it. >> So when you say tokenized, you mean like token as in decentralization token? >> No, I mean create like a totem or an icon of it. >> Okay, got it. >> A thing you can hold holy. If you're a token company. >> Not token as in Token economics and Crypto. >> If you're a mortgage company, take that customer record for one of your customers, print it out and hold the file. Like in a Manila folder, like it's 1963. Hold that file, and then say yes. And you're explaining to somebody and say yes, and we have 3 million of these. If we printed them all out, it would take up a room this size. >> It shows the scale. >> Right. >> Right. >> Exactly, create that connection back to the human level of interaction with data. How do you interact with a terabyte of data, but you do. >> Right. >> But once she hits upgrade from Google drive. (team laughs) >> What's a terabyte right? We don't hold that anymore. >> Right, right. >> Great conversation. >> Recreate that connection. Talk about data that way. >> The visceral connection with data. >> Follow up after this event. We'd love to dig more and love the approach. Love open source, love what you're doing there. That's a very unique approach. And it's also an alternative to some of the other vast growing plus your valuations are very high too. So you're not like a... You're not too far away from these big valuations. So congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah excellent, I'm sure there's lots of work to do, lots of strategic work to do with that round of funding. But also lots of opportunity, that it's going to open up, and we know you don't hire jerks. >> I don't >> You have a whole team of non jerks. That's pretty awesome. Especially 40 of 'em. That's impressive James.| >> It is. >> Congratulations to you on what you've accomplished in the course of the team. And thank you for sharing your insights with John and me today, we appreciate it. >> Awesome. >> Thanks very much, it's been great. >> Awesome, for John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube, live in New York city at AWS Summit NYC 22, John and I will be right back with our next segment, stick around. (upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Infor. >> And good afternoon, or I guess at least Eastern Time, good afternoon. We're in Washington DC, theCUBE live here at Inforum '18. We're at the Washington D.C. Convention Center along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. It's a pleasure to welcome Nanzio Esposito who's a VP and Head of Experience at Infor and you can tell he's the coolest guy in the room right now. (all laughing) Yeah, Nanzio, good to see ya. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate that. >> Thank you, thank you for asking. >> So you had a, as part of your primary responsibility, the in-house creative agency. >> Yep. >> Hook and Loop. First off, let's just deal with design, from an approach standpoint. Why is that so important for Infor to have its own in-house agency? >> Well I mean, we have amazing capabilities, and a lot of, and those capabilities really differentiate us against our competitives that. But what ends up happening is that our end users essentially want to have a more enjoyable and more satisfying experience, through their work. So, the reason why design is extremely important to Infor is because, through design, we get to do things like provide efficiency through workflows. We get to do things like create a design system that helps to escale and empower and enable our development teams to pick up UX best practices and UI assets so that they can build quicker. Or open-sourcing those kind of capabilities to be able to empower our partners and our customers to build apps with kind of a standard code base. So, I would tell you that the reason why design is so important is because we look at things from a very macro view, strategically. Design is very holistic, it's problem-solving. And it's taking the best of some of design's key attributes of modernizing the UI, being able to apply design thinking to understand kind of what the business value needs to come out of the system or the solution that's put in play. And how that mutually creates a beneficial kind of delivery mechanism to each user as they're doing their work. And also looking at kind of just the raw, sheer amount of assets that we have from data and being able to find ways to essentially come up with solutions that businesses today really need. And it's a very competitive landscape. And what best to have a designer be able to try to solve some of your business application needs. >> And does it change depending upon the vertical in which you're working? So, I mean, those have to be considerations too, and the environment, right, from the mobile if you're going to be at the desktop, you're going to be on a laptop or? >> Yep, yep. >> On iPad or whatever. All that factors into that. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, it is interesting. I mean, part of Infor strategy has always been to, you know, have industry-focused cloud suites. And from a design perspective, for us, we do tend to see patterns. So, it depends on user roles, kind of access points, you talked about devices. So we see the use of device in, say, healthcare industry, very different, say, than to the use of a device in manufacturing. But mobile, is really starting to kind of blur those lines. And you brought up something that was part of our mobile strategy, internal that was kind of finished out in October of 2017. Which is essentially what we call mobility in context. So context is very important. Knowing situationally where a user is in a moment so that they can, from one moment, work with, say, some portal. And that portal may be a laptop to a, say, an iPhone or even just an Alexa device, and be able to understand where they are, allow them to continue on in that workflow and make sure that it's integrated, it's smooth and it's direct and to the point. So, that's what has kind of transpired through the evolution of Hook and Loop because design has evolved and it's bigger than just modernizing our user interfaces here at Infor. >> So when we first heard about Hook and Loop, it was through Infor. It was the early part of this decade. The mobile was only five or six years old. I mean, smart phones. >> Yeah. >> At the time. So in was early days, you guys were first, certainly, of all the major software company enterprises to focus on that. Now, subsequently, we hear you've always heard a lot about UI. >> M-hmm. >> And UX. Subsequently, much more recently we're hearing much more around design. You're seeing, you know, you go to conferences like Service Now and they're focusing on this stuff and you guys have always been there. What's the difference between UX, UI, and sort of design at the core? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it, sometimes the lines are blurred, right, and it depends on the industry and it depends on where you're speaking as far as when you say user experience design or if you say just design in general. So, I'm going to just take two steps back. The reason why I didn't go for head of design at Hook and Loop was just because design means, has a certain definition here at Infor. We are obviously an enterprise, it's very vast, it's extremely broad and at that point, each, say, of our major constituents, product management, it could be a product development, it could be a customer, they have different mental models on what design means. So, we wanted to go with something that's a little more elusive. Alright, so Head of Experience. But, essentially, now, through our evolution in our sixth year, we're really focused on product experience. So what that means is taking kind of all the learnings that we've had in the industry around modernizing UI, so that's essentially the way in which the solution manifests itself, how it looks, and the best of user experience. Essentially, what is the flow? What are the click states? How can we provide efficiency in form fields? But now you bring in A.I. and that obviously puts a different dimension on that process. But when it kind of all comes together, it's really just about making a strategic call on what the solution needs to be able to satisfy, all the different configurations in which it needs to account for, and then how to package that in a very lightweight manner. So, it's almost to the point that a company or a user doesn't need any instructional information on how to use it. And that's always been a goal at Hook and Loop. Through the six-year journey, strategically, even with some prior leadership, there was a very amazing strategic call to focus on a more mobile first initiative and mobile first, that brought forward kind of all the responsive web behaviors to our applications. So, that's great. Because that just essentially means that on any device, the application will conform, will render, to kind of provide the best usability that it can. As we're evolving, though, we're realizing that the future of work, and I mentioned this to the analysts yesterday, the future of work, which is now post-Millennial, and I know that sounds crazy 'cause I think we're all still seeing millennials in our workforce and trying to reconfigure, figure out what the company culture is, the purpose is, and how business solutions help to support that. But the article in the New York Times talked about iGen, and you know, the theme that Inforum here is all about human potential. Well, in the iGen generation, it's all about the personal aspects of the way in which they communicate, the way they do work, the way they have social gatherings. And I found it very profound because that essentially really supports what the vision of Hook and Loop is now in this era, which is the personal enterprise. And there's nothing more personal than the device that we choose on a daily level, which is the mobile device. So, at that point, it's extremely innate. And it definitely kind of personifies who we are in our digital world, our digital selves, and because it actually has all this tons of capability that's packed into it, what ends up happening is not about kind of the nine to five anymore, and I think you guys, and myself, we all know that. We're getting notifications and communication to, say, a loved one or some kind of social event that's going on and then getting pinged through some kind of communication or notification of work that we have jobs to do, there's things that have to get done. So, it moves from work-life balance to a work-life blend. And for our enterprise, and through kind of I think the investment that we've done with design, that allows us at Hook and Loop to really push the boundaries of user experience and think about the balance of all those to kind of give our customers always only exactly what the user needs right now. And that's been our new mantra, where we've kind of strategically pivoted, evolved, and been essentially looking at our principles and re-looking at our work, given all this investment in our capabilities. >> We heard this morning in the keynotes that you're basically infusing A.I. into your applications, in an effort to create better outcomes. Giving users advice as to how they maybe could have done things differently, maybe tracking some KPI's and giving feedback to the user, so that they can have better outcomes. How does A.I. from a design standpoint change the way in which you have to think about presenting data and information to the user? And not being intrusive, but being helpful? >> Yeah. I could probably talk about that for like the next two to five hours, but the reality is there's different versions or flavors of A.I. So, some of it could be more backend processes, like you alluded to and presenting, say, best potential outcomes that a user, or paths that a user can navigate or select or go down. One thing that we saw from a design perspective is the fact that you don't want to just present the recommendation. You don't want to lose the human factor. You have to establish trust with A.I. over time. So, in just saying, hey I got that or I got that done or here's the best KPI to use, you want to still have a system that can offer up why. And be able to kind of promote choice. A user doesn't want to feel, essentially, controlled. They want the system to be able to make them feel like they're in control. So, those are some nuances there. When it gets into kind of the more conversational aspects of A.I., you know, and I'm going well beyond kind of chat bots, having conversations and having it kind of leverage some of our CIR capabilities, find business objects and promote it, say through our GUI, conversations get intense. And why I say intense, it's some of the terminology we use at Hook and Loop. But that's just because utterances and variancing in the way in which we communicate, are complex. You might say, OK and I might say yeah. You might say I am on it and I might say, yo, I'm doin' that. And just through-- >> That's exactly right, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what David would say. (all laughing) >> I wasn't trying to say this or that. But they all mean the same thing, or in different contexts or whatever the inquiry was, we have to understand that kind of user intent and be able to map all those correlations. So, it's not so easy as just saying hey, we have A.I. and we'll put it into play. And from a design perspective, the last thing we want to do is ever alienate a user. So. >> A frustrated user. >> And frustrated user, exactly. So, just because you can doesn't mean you should and we really need to think strategically in a way in which we ultimately empower a user. So when I say user we're saying a name for customer's employee, or a new force customer customer. So it's a very interesting strategic place that we sit within Infora in our product development teams. >> Yeah, within user experience and best practices, so obviously there are some general trends or general concepts, what do you find out though amongst your clients and your user base maybe that offers additional insight or is giving you maybe a little sneak peak about something that you are uniquely discovering, if you can talk about that? >> Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I think as we evolved kind of our business model this year and our services, I think one of the things that we've learned over the years is that, like, we're no subject matter experts. Like at all. So it's kind of like, well, how do we get this information? How can we learn more? How can we provide or satisfy or create solutions that satisfy these certain pain points? So what we ended up doing is, ya know, I hear this from my team constantly, it's like who's the customer? Or who's the user? And we need personas. And we need to understand the journey maps. And we lose sight of some of the more internal mechanisms that we have that really kind of give us that information. So, we've, over the last few months, have gotten access to Infor Concierge, which is a tool that Infor created for our customers to be able to kind of understand what's new in the product. If they have any product enhancement requests, issues, that they would love to see, bugs, defects. They're finding that their Infor is working really well in creating kind of a two-way conversation. Well, what best to have design team, which, you know, product experience team, to be able to have access to all of that information. Be able to comb and sift through it. So, we're learning kind of what the customer and the user wants, but they're participating in that. So it's a really interesting orchestration or concert. And then on the flip side, we have a ton of subject matter experts. So, and that goes well beyond just our solution, industry solution, architects. This goes into like, our sales teams, or our solution consultants, or our channel partners. So, strategically over these last six to eight months, I think what we have uncovered is that we have a lot of support. And there's like ways for us to make decisions quicker and be able to test or have successes or failures in a very like small, confined box, so to speak. So that we make decisions that don't necessarily create massive ramifications in the enterprise but get us to kind of create value quicker in a more kind of sizeable chunk in deployment mechanism. So, I think the biggest thing that we've uncovered is the fact that, not only do we have a lot of talent but we have a lot of amazing, bright ideas. And that is why we moved from an in-house design agency to product experience because essentially Infor has grown and our team is everyone's becoming a designer. And that's you want. You want to go from a design organization which was the goal in 2012 to now in 2017, 2018 and where we're headed, to move from a design org to a design culture. And I think that's what is going to definitely going to get Infor to differentiate against its competitive landscape. >> 'Cause one of the problems with design is oftentimes the design, the ideal design, there's a gap between that and the actual functionality of the product. And then you end up with this kind of hybrid. Some of the design intent matches the outcome but then the functionality is sort of becomes roadmap. >> Yeah, and a lot of that was happening, I think 'cause we were going through an evolution. What we noticed is we need to move design closer to our product development teams in Hyderabad, Manila. You know, development is getting done all over the globe. So what we did was, we wanted to ensure that UX practitioners were, ya know, sitting side by side of our development teams so that in a moment's time they can have a conversation, quickly make a decision, and obviously just continue on their way. Another piece, though, is what is the right balance between having massive amounts of engineering capacity to, say, a designer that's in partnership with them? So we started practicing and growing our team to be less focused on some of the more baseline design capabilities and we brought in some really smart and talented engineers that understand design, find ways to translate it. And we're doing that kind of translation right now in building native mobile applications inside of Hook and Loop. And that gives us a mechanism to prove out our work, understand some of our decisions, get kind of the feasibility more done upfront so that when we make strategic calls or we want to scale from there, we start to minimize the gap between wouldn't this be amazing if it could render or do this, to, oh, God, we just did like, patchwork, or it was a quill that we created to get it done. We want to bridge that gap and get closer and closer to what the original concept or the idea was. >> So you announced one of those apps this week. >> Yeah, that was super exciting! >> If you want to talk about that. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I mean leveraging the best of human-centered design, I can't mention the customer's name given the NDA, but we did work with a very large consulting firm that had 18,000 users. And they're kind of road warriors. So, strategically working with our C suite, we were focusing on more agnostic solutions and then scale to more industry-focused solutions, so this is in expense management. But we needed something that was insanely high consumer grade. So really driven by usability. But offered more of the baseline utility. So leveraging the capabilities of XM, this was all kind of like the road warrior, I just need to capture my receipt, potentially build a queue, wait 'til my credit card feeds in these data points, my expenses, match these expenses, submit a report, and like can I just get back on my day 'cause we all hate doing that. So the app that we just released, it's available on Apple iTunes, the Apple Store, today. It's called Infor Expense. It acts as a companion to Infor Expense Management. We say companion because if you're an Infor Expense Management customer today, you have access to it. And it really is a mechanism to kind of promote the best of what Hook and Loop is trying to scale, continues to scale, inside of Infor. At the same time, it's a playground for us. It's a playground for us to test new capabilities, leverage capabilities that are on the device. You know, evolve our design patterns and our UI assets. So that we kind of always stay at the tip of the spear. And that's essentially where Hook and Loop sits for Infor from a product strategy perspective. >> Well if you make expense reports easy, I'm all for it. >> Me too, right? >> I got my parking ticket right here, we can start as soon as we're done. >> Alright, you want me to take a picture of that? (all laughing) >> Nunzio, thanks for the time. >> Awesome. >> Congratulations. I know you're moving into your second year, it'll be an exciting time for you I'm sure. >> Yeah, I'm excited. >> Keynote tomorrow, right? >> Yeah, I'm opening up day two. >> Just give us real quick, sneak peak, what are you going to talk about? >> Yeah, it's, I think it's really just all about design's evolution inside of Infor, really setting the stage that Hook and Loop went from an internal kind of creative agency and is really moving towards product experience. So that's product strategy, product thinking, how do we aggregate all of that capability, from a data and A.I. perspective, and then find deployment mechanisms that not only inspire our internal teams, but more importantly, inspire our customers in the market. >> Good deal. >> Thank you again for the time. Pleasure. >> Alright, thank you. >> See you tomorrow morning. Nunzio Esposito joining us from Infor. Back with more, we're at Inforum '18. We're live in Washington D.C. and you are watching theCUBE. (light upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering Women Transforming Technology. >> Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto, with the third annual Women Transforming Technology event and I'm very excited to be joined by the CEO of Women Who Code, Alaina Percival. Alaina, nice to have you here. >> Hi, thank you very much for having me. >> So tell me about Women Who Code. You co-founded it a while ago. Give us a little bit of a background about what your organization is. >> Yeah, Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of technical women in the world. Our mission is to see women excel in technology careers, and that's because we have a vision of women becoming executives, technical executives, founders, board members, and of course through a pathway of being software engineers. >> So Women Who Code started, originally, back in 2011 as a community. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that and what you've transformed it into, today. >> Yeah, it started off as a local community, and it was just a space to get together with other technologists, and what we started to see is it was this thing that was just fun and kind of our little secret for, you know, that first year, and we realized-- at one point I said, "Hey other women around the world deserve to have this, as well." And, that's really where the focus to grow globally came about and focus on women: building on their skills and building up their leadership skills and if you invite software engineers to a leadership and networking event, they won't come, but we hold an average of five free technical events every single day, throughout the world, and at those events, they're primarily technology events where we weave in a little bit of leadership and networking, but it feels authentic and its an event that software engineers are excited to be. >> Five events per day, that's incredible. So, VMware became a partner back in 2015, when you had around nine or 10,000 members. Now, today, its over 137,000 global members. Talk to us about the strategic partnership with VMware and what that's enabled Women Who Code to achieve. >> Yeah, we can't accomplish what we accomplish without the partners that support us. We try not to charge our members for anything. So, those 1,900 events we put on last year were free. We've given away $2.8 million in our weekly newsletter of scholarships, and conference tickets, encouraging our community to go out there in the broader tech community and we can do those things, we can launch in the cities that we can launch in, we can elevate women as leaders around the world, but we can only do that through partners, and VMware is one of our founding partners and what that took is someone in executive leadership to see who we could be, because we're very small, and we were very local when we came to VMware and talked to them about what our vision was and what we were going to accomplish and I say now, what I said back then, is we've only scratched the surface of what we are going to achieve. >> There's some commonalities, some parallels that Women Who Code has with VMware. You know, this is the third annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware here and its sold out within hours. Walking into that room it's very empowering. The excitement and the passion are there and you just start to feel a sense of community. Tell me about the parallels that you see with VMware and some of the visions that they share about, not just raising awareness for the diversity gaps and challenges, but also taking a stand to be accountable in that space. And what they announced this morning with Stanford, with this massive $15 million investment in this Innovation Lab of actually wanting to dig deep into these barriers to help identify them to help eradicate them. What are some of the visionary similarities with Women Who Code and VMware? >> Yeah, so what you see with that is you know, you're investing in someone or an organization that already has the potential. Our average age of our community is 30. We have a lot of trouble claiming that you achieve what you achieve in your career, because of us. We know we play a part in it, but we know that potential, that raw power, exists within you, and when someone sees and knows that that's there and gives you what you need to be able to harness that potential, you are able to achieve great things, global things. You're able to change the world, and that's what we do for our members and their careers, and that's what our partners, like VMware do for us. >> I saw on your website: 80% of members experience a positive career impact, after joining Women Who Code. 80% of women, that's huge. >> Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people that you connect with, the sense of belonging. We had a women at the end of Hackathon, in Manila come up to our leaders, there, and she started crying. She said, "I was about to leave the industry and I realize I have a place." And that sense of belonging that you get from coming to a Women Who Code event that's very welcoming, it can really help to override all of those unconscious biases that you encounter every day, throughout the course of your career, and it helps you to realize, "I'm not alone. There's a lot of really smart, talented women in the tech industry, who want me to be in my job and being in my job isn't just for me. I'm lifting up the people around me, as well." >> So one of the things that we hear a lot about is a lot of focus on STEM programs and getting young girls interested in STEM fields to study in college, but another thing that's huge is the attrition rates. Women are leaving technology at alarming rates, and a lot of people think it's to go off and have children, and it's actually not the case. What are some of the things that have surprised you about women kind of in that, maybe, mid-stage of their career that are leaving, and how can Women Who Code help to impact that, positively? >> Yeah, so what you're speaking to is definitely the data showing that women are leaving their technical careers at a rate of 50% at the mid-career level, and they're leaving their overall careers, if you aggregate women in careers, at a rate of 20% over a 30 year period, so that gap is huge and the industry is a great industry for women. You've got a lot of job security, a lot of job opportunity, a lot of flexibility. All of these things are great for women and their careers, but what you're encountering is often being the only, or one of the only, and you really don't overcome that, until you're getting above 20%, 25%, 30% of that feeling of being the only on a team, and what I think is the biggest issue with women coming into their careers at what kind of wears you down is the unconscious bias. It's something that you encounter on a daily, or multiple times a day basis. That thing that if you complained about a single one of them, you'd be the weird person who complains, at your company. And so, what Women Who Code really does is: one, it helps to create a sense of belonging, it helps to build domain-specific and non-domain-specific skills, it helps you to envision your career, not just the next step in your career, but the step after that, and the step after that, so it's really working to combat those things that you're to, on a daily basis, to provide that sense of community, to remind you, you do belong, and to really help you envision and achieve your career goals, long-term. >> So you have about 137,000 members, globally. And when we had Lily Chang on earlier, she was talking about the Shanghai and Beijing and kind of what that sort of thing meant to her going back there now, on the board. Tell us, maybe give me an example of a real shining star, who joined Women Who Code and was able to get that support, and that guidance, and that camaraderie to continue to be successful, and actually be promoted, and succeed. >> Yeah, so one example that I love is a woman came up to me at an event, last year, and she said, "Hey Alaina, I was going to the Women Who Code Python events, and I now, today, because of what I learned, ended up choosing a path in data science. I'm a senior data scientist, and this year, I'm being flown across country to speak, as an expert in data science. I would not be in this career path, without Women Who Code." Another story that I love is a woman who came up to me at a Hackathon and she told me her story that she had joined Women Who Code, in February, and she was going to our events and kind of figured out what she wanted to do, and by the summer she had transitioned into a new job, gotten a job with The Weather Channel, as a software engineer, and she was making more than double any salary that she had had prior to that. >> Wow. >> And so its career direction, competing job offers, which really increases your likelihood of having a higher salary, those are kind of two examples that I love. The one thing that we haven't talked about is our leadership program. We have a global leadership program, which really actions you to build skill-based volunteering and become a local tech leader. It opens up lines of communication between you and executives at your company. You often get called in as a thought leader at companies. You typically will receive a promotion or a pay increase, at a higher rate than you would otherwise. Some of our leaders get press mentions, get invited to be speakers at conferences, or even advisors on advisory boards. And so, when I look at the stories that are coming from our leaders, one of my favorite stories is a woman in Atlanta. She had a master's in CS. She was inside of the box, you know, the person that every company wants to hire. She was incredibly shy, and when she stepped up as a Women Who Code leader she said, "Oh Alaina, I'm going to be the worst leader." And, okay you've got this. At her first event, she stoop up and she was like, "My name's Erica. Feel free to ask me questions," and kind of sat down, as quickly as possible, but she stood in the front of that room. She began to be perceived by the community, and by herself, as a leader. And in under one year, she was invited, she didn't even apply, to speak at three different tech conferences, and she went from barely being able to say her name in front of a nice community to giving a talk to a standing-room-only crowd. >> Wow, very impactful. And is that for other opportunities that you guys deliver, in terms of public speaking, or was that because she was able to, through Women Who Code, to start to get more confidence in her own capabilities and in her own skin? >> Experience, confidence, self-perception, community-perception, I had one lead at our community tell me that she became a leader at Women Who Code, by regularly attending events. One day, the leader was running late, so she said, "Oh, well, you know I can probably get this started. I've been coming enough," so she went and stood at the front of the room, welcomed everyone, got everything going, said our pitch and she said, by the end of that three-hour event, people thought she was a leader and she began to think, "Oh yeah, I'm a leader," and she says, "Hey, I know that I can get an interview anywhere I want. I know that this opens doors for me." I had one leader tell me that she interviewed with SpaceX, and they specifically told her in the interview that they were impressed with her Women Who Code leadership and that was one of the reasons they were interviewing her. >> Wow, what have been some of the things that have really blown you away, in the few years that this organization has been around? >> It's just the individual stories. It's, every step of the way, the impact that it has in the lives of our leaders in our community. And I honestly feel, everyday, that I get to do this for a job. >> With what VMware announced this morning, with Stanford and this huge investment that they're making into Women's Leadership and Innovation Lab, to look at some significant barriers that women in technology are facing and to identify those barriers that we can then eradicate, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, from that research and how you think that can actually benefit Women Who Code? >> Yeah, I'm very excited to see what comes out from there. I think we need a lot more research to help us to understand at what point things are happening and what things you can be doing that really help to overcome. I think that combining research with the real-world, in-person action that Women Who Code does and the work that we do with our community would have an even bigger impact. >> I also think what it speaks to is accountability. You know, a very large, very successful, 20-year-old organizations standing up saying, "We actually want to study this," and I think that there's a message there of accountability, which is, I think, a very important one that other organizations can definitely learn from. >> Yeah, I think that also they're going to an organization outside of them and funding that. And so, the research that comes out of there might come back and say, "You're doing this wrong. This is how you can be doing it better." And so, the fact that they're willing to make an investment and say, "Hey, we want to see this better, not only for us. It's not just going to be internal. This data's going out to the world." That's an investment in global change. That's not just holding that in at a personal or organizational level. >> Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, what are some of the things that you're going to walk away, from this third annual Women Transforming Technology event going, "Ah, that was awesome. Now, this gives me even more ideas for Women Who Code." >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to connect with, especially, women who are in leadership positions and figure out how we can better service women at the higher tiers of their career, because you don't stop needing support, and you don't stop growing your career, once you become a director or a vice president. You continue to invest in your career, and you continue to needs support. And so, I'm really looking for ways that we can better serve those women. >> And hopefully, we start to see that attrition number at 50% start to come down. >> Alaina: Definitely. >> Alaina, thanks so much for your time. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at VMware, for the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching. (funky electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone center it's theCUBE covering AWS Summits San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. Here at the Moscone Center West. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have a distinguished panel of guests on the program. Starting down of the fair side, Steven Jones whose the Director of Solution Architecture with AWS, helping us talk about how AWS gets to market is Chris Wegmann, Manager and Director of Accenture, and then super excited to have a customer on the program Chad Anderson is the IT Director of Operations at Del Monte Foods. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright Chad, we're going to start with you, talk to us a little bit about your role inside Del Monte and really the journey of the cloud, something we've been talking about for years, but Del Monte has an interesting story. I want to kind of understand your role in that. Start us off. >> Ya so I oversaw the project for us to migrate everything to AWS. We started off with just needing to really understand if were missing something here. Like, shouldn't we be moving to the cloud and that ended up in a study where we just kind of went threw the numbers, we looked at what the benefits were going to be and it kind of just turned into a obvious choice for us to do it. >> Back us up for a second, give us you know your organization Del Monte Foods and your technology group is this global and scope kind of how many end user do you have? How many sites? Can you give us a little bit of the speeds and feeds of what what was being considered, was it everything or some pieces, what was the impetus for the journey of the cloud? >> Ya, so we have about a thousand users, globally we are mostly in Manila, for our global share services our business back office work is done there and then most of it is U.S. footprint of plants and distribution centers and headquarters, et cetera operations. >> Alright so Chris, the SI partner for this cloud journey. So bring us a little bit of insight, bring us back to you know, kind of what was the business challenge and what was your teams role in helping along those journeys? >> The business challenge was getting Del Monte, getting the heart of their organization SAP to AWS quickly. Alright, there was a short time frame, I learned a lot about fruit packing during the project, but it was about how quickly could we get there? So, when we actually started, we started looking at taking seven months to do the migration of their environment. We really got into it and really got focused on what needed to be done. We looked at a lot of automation, put a lot of automation on the process, a very diligent approach, and we were able to do it, we thought we could do it in four months, and we did in three and a half months so very rapid, and I think as Chad will tell you we really kind of focused on building the right architecture, putting a lot of automation, and then also getting it in there with the right performance and then being able to tune things down, because you can you can move so quickly between engine sizes and memory and it was a really really exciting process to go through. >> Ya, so you said it originally we thought it was seven months, and it was good and done in half that time. That's not my experience with Enterprise Software roll outs. So, what was the delta there? How was the team able to move so fast? >> A lot of it was obviously AWS, being able to spin up the infrastructure, being able to automate a lot of the tasks that had to be done. Alright we did it threw three different environment sets. So we started diligent, moved to test, then went to production, and in each step we automated more and more of the process so we were able to condense the speed of the technical work that had to take place in a really short amount of time. >> We had to treat it also, like a mission critical thing across it wasn't just a infrastructure move it really the application guys were focused on this, we stopped all development of other activities going on. We really just kind of turned everybody and say "Let's get this done as soon as possible "and not be competing with each other." >> When you say stop everything, but of course the business didn't stop, but was transition pretty seamless. >> I mean other projects. >> Ya, ya, ya I understand, but I mean from the cut over and from your users stand point, did it go pretty smoothly? >> Oh definitely, these guys did an amazing job of putting together a plan that was really ready to be executed against. It took some, it took a lot of, I mean on my part it was really just to negotiate the extended maintenance window, but as far as the best compliment I ever got was people were like what did you do? Like I didn't even know that you guys did anything. From day one they took it and ran with it and we were stable. I mean it was pretty awesome. >> A black box, magic happens here and all of a sudden everything is running faster, scaling easier, cost is better, some of those types of thing? >> Ya, cocktails and beach time. >> Steve cocktails? I didn't realize that when I moved my enterprise application to cloud cocktails were involved. >> A few cocktails are involved. >> I mean look, I remember a few years ago where it was like well it's your development will do in the cloud, but I mean SAP has really raised cloud full boar and you know very strong partner, but bring us up to how does AWS help customers make sure that, this is critical things running the business, that it runs so smoothly. What have you learned along the way? What is different in 2018, then say it was even a year or two ago? >> A lot of great questions in there Stu, I would say this is become the new normal. Right? It use to be full disclosure, dev test, training type work loads in the early days but over the course of years we have taking a lot of learning with partners like Accenture and customers like Del Monte and we've taking those learnings and put them back into the platforms, so what you see today is a platform that a partner like Accenture could come in build a lot of automation tooling around, to reduce time frame from seven months down to three and a half. I think it was around two hundred servers, 50 of those were SAP related, and 25 terabytes of data that were moved in a short amount of time. So it's a combination of years worth of effort to build a platform that is scalable, resilient, and flexible. As well as the work that we have done directly with SAP that has gone right back into the platform. >> Chad bring us inside kind of operations on your team. What is the before and after? What's it look like? Was there change in personal or roles or skills? >> We transition services with our migration. So the Accenture team has taking over the long term operational activities as well as helping us through the migration efforts. We had a lot of preparation that was going on besides the server migration that was happening and I think what is really unique about them is because they can deliver these capabilities of the migration they have got a lot of the tooling and the automation is built into the operational mana services model as well. So it's been a much easier kind of hand over from those teams because we are working with the same vendor. >> Most of the time its not just that I've migrated from my environment to the cloud, but how does that enable the new services either Accenture from AWS from the marketplace. What has changed as to how you look at your SAP environment and kind of capability wise? >> It's just incredibly flexible now. It's just one of those situations where we can start small and we can scale so rapidly and it's like I feel like its kind of like walking into a fast food restaurant and just like oh, I'll take one of these, one of these, and one of these. You wait there and the food comes out, it just happens automatically. So, it's a great thing. >> Chris, I remember I interviewed a CEO a few years ago, and he said use to give me a million dollars in 18 months and I'll build you the Taj Mahal from my applications. Today I need to move faster and it's not a one time migration, but there's ongoing I've heard it a time and again there, so where does Accenture, it's not just the planning, where's Accenture involved? What is kind of the ongoing engagement? >> We go end to end. Right? So, we start out with strategy, we start out with a migration. The migration takes planning and execution, but really we focus on the run area as well using our Accenture platform and tooling that we have built. We really focus on how do you continue to optimize? How do you continue to improve performance? How do you govern? How do you do things like quota and security management and that type of stuff. I do think that a lot of our customers start with cloud think I can spin this stuff up, I can run it just like I ran my on premise data center and it's not the same. You go from a capacity planning person to a cost management person. You need to have a cloud architect understanding how you build your applications to be Cloud ready and AWS ready. There are a lot of great services, but if your not taking advantages of those services you can't auto scale, you can't do that stuff. So, we really help our clients go threw that entire process and make sure their getting the most value out of AWS all the way through the run for many years after they have done the migration. >> Chad, do you have any discussion of how are you reporting back to the business as to what were the hero numbers or success factors that said hey this was actually the right thing to do? >> Ya I mean we're a canned food company, so people are very interested in making sure that we are keeping our cost low. Most people from a business prospect want to talk to me about the efficiencies that their seeing and how's that going to show up a reduction in SG and A. We have seen it, I mean when you move to a group of people that can manage a larger set of infrastructure with a smaller group of people and the underline services can be turned on and off, so you only utilize what you really absolutely have. Those numbers show up on our bottom line. >> Steve, any other similar, what do you hear from customers when it comes to SAP, and what is the main driver, and what are the big hero things? >> So in the early days, it was all about cost right, driving cost out of the system. Now it's the flexibility, the ability to move quicker. Chad was relating earlier how you would spend a lot of time sizing environment and now there actually able to right size their environments using purpose built equipment the AWS has built for SAP. It's enabled them to actually reduce cost and move quicker. That's what we are hearing is common theme now these days. It's okay to move faster, to maybe not worry about sizing as much as we use to. >> Ya for future initiatives, I mean it's, there's all these windows of time that are just gone for us to stand up new services whether it's traditional application that needs servers and computer, whether it's SAP services, we are kind of all on that platform now where we can just click and plug in items much easier. >> Chad, what do things like digital transformation and innervation mean to a canned food company? >> We are desperately trying to get in touch of our consumer. So, whether were figuring out how to get improve kind of how we are managing our digital assets, how were managing, our pages on Amazon, or our pages on Walmart.com. We need to be much more in touch and much more consumer focused and a lot of these newer technologies, et cetera there built to run on AWS and we ready to kind of integrate that into our existing enterprise environment. >> Innervation has been a big part of our customers reason for moving to cloud. I'd say 18 months ago, we saw a big transition in our enterprise customers a lot of them were starting off with cost savings, for operational savings, just overall improvement of their operations, and then we seen about 18 months ago we saw a big shift of people very much focused on innervation and using AWS platform as that catalyst renovation. So, the businesses asking for Alexa apps, they're asking for the integration. Well, the SAP data has to be there to support that stuff. Right, and your enterprise tech has to be there, so by doing that it's enabled a lot of innervation in our processors. >> Chad, last question when you talk about innovation, are there certain areas that your team's investing in is it AI, is it IOT, you know what are some of the areas that you think will be the most promising and how do Accenture and AWS fit into those from your planning? >> Ya, I mean IOT is definitely an interesting area for us, and getting to a point where we can measure our effectiveness and our manufacturing processes, those are all really initiatives now that we're starting to focus on, now that we kind of gotten some of the infrastructure related stuff and were ready to kind of build out those platforms. We're talking about scaling out our OE software and our infrastructure its just such an easier conversation to kind of plan for those activities. We turned a three month sizing exercise as to how much IOT did and we think were going to have to process through these engines into a hey let's go with this and if it doesn't work then we'll take it out and increase the size. It really helps us deliver capabilities new capabilities and new types of ways of measuring or helping our business run in a much more effective and efficient way. >> Anything that you've learned along the way that you've turned to peers and say "Here's something I did, maybe do it faster or do it a little bit different way?" >> I think Accenture has been an amazing partner. I think a lot of people are skeptical about running their entire enterprise across the network and once you kind of bring them in and you really let them look under the cover of what you have. One of the reasons we went with them was just the trust and confidence that they had that we could do this. Once I kind of saw that it was like well I mean let's trust the process here. I mean these guys are the experts and so so that's been a big thing is just reach out learn about what people are doing. There's no reason why you can't do this. >> Well Chad, Chris, and Steve thank you both so much for highlighting the story of a customer's journey to the cloud. We will be back with lots more coverage here at AWS Summit in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)