(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios today. And obviously, what's top of the news is the coronavirus and COVID-19, and it's having a direct impact on anything where people get together. We're obviously really tied into the convention space. But we're excited to have an expert in the field coming at it from a different kind of point of view, more from the entertainment side. We'd like to welcome, calling in from Tennessee, Lauren Spahn. She is a partner for Shackelford, Bowen, McKinley, or excuse me, but yeah, McKinley & Norton. Lauren, great to see you. >> Hey there, how are ya? >> Jeff Frick: Good. So we were introduced through kind of the process of the South by Southwest cancellation. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about kind of what you do, what type of clients do you have, who do you guys kind of represent? >> Yeah, sure, so I practice primarily in entertainment law here in Nashville. But I work with a variety of people in the music industry, whether it be artists or music festivals, record labels, publishing companies, you name it, across the US. So I do a lot of work in L.A. and New York as well. And our firm specializes in a little bit of everything, but our national hub is kind of the spearhead for the entertainment and music practice. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause we're not so directly involved in entertainment, but we do go to a lot of conferences. And, I think, for us, the watershed moment this year was Mobile World Congress earlier this year in February, 100,000 people in Barcelona, Spain. That's a little unique because most of the main vendors are Asian in terms of all the mobile carriers and the handset tech carriers. But, you were saying before we turned the cameras on, that now the South By Southwest event cancellation is kind of sending the same shock waves if you will through the entertainment industry. >> Yeah, I mean South By Southwest obviously is a big coming together of multiple industries. You know, music, film, TV, technology, but it really was one of the first events that were canceled that impacted the music industry. And so, such a large conference to completely cancel, really just started, it was the tip of the iceberg, or I think what we are going to continue to see across the sphere in music whether its tours being canceled or music festivals that are being canceled, everything is kind of starting to ramp up, and were starting to see the effects from South By Southwest line. >> Jeff Frick: Right. So, one of the things that really is just kind of a splash of cold water, is these things are going down it just really highlights the interconnectedness of all these different parts of these events, right? whether it is the primary promoter or the primary bands in the case of South By Southwest or even the tech companies, but then there are tons and tons of secondary, third and other vendors that are involved from food and transportation and the list goes on and on. So, you're quoted quite often in the press about talking about force majeure and that this is something that kind of comes up in contract law when these types of events happen. So, I wonder if you can kind of explain the dictionary definition of force majeure and how do you see it kind of executed traditionally in a contract where maybe one person just can't uphold their part of the deal and how that contrasts with something like this, which is hitting kind of both sides of the agreement, if you will. >> Completely. So, I think it's important to step back and look at if we are going to use a music festival as an example. You have a contract, the music festival itself will have a contract with the artist, but they will also have contracts with their vendors, with the production team that comes in and sets up the staging and the sound and the light. There are a myriad of contracts and so, the language in each contract tends to govern the relationship between the festival and that third party. So, in this situation of let's use an artist, for example. There is different things in the contract that point to how you can cancel and what happens when you cancel. A force majeure is an example of that. And force majeure is something that is outside of the control of both parties. So, again, the festival and the artist. If something like the Coronavirus is coming, neither one of those parties can control that from happening. And so it typically relieves both parties of any obligation to move forward with the contract. What is important, though, is the language that's in that force majeure provision. So, you sometimes will see language like sickness or an epidemic. But then, you may not have that, and you may have language that says, a local or national state of emergency. So, depending upon the state you're in, depending upon the exact situation in the city that you are holding the event, all of those things can be looked or looked to to interpret whether or not the language that's in that force majeure contract will impact you or will give you the rights to cancel that event without having to pay additional money. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And so, you know, not only that but you're then seeing it carried out through the insurance policies, as well. So, even if you have force majeure language whether or not the insurance company will help cover the losses for you again depends upon the exact language that's in your insurance policy. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So, across the board, it really is a contractual right, that can differ for the different people that are involved. >> Right. But, there's the contractual, the language in the contract, but then there is kind of this random stuff that comes up. And, we hear kind of act of God kind of thrown up by insurance companies when it's something they haven't defined in all the fine language. And then, the other piece that we're hearing about a lot in the news here on Palo Alto, right is the specific descriptive terms used by the authorities. Is it a pandemic? Is it an outbreak? Is it a natural disaster? Is it a state of emergency called by the government? >> Or other. So, how does that figure in on something like we're experiencing? I don't know that we've seen anything quite like this before. >> You know, I was looking back through some contracts earlier this morning because I had a potential cancellation that was going to happen, and I mean some contracts go as far as to even describe the Swine Flu and similar things like that but we really are looking to the authorities to see what decision they are making on everything. And whether or not they are calling it a local state of emergency because a lot of times that exact definition or that exact cause is defined in the agreement . But, yeah, I mean really it comes down to small print wording in this situation, if you are looking at the contract itself to see what rights that you have. What I found is that people aren't going to the nitty gritty of at least the contracts, you're probably going to get into the nitty gritty of the insurance policy, if you have a chance of getting any kind of protection. But, at the end of the day, the artist doesn't want to go play a festival that could potentially cause their fans to have some outbreak of the Coronavirus. An event doesn't want to be liable for holding an event that could be connected with that, as well, because across the board, that creates a PR nightmare for whoever's making that decision. So, you're seeing people that are trying to work together to figure out exactly how we're going to handle things, and what we're going to do moving forward, because no one is going to win in this situation. >> [Jeff Frick} Right. Right. >> It's really just figuring out a way that we can all be in the best position possible across the board. >> Yeah. And I think that's what we're kind of seeing a lot too, where, you know, I think everyone is again instead of just one party that's not upholding their part of the deal and the other party getting screwed on that, this is really, you know, we're kind of in it together, this has kind of come down on both of our houses so how do we work together to minimize the pain and at least, kind of get through this window that we assume will pass at some point or at least the current heightened state will go. But, I just wonder if you have an opinion on, from a legal point of view, and it's not your space, so if you say no that's an okay answer, but, you know, if you look at kind of market forces is determining what is the appropriate action, right? Because we don't really know what's the right action. But, clearly, the market is defined based on activity and the University of Washington shutting down and Stanford shutting down >> Vanderbilt >> Almost is a self-imposed kind of semi-quarantine state, which is just, you know the latest now I think they get the local high school basketball game is they can only have 100 people in the stands in the biggest building they can find and everybody needs to spread out. So, it's just been very interesting to see you know kind of what is the appropriate response. What's the right response? Because ultimately it seems like it's driven by nobody wants to be the one that didn't take the max precautions and something bad happens. >> To be honest, I don't think that anyone really knows. You know, it really is the conversations right now are not the artist's agent calling the festival and saying we're absolutely not doing this The conversation is more so, hey what are you guys seeing? What are you guys thinking? What's the best way to handle this? You know, no one wants to put the consumers and the fans at risk. And, you know, until we have a better handle on exactly how we handle this type of situation, it's really going to be people doing their best to try to not create a situation that's going to, you know, cause some kind of massive outbreak. >> Right. Right. >> If you look at, you know, something like South By, no one wants to cancel, you know. It really impacts, not only the company and the event itself, but really everyone that's associated to it, has a financial hardship because of that decision, but the decision isn't made because someone wants to do it, it's made because collectively, you know, people are feeling like it needs to be done in order to keep people safe. >> Right. >> And if they didn't think that, they'd probably go ahead and try to hold the event and, you know, risk the liability. But, I think people truly want what's in the best interest of everyone. And that's why they are working together to try to figure this out. >> Yeah. Yeah. It really is driven home what social creatures we are when you start to kind of disconnecting crowds and groups of people from so many events and it just continues to ripple through whether it's our business, a convention business, the entertainment business, you know March Madness is coming up here in a very short order. What's going to happen there all the way down to you know, the local talent show for the local middle schoolers that they used to have before graduation, which is now canceled. So, it's interesting times. >> And I think for us, the biggest indicator in terms of just music festivals is going to be what happens with Coachella. And, you know, Billboard and Variety have reported that they're looking to potentially reschedule the event to October, if artists are able. And if not, they're going to have to completely cancel it for this year. And, you know, Coachella is such a massive festival that attracts people from all over the world. And if Coachella is canceled then I think there is a good chance that so long as this is continuing at the speed it is, that we're going to see a lot more music festivals canceled. >> When is Coachella scheduled? >> It starts in about a month. >> In about a month. >> So it's the second weekend in April, but they have to start production and really building out the grounds now. >> Wow. Wow. >> And so the decision kind of has to be made before then. And then, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a decision there in the next few days. >> Yeah. I think I would take the short if I was in Vegas, because there's just not enough data, I don't think, to go forward based on the current situation. I'm glad I'm not the one sitting in that chair. >> Yeah. It'd be a tough position. >> All right, well Lauren, well thank you for sharing your insight and, you know, it's great to get the perspective of another you know kind of industry that's all built around bring people together. And, I think we probably both would agree that this time will pass and we'll get a vaccine out, we'll get the growth curves to start to flatten out and go down which is where they need to go. And then you know I think it will be a different time, but hopefully things will get approximate a little bit more to normal in the not too distant future. >> Yeah, fingers crossed. I hope it gets figured out sooner rather than later and we can all have our summers full of conferences and festivals and the gathering of people. >> Yep. All right Lauren. Well thanks again for your time >> Thank you >> And have a great Tuesday. >> Awesome. You too. >> Alrighty. She's Lauren. I'm Jeff. Thanks for checking in on this Cube Conversation. We'll catch you next time. (upbeat music)

so two points max first off ideas aren't worth a damn ever he's got ideas all right I could give a holy hoot about about ideas I mean I I I got people throw ideas at me all the friggin time you know I don't give a shit I just truly told give a shit right I want actions show me how I'm gonna turn something into an action how am I gonna make something better right and I I want to know ahead of time what that something is am I trying to improve customer attention trying to improve recovery time for an athlete who's got back-to-back games right III I know what I'm trying to do and I want to focus on that where ideas become great and you said it really well max is ideas are something I want to test so but I know what I want to test these of the event what outcome I'm trying to drive so it isn't just it is an ideation for the I eat for the sake of ideation its ideation around the idea that I need to drive an outcome I need to have athletes that are better prepare for the next game who can recover faster who are stronger and can you know it can play through a longer point of the season here we are in March Madness and we know that by the way that the teams that tend to rise to the top are the teams that have gone through a more rigorous schedule played tougher teams right they're better prepared for this and it's really hard for a mid-major team to get better prepared because they're playing a bunch of lollipop teams in their own conference so it's it's ideas really don't excite me ideation does around an environment that allows me to test ideas quickly fail fast in order to find those you know variables or metrics those data sources it just might be better predictors of performance yeah I like the idea of acting quickly failing quickly and learning quickly right you have this loop and what happens is and then I think every strand coach in the world is probably guilty of this is we get an idea and we just apply it you go home you know I think eccentric trainings this great idea and we're going to do an eccentric training block and I just apply it to my athletes and you don't know what the hell happened because you don't have any contextual metrics that you base your test on to actually learn from so you at the day go I think it worked you know they jump high but you're not comparing that to anything right they jump they've been the weight room for three months my god I hope they jump higher I hope they're stronger like I can sit in the weight room probably get stronger for three months and my thought is but let's have context and it's um I call them anchor data points they were always reflecting back on so for example if I have a key performance metric where I want to jump high I'll always track jumping high but then I can apply different interventions eccentric training power training strength training and I can see the stress response of these KPIs so now I've set an environment that we have our charter still there my charter being I'm going to improve my athletic development and that's my goal I'm basing that charter on the KPI of jumping high so key performance indicator of jumping high now I can apply different blocks and interventions with that anchor point over and over again and the example I give is I don't come home and ask my girlfriend how she's doing once every month I ask her every day and that's my anchor point right and I might try different things I might try cookie and I might try making dinner I might do the dishes I might stop forgetting our dates I might actually buy groceries for once well maybe she gets happier then I'll continue to buy groceries maybe I'll remember it's her birthday March 30th I remember that that's my put it on there right and so but the idea is we have in life the way life works we have these modular points where we call anchor points where we were self-reflect and we reflect off of others and we understand our progress in our own life environment based on these anchor points and we progress and we apply different interventions I want this job maybe I'll try having this idea outside of here maybe I'll play in a softball league and we're always reflecting it's not making me happier is that making me feel fulfilled and I don't understand why we don't take what we do every day and like subconsciously and apply it into the sports science world but lava is because it happens unconsciously because that's how our body has learned to evolve we have anchor points I want to survive I want to have kids lots of kids strong kids and I and I die so my kids can have my food and that's what we want as a body right your bison care about anything else and so that's why you walk with a limp after you get hurt you don't want perfect again it's a waste of energy to walk perfect right you can still have kids with a limp I hate to break it to you right we're not running from animals anymore and so we have all these anchor points in life let's apply that same model now and like you said it's like design thinking and actually having that architecture to outline it whether it's in that hypothesis canvas to force us to now consciously do it because we're not just interacting with ourselves now we're interacting with other systems other nodes of information to now have to work together in use in to achieve our company's charter interesting max there's a lot of a lot of key points in there the one that strikes me is measurement John Smail at Procter & Gamble I was there you still I say you are what you measure and you measure what you reward that was his way of saying as an organization that the compensation systems are critical and the story just walked through about what Kelsey right and what you guys are doing and how you increase your your happiness level right now here's the damnest your work I mean that is that is how you're rewarded right if you are rewarded by happiness and so you you learn to measure if you're smart right that you don't miss birthdays that you do dishes you you you help up around the house you do things and when you do those things the happiness meter goes up and when you don't do those things happiness meter goes down and you know because you're you're you're probably pulling not just once a day but as you walk by her throughout the day are on a weekend you're you're constantly knowing right if if you're liking your mom you know when mom's not happy you don't need to be a day to sign this and know mom's not happy and so then you you know you re engineer about okay what did I do wrong that causes unhappiness right and so life is a lot of there's a lot of life lessons that we can learn that we can apply to either our business our operations or sports whatever it might be that your your profession is in about the importance of capturing the right metrics and understanding how those metrics really drive you towards a desired outcome and the rewards you're gonna receive from those outcomes yeah and with those it's the right metrics right that's what not metrics the right metrics if I want to know if someone was happy I wouldn't go look at the weather I wouldn't you know check gas prices especially if I'm curious they're happy with me well maybe they might reflect if they're happy in general if they're happy with me right now I'm contextualizing I'm actually trying to look at I know a little bit more about what I should look at I don't know everything and so you might have metrics that you say you know I know science says this metric is good this metric is good maybe we want to explore of these couple of metrics over here because we think that either aid they're related to one of these metrics or they related to the main outcome itself and that gives you a way to then I have these key and core metrics that's not stacking the deck but it's no one you're gonna get insights out of it and then I have these exploratory metrics over here but you're gonna allow me then to dive and explore elsewhere and if you're a company those can be trade secrets they can be proprietary information if you're a trainer it can be ways to learn how different athletes adapt to make yourself better and again we're talking about a company and we're talking about trainer there's no difference when it comes to trade secrets right trainers keep their trade secrets and companies keep their trade secrets and as we talk about this it's really easy to see how these two environments where they're talking about company athletic development sports science personal training health and wellness are really universally governed by the same concepts because life itself is typically governed by these concepts and when we're playing those kind of home iterations to it you can really begin to quickly learn what's going on and whether or not those metrics that you we're good ARCA and whether or not you can learn new metrics and from that max you raise an interesting question or made a point here that's I might be very different in the sports world than it is in the business world and that is the ability to test and what I mean by that is you know the business world is full of concepts like a bee testing and see both custody and simulations and things like that when you're dealing with athletes individually I would imagine it's really hard to test athlete a with one technique and athlete B with another technique when both these athletes are trying to maximize their performance capabilities in order to maximize you know the money there can they can they can generate how do you deal with that so yes no one wants to get the shitty program yes that's correct yeah for the most part people don't and this I'll take people don't test like that and but here's my solution to us I think being a critic without solutions called being an asshole my solution to that is making it very agile and so we're not going to be able to you know test group a versus group B but what you can do if you're a coach and you have faith in because there are a lot of programs coaches use coaches probably use you know every offseason they might try a new program so there's no real difference in all honesty to try a new program on you know these seven athletes versus and then try a different one that you also trust on these seven athletes and part of that comes from the fact that we have science and evidence to show that both these programs are really good right but there's no one's actually broken down the minutiae of it and so yes you probably could do a and B testing because you have faith in both programs so it's not like either athletes getting the wrong program they're both getting programs that are going to probably elicit an outcome of performing better but who wants to perform the best the second asks the second aspect would be what kind of longitudinal data that you can collect very easily to understand typical progression of athletes for example if you coach and you coach for eight years you'll have you know eight different freshman classes theoretically and you'll begin to understand how a freshman typically progresses to a sophomore in what their key performance indicators typically trend ass and so you can now say okay last year we did this this year we do this I'm gonna see if my freshman class responds differently is this going to give us the perfect answer absolutely not no but without data you're just another person with an opinion that's not my quote I stole that quote but it's true because if we don't try and audit ourselves and try to understand the process of how is someone developing then we're just strictly relying on confirmation bias I mean my program was great you know Pat some guys in the back that jumped higher and we did awesome if we're truly into understanding what's best then we'll actually try and you know measure some of these progress some of this some of these KPIs over time in the example I give and it's unfortunate and fortunate I don't mean anything bad by this either we're on a salary right and so what happens when you're on a salary is no matter really what happens assuming you're doing your job you're gonna keep your job but if you look at a start-up a startup has one option and that's to make money or go out of business right they don't really have the luxury of oh we're just gonna you know hang out and not saying coaches hang up or not we're just gonna you know keep this path we're going on as a coach you know how do I apply a similar model well I start up the bank my startup is you can go from worth zero dollars to worth a hundred you know million two billion dollars in one year at the coach we don't have that same environment because we're not producing something tangible which doesn't always it doesn't have the same capitalistic Drive right the invisible hand pushing us the same way the free market does with you know devices and so we don't always follow the same path that these startups have done yet that same path and same model might provide better insights so max you've hit something I found very interesting confirmation bias if if you don't take the time before you execute a test understand the variables that you're gonna test what happens is if you after the test is over you go back and try to triage what the drivers were that impact and confirmation bias and revisionist history and all these other things that make humans really poor decision-makers get in the way and so but before as a coach I would imagine before as a coach what you'd want to do is is set up ahead of time we're gonna test the following things to see if they have impact by thoroughly like the hypothesis development canvas right they'll really understand against what you're really going to test and then when you've done that test you you will you would have much more confidence in the results of that test versus trying to say wow Jimmy Jimmy jumped two inches higher this year thank God what did he do let's figure out and revision it wasn't what he ate was it where he slept oh he played a lot of video games that must be it he is the video games made him jump higher right so it's I think a lot of sports in particular even more than the business for a lot of sports is based on on heuristics and gut feel it's run by a priesthood of former athletes who are were great because of their own skills and capabilities and it maybe had very little do with her development and I don't want to pick on Michael Jordan but no Michael Jordan was notoriously a poor coach and a poor judge of talent he made some of the most industries when the worst draft choices industry has ever seen and that's because he mistakenly thought that everybody was like him that he revision history about well what made me great were the following thing so I'm gonna look for people like that instead of reversing the course and saying okay let's figure out ahead of time what makes what will make you a better plant player and then trying these tests across a number of different players to figure out okay which of these things actually had impact so sports I think has gotten much better Moneyball sort of opened that people's eyes to it now we're seeing now more and more team who are realizing that that data science is as a discipline it's not something you apply after the fact but in order to really uncover what's the real drivers of performance you have to sit down before you do the test to really understand what it is you're testing because then you can learn from the tests and and let's be honest right learning is a process of exploring and failing and if you don't try and fail enough times if you don't have enough might moments you'll never have any break to a moment and I think what people don't understand is they hear the word fail and assumed oh we did a six-month program and failed nope failure can occur in one day and that's okay right you can use for example I'm going to use this piece of technology as motivation for biofeedback to increase my athletes and tint and the amount of effort they put into the weight room that's right hypothesis you can test that in one day you print out that piece of technology the athletes don't respond well you'd have learned something now okay that technology didn't bring about the motivation I thought why was that you can do reflect and that revision because you had the infrastructure beforehand on maybe notes that you may have taken and scribbled down on your pad or observations from the coaches I am I but you know what the athletes weren't very invested because the technology took too long to set up right it wasn't the technology's fault it was the process of given technology available to act and utilize on so maybe you retest again with it set up beforehand or a piece of technology that's much easier to use and the intent increases so now you say okay it's not the technology's fault it's the application of how we're using the technology at the same time we hear a lot of things like I'm gonna take a little bit of pivot not too far though is in the baseball world you see technology being more used more and more as a tool and it's helping guide immediate actions on the field whether it's not it's a you know spin rates its arm velocities with accelerometers or some sort of measurement they decide to use but that's not necessarily collecting data that's using technology as a performance tool and I think there's a distinction between the two the two are not mutually exclusive you can still use it as a performance tool but that performance data if the infrastructure is not there to store a file and reflect and analyze it's only being used one-sided and so people think oh we're doing sports science we're doing data science because we're collecting data well that's not I can go count ants that's collecting data but that's not you know I don't unless I count ants every day and say oh my game populations decreasing right and kind of a here's a really easy way to think of it in my opinion you have cookies in the fridge right and every day I go and every week will say my mom makes cookies this doesn't happen I wish it did be very cool but I love your mom and we didn't eat cookies every week but in the fridge I go when I count how many cookies there were right and using data I'd say oh twelve cookies if there's any cookies at all I can eat right that's using technology and that moment but doing data Sciences well you know what she's gonna make you know twelve and a couple of days and I have two days left and there's six cookies I can eat three today and three tomorrow because now you're doing prescriptive analytics right because you are prescribing an action based on the information you collected it's based on historical data because you know that every seventh day the cookies are coming no I just take it as I'm using technology as a tool I might only eat one cookie and forever be leaving six cookies on the table right and so there's hid don't want to do that no we don't but we trick ourselves I think we see that not saying baseball does is but I'm saying we've see that in all domains where we use technology we say oh technology good we had someone use technology that's data science no that's not data science that's using technology to help Tripp augment training using data Sciences understand the information that happened during the training process looking at it contextually to them prescribed saying I'm going to do this exercise or this exercise based on the collection and maturation of the information so instead of cookies here I eat one cookie it's a historic Lee I know there's going to be twelve cookies every seven days I have two days left I can eat three cookies now I can hide two and tell my sister Amelia oh there's only one left very weird I don't know who ate data - well let max let me let me let me wrap up with a very interesting challenge that I think all all data scientists face wellmaybe all citizens of data science face and I say did as citizens of data science I mean people who understand how to use the results of data science not necessarily people who are creating the data science and here's here's the challenge that if you if you make your decisions just based on the numbers alone you're likely to end up with suboptimal results and the reason why that happens is because there's lots of outside variables that have huge influence especially when it comes to humans and even machines to a certain extent let me give you an example know baseball is is infatuated with cyber metrics and numbers right everybody is making decisions we're seeing this now in the current offseason you know who was signing contracts and who has given given money and they're using they're using the numbers to show you know how much is that person really worth and and organizations are getting really surgical and their ability to figure out that that person is not worth a you know a six year contract for you know 84 million dollars they're worth a two-year contract for 36 and that's the best way I'm gonna you know pay but minimize my risks and so then the numbers are really drive and allow that but it isn't just the big data that helps to make decisions and in fact I would argue the insights carried from the small data is equally important especially in sports and I think this is a challenge in other parts of the business is the numbers itself the data itself doesn't tell the full story and in particular think about how does an organization leverage the small data the observed data to really help make a better decision so right now in baseball for example in this offseason the teams became infatuated with using numbers to figure out who were they going to offer contracts to how much they were going to pay him for how long and we saw really the contracts in most cases really shrinking and value in size cuz people are using the numbers and comparing that to say always so and so it only got this you're only going to get this and numbers are great but they miss some of the smaller aspects that really differentiate good athletes from great athletes and those are things like fortitude part you know effort resilience these these kind of things that aren't you can't find that in the number so somebody's ability to a closer write who goes out there in the eighth-inning and and just has a shit performance gets beat up all over the place comes back in it still has to lead and and does that person have the guts the fortitude to go back out there after us bad eighth-inning and go do it again who can fight through when they're tired it's late in the game now you've been playing it's a you know 48 minute game you've been playing forty minutes already you've hardly had a break and you're down by two the balls in your hand a three-pointer is gonna win it what are you gonna do my numbers don't measure that it's theirs these these these other metrics out there like fortitude at heart and such that you actually can start to measure they don't show up a numbers where they come from the inside some subject matter experts to say yeah that person has fight and in fact there's one pro team that actually what they do in the minor leagues they actually put their players into situations that are almost no win because they want to see what they're gonna do do they give up or do they fight back and and you know what you again you can't batting average then tell you that if somebody's gonna get up and that you're gonna give up it's a ninth in and you think you've lost you know what I don't want that person out there and so think about in sports how do you complement the data that you can see coming off of devices with the data that experience coach can say that that person's got something extra there they got the fight they have the fortitude they have the resilience when they're down they keep battling they don't give up and you know from experience from from playing and coaching I know from playing and coaching the guy is going to give up you know who they are I don't want them on the court right it made me the best player from a numbers perspective hell if that was the case Carmelo Anthony would be an all-star every time his numbers are always great the guide lacks heart but he doesn't know how to win so think about how as an organization a sporting organization you use the metrics to help give you a baseline but don't forget about the the soft metrics the servable things that you got to tell you that somebody has something special that is an awesome way to bring this together because subject matter experts those are people who have been in the trenches who see it firsthand date is here to augment you in your decisions it's not here to override you it's not here to take your place and so in coaches fear data it's the silliest thing ever because it's giving more ammo to a gunslinger that's all it does right it's not going to win the battle right it's just the bullets you got to still aim it in fire and so when we look at it in regards to performance and athletic development all these numbers they'll never be right ever they'll never be 100% perfect but neither will you and so what we're trying to do is help your decisions with more information that you can process into your brain that you might otherwise not be able to quantify so it's giving that paintbrush not just the color red but given all the colors to you and so now you can make whatever painting you want and you're not constrained by things you can't measure yourself I could add one point max to bill on that data won't make a shitty coach good but it will make a good coach great yeah yeah I couldn't agree more well dad thank you for being on here I really appreciate and for everyone who's listening this is going on prime March Madness time and so to pull away the dean of big data from March Madness who for people listening he made his bracket on the Google cloud using AI and so it only he so I was thanking him to come here and only he would be the one to I guess take I don't say take the fun out of it but try and grid the family bracket for used it all augmented decision-making he possibly can like it the data will make won't make somebody shitty good and I'm still not good Google Cloud couldn't help me I still at the bottom of the family pool it's great to have you in I guess every minute here is worth double being that's March Madness time thanks max for the opportunity it's a fun conversation alright thank you guys for listening really appreciate it and [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS Reinvent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to Las Vegas, we're in the Sands now for AWS re:Invent day one, here for all three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, exclusive CUBE coverage here. I'm John Walls with Justin Warner and John Ferrier. Gentlemen, good to see you, it's been a while since we had the band together so it's good to be back. >> Well we can reinvent, everyone is going to run the marathon, it's a hard hitting show, it's the wall-to-wall coverage. Started with what they call Midnight Madness kind of played off March Madness. Sunday at midnight kicks off the show, they have a party that goes well into the evening, to get the launches out there. >> I don't want to ask where you were at that time. >> I was actually coming home from Phoenix, from a family trip but I'll be coming this year but this even, wall-to-wall coverage, here at The Cube, three days of live broadcast. It really kicked off yesterday, there's evening events, 52 000 people, it is packed, it feels like you're walking through Disneyland on the busiest day, really is crazy. A ton of networking, a lot of customers. This is Amazon's biggest show, it's really awesome and it's a great way to see the formation of the industry. So it really is the industry Super Bowl event as Dave (mumbles) says and watching how people form, how their posture is, what their messaging is and our job, we're going to split through that this week, we're going to extract from the messaging and the conversations, get the story, get to the truth, shortcut to the data and should be fun. >> Well, let's talk about the head coach here in AWS. You've had a chance to sit down with him recently. We'll hear the key note tomorrow morning but just give you a little sneak peak of what you think is coming from Mr Jassy and what do you think the message is that he wants to deliver? >> Well, we've been covering Amazon since its founding, or our founding eight years ago and seven years they started reInvent, eight years ago, we are seven years, this is our seventh year at reInvent. So we get to know Jassy So he invites me every year for a one-on-one. This year, I did it at his house. He's got a sport bar in his basement. Tricked out sports bar, great football game was on, Chiefs against the Chargers, we watched that, two and a half hours I spent with him really kind of getting a feel for what's on his mind. How he's thinking about the business because a lot of, he's having a lot of pinch-me moments where certainly they're winning, they're blowing away field in my opinion in cloud computing. I think there's really not even a close second place although Microsoft's got the chops, they're doing their gaming, Google's got the tech and they're repositioning, you know, how does he feel? He's humble as they come and he's got the management discipline, but he was really kind of saying to me, hey, great leaders are listening to customers and he was walking back his position on hybrid cloud because clearly they're going to make some big announcements here around hybrid cloud but I got insight into his mind and he's not done and these guys are not celebrating in the end zone, they're not high fiving each other, they've got a lot of work to do and still, people are not using the cloud like they really are in their mind. I think things like Lambda and the announcements we'll be expecting to see here today is going to set the stage for a new set of apps and I think there's going to be a renaissance of software development, they recognize it, they recognize that the competition's hotter, they recognize that they got to get better and raise the bar and that's what they're doing. They have a cadens to their management style that I think is historic in this era of leadership and the likes of all the Uber scandals, Facebook, the scandals of the management team of Facebook. No one trusts corporate America. Amazon's got this execution style that kind of reminds me back in the old days, Intel had or an HP back in the day. They actually kick ass as a management team. They're focused, they're not celebrating and they're clearly guns glaring. SO they're doing the work. I still think that they see the world as still competitive, there are things out there that I think scares them, although he didn't say CNCF directly but there's things out there forming that could dis-intermediate the greatness of AWS and that's just natural competition and his philosophy, Justin is, bring it on. >> Well, I was just in China funnily enough for CNCF Cube, CNCF club native con, Cube con. The first one that they held in China and it was amazing to see what the Chinese are actually doing. So we ear a lot over here in Europe and over here in the Western world. There's a lot of conversation about Amazon and Google and Microsoft, but you never hear the words Tencent or Alibaba, they don't come up a lot and yet what Alibaba and Tencent are doing over there is amazing so I think if we're thinking about the competition in a global sense, then certainly Amazon needs to be right onto of their game because yeah, we might have some stumbles from Google as we've seen and Microsoft, still a little bit behind the plan but if you look at globally and see what's happening over there in China, there's a lot that they should be worried about. >> Well, give me a such as. When you talk about Alibaba doing things that maybe aren't happening here, for example. >> There was some amazing stuff around our AI machine learning that they were doing around grid management of renewable energy and distribution around the entire country of China. So there are things that are possible in China that are not quite as easy to do over here in the West. It's a lot easier when you have one person in charge of all of the things and they can say, we're going to go and do that. It's a little bit more, there's a lot more negotiation required over this side. >> And you think too about China as the mobile penetration is higher there and they're very data centered. You look at the United States, even in the IT world. Dell, HP's, the Oracle's of the world, the old IT guard essentially had that data but now you got data on phones, with this proximity, you've got edge of the network. The data is going to live in a lot of places and in our legacy infrastructure and IT in North America, Dell doesn't have anything to do with my phone or HP, that's just service so the old way of storing data and where data lives and how data's being used is radically changing. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening at the edge. We have some presentations on wind farms. So you have compute lives in wind farms and they're actually sampling the air and finding out what the weather patterns are like, feeding that back into central systems and they're having to design systems that are able to be deployed, the same thing, cookie cutter all over the country, distributed around the place where you've got latency and communication issues, where you've got power distribution issues. So you have to think about the way you're deploying these infrastructure, completely differently than if you centralize in one cloud or even in a data center or you're running it yourself. So they're actually thinking about things in a layered sense. So it's not just one size fits all, it's actually we need sides, multiple different sizes to fit lots of different things. >> And what, I mean John you got off the phone with 5G on the horizon. I can only imagine the exponential explosion we're going to see in data coming in from sensors and IoT, you talk about edge and faster, more, where's all that going? >> So I got a little reporter's notebook here from my meeting with Jassy and also connecting the dots what's going to be announced. There's going to be an announcement today around 11 o'clock this morning around maybe Jassy announcing new connectivity option and what you're seeing is that Amazon recognizing that IoT at the edge, Internet of Things is sensors as wind farms so this IoT is about power and connectivity. Without power and connectivity, IoT doesn't really exist. SO these new kinds of internet infrastructure data devices that need computer, you got to have power, you got to have connectivity and they might not have the worst power on a safe phone, although this is a, plenty of power on there. You want to take advantage of bigger data sets. You've got to go back to the cloud. So the cloud is becoming the brain and that's what Andy Jassy said to me, he said the cloud is going to be the brains and the edge can be, use some processing, we're going to send compute there if we need it. We don't want to move data around because latency will kill. So we're expecting Amazon to announce new services around connectivity where you can stand up things like satellites as a service and that's what's going to be announced at 11 o'clock. I just got that out there so we'll see if that's confirmed or not. (John Walls laughs) Two hours early if you watch this, don't tweet this, I'll get in trouble. >> Is that cat out of the bag. I think yeah, go ahead. >> Well you know, it's a brief guess, I heard some rumbles in the hallway but we'll see what the details are but this is a new kind of progressive thinking, this is what I love about AWS and Jassy, they're not afraid to use their scale and power to push new capabilities, not just extract ranch from customers and by standing up connectivity, this is a weak link in the equation of IoT. There's a lot of things that need power and connectivity and if you have good processing power and compute at the edge, that's going to happen. So Andy's philosophy and Amazon's philosophy is consistent with Wikibon research and most analysts have discussed in this strand that you want to move compute to the edge, not move data back to the cloud. This is fundamentally the shift that's going on with services like Lambda, you can power up things in hundreds of milliseconds versus an instance of ten seconds. This is changing the software development paradigm. This is a tailwind, this is going to power new work loads so you see Amazon recognizing this, increasing power compute to the edge, offering connectivity ops where there isn't any. Making things faster with compute and then moving up the stack. This is going to be a big part of this show. We're expecting to see if Amazon is going to move up the stack. Aurora, Sagemaker and levels of services that they're going to allow developers, new kind of software development where truly the dream of (mumbles) of not knowing anything about the infrastructure could be realized. >> That is a pretty big shift for Amazon 'cause they've always been talking about themselves as undifferentiated heavy lifting as one of their analysts told me it some years ago. That was their idea, was that we're just going to be the utility service that is the one true way that you should use it and it will be ubiquitous in the same way that you have power as a utility, you rent it and you just use it and you build other things on top of that. So it's interesting that we're now starting to see that Amazon themselves are building things on top of what they've already created in the same way that S3 was build on top of EC2, so now we're seeing this layering effect of we built the underlying technologies and now we're going to start putting extra value technologies on top of that and that's where to start to see things like as a services, serverless Lambda being built on top of all this underlying stuff. We're going to start seeing some really interesting stuff coming form Amazon. >> I'd like to hear from you guys, you've talked about what you think AWS is going to talk about. What do you want them to talk about. What do you want to hear form them this week, whether it's a challenge they have to take on or whether it's about the competitive landscape what is it between the two of you that's you'd like to hear them address. >> I would like to hear their position on the software development paradigm around moving between clouds. I know they don't like the word multi-cloud, hybrid cloud's the word that they choose. They don't actually use the word multi-cloud, hybrid cloud is their word. They see the world in a very specific way which I don't disagree with. On premises with clouds, operations and seamless consistency around both, how that works and what is means for the customer is what I want to know. WHat's the switching cost involved, what's the benefit to customers, it's going to be a lock inspect. I want to hear about some of the migration stories, I want to hear them talk about migrations. I don't think migration to the cloud has been successful for Amazon as they had hoped. I think when you look at what's going on in the enterprise, legacy workloads that run payroll around mainframes, they're going to stay there and no-one's moving that to the cloud 'cause why would I want to rewrite that. So this is the interesting thing. So I want to hear them talk about how they're going to handle a workload that's on premises, that's legacy, that's part of a production mission critical application and how that's going to work with new services via APIs. Stable data, things of that nature. I want to hear how they're going to handle containers and Kubernetes, 'cause this is going to be the key linchpin between moving data and services via APIs and web services, this is the holy grail. They can address that in a clear way, I would be happy and I expect them to see them do things like put a VM container around containers. A lot of competitive strategy going on, so I'm trying to look for the chess moves on the board. Kubernetes and containers is a big one. >> The customer, in terms of helping customers, I would actually like to see, I think similarly, see Amazon relax we are the one true way message that they've been hammering pretty hard for a long, long time. If you do cloud, it has to be us and we're really the only the cloud that exist. That's caused a lot of issues inside particularly enterprise customers who have, as you say, they've got legacy applications, or we'd like to call them heritage applications. They work, they've been debugged, they're sold applications. Rewriting those adds a lot of risk and a lot of IT projects found, more than 50% of them fail. SO if you're going to say, oh you have to completely rewrite everything and take it all to serverless, if you're going to do anything cloud, that adds a huge amount of risk onto the IT portfolio. So for an enterprise, or anyone who's actually been a successful company already, not the new startups, I'd say yes, brand new, you can start green, field's awesome, but if you have any kind of successful company already, you need to have a migration part. You need to understand it's appropriate to put these things, net news should start in cloud, great. What about the stuff that we've already got that's debugged, how do I get that to talk to cloud and how do I not end up with a bifurcated organization where I've got this legacy stuff that sits in the cupboard which no-one want to touch and play with and I have everyone doing all the new shiny stuff over here and then I end up killing my business because I have no migration part. >> And one final thing and then we got to go wrap up and get started for the day. I want to see more on the net new work loads because I think that is going to be a key part. The application developers are going to be where the power source is. New breeded developer, classic IT experts emerging, changing to devops and kind of a new community, open source community kind of personas them all evolving. So development, of our environment changing with developer persona, IT experts are changing to devops and the role of open source communities, I want to see more of that. At the end of the day, I want to see how Amazon thinks and how their customers are working with their data. Because if they have that Heritage app or legacy or an edge or wherever, the data is going to be a critical design component for the next generation. So that's what I'm looking for, what's going on with the data and trying to survive the slew of announcements. >> Big data, big topics and we have 40 000 of our best friends here to share their knowledge with you. Well, we're not going to have all of them, but we're going to have a lot. Wall-to-wall coverage here, AWS re:Invent kicks off in just a few moments, you are watching The Cube live from Las Vegas. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS reInvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube here, live in Las Vegas for Amazon web services, AWS annual conference reInvent 2017 and I'm John Furrier here, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of the Cube. We are here for our fifth year in a row as Amazon Web Services continues to go on a thundering pace of product announcements and massive growth and we're here with two live sets, we're growing so much, there's so much action, there's two cubes, double barrel shotgun of innovation and data we're sharing with you, go to SiliconAngle.com, check out all the stories, all the news and we're hear kicking it of with an analysis, getting ready for tomorrow, the big day, today's officially the partner day, Sunday night they had Midnight Madness, the first ever event for Amazon, where they used the March Madness, kind of copied Cube Madness if you follow the Cube and they do a little preview, I'm here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend, two great analysts in the community, guys and co-host this week at the cube. First of all thanks for co-hosting the Cube this week and thanks for coming by >> It's a pleasure >> Nice being here with my 50,000 closest friends (laughs) >> It's so good to have you guys here, one, the hosting but more importantly more Cloud thinking men but we've been watching this evolution, both when the Amazon start, I know you both have been involved in the game, in the Cloud watching it and participating but watching just like the tipping point, you're starting to see that moment where, people are calling this the Vmware 2008 moment, Where it's like oh my God its kind of gone mainstream but its still got a community, can they keep that alive? Meanwhile everybody is just getting blown away by Amazon, no matter what is being said, they're clearly the leader in Cloud, Microsoft pedaling as fast as they can, cobbling together their legacy Cloud, to try to keep up. Google, a new guard company looking really good with developers but not international, not a lot of things there yet but certainly looking great and then you got everybody else. >> Keith: Is there anybody else, really? >> As Dave Alonzo would say, what horses are on the track? >> Yeah there's lots of smaller players who are calling themselves Cloud, they're much more like, manage service providers and collocation kind of things, its not really Cloud they way you would think of it from the AWS kind of perspective. >> I've been talking to a lot of Fortune 500's lately and all of their internal customers, when they describe what they want, they're describing AWS, Azure and Google compute and everything else is just not even part of the discussion >> Yeah it needs to look like AWS, that's like the bench mark so this is what it is >> Total gold standard, the bell weather, let's talk about Amazon because I was writing a post on Forbes, I posted about kind of, trying to tell the story in a way that was kind of understood by the mainstream, still not really truly understood but they're changing the game, they're just kind of minding their knitting, they're just all steam ahead, you know, why look in the rear view mirror when your top dog? Why do that but the game is changing, they're constantly introducing new stuff, serverless is the hot trend that we've been tracking, you're seeing it here, you're seeing real developer centric, customer centric announcements. Even during the analysts meeting I heard rumblings, we can't even keep up with all the news, it's so massive so just thundering pace of announcements. Where's the innovation? What's Amazon doing now? What do they gotta do to distance themselves from the field? >> It's interesting, I reckon the competitors to Amazon are actually distancing themselves from AWS, they're trying to find their own way of doing things because you cannot AWS AWS >> Keith: Rackspace learned that a couple years ago right? >> Yeah, trying to compete head on, you're gonna lose so then we see Google is pushing really really hard, machine oiling and they are in top systems, a lot of people are using them for that big data and genomics research, Microsoft is all about office 365 and their traditional enterprise applications that all of their customers today, they know and love >> Yeah so Microsoft is doing what Microsoft does, which is taking care of their enterprise customers and I think this is where AWS needs to innovate in and its not maybe a technical innovation more than a operating and sales approach to how they treat enterprise customers. Enterprise customers still I think, are struggling to this date on how to interact with AWS and AWS is still trying to figure out how do they sale and help manage enterprise accounts. >> So let's separate IT because obviously two factors are merging, the CXO which is traditional IT, which we're all familiar with and a new kind of developer model is emerging and I won't say it's developer speeds and fees, developer programs, where developers are shaping the agenda. It used to be CXO's have the cash, they drive everything. Now you got this developer mojo and I can see early signs of a cult here, where all the innovation that's come in the field, is from customers saying screw it, I don't need the big dog telling me, the old guard, the old CIO up there, I'm just gonna go do it, get out of my way, three feet in the Cloud dust, get a prototype up and running. So you guys see that dynamic, with this cultural shift, what's your thoughts? >> Cloud is a state of mind... (laughs) It's a way of operating the business, its not so much about the infrastructure, its not so much about the services that live on top of it, it's how you use them and that way of doing things that the developers like, is that they get to pick and choose their favorite tools from what they think is the best solution and a lot of the time that's been AWS and then they blend them together and they just stitch this system together based on the favorite tools that they have and that just lives in a completely different level of abstraction than what we've seen before. >> And the speed too, I mean that's just changing the game too, right? >> Well you can do that a lot faster than waiting, raise a PO, wait for three months for someone to rack ans stack a whole bunch of gear, wait for everything to clear through purchasing and then you get access to the enterprise, anointed correct thing, so we saw it the same with sales floors, where people would... sales guys would just go with a credit card and just say, yes I'll have some of that, thanks >> It's much more than a credit card, VMware worked their re-Cloud air service a couple years, said, I can take your credit card, build a data center, my son a developer, in college, I gave him that solution, he looked at it, he was like what's a load balancer, why do I need to configure a firewall, I just want to build a application man, I just want to build, I just want to code, and AWS has figured that out, how to get developers back to what they love to do, which is solving problems via code and you see it, even before the start of this show, there's a lot of hoodies and shorts at this conference, compared to the culture that we see at a lot of other and past shows. >> I find it inspirational, so couple key points, so I asked Andy Jassy, an exclusive one on one with him last Monday and I asked him, you know, he was talking and he made a comment to me and I'll tell you the story here, he says, you know, we have a conversation inside Amazon, this is Andy talking about if we were gonna start Amazon all over again, cause he tells the story about the scar tissue and all the pain they went through with S3. He says if we're going to do it all over again, we would use Lambda, and the serverless trend is interesting because now that speaks to your son's objective, I don't need routers, I don't need load balances, I don't need gear... >> What do you mean how many CPUs I need? I don't know >> What's a patch? >> You tell me, alright, yeah >> Load Linux? What's Linux? So, okay if that's the norm, the driver has to be a new programming methodology, not agile, we're talking about compose ability and a level where no one says, oh I need Oracle for that or I need Mongodb for that, there's just data bases. So a whole new things happening where this choice that used to be the religious war between vendor A or B... serverless could change the game on this >> We're just gonna end up with a new religious war I think, it's gonna be, instead of Vim versus Emacs, it's gonna be should I use Amazon Lambda or should I use Google Cloud functions, it's gonna be one of those, which programming language is the best. >> Okay old guard, new guard, it's a term that Jassy uses, I like it because I'm old, so maybe I'm old guard trying to be new guard, old guard means legacy, he's really talking about Oracle, IBM, probably say Microsoft, so move over and put them in that bucket, so new guard players, clearly Amazon, saying they're new guard, but Google's new guard in Cloud, they're not really trying to do anything legacy, they have legacy infrastructure but they're approaching a... a market from a new guard perspective. What's you guys take on old guard, new guard and do you agree with that statement and what do the old guards have to do to be cool with the new school? >> So the Cube has been at almost every major conference, this year, take an example, what some of the old guard is trying to do, NetApp is trying to get into the Cloud conversation. Google has none of that legacy concern of needing to sell boxes, you look at a solution like Kubernetes, Kubernetes has come on and taken over the container orchestration conversation because Google doesn't need to make money off of Kubernetes, they don't need it to sell more boxes, there's a bit of freedom... >> They may have moved some work loads off Amazon, don't you think? >> It's a great way to move work loads out of Amazon, AWS has joined the CNCF because they no longer have a choice in the matter, Kubernetes has won the containers war so because of that, these new school competitors can compete in ways that a HPE, Dell EMC, etc., simply can't. >> Josh I gotta ask you this, I agree with what he's saying, I'll take it one step further, the old guards trying to slow the game down, move the goal post as an expression, they gotta try to slow this freight train down because otherwise it could be less than it does and they have leverage, they've got customers, they have market power, even Oracle I would say is in that category so they gotta kind of slow the game down but is the scale and the unprecedented amount of announcements, the differentiator as more services come on, their thesis here at Amazon, as I release more services faster, more available capability thus more, total address full markets available. Do you buy those two things, slowing down and services being the advantage? >> That's interesting I think it's more of a scatter gun approach in a way, it's like you know, fail fast. So if we throw enough services out there, throw enough stuff at the wall, we'll just find the ones that work and concentrate on those, as someone who tries to keep up with what Amazon is doing and this happens with developers as well. When you release 800 new services in a year, name them all, as a human that's really really difficult to manage. So I think in some ways it's a little bit... >> I've got four kids I can't even name, I get them all confused >> It's a little bit like Microsoft Word, it's got 800 billion different features but for any given customer they're gonna use maybe 10% of them and yet all of them are there because different customers use a different 10%. I think that's a little bit what Amazon is going for, kind of ubiquitous market coverage, as much market as it can possibly get, it's a lot like it's retail strategy, we want to be in everything, where some of the competitors are being a little bit more focused about saying well rather than just being a generic service that covers everything, we're gonna focus on particular areas that we think have enough value in that for it to be worth that time. >> Okay I wanna ask you guys a question about value creation, entrepreneurial, the startups, companies that are trying to go, you kind of see, certainly in Silicon Valley, where I live, startups are getting pummeled, if they were born before 2012, they're really going.6.. they try to go big but they're mostly going home. Barracuda Networks just announced this week that they're gonna go private, private equity's squabbling up all these companies that have pretty good sizeable funding, 100 million dollar invests from Andressen Horowitz, Graylog, Sequoia, big names, folding tent and being acquired which is code words for we can't got public and even big public companies that don't have a Cloud player, kind of retooling. So the question is, are we at a point now where scale and speed of the game is causing some havoc in the market place. >> Well look no further than what's going on in Europe now, the Cube is at HPE reInvent. HPE's discover in Europe and HPE is a completely different company than it was three years ago as a direct result of what Amazon has done in the Cloud space and gobbling up all of these smaller accounts and new opportunity. You mentioned it earlier, HPE is still HPE, HPE is gonna get that interview or session with the CIO, Meg makes the call, someones going to pick up the line. >> Now Antonio >> Yeah, now Antonio But AWS has been changing that story, impacting and taking the air out. HPE chose a interesting approach, get smaller, become more agile, Dell chose the opposite route of getting bigger to compete, we'll see which one plays out, in the meantime 18 billion dollar run rate and no sign of slowing down. >> 18 billion dollar run rate with 40% growth on that bassline is pretty significant, I think they might even be doing better than that next quarter but that speaks to the traction, it's not just startups, those numbers aren't just startups. Airbnb is a big company now but they started out small. We use Amazon, a lot of people use Amazon, they're winning big enterprise deals, why? What do you guys think, what's the reason why? >> You know what... Go a little bit intuitive here, look at VMware on AWS, I've been kind of critical of that solution but it is a easy win, if VMware made the exact same announcement on IBM, the year before at VM world... the Fortune 500's I talk to don't consider that Cloud, the exact same solution and AWS is Cloud, that's the Cloud check box. AWS, they do a much better job at controlling their brand Kleenex but they are the Kleenex, they are the Xerox of Cloud, you don't have Cloud unless you have AWS from a enterprise perspective, that's what Azure, Google Compute, and all the other Cloud providers have to compete against >> First of all those guys are incomplete in their Cloud and that's just on a feature by feature basis, I do agree it's kind of like Outlook or Word, I like Outlook because it's more bloated than Word and less useful but my point is, that's the name of the game, getting functional value creation. So final question for you guys is, as we look at reInvent this week obviously I looked at the industry day yesterday and the board, a lot of Alexa repeats. So you can see what sessions are repeating so that's a indicator of popularity so Alexa's got traction, serverless with Lambda. What do you guys see as the big, so far, early show buzz? >> I'm hearing a lot about containers, containers and like you say, things like Lambda and Alexa, anything that has AI machine learning in it, that's very hot at the moment whether or not it's just hype and the bubble on that will pop in a few years, I personally think that that is mostly hype and hot air but it'll settle down and there'll be some real value in there. That's where I'm seeing the noise. >> So over at the RA, they have the container kind of show, it's a show within a show and I'm hearing similarities with containers but not just containers, to your point, serverless, it was a term that we struggled with a couple years ago, now it's generally accepted, you know what, I can just write code and that code can be executed without regard to infrastructure operations. That has proved to be insanely popular right now. >> Okay final question, I'll start it, we're gonna end this on this last segment, I know I wanna get one more in, that's the buzz. I wanna ask you guys, what tea leaves are you reading, what signals are you looking for? Because remember Amazon is very scripted up right now, you can see them on message, I'm trying to poke holes, and which tea leaves, smelling it, putting my ear, ear to the ground, think about that question, my view is, I'm looking at, is this developer trend a cultural shift and to what extent is that developer traction in terms of mind share and love of the brand, Kleenex, the Cloud, the real Cloud, and how much will that tip the CXO conversation. Where's that power shift? So me, I'm trying to read what the tea leaves are saying, if this developer tipping point happens at this scale, developers could really be in the drivers seat. Not just oh developers are in charge, I'm talking about really making the decisions on all big deployments, that's my tea leaf read. What are you looking at? >> So I'm talking to a lot of vendors, their number one reason for being at AWS, when I say vendors, vendors that we see at traditional infrastructure shows, they're here to talk to new audiences, to that developer audience that you mentioned and what I want to know from them, more than just interest, do these developers have money? One of those challenges that all of these Cloudy type companies have faced is that the developers fall in love with them, Docker is a great example, developers fell in love with Docker, millions of downloads. However that doesn't translate to POs and purchases, do these guys actually have the buying power to see through that initial contact all the way to the sale of the solution. >> Influence the buying decisions and IT, thoughts? >> You made the same comment I think earlier about 2008 VM world, it has a very similar vibe to me here, I'm seeing that this is now the crossover between where it was developers, where it was all hoodies and tracksuits and pink hair, I'm seeing a lot of suits, seeing a lot of money floating around this conference, so I'm starting to think that this is the point where AWS is starting its transition from being the new guard to the old guard, they would love to be IBM, IBM made a lot of money. >> Turning into an old guard is very good financially >> It makes you a lot of money. So I'm looking to see where on that transition are we and how long can AWS maintain that momentum of being a new guard company. >> If they can hold the line on new guard they win everything as long as they could in my opinion. Alright, I'm John Furrier here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend kicking off the first day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at AWS reInvent, stay tuned for more analysis opinion, commentary, of course go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the exclusive interviews with Andy Jassy and all the top executives of Amazon. We'll be back with more after this short break. (slow futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, the CUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Rodney Rogers, he's the CEO of Virtustream. Thanks so much for joining us, Rodney. >> Oh, awesome to be here, always is. >> CUBE veteran, a CUBE guy. >> A CUBE veteran. I was that top 16 thing that you guys-- >> Oh right. >> You know March Madness? >> Yeah. >> CUBE Madness. >> Yeah CUBE Madness, that was awesome. >> I think I made it to the elite, I think I might have made it to the Elite Eight. >> Who knocked you out? >> I know I was Sweet 16. >> Who knocked you out? >> I can't say that man. That still hurts too much. >> Oh, sorry, okay, I didn't mean to bring it up. I didn't mean to bring it up. But before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how you accomplished the improbable by running these mission critical apps in the cloud. It was a mission impossible to run mission critical. How did you do it? >> Yeah, so when we started Virtustream in early 2009, AWS' EC2 was just coming into mainstream of I.T. awareness I would say. We took a look at what they did. They kind of made a market for creating ubiquitous access to the developers to develop cloud-native apps to run distributive scale type of applications. We were venture-backed, we were a startup, started from scratch. When you're an entrepreneur, you kind of need to build what you know and sell it to who you know. We were enterprise application guys. So we said we'd love to take this unique innovation and apply it to the types of application landscapes that we've grown up knowing and managing and implementing, and things of that nature. And so we specifically purpose-built software to run a cloud infrastructure as a service that focused on solving the engineering problem of IO-intensive scale-up applications. And what you have with those types of applications is IO-centricity as opposed to compute or distributive points of failure, distributive points of computing challenges that the general purpose public clouds are very well suited for. And so we kind of invented this software, we kind of melt the cloud into its molecular components so we could control the individual attributes. And it allows us to run public cloud economics because we're not bound by instant sizes, things of that nature. But it allows us to control throughput in a more acute manner to service the application environment. And that makes us the only guys that provide actually an application latency SLA for the apps to run on our cloud. And that's really critical if you go to a Fortune 500 CI and say put your mission critical, your spinal fluid apps, your order-to-cash apps, in production in a multi-tenant cloud, they've got to be sure that there's not going to be resource contention that'll actually affect and bring that business down. So yeah, we were kind of viewed a bit like we were crazy back then. And we stayed very determined. We were probably the least cool guys in the cloud. Nobody cared what we were doing five years ago. Now as you read in the press, everybody's pivoting towards enterprise. That's where the big adoption cycle is. And we are so confident in our IP and in our first move or position for this type of marketplace. We have an architecture that's purpose-built, software that's purpose-built, particularly for these types of apps. So we're quite excited about where it is today. >> Rodney, I want to get back to that, talking about how you were the least cool guys. But one of your claims to fame is that you helped realize two back-to-back unicorns. These are startups that start from scratch, that are then valued at over a billion dollars. >> Rodney: Yeah. >> What is your secret sauce? How are you able to see so far ahead? >> You know I think kind of, it sounds very basic, but one of the things you see in a venture-backed technology community a lot is product-centric initiatives, so building products for the sake of the product. We really focused on where the market demand was, right. So we saw emerging space in cloud automation. We didn't see that automation servicing what large enterprises spent 60 to 70 percent of their I.T. budgets on. So were just like the big legacy OEM guys that have dedicated hosts. We were kind of more servicing that. And we were like look, you know, last thing in the world needs is a subscale AWS. That'll be venture capital suicide. Let's go prosecute this opportunity and bring this automation, and compete more with the guys who can't compete with us. And so, I think we were back in four or five years ago there's been a lot of religious wars around cloud. It was public versus private. There's API standards, are you going to adopt AWS, there's OpenStack, build your own, things of that nature. And we were, there were many cloud purists. They said, if you can't re-architect, rebuild your app to run in the cloud then don't run it in the cloud, but rebuild and re-architect the app. You're talking about an SAP system at a Fortune 50 company, they've literally spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, that's not going to get rewritten, at least not in my business lifetime. >> Yeah, right. (laughing) >> It probably will eventually. And it'll morph into various SAS models. But there's a core part of the applications today, running any business, especially large enterprises, very well suited for what we do. So if there's a secret there, we stay. It wasn't a sexy thing. My co-founder, Kevin Reid, and I, we're kind of the apps antithesis of the Silicon Valley hipster. We were East Coast middle-aged guys (laughing) that focused on enterprise. It couldn't have been less interesting, I think, but we saw a prosecutable opportunity, we brought on some really smart people that wrote software. Cloud infrastructure as a service, you think storage network. It's not really about that, it's about the software that controls it, runs it, drives your feature sets. So we furiously wrote code. We were told we were going to fail everyday. And I'd go on to Twitter and read, 2010, 11, 12. We had no chance of competing with the scale guys. But we did, we created a software reason to exist. We got those economics, we run a much more utilized hardware state than anybody in the industry, much higher memory page utilization so we use that to compete with the procurement scale but we found a prosecutable margin, we're patient and we never pivoted. In a lot of the Silicon Valley language, pivot's an over-aggrandized word. When you pivot, you've generally made a mistake. We never pivoted. >> Let's talk about that focus. You guys were laser-focused on SAP. You say it's not sexy. I have SAP roots, so-- >> Rebecca: He's a geek, he's a geek. >> Yeah, I'm a geek. >> Yeah, he find a lot of, yeah. >> I think you're sexy. (laughing) >> So you guys did some amazing things with automating deployment of SAP. I would call you a COE, cloud of excellence for SAP. So talk about the maturity of moving from focused on SAP to what we hear today about Virtustream being for enterprise applications, not just SAP. Where's the secret sauce or the new advantages that customers can realize? >> So, we started with SAP because again, building what we knew. My co-founders and I had grown up around that ecosystem, so they knew the application very well. So there are two levels to our IP, one is the infrastructure automation, and that's actually agnostic to the app. We run thousands of apps. When you go run an SAP environment in the cloud, maybe 50, 60% of workloads are actually SAP. The rest are all the workloads for the supporting apps that satellite around an interface. The interface management gets quite tricky, you know, things of that nature. Ultimately, the second layer of automation is application control automation that we built. That is very application-specific. So there's a part of our core capability that can run any app, and we do very well with those apps that have that IO-centric challenge, just a different engineering problem. High IO apps place great degrees of memory burden on the underlying infrastructure, versus compute burden for scale-wide apps, generally. What we've now done is we've kind of built the foundation of the business along a horizontal line, we're kind of associated with SAP. >> Right. >> Because of heritage, and then for the application control that we've built, we've now expanded that to a number of different applications. And this week at Dell EMC World, we announced the healthcare vertical, we've gotten big into the federal and public sector, so we wanted to build a foundation using a horizontal technology, and now to really scale this, we're going to develop very specific vertical solutions. >> That's great, well Rodney, thanks so much. We're going to see you tomorrow night at the Gwen Stefani concert, you'll be dancing-- >> Absolutely, I wouldn't miss it. >> We'll both see you, I will say hollaback girl. >> Hollaback girl. >> We'll do a little-- >> We'll be on the tables. >> I will mime it. >> Awesome, awesome. >> Rodney, thanks so much for joining us. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Rebecca: Great to have you on the show. >> Awesome, thank you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Keith Townsend. We will have more from Dell EMC World 2017 after this. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live in Las Vegas for IBM Interconnect 2017, this is theCUBE's three-day coverage, we're in day two, wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jason Kelley, Vice President, he's a partner at IBM's Global Business Solutions, GBS Solutions and Design, part of the group that brings it all together in the digital transformation for IBM. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Grand to be here, thanks for having me. >> So, we were just talking about South by Southwest, before we kicked on the cameras, and you guys had a huge presence there. But you're an interesting part of IBM, and I want you just to make a minute to explain what you do, because everyone talks about, "Oh UX design, you're going to develop the future," it's a lot more complicated than just saying UX design. >> That's true, very true. >> There's some work involved, so take us through what this design experience concept's about, and how does it work, and why everyone's so buzzed-up about it, 'cause it's gettin' a lot of traction. >> Great question to start with, and I always get to spin that then back to you. So as you said UX, first thing that came out, you said design and UX, so tell me, when you hear design, what do you think of? Do you think of cool ties, jackets, what do you think? >> I don't know, a nice cube setup with good user-- >> A couple good lookin' guys. >> Interface on the website. >> I was thinking devices. >> Dave's tie. >> I think of cool visuals, right? I think of movies, actually. >> Okay, okay. So, they are things that give you some type of experience. >> Dave: Yeah, they create a feeling inside, an emotion, it's a motive. >> All right, okay. So, now we're headed in that direction. So take that emotion piece, set that to the side, and think about what also came out, you said device, so it's something that you use. And often when you say design now, they think of the wonderful things like-- >> John: The iPhone. >> You got it, iPhone. They say, "Oh, what wonderful design." That design evokes emotion. And so, when we think of emotion, take that and put that into business, and think about creating an elegant solution for the outcomes of the end user in a business. So, you have a business that has a problem, they need to solve it, and you want to create a solution that evokes emotion. So that as they experience, like you can't set down that phone, we don't want them to set down their IBM solutions, that's the type of design that I'm talking about. >> Jason, this is interesting, Dave and I always talk about this in theCUBE when we get into this kind of like, get into The Cloud and look down at the world, the computer industry has always been centered on how many users do you have? I mean user, are you a drug user? What kind of user are you? It's the consumer, right? So, now you're really getting at the heart of design transcending computer, a user on a terminal. They're all consumers. So this is kind of the new normal. >> That's right, the new norm is, the consumer, meaning the focus. We'll go back to your phone, you think about this consumable capabilities and that consumption. You think back when we thought were cool and you would say, "This is my home office, "and I've got my fax machine here and I've got my-- >> John: A pager! >> "I've got my pager, I've got my telephone, "I've got all these things." >> My stereo. >> You had all those, and now... Here it is. And who did this? This is the consumer. And so, having consumable solutions that a consumer would be excited about, but taking that to the enterprise, at scale. At scale, did I send someone a great text there? >> No, I was just plugging in. (Jason and John laughing) >> So that you have to-- >> It's got a cognitive energy in it, so it's designed well. (all laughing) >> Honey, bring me more milk and bread. What we do from a consumability perspective is just that: how do you make sure that you have consumer grade solutions that the enterprise can enjoy? Right? So that is key, and this is what you pivot around. >> One of the things that we also were watching last week, we were at the Big Data event that we had in Silicon Valley, you can judge 'em as Strata Hadoop is, the collision course between the big data world which tends to be analytics: Watson's got cognitive, and then The Cloud, you've got brute force blocking and tackling, Cloud under the hood, hard IT problems, in-production workloads; and then you have the cool, sexy, sizzley web app, and mobile apps, creativity, kind of comin' together. So, on one hand you got creativity, you have energy, you have emotions, all this kind of outcome-based consumer thinking, and then you got the hard scaffolding, the iron under the hood, like workloads, hard stuff. So, how do you balance that when you get into the Design Center? It's not what people might think, "Oh, they got the crazy ideas, and I'm going to do this, "change the world," but at the end of the day you got to go implement it, so take me through that process. >> So you think about implementation, and we have, here over the last four years, established 26-plus IBM Design Studios globally. And our clients love to come to those studios because they get to talk about what you're asking me here, "Look we have all these things, these piece parts, "some things new, some things legacy. "How do I take this, and how do I tie it all together?" They usually come with these business challenges and say, "Look, I have a front office, and a back office, "and I'm tyin' to get all this," we go "Wait a second. "What you've just described is really one office, "and in that one office, "at the center of all those challenges are data, typically." And you're tryin' to figure out, "How can I make this data work?" And then, as soon as you solve that problem you say, "Wait a minute, then there's business process, "that's working between the front office, "and the back office, and this middle office." And then "Oh wait, there's also then some regulation "that I have to worry about." So now, you have this crashing of these different capabilities, you have this challenge of saying, "How do I make the business architecture, "work with the technical architecture, "work with my human architecture?" And that's where design comes in, that's where you begin to weave those things together by understanding how each one of those diverse pieces of the business work in harmony. >> So Jason, what are some of your favorite examples of an outcome that drove business value? >> I'll use a great example, and it was one with a client I was just havin' a wonderful dinner with last night, the Bank of the Philippine Islands. Banking has each one of these things that I've talked about: trying be more nimble on the front end, as well as having a very complicated, and often regulated back end. This wonderful, wonderful client of IBM said, "Listen, could you come in "and help me solve my data problem? "Because we have a big data challenge." I said, "Sure, well let's understand that, "let's get under the covers of this data problem," in a design workshop with them, walking them through their end users, their end users being all the way through their enterprise, our process realized, wait a minute, it's not our data problem that we have, it's a start-up problem. We're always going to have a data problem, but we can't run like a start-up, we can't move fast, we're not as agile as we think we are. We think we do DevOps, but our DevOps hit separate from agile, and by the way, this design-thinking thinking is great, how do you weave all of that together? What they found then in their start-up was now that we know what our problem is, you've wowed us, we're wowed. But then, how do we execute? We use this term, if I can wow you, you will definitely then how me, right? So how do we do this? And this is where the design came in where we said, "Look, now let's understand how you move like a start-up," which then did get under the covers with: well we need a Cloud capability; we need to have some tooling, like Bluemix, where we can go ahead and quickly assemble those things together; and we need to understand how we can apply some of our analytics, and maybe even cognitive, towards our clients. So, that's something that started one way, here's the problem, and it's data, that really ended up another way. And as they will tell you if you were to ask Bank of Philippine Islands, they'd say, "Listen, the design doesn't stop." And what they've learned from us is that design never stops, everything's a prototype in a sense, and design only stops when the problem is solved. And I can ask you, is the problem ever solved? >> No, it's a moving train every day. >> Jason: You're never done. >> The Design Center, really Studio is a great idea, I think it's phenomenal. The question I want to kind of probe into is how much of it is therapy for the customer to kind of, "Doctor, am I okay? "I think what's goin' on with me, can you look around me?" 'Cause they're lookin' from kind of that 360 blind spot, and how to be innovative. And so, you kind of rub their shoulders, "You been doin' okay, you're going to survive," and then you got to wow them. So before you wow them, you have to kind of whip 'em into shape and get their perspective, so how much of the percentage of time is herding the cats in a therapeutic way? Or is it not a factor to then, when you get that momentum going? Take us through the psychology of the buyer, your customer, because I can almost imagine the opportunities is somewhat intoxicating these days. So you go, "Hey, I got pressure to go Cloud native, "but I know it's going to be a disaster if I do." >> You're on a great point, and I like the thought of the therapy because look, it is somewhat of a Dr. Phil moment that they have. Where you sit back and what we find client after client is that sure, we could tell them, "Here are your pain points. "We're IBM, we deal with thousands of clients every week," but that doesn't cause change. I mean, you really have to change in the way that you're acting, so you can't really, we like to use this phrase-- >> Hit the playbook, run the offense. >> That's right. >> You got to have the culture. >> And you will have some people say that you have to have a culture, so you can't think your way into a new way of acting, you have to act your way into a new way of thinking. And so that's the process, is where you bring this discovery by way of using the basics of empathy, and this is design thinking, in the core of its essence. >> Empathy, great word. Business empathy is really the challenge because, I hate to use the example of will the parachute open? You know I always say to my kids, "Pack your own parachute, learn how to pack a parachute." Not that I tease that dangerous, but it can be, I mean, security breaches are one of those things where the blind trust that's out there, and some opportunities, to Jenny's point on stage today, trust economy. >> That's very true. >> This could be a dangerous world, so you don't want to just trust the parachute's going to open. >> No, no, I will tell ya in a prior life I used a parachute, I jumped Airborne Ranger, jumped out of planes, and I always joked saying, "Hey, no one is going to get shot out, "or have to jump out of an airplane today," so it'll be fine. Well, I can laugh and joke, but you're right because you sit there and to any of our clients, it's not a joke. That trust economy that we're in is reality, and it has to be underlayed with the confidence that we can bring that to-- >> Well Cloud, I have said The Cloud which underpins all this is going to move at the speed of trust, if you don't trust The Cloud, you're not going to use it. >> Jason: Very true. >> That example you gave, I want to go back to it, 'cause we talked about the emotion. So, the emotion comes from what, the consumer experience? You know the bank, that you gave that example. So, take us through sort of what that outcome was, I mean, it was the entire experience that was reimagined? Is that right? >> Well that's exactly, the experience was when the diverse team across the bank was in one room, and going through some of the exercises we take them through to use this empathy for the enterprise. Not just for the individual, or design for a product, this is design for an entire business. As they sit there and they look across that, what they got out of that was this thought that, "Wait a second, this is very complicated "for my part of the business. "Oh but wait, your part of the business "is having similar challenges, and oh, yours as well." And then you have the aha moment you're like, "Wait, we're all having similar challenges." And this becomes the emotion, the emotion goes, "Wait a second, you've just helped me see something "that was right in front of me, it was right there." Thank you, this is the Dr. Phil moment, because then you say, "Oh well, "then we're doing this together." And you go, "Yes, now let us walk you through, "walk you through walking us through "what we might do together collaboratively," and that's where you get this new step change of action. >> So, you're a business therapist, but also can implement. >> Right, because ultimately you have to make, and we have these steps where we look at how we walk through our cycle. If you think of an infinity sign, we go through: you must understand, reflect and make. And we have those as stages of this infinity sign, that you never stop going through those loops, as we call it, the loop of understanding, reflecting and making. >> Jason, I want to talk about the, you mentioned a Dr. Phil moment, this empathy, really a legitimate thing that goes on but-- >> Yeah, you're going to think I'm Dr. Phil, right? >> But also, a lot of customers I can imagine are grounded in disappointment. I mean, the way I felt when Duke lost in the March Madness, I'm like, and then like, "Oh my God, how could they be out?" I had them goin' all the way, it kind of screws up the brackets. So, like that's IT. IT's a lot like, you know, you make a bet, and sometimes it doesn't pan out, you got to be agile. So coming into the disappointment, clients come into the Design Center, probably with either an itch they're scratching, I want to innovate, and then problems that they're trying to solve, which might be some baggage, some sort of issue. Is there a pattern that you see when you have prospects come through, and clients come through the Design Center that are consistent? Like is there a trend, a trending chart, like top three, stack-ranked, issues fall into categorically, Cloud transformation, Watson analytics, is there a trend line? And by the way, did you have Duke to go all the way? >> I thought they would. In the trend that we see, there's some common things that come to mind where a client will say, "I want to move faster." And none of these are going to be surprises: I need to move faster, okay; I need to be agile; I would love to be more innovative; I would like to take my innovation and put it in action; how do I do all of there things? And you'll find if you work with them you go, "So why?" "Why?" We play the game of 5-Whys, and eventually you get to what the true, the true need is, and that true need is to get to get an outcome very quickly, they all have something right in front of them, and it's to be agile, innovative, and out in front of the market. All of those things require what you've already called-out with the technologies, and they are just technologies, the challenge is putting them in action. >> So with the Whys, you get to the outcome, that's the real pain point, and then you settle in to a variety of solution architectural choices. >> Yes, because that architecture battle, as we hear from Jenny, it's going to be the architecture battles on cognitive, on AI and data. And finding those three areas, that's where it has to be knit together. >> Enterprise strong, data first, and cognitive to the core. >> Well said. >> See, I was listening Jenny, I've listened to all your words in your speech, and I don't need Watson for that, but I'll forget tonight after I have a few cocktails. Jason, thank you so much for comin' on theCUBE, appreciate the insight. >> I appreciate the time. >> Be safe jumping out of the airplanes. >> All right, take care guys. >> Thanks so much. More live coverage here from theCUBE after the show, stay with us, some more interviews still on day two to come. Great content here, great guests, more after the short break.

>> Commentator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special broadcast here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is IBM's big Cloud show. I'm John Furrier. My co-host, David Vellante for the next three days will be wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's Cloud Watson. All the goodness from IBM. The keynote server finishing up now but this morning was the kickoff of what seems to be IBM's Cloud strategy here with Dave Vellante. Dave, you're listed in the keynote, we are hearing the presentation. We had the General Manager/Vice President of Data from Twitter on there, Chris Moody, talkin' about everything from the Trump presidential election being the avid tweeter that he is and got a lot of laughs on that. To the SVP of Cloud talking about DevOps and this is really IBM is investing 10 million dollars plus into more developer stuff in the field. This is IBM just continuing to pound the ball down the field on cloud. Your take? >> Well IBM's fundamental business premise is that cognitive, which includes analytics, John plus cloud plus specific industry solutions are the best way to solve business problems and IBM's trying to differentiate from the other cloud guys who David Kenny was on stage today saying, you know, they started with a retail business or the other guys started with search, we started with business problems, we started with data. And that's fundamental to what IBM is doing. The other point, I think is-- the other premise that IBM is putting forth is that the AI debate is over. The Artificial Intelligence, you know, wave of excitement in the 70s and 80s and then, you know, nothing is now back in full swing. An AI on the Cloud is a key differentiator from IBM. In typical IBM fashion for the last several Big Shows, IBM brought out not an IBMer but a customer or and or a partner. And today it brought out Chris Moody from Twitter talking about their relationship with IBM but more specifically the fact that Twitter's 11 years old. Some of the things you're doing with Twitter obviously connected into March Madness and then Arvind Krishna who has taken over for Robert LeBlanc as the head of the Cloud group, talked about IBM, AI, IBM's Cloud, blocked chain, trusted transactions, IoT, DevOPs, all the buzz words merged into IBM's Cloud Strategy. And of course, we reported several years ago at this event about Bluemix as the underpinning of IBM's developer strategy. And as well it showcased several partners. Indiegogo was a crowdfunding site and others. Some of those guys are going to be in theCUBE. So. You know as they say, this AI debate is over. It's real and IBM's intent is to the platform for business. >> Dave, the thing I want to get your thoughts on is IBM's on a 19 consecutive quarters of revenue problems with the business on general but they've been on a steady course and they kind of haven't wavered. So it's as if they know they got to shrink to grow approach but we just came off the heels of Google Next which is their Cloud Show. How the Amazon is on re-invent as the large public cloud but the number one question on the table that's going to power IoT, that's going to power AI, is the collision between cloud computing and IoT, cloud computing in big data I should say is colliding with IoT at the center which is going to fuel AI and so, it brings up the question of enterprise readiness. Okay? So this is the number one conversation in the hallways here at Las Vegas and every single Cloud Show in the enterprise is, can I move to the cloud? Obviously it's a hybrid world, multi-cloud world. IBM's cloud play. They had a Cloud. They're in the top four as we put them in there. Has to be enterprise ready but yet it as to spawn the development side. So again, your take on enterprise readiness and then really fueling the IoT because IoT is a real conversation at an architectural level that is shifting the-- tipping the scales if you will for where the action will be. >> Well John, you and I have talked in theCUBE for years now. Going on probably five years that IBM had to shrink to grow. They've got the shrink part down. They've divested some of its business like the x86 business and the microelectronics business. They have not solved the grow problem. Let's just say 19 straight quarters of declining revenue. But here's the question. Is IBM stronger today than it was a year ago? And I would argue yes and why is that? One is its focus. Its got a much clearer focus on its strategy around cognitive, around data and marrying that to Cloud. I think the other is as an 80 billion dollar company even though it's shrinking, its free cash flow is still 11.6 billion. So it's throwing off a lot of cash. Now of course, IBM made those numbers, made its earnings numbers by with through expense control, its got lower tax right. Some of the new ones of the financial engineering. Its got some good IP revenue. But nonetheless, I would still argue that IBM is stronger this year than it was a year ago. Having said that, IBM's service as business is still 60% of the company. The software business is still only about 30% into it but 10% is hardware. So IBM-- people say IBM has exited the hardware business. It hasn't exited completely the hardware business but it's only focusing on those high value areas like mainframe and they're trying to sort of retool power. Its got a new leader with Bob Picciano but it's still 60% of the company's business is still services and it's shifting to a (mumbles) model. An (mumbles) model. And that is sometimes painful financially. But again John, I would argue that it is stronger. It is better positioned. And now its got some growth potential in place with AI and with, as you say, IoT. We're going to have Harriet Green on. We're going to have Deon Newman on. Focusing on the IoT opportunity. The weather company acquisition as a foundation for IoT. So the key for IBM is that it's strategic imperatives are now over 40% of its business. IBM promised that it would be a 40 billion dollar business by 2018 and it's on track to do that. I think the question John is, is that business as profitable as its old business? And can it begin growing to offset the decline in things like storage, which has been seeing double digit declines and its traditional hardware business. >> So Dave, this is to my take on IBM. IBM has been retooling for multiple years. At least a five year journey that they have to do because let's just go down the enterprise cloud readiness matrix that I'm putting together and let's just go through the components and then think about what was old IBM and what's new. Global infrastructure. Compute networking, storage and content delivery, databases, developer tools, security and identity, management tools, analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, mobile services, enterprise applications, support, hybrid integration, migration, governance and security. Not necessarily in that order. That is IBM, right? So this is a company that has essentially (mumbles) together core competencies across the company and to me, this is the story that no one's talking about at IBM is that it's really hard to take those components and decouple them in a fashion that's cloud enabled. This is where, I think, you're going to start to see the bloom on the rose come out of IBM and this is what I'm looking at because IBM had a little bit here, they had a little bit here, then a little stove pipe over here. Now bringing that together and make it scalable, it's elastic infrastructure. It's going to be really the key to success. >> Well, I think, if again if you breakdown those businesses into growth businesses, the analytics business is almost 20 billion. The cloud business is about 14 billion. Now what IBM does is that they talk about as a service runway of you know, 78 billion so they give you a little dimensions on you know, their financials but that cloud business is growing at 35% a year. The as a service component, let's call it true cloud, is growing over 60% a year. Mobile growing, 35%. Security, 14%. Social, surprisingly is down actually year on year. You would thought that would be a growth theory for them but nonetheless, this strategic initiatives, this goal of being 40 billion by 2018 is fundamental to IBM's future. >> Yeah and the thing too about the enterprise rate is in the numbers, it speaks to them where the action is. So right now the hottest conversations in IT are SLA's. I need SLA's. I have a database strategy that has to be multi-database. So (mumbles) too. Database is a service. This is going to be very very important. They're going to have to come in and support multiple databases and identity and role-based stuff has to happen because now apps, if you go DevOps and you go Watson Data Analytics, you're going to have native data within the stack. So to me, I think, one of the things that IBM can bring to the table is around the enterprise knowledge. The SLA's are actually more important than price and we heard that at Google Next where Google tried it out on their technologies and so, look at all the technology, buy us 'cause we're Google. Not really. It's not so much the price. It's the SLA and where Google is lacking as an example is their SLA's. Amazon has really been suring up the SLA's on the enterprise side but IBM's been here. This is their business. So to me, I think that's going to be something I'm going to look for. As well as the customer testimonials, looking at who's got the hybrid and where the developer actually is. 'Cause I think IoT is the tell sign in the cloud game and I think a lot of people are talking about infrastructures of service but the actual B-platform as a service and the developer action. And to me, that's where I'm looking. >> Well comparing and contrasting, you know, those two companies. Google and Amazon with IBM, I think completely different animals. As you say, you know, Google kind of geeky doesn't really have the enterprise readiness yet although they're trying to talk that game. Diane Green hiring a lot of new people. AWS arguebly has, you know, a bigger lead on the enterprise readiness. Not necessarily relative to IBM but relative to where they were five years ago. But AWS doesn't have the software business that IBM has yet. We'll see. Okay so that's IBM's ace in the hole is the software business. Now having said that, David Kenny got on stage today. So he came out and he's doing his best Jeremy Burton impression. Came out in sort of a James Bond, you know, motif and guys with sunglasses and he announced the IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex. And he said, yes we have a marketing department and they came up with that name. You know, this to me is their clever safe objects tour to compete with S3, you know several years late. After Amazon has announced S3. So they're still showing up some of that core infrastructure but IBM's-- the (mumbles) of IBM strategy is the ability to layer cognitive and their SAS Portfolio on top of Cloud and superglue those things together. Along, of course, with its analytics packages. That's where IBM gets the margin. Not in volume infrastructure as a service. >> I want to get your take on squinting through the marketing messages of IBM and get down to the meat and the bone which is where is the hybrid cloud? Because if you look at what's going on in the cloud, we hear the new terms, lift and shift. Which to me is rip and replace. That's one strategy that Google has to take is if you run (mumbles) and Google, you're kind of cloud native. But IBM is dealing a lot at pre-existing enterprise legacy stuff. Data center and whatnot so the lift and shift is an interesting strategy so the question is, for you is, what does it take for them to be successful? With the data platform, with Watson, with IoT, as enterprise extend from the data center with hybrid. >> Well I think that, you know, again IBM's (mumbles) is the data and the cognitive platform. And what IBM is messaging to your question is that you own your data. We are not going to basically take your data and form our models and then resell your IP. That's what IBM's telling people. Now why don't we dig into that a little bit? 'Cause I don't understand sort of how you separate the data from the models but David Kenny on stage today was explicit. That the other guys, he didn't mention Google and Amazon, but that's who he was talkin' about, are essentially going to be taking your data into their cloud and then informing their models and then essentially training those models and seeping your IP out to your competitors. Now he didn't say that as explicitly as I just did but that's something as a customer that you have to be really careful of. Yes, it's your data. But if data trains the models, who owns the model? You own the data but who owns the model? And how do you protect your IP and keep it out of the hands of the competitors? And IBM is messaging that they are going to help you with the compliance and the governance and the (mumbles) of your organization to protect your IP. That's a big differentiator if in fact there's meat in the bone there. >> Well you mentioned data, that's a key thing. I think whether doing it really quickly is getting the hybrid equation nailed so I think that's going to like just pedal as fast as you can. Get that going. But data first enterprise is really speaks to the IoT opportunity and also the new application developers. So to me, I think, for IBM to be successful, they have to continue to nail this data as value concept. If they can do that, they're going to drive (mumbles) and I think that's their differentiation. You look at, you know, Oracle, Azure, Microsoft Azure and IBM, they're all playing their cards to highlight their differentiation. So. Table stakes infrastructures of service, get some platform as a service, cloud native, open source, all the goodness involved in all the microservices, the containers, Cooper Netties, You're seeing that marker just develop as it's developing. But for IBM to get out front, they have to have a data layer, they have to have a data first strategy and if they do that well, that's going to be consistent with what I think (mumbles). And so, you know, to me I'm going to be poking at that. I'm going to be asking all the guests. What do you think of the data strategy? That's going to be powering the AI, you're seeing artificial intelligence, and things like autonomous vehicles. You're seeing sensors, wearables. Edge of the network is being redefined so I'm going to ask the quests really kind of how that plays out in hybrid? What's your analysis going to be for the guests this week? >> Well, I think the other thing too is the degree to-- to me, a key for IBM success and their ability to grow and dominate in this new world is the degree to which they can take their deep industry expertise in health care, in financial services and certain government sectors and utilities, et cetera. Which comes from their business process, you know, the BPO organization and they're consulting and the PWC acquisition years ago. The extent to which they can take that codifier, put it in the software, marry it with their data analytics and cognitive platforms and then grow that at scale. That would be a huge differentiator for IBM and give them a really massive advantage from a business model standpoint but as I said, 60% of the IBM's business remains services so we got a ways to go. >> Alright. We're going to be drilling into it again. There's a collision between cloud and big data markets coming together that's forming the IoT. You can see machine learning. You can see artificial intelligence. And I'm really a forcing function in cloud acceleration with data analytics being the key thing. This is theCUBE. We'll be getting the data for you for the next three days. I'm John Furrier. With Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more coverage. Kicking off day one of IBM InterConnect 2017 after the short break.

live from Las Vegas Nevada it's the cube at HP discover 2014 brought to you by HP the keynotes this afternoon meg whitman was just on a panel with thomas friedman and intel and satya nadella microsoft and pretty interesting i was it was interesting i'm here with Jeff Rick to note how passionate meg is about politics and government wow I'm she comforted by boat for Bobby Patrick is here we've been drilling down into cloud all day Bobby is the CMO of the HP Cloud Division a lot of new announcements coming on a lot of action and HP Cloud Bobby welcome to the cube yeah thank it's great to be here yeah good to see you so yeah good keynotes good good that was a good refresher you know a lot of these keynotes just products pushing and pushing we had some of that earlier but I thought it was a good eye opening refreshing right kind of discussion so it was very worthwhile but anyway you're relatively new to to HP to run to actually soon how's it going it's great it's exciting i joined it like a great time for the company we were gearing up for the big launch of our new brand HP Helion that that was launched on May seventh so just a little over a month ago and we hit the mark market hard globally it's a complete pull together of all of our products and services around cloud under a single brand customers love it and and it's really reiterated our commitment to OpenStack and you know it's great HP announced the billion dollar commitment to HP Helion over the next two years so it's backed by some some big funding that's a great time to come in so I saw that what is that would help us unpack that billion dollars it was big number right it's popular number right even we aren't buffin right her site Warren Buffett hehe underwrote the whole thing the March Madness right giving away a billion dollars for the perfect bracket right no longer a million does out of the abelian so what is that billion what does it go to what does it comprised yeah I mean it goes 2 r.d where where the most where the most active corporate sponsor behind OpenStack which is the fastest-growing open source project on the planet we are we have more contributors we have more team leads for the different projects and so we're working with the community we're hiring OpenStack experts always looking for the best in the world all around the world and we're then hardening and curating it in making a commercial now with our support and we believe it's the underpinning of the future of what we call hybrid cloud the ability to put some of your information some of your applications with an enterprise some of the public cloud some in different countries that matter for compliance reasons and to be able to move around between those different clouds in a very easy fashion so this money is going to that rd2 skills and to you know truly a global global launch so when you think about the sort of messaging for our HP Cloud what do you want customers to think about in the Helion brand and the HP Cloud yeah the number one thing is commitment to open standards so we are if you heard Martin Fink today talk about HP Labs and they're coming to open source we're all in on open source we believe it's the way to deliver innovation faster we can bring the market tech new technologies faster to customers so we're all into open source we are committed to the projects that matter to the next 20 years of IT and so that could emma has a real though we have to be to prove it with to say you know you can run our software on other hardware we think it'll be we'll have some optimal integrated solutions for you using our entire stack but this is about this is about eliminating vendor lock-in which is one of the biggest challenges at IT departments have faced in the last 20 years and so I think the commitment behind it open is at the core of our messaging so we should mention so Martin fake gave i really liked his presentation i have been safer I don't know for years that HP's got to get back to its roots right which are in fence right and I have not heard until today something that excited me about invention and we saw it today right now invention is not easy all we've talked about a lot that the previous administration cut cut cut by the bone right it takes a long time to turn that's Nisha but but we saw today think was put into that job for very particular reason I said about two things one it's a guy who's going to commercialize inventions answer the marketplace and two there's going to be a heavy systems focus so he basically showed a little leg on the machine which eventually is probably gonna be powering your clouds right he also announced HP is going to put forth a new open source operating system optimized for non-volatile memory not only a blank sheet of paper that they're going to work on with universities but also a Linux derivative stripped-down Linux driven and one for Android that was excited yeah I think what's great also is the cloud business actually falls under market so our our entire business worldwide in our cloud effort our rd on product development is all under martin who runs our CTO of our of our HP labs and when you look at the problems he's addressing with the machine and he's going after it's going after the massive scale challenges of the internet right and the massive scale challenge to the cloud and the day-to-day lose that we're all that we're all facing within the Internet of Things and so you know what's great is by being a part of the labs and being part of Martin's organization you know we're we're injecting that thinking into our cloud we're injecting it into our innovation and and you can see a road map here right you can see this this whole new architecture you talk about architecture that's been in existence since 1950 it was called the von Neumann architecture all the way to now and you know the world with copper at the core you know the world's in need of a new architecture and so it's great to be part of that there's that was a cool talk you talking about electrons photons and ions electrons compute compute autonomy photon photons communicate anions door right and that in essence is the future direction of where HP is going with the machine run a civ massive memory blowing away the volatility hierarchy blowing way ultimately slow spinning disks using memory store right as the platform for future systems I love it yeah he mentioned also but one thing that's close to my heart is the distributed mesh you saw that distributed mesh where we're different different hardware software combinations sit at different points of the you know the net work and they work together you know compute and data and that's really hybrid cloud you know hybrid cloud is putting compute workloads in certain areas and having data stored and distributed for maximum availability and doing that you know with self-service and doing that in a way that you know I see over nations can scale effectively yeah I think that you know as a marketing person you realize that customers want to know that your relevant for their future right and you know as much as I love things like store once it's not the future of computing Ryan comes out HP Labs this potentially is so that's got to have customers really excite this really the first time you've unveiled it right massively in the public scale right maybe you're talking you know that's why that's why i joined the HP i saw that coming out a few months ago and the the new style of IT thinking we're we're saying you know we're radically going to be at the core of helping IT transition from the old style very inward to a customer centric style 21 you know where you're delivering the customer you know consumer experience in the business world and i saw that with HP and it got me excited and i joined on board not upside yeah the other part that Martin mentioned I no idea of the power of HP Labs but the leveraging open source as well which are I probably not a tool in the arsenal not that long ago to really bring the power of a large communities engaged you can attack right specific problems and make that a core piece of the of the process yeah we think about it we've got thousands of the world's best developers right the Millennial developers these guys working all around the clock working on you know our core cloud future called OpenStack contributing to that right including our experts and then we're taking that and then bringing it to market you know into providing that twenty four seven support testing and hardening it you know doing the things need to do to help it enterprise feel comfortable with that decision you could never do that we could never do that and deliver that kind of innovation on our own just couldn't afford it we wouldn't be able to deliver on it you know these are the best minds of the world who are contributing this and we're we're all in nope in fact so you talked about we talked about what the brand is stand for you said open no lock-in can open source innovation occur at a pace with somebody who's got full control of a stack it's much faster actually I mean this is the you watch the innovation of OpenStack it's only what four years old we just at a four-year birthday of OpenStack already that's an entire cloud computing platform you've got databases service projects like trove you've got object storage projects like Swift and block storage like Senator you know all of these things are being worked on by people around the world you could never deliver and so what's happening is the pace of innovation with an open source project like OpenStack is like it's a hockey stick and and so I think yeah I think if we did this ourselves we or anyone else you would never be able to deliver the kind of innovation it's coming to market now we talked about some of the announcements you guys know why don't we actually go back a month right but Helion and then work through today we've got some HPC announcements you got the network you know for Helion right start with Helia so what's great about healing on is is it really brought together a lot of great products and services of the cloud that already existed and it took OpenStack and it was our first foray into the market with an OpenStack distribution and what's important actually is we have technology one called HP cloud system that is actually the most popular cloud platform right now private cloud platform on the planet about almost two thousand users right or two thousand companies third of the Fortune 100 right now using that technology so it is a proven capable platform used by big banks and others we're injecting OpenStack into that so that you can you can over time scale that out with new applications and so the launch really was about pulling all the pieces together pulling our support and services together and saying to a customer you know with confidence here's here's our cloud portfolio and here's how we can take you on a journey it's your pace and accelerate that journey take advantage of that cloud portfolio and that was really the launch month ago today and it discover I mean only a month later we've already done a number of great things but one is we brought out OpenStack the commercial version so we've launched community one you can download it thousands of downloads already the commercial versions coming up now and we announced pricing and what we are all about here this is what it really really important we are about accelerating the adoption of OpenStack throughout the enterprise we're about breaking down the barriers that have that have inhibited the proliferation of this great technology so one of those things today was the price point we announced 1000 for three dollars per year per server all in price point for HP Helion OpenStack and that's critical because this is a scale out a scale-out product you're going to have dozens hundreds maybe even thousands of these all around the world and so the price point is it's disruptive it's the lowest of the planet and and you know we said it's gonna be simple and easy we're not going to do all of this good better best packaging it's it's super easy and that's a big part of today the other part of today as we said you know what we're going to work with partners we're going to deploy this all around the world and that was the helium Network announcement along with ATT and the British Telecom and Intel and that's that's just huge for today now now helium comprises both on-premise in an HP public cloud correct that's right so talk about how that pricing works I mean I like what you're saying simple because cloud pricing is really complicated yeah so we use we wear that we're probably the largest user of OpenStack in production in production today without public cloud so we use it and people can consume services from that buy them on a on a you know on an as you go basis but with OpenStack which you what's really happening is people are able to deploy their own private clouds right they're able to a service provider could deploy and build their own public cloud so when I talk about the price point talking about a customer building their own cloud building their own cloud and a third party data center or in one of HP's 82 data centers and that that price point is is is you know it's easy easy to use you can predict it in your business model and feel comfortable about what it's going to cost you know two three four years out and so help me understand let's unpack that a little bit what am I getting for that fourteen hundred dollars per so you get the entire so this is what's amazing you get the entire cloud operating system called OpenStack right you get all of the projects now that are part of the OpenStack bill you're getting a top you're getting an object story it's it's a you know a la amazon s3 but in a box called Swift right with a swift API and you can build that and do that yourself now you can do that in a way that controls that gives you full control and full flexibility you get databases the service product you get a cute engine with cinder grizzly everything that's right no lad for the computer and so you get all of this in that box all of this and you can go deploy this and you can benefit now from the thousands of developers who are every six weeks putting out new code and innovative so okay so all the new innovations will fall under that umbrella and that's right at any price they choose to use you might say I'm just building a cloud storage environment you might choose to be heavy on Swift that's what you're doing but it is all inclusive and you can use the entire cloud platform or you can build a storage platform or databases a service platform that's a different model clearly what a customer is telling you about that yeah so they well they want they want the control and the flexibility of having their own platform for you know security reasons their own for compliance they want to put their data you know in their own centers but they're also saying I want to use public cloud some too and I like the idea that if OpenStack is here and OpenStack is here right same code bases I can fairly easily take a workload take an application to go from here to here and back and forth that kind of flexibility call interoperability and that's what's coming down the road with OpenStack underneath is something that does not exist today is everybody wants make sure I understand so I'm paid 1400 hours per server for that OpenStack instance on-premise and then when I want to access public cloud services I'm what you would pay an answer you might want to burst you might want to just go do you might have some peak demand he's burst out there you pay for and I would vote for money to make your partner of ours yep excellent now you also had some hpc announcements that's right so there's a number what's great is HP now is people are taking Helion OpenStack and they're putting it in their products are hpc group a high-performance computing group said hey we want to have a self-service mechanism we want to be able to scale out sap architecture people want in that in hpc so they put OpenStack inside their solution and launched it today and so it's you know OpenStack and better than hpc open hybrid simple to consume is what I'm that's right that's right it's ductable and predictable all right good Dave Lisa Marie wrote the book on this so this is great if you don't believe Bobby Lisa came I gave me this right gave me the books it's the OpenStack technology breaking the enterprise barrier you've got it you got it it's one of the best best reads on the planet right now yeah excellent all right so what does it go to the next level what is it I'm just buying computer part of just I'm just getting capacity if you just want capacity you might say you might just build a storage cloud yourself or you might use the our public cloud storage or with our Helia network our partners around the world be deploying OpenStack and you can buy it from them awesome all right we got to leave it there Bobby thanks so much for coming to the cube is a pleasure meantime take it all right keep it right to everybody John furrier is in the house he's back from San Francisco or San Jose good to have him back John keep right there but back with job fair in just a moment