(ambient Music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for the week is John Troyer, happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alumni, we have Margaret Dawson and John Alessio. Margaret is the vice-president of Portfolio Product Marketing and John is the vice-president of Global Services. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Alright so, John has gotten the week and a half now of the red hat greatness of being at summit last week, I unfortunately missed Summit, first time in five years I hadn't been at the show, did watch some of the interviews, caught up on it, and of course we talked to a lot of your team but, Margaret, let's start with you >> Margaret: Okay. >> One of the things we were looking at was, really, it's not just a maturation of OpenStack, but it's beyond where we were, how it fits into the greater picture, something we've been observing is when you think about open sourced projects, it's not one massive stack that you just deploy, it's you take what you need, it kind of gets embedded all over the place, and help us frame for us where we are today. >> Wow, that's a big question. So I think there's a couple things, I mean, in talking to customers, I think there's a couple trends that are happening. One is one you've probably talked about a lot and we probably covered at the Red Hat Summit which is just this overall digital transformation, digital leadership, whatever you want to call it, digital disruption tends to be a thing, and open sources definitely playing, really, the critical role of that, right, you will not be able to innovate and disrupt or even manage a disruption if you're not able to get to those technologies and innovations quickly and be able to adapt to it and have it work with other things. So the need for openness, for open APIs, for open technologies, inner-operability allows us to move faster and have that innovation and agility that every enterprise and organization needs world wide. And tied to that is kind of this overall hybrid cloud, so it's not just, OpenStack is a part of a much bigger kind of solution or goal that enterprises have in order to win and transform and be a digital leader. >> Margaret, I love that. Digital transformation, absolutely something we hear time and again from customers. >> Margaret: Yup. >> John, I've got a confession to make. I'm an infrastructure person and sometimes we're always like, why, come on, we spend all our time talking about how all the widgets and doo-dads and things-- >> Margaret: Blinky lights. >> Blinky lights, up on stage we have the-- >> He missed the blinking lights >> He did miss the blinking light. >> They had a similar stack up on stage yesterday. >> Oh, that's right. >> Same fans you could hear in the back of the room. But the whole goal of infrastructure always, of course, is to run the application, the whole reason for applications is to run and transform and do-- >> John: Serve the business >> Yeah, so that's where I'm going with this is we're talking more about not only that foundational layer of OpenStack but everything that goes with it and on it so maybe you could talk about the services-- >> Sure. So I think, Stu, that's exactly what we're seeing. So if you think about the last year and what we're seeing with services and projects here on OpenStack, I think the first thing to talk about is the fact that it's been growing quite a bit, in fact, from a 2017 versus 2018 perspective, our number of OpenStack projects have increased 36% year on year globally. So we're seeing a lot of demand, but we're seeing the projects be a lot more comprehensive. So these are OpenStack projects, but they're OpenStack with Open Shift, with Cloud Form, with Suff, as an example, and this combination is, really, a very very powerful combination. In fact, it's been so powerful that we started to see some common patterns of customers building a hybrid cloud solution, using OpenStack as their kind of private cloud infrastructure, but then using Open Shift as their way to kind of deploy applications in containers in that hybrid way, that we created a whole solution, which we announced two weeks ago, when John was at our Red Hat Summit, called Containers on Cloud. And that's taking all of our best practices around combining these products together in a very comprehensive, programmatic approach to deploying those solutions together. >> And I think it's really important, I mean, as you know, I think you and I met when we were both in networking, so coming from that infrastructure background but we really all need to talk about the workload down, starting with the application, starting with the business goal, and then how the infrastructure is almost becoming a services-based abstraction layer where you just need it to be always there. >> John: Yup. >> And whether it's public cloud or private cloud or traditional infrastructure, what developers in the business want is that agility and flexibility and containers provide that. There's other kind of architectural fabrics that allow that consistency and that's when it gets really exciting. >> One thing that's really interesting to me this week at OpenStack, as we've drilled into different customers, and talking to different people, even at lunch, is one, it's real. Everyone I've talked to, stuff in deployment, it went quickly, it's rock solid, it's powering, as we know, actually a lot of that is technical infrastructure that's powering a lot of the world's infrastructure at this point. >> That's right. >> The other thing that was interesting to me is some folks I talked to were saying, "Well, actually we have enough knowledge "that we're actually doing a lot of it ourselves, "we're going upstream." However, so that's great, and that's right for some people, but what I'm kind of been interested in both just coming from Red Hat Summit is both the portfolio, the breadth of the stack, and then all the different offerings that Red Hat, you know, it's not Rel anymore, it's not just Linux anymore, there's everything that's been built up and around and on top for orchestration and management, and then also the training, the services, the support, and that sort of thing, and I was wondering, that's kind of a two-part question, but maybe you all could tackle that. What does Red Hat bring to the table then? >> So, let me just start with, again, just to kind of position what we do as global services, our number one priority is customer success with Red Hat technology, that's the first and foremost thing we do and second is really around building expertise in the ecosystem so our customers have choice and where to go to get that expertise. So, if you start to look at kind of what's been going on as it relates to OpenStack, and, again, many customers are using Upstream bits, but many customers are using Red Hat bits, we see that and we look at the number of people who are getting trained around our technology. So over the last three years, we've trained, through our fee-based programs, 55,000 people on our OpenStack portfolio and in fact from 2017 to 2018 that was up 50% year on year and so the momentum is super super strong. So, that's the first point. The second is it's not just our customers. So part of my remit is, yes, to run consulting and, yes, to drive customer enablement and training, but it's also to build an ecosystem through our business partners. Our business partners use a program we call OPEN, Online Partner Enablement Network, which actually will just be celebrating five years just like OpenStack will, we'll be celebrating five years for OPEN. And our business partner accreditations on OpenStack specifically are up 49% year on year. So we're seeing the momentum in our regional systems integrators, our global systems integrators, our partners at large, building their solutions and capabilities around OpenStack, which I think is fantastic. >> No and it helps a lot with the verticalization of that, right, 'cause every industry has slightly different things they need. The thing I that would add to that, in terms of do-it-yourself community versus a dis-ter that's supported from someone like Red Hat, is it really comes down to core competency. And so even though OpenStack has become vastly simplified from a day one, day two, ongoing management, it is still a complex project. I mean that's the power of it, it can be highly customizable, right, it is an incredibly powerful infrastructure capability and so for most people their core competency is not that, and they need that support at least initially to get it going. What we have done is a couple things. I've actually talked to customers a lot about doing that training earlier and it's for a couple reasons, one is so that they actually have the people in house that have that competency but, two, you're giving infrastructure folks a chance to be part of that future cool stuff, right? I mean, OpenStack's written in Python and there's other languages that are newer and sexier, I guess, but it's still kind of moving them towards that future and for a lot of guys that have been in the data center and the ops world for a long time, they're looking out there at developers and going, I'm not the cool kid anymore, right? So OpenStack actually is a little bit of a window, not just to help companies go through that digital transformation, but actually help your ops personnel get a taste of that future and be part of that transformation instead of being stuck in just mainframe land or whatever, so training them early in the process is a really powerful way to do a lot of things. You know, skillset, retention, as well as then you can manage more of that yourself. >> And then all the way up to Stack, right? I mean, we're talking about containers, and then there's containers but then there's container data storage, container data networking. I mean, you've got the rest of the pieces in that, in Open Shift, in the rest. >> Absolutely. >> That is correct. >> And I think, John, you were at Red Hat Summit, we had a number of different innovation award winners. So I think one good example of kind of this kind of transformation from a digital transformation perspective, but also kind of leveraging a lot of what our Stack has to offer is Cafe Pacific. And so we talked about Cafe, they were one of our innovation award winners and what their challenge really was is how do they create a new modern infrastructure that gave them more flexibility so they could be more responsive to their customers. >> Yeah. >> In the airline industry. And so what they were really looking for was really, truly a hybrid cloud solution. They wanted to be able to have some things run in their infrastructure, have some things run in the public cloud, and we worked with them over the last, little over a year now, Red Hat consulting, Red Hat training, the Red Hat engineering team, in really building a solution that leverage OpenStack, yes, but also a number of other capabilities in the Red Hat portfolio, Open Shift, so they can deploy these applications, containerized applications now both to the public cloud as well as to the private cloud, but also automation through Ansible, which we're hearing a lot about Ansible and products like Ansible here at the conference-- >> Well the Open Stock and Ansible communities are starting to really work well together, just like Kubernetes, you've got a lot of this collaboration happening at the project level not to mention when we actually productize it and take it to customers. >> Yeah, so it's been super super powerful and I think it's a good one where it really hit on what Margaret was saying, which was giving the guys in infrastructure an opportunity to be a part of this huge transformation that Cafe went through, 'cause they were a very very key part of it. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're seeing that also with the open innovation labs. So this is something, which is really an innovation incubation process, it's agile, scrum, whatever, and in those we're not just talking to the developers, we're actually combining developers, functional lines of business leaders, infrastructure, architects, who all come together in a very typical six week kind of agile methodology and what comes out of that, I don't know, I've seen it a couple times, it's magical is all I can say, but having those different perspectives and having those different people work together to innovate is so powerful and they all feel like they're moving that forward and you come out with pilots, and we've seen things where they come out with two apps at the end of six weeks or eight weeks, it's just incredible when they're all focused on that and you start to understand those different perspectives and to me that's open source culture, right? It's awesome. >> And, Margaret, I'd love to hear your perspective also on that hybrid cloud discussion because so many people look at OpenStack and be like, oh, that's private cloud. >> Margaret: Right. >> And, of course, every customer we talk to, they have a cloud strategy. And they're doing lots of SaaS, they've got public cloud, multiple, Red Hat, I know you play across all of them, big announcement with Microsoft last week, last year was Amazon big partnerships with, so is Kubernetes the story, or is Kubernetes a piece of the story, how do all these play together for customers? >> I think Kubernetes is one and so, especially when you look at the broader architectural level, OpenStack becomes obviously the private cloud and enables them to start to do things that are more cloud-native even in their own data center, or if it's hosted or management or more traditional infrastructure, but it really has to be fluid. And a lot of customers initially were saying that their strategy was cloud first, and they would say, "Oh, we're going to put "everything in the public cloud." And then you actually start going through the workloads, you start going through the cost, you start going through the data privacy, or whatever the criteria capabilities are, and that's just not practical, frankly. And so this hybrid reality with private cloud, traditional, and public is going to be the reality for a very very long time, if not forever. There's always going to be things that you want to have better control of. And so Kubernetes at the orchestration layer becomes really critical to be able to have that agility across all those environments, but you have other fabrics like that in your architecture too, we talked about Ansible, it allows you to have common automation and do those play books that you can use across all those different infrastructure, KVM, what's your virtualization fabric, and can KVM take you from traditional virtualization all through public cloud? The answer is yes. So we're going to see increasingly these kind of layers of the overall architecture that allows you to have that flexibility, that management that's still the consistency, which is what you need to keep your policies the same, your access controls, you security, your compliance, and your sanity, whereas before it was kind of Ad Hoc. People would be like, oh, we're just going to put this here, go to public cloud. We're going to do this here, and now people are finding standardizing on things like even Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that's my OS layer, and that allows me to easily do Linux containers in a secure way, et cetera, et cetera. So, doing hybrid cloud means both the agility but you got to have some consistency in order to have the security and control that you need. So it's a little bit different than what we were talking about a few years ago, even. >> And I think one of the things that we've learned in the services world is that we started this idea about 18 months ago, we called these journey adoption programs, which were really the fact that some of these transformations are big, they're not about a single project that's going to last four to six weeks, it's a journey that the customer's going to go on and so when we talk about hybrid cloud, we've actually created this adoption program which can really start with the customer in this whole discovery phase, really, what are you trying to accomplish from a business perspective then take them into a design phase, take them into a deployment phase, take them into an enablement phase, and then take them into a sustainment phase. And there's a number of different services that we'll do across consulting, training, even within Marco Bill Peters Organization, which is our customer experience and engagement organization, around what role a technical account manager can play and really help our customer in the operational phases. And so we've learned this from some of the very large deployments, like Verizon, where we've seen some very-- >> And it's cyclical, right? You can do that many times. >> We do. In fact, you absolutely do. And so we've created now a program, specifically, around hybrid clouded option to try and de-mistify it. >> Yeah. >> Because it is complex. >> Well, and the reality is, there's somewhere around 30% of organizations still do not actually have a clear cloud strategy. And we see that in our own research, our own experiences, but industry analysts come up with the exact same number. >> And Margaret, by the way, the other 70%, the ink still pretty-- >> Yeah. >> Still wet! (laughing) >> Yes, it is. I'll tell you, I love saying cloud first to people because they kind of giggle. It's like, yeah, that's our strategy but we know we don't really know what that means. >> Which cloud? >> Exactly. >> Exactly. >> All the clouds. >> Exactly. >> Alright, well Margaret and John, want to give you a final word, key takeaways you want to have or anything new to the show that you want to point out? >> I would just say we are still in early days. I think sometimes we forget that we, both in the open source communities, in the industry for a long time, tend to be 10 years ahead of where most people are and so when you hear jokes about, oh, is OpenStack still viable or is everything doing this, it's like right now we only have a very small percentage of actual enterprise workloads in the cloud and so we need to just now get to the point where we're all getting mature in this and really start to help our customers and our partners and our communities take this to the next level and work on inter-operability, and ease of use, and management. We're so mature now in technology, now let's put the polish on it, so that the consumption and the utilization can really go to the next level. >> Yeah, and I'll play off what Margaret said. I think it's very very key. When I look at where we've had the biggest success, as defined by, in that discovery phase, the customer lays out for us, here's what our business objectives were, did we achieve those business objectives, it's all about figuring out how we can create the solution and integrate into their environment today. So Margaret said I think very very well which is we have to integrate into these other solutions and every one of these big customer deployments has some Red Hat software, but it also has some other software that we're integrating into because customers have investments. So it's not about rip and replace, it's about integrate, it's about leverage, it's about time to market, and that's what most of the customers I've talked to, they're very worried about time to value, and so that's what we're trying to focus in, I think as a whole company, around Red Hat. >> Margaret: Agree. >> Absolutely. Summed it up very well. John Alessio, Margaret Dawson, thanks so much for joining us again. >> Thanks again. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, watch more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: It's theCube. Covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform in HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome to the special Cube conversation covering SAP SAPPHIRE 2017 in Orlando. I'm John Furrier here for special coverage. Our next guest is Margaret Anderson, Senior Vice President of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Thanks for joining me today. Talking about the news and the relationships, what's happening around SAPPHIRE. A lot of great things are happening. One of the super exciting thing that we're seeing is, this notion of multi-cloud, this notion of customer value. Starting to see some visibility into a clear line of sight around how the technology in the cloud can be put into use. You guys have some exciting news around some of your partnerships with Cisco and CenturyLink. Tell us about that. >> Yeah we're very excited about that. In the sense that, customers are always asking us, why the cloud and why now. Why don't I just stay with what I have. And we keep telling them that as technology changes, we want to be on top of it for them. And they don't have to think about it. They just have to use it. So we're making it easier for them to consume our technology. But for us to be able to do that, we need partners. We need partners that can be the backbone inside the cloud. Because the cloud is supported by equipment, machinery, systems, all sorts of things that we don't really want the customer to worry about that. We want the customer to consume the services. We want them to run their business. So when we formed the partnership with the Cisco and CenturyLink team, the best thing about it is the fact that we have a partner who creates the engine, who puts together our HANA reference architecture, who sets everything up so the customer doesn't have to think about it. And then we have the CenturyLink team, who provides all the services. They make sure everything works. They listen to what the customer needs and they make sure it all runs together. >> This is important and I want to highlight this and I want to ask another followup question on that. I think this really speaks to the cloud transformation we're seeing. Digital transmission, whatever you want to call it. Certainly it's the cloud, it's data. And Bill McDermott has been on this for years. It's our eighth year of covering SAPPHIRE. He was showing data dashboards years ago, so he's been Nostradamus in the whole vision there. But cloud has been a moving train. And your customers and CenturyLink customers and Cisco customers are constantly questioning themselves around their relationships that they have and the business that they run. This is important because what you're highlighting is, you guys have been no stranger to partnering. >> Correct. >> Now that the cloud stakes are high, the value to the customer at CenturyLink is that they can provide no disruption. I want to get into that a little bit. What at Sapphire is being announced that's going to help this. >> Well I think that customers are always interested in global reach. They might be starting locally in one country and they want to know that when they partner with us SAP, or when we SAP partner with someone else to help us, that when their business grows, we're ready for them and we can grow with them. And in the cloud, customers just assume that somewhere is all the equipment, somewhere the cloud runs. But today, security is really important for our customers. They want to know, can we comply with the rules for data sovereignty in various countries around the world. And they want to know if our partners, if we choose one to work with us, can also do that for them. >> I was just saying I was just having a conversation with a group of experts and influences this morning, on our crowd chat digital platform; question that came up is, what's the biggest misconception of dev-op or cloud in the enterprise? And the number one question that came up was oh, it's easy. That's the number one misconception. And it's not easy. [Margaret] Chuckles. There's a lot of things going on around compliance, governance, but also SLA performance around latency. Little things like, >> Yes. >> Moving packets around and making applications bulletproof and security. How does this relationship with CenturyLink and Cisco make that a reality for customers so they can be confident. Things are going to be secure, and these implementations are going to be reliable. >> Well first of all, at SAP we've defined a very specific reference architecture. So the Cisco team builds the environment for the customer according to that architectural standard. Our security team provides guidance on what the security standards have to be. And between our CenturyLink team and our Cisco team, they have to make sure that those standards are deployed. And that we are completely hack-proof. Because you know it, everybody out there trying to get into customer systems. Data is very valuable. Business knowledge could destroy you if a competitor could find something out about you. We want to promise our customers that everything is secure. And that we have a team of ace security experts and we all collaborate together to make sure that we can keep the environment safe. >> Cloud enabled IT infrastructure and application development and all these SLAs that are required in the cloud are going to be interesting. In our next segment, we're going to have Cisco and CenturyLink on. >> Umhmm. >> What are they going to be saying? When we ask them about the relationship what are some of the things they're going to say about what this all means for SAP, Cisco and CenturyLink. >> I think, I won't put words in anybody's mouth, but I know that the Cisco team, >> John: But we will. >> Is looking at the fact that they're doing a lot of business today on-premise. And customers are getting out of having their own data centers because it's not cost effective for them. So when the customers is thinking about the cloud, and they happen to like the environment that they have, they want to know that they can have a similar environment in the cloud. Because realistically, customers still ask the question, what's under the hood? What am I getting? How do I know that you can provide these SLAs? What are you doing to guarantee me the 99.9 uptime? So customers do ask us those questions. Cisco has excellent answers for those questions. And they also ask the CenturyLink team, what is your expertise in HANA and what is your expertise in running all the other applications that I might want to consume from SAP? So it's the combination of the engine and the people that make the success in the cloud. Because that's how we deliver the services to the customers. >> And also to complicate things, I would say that customers want things faster now. >> Yes they do. >> Not just faster latency and speed of solutions but performance but like deployments. I want it yesterday. That's a big factor, the deployment expectations for the customers are pretty high. >> Sometimes the customers think that they can call us up and they can say I'd like to do a cloud project. And then 24 hours later, magically, all sorts of stuff can appear. That's not always the case. Because every customer has a unique set of things that they'll like to see in the cloud. When they tell us what they need and we recommend how to set it up for them, we work with them on when to deliver it. And I've worked with customers on some very large implementation complicated projects, it still requires the same amount of thought process from an implementation perspective when you do it on-premise as if you do it in the cloud. Because you still have to think about what you want to use, and how you want to use it, and when you want to go-live. >> Lots going on at SAPPHIRE. Just to wrap up, we're going to bring on our guests from Cisco and CenturyLink in our next segment, talk about this relationship. But just in general, what's your perspective of the things that are happening right now around SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. What's the big exciting announcements if you can generalize the theme. What's the sentiment, what's the aroma of the buzz. >> Well, I would think first of all our new Leonardo announcement is going to generate an awful lot of excitement in the market. And I'm not going to steal anybody's thunder by talking some more about what that is. But I also think customers want to know that we are keeping up and that we are ahead of, more importantly, the technology trends. So when we have a big event like SAPPHIRE, we make sure to have announcements keyed up and ready to go. And each day we will tease them with releases of what some of these information is going to be. So that it generates excitement because post SAPPHIRE, we'll be doing a lot of followup conversations with our customers. >> One of the things I observed, just as anecdotal to that is that, I think, I like SAP. Always had good strategy with the data. As I mentioned about McDermott earlier, but I think the developer stake in the ground that was put in last year, around the IOS with the Apple, set the tone over the course of last year, hey, we're going outside of the SAP traditional developer, we're going to expand the reach of what a developer is. >> Margaret: Right. >> That cloud native view is very relevant. I think you're leading the charge on that. So congratulations. >> Well, we are. And we have converted what used to be the traditional on-premise software code lines into cloud code lines. And that means a lot of work internally that people may not realize that you just don't have what you used to have run one way and throw it into the cloud. You really have to think about and develop for specifically the cloud. >> Well, super impressed to see the partnership evolution where you're really bring the big players in partnership delivering real value. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on. In our next segment we're going to have Cisco and CenturyLink on to discuss the relationship with SAP, Cisco and CenturyLink. Great combination, up and down the stack. Great benefit for customers. Again thanks so much. This is theCUBE. More coverage of SAPPHIRE NOW after this short break.

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hey, friends of theCUBE. It's Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the Eighth Annual Women In Data Science. But you've been a Cube fan for a long time. So you know that we've been here since the beginning of WiDS, which is 2015. We always loved to come and cover this event. We learned great things about data science, about women leaders, underrepresented minorities. And this year we have a special component. We've got two grad students from Stanford's Master's program and Data Journalism joining. One of my them is here with me, Hannah Freitag, my co-host. Great to have you. And we are pleased to welcome from Intuit for the first time, Shir Meir Lador Group Manager at Data Science. Shir, it's great to have you. Thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> And I was just secrets girl talking with my boss of theCUBE who informed me that you're in great company. Intuit's Chief Technology Officer, Marianna Tessel is an alumni of theCUBE. She was on at our Supercloud event in January. So welcome back into it. >> Thank you very much. We're happy to be with you. >> Tell us a little bit about what you're doing. You're a data science group manager as I mentioned, but also you've had you've done some cool things I want to share with the audience. You're the co-founder of the PyData Tel Aviv Meetups the co-host of the unsupervised podcast about data science in Israel. You give talks, about machine learning, about data science. Tell us a little bit about your background. Were you always interested in STEM studies from the time you were small? >> So I was always interested in mathematics when I was small, I went to this special program for youth going to university. So I did my test in mathematics earlier and studied in university some courses. And that's when I understood I want to do something in that field. And then when I got to go to university, I went to electrical engineering when I found out about algorithms and how interested it is to be able to find solutions to problems, to difficult problems with math. And this is how I found my way into machine learning. >> Very cool. There's so much, we love talking about machine learning and AI on theCUBE. There's so much potential. Of course, we have to have data. One of the things that I love about WiDS and Hannah and I and our co-host Tracy, have been talking about this all day is the impact of data in everyone's life. If you break it down, I was at Mobile World Congress last week, all about connectivity telecom, and of course we have these expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7 from wherever we are in the world and we can do whatever we want. I can do an Uber transaction, I can watch Netflix, I can do a bank transaction. It all is powered by data. And data science is, some of the great applications of it is what it's being applied to. Things like climate change or police violence or health inequities. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on at Intuit. I'm an intuit user myself, but talk to me about some of those things. Give the audience really a feel for what you're doing. >> So if you are a Intuit product user, you probably use TurboTax. >> I do >> In the past. So for those who are not familiar, TurboTax help customers submit their taxes. Basically my group is in charge of getting all the information automatically from your documents, the documents that you upload to TurboTax. We extract that information to accelerate your tax submission to make it less work for our customers. So- >> Thank you. >> Yeah, and this is why I'm so proud to be working at this team because our focus is really to help our customers to simplify all the you know, financial heavy lifting with taxes and also with small businesses. We also do a lot of work in extracting information from small business documents like bill, receipts, different bank statements. Yeah, so this is really exciting for me, the opportunity to work to apply data science and machine learning to solution that actually help people. Yeah >> Yeah, in the past years there have been more and more digital products emerging that needs some sort of data security. And how did your team, or has your team developed in the past years with more and more products or companies offering digital services? >> Yeah, so can you clarify the question again? Sorry. >> Yeah, have you seen that you have more customers? Like has your team expanded in the past years with more digital companies starting that need kind of data security? >> Well, definitely. I think, you know, since I joined Intuit, I joined like five and a half years ago back when I was in Tel Aviv. I recently moved to the Bay Area. So when I joined, there were like a dozens of data scientists and machine learning engineers on Intuit. And now there are a few hundreds. So we've definitely grown with the year and there are so many new places we can apply machine learning to help our customers. So this is amazing, so much we can do with machine learning to get more money in the pocket of our customers and make them do less work. >> I like both of those. More money in my pocket and less work. That's awesome. >> Exactly. >> So keep going Intuit. But one of the things that is so cool is just the the abstraction of the complexity that Intuit's doing. I upload documents or it scans my receipts. I was just in Barcelona last week all these receipts and conversion euros to dollars and it takes that complexity away from the end user who doesn't know all that's going on in the background, but you're making people's lives simpler. Unfortunately, we all have to pay taxes, most of us should. And of course we're in tax season right now. And so it's really cool what you're doing with ML and data science to make fundamental processes to people's lives easier and just a little bit less complicated. >> Definitely. And I think that's what's also really amazing about Intuit it, is how it combines human in the loop as well as AI. Because in some of the tax situation it's very complicated maybe to do it yourself. And then there's an option to work with an expert online that goes on a video with you and helps you do your taxes. And the expert's work is also accelerated by AI because we build tools for those experts to do the work more efficiently. >> And that's what it's all about is you know, using data to be more efficient, to be faster, to be smarter, but also to make complicated processes in our daily lives, in our business lives just a little bit easier. One of the things I've been geeking out about recently is ChatGPT. I was using it yesterday. I was telling everyone I was asking it what's hot in data science and I didn't know would it know what hot is and it did, it gave me trends. But one of the things that I was so, and Hannah knows I've been telling this all day, I was so excited to learn over the weekend that the the CTO of OpenAI is a female. I didn't know that. And I thought why are we not putting her on a pedestal? Because people are likening ChatGPT to like the launch of the iPhone. I mean revolutionary. And here we have what I think is exciting for all of us females, whether you're in tech or not, is another role model. Because really ultimately what WiDS is great at doing is showcasing women in technical roles. Because I always say you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see more role models, female role role models, underrepresented minorities of course men, because a lot of my sponsors and mentors are men, but we need more women that we can look up to and see ah, she's doing this, why can't I? Talk to me about how you stay the course in data science. What excites you about the potential, the opportunities based on what you've already accomplished what inspires you to continue and be one of those females that we say oh my God, I could be like Shir. >> I think that what inspires me the most is the endless opportunities that we have. I think we haven't even started tapping into everything that we can do with generative AI, for example. There's so much that can be done to further help you know, people make more money and do less work because there's still so much work that we do that we don't need to. You know, this is with Intuit, but also there are so many other use cases like I heard today you know, with the talk about the police. So that was really exciting how you can apply machine learning and data to actually help people, to help people that been through wrongful things. So I was really moved by that. And I'm also really excited about all the medical applications that we can have with data. >> Yeah, yeah. It's true that data science is so diverse in terms of what fields it can cover but it's equally important to have diverse teams and have like equity and inclusion in your teams. Where is Intuit at promoting women, non-binary minorities in your teams to progress data science? >> Yeah, so I have so much to say on this. >> Good. >> But in my work in Tel Aviv, I had the opportunity to start with Intuit women in data science branch in Tel Aviv. So that's why I'm super excited to be here today for that because basically this is the original conference, but as you know, there are branches all over the world and I got the opportunity to lead the Tel Aviv branch with Israel since 2018. And we've been through already this year it's going to be it's next week, it's going to be the sixth conference. And every year our number of submission to make talk in the conference doubled itself. >> Nice. >> We started with 20 submission, then 50, then 100. This year we have over 200 submissions of females to give talk at the conference. >> Ah, that's fantastic. >> And beyond the fact that there's so much traction, I also feel the great impact it has on the community in Israel because one of the reason we started WiDS was that when I was going to conferences I was seeing so little women on stage in all the technical conferences. You know, kind of the reason why I guess you know, Margaret and team started the WiDS conference. So I saw the same thing in Israel and I was always frustrated. I was organizing PyData Meetups as you mentioned and I was always having such a hard time to get female speakers to talk. I was trying to role model, but that's not enough, you know. We need more. So once we started WiDS and people saw you know, so many examples on the stage and also you know females got opportunity to talk in a place for that. Then it also started spreading and you can see more and more female speakers across other conferences, which are not women in data science. So I think just the fact that Intuits started this conference back in Israel and also in Bangalore and also the support Intuit does for WiDS in Stanford here, it shows how much WiDS values are aligned with our values. Yeah, and I think that to chauffeur that I think we have over 35% females in the data science and machine learning engineering roles, which is pretty amazing I think compared to the industry. >> Way above average. Yeah, absolutely. I was just, we've been talking about some of the AnitaB.org stats from 2022 showing that 'cause usually if we look at the industry to you point, over the last, I don't know, probably five, 10 years we're seeing the number of female technologists around like a quarter, 25% or so. 2022 data from AnitaB.org showed that that number is now 27.6%. So it's very slowly- >> It's very slowly increasing. >> Going in the right direction. >> Too slow. >> And that representation of women technologists increase at every level, except intern, which I thought was really interesting. And I wonder is there a covid relation there? >> I don't know. >> What do we need to do to start opening up the the top of the pipeline, the funnel to go downstream to find kids like you when you were younger and always interested in engineering and things like that. But the good news is that the hiring we've seen improvements, but it sounds like Intuit is way ahead of the curve there with 35% women in data science or technical roles. And what's always nice and refreshing that we've talked, Hannah about this too is seeing companies actually put action into initiatives. It's one thing for a company to say we're going to have you know, 50% females in our organization by 2030. It's a whole other ball game to actually create a strategy, execute on it, and share progress. So kudos to Intuit for what it's doing because that is more companies need to adopt that same sort of philosophy. And that's really cultural. >> Yeah. >> At an organization and culture can be hard to change, but it sounds like you guys kind of have it dialed in. >> I think we definitely do. That's why I really like working and Intuit. And I think that a lot of it is with the role modeling, diversity and inclusion, and by having women leaders. When you see a woman in leadership position, as a woman it makes you want to come work at this place. And as an evidence, when I build the team I started in Israel at Intuit, I have over 50% women in my team. >> Nice. >> Yeah, because when you have a woman in the interviewers panel, it's much easier, it's more inclusive. That's why we always try to have at least you know, one woman and also other minorities represented in our interviews panel. Yeah, and I think that in general it's very important as a leader to kind of know your own biases and trying to have defined standard and rubrics in how you evaluate people to avoid for those biases. So all of that inclusiveness and leadership really helps to get more diversity in your teams. >> It's critical. That thought diversity is so critical, especially if we talk about AI and we're almost out of time, I just wanted to bring up, you brought up a great point about the diversity and equity. With respect to data science and AI, we know in AI there's biases in data. We need to have more inclusivity, more representation to help start shifting that so the biases start to be dialed down and I think a conference like WiDS and it sounds like someone like you and what you've already done so far in the work that you're doing having so many females raise their hands to want to do talks at events is a good situation. It's a good scenario and hopefully it will continue to move the needle on the percentage of females in technical roles. So we thank you Shir for your time sharing with us your story, what you're doing, how Intuit and WiDS are working together. It sounds like there's great alignment there and I think we're at the tip of the iceberg with what we can do with data science and inclusion and equity. So we appreciate all of your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> I enjoyed very, very much >> Good. We hope, we aim to please. Thank you for our guests and for Hannah Freitag. This is Lisa Martin coming to you live from Stanford University. This is our coverage of the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference. Stick around, next guest will be here in just a minute.

>> Hi, I'm Kyle Rourke, VP of Platform Strategy here at Snowflake. And I could not be more excited to be here today with Margaret Sherman, who is the Head of Data Strategy for Sonos. Now, all throughout the day-to-day we've been hearing from lots of customers from all over the world and hearing about their journeys and how they've transformed their business by embracing the data cloud. And of course, this next story is one I am personally very excited about because I'm a huge Sonos customer. And I'm sure many of you are as well. >> Thanks Kyle. As you mentioned, I'm the Head of Data Strategy at Sonos. And what that means is that I set the data priorities for the company, as well as guide the company on where to invest now and in the future, to get the most out of our data resources. I've spent about four years at Sonos. Previously I was the head of product data and worked a lot with setting up Snowflake and the IoT data. And I've been in technology for 20 years and the last 10 years I've spent in data analytics and machine learning. >> That's very cool. Now, how does your company view data in general? How do you guys... How does your team fit in, in the overall strategy of how Sonos leverages data? >> Yeah. So Sonos is a sound experience company and we really pioneered multi-room wireless audio. And we made that experience amazing and truly changed how people listen. And our mission is to inspire the world to listen better. And everything that we do is in service to that. And data is a part of that. So we really believe that data is fundamental to helping us achieve our mission. Data helps us build a better business, build better products and ultimately we think it helps us make our customers happier. >> Now, before Snowflake, maybe let's go back in time. You've been at Sonos for the last four years. Maybe go back in time a little bit for the time pre Snowflake. What were some of your challenges that you guys faced before you started with us? >> Yeah, it was really challenging. So I was actually leading the product data team at the time and we use Snowflake primarily for our IoT data. And so we're collecting tons of data, but we're really struggling to leverage it. Essentially what would happen is, if we wanted to answer a single question about what was happening with the customer experience, we would have to have data engineers go and write some code, spin up clusters. This could take weeks just to extract the data and get it into a shape where analysts and scientists could go and work with it. And so we really went from being in a place where it was taking weeks just to answer a single question, to now we can do things in hours. So it really changed things for us. >> Wow. And so the benefits of obviously being able to go act on information very, very quickly. What are some of the other benefits that's driven for you guys? >> I mean, our data people love it, obviously, because if you think about the process of data science, it's very iterative. So you're going to ask a question, you're going to go and investigate your data. You're going to do some data processing, you're going to do some visualizations and then you're going to come up with more questions. You're going to want to dig in. You're going to want to pull more data and you're going to want to join it together, do different cuts and pivots. And before that was just off the table, because as you can imagine, if every time you have to go weeks to go do that, it's just impossible. Whereas now, our data scientists can churn through these problems very quickly. And the data engineers love it because they're not sitting around waiting for jobs to finish for forever. They are able to get through their code faster. And as one of my engineers likes to say, she was telling me, she said, "Snowflake, she's a beast." (Kyle and Margaret laughing) It's like crunching through the data. >> You mentioned IoT. And I think that's obviously a very challenging space for a lot of customers and there's a lot of interest in it. Maybe give me some more thoughts on how much data are you guys are bringing in? Is it small, large? Has the volume been something that you could handle with Snowflake? >> Yeah, I mean, that was why we chose Snowflake. So prior to having Snowflake, we were really struggling with the vol... I mean, we've very large volumes of data, as you can imagine from an IoT device because we're collecting from over 10 million homes across the world. So it's quite a bit of data. And all of that doesn't fit in a traditional sort of data warehouse. We were trying to push some of it into SQL and we were essentially taking just a handful of our telemetry events. And we were boiling them down to daily and weekly aggregates. And even trying to push that into SQL was just too much for it to handle. And with Snowflake, we had processing jobs that were timing out in SQL server after running for hours and hours, and then Snowflake could just crunch through it in a few minutes. So-- >> Kyle: Wow. >> It was, yeah. I mean, I literally almost fell off my chair. (Margaret laughs) They showed me the comparison numbers. >> Well, so now... So it's been a good experience for you, but let's talk about your customers. And I think, I can say as a customer myself, I've always had a great experience with Sonos, it's probably why I keep buying more and more and more of them. But talk to me about how has data really helped you guys drive that customer experience in some very tangible ways? >> As a Sonos customer, we really hope that you enjoy the great sound and freedom of choice and ease of use that the product brings. But obviously behind all of that, behind that really easy experience, it's very complex. You've got a lot going on, when you're interacting with your Sonos system. So, it's not just a single piece of hardware, you've got a mobile device potentially that you're using to control it, you have third-party voice services, you have music service providers, wifi, network traffic, all of these things are going on. So for us to really make sure that we're creating an amazing experience cause we're super customer obsessed. >> So Margaret, one of the things that I've always experienced as a customer of Sonos, is that, frankly for me it just always works. And that's one of the best parts of the customer experience. Whether I'm pulling up Spotify on my phone to go listen to it, or whether I'm plugging in a soundbar into the TV, everything seems to just work. So maybe just walk me through why it's been such a good experience maybe for me. >> Yeah. So some of the kind of at a high level, an example of what we do is we use Snowflake to... And because of the power of Snowflake, we're able to bring together different kinds of telemetry about what's happening in our products and our services. And then we can try to pinpoint reliability issues and determine what's happening, like what's causing them. That was kind of the first thing that we attacked with Snowflake, was really to go in and dig in and join some different events together and start slicing and dicing and looking for what are the main problems that we're seeing and what are the fixes to them. And the product team was able to find some reliability issues that they were able to fix. And they shipped the fixes and we were able to significantly reduce the rate at which some of these errors were occurring. >> Just by having all the data in one place and being able to go actually act on it quickly and of course in a cost effective manner, it really did let you guys really pinpoint any issue when it did occur and go and go support it, fixed quickly. >> Yeah. I mean, we were able to find things that we didn't even know were happening because we could really drill into the data. >> So it wasn't just having one place, it was also just being able to go dig into a different level of fidelity that you didn't have before? >> I mean, you should see some of the tableau dashboards that we've put on top of Snowflake. So, it's pretty impressive. (laughs) >> That's awesome. That's awesome. So what really set it apart? I mean you've been in the business, you're an expert in this business and there's a lot of options out there. What really set apart Snowflake from everything else at the time, and even now in your opinion? >> Just like you said about Sonos, it just works. (Kyle and Margaret laughing) We were able to stand it up really easily. We were able to load data into it really easily. It's pretty flexible in terms of what you can do. So for example, we use the variant column quite a bit, and that allows us to take kind of this semi-structured data and throw it in there and have an index. And then we can work with it as we want to. We don't have to have like a real complex data pipeline upstream before we throw things into Snowflake. If we don't want to, or we can, we really like, obviously I mentioned the speed. I keep mentioning that cause it's really powerful and it holds a ton of data. But even better is the cost. So we're pushing tons of data into Snowflake and we're not having to pay that much for that cost. We're basically paying S3 costs. But then you pay for what you use. So you're just paying for your processing costs. And even that is pretty easy to optimize. And you guys provide tools for that and support. I mean, you've helped me save thousands dollars a month this year (laughs) and it's really great. >> What's the plan for the future? Where do you see Sonos and Snowflake and the data cloud? Where do you see all that intersecting in the future? >> Yeah, I mean we really want Snowflake to be kind of the center of our data platform and bring all of our data together. We want to live the data dream. (Kyle and Margaret laughing) (indistinct) our data together and do all sorts of cool analysis. So we have a bunch of different projects that we want to be able to do. For example, one thing that we're looking at doing is bringing together our product telemetry data and our customer support data so that we can try to find patterns in terms of the types of errors or sequence of events that happen before somebody calls us, so that we can potentially intervene and fix the problem before somebody even has to reach out to our care team. And then another place that we're looking at using Snowflake is connecting it to salesforce. So for people who are interested in hearing from us, we could do things like when you set up a new product, we can send you information about how to use that product, or if there's new features available for the product that you have, we could send you information about that. And with Snowflake as our backend, it really helps us be able to tailor the customer experience. >> So Margaret, you've talked a lot about Snowflake and using Snowflake and it just works. I mean, you guys are running a very, very large implementation of Snowflake like using IoT data coming from, as you mentioned, millions and millions of devices. What's been the overall lift to the organization just to go manage the whole thing and keep it going and keep it up and running? >> It almost runs itself. (Margaret laughing) I'm almost surprised because we obviously use a lot of different third party tools and most of them require quite a bit of intervention on a regular basis. I would say Snowflake, it stays up and running and you have great tools for managing the whole system. And it's easy to see what's happening, it's easy to see when different clusters are spinning up and spinning down, we have tableau dashboards that we use to monitor all of our usage. And you guys provide all the data for that to make that really easy. So that's really great. Can't say it enough, without Snowflake. (laughs) >> So Margaret, thank you so much. It was great hearing your story about Sonos and how you leverage data cloud. So again, thank you for being a customer. And thank you again for being here today. >> Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering >>space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly >>Over On Welcome to this Special virtual conference. The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from the Cube. I'm John for your host and master of ceremonies. Got a great topic today in this session. Really? The intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic and this conversation is the cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup. We have Jeff Armstrong's the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly Jeffrey. Thanks for jumping on and Bang. Go ahead. The second director of C four s R Division. And he's joining us from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition Sustainment Department of Defense, D O D. And, of course, Steve Jake's executive director, founder, National Security Space Association and managing partner at Bello's. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session. We got an hour conversation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>So we got a virtual event here. We've got an hour, have a great conversation and love for you guys do? In opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity in space, Jeff will start with you. >>Well, thanks very much, John. It's great to be on with all of you. Uh, on behalf Cal Poly Welcome, everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission to Cal Poly. Whether that means traditional undergraduates, master students are increasingly mid career professionals looking toe up, skill or re skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers ready Day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves is lucky to be on California's beautiful central Coast. But in recent years, as we have developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, we have discovered that our location is even more advantages than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than u C. Santa Barbara, and the base represents the southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air force base have partner to support regional economic development to encourage the development of a commercial spaceport toe advocate for the space Command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because because both parties stand to benefit Vandenberg by securing new streams of revenue, workforce and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students, and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the Central Coast and the US, creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called Reach, which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to camp to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that is facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has has long been an important defense contractor, an important partner to Cal poly funding scholarships and facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years north of grimness funded scholarships for Cal Poly students this year, their funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars program, Cal Poly Scholars, a support both incoming freshman is transfer students. These air especially important because it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal, and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernized the U. S. I. C B M Armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. How Polly is partnered with many private companies, such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cybersecurity Institute, College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber ready workforce by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment, side by side with military, law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG and E, most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry as a rough approximation. More than 4500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace and defense as their employment sector on linked in, and it's not just our engineers and computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow Panelists not too long ago, >>are >>speaking to bang, we learned that Rachel sins, one of our liberal arts arts majors, is working in his office. So shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates sword extraordinary heights such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International space station later this year as I close. All of which is to say that we're deeply committed the workforce, development and redevelopment that we understand the value of public private partnerships and that were eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state in the nation and our past efforts in space, cybersecurity and links to our partners at as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cybersecurity. Thank you so much, John. >>President, I'm sure thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique progressive. You and wanna tip your hat to you guys over there. Thank you very much for those comments. Appreciate it. Bahng. Department of Defense. Exciting you gotta defend the nation spaces Global. Your opening statement. >>Yes, sir. Thanks, John. Appreciate that day. Thank you, everybody. I'm honored to be this panel along with President Armstrong, Cal Poly in my long longtime friend and colleague Steve Jakes of the National Security Space Association, to discuss a very important topic of cybersecurity workforce development, as President Armstrong alluded to, I'll tell you both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the N S. A have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them in training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs. A swell Asare collective National security Earlier today, during Session three high, along with my colleague Chris Hansen discussed space, cyber Security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferations of hundreds, if not thousands, of satellites providing a variety of services, including communications allowing for global Internet connectivity. S one example within the O. D. We continue to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you one of the enabling technologies eyes the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used unemployed for the U. D. Certainly not lost on Me is the fact that Cal Poly Pioneer Cube SATs 2020 some years ago, and they set the standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the valiant benefit gained way ahead of everybody else, it seems, and Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steve's I colleague, current CEO Mr Bill Britain, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Uh, earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's Cyber Innovation Challenge. In June works Cal Poly host California Mill and high school students and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the pandemic change the plan. Why I truly look forward. Thio feature events such as these Thio participating. Now I want to recognize my good friend Steve Jakes, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here over two decades or so, who was in acknowledge space expert and personally, I truly applaud him for having the foresight of years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology but Polly policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operational izing space. Space is our newest horrifying domain. That's not a secret anymore. Uh, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains such as land, air and sea, obviously all of strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict they will need to be. They will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts in a joint operation. We must succeed. All to defending space is critical as critical is defending our other operational domains. Funny space is no longer the sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly, as I discussed in the previous session, commercial space is taking the lead a lot of different areas, including R and D, A so called new space, so cyber security threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. Three US considers and federal access to and freedom to operate in space vital to advancing security, economic prosperity, prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country. That's making cyberspace an inseparable component. America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space force ah, year ago or so as the newest military service is like the other services. Its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect us and allied interest in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Imagine combining that US space force with the U. S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of space and cyberspace operation strengthened U D capabilities and integrate and bolster d o d cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires had trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy as well as high technical skill set much like we're seeing in stem, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now the D. O. D. Is recognized the importance of the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage his growth Back in 2013 the deputy secretary of defense signed the D. O d cyberspace workforce strategy to create a comprehensive, well equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the D. O. D and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program or site up. It's an exchange programs, which is very interesting, in which a private sector employees can naturally work for the D. O. D. In a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas are important to the d. O. D. A key responsibility of cybersecurity community is military leaders on the related threats and cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talk about rapid that position, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation. Likewise, cybersecurity must keep up with this challenge to cyber security. Needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent investing the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity, workforce, streets, future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John. Thank you. >>Thank you so much bomb for those comments and you know, new challenges and new opportunities and new possibilities and free freedom Operating space. Critical. Thank you for those comments. Looking forward. Toa chatting further. Steve Jakes, executive director of N. S. S. A Europe opening statement. >>Thank you, John. And echoing bangs thanks to Cal Poly for pulling these this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, we on behalf the association delighted and honored Thio be on this panel with President Armstrong along with my friend and colleague Bonneau Glue Mahad Something for you all to know about Bomb. He spent the 1st 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve. Very few people do that. So bang on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your long life long devotion to service to our nation. We really appreciate that and I also echo a bang shot out to that guy Bill Britain, who has been a long time co conspirator of ours for a long time and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly Bill, keep it up. But professor arms trying to keep a close eye on him. Uh, I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by by President Armstrong and bahng. Uh, in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. Um, we all recently reflected again on that tragic 9 11 surprise attack on our homeland. And it's an appropriate time, we think, to take pause while the percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or babies then For the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9 11 has taught us a lot to include to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open to include those quote eyes and ears from space, making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect. Protecting our nation requires we work in a cybersecurity environment at all times. But, you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see him. No, sir, We see Space launches man there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch, they become invisible. So what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well, to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine by Bonds and my good friend Chuck Beans. Chuck. It's a space guy, actually had Bonds job a fuse in the Pentagon. He is now chairman and chief strategy officer at York Space Systems, and in his spare time he's chairman of the small satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand. So I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article. Uh, they're afraid somewhat. So these are Chuck's words. Let's talk about average Joe and playing Jane. Before heading to the airport for a business trip to New York City, Joe checks the weather forecast informed by Noah's weather satellites to see what pack for the trip. He then calls an uber that space app. Everybody uses it matches riders with drivers via GPS to take into the airport, So Joe has lunch of the airport. Unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made with the help of precision farming made possible through optimized irrigation and fertilization, with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS on the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, aided by GPS and nose weather satellites. And Joe makes his meeting on time to join his New York colleagues in a video call with a key customer in Singapore made possible by telecommunication satellites. Around to his next meeting, Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting to another to the other side of town. So he calmly tells Syria to adjust the destination, and his satellite guided Google maps redirects him to the new location. That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite. The report details a meeting among world leaders discussing the developing crisis in Syria. As it turns out, various forms of quote remotely sensed. Information collected from satellites indicate that yet another band, chemical weapon, may have been used on its own people. Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary as they cruise across the Atlantic, made possible again by communications satellites and Joe's parents can enjoy the call without even wondering how it happened the next morning. Back home, Joe's wife, Jane, is involved in a car accident. Her vehicle skids off the road. She's knocked unconscious, but because of her satellite equipped on star system, the crash is detected immediately and first responders show up on the scene. In time, Joe receives the news books. An early trip home sends flowers to his wife as he orders another uber to the airport. Over that 24 hours, Joe and Jane used space system applications for nearly every part of their day. Imagine the consequences if at any point they were somehow denied these services, whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. And each of these satellite applications used in this case were initially developed for military purposes and continue to be, but also have remarkable application on our way of life. Just many people just don't know that. So, ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to chuck beans, well, the United States has a proud heritage being the world's leading space faring nation, dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Today we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to quote, wash and listen, provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation and timing from our GPS system. Much of what you heard in Lieutenant General J. T. Thompson earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also our also to our quality of life is Chuck told us. We simply no longer could live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversary like adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing ketchup while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2000 and seven, China demonstrated it's a set system by actually shooting down is one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counter space systems to disrupt hours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to bay well as Bond mentioned, the United States has responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and in Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational you United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located. Vandenberg Air Force Base Combined with our intelligence community today, we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space. And that's a very, very good thing. Commence, really. On the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association devoted solely to supporting the national security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the D C area, but we have arms and legs across the country, and we are loaded with extraordinary talent. In scores of Forman, former government executives, So S s a is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway ranging from a number of thought provoking policy. Papers are recurring space time Webcast supporting Congress's Space Power Caucus and other main serious efforts. Check us out at NSS. A space dot org's One of our strategic priorities in central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development. Just like cow calling. We will work with our U. S. Government customers, industry leaders and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry and two assistant mentoring and training as their careers. Progress on that point, we're delighted. Be delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with him very soon. So students stay tuned something I can tell you Space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry work force is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists, method and mathematicians, but also with a large non technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets things thes systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board from cost estimating cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal and many other support. Tasker Integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff, no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. When summary as bang had mentioned Aziz, well, there is a great deal of exciting challenges ahead we will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead, and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Richard Branson are in the game, stimulating new ideas in business models, other private investors and start up companies. Space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and microelectronics now allows the potential for a plethora of small SAT systems to possibly replace older satellites the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much, and I look forward to the further conversation. >>Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool. It's relevant. But it's important, as you pointed out, and you're awesome story about how it impacts our life every day. So I really appreciate that great story. I'm glad you took the time Thio share that you forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you. But that would add that to the story later. Great stuff. My first question is let's get into the conversations because I think this is super important. President Armstrong like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bang and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives. Through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation. There are opportunities now with with research and grants, and this is, ah, funding of innovation that it's highly accelerate. It's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >>Yeah, I really appreciate that And appreciate the comments of my colleagues on it really boils down to me to partnerships, public private partnerships. You mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockie Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Space six JPL, also member of organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science, and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity in space but those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward at Cal Poly Aziz mentioned we've been involved with Cube set. Uh, we've have some secure work and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Uh, those partnerships are essential not only for getting the r and d done, but also the students, the faculty, whether masters or undergraduate, can be involved with that work. Uh, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during Covic or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or our industry. Uh, and then they're even better equipped, uh, to hit the ground running. And of course, we'd love to see even more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that a secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical, and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest and all demographics of California and the US into this field, uh, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential, and our goal is to grow them just like I know other colleagues and C. S u and the U C are planning to dio, >>you know, just as my age I've seen I grew up in the eighties, in college and during that systems generation and that the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives. They were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bond talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud. And Bezos was mentioned. Elon Musk. Sir Richard Branson. You got new ideas coming in from the outside. You have an accelerated clock now on terms of the innovation cycles, and so you got to react differently. You guys have programs to go outside >>of >>the Defense Department. How important is this? Because the workforce that air in schools and our folks re skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table. So share your thoughts. >>No, thanks, John. Thanks for the opportunity responded. And that's what you hit on the notes back in the eighties, R and D in space especially, was dominated by my government funding. Uh, contracts and so on. But things have changed. As Steve pointed out, A lot of these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork funding R and D. So they're taking the lead. So what we can do within the deal, the in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done on. Uh, since they're they're, you know, paving the way to new new approaches and new way of doing things. And I think we can We could certainly learn from that. And leverage off of that saves us money from an R and D standpoint while benefiting from from the product that they deliver, you know, within the O D Talking about workforce development Way have prioritized we have policies now to attract and retain talent. We need I I had the folks do some research and and looks like from a cybersecurity workforce standpoint. A recent study done, I think, last year in 2019 found that the cybersecurity workforce gap in the U. S. Is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened off getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like assess a professor Armstrong indicated, because we're gonna need them to be in place. Uh, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so, Uh, on top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with with stamps students, we can't afford not to have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within the with the not only deal with the but the commercial side as well. Thank you. >>How's the gap? Get? Get filled. I mean, this is the this is again. You got cybersecurity. I mean, with space. It's a whole another kind of surface area, if you will, in early surface area. But it is. It is an I o t. Device if you think about it. But it does have the same challenges. That's kind of current and and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap Get filled, Steve Or President Armstrong? I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What is some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >>Steve, go ahead. I'll follow up. >>Okay. Thanks. I'll let you correct. May, uh, it's a really good question, and it's the way I would. The way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it up front. And it comes with our teaching, etcetera across the board and from from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it. We've gotta have secure systems with everything we do and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them. Eyes is so paramount to the whole the whole cycle, and and that's kind of and it really takes focused attention. And we continue to use the word focus from an NSS, a perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce on the government side, but not nearly enough of them. And likewise on industry side. We could use Maura's well, but when you get down to it, you know we can connect dots. You know that the the aspect That's a Professor Armstrong talked about earlier toe where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that. That network at that ecosystem the will of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power not just of one or two companies, but our our entire membership to help out >>President >>Trump. Yeah, I would. I would also add it again. It's back to partnerships that I talked about earlier. One of our partners is high schools and schools fortune Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of, uh, administrations in California across party lines and education. Their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly and visit our learned by doing lab and you, you've got to get students interested in stem at a early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running. And that's exacerbated and really stress. Now, with this covert induced recession, California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation. But that is that has dropped this year or reasons. We all understand, uh, due to Kobe, and so our partnerships, our creativity on making sure that we help those that need the most help financially uh, that's really key, because the gaps air huge eyes. My colleagues indicated, you know, half of half a million jobs and you need to look at the the students that are in the pipeline. We've got to enhance that. Uh, it's the in the placement rates are amazing. Once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, uh, placement rates are like 94%. >>Many of our >>engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just gonna take key partnerships working together. Uh, and that continued partnership with government, local, of course, our state of CSU on partners like we have here today, both Stephen Bang So partnerships the thing >>e could add, you know, the collaboration with universities one that we, uh, put a lot of emphasis, and it may not be well known fact, but as an example of national security agencies, uh, National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber, the Fast works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate its 45 future cyber first responders as an example, so that Zatz vibrant and healthy and something that we ought Teoh Teik, banjo >>off. Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point. I'd like to define what is a public private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped. It's a modern error. Things air accelerated get you got security. So you get all these things kind of happen is a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business. Andi in the public sector. So >>what is what >>is a modern public private partnership? What does it look like today? Because people are learning differently, Covert has pointed out, which was that we're seeing right now. How people the progressions of knowledge and learning truth. It's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public private partnership and some some examples and improve points? Can you can you guys share that? We'll start with the Professor Armstrong. >>Yeah. A zai indicated earlier. We've had on guy could give other examples, but Northup Grumman, uh, they helped us with cyber lab. Many years ago. That is maintained, uh, directly the software, the connection outside its its own unit so that students can learn the hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses, and I know that that has already had some considerations of space. But that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public private partnership has benefits to both entities. Uh, in the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the is the talent, the talent that is, that is needed, what we've been working on for years of the, you know, that undergraduate or master's or PhD programs. But now it's also spilling into Skilling and re Skilling. As you know, Jobs. Uh, you know, folks were in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago. But it also spills into other aspects that can expand even mawr. We're very fortunate. We have land, there's opportunities. We have one tech part project. We're expanding our tech park. I think we'll see opportunities for that, and it'll it'll be adjusted thio, due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before Cove it. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important. Um, I wanna make sure that I'm driving across the bridge. Or or that that satellites being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training, uh, to do that and that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on a campus, getting that experience expanding and as adult. And we're gonna need those public private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these stem and engineering fields. >>It's interesting People in technology can work together in these partnerships in a new way. Bank Steve Reaction Thio the modern version of what a public, successful private partnership looks like. >>If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically, Dodi's has have had, ah, high bar thio, uh, to overcome, if you will, in terms of getting rapid pulling in your company. This is the fault, if you will and not rely heavily in are the usual suspects of vendors and like and I think the deal is done a good job over the last couple of years off trying to reduce the burden on working with us. You know, the Air Force. I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days where companies come in, do a two hour pitch and immediately notified of a wooden award without having to wait a long time. Thio get feedback on on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best. Thio strengthen that partnership with companies outside the main group of people that we typically use. >>Steve, any reaction? Comment to add? >>Yeah, I would add a couple of these air. Very excellent thoughts. Uh, it zits about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone. You know, the world that Bond and Bond lives in and I used to live in in the past has been quite structured. It's really about we know what the threat is. We need to go fix it, will design it says we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Um, life is so much more complicated than that. And so it's it's really to me. I mean, you take you take an example of the pitch days of bond talks about I think I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, uh, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks in academia. Because we are all in this together in a lot of ways, for example. I mean, we just sent the paper to the White House of their requests about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective? And we hope Thio embellish on this over time once the the initiative matures. But we have a piece of it, for example, is the thing we call clear for success getting back Thio Uh, President Armstrong's comments at the collegiate level. You know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program they grabbed kids in their their underclass years identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this. Get them scholarships. Um, um, I have a job waiting for them that their contract ID for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with S C I clearance. We believe that could be done so, and that's an example of ways in which the public private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on Day one. We think those kind of things can happen. It just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, give them giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can like these days. >>That's a great point, E. President. >>I just want to jump in and echo both the bank and Steve's comments. But Steve, that you know your point of, you know, our graduates. We consider them ready Day one. Well, they need to be ready Day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's that's exciting, uh, and needed very much needed mawr of it. Some of it's happening, but way certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans, >>and that's a great example of good Segway. My next question. This kind of reimagining sees work flows, eyes kind of breaking down the old the old way and bringing in kind of a new way accelerated all kind of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue, and this is the next topic. How can we employ new creative solutions? Because, let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern. You know the programs you get you particularly through the system. This is this is multiple disciplines. Cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart and math and have, ah, degree in anthropology and even the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new new world. What are some creative approaches that >>you know, we're >>in the workforce >>is quite good, John. One of the things I think that za challenge to us is you know, we got somehow we got me working for with the government, sexy, right? The part of the challenge we have is attracting the right right level of skill sets and personnel. But, you know, we're competing oftentimes with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples of a big deal. And those are the same talents. We need to support a lot of programs we have in the U. D. So somehow we have to do a better job to Steve's point off, making the work within the U. D within the government something that they would be interested early on. So I tracked him early. I kind of talked about Cal Poly's, uh, challenge program that they were gonna have in June inviting high school kid. We're excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security, and so on those air something. So I think we have to do it. Continue to do what were the course the next several years. >>Awesome. Any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be on idea, or just a kind of stoked the ideation out their internship. So obviously internships are known, but like there's gotta be new ways. >>I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier getting students in high school, uh, and aligning them sometimes. Uh, that intern first internship, not just between the freshman sophomore year, but before they inter cal poly per se. And they're they're involved s So I think that's, uh, absolutely key. Getting them involved many other ways. Um, we have an example of of up Skilling a redeveloped work redevelopment here in the Central Coast. PG and e Diablo nuclear plant as going to decommission in around 2020 24. And so we have a ongoing partnership toe work on reposition those employees for for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond. Uh, but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the up skilling and re Skilling uh, on I think that's where you know, we were talking about that Purdue University. Other California universities have been dealing with online programs before cove it and now with co vid uh, so many more faculty or were pushed into that area. There's going to be much more going and talk about workforce development and up Skilling and Re Skilling The amount of training and education of our faculty across the country, uh, in in virtual, uh, and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on one final question as we in the in the segment. And we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where you know, SAS business model subscription. That's on the business side. But >>one of The >>things that's clear in this trend is technology, and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at the world now we're living in co vid um, Cal Poly. You guys have remote learning Right now. It's a infancy. It's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity to enable new ways to collaborate, Right? So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed? How these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery higher to build the workforce? These air opportunities? How do you guys view this new digital transformation? >>Well, I think there's there's a huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium. We're filming this on one day, and it's going to stream live, and then the three of us, the four of us, can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing. And I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this this symposium, I think there's more and more that we can do from a Cal poly perspective with our pedagogy. So you know, linked to learn by doing in person will always be important to us. But we see virtual. We see partnerships like this can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in person time, decrease the time to degree enhanced graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps or students that don't have the same advantages. S so I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the up Skilling and Re Skilling, where employees air all over, they can be reached virtually then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. Eso I'm I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's gonna be different with every university with every partnership. It's one. Size does not fit all. >>It's so many possibilities. Bond. I could almost imagine a social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the d o. D. Possibly in the future. But >>these are the >>kind of kind of crazy ideas that are needed. Are your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross policy? >>I think technology is gonna be revolutionary here, John. You know, we're focusing lately on what we call digital engineering to quicken the pace off, delivering capability to warfighter. As an example, I think a I machine language all that's gonna have a major play and how we operate in the future. We're embracing five G technologies writing ability Thio zero latency or I o t More automation off the supply chain. That sort of thing, I think, uh, the future ahead of us is is very encouraging. Thing is gonna do a lot for for national defense on certainly the security of the country. >>Steve, your final thoughts. Space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people. Your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity >>Such a great question in such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Um echoing are my colleague's sentiments. I would add to it. You know, a lot of this has I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. Um, you know, we're not attuned to doing things fast. Uh, but the dramatic You know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now. I think it ties back Thio hoping Thio, convince some of our senior leaders on what I call both sides of the Potomac River that it's worth taking these gamble. We do need to take some of these things very way. And I'm very confident, confident and excited and comfortable. They're just gonna be a great time ahead and all for the better. >>You know, e talk about D. C. Because I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies in Congress and Senate. So I was getting job when I say that. Sorry. Presidential. Go ahead. >>Yeah, I know. Just one other point. Uh, and and Steve's alluded to this in bonded as well. I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships. That doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And I would also I have a zoo. You talk about technology. I have to reflect on something that happened in, uh, you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing a traditional data a data warehouse, data storage data center, and we partner with a W S. And thank goodness we had that in progress on it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before Cove. It hit on with this partnership with the digital transformation hub. So there is a great example where, uh, we we had that going. That's not something we could have started. Oh, covitz hit. Let's flip that switch. And so we have to be proactive on. We also have thio not be risk averse and do some things differently. Eyes that that is really salvage the experience for for students. Right now, as things are flowing, well, we only have about 12% of our courses in person. Uh, those essential courses, uh, and just grateful for those partnerships that have talked about today. >>Yeah, and it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these air themes that expand into space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you. very much for sharing your insights. I know. Bang, You're gonna go into the defense side of space and your other sessions. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time for great session. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube here in Palo Alto, California Covering and hosting with Cal Poly The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special virtual conference, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from The Cube. I'm John Furey, your host and master of ceremony's got a great topic today, and this session is really the intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic, and this conversation is a cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup, we've Jeff Armstrong is the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly. Jeffrey, thanks for jumping on and Bong Gumahad. The second, Director of C4ISR Division, and he's joining us from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition and sustainment of Department of Defense, DOD, and of course Steve Jacques is Executive Director, founder National Security Space Association, and managing partner at Velos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session, we've got an hour of conversation, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So we've got a virtual event here, we've got an hour to have a great conversation, I'd love for you guys to do an opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity and space, Jeff, we'll start with you. >> Well, thanks very much, John, it's great to be on with all of you. On behalf of Cal Poly, welcome everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission at Cal Poly, whether that means traditional undergraduates, masters students, or increasingly, mid-career professionals looking to upskill or re-skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers, ready day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves as lucky to be on California's beautiful central coast, but in recent years, as we've developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, We have discovered that our location is even more advantageous than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than UC Santa Barbara and the base represents the Southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air Force Base have partnered to support regional economic development, to encourage the development of a commercial space port, to advocate for the space command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because both parties stand to benefit. Vandenberg, by securing new streams of revenue, workforce, and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the central coast and the U.S., creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure, and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called REACH which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that has facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has as long been an important defense contractor and an important partner to Cal Poly, funding scholarships in facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years, Northrop Grumman has funded scholarships for Cal Poly students. This year, they're funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars Program. Cal Poly scholars support both incoming freshmen and transfer students. These are especially important, 'cause it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented, and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernize the U.S. ICBM armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting... Protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. Cal Poly has partnered with many private companies such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web Services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part, through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cyber Security Institute College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber-ready workforce, by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment side by side with military law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG&E most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry. As a rough approximation, more than 4,500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace or defense as their employment sector on LinkedIn. And it's not just our engineers in computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow panelists not too long ago, speaking to Bong, we learned that Rachel Sims, one of our liberal arts majors is working in his office, so shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates soar to extraordinary heights, such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International Space Station later this year. As I close, all of which is to say that we're deeply committed to workforce development and redevelopment, that we understand the value of public-private partnerships, and that we're eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state and the nation, in our past efforts in space, cyber security and links to our partners at, as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cyber security. Thank you so much, John. >> President Armstrong, thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique, progressive view and want to tip a hat to you guys over there, thank you very much for those comments, appreciate it. Bong, Department of Defense. Exciting, you've got to defend the nation, space is global, your opening statement. >> Yes, sir, thanks John, appreciate that. Thank you everybody, I'm honored to be in this panel along with Preston Armstrong of Cal Poly and my longtime friend and colleague Steve Jacques of the National Security Space Association to discuss a very important topic of a cybersecurity workforce development as President Armstrong alluded to. I'll tell you, both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the NSSA have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them and training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs, as well as our collective national security. Earlier today, during session three, I, along with my colleague, Chris Samson discussed space cyber security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferation of hundreds, if not thousands of satellites, providing a variety of services including communications, allowing for global internet connectivity, as one example. Within DOD, we continued to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you, one of the enabling technologies, is the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used and employed for DOD. Certainly not lost on me is the fact that Cal Poly pioneered CubeSats 28, 27 years ago, and they set a standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the value and benefit gained way ahead of everybody else it seems. And Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I'm especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steven's colleague, the current CIO, Mr. Bill Britton, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's cyber innovation challenge in June, Oops, Cal Poly hosts California middle, and high school students, and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid, unfortunately, the pandemic changed the plan, but I truly look forward to future events such as these, to participate in. Now, I want to recognize my good friend, Steve Jacques, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here, over two decades or so, who was an acknowledged space expert and personally I've truly applaud him for having the foresight a few years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology, but policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operationalizing space. Space, it certainly was fortifying domain, it's not a secret anymore, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains, such as land, air, and sea, obviously all are strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict, they will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts, and in a joint operation, we must succeed in all. So defending space is critical, as critical as to defending our other operational domains. Funny, space is the only sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly as I discussed in a previous session, commercial space is taking the lead in a lot of different areas, including R&D, the so-called new space. So cybersecurity threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. The U.S. considers and futhered access to and freedom to operate in space, vital to advancing security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country, thus making cyberspace an inseparable component of America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space Force a year ago or so as the newest military service. Like the other services, its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interest in space and to provide spacecape builders who joined force. Imagine combining that U.S. Space Force with the U.S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of the space and cyberspace operation, strengthen DOD capabilities and integrate and bolster a DOD cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires a trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy, as well as a high technical skill set. Much like we're seeing in STEM, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now, the DOD has recognized the importance to the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage its growth. Back in 2013, the Deputy Secretary of Defense signed a DOD Cyberspace Workforce Strategy, to create a comprehensive, well-equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now, this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the DOD and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program, or CITE that it's an exchange program, which is very interesting in which a private sector employee can naturally work for the DOD in a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas, important to the DOD. A key responsibility of the cyber security community is military leaders, unrelated threats, and the cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talked about rapid acquisition, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation, likewise, cyber security must keep up with this challenge. So cyber security needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent, invest in the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity workforce for the future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John, thank you. >> Thank you so much, Bob for those comments and, you know, new challenges or new opportunities and new possibilities and freedom to operate in space is critical, thank you for those comments, looking forward to chatting further. Steve Jacques, Executive Director of NSSA, you're up, opening statement. >> Thank you, John and echoing Bongs, thanks to Cal Poly for pulling this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, on behalf of the association, I'm delighted and honored to be on this panel of President Armstrong, along with my friend and colleague, Bong Gumahad. Something for you all to know about Bong, he spent the first 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve, very few people do that. So Bong, on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your lifelong devotion to service to our nation, we really appreciate that. And I also echo a Bong shout out to that guy, Bill Britton. who's been a long time co-conspirator of ours for a long time, and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly, Bill, keep it up. But Professor Armstrong, keep a close eye on him. (laughter) I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by President Armstrong and Bong. And in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. We all recently reflected again on that tragic 9/11 surprise attack on our homeland and it's an appropriate time we think to take pause. While a percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or were babies then, for the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9/11 has taught us a lot to include, to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open, to include those "eyes and ears from space," making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect, protecting our nation requires we work in a cyber secure environment at all times. But you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see 'em. Now sure, we see space launches, man, there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch they become invisible, so what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine, by Bongs and my good friend, Chuck Beames, Chuck is a space guy, actually had Bongs job a few years in the Pentagon. He's now Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at York Space Systems and in his spare time, he's Chairman of the Small Satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand, so I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article, paraphrase somewhat, so these are Chuck's words. "Let's talk about average Joe and plain Jane. "Before heading to the airport for a business trip "to New York city, Joe checks the weather forecast, "informed by NOAA's weather satellites, "to see what to pack for the trip. "He then calls an Uber, that space app everybody uses, "it matches riders with drivers via GPS, "to take him to the airport. "So Joe has launched in the airport, "unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made "with the help of precision farming "made possible to optimize the irrigation and fertilization "with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS. "On the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, "aided by GPS and NOAA's weather satellites "and Joe makes his meeting on time "to join his New York colleagues in a video call "with a key customer in Singapore, "made possible by telecommunication satellites. "En route to his next meeting, "Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting "to the other side of town. "So he calmly tells Siri to adjust the destination "and his satellite-guided Google maps redirect him "to the new location. "That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite, "report details of meeting among world leaders, "discussing the developing crisis in Syria. "As it turns out various forms of "'remotely sensed information' collected from satellites "indicate that yet another banned chemical weapon "may have been used on its own people. "Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents "and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary "as they cruise across the Atlantic, "made possible again by communication satellites "and Joe's parents can enjoy the call "without even wondering how it happened. "The next morning back home, "Joe's wife, Jane is involved in a car accident. "Her vehicle skids off the road, she's knocked unconscious, "but because of her satellite equipped OnStar system, "the crash is detected immediately, "and first responders show up on the scene in time. "Joe receives the news, books an early trip home, "sends flowers to his wife "as he orders another Uber to the airport. "Over that 24 hours, "Joe and Jane used space system applications "for nearly every part of their day. "Imagine the consequences if at any point "they were somehow denied these services, "whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. "In each of these satellite applications used in this case, "were initially developed for military purposes "and continued to be, but also have remarkable application "on our way of life, just many people just don't know that." So ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to Chuck Beames. Well, the United States has a proud heritage of being the world's leading space-faring nation. Dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, today, we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to "watch and listen," provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation, and timing from our GPS system, much of which you heard in Lieutenant General JT Thomson's earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also to our quality of life. As Chuck told us, we simply no longer can live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing catch up while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2007, China demonstrated its ASAT system by actually shooting down one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counterspace systems to disrupt ours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to be. Well, as a Bong mentioned, the United States have responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and the Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Combined with our intelligence community, today we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space, and that's a very, very good thing. Commensurately on the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association, devoted solely to supporting the National Security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the DC area, but we have arms and legs across the country and we are loaded with extraordinary talent in scores of former government executives. So NSSA is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway, ranging from a number of thought-provoking policy papers, our recurring spacetime webcasts, supporting Congress's space power caucus, and other main serious efforts. Check us out at nssaspace.org. One of our strategic priorities and central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development, just like Cal-Poly. We will work with our U.S. government customers, industry leaders, and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry, and to assist in mentoring and training as their careers progress. On that point, we're delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with them very soon. So students stay tuned, something I can tell you, space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry workforce is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists and mathematicians, but also with a large non-technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets these systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board, from cost estimating, cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal, and many other support tasks that are integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce, tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff and no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. In summary, as Bong had mentioned as well, there's a great deal of exciting challenges ahead. We will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, are in the game, stimulating new ideas and business models. Other private investors and startup companies, space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and micro electronics now allows a potential for a plethora of small sat systems to possibly replace older satellites, the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much and I look forward to the further conversation. >> Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool, it's relevant, but it's important as you pointed out in your awesome story about how it impacts our life every day so I really appreciate that great story I'm glad you took the time to share that. You forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you, but we'll add that to the story later, great stuff. My first question is, let's get into the conversations, because I think this is super important. President Armstrong, I'd like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bong and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation, there are opportunities now with research and grants, and this is a funding of innovation that is highly accelerated, it's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >> Yeah, I really appreciate that and appreciate the comments of my colleagues. And it really boils down to me to partnerships, public-private partnerships, you have mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Space X, JPL, also member of an organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity and space. But those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward. At Cal Poly, as mentioned, we've been involved with CubeSat, we've have some secure work, and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Those partnerships are essential, not only for getting the R&D done, but also the students, the faculty, whether they're master's or undergraduate can be involved with that work, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during COVID or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or industry, and then they're even better equipped to hit the ground running. And of course we'd love to see more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest in all demographics of California and the U.S. into this field, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential and our goal is to grow them just like I know our other colleagues in the CSU and the UC are planning to do. >> You know, just as my age I've seen, I grew up in the eighties and in college and they're in that system's generation and the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives, they were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bong, talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud and Bezos was mentioned, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, you got new ideas coming in from the outside, you have an accelerated clock now in terms of the innovation cycles and so you got to react differently, you guys have programs to go outside of the defense department, how important is this because the workforce that are in schools and/or folks re-skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table, so share your thoughts. >> No, thanks Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to respond to, and that's what, you know, you hit on the nose back in the 80's, R&D and space especially was dominated by government funding, contracts and so on, but things have changed as Steve pointed out, allow these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork, funding R&D so they're taking the lead, so what we can do within the DOD in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done. And since they're, you know, paving the way to new approaches and new way of doing things and I think we can certainly learn from that and leverage off of that, saves us money from an R&D standpoint, while benefiting from the product that they deliver. You know, within DOD, talking about workforce development, you know, we have prioritized and we have policies now to attract and retain the talent we need. I had the folks do some research and it looks like from a cybersecurity or workforce standpoint, a recent study done, I think last year in 2019, found that the cyber security workforce gap in U.S. is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened, getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like Professor Armstrong indicated because we're going to need them to be in place, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so. On top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with STEM students. We can't afford not have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within DoD, not only DoD but the commercial side as well, thank you. >> How's the gap get filled, I mean, this is, again, you've got cybersecurity, I mean, with space it's a whole other kind of surface area if you will, it's not really surface area, but it is an IOT device if you think about it, but it does have the same challenges, that's kind of current and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap get filled, Steve or President Armstrong, I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What are some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >> Steve, go ahead., I'll follow up. >> Okay, thanks, I'll let you correct me. (laughter) It's a really good question, and the way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it upfront and it comes with our teaching, et cetera, across the board. And from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it, we've got to have secure systems in everything we do, and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them is so paramount to the whole cycle. And that's kind of, it really takes a focused attention and we continue to use the word focus from an NSSA perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce, on the government side, but not nearly enough of them and likewise on the industry side, we could use more as well, but when you get down to it, you know, we can connect dots, you know, the aspects that Professor Armstrong talked about earlier to where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that network, that ecosystem if you will, of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power, not just of one or two companies, but of our entire membership thereabout. >> President Armstrong-- >> Yeah, I would also add it again, it's back to the partnerships that I talked about earlier, one of our partners is high schools and schools Fortune, Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of administrations in California across party lines and education, their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly, and visit our learned-by-doing lab. And you've got to get students interested in STEM at an early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid, so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running and that's exacerbated and really stress now with this COVID induced recession. California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation, but that has brought this year for reasons all understand due to COVID. And so our partnerships, our creativity, and making sure that we help those that need the most help financially, that's really key because the gaps are huge. As my colleagues indicated, you know, half a million jobs and I need you to look at the students that are in the pipeline, we've got to enhance that. And the placement rates are amazing once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, placement rates are like 94%. Many of our engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just going to take a key partnerships working together and that continued partnership with government local, of course, our state, the CSU, and partners like we have here today, both Steve and Bong so partnerships is the thing. >> You know, that's a great point-- >> I could add, >> Okay go ahead. >> All right, you know, the collaboration with universities is one that we put on lot of emphasis here, and it may not be well known fact, but just an example of national security, the AUC is a national centers of academic excellence in cyber defense works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate and certify future cyber first responders as an example. So that's vibrant and healthy and something that we ought to take advantage of. >> Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point, 'cause I'd like to define, you know, what is a public-private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped, it's a modern era, things are accelerated, you've got security, so you've got all of these things kind of happenning it's a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business and in the public sector. So what is a modern public-private partnership and what does it look like today because people are learning differently. COVID has pointed out, which is that we're seeing right now, how people, the progressions of knowledge and learning, truth, it's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public-private partnership and some examples and some proof points, can you guys share that? We'll start with you, Professor Armstrong. >> Yeah, as I indicated earlier, we've had, and I could give other examples, but Northrop Grumman, they helped us with a cyber lab many years ago that is maintained directly, the software, the connection outside it's its own unit so the students can learn to hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses and I know that that has already had some considerations of space, but that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public-private partnership has benefits to both entities and the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the talent. The talent that is needed, what we've been working on for years of, you know, the undergraduate or master's or PhD programs, but now it's also spilling into upskilling and reskilling, as jobs, you know, folks who are in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago, but it also spills into other aspects that can expand even more. We're very fortunate we have land, there's opportunities, we have ONE Tech project. We are expanding our tech park, I think we'll see opportunities for that and it'll be adjusted due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before COVID. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important, I want to make sure that I'm driving across a bridge or that satellite's being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training to do that in that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on campus, getting that experience, expanding it as an adult, and we're going to need those public-private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these STEM and engineering fields. >> It's interesting people and technology can work together and these partnerships are the new way. Bongs too with reaction to the modern version of what a public successful private partnership looks like. >> If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically DOD's had a high bar to overcome if you will, in terms of getting rapid... pulling in new companies, miss the fall if you will, and not rely heavily on the usual suspects, of vendors and the like, and I think the DOD has done a good job over the last couple of years of trying to reduce that burden and working with us, you know, the Air Force, I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days, where companies come in, do a two-hour pitch and immediately notified of, you know, of an a award, without having to wait a long time to get feedback on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best to strengthen that partnership with companies outside of the main group of people that we typically use. >> Steve, any reaction, any comment to add? >> Yeah, I would add a couple and these are very excellent thoughts. It's about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone, you know, the world that Bong and I, Bong lives in and I used to live in the past, has been quite structured. It's really about, we know what the threat is, we need to go fix it, we'll design as if as we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Life is so much more complicated than that and so it's really, to me, I mean, you take an example of the pitch days of Bong talks about, I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks and academia, because we are all in this together in a lot of ways. For example, I mean, we just sent a paper to the white house at their request about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective and we hope to embellish on this over time once the initiative matures, but we have a piece of it for example, is a thing we call "clear for success," getting back to president Armstrong's comments so at a collegiate level, you know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program that grabs kids in their underclass years, identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this, get them scholarships, have a job waiting for them that they're contracted for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with an SCI clearance. We believe that can be done, so that's an example of ways in which public-private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on day one. We think those kinds of things can happen, it just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can, like pitch days. >> That's a great point, it's a good segue. Go ahead, President Armstrong. >> I just want to jump in and echo both the Bong and Steve's comments, but Steve that, you know, your point of, you know our graduates, we consider them ready day one, well they need to be ready day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's exciting and needed, very much needed more of it, some of it's happening, but we certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans. >> And that's a great example, a good segue. My next question is kind of re-imagining these workflows is kind of breaking down the old way and bringing in kind of the new way, accelerate all kinds of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue and this is the next topic, how can we employ new creative solutions because let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern, you know, the programs and you'd matriculate through the system. This is multiple disciplines, cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart in math and have a degree in anthropology and be one of the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new, new world, what are some creative approaches that's going to work for you? >> Alright, good job, one of the things, I think that's a challenge to us is, you know, somehow we got me working for, with the government, sexy right? You know, part of the challenge we have is attracting the right level of skill sets and personnel but, you know, we're competing, oftentimes, with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples is a big deal. And those are the same talents we need to support a lot of the programs that we have in DOD. So somehow we have do a better job to Steve's point about making the work within DOD, within the government, something that they would be interested early on. So attract them early, you know, I could not talk about Cal Poly's challenge program that they were going to have in June inviting high school kids really excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security and so on. Those are some of the things that I think we have to do and continue to do over the course of the next several years. >> Awesome, any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be an idea, or just to kind of stoke the ideation out there? Internships, obviously internships are known, but like, there's got to be new ways. >> Alright, I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier, getting students in high school and aligning them sometimes at first internship, not just between the freshman and sophomore year, but before they enter Cal Poly per se and they're involved. So I think that's absolutely key, getting them involved in many other ways. We have an example of upskilling or work redevelopment here in the central coast, PG&E Diablo nuclear plant that is going to decommission in around 2024. And so we have a ongoing partnership to work and reposition those employees for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the upskilling and reskilling, and I think that's where, you know, we were talking about that Purdue University, other California universities have been dealing with online programs before COVID, and now with COVID so many more Faculty were pushed into that area, there's going to be a much more going and talk about workforce development in upskilling and reskilling, the amount of training and education of our faculty across the country in virtual and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >> I want to get your guys' thoughts on one final question as we end the segment, and we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where, you know, SAS business model subscription, and that's on the business side, but one of the things that's clear in this trend is technology and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at a world now, we're living in COVID, and Cal Poly, you guys have remote learning right now, it's at the infancy, it's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity enable new ways to encollaborate, So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed, how these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery, hire, develop the workforce, these are opportunities, how do you guys view this new digital transformation? >> Well, I think there's huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium, we're filming this on Monday and it's going to stream live and then the three of us, the four of us can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing and I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this symposium. I think there's more and more that we can do. From a Cal Poly perspective, with our pedagogy so, you know, linked to learn by doing in-person will always be important to us, but we see virtual, we see partnerships like this, can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in-person time, decrease the time to degree, enhance graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps for students that don't have the same advantages. So I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the upskilling and reskilling, where employees are all over, they can re be reached virtually, and then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. So I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's going to be different with every university, with every partnership. It's one size does not fit all, There's so many possibilities, Bong, I can almost imagine that social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, and have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the DOD possibly in the future. But these are the kind of crazy ideas that are needed, your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross-pollination. >> I think technology is going to be revolutionary here, John, you know, we're focusing lately on what we call visual engineering to quicken the pace of the delivery capability to warfighter as an example, I think AI, Machine Language, all that's going to have a major play in how we operate in the future. We're embracing 5G technologies, and the ability for zero latency, more IOT, more automation of the supply chain, that sort of thing, I think the future ahead of us is very encouraging, I think it's going to do a lot for national defense, and certainly the security of the country. >> Steve, your final thoughts, space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people, your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity. >> Such a great question and such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Echoing my colleagues sentiments, I would add to it, you know, a lot of this has, I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. You know, we're not attuned to doing things fast, but the dramatic, you know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now, I think it ties back to, hoping to convince some of our senior leaders and what I call both sides of the Potomac river, that it's worth taking this gamble, we do need to take some of these things you know, in a very proactive way. And I'm very confident and excited and comfortable that this is going to be a great time ahead and all for the better. >> You know, I always think of myself when I talk about DC 'cause I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies than in Congress and Senate, so (laughter)I always get in trouble when I say that. Sorry, President Armstrong, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, just one other point and Steve's alluded to this and Bong did as well, I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships, that doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And also, as you talk about technology, I have to reflect on something that happened and you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing traditional data, a data warehouse, data storage, data center and we partnered with AWS and thank goodness, we had that in progress and it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before COVID hit, and with this partnership with the digital transformation hub, so there's a great example where we had that going. That's not something we could have started, "Oh COVID hit, let's flip that switch." And so we have to be proactive and we also have to not be risk-averse and do some things differently. That has really salvaged the experience for our students right now, as things are flowing well. We only have about 12% of our courses in person, those essential courses and I'm just grateful for those partnerships that I have talked about today. >> And it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these are themes that expand the space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you very much for sharing your insights, I know Bong, you're going to go into the defense side of space in your other sessions. Thank you gentlemen, for your time, for a great session, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you all. I'm John Furey with The Cube here in Palo Alto, California covering and hosting with Cal Poly, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, thanks for watching. (bright atmospheric music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of the ex Censure Executive Summit here at AWS. Reinvent I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Satya Adric, Carl Adder Gala. Sorry, He is the VP single family technology at Fannie Mae. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Satya >>glad to be here. >>And we have Dave Baldwin, VP Architecture, Cloud Engineering at Fannie Mae. Thank you so much for coming on the show D thanks >>for having us. >>So we're talking today about transforming the mortgage industry through through the cloud. Fannie Mae is obviously a foundational part of the US home mortgage industry, and it's been around for a long time. But at a time right now, where there is just so much tremendous change going on in the industry, particularly with the emergence of fintech and other push button mortgage providers, talk a little bit about the last 3 to 5 years. In terms of the changes, you've seen two to the business. You want to start? >>Yeah, I will. So So when we look at the industry changes. What Fannie Mae does is mostly in the secondary market, so our core business hasn't changed from the point of taking the lone synchronizing and selling. However, in the mortgage industry, when we talk about the bar or experience and then the lenders how they have improved the experience across the board, I think is it has been a huge shift right three years ago. The discussion has bean always about Hey, can we do more reliably? Can we do more faster? Right? Those were the conversations, but now the expectations off our lenders and bottles have significantly increased. Right now, they're talking about user experience. How can we meet our bar or where they are, Right. So the lenders have got a lot of expectations on us in terms of how do you feel? Feel that that is the first biggest change in the realm off several of these, right? The 2nd 1 ese, the data has become the currency now, right? It has significantly improved our posture around finding about, um, their assets that income, their employment. Right. So you guys may have seen a lot off David surgeon. It is a product that we have launched in that well, so data revolution has been a big change. And then how we're utilizing that to serve Margaret's industry, our lenders and borrowers, thereby we also reduce the risk within the industry. Right? So those two have bean huge changes. Then there is a technology revolution in terms off AP eyes, Microsurgery says. How do I plug and play? How do we reduce my cost when I'm locking a bottle or two alone? Right. And these are the things that are lenders have bean pushing us on right? Reduced the cycle from somebody coming to the application to taking a loan, closing alone and delivering to Fannie Mae. Shrink the timeline and in doing it, reduce our costs. Right? So these are being like more and more expectations Have bean really set from the border for a few from the lender point of view on Fanny me and all our innovation. Our transformation is all about meeting them and also setting standard for them. What is great in this industry and that's that's what has been going on in the last 3 to 5 years. >>Yes, and that you just laid out a tremendous number of trends and all this disruptive change when you were trying to meet these new expectations from your lenders and your borrowers. Dave. What? What are the in making this journey to, from to to say, I'm sorry from to the Cloud, How are you thinking about these challenges ahead at a time where the user experience is so important? Data is currency and this technology revolution, >>well, it's a big change and, you know, and it's a change across people, process and technology. So if you think about it, what we've done is we've started to trade a new operating model, which really is a lot more engaging, and and it requires an uptick, a scale and really ah, a new way of working right. We've even gone as far as to introduce lean management in a tools and processes. But if you think about it, the people definitely have to change. If you think about it from a process point of view, you're you're really looking at reimagining the way some of the mortgage industry works right, because there's a lot of demand for it. At the end of the day, the customer expectations and especially If you go all the way to the borrower, the customer expectations is very different. You know, they're very they they don't understand unnecessarily why they would have to fill out all this paperwork, right? When don't you already have the information? And to sati is point about data. That's why it's so important to get that data together. Because if we can harness it right, then we can truly start to re imagine these processes and make it so much easier for a borrower nor a lender to work together and eventually work with us. So and then finally, you know, from a tech point of view with the introduction of the cloud, you know, that new foundational sort of technology that really gives you something to pivot off, you can really you can really start to take advantage of the micro service architectures and the new technical capabilities that can help make this really right. And so that's That's generally how we look at our digital transformation and and as you start to think about prioritization, how do I move those? How do I think about the applications that are going to change and how they're gonna neither either Transformer moved to the cloud. You really start to think of you know what business value and I'm trying to achieve 1st 2nd 3rd right? And then what applications won't make it, You know, they're gonna be completely redone. And what applications? Frankly, we're gonna have to move along with it to manage some of the dependencies we're going. >>So I think one more point I wanted and Rebecca is that when we look at this B to B businesses, they're very tightly integrated, right? Our companies have been integrated when we are extending out information explained, extending the responses in the past. Anybody talks about experience, right? It is about Hey, there will be there are technological glitches, but you don't want to impact big. That's used to be the norm. Not anymore. I think when we look at now one of the top customer slate, if you blink from the infrastructure layer point of view, there is business loss. People are not just looking for resiliency anymore. People are looking for fault tolerance, especially when it comes to the top to your customers. Right. So I think we can see the underpinning off cloud and also how we architect our applications to meet that kind of need. It's not just about being resilient anymore. Gotta be. You cannot lose a transaction. But I think those things have bean more and more that we're hearing from our customer base, and we feel like the cloud journey is going to be underpinning for these types of expectations from our customers. >>So how do you work with partners like Accenture in AWS? When you embark on this journey and think through the your business imperatives and think through your strategy, >>I think when when we think about our partnership's. First of all, there are a lot of partners that we have and that we've had for years, as we as we really not only do digital transformation, but you got to run the business, too, while you're doing this transformation. And so you know, when you think about it, the way the wake centers worked with us is you know they number one have helped us with a cloud strategy. So that's a very hard thing to Dio because you think about all the different personalities in your organization and all the people that you have to bring together. You know what Accenture helped us with. It is to really level, said everyone and get everybody on the same page in terms of, you know, where we want to go on how we wanna head on this journey. The second thing that they helped us with was really the program management. So that's a huge undertaking to write and given the fact that it's very different and these are new things that we're doing in our firm. It's good to have that external expertise that that sort of done it with other companies and they can bring that to bear with eight of us. You know, eight of us is is one of one of the major providers that we're using. Thio post a lot of our business applications, and if you think about that there, you know we're taking advantage of their technology. We're leveraging some of their pro serve professional service is thio, help us get it right and help us sort of not only with the implementation, but in some cases the governance and control frameworks that are highly regulated. Organization like ours needs So >>and I think if you think about this from the scale point of view, right? Everybody knows there is war for talent, right? We use our partners in terms of how can we scale these things that are new operating models? New technological? Because there is a change curl in bringing up the entire employees based without extent, These guys can be catalyst. In addition to that, they can be scaled provided us, right. I think that's how we can I use these, But it is action generator B s. >>This morning during Andy Jassy fireside chat, he talked a lot about the importance of innovation and experimentation and trying different things. How What's the experience of innovation at Fannie Mae? How do you innovate with partners or just thinking about all of the changed expectations? How do you make sure you are trying to solve the right problems? Describe your process creative process >>again, I think, um, when we I think about this innovation process and how we do water in Fannie Mae right three years ago, it is about Hey, how do we get our employee base to think about the possibilities right on Veran bunch of hackathons innovation days so that you get excitement from the teams, but in the last one and 1/2 year. It's more about innovation that can reap benefits, right? So we call it as focused innovation. We have, ah, clear cut Enterprise Innovation team. And they're on some of these innovation days and whatever have you within the within the firm so that you get the ideas and we have a process called pitch. So all these ideas feeding to lack of a better time a funnel where we have this enterprise innovation groups actually scan through the I. D. S and then can identify what things we can use and where we want to put our innovation investments. Right. So there is, ah, set off funnel requirements and gates we go through to identify Hey, this is where we want to do. And how we do is that Fanny Me is a lot more design thinking shop, right? So customer is at the center of everything. So anything we do, we will have some sort of research first, right with the customers and then how that might push the needle such that it can reach different boundaries through innovation. Right? So our processes cultivated ideas from inside. Also, look at what is happening with the trends. We have a strong strategy group. They're gonna look at this and our innovation team is always on the hunt for Hey, what is happening in industry in the cutting edge, How do you bring these three dimensions and then come up with a bunch of ideas? And then we have a funnel process where we identified what moves? What's this? What stays? Because there are other things that are at play. Is this innovation ready for the market? Now? Does it have to wait that sort of There are so many dimensions that going to that. But we have a structure process, and we have AH, dedicated team who can manage is that yet uses the creativity of the employees to be able to participate in animation. I mean, that's how we have a wall this process from. Think of the possibilities, too focused innovation. >>I think there's one extra point as well, like when it comes to technology side of that, it's it's creating a safe place for people to experiment, right, So we have a sandbox, the environment that we've created, an Amazon there in eight of us, and what we're doing is we're actually releasing some of the controls. I mean, obviously there's security and compliance, but released some of the controls and and just put a few guard rails in place so that people can experiment safely and not impact our firm, you know, in a very negative way. So >>talk about your employees and how they received this, this major transformation, and how are you receiving feedback in terms of their productivity in their engagement with the process? Dave. >>So you know, I would say this. There are lots of different types of employees, right? And like I said earlier, we also have as we're building the new, we also have to continue to support what we're running. So So what we've done is we've actually rolled out on South. We'll talk about it more detail because his team rolled it out. But, you know, but we have rolled out some training. You know, we've created a change management process, an organization right. Working with our human resource is so that we can up left, you know, sort of skills. And that's what I think. What's important is you're not going to be able to find the people out there to do everything that you need to do right. What's really important is creating those opportunities to carry the people that you have in your organization along with you for the journey as they learn you benefit right as an organization. So but salty should talk about some >>of the training. Yeah, so I take your question in two parts one. Is that how the employee base is taking the message of this district transformation or don't have right again? We have a compelling vision and mission like people that fanny man, they what? They take pride in fulfilling the mission. That's that's the 1st 1 along the way, when we crafted our message around why we're doing this. That is a lot more compelling. It is meaningful for our customers, our employees, right? So I think the messaging has been very important. Then, when you look at the things that we're trying to do, our cutting edge right from the employee point, if you it is a lot of excitement, because that keeps them at the cutting edge of what is happening in the world that makes them more marketable, right? Naturally, people are excited about it, but like any transformation, right? There will be camps off who will come across the change car up front like they're catalyst. Right? And then there are some in the middle and summer can a lagging right? But when we look at the entire gambit off the employee base, majority off them are. Hey, we are on board with this. We want to do it. We want to learn, How do we get there? And the company has done several different things to help the employees through this kind of knowledge cover I would call rather than the change career. We have a whole bunch of training plans that we have laid out. People have been wall until early taking. I mean, maybe a classroom training, maybe a self, sir. Uh, type off, download this particular module and then kind of read upon it and then also provide them to practice them with the sandbox. Right? So all these things have been done. I think one challenge we had actually facing now is that we can train them up pretty easily if we haven't put them in a place to practice it. Then it kind of fades away. So we're now kind of trying to see. Okay, let's identify groups off people. Give them a tool where they can assess for them their own self. What I wanted to learn such that I can become that and then be eligible for doing that right so that now they learn. And then they're put in a role on a project that they can actually practice on. So we are in that posture of that right now. So I think, but employee base is really excited about this, >>So I want to. I want to end where we started where Sati described the myriad changes that are taking place in your industry and getting back to your your cause, which is helping the customer buy a home, get it, get it, get it more easily, qualify for a loan. Can you think about the customer experience of the home buying process 3 to 5 10 years from now? And how it will be different as Fannie Mae embarks on this on this cloud journey. Do you want to start David? Just think. Look into your crystal ball >>and it's great. I wish I had a crystal ball. That would be great, but but you know. Look, we're making significant advancements, you know, working, working with our customers, taking that customer first mentality. And, ah, and and, you know, the mortgage industry itself is right for a change. I mean, you know, and and we're in a good position to really help and drive a lot of that. So my expectation, if I were to look out, I would expect to see a world where you know that borrower experience gets a lot better. I mean, one of the things we've learned to our research is that you know what is it? 40% of people actually cry as they're going through the mortgage experience, >>and they're not tears of joy. No, it's actually, you >>know, tougher to get into a tougher to think through the mortgage process, you know, and really take that big leap than it is to, you know, our Cielo tells us all the time than it is to actually apply for college. It z, it's often on bigger life event our goal. How do we make that simpler? How do we make people have a much more pleasant experience? Right? Waken do that with our data. We can make sure that they don't have to fill out those amazing forms. Heck, find the information. Sometimes they don't have it. You know, we're in a better position, right? You know, really? Get Teoh. You know, I can't promise a single click experience, but we're all gonna try to aspire to that, because that's what the customers out there with their cell phones and their technology or used to right. So we've got to get at least somewhere close to being there. >>So in the bottle, it expedient sight. I think we can even now see one tap market. How do we get them right? I think that's probably not too far. It's probably within two or three years. That's if I were to think about that. But if you want to think about 5 to 6 years, 10 years, if I am an individual driving by a home and then take your phone and say, Hey, can I buy this home? That should be able to tell you this is your lender and then go. That's right. And again from Fannie Mae, a point if you re help the lenders and they helped the borrowers threat. So through this transformation, what we're doing is that set up an engine that can be nimble, that can move fast. That runs with the low investment so that if we were to pivot, do things testing, learn and then change your game. We are fully in the position to be able to do that, right So and however fast, fast, you can experiment, those many different ideas will come out, and then some of them will reap fruit. And all of these for two things, like for our customers. How do we benefit our company, Fannie Mae? And how do we move the needle in industry? I think these are the three things that we want to achieve through this transformation. And we're building an engine to be able to do those types of things. I wish I could say this is one thing we would do. That's not what we're trying to do. Being a position where we can move quickly, we can lead industry. We can set the standard and then make good for the good for the American house. So that's all stories. >>Exciting times. Thank you so much. Both for coming on the Cube. Satti on Dave. Thank you. I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Ex Censure Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.

>>Live from Miami, Florida. It's the cube covering IBM's data and AI forum brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to downtown Miami. Everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental hotel covering the IBM data AI form hashtag data AI forum. My name is Dave Volante and you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Ritika gunner is here. She's the vice president of data and AI expert labs and learning at IBM. Ritika, great to have you on. Again, always a pleasure to be here. Dave. I love interviewing you because you're a woman executive that said a lot of different roles at IBM. Um, you know, you've, we've talked about the AI ladder. You're climbing the IBM ladder and so it's, it's, it's, it's awesome to see and I love this topic. It's a topic that's near and dear to the cubes heart, not only women in tech, but women in AI. So great to have you. Thank you. So what's going on with the women in AI program? We're going to, we're going to cover that, but let me start with women in tech. It's an age old problem that we've talked about depending on, you know, what statistic you look at. 15% 17% of, uh, of, of, of the industry comprises women. We do a lot of events. You can see it. Um, let's start there. >>Well, obviously the diversity is not yet there, right? So we talk about women in technology, um, and we just don't have the representation that we need to be able to have. Now when it comes to like artificial intelligence, I think the statistic is 10 to 15% of the workforce today in AI is female. When you think about things like bias and ethicacy, having the diversity in terms of having male and female representation be equal is absolutely essential so that you're creating fair AI, unbiased AI, you're creating trust and transparency, set of capabilities that really have the diversity in backgrounds. >>Well, you work for a company that is as chairman and CEO, that's, that's a, that's a woman. I mean IBM generally, you know, we could see this stuff on the cube because IBM puts women on a, we get a lot of women customers that, that come on >>and not just because we're female, because we're capable. >>Yeah. Well of course. Right. It's just because you're in roles where you're spokespeople and it's natural for spokespeople to come on a forum like this. But, but I have to ask you, with somebody inside of IBM, a company that I could say the test to relative to most, that's pretty well. Do you feel that way or do you feel like even a company like IBM has a long way to go? >>Oh, um, I personally don't feel that way and I've never felt that to be an issue. And if you look at my peers, um, my um, lead for artificial intelligence, Beth Smith, who, you know, a female, a lot of my peers under Rob Thomas, all female. So I have not felt that way in terms of the leadership team that I have. Um, but there is a gap that exists, not necessarily within IBM, but in the community as a whole. And I think it goes back to you want to, you know, when you think about data science and artificial intelligence, you want to be able to see yourself in the community. And while there's only 10 to 15% of females in AI today, that's why IBM has created programs such as women AI that we started in June because we want strong female leaders to be able to see that there are, is great representation of very technical capable females in artificial intelligence that are doing amazing things to be able to transform their organizations and their business model. >>So tell me more about this program. I understand why you started it started in June. What does it entail and what's the evolution of this? >>So we started it in June and the idea was to be able to get some strong female leaders and multiple different organizations that are using AI to be able to change their companies and their business models and really highlight not just the journey that they took, but the types of transformations that they're doing and their organizations. We're going to have one of those events tonight as well, where we have leaders from Harley Davidson in Miami Dade County coming to really talk about not only what was their journey, but what actually brought them to artificial intelligence and what they're doing. And I think Dave, the reason that's so important is you want to be able to understand that those journeys are absolutely approachable. They're doable by any females that are out there. >>Talk about inherent bias. The humans are biased and if you're developing models that are using AI, there's going to be inherent bias in those models. So talk about how to address that and why is it important for more diversity to be injected into those models? >>Well, I think a great example is if you took the data sets that existed even a decade ago, um, for the past 50 years and you created a model that was to be able to predict whether to give loans to certain candidates or not, all things being equal, what would you find more males get these loans than females? The inherent data that exists has bias in it. Even from the history based on what we've had yet, that's not the way we want to be able to do things today. You want to be able to identify that bias and say all things being equal, it is absolutely important that regardless of whether you are a male or a female, you want to be able to give that loan to that person if they have all the other qualities that are there. And that's why being able to not only detect these things but have the diversity and the kinds of backgrounds of people who are building AI who are deploying this AI is absolutely critical. >>So for the past decade, and certainly in the past few years, there's been a light shined on this topic. I think, you know, we were at the Grace Hopper conference when Satya Nadella stuck his foot in his mouth and it said, Hey, it's bad karma for you know, if you feel like you're underpaid to go complain. And the women in the audience like, dude, no way. And he, he did the right thing. He goes, you know what, you're right. You know, any, any backtrack on that? And that was sort of another inflection point. But you talk about the women in, in AI program. I was at a CDO event one time. It was I and I, an IBM or had started the data divas breakfast and I asked, can I go? They go, yeah, you can be the day to dude. Um, which was, so you're seeing a lot of initiatives like this. My question is, are they having the impact that you would expect and that you want to have? >>I think they absolutely are. Again, I mean, I'll go back to, um, I'll give you a little bit of a story. Um, you know, people want to be able to relate and see that they can see themselves in these females leaders. And so we've seen cases now through our events, like at IBM we have a program called grow, which is really about helping our female lead female. Um, technical leaders really understand that they can grow, they can be nurtured, and they have development programs to help them accelerate where they need to be on their technical programs. We've absolutely seen a huge impact from that from a technology perspective. In terms of more females staying in technology wanting to go in the, in those career paths as another story. I'll, I'll give you kind of another kind of point of view. Um, Dave and that is like when you look at where it starts, it starts a lot earlier. >>So I have a young daughter who a year, year and a half ago when I was doing a lot of stuff with Watson, she would ask me, you know, not only what Watson's doing, but she would say, what does that mean for me mom? Like what's my job going to be? And if you think about the changes in technology and cultural shifts, technology and artificial intelligence is going to impact every job, every industry, every role that there is out there. So much so that I believe her job hasn't been invented yet. And so when you think about what's absolutely critical, not only today's youth, but every person out there needs to have a foundational understanding, not only in the three RS that you and I know from when we grew up have reading, writing and arithmetic, we need to have a foundational understanding of what it means to code. And you know, having people feel confident, having young females feel confident that they can not only do that, that they can be technical, that they can understand how artificial intelligence is really gonna impact society. And the world is absolutely critical. And so these types of programs that shed light on that, that help bridge that confidence is game changing. >>Well, you got kids, I >>got kids, I have daughters, you have daughter. Are they receptive to that? So, um, you know, I think they are, but they need to be able to see themselves. So the first time I sent my daughter to a coding camp, she came back and said, not for me mom. I said, why? Because she's like, all the boys, they're coding in their Minecraft area. Not something I can relate to. You need to be able to relate and see something, develop that passion, and then mix yourself in that diverse background where you can see the diversity of backgrounds. When you don't have that diversity and when you can't really see how to progress yourself, it becomes a blocker. So as she started going to grow star programs, which was something in Austin where young girls coded together, it became something that she's really passionate about and now she's Python programming. So that's just an example of yes, you need to be able to have these types of skills. It needs to start early and you need to have types of programs that help enhance that journey. >>Yeah, and I think you're right. I think that that is having an impact. My girls who code obviously as a some does some amazing work. My daughters aren't into it. I try to send them to coder camp too and they don't do it. But here's my theory on that is that coding is changing and, and especially with artificial intelligence and cognitive, we're a software replacing human skills. Creativity is going to become much, much more important. My daughters are way more creative than my sons. I shouldn't say that, but >>I think you just admitted that >>they, but, but in a way they are. I mean they've got amazing creativity, certainly more than I am. And so I see that as a key component of how coding gets done in the future, taking different perspectives and then actually codifying them. Your, your thoughts on that. >>Well there is an element of understanding like the outcomes that you want to generate and the outcomes really is all about technology. How can you imagine the art of the possible with technology? Because technology alone, we all know not useful enough. So understanding what you do with it, just as important. And this is why a lot of people who are really good in artificial intelligence actually come from backgrounds that are philosophy, sociology, economy. Because if you have the culture of curiosity and the ability to be able to learn, you can take the technology aspects, you can take those other aspects and blend them together. So understanding the problem to be solved and really marrying that with the technological aspects of what AI can do. That's how you get outcomes. >>And so we've, we've obviously talking in detail about women in AI and women in tech, but it's, there's data that shows that diversity drives value in so many different ways. And it's not just women, it's people of color, it's people of different economic backgrounds, >>underrepresented minorities. Absolutely. And I think the biggest thing that you can do in an organization is have teams that have that diverse background, whether it be from where they see the underrepresented, where they come from, because those differences in thought are the things that create new ideas that really innovate, that drive, those business transformations that drive the changes in the way that we do things. And so having that difference of opinion, having healthy ways to bring change and to have conflict, absolutely essential for progress to happen. >>So how did you get into the tech business? What was your background? >>So my background was actually, um, a lot in math and science. And both of my parents were engineers. And I have always had this unwavering, um, need to be able to marry business and the technology side and really figure out how you can create the art of the possible. So for me it was actually the creativity piece of it where you could create something from nothing that really drove me to computer science. >>Okay. So, so you're your math, uh, engineer and you ended up in CS, is that right? >>Science. Yeah. >>Okay. So you were coded. Did you ever work as a programmer? >>Absolutely. My, my first years at IBM were all about coding. Um, and so I've always had a career where I've coded and then I've gone to the field and done field work. I've come back and done development and development management, gone back to the field and kind of seen how that was actually working. So personally for me, being able to create and work with clients to understand how they drive value and having that back and forth has been a really delightful part. And the thing that drives me, >>you know, that's actually not an uncommon path for IBM. Ours, predominantly male IBM, or is in the 50 sixties and seventies and even eighties. Who took that path? They started out programming. Um, I just think, trying to think of some examples. I know Omar para, who was the CIO of Aetna international, he started out coding at IBM. Joe Tucci was a programmer at IBM. He became CEO of EMC. It was a very common path for people and you took the same path. That's kind of interesting. Why do you think, um, so many women who maybe maybe start in computer science and coding don't continue on that path? And what was it that sort of allowed you to break through that barrier? >>No, I'm not sure why most women don't stay with it. But for me, I think, um, you know, I, I think that every organization today is going to have to be technical in nature. I mean, just think about it for a moment. Technology impacts every part of every type of organization and the kinds of transformation that happens. So being more technical as leaders and really understanding the technology that allows the kinds of innovations and business for informations is absolutely essential to be able to see progress in a lot of what we're doing. So I think that even general CXOs that you see today have to be more technically acute to be able to do their jobs really well and marry those business outcomes with what it fundamentally means to have the right technology backbone. >>Do you think a woman in the white house would make a difference for young people? I mean, part of me says, yeah, of course it would. Then I say, okay, well some examples you can think about Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Angela Merkel, and in Germany it's still largely male dominated cultures, but I dunno, what do you think? Maybe maybe that in the United States would be sort of the, >>I'm not a political expert, so I wouldn't claim to answer that, but I do think more women in technology, leadership role, CXO leadership roles is absolutely what we need. So, you know, politics aside more women in leadership roles. Absolutely. >>Well, it's not politics is gender. I mean, I'm independent, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, right? Absolutely. Oh yeah. Well, companies, politics. I mean you certainly see women leaders in a, in Congress and, and the like. Um, okay. Uh, last question. So you've got a program going on here. You have a, you have a panel that you're running. Tell us more about. >>Well this afternoon we'll be continuing that from women leaders in AI and we're going to do a panel with a few of our clients that really have transformed their organizations using data and artificial intelligence and they'll talk about like their backgrounds in history. So what does it actually mean to come from? One of, one of the panelists actually from Miami Dade has always come from a technical background and the other panelists really etched in from a non technical background because she had a passion for data and she had a passion for the technology systems. So we're going to go through, um, how these females actually came through to the journey, where they are right now, what they're actually doing with artificial intelligence in their organizations and what the future holds for them. >>I lied. I said, last question. What is, what is success for you? Cause I, I would love to help you achieve that. That objective isn't, is it some metric? Is it awareness? How do you know it when you see it? >>Well, I think it's a journey. Success is not an endpoint. And so for me, I think the biggest thing I've been able to do at IBM is really help organizations help businesses and people progress what they do with technology. There's nothing more gratifying than like when you can see other organizations and then what they can do, not just with your technology, but what you can bring in terms of expertise to make them successful, what you can do to help shape their culture and really transform. To me, that's probably the most gratifying thing. And as long as I can continue to do that and be able to get more acknowledgement of what it means to have the right diversity ingredients to do that, that success >>well Retika congratulations on your success. I mean, you've been an inspiration to a number of people. I remember when I first saw you, you were working in group and you're up on stage and say, wow, this person really knows her stuff. And then you've had a variety of different roles and I'm sure that success is going to continue. So thanks very much for coming on the cube. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, we're here covering the IBM data in a AI form from Miami right back.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody, you watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Ahmed Zion, he is here, he's the chief automation officer at accelerate a specialist service provider in this area of RPA in Armando Lambert is the vice president of enterprise optimization governance and risk guys. Oh sorry. At Bayview asset management in Miami. Welcome to the cube criminal. Thank you for that. So Bayview, you've got a good view of the Bay and Miami, is that kinda where the name comes from or the beautiful place to work happening with UI path forward to was in Miami at the Fontainebleau back here in Vegas. But um, so let's get into it. I met um, chief automation officer. That's kind of a cool title. I don't see that a lot. What's that entail? And tell us about accelerate. >>So accelerate at accelerated where one of the largest nice providers is the only thing that we do a process automation and AI company. And our sole focus has been process automation since our inception and our past lives were generalists. We did well and wanted to do it again. Uh, so when we started accelerate, we wanted to make sure that we focused on a very specific vertical niche and process automation was just starting up the uptick about mid 2016 ish. >> So there's gonna be some interesting conversations around process automation is like had an analyst on yesterday, they predicted RPA is dead, you know, process automation lives. You know, it's kind of a tongue in cheek thing. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit, but Amando tell us about your role and a little bit about Bayview. So Bayview is an asset management company, primarily whole loans, mortgage back securities, mortgage servicing rights. >>We offer service advisory as well as investment vehicles. My role basically is to strategize, innovate, look at new technologies, new ways of streamlining the business. Um, and you know, about in 2016, you know, we were faced with the challenge and the challenge was we have a lot of road swiveled to chair type work, back office, operational work. Um, and I went in there just trying to look at people, processes and systems and trying to figure out a way to make things more efficient. And you know, RPA is one of those vehicles. Okay. So smart. You started with people in process, you didn't start with the technology. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So what did you learn? I mean, take us back to 2016 when you started to do the investigation, you started unpack the processes and the people. What did you see and then what led you to RPA? >>Yeah, I mean, I think inherently you're, you're, there's a lot of business processes that are just brought down through years of just being kind of entrepreneurial and doing a lot of business. So a, of these prices of processes early on we felt like we can just go in and automate and we realized that just needed a level of process optimization first. Um, so in doing that, it just kind of directs the vehicle right into what type of automation you need to do. It's not always RPA. RPA is big, a big component for us. Um, it works for us. Early on we wanted to put a strong governance structure. I strongly believe that, you know, and it's worked out so far for us. >> So you, you brought in accelerate, you brought in an outside firm to help you with that process automation, is that right? Absolutely. >>So tell us more about how that all went down. So that was, that was an interesting, um, interesting time, right? The, these products were coming up. Nobody really knew how well they work. And so we went in and we actually did proof of value, right? We said, Hey, this is all well and good. Let's do a proof of concept that a proof of value at that time, proof of concepts really were a thing. I don't, I don't think we should do them anymore. We should only do proof of values. But we went in, looked at the various systems they had, tried it out so he could demonstrate it to his management that this thing works. And as soon as that was over, I think I'd given to her, Armando, here we went all in, right? We said, all right, let's look at the highest value things. >>Let's deliver this. Um, let's figure out a governance model. Let's, let's not, let's not hold it back like we, like we have done in the past. It project spinning up. So let's get the infrastructure up and running very quickly. Let's get, let's get a few automations out there. Some of the business sees the value right away, right? Crawl, walk, run. We can do this. You know, what are we going to automate and what do we need from it and how are we going to govern this? These are the three pillars that I see that I suggest everybody look at it. And we did that in parallel parallel streams and all three of them. And within a few months he was able to return a significant value back to the business, which has led to adoption. I think, I think that has been a very big reason why he's been able to scale because he was able to show early value back to the business very quickly focusing on value rather than the technology or the underlying solution. >>Right? It's um, a lot of times we see folks going into RPA saying, what can RPA do for me? I think that is the wrong question. Um, the question really is what do you do? Let's classify what you do in manual mechanical work, intelligent work and wasteful work, right? And then look at your toolbox. I have RPA, I have AI, I have other technologies that within an enterprise folks are working on, and then apply those to it. RPA becomes the glue for most of these things. You have API as SDKs. You have AI technologies, be it cloud or on prem. RPA becomes the glue and it becomes easy to deploy once you figured out what all the different pieces are. But it's important to look at the process first and say, what? What do you do? So when the business comes back and say, what can you do for me with RPA? >>I said, no, I don't know. What can you do for, with the, I don't know. Tell me what you do and then I'll tell you what the solution is. So mono, given that you started with the value, did that ease some of those potential friction that you sometimes see with change management or change in general? Or did you still see that resistance? And I'm interested in where you started, what were some of those high value areas that you attack but, but the cultural piece first if you will. Yeah, I mean a lot of marketing, you know, it's really what it comes down to trying to prove to the Csuite and managing director areas. Like this is a value proposition. You know, early on, you know, we did a lot of presenting roundtables, luncheon learns with the business. You know, because there is some resistance early on. >>I think everybody has a misconception that it's going to take their jobs where I believe it's gonna create a lot more jobs in the future. Um, for me it was always a scalability play. You know, how can our business do more for less? And that's really what we really wanted to get to. Throughout that journey. We realized there's a lot of benefit, especially for companies that have a heavy back office operations. Um, and we just started, like I mentioned there, we started slow. I didn't want to boil the ocean. I knew I needed to prove to leadership that this works. And I think about three years ago, we all kind of felt, is this going to stick? You know, we've seen technology, I've been in technology for over 20 years and you know, some things fly, some things don't. Right? So we wanted to prove that it worked. >>And you know, the industry just kind of surrounded itself around that. And look where we are now. I think everybody's putting a lot of money in their budgets for, you know, intelligent automation, not just RPA. So the initiative was kind of middle up to the C suite and then top down. Is that how it, absolutely. I'm a firm believer the tone needs to come from the top. It has to come from the top. And you know, luckily for me, I have great leaders in our company. Um, they understood the vision, they understand what, what it could potentially mean for their business. They just needed someone to help execute it. So what kinds of things did you start with? There was a lot of sort of manual form filling out or some of that, uh, you know, data extraction from PDFs using, utilizing OCR, you know, RPAs great to gather and collect data so that they can put it in their models and make more informed decisions. >>Uh, claims processes, you know, dealing with different agencies. So, you know, early on in adopting UI path, there were some limitations. We worked around that. Now it's pretty much limitless and they could touch any system, any technology, any process. So yeah, it's growing tremendously. And in terms of just ensuring governance and compliance as you scale, you have robots doing that. Um, how do you tell me what we're working more and more. I mean, I think regulators now realize, okay, you're removing the human element, right? So, you know, that's a big value as well. Or sampling. Now you're not limited to what you can sample. You can sample 100%, you know, so those are big values and when you speak to regulators, they really understand that I would say five years ago, I'm not so sure. Um, but now they welcome it. And I think a lot of the government agencies now are, are adopting RPA. >>Uh, so it's, it's a good story. Well, automation kill sampling is that I think it is absolutely right. The point actually interesting point that you made, right? Uh, the regulators or the auditors or for that matter, the security and the compliance guys inside the enterprise have this. So this term of the bot, right has this connotation of Terminator and I keep telling him, no, this is that thing. You buy a target that does this. I press the right button, it goes right up, press the left button, mil goes left. It just doesn't think on its own. And I think that conversation is very important, right? Once you have that conversation with the security and the compliance guys to say, this is a bot, it only does what you ask it to do. You could put a social security number in front of this guy all day long in front of this user ID all day long. >>It just doesn't know what to do with it. Won't ever read it. And once they realize that they, the, the conversation changes, um, you know, especially when it in compliance and audit, right? Uh, the compliance officers would love this. Once you tell them there's a lot of decision making that happened in people's heads or Excel spreadsheets that never made it to systems and was never logged. So you'd get something in you massage that, you did that, and you put that in the system. That decision making is now auditable. So you can go back and say, here was the input, here was the massaging of it. Here's what went into the system of record after it came in. So that I think, I think those conversations early on really helped this scale in an age old problem and tribal knowledge. Exactly. You know, Joe has his spreadsheet and Fred knows the Joe has the spreadsheet. >>So when Joe leaves, he has to get the spreadsheet back. And that's kind of this perpetual thing. How much of what you guys did, Armando was processed re-engineering versus just applying automation at some low hanging fruit. Um, I think looking back now it's about a 50, 50 split. Um, you know, there are some areas that have robust processes and that makes our life easier. We can just kind of go in, map it out, look at the automation future state and deploy, develop and deployed. Uh, you know, some areas, you know, they inherit processes and they don't always just so busy doing their day jobs and they don't always realize there's, there's room for efficiency in their process. So, you know, early on when we priced out how much this would cost, how much development it would be, we didn't always factor in that it would be a 50, 50 split and doing a lot more process improvement in the beginning. >>Um, we've now counted for that. So absolutely. It's about a 50, 50 split. Craig LeClaire this morning said something that, you know, I was an analyst and he says, very, you know, very analyst's sort of savings. You've got to stop worrying about the ROI, you know, focus on the more strategic stuff. Every analyst sort of says that. But yeah, there weren't a lot of CFOs too. And they're like, where's the ROI? So you know, you're in the services business, you know, you have to have ROI dollars matter. Absolutely. So you obviously measure ROI. How do you look at it? You know what you said earlier, you're not cutting jobs, right? But so what do you tick? How do you measure kind of the, the value, the ROI? I mean, you know, giving the end user a little more to think about, right? Giving them the opportunity to, you know, do more, be more thoughtful in what their day to day job is rather than doing the swivel chair type work. >>So, you know, the measurement, the beauty around RPA is it's very quantifiable. You know, unlike some traditional it systems, you really can, the data doesn't always kick back. You know, all our, our, our own bots, all our processes kickback, they give us data that we can quantify, um, metrics on, on, on volume versus man hours. This is all information you capture early on. You need to do this at the discovery stage and we train. We have a robust training program for our business analysts and program managers and developers and they're always, that's the question they ask every time. It's not just about what is your process, your cute future, current state, future state, and it's like, how many limit? Let me look at your historical trending. What are their volumes look like? You know, our business is very cyclical. It goes up and down, and when I mentioned I want them to be scalable and have more capacity, that's really the play for me. >>For me, it's never been an FTE. I get it. It may come from the Csuite, but like I said, the tone from the top has been solid. Their vision is more about, Hey, when it's cyclical and it goes up and down, we need to be able to do more. We need to be able to scale. Have you been able to measure productivity improvement? Absolutely. Absolutely we have. If you had a Mulligan, what would you do differently? A good question. I mean, I think we factored early on, I mentioned this early on how much process improvement was needed. I think we undervalued that. And um, you know, every business faces the same challenges, right? They, you know, everyone feels like they're doing the right thing. These processes are inherited. You know, regulations change, investors change. There's new business rules every day, you know, and you kind of need to sit back as a business user every now and then and refresh that. >>And um, you know, we didn't account for that early on. We're helping the business do that. Our business is fantastic. They bought into the program and it's like having additional workforce working on your side. You know, Daniel Dienes in his keynote last night, basically sending them pick up on something you guys said is, is, um, he really appreciates those customers who took a chance early on. He goes, because frankly, our product wasn't, you know, fully, fully baked out. And I was like, wow, what an honest statement from a CEO. You don't usually hear that. My sense is that they got it right. You path. And I'd love your comments. In the sense that they attack, they went after simplicity and said, okay, make it easy to adopt and then we'll figure it out. And then, you know, bringing in the functionality is that, is that kind of what happened or picking up on Daniel? >>And by the way it was, it's amazing. Humility really comes through, right? So I saw him 2016 standing on stage and when my partner came to us for the idea of saying, Hey, we're going to do, we should do this RPA thing. Now I'm giving away my age. But 1998, my first job, I was sitting in front of the computer and Prudential and they put this software in front of me. It was called SQA robot. It was a test automation tool. It was called SQL robot. Uh, why that relates to Daniel is he's had a, came on the stage in the IRPA conference in 2016 if remember, I love this presentation just to blues black thing and few words on it. He goes, let's not kid ourselves. We have this very traditional, you know, QA automation technology that we think can do something really super. >>And I have built a product on top of that, but there's, there's not a lot of magic in here yet. Right. So that's, but, but I think the, the, the great thing about you I've had has been the vision, right? The vision has been, and if you saw yesterday they started with the core and unlike some of the other vendors, they said, we're just going to do RPA really well. We're not going to go into the OCR market. We're not going to try to build AI things. Let's make sure that our core RPA, so you know, you want to go, you're an enterprise, you want to do OCR, you're not going to buy it from an RPA company. You want to buy it from somebody who's been doing it for 30 years or we just has that sole focus. I think you'll have had had that sole focus. >>But as I've seen in the past three, four years, they've just done a great job with the, with the full vision, right. Starting from, they started with the middle of the core of the product and they said, okay, let's go towards the business and see what the business needs with, you know, planning of their, um, of their automations on and so forth and going further to the right to say, let us enable the technology guys who actually implement this to give them the tools and the integrations they need to, to actually make this routed to full product. Um, I think it's a very good question when people say, what can you do with RPA for me? So I said that answer was very different three years ago than it is today. Right? Some of the things are coming out of the box with these. So I, I, I predict that in the next few years, document understanding and natural language and all of that will just be built in today's still very sort of clunky in terms of how you do it. >>But I think those things are coming, coming together. So looking at processes that way is really important. It's a lot of runway for this. Margaret, Armando, I'll give you the last word. Where do you see are RPA or intelligent automation going in, in your organization? Is it still early days you had a lot more adoption or you're pretty much, you know, settled? No, definitely not settled. Um, I think it's, you know, RPA is just one of the tools in the spectrum of intelligent automation. So more integration, more API APIs, a lot of machine learning, uh, eventually some AI. Um, so yeah, we are not slowing down. There's a lot of opportunity. My mandate as I mentioned before, is just scale, scale, scale. So you know, the process is working. We have a good program in place. We'll continue marching forward. Great guys, thanks so much for coming. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for watching. From right back with the cube. Live from UI path forward three in Las Vegas. Right back.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by Extension Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for adobe summat. Twenty nineteen. I'm John for With my Coast. Jeffrey for Yu here for two days. The wall, the wall coverage We're on day to our next guest. Marc Andre Sinclair, director of digital marketing Platform Content Strategy Export Development Canada E D. C. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So love your channel. Digital marketing platform content strategy. That's kind of in the center of all the action. So, you know, you've been doing some transformation. Tell us your story. What do you guys do? What was what was that? What's the story? >> So I joined E. C. Exported moment Cata two years ago, really helping them out on the overall digital transformation. So I've been fortunate, joined the organization as the moment that they're our position. We wanted to change like we weren't a mandate to gain back some relevance in the market. CDC exists how occasion businesses go beyond the borders, go international. So they really wanted to be relevant to the market because we're not competing with the markets were really just like a compliment in a market. So we've been on that journey distrust, transformation For the last two years, we've are now competing the first phase of a transformation and just about two years, which normally takes four years in the industry. And we're now add midway to our overall digital transformation. We want a critical the number of customers that we have in four years, but it's a very aggressive target what we call normal, like a stretch goal that are serious put. So that's what we've been up to in the last two years. >> And what >> was the catalyst? Why the change? Because, well, what was going on kind of behind the scenes t make such an aggressive, so aggressive move. If you look at >> the interest you overall, there's a major shift in what is export. So exporting means merchandising guys ing good for most of the people. When when you look at the shipping industry to software and services, these folks are not perceiving themselves as being on exporter like really, you build a software, you sell it. You don't think about your software getting beyond the borders. So the industry, the overall market size, are the number of companies that we could help in. The country has grown, but our number of customer remained flat. So we wanted to catch back at that market reach. And there was a theater in Perth. Is that forced us to change? But basically it started. What? Our CEO Putting forward a strong paper cultured like really forced people to think differently and change. >> What's the progress Like how you happy with the progress so far? Absolutely. What are what are some of the things you've knocked down already? What was the pick us through the steps? They could screw up the plan. What was the What is the plan? What is completed were how much how much is left. >> OK, so it started for us as a strong investments and over all the marketing tech stocks which started obviously where I will be summit. So we started in the vestments with the Adobe expense manager and it was about us changing the technology that we had in terms of delivering a customer experience. So your approach we took wass people processing technology. But at the middle, we really put the customer experience at the forefront of everything at the art of every decisions. Makings. So for us were Margaret, we're finishing the migration as we speak right now. That's the first phase. And now with the partner that we have X censure. We're looking in terms ofthe archaic. How can we build capabilities back in the business? Because we've outsourced are full function to our partner. And now it's about how do we get the right level of cost tower scalability for the future so we can deliver premium customer experience. So a lot of activities have happened. We went into natural transformation at the same time, the organization has embraced our job overall and now we're really thinking about was the future data customer experience. So these are the biggest shift that their condition is looking at As we stand right now, we've done the migration and we can now start to think about personalization experimentations. These are all the cool things that we have ahead of us. >> What was the heavy lifting hard part of getting this off the ground? What, some learning or any experiences where you, you know, failed miserably and rebooted or reset means you learned through it oration. We see these successful projects. What's the key learnings? Have you had any moments like that? >> Definitely So So, First of all, I would like to talk a bit about the fail approach because this is something that wasn't obviously part of the organization. And that is something fundamental to a change in organizations. So to quote my boss fail stance or first attempt and learning, So you got to get out and you got to try things and we gotta experiment. Otherwise, you're not really pushing the boundaries. Eso I'm proud of her failure and actually won an award about failure last year at our, um, organizations. So they have a corporate awards that recognise people that do fails but move on and fell fast, like that's a spirit. So for us as, say, at the beginning, the biggest part of a project was to get the what I call the M V P. Zero. So we have to change from a nun premise toe called architectures. And when you start to do these things at an organization that has never done cloud, you uncover a lot of stuff a lot of security protocols, firewalls kicking in. So our first BP zero just to set the infrastructure has been quite a challenge. I think we went three times out, and the third time was the right one. But this is the critical one where you start to build credibility. And even though for us we're working and agile every two weeks without ever cradle to grave, everything full blown experience, this one was really a longer one. And we were really made sure that the requisition understood that this is complicated When you do the foundation. This >> is company goes cousins to say its foundational. So I'm going to take your time. You've got to get that right. Can't have any cracks in the foundation because you're building on top of it. Exactly. So that three attempts you. You said you went out for forbid, or how did three attempts of building it was >> so the throughout That's R about us deploying the full Levi's serology in the clouds. So first time we went uncover a few things. Second time, not anything pop up weren't aware. And then the third time we went out. Third time's a charm to say we went >> out. It was good >> way. Nailed it on that >> time. It's the >> price I didn't invite you on stage. I don't know if you caught that in the Kino. Towards the end of his keynote, he said, We need to have an award for people that disproved their own hypothesis. Exactly so. But you said it's interesting. He said. The people part was hard in the process, and yet it was a top down initiative from the CEO. So was it not bought in a kind of the mid tier management level? The senior management? Why, if the COC and we need to do this, was it hard to move those different party organization? Well, >> I'd say the people part was more about having the right talent on the right mind sets. So one to CEO put forward the culture paper, the stretch goals. Really the organization started to organize themselves on. Are we going to make that thing happened now? Like we need to work differently. And this is not about just more cash, more at counts. We need to re engineer a bit the way we were working, so I wouldn't say that there was an issue with with the way or the people of today was just like you start through higher scrums, you start the heart coach to start our appeal. These are skills says that you've never had. Like at the beginning of the project, we had new marketing talent. We had new partner for the ritual that every we have a new partner for agile and we also have new technology. So you start with a lot of new stuff at the same time. So I'd say these are natural things that you have to do. Is it easy? No, not necessarily. But we had a lot of support from the sea level standpoint. >> It sounds like you guys have a very Dev ops oriented culture because talking about failing fast is a cultural cloud concept. I mean agile iterating scrums. This's a dev ops mindset, infrastructure. It's code. Did you guys have that built in Or you said you started three years ago. Was that was that the core cultural mindset? >> So I wouldn't say that we're a dev ups type of culture of mentality, I would say, actually, it's probably the part that we still need to invest hard because now we build a fully whole machine that scaring and pushing the machine you start uncover that once you go that full cycle, few things are popping up, so you know, and and the in the nineties are beginning of this of two thousands. Like when you were thinking about nal ticks, people were always like, Okay, let's let's do this on our techs use case. Our position at the end. Let's do your documentation at the end. It tends to be the same thing with Dev up. Sometimes like we have a strong architectural when in terms of regression, automation and all these things, we truly need to invest a bit more so we can have a because we're playing every single two weeks that we wanted or not. So that's a lot of pressure on all the people that do, que way you waited to make sure everything >> you want to get it right first, then kind of bolted on after as more of an operational models >> way had a very strong foundation, and now we're spinning everything. >> It's all I got to ask you about the export piece of it because, obviously, um, international global competitiveness is a big force. Right now, people have to be global and data privacy. You mentioned. We talk about genie pr before we came on camera you an opinion on this. Do you have anything? You? Could you please share your view on TV? I really Well, I thought it's valuable. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what I didn't mention when we chatted about that before is Wei thought a lot about you. We need to comply to GDP. Are because this is ah, European regulation. And we headed up that Yes, a CZ. Because we have prisons internationally and erupts. Not everyone that has that opinion that they need to comply. But what we've uncovered was one, one or two weeks before the D days on May twenty fits that We needed to be compliant. So what has happened is in two weeks, we stop everything. We worked twenty four hours for two weeks to restructure the platform to make sure that we were, like, compliant to do CPR. And then after that, we fought a lot. Next few months, we'LL look into it. Are we going to make that thing right? Because people are scared of gpr, but that you want it or not? This is just a beginning way. See it with the California Act Canada as a castle. I'm pretty sure they're going to be very aggressive, so you need to make sure that you really invest in. There are privacy management and all these things. At the end of the day, if it's well done, your customers will love it. The issue is people are being a bit sneaky without the use data. But if you're being transparent and you're being honest with the way you use the data and you're being fully disclosing what you're doing, it's not an issue you need to embrace it. Actually, I think that's a commis it embrace it because it's going to be part of our journey that we >> want to do the tough work up front for you. He was forced to because you are building something new. And then, well, the deadlines here, so is the struggles. Hard works. He had to grind it out. So you and then once you get over that, prepare for it, invested it, nurture the strategy for that. What's the advice to give someone sets there has to do the GPR and might not be into the time pressure, but it's starting out and saying Okay, I got to get my arms around this. What's the core issues well, getting started, not colour, but like what's playbook? >> So the playbook and say like if you think about G p r. This is basically for the European. You If they're not giving you the right tio leverage cookies and tracking and all these things, you should not be doing it. So it's simply thinking in your implementation of a piece of software that goes at the beginning that says, Do you want to have full functional thief, full personalization or not? And don't look at GDP R. But look at the customer experience. If you put the customer once again at the forefront and you really think about what does it make sense? You know if if you and I get on the Web sites and we see that thing that is fronting A, I know what you've done last summer like it's kind of creepy. You don't want to have these things. And so you just build that customer experience around their privacy management, and then everything will fall together. >> So build it into the product. >> Yeah, platform, yeah, and do it the right way and compliance will follow. Don't do it to be compliant. Don't >> exactly do it through a customer experience, >> right? Right. So how's this success band in terms of getting into some of these new markets for you in terms of software and services and some of the other export markets? So, so >> interesting question, because two years ago a DC was focused on to court things, financial products and insurance products. So right now we've expended our product line, and we're now having this what we call knowledge business. So if you think about occasion, business or any business that wants to go beyond the borders, this's quite scary to go in the international game. So now we're capable of offering them a lot of insights on international market out the exports virus key questions that haven't her journey. So we're not helping them to our journey and also as were wet and better than the international supply chains. We're helping them with connecting with big, big companies that are leveraging or looking for some capabilities that we have in the country. So we've really skilled up the product line that we have. We're really shifting the model. We're working a lot with the banks and the way we're supporting the Cajun businesses so like it's days and nights, the type of products that have a solution, the experience that were providing, uh, from two years ago. Do we still have work? Absolutely. Like digital transformation is never such a thing that is completed. The key essence here. The key message is, it's never done, and the customer experience has to be at the forefront if you think about the customer experience. It just happened that most of the experiences digital these days so test our mission is never handing. >> I think I think it's a great mind set. I think that's so smart. It's not just about mobile first or cloud for just customer center. From the beginning, I'm gonna ask you the question. What's it like working with a century Iraq? That what role that they play with a easy to work with the good? What's the story? >> Absolutely. I'm very pleased with the team that we had. We have strong people from Accenture were fully leveraging the network that they have because they're distributed in the global business. Axe Central, for us, is doing all the delivery stuff, the the very difficult stuff behind the scene that is normally like your function that you haven't an organization. So we've been extremely pleased on DH. Actually, I think that the fighter fact that were capable of delivering every single two weeks and agile were pure, agile. You will hear in the industry that some people think they're our job, but they're actually hybrid Elijah. So we're full blown, agile the organization. And they've been strong partner with us on that journey. >> That's awesome. Well, I love the story looking for to keep it in touch. Keep us posted on When you get this transformation. I look forward to chatting. And thanks for sharing your story. And inside here in the Cube, my pleasure. Mark Andreessen, Claire customer here inside the cute telling about the journey and the struggles and GDP are get on it and make it an advantage. Great. Great line there. And digital is the future. I'm Jeffery Jeffery. More day to coverage with the Cube after the short break

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's the CUBE! Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to the CUBE We are live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018 from Bellevue, Washington. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we're pleased to welcome to the CUBE for the first time, Margo Visitacion, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester. Margaret, it's great to have you here. >> Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >> You have a session this afternoon, so we'll get a little preview of that. You recently at Forrester were doing a lot of work with some Smartsheet customers on a white paper, regarding digital transformation, looking at how project management has typically been done and how it's evolving. Give us a little bit of an overview of that research and what people are going to hear about today. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, what we've seen is that digital transformation is really changing the way that companies need to work today, and that everybody in an organization is now a project manager, whether they recognize it or not. So what we've seen is three quarters of the respondents that we've surveyed, what they've seen is that they've seen their project management activities, and the scale of their projects, increase significantly in size. They've seen projects being far more distributed throughout the organization, so it isn't we have a central group that does project management, it's now everybody does projects. And what we've also seen is that the rate and pace of change creates a lot of uncertainty, and that organizations are dealing with a lot of unplanned tasks, instead of having something that was highly controlled, when you saw more traditional project management. People have to be a lot more flexible, a lot more adaptable, and they need to have a much greater visibility to be able to manage through that rate of change. >> Seems like a dichotomy though, cause on one hand, you're saying that project management is getting more complicated or complex, more pieces, more people need to do it. On the other hand, you need tools that are not for professional project managers. We need the ability to do things for people that aren't trained on those tools. And the amount of work and reach of that order is just growing, so how do you square that circle? >> It is a dichotomy. It really is a dichotomy. The nature of technology and software being central to everything a company does. All companies are software companies today, and what that means is that you have to have more collaboration, and you have a greater need for transparency and interaction between teams so that they can work together more effectively. So while elements of the project are more complex, the fact that you have more stakeholders and more people involved means that you have to create a balance that you have very highly usable technology to get everybody to work together more effectively. Especially when you think about the demographics of the workplace is changing. When I started in a technology world, I expected green screens, I expected difficult, highly complex applications. I thought that went along with the job, but in today's demographics, people want consumer grade applications. I want something that is as pleasing as it is on my device, as it is going on my desktop, and I want to be able to have the same experience no matter where I go, because work isn't nine to five where I'm sitting at a desk any longer. It is wherever I'm going, because the majority of information workers today or knowledge workers today, work on the road. They need to be able to have that experience, so you can balance complexity if you increase accessibility and usability. That allows you to reduce risk within your projects. >> Ultimately, the top line of any enterprise is the same. We got to grow revenue, we've got to do it faster, we've got to deliver better products and services that are based on feedback and data that we can glean. That's a lot of cultural challenge. I imagine in this emerging market of collaborative workforce management versus portfolio program, or project management, how have you seen companies of, and across industry, actually embrace the cultural shift that is essential to drive digital transformation. >> It's a journey and companies are really still moving through this. As we heard in the keynote today, you're seeing pockets of innovation that are growing and as companies are seeing these results, because of accessibility in schools, and because of the transparency and usability of the tools that are on the market today, you're now seeing that, "Oh, you know what, there is value." I get to see it, because it's visible to me. I'm less resistant to the change, so I'm more willing to try and, frankly, sometimes a company really has to get burnt. What we found is if a project fails, half of the respondents said, "Our company lost revenue because a project failed." Well, nobody needs to have that happen. Nobody wants to have that happen, actually. So what they really want to do is say, "What can I do to mitigate that risk?" And they're finding that, because team's today are more willing to work with technology, and more willing to have that transparency, you know everybody's life is an open book now in technology, it actually promotes teamwork. You move from the project manager as the only person, the single throat to choke, to recognize that it is a team that works together more effectively. That's what helps drive that cultural change, because when everybody's empowered to drive to a successful outcome, you're going to see that cultural resistance move away. >> I imagine that sort of, I don't know if shared accountability's the right thing. >> Absolutely. >> Also is a facilitator of that cultural shift? >> Absolutely, absolutely. When you can see the intelligence behind why a decision was being made, and people can contribute to that decision being made, you get better decision making. It's not a decision made in a vacuum, and you don't have people waiting around for someone to make a decision, or you create cost of delay and waste in a process where no company wants that today. Nobody has time for that today. >> It's pretty interesting cause all we see, that diversity of opinions and background, makes better decisions. We've seen that time and time again. And then also, there's this little thing where if people are part of the decision that was made, they generally have a little bit more buy-in. So that's all-- >> Correct. >> All goodness. So you call it collaborative workflow management as a-- >> Collaborative work management. >> Work management. >> Yes. >> Excuse me, work. Not work flow. I'm just curious, in terms of this kind of struggle for the desktop, right, there's so many SAAS tools out there now, whether you're in Slack or you're in Salesforce, or in G Suite or Office 365. As you look at that competition for what is the top level that is driving what I do, how are people sorting through that? Are we just in this multi-app world? Is there a place for something to be on top? Or is it horses for courses depending on where you are in that process? Cause, man oh man, I find myself tapping from app to app to app to app to app. I've got so many browsers open on my desk, just to get through my day. >> Well, we see the average knowledge worker opening between 8 and 13 apps a day to get their job done, and they spend a third to half of their time in email just looking for information. So you're right, it's a morass of applications and it's very difficult. I don't think we're ever going to get to a one stop shop, but what I do think is that organizations can build an operational system of record. When you think about this, you have CRM system where you know everything about your customer. All their contact information, all the deal data, everything that's going on. You have a financial system of record. You know exactly the revenue that your company is generating, the costs that they're incurring, but when you think about how you actually balance that, how you know and deliver to your customers, and know revenue and costs, what's in the middle is just a jumble of different types of applications. And what we're seeing at Forrester is a trend, is that organizations are trying to create an operational system of record. Now as I said, I don't think it's going to be a one-stop shop, but I do think that there will be a planning and delivery ecosystem that will allow organizations to bring together the tools that work for them. As they said in the keynote this morning, as Mark said in the keynote, if you want to tell somebody, "We're going to work together more effectively," stop what you're doing, that's never going to work. So it's really incumbent upon the tools that are able to work with other tools that make people in your organization productive, because employees have to feel productive to really be able to grow a great customer experience. So collaborative work management is an essential element. It's the core part of the execution layer. Project management tools, like I said, are never going to go away. They're going to be for that formal, critical path from building a ship, for building a road or something very plan intensive. They're always going to be there. If you're going to be managing a services organization, you still need to have your people allocated. You don't want people on the bench. You still need that, but to actually get the work done, collaborative work management is really that core that brings together contextual information around the work that's being done. So it gives collaboration purpose. So I really think that's a central core application. >> You guys at Forrester just collaborated, we'll say there in the spirit of marketing terms, with Smartsheet. You interviewed several hundred Smartsheet customers and-- >> Not just Smartsheet customers, really across the industry. >> This was across even some of their competitors. >> Yes. Project managers, professionals, collaboration workers, information workers. >> Okay. >> PMO directors. We really were trying to get into the user community. That's what we were really focusing on. >> Okay, this was agnostic. One of the things Jeff and I were chatting about before we went live is wanting to understand, okay, Smartsheet has a lot of competition, right, so if I'm going to manage a marketing project and I use JIRA, and my sales team is using Salesforce, but I communicate with a lot of people across the company in Slack, how does that integration work? They've got a lot of connectors, and a lot of integrations. What was some of the feedback that you heard from, in this sort of agnostic city, about the workers in terms of confusion, or "I just want to be able to go into one tool and have everything talk to it." >> Right. Depending on the persona there were different requirements. So what we've found is that for PMO leaders, PMO directors, they had a set of tools. They really created a tool kit for their organizations. So you had at the PMO level, they still use project management tools, they still use spreadsheets, but they increasingly used collaborative work management tools. Collaborative work management has only been around for a few years, and a quarter of the respondents that we saw were adding collaborative work management to their tool kits to reach out to that team member, to bring in more information. That became a stronger, a secondary persona, being the team member that was going to be delivering. What was interesting is the high performers, the high maturity organizations that we interviewed, they really latched on to collaborative work management, seeing this as sort of a secret sauce to say, "Okay, now I can get in better data." We don't have people rushing to fill in a time sheet on Friday, we're getting data real time. Where the integration comes in is if you have people happily and actively using tools that are sticky for them, you get better data and you're not running around at 5 o'clock on a Friday saying, "I need your time sheets." "I need your status reports." And speaking with the folks from Office Depot, they have a great saying. They said, "We move from status to progress. We weren't looking backwards, we knew where we were going." And that's a really important element. Speaking of tools like Slack and some of the other messaging tools that are out there, you might be working with somebody in legal, or you might be working with somebody in HR. That doesn't necessarily need to be in a collaborative work management tool. Almost certainly, probably never need to be in a project management tool, but you need input from them. You need to review something. "Is this contract okay? Are we allowed to say this in a marketing campaign?" Slack allows them to share that information, and then you can bring it back into the collaborative work management tool and see the information and the context around the information real time. It takes you from being able to have some transparency into the project, or the work stream that you're working on, to really actually being able to live in that work stream, and have all of that visibility around you. >> Margo, I'm curious in terms of priorities to move into this space, when you talk about all these customers. How much of it was the digital transformation prerogative? How much of it was, "We just can't move fast enough with the old way and our old tools?" How much of it was competitive threats? Either because we have to respond quickly or how much was it, "My goodness, we have so much institutional knowledge and all these greats heads that we're just not leveraging into this process." What are some of those drivers that are moving this next evolution of, well it's project management now into the work management. >> I think it's a little of everything. Digital is definitely accelerating all of those areas. Tribal knowledge, institutional knowledge, being able to move faster, being able to move more efficiently, again, another great phrase I heard in the keynote today was, "Once we move from efficiency to effectiveness, we really were able to drive better outcomes." That, to me, was a very telling statement, because that's a pain point that I hear from my clients all the time and digital is just the accelerant, because, again, customers today are more knowledgeable than ever. They don't interact in one or two ways, physically or over the phone. They now want to interact in multiple ways, and very often the very first way that they're going to interact with a company is online. It's going to be on a device, and they want that same experience throughout every channel that they're interacting with. What that does is that really puts pressure on a company to be able to design experiences for their customers that are consistent throughout their entire journey with a business. With their business. Otherwise, it takes 30 seconds to lose somebody and have them move on to the next company. >> It's so interesting to me, both the consumerization of IT, which you touched on, right. Our expectation is driven by our interaction with a lot of different applications. >> Absolutely. >> And the other thing is how quickly the gold standard becomes baseline. How quickly we just get used to something new and now we just expect that, not only in that application, but now we expect that, "Doesn't that reapplication have that capability?" >> Oh yeah. >> The competitive thread, the competitive speed in which you have to react is way faster than it ever has been before, and you're competing with my Amazon app. You're competing with the way I interact with Netflix. You're not necessarily competing with how I interact with your competitor down the street. It's a completely different paradigm. >> Absolutely. When you think about companies that have been around for a very long time in the banking industry, is such a great example of this. Millennials don't go into branches. Gen Z does not go into a branch. The need for great digital experiences that that demographic requires, needs to also appeal to a generation that was used to going into branches. You need to be able to balance that, and that puts a lot of pressure on a traditional bank, especially when you see that there are digital banking applications that have no real estate. Everything is digital and you have to be competing with that. It really does put pressure on, so that's why the digital transformation was the accelerant that makes all of the other pain points just that much more magnified. >> I like that. I like thinking about digital transformation in that accelerating version. We're out of time, but I have to ask you one more question. >> Sure. >> We're hearing that there's over 50 customers speaking at this event, which is huge. They gave us some great examples of customers in quotes, as well as presenters during the keynote. I heard a lot of strong qualitative, measurable business outcomes. From the survey that you've recently done, the research, can you give us one or two really strong qualitative, like was a company able to increase revenue by 2X or 3X, or reduce costs by 40 percent? >> Sure. What we saw where a lot of productivity increases and satisfaction increases. What we saw was that productivity increased by three to four times. That you were able to reduce the amount of time you were in email. You were enabled to speed up decision making capabilities. When you thought about how organizations were seeing higher customer satisfaction scores coming back, we saw increases there that were 3 to 4X. And from a little tidbit that we saw just from our own research, is that when we interview information workers about what collaborative tools were most valuable to them, over 70% said collaborative work management tools were the most valuable tools for them in how they leverage collaboration to deliver successful outcomes. >> Margo, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Sure, it was my pleasure. >> Sharing with us about collaborative work management in this emerging market. Excited to hear what comes next. >> Great. >> Thank you for your time. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching the CUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are live from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, we'll be back. (Outro Music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit, North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018, here in Vancouver. Three days wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, Radhesh Balakrishnan, who is the general manager of OpenStack with Red Hat. Radhesh, great to see you. It's been a week since John talked to you, and always good to have you on at the show. >> Great to be on. Good to be here talking about OpenStack at OpenStack Summit. >> Yeah so, look, OpenStack is in the title of your job. I believe, did we have a birthday cake and a party celebrating a certain milestone? >> That is indeed true; so it's the fifth anniversary of that fact that we've had a product, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, on the market. And so, we've been doing a little bit of a look back at how far we have come in the last five years as well as looking ahead at, you know, how does the next three to five years shape as well. >> Yeah, Radhesh, I'm going to date myself and when I think back to, gosh it was 18 years ago, I was working with Linux, and there were kernels all over the place and things like that. And then, I worked for an enterprise storage company and was like, ugh, like keeping up with Chrome.org was a pain in the neck. There came out this thing called Red Hat Advanced Server that was like, oh wait, we can glom onto this, we can support this with our customers, and that eventually turned into RHEL, which, of course, kind of becomes the main standard for how to do Linux. I feel like we have a lot of similarities. >> Radhesh: Absolutely, absolutely. >> In how we did. RHOSP, I believe, is the acronym, so. >> That's exactly right, and we like to have long names. >> Which are very descriptive, but Red Hat OpenStack Platform, fundamentally, to your point brings the same valid proposition that RHEL brought to Linux, to OpenStack, with the twist that, it's not just curated OpenStack, but it's a co-engineered solution of Linux and Cavium and OpenStack. And along the way we learned that, look, it's not just OpenStack and the infrastructure solution. It's done in conjunction with the software-defined storage solution or it's done in conjunction with software-defined networking. Or, fast-forward all the way now, it's being done in conjunction with cloud-native applications running on top of it, right? But regardless, in five years we've been able to grow to address these different demands being placed at infrastructure level, and at the same time evolved to address new-use cases as well; Telco is an example of that. >> Radhesh, let's spend a couple of minutes, though, on the OpenStack Platform itself from Red Hat. Some of the things, guys, that you were bringing to market, I know we talked about, here at the show, fast-forward upgrades, for instance were, they were just introducing, and maybe some other things in the Queens release that you all are bringing forward and have engineered. >> Yeah, thanks for that question, very topical, in the sense that yesterday we launched OSP 13, which is the latest and greatest version based on Queens release. If you look at the innovation packed in that it fundamentally falls in three buckets. One is the bread part that you talked about, whereby, anybody who is standing on OSP 10, which was the prior, long-release lifecycle product, over to 13, how do you kind of get over there in a graceful manner is the first area that we have addressed. The second area is around security, because how do you make sure that OpenStack-based clouds are secure by default, from the day you roll out all the way to until you retire it, right? I don't know if there's going to be a retirement, but that's the intent of all the security enablements that we have in the product as well. And the third one, how do we make sure that containers in OpenStack can come together in a nice manner. >> Yeah, the container piece is something else that, so a lot of effort, here at the show. They announced Kata containers, which, trying to give the security of a VM, lightweight VM. How does Red Hat look at Kata containers? I know Red Hat, you know Linux's containers, you know, very strong position, fill us in on that. >> Yeah, to maybe pull back a little bit and then look at the larger picture of there is the notion of infrastructure or the open infrastructure that you need and OpenStack is a good starting point for that. And then, you overlay on top of that an application deployment management configuration, lifecycle management solution that's the container platform called OpenShift, right. These are the two centers of gravity for the stack. Now, aspects such as Kata containers or Hubbard, which is for again, similar concept of addressing how do you use virtualization in addition to containers to bring some of the value around security et cetera, right? So we are continuing to engage in all these upstream projects, but we'll be careful and methodical in bringing those technologies into our products as we go along. >> Okay, how about Edge is the other kind of major topic that we're having here, I know I've interviewed some Red Hat customers looking at NFV solutions, so some of the big telcos you know specifically that use various pieces. What do you hear from your customers and help us kind of draw that line between the NFV to the Edge. Yeah, so Edge has become the center is kind of the new joke in the sense that, from an NFV perspective, customers have already effectively addressed the CORD errors and the challenges, now it's about how do you scale that and deploy that on a massive scale, right? That's a good problem to have. Now the goodness of virtualization can be brought all the way down to the radio Edge so that a programmable network becomes the reality that a telco or a carrier can get into. So in that context, Edge becomes a series of use cases. You know, it's not just one destination. Another way to say it is there is Edge an objective and there is Edge as a noun. Edge as the objective is a set of technologies that are enabling Edge, Edge networking, right. Edge management, for example, and then Edge as a destination where you have a series of Edge locations starting from CORD error center going all the way to radio. Now, the technology answers for all these are just being figured out right now. So you can say, you know, put crudely, KBM, OpenStack, containers, and Ansible will be all good elements that will come into the picture when it comes to a solution for all these footprints. >> Nice. Radhesh, maybe let's switch over to talk about the summit here, and the people here, filled with people being productive with OpenStack, right? Either looking at it, upgrading it, inheriting it. We talked to people in a bunch of different scenarios Red Hat, huge installed base, and you are good at helping and supporting, and uplifting, and upskilling a set of operators who started with Linux and now have to be responsible for an entire cloud infrastructure. Plus, now, at this conference, we've been talking about containers, we've been talking about open dev, right. That's again broadening the scope of what an operator might have to deal with. How does Red Hat look at that? How are you and your team helping upskill and enhance the role of the operator? >> Yeah, so I think it comes down to, how do we make sure that we are understanding the journey that the operator himself or herself is taking from a career perspective, right, the skill set of evolving from Linux and core automation-related skills to going to being able to understand what does it mean to live with cloud implementation on a day-to-day basis. What does it mean to live with network function virtualization as the way in which new services are going to be deployed. So, our course curriculum has evolved to be able to address all these needs today. That's one dimension, the other dimension is how do we make sure that the product itself is so easy that the journey is getting to a point where the infrastructure is invisible, and the focus is on the application platform on top. So I think we have multiple areas of focus to get to the point where it's so relevant that it's invisible, if that paradox makes sense. That's what we're trying to make happen with OpenStack. >> Radhesh, Red Hat has a very large presence at the show here; we were noting in the keynote the underlying infrastructure didn't get a lot of discussion because it is more mature, and therefore, we can talk about everything like VGPUs and containers, and everything like that. But Red Hat has a lot in the portfolio that helps in some of those underlying pieces. So maybe you can give us some of the highlights there. >> Absolutely, so we aren't looking at OpenStack as the be-all end-all destination for customers, but rather an essential ingredient in the journey to a hybrid cloud. So when you have that lens it becomes natural to you that a portfolio of our offerings, which are either first-party or in conjunction with our partners --we have over 400 partners with whom we have joint solutions as well -- so you naturally take a holistic view and then say, "How do you optimize the experience of ceph plus OpenStack for example." So we were talking about Edge recently, right, in the context of Edge we realize that there is a particular use-case for hyperconverged infrastructure whereby you need to collocate, compute, and store it in a way that the footprint is so small and easy to manage plus you want to have one life-cycle both for OpenStack and ceph right, so to address that we announced, right at hypercloud infrastructure for cloud, as an offering that is co-engineered between ceph team, or our storage team, and the OpenStack team. Right, that's just an example of how, by bringing the rest of the portfolio, we're able to address needs being expressed by our customers today. Or you look forward in terms of use-case, one thing that we are hearing from all our large customers, such as the Amadeus's of the world is, make the experience of OpenShift on OpenStack, easy to deploy and manage, as well as reduce the penalty of running containers on VMs. Because we understand the benefits of security and all of that, but we want to be able to get that without having any penalty of using a virtual infrastructure so that's why we're heavily focused on OpenShift, on OpenStack, as the form-factor for delivering that while continuing to work on things such as Kata containers as well as, you know, Kuryrs, as technology is evolving to make communities much richer as well as the infrastructure management at OpenStack level richer. >> You brought up an interesting point, we spoke a little bit yesterday with John Allessio and Margaret Dawson, about really that kind of multi-cloud world out there, because pieces like Kubernetes and Ansible, aren't just in the data center with this one stack, it's spanning across multiple environments and when we talk to customers, they do cloud, and cloud is multiple things in multiple places and changing all the time. So I'd love to get your viewpoint on what you hear from customers, how Red Hat's helping them across all those environments. >> Absolutely, so the key differentiation we see in being able to provide to our customers is that unlike some of the other providers out there, they're where they are stitching you with a particular private cloud, with the particular public cloud, and then saying, "Hey, this is sort of the equivalent of the AOL walled gardens, if you will, right, that's being created for a particular private and public cloud. What we're saying is fundamentally three things. First is, the foundation of Linux skills from RHEL that you have is going to be what you can build on to innovate for today and tomorrow, that's number one. Secondly, you can invest in infrastructure that is 100% open using OpenStack so that you can use commodity hardware, bring in multiple use-cases which are bleeding it, such as data lags, big data, Apache Spark, or going all the way to cloud-native application, development on top of OpenStack. And then last but not least, when you are embarking on a multi-cloud journey it is important that you're not tied to innovation speed of one particular public cloud provider, or even a private cloud provider, for that matter, so being able to get to a container platform, which is OpenShift, that can run pretty much everywhere, either on PREM or on a public cloud, and give you that single pane of consistency for your application, which is where business and IT alignment is the focus right now, then I think you've got the best of all the worlds. You know, freedom from vendor-lock in, and a future-proof infrastructure and application platform that can take you to where you need to go, right. So pretty excited to be able to deliver on that consistently as of today, as well as in the coming years. >> All right, we just want to give you the final word, for people out there that ... you know, often they get their opinion based on when they first heard of something. OpenStack's been around for a number of years, five years now, with your platform. Give us the takeaway for 2018 here from OpenStack Summit as to how they should be thinking about OpenStack, in that larger picture. >> The key takeaway is that OpenStack is rock-solid, that you can bring into your environment, not just to power your virtual machine infrastructure, but also baremetal infrastructure on which you can bring in containers as well. So if you're thinking about an infrastructure fabric, either to power your telco network or to power your private cloud in its entirety OpenStack is the only place that you need to be looking at and our OpenStack platform from end to end delivers that value proposition. Now the second aspect to think about is, OpenStack is a step in the journey of a hybrid future destination that you can get to. Red Hat not only has the set of surround products and technologies to round-up the solution, but also have the largest partner ecosystem to offer you choice. So what's your excuse from getting to a hybrid cloud today if not tomorrow? >> Well, Radhesh Balakrishnan, thank you for all the updates appreciate catching up with you once again. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Minimam, getting near the end of three days wall-to-wall coverage here in Vancouver, thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its Ecosystem partners. (soft music) >> Hi, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Medias coverage of theCUBE, here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. We've been here, this is now the third day of coverage, John. We've done a couple dozen interviews already. We've got one more day of coverage. We had some kind of perceptions coming in and I have some interesting differing viewpoints as to where we are for OpenStack the project, where this show itself is going. First of all John, give me your impressions overall. Vancouver, your first time here, city I fell in love with last time I came here, and let's get into the show itself, too. >> Sure, sure, I mean the show's a little bit smaller this year than it had been in past years. Some of that is because they pulled some of the technical stuff out last year, or a couple years ago. By being a little bit smaller, and being in a place like Vancouver, I get good energy off of the crowd. The folks we've talked to, the folks that have been going to sessions, have said they've been very good. The people here are practitioners. They are running OpenStack, or about to run OpenStack, or upgrading their OpenStack, or other adjacent technologies. They're real people doing real work. As we talk to folks and sponsors, the conversations have been productive. So, I'd say in general, this kind of a small venue and a beautiful city allows for a really productive community-oriented event, so that's been great. >> Alright, so John come on, on the analysis segment we're not allow to pull any punches. Attendance, absolutely is down. Three years ago when we were here it was around 5500. Mark Collier, on our opening segment, said there was about 2600. But two-year point, I've not talked to a single vendor or attendee here that was like, "Oh boy, nobody's here, "it's not goin' on." Yes, the Expo Hall is way smaller and people flowing through the Expo Hall isn't great all the time, but why is that? Because the people that are here, they're in sessions. They have 40 sessions about Edge Computing. Hot topic, we've talked a bunch about that. Interesting conversations. There is way more in Containers. Containers for more than three years, been a topic conversation. There's so many other sessions of people digging in. The line you've used a couple a time is the people here are people that have mortgages. In a good way, it means these are jobs, these are not them, "Oh, I heard about "this cool new thing, and I'm going to "go check out beautiful Vancouver." Now, yes, we've brought our spouses or significant others, and checking out the environment because yeah, this place is awesome, but there's good energy at the show. There's good technical conversation. Many of the people we've talked to, even if they're not the biggest OpenStack fans, they're like, "But our customers are using this in a lot of different ways." Let's talk about OpenStack. Where is it, where isn't it? What's your take from what you've heard from the customers and the vendors? >> Sure, I definitely think the conversation is warranted. As we came in, from outside the community there was a lot of conversation, even backchannel, like why are you going to OpenStack Summit? What's going on there, is it still alive? Which is kind of a perception of maybe it's an indication of where the marketing is on this project, or where it is on the hype cycle. In terms of where it is and where it isn't, it's built into everything. At this point OpenStack, the infrastructure management, open infrastructure management solution, seems to be mature. Seems to be inside every Telco, every cable company, every transportation company, every bank. People who need private resources and have the smarts and power to do that have leveraged OpenStack now. That seems stable. What was interesting here is, that that doesn't speak to the health overall, and the history of, or the future of the project itself, the foundation, the Summit, I think those are separate questions. You know, the infrastructure and projects seem good. Also here, like we've talked about, this show is not just about OpenStack now. It's about Containers, it's broadening the scope of these people informally known as infrastructure operators, to the application level as well. >> Yeah, if you want to hear a little bit more, some two great interviews we did yesterday. Sean Michael Kerner, who's a journalist. Been here for almost every single one of the OpenStack shows. He's at eWeek, had some really good discussion. He said private cloud, it doesn't exist. Now, he said what does he mean by that? There are companies that are building large scalable cloud with OpenStack but it's like if some of the big China Telecom, big China cloud companies. Oracle and IBM have lots of OpenStack, in what they do, and yes there are, as you mentioned, the telcos are a big used case. We had some Canonical customers talking about Edge as in a used case for a different type of scalability. Lots of nodes but not one massive infrastructure as a service piece. If I talk, kind of the typical enterprise, or definitely going the SNE piece of the market, this is not something that they go and use. They will use services that have OpenStack. It might be part of the ecosystem that they're playing, but people saying, "Oh, I had my VMware environment "and I want to go from virtualization "to private cloud" OpenStack is not usually the first choice, even though Red Hat has some customers that kind of fit into some of the larger sides of that, and we'll be talking to them more about that today. Randy Bias is the other one, take a look. Randy was one of the early, very central to a lot of stuff happening in the Foundation. He's in the networking space now, and he says even though he's not a cheerleader for OpenStack, he's like, "Why am I here? "That's where my customers are." >> Right, right. I mean, I do think it's interesting that public cloud is certainly mentioned. AWS, Google, et cetera, but it's not top of mind for a lot of these folks, and it's mentioned in very different ways depending on, kind of, the players. I think it's very different from last week at Red Hat Summit. Red Hat, with their story, and OpenShift on top of OpenStack, definitely talked public cloud for folks. Then they cross-cloud, hybrid-cloud. I think that was a much different conversation than I've been hearing this week. I think basically, kind of maybe, depends on the approach of the different players in the market, Stu. I know you've been talkin' to different folks about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like, Margaret Dawson at Red Hat helped us talk about how that hybrid-cloud works because here, I hate to say it's, some oh yeah, public cloud, that's too expensive. You're renting, it's always going to be more. It's like, well no, come on, let's understand. There's lot of applications that are there and customers, it's an and message for almost all of them. How does that fit together, I have some critiques as to how this goes together. You brought up another point though John, OpenStack Foundation is more than just OpenStack projects. So, Kata Containers, something that was announced last year, and we're talking about there's Edge, there's a new CI/CD tool, Zuul, which is now fully under the project. Yes, joke of the week, there is no OpenStack, there's only Zuul. There are actually, there's another open-source project named Zuul too, so boy, how many CI/CD tools are out there? We've got two different, unrelated, projects with the same name. John, you look at communities, you look at foundations, if this isn't the core knitting of OpenStack, what is their role vis-a-vis the cloud native and how do they compare to say, the big player in this space is Linux Foundation which includes CNCF. >> That's a good one. I mean, in some sense like all organic things, things are either growing or shrinking. Just growing or dying. On the other hand, in technology, nothing ever truly dies. I think the project seems mature and healthy and it's being used. The Foundation is global in scope and continues to run this. I do wonder about community identity and what it means to be an OpenStack member. It's very community-oriented, but what's at the nut of it here if we're really part of this cloud-native ecosystem. CNCF, you know, it's part of Linux Foundation, all these different foundations, but CNCF, on the other hand, is kind of a grab-bag of technology, so I'm not sure what it means to be a member of CNCF either. I think both of these foundations will continue to go forward with slightly different identities. I think for the community as a whole, the industry as a whole, they are talking and they better be talking, and it's good that they're talking now and working better together. >> Yeah, great discussion we had with Lisa-Marie Namphy who is an OpenStack Ambassador. She holds the meat up in Silicon Valley and when she positions it, it's about cloud-native and its about all these things. So like, Kubernetes is front and center whereas some of the OpenStack people are saying, "Oh no, no, we need to talk more about OpenStack." That's still the dynamic here was, "Oh, we go great together." Well, sometimes thou dost protest too much. Kubranetes doesn't need OpenStack, OpenStack absolutely must be able to play in this Container, cloud-native Kubranetes world. There's lots of other places we can learn about Kubranetes. It is an interesting dynamic that have been sorting out, but it is not a zero-sum game. There's absolutely lots, then we have, I actually was real impressed how many customers we got to speak with on the air this time. Nice with three days of programming, we had a little bit of flexibility, and not just people that were on the keynote stage. Not just people that have been coming for years, but a few of the interviews we had are relatively new. Not somebody that have been on since very early in the alphabet, now we're at queens. >> Right. >> Anything more from the customers or that Container, Kubranetes dynamic that you want to cover? >> Sure, well I mean just that, you know, Containers at least, Containers are everywhere here. So, I think that kind of question has been resolved in some sense. It was a little more contentious last year than this year. I'm actually more bullish on OpenStack as a utility project, after this week, than before. I think I can constantly look people in the eye and say that. The interesting thing for me though, coming from Silicon Valley, is you're so used to thinking about VCs and growth, and new startups, and where's the cutting edge that it's kind of hard to talk about this, maybe this open source business model where the customer basis is finite. It's not growing at 100% a year. Sometimes the press has a hard time covering that. Analysts have a hard time covering that. And if you wanted to give advice to somebody to get into OpenStack, I'm not sure who should if they're not in it already, there's definitely defined use cases, but I think maybe those people have already self-identified. >> Alright, so yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention is yeah. Big thank you to our sponsors to help get us here. The OpenStack Foundation, really supportive of us for years. Six years of us covering it. Our headline sponsor, Red Hat, had some great customers. Talked about this piece, and kind of we talk about it's practically Red Hat month on theCUBE for John with Red Hat Summit and OpenStack. Canonical, Contron, Nuage Networks, all helping us to be able to bring this content to you. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage in the past as well as where we'll be. Hit John Troyer, J. Troyer, on Twitter or myself, Stu, on Twitter if you ever have any questions, people we should be talking to, viewpoints, whether you agree or disagree with what we're talking about. Big thanks to all of our crew here. Thank you to the wonderful people of Vancouver for being so welcoming of this event and of all of us. Check out all the interviews. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> The sun has come out, but we're still talking about a lot of the cloud here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program the 2018 Super User Award winner, George Mihaiescu, who's the senior cloud architect with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research or OICR. First of all, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you so much for joining us. So cancer research, obviously is, one of the things we talk about is how can technology really help us at a global standpoint, help people. So, tell us a little about the organization first, before we get into the tech of it? >> So OICR is the largest cancer research institution in Canada, and is funded by government of Ontario. Located in Toronto, we support about 1,700 researchers, trainees and clinician staff. It's focused entirely on cancer research, it's located in a hub of cancer research in downtown Toronto, with Princess Margaret Hospital, Sick Kids Hospital, Mount Sinai, very, very powerful research centers, and OICR basically interconnects all these research centers and tries to bring together and to advance cancer research in the province, in Canada and globally. >> That's fantastic George. So with that, sketch out for us a little bit your role, kind of the purview that you have, the scope of what you cover. >> So I was hired four years ago by OICR to build and design cloud environment, based on a research grant that was awarded to a number of principal investigators in Canada to build this cloud computing infrastructure that can be used by cancer researchers to do large-scale analysis. What happens with cancer, because the variety of limitations happening in cancer patients, researchers found that they cannot just analyze a few samples and draw a conclusion, because the conclusion wouldn't be actually valid. So they needed to do large-scale research, and the ICGC, which is International Cancer Genome Consortium, an organization that's made of 17 countries that are donating, collecting and analyzing data from cancer patients, okay, they decided to put together all this data and to align it uniformly using the same algorithm and then analyze it using the same workflows, in order to actually draw conclusion that's valid across multiple data sets. They are focusing on the 50 most common types of cancer that affect most people in this world, and for each type of cancer, at least two countries provide and collect data. So for brain cancer, let's say we have data sets from two countries, for melanoma, for skin, and this basically gives you better confidence that the conclusion you draw is valid, and then the more pieces of the puzzle you throw on the table, the easier to see the big picture that's this cancer. >> You know George, I mean, I'm a former academic, and you know, the more data you get right, the more infrastructure you're going to have to have. I'm just reading off the announcement, 2,600 cores, 18 terabytes of RAM, 7.3 petabytes of storage, right, that's a lot of data, and it's a lot of... accessed by a lot of different researchers. When you came in, was the decision to use OpenStack already made, or did you make that decision, and how was the cloud architected in that way? >> The decision was basically made to use open source. We wanted basically to spend the money on capacity, on hardware, on research and not on licensing and support. >> John: Good use of everybody's tax dollars. >> Exactly, so you cannot do that if you have to spend money for paying licensing, then you probably have only half of the capacity that you could. So that means less large analysis, and longer it takes, and more costly. So Ceph for storing the data sets and OpenStack for infrastructure as a service offering was a no-brainer. My specialty was in OpenStack and Ceph, I started OpenStack seven years ago, so I was hired to design and build, and I had a chance to actually do alignment, and invitation calling for some of the data sets, so I was able to monitor the kind of stress that this workflows put on the system, so when I design it, I knew what is important, and what to focus on. So it's a cloud environment, it's customized for cancer research. We have very good ratio of RAM per CPU, we have very large local discs for the VM, for the virtual machines to be able to download very large data sets. We built it so if one compute node fails, you only impact a few workflows running there, you don't impact single small points of failures. Another tuning that we applied to the system too. >> George, can walk us through a little bit of the stack? What do you use, do you build your own OpenStack, or do you get it from someone? >> So basically, we use community hardware, we just high-density chassis, currently from Super Micro, Ubuntu for the operating system, no licensing there, OpenStack from the VM packages. We focus more on stability, scalability and support costs, internal support costs, because it's just myself and I have a colleague Gerard Baker, who's a cloud engineer, and you have to support all this environment, so we try to focus on the features that are most useful to our users, as well as less strain on our time and support resources. >> I mean that's, let's talk about the scalability right? You said the team is you and a colleague. >> George: Yes. >> But mostly, right. And you know, in the olden days, right, you would be taking care of maybe a handful of machines, and maybe some disk arrays in the lab. Now you're basically servicing an entire infrastructure for all of Canada, right? At how many universities? >> Well basically, it's global, so we have 40 research projects from four continents. So we have from Australia, from Israel, from China, from Europe, US, Canada. So approved cancer researchers that can access the data open up an account with us, and they get a quota, and they start their virtual machines, they download the data sets from the extra API of Ceph to their VMS, and they do analysis and we charge them for the time used, and because the use, everything is open source, and we don't pay any licensing fees, we are able to, and we don't run for profit, we charge them just what it costs us to be able to replenish the hardware when it fails. >> Nice, nice. And these are actually the very large machines, right? Because you have to have huge, thick data sets, you've got big data sets you have to compare all at once. >> Yeah, an average bandwidth of a file that has the normal DNA of the patient, and they need also the tumor DNA from the biopsy, an average whole genome sequence is about 150 gigabytes. So they need at least 300 gigabytes, and depending on the analysis, if they find mutations, then the output is usually five, 10 gigabytes, so much smaller. For other workflows, you have to actually align the data, so you input 150 gigabytes and the output is 150 or a bit more with metadata. And so nevertheless, you need very large storage for the virtual machines, and these are virtual machines that run very hard, in terms of you cannot do CPU over subscription, you cannot do memory over subscription, when you have a workflow that runs for four days, hundred percent CPU. So is different than other web scale environments, where you have website was running at 10%, or you can do 10 to one subscription, and then you go much cheaper or different solutions. Here you have to only provide what you have physically. >> John: That's great. >> George, you've said you participated in the OpenStack community for about seven years now. >> George: Yes. >> What kind of, do you actually contribute code, what pieces are you active in the community? >> Yeah, so I'm not a developer. My background is in networking, system administration and security, but I was involved in OpenStack since the beginning, before it was a foundation. I went to the first OpenStack public conference in Boston seven years ago, at the International Intercontinental Hotel and over time I was involved in discussions from the RAC channel, mailing list support, reporting backs. Even recently we had very interesting packet affected as well. The cloud package that is supposed to resize the disk of the VM as it boots, it was not using more than two terabytes because it was a bug, okay. So we reported this, and Scott Moffat, who's the maintainer of the cloud utils package, worked on the bug, and two days later, we had a fix, and they built a package, it's in the latest cloud Ubuntu image, and that happen, everybody else is going to use the same virtual Ubuntu package, so somebody who now has larger than two terabytes VMs, when they boot, they'll be able to resize and use the entire disk. And that's just an example of how with open source we can achieve things that would take much longer in commercial distribution, where even if you pay, doesn't necessarily mean that the response... >> Sure. Also George, any lessons learned? You've been with us a long time, right, and like Ceph. One thing we noticed today in the keynote, is actually a lot of the storage networking and compute wasn't really talked, those projects were maybe down focused a bit, as they talked about all the connectivity to everything else. So, I mean any lessons, so you... My point is, the infrastructure is stable of OpenStack, but any lessons learned along the journey? >> I think the lessons are that you can definitely build very affordable and useful and scalable infrastructure, but you have to get your expectations right. We only use from the open standard project that we consider are stable enough, so we can support them confidently without spending, like if a project adds 5% value to your offering, but eats 80% of your time debugging and trying to get it working, and doesn't have packages and missing documentation and so on, that's maybe not a good fit for your environment if you don't have the manpower to. And if it's not absolutely needed. Another very important lesson is that you have to really stay up to date, like go to the conferences, read the emails from the mailing list, be active in the community, because the OpenStack meetups in Toronto for 2018, we present there, we talk to other members. In these seven years I read tens of thousands of emails, so I learn from other users experiences, I try to help where I can. You have to be involved with the developers, I know the Ceph core developers, Sage and other people. So, you can't do this just by staying on the side and looking, you have to be involved. >> Good, George what are you looking for next from this community? You talked about the stability, are there pieces that you're hoping reach that maturity threshold for yourselves, or new functionalities that you're looking for down the road? >> I think what we want to provide to our researchers, 'cause they don't run web scale applications, so their needs are a little bit different. We want to add Magnum to our environment, to allow them deploy Kubernetes cluster easily. We want to add Octavia to expose the services, even though they don't run many web services, but you have to find a way to expose them when they run them. Maybe, Trove, database as a service, we'll see if we can deploy it safely and if it's stable enough. Anything that OpenStack comes up with, we basically look, is it useful, is it stable, can you do it, and we try it. >> George, last thing. Your group is the Super User of the Year. Can you just walk us through that journey, what led to the nomination, what does it mean to your team to win? >> I think we are a bit surprised, because we are a very small team, and our scale is not as big as T-Mobile or the other members, but I think it shows that again, for a big company to be able to deploy OpenStack at scale and make it work, it's maybe not very surprising 'cause yes, they have the resources, they have a lot of manpower and a lot of... But for a small institution or organization, or small company to be able to do it, without involving a vendor, without involving extra costs, I think that's the thing that was appreciated by the community and by the OpenStack Foundation, and yeah, we are pretty excited to have won it. >> All right, George, let me give you the final word, as somebody that's been involved with the community for a while. What would you say to people if they're, you know, still maybe looking from the outside or played with it a little bit. What tips would you give? >> I think we are living proof that it can be done, and if you wait until things are perfect, then they will never be, okay. Even Google has services in beta, Amazon has services in beta. You have to install OpenStack, it's much more performant and stable than when I started with OpenStack, where there was just a few projects, but definitely they will get help from the community, and the documentation's much better. Just go and do it, you won't regret it. >> George, as we know, software will eventually work, hardware will eventually fail. >> Absolutely. >> So, George Mihaiescu, congratulations to OICR on the Super User of the Year award, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we're getting towards the end of day one of three days of wall to wall coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage here in theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier and I'm with Frank Pulambo with Cisco, on my left Margaret Anderson with SAP and Gary Gauba with CenturyLink. Some significant news announcing, in conjunction with Sapphire is the relationship between you guys around a significant cloud and cloud computing deal. Margaret, congratulations. This is significant because customers want more flexibility. They want to have a cloud native, they want to have the flexibility of a data center. Frank, talk about the deal from a Cisco perspective and the relationship to the context of this deal. >> John, we're super excited to be part of it, and especially with CenturyLink and a vendor like SAP. Really, our role in it is to help our customers run on print, run in the cloud and really our infrastructure products need to provide the simplicity to performance and the security for them to do that. >> Margaret, talk about the deal specifics. What does the deal entail? >> Well, it's a unique deal, because CenturyLink was already on of our partners for the HANA Enterprise cloud business. Then when the Cisco team came along and said, "You know what? "If we put our gear into the CenturyLink data centers "and power the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, "that would be a tremendous win for everybody." And so, we're very excited about that. >> Gary, I find this deal interesting because you have the engine of the SAP, you have the network and all the benefits that Cisco brings to the table. You're dealing with the implementation and manage to serve the customers. What's the important takeaway from this announcement? >> To me, I think if you take a step back, as we're siting down with some of the top SAP execs, and Chuck from Cisco and our CEO, Glen Post. We're talking, "Okay, how do we leverage "our joint assets together? "How do we create more value for our customers?" If you look at today, every customer the number one priority is digital transformation. The cloud obviously is part of that equation, right. The other bigger priority is, "Okay, how do I monetize this data "in this new connected world?" You're looking at 1.8 trillion connected objects by the year 2020, which will be generating 43 zetabytes of data. But let me quiz you out, how many zeros in a zetabyte? >> I think I knew this answer going in, since I got it wrong on our previous take. So, 12, it's 21. >> Maybe. (panel laughs) >> Okay. >> It's a lot. >> All right, I'm going to say 21 too. >> All right. >> Well, just a lot. It's a lot of data, a lot of devices. >> Yeah, I got to go with 21. It sounds like a good number. >> These are my cheat sheets, right. Anyway, they had-- >> Too many zeros. >> Too many zeros. >> Margaret: Yeah, too many zeros. >> And a significant, it's getting worse, the data tsunami is coming, it's already happening. >> It's happening. You think about the amount of data which is being generated. What we want to do is we want to provide highly secure, automated and in this case SAP certified private cloud platform from CenturyLink. Where we can really have the customers laser focus on the business they do. We help them with the deep platform which can help them monetize their data, help them drive their top line, increase the bottom line. Mitigate the rest in a fast manner and a highly secure manner as well, I'll talk more about that. >> Gary, you bring up a good point, and I want to get Frank involved in this and next I want to double down on the data comment. Because you factor in even the IoT, Internet of Things growth. It's going to be even more significant. Then, the security question pops up, because as the data centers move to the cloud and the hybrid and or pure cloud, the perimeter is gone. Now, the perimeter is how we managed security in the past. But now with the perimeter-less environments security is critical. How does this customer feel secure? And if you guys comment on the security aspect of how this relationship will roll out and the non-disruptive nature that you guys bring to the table? Because that's what customers want to know. >> John, from a Cisco perspective and Gary mentioned, when we talk about the digital transformation. And that's the buzzword in the industry, but most customers are looking for a business outcome. Really, to get that business outcome they have to make a business decision probably based off the technology like SAP HANA. This is mission critical information. At Cisco that's why we're in tune for what the network can do, because it's going to provide security at a lot of layers. Whether it's at the edge, whether it's at the aggregation point or all the way back to the data center, or into the cloud. The security at multi-layers and multiple places. With the bad actors out there that's the way you need to implement it. So you can start to bring this stuff together and give the customers the confidence that, "Hey, this transactionous data is going to be secure." >> Gary, the outcome that we're talking about is no hacks, no breaches, secure? >> Yeah, well it is highly secure, but you got to always be prepared. If you think about it, CenturyLink, we have 550,000 miles of fiber. Once we complete the level three acquisition, we'll add another 200,000 miles of fiber. You're talking about 750,000 miles of fiber touching 100 countries over six continents and 35 person of the global internet traffic going to our network. Once the level three acquisition is complete, we'll be the second largest network and we're critical to countries' infrastructure. There's a deep focus on cyber threats, things we do to avoid the bad actors getting in. >> I think that network intelligence too is going to give you more data to fight the actors as well. >> Absolutely, but to your earlier point, we truly, the situation gets compounded with this connected world revolution. When you are connecting these 1.8 trillion objects, you got to ensure each of these objects is secure. This is where the intersection of cyber security and IoT kicks in, and that's right in our wheel house. >> Don't forget latency, a word that's reering its head. More importantly it has people move across with IoT and across the cloud. Margaret, talk about the role that the HANA Enterprise Cloud plays in all of this. Is it the glue, is it the connecting tissue? What's the role of the HANA Cloud platform? HANA Enterprise Cloud, sorry. >> Yeah, I was just going to say. From a HANA Cloud perspective, it's a private managed cloud. We do an awful lot of work from an SAP perspective to make sure that the customer's environment is totally secure, but is also accessible all of the time for the customer. Because today, most businesses run 24/7 and they run all around the globe. When some team is working and this is their prime business day, later in the US business day, it's prime business time out in Asia, it's prime business time in Europe. You need a cloud that's always available, always up and it's secure. You can guarantee that no other data is leaking into it or out of it. That's really important for our customers, because if you think about it, we have customers today that are SAP customers running in the HANA Enterprise Cloud that are competitors to each other. You have to make sure that you can guarantee that there's not going to be any, data is going to sneak out the back door here or something is going to get in the back door over there. We have a fairly large security team at SAP. We have very stringent standards at SAP. Every time we form partnership with somebody, we say, "Here are our standards. "If you can't comply to these, "we can't do business with you as a partner." From our perspective, it's very important to know that anybody that we work with takes security as serious as we do. >> Well, certainly these guys are big partners, they're known companies, Cisco and CenturyLink. This is big. Talk about the unified, how you guys are going to help with the unified competing architecture that Cisco has. Because you guys have mastered this in the data center and you guys have a lot of experience with now the cloud. What's your vision on how this is going to play out from a Cisco standpoint? >> As Margaret described, their multi-tenancy in the SAP environment is a pillar for them, they have to make that work for the customer and that's something we've been driving at Cisco for a long time. When it comes to the computer platform, which we call UCS, we've been really the leader in converge infrastructure platforms for a long time with UCS and most recently now we're the number one platform for SAT with UCS in the converge environment. It's those attributes that have enabled us to really get inserted there to provide the customer value. >> You get the packet level of the network transformations, >> Yeah, John. >> So picked very nicely. >> You're more of a geek than I know. You're pretty good. >> Well, we follow Looking at the 5G network transformation you're seeing a lot of end-to-end architectures really winning out. I think why I'm excited about this new is essentially it's a partnership that's providing an need-to-end solution. Gary you are in the front line, you're the manager of service. Talk about the impact that you see this deal, because now you have to turn up services and have that customer touch point. >> If you look at how we're pulling together the solution. Obviously if look on the compute side we're using the UCS and on the switches there's the Cisco networking switches and then you're looking at the-- >> Nexus, Gary, Nexus. >> Nexus, all right. >> I didn't get to that. >> I wanted to make sure Frank is paying attention. (panel laughs) Then you're looking at the net app storage and the VMWare for virtualization. Then another key element we're using is Winamix, which integrates with the UCS and is pretty much integrating all the APIs for all these components. Obviously the powerful in memory HANA engine. All these things are pulled together to create a platform which we are providing to the customers, so that they can really focus on what they are good at, their business and they're delivering a powerful rally to their customers. What it does is, with the UCS and the Winamix and some of the other elements, we can onboard customers within this. What used to take us 32, 33 days now we can do that within 9 to 11 days which is a big big plus when a customer approaches us. >> It's a huge shape in the business model first of all, the client delivery on your end and service is significant. There's a lot of automation involved. In fact I was talking to a venture capitalist recently here in Silicon Valley and we were talking about network transformation, digital transformation and they invest in infrastructure. He goes, "Oh no, not a lot of new companies are coming out "with an infrastructure making hardware just as the cloud." He says plumbers are turning into machinists kind of indicating that a lot of automation is happening at the lower end of the stack and the action is happening higher up in the stack to your point. Things are happening faster in terms of level of services. >> Absolutely and I think another thing which we also bring to the table is that the deep essence expartice if you look at some of the mission critical applications whether it is SVOHANA, suite on HANA the ECC or the entire BI suite enterprise portal and the list goes on right. And that becomes critical so we can get them up and running very quickly and give us all in one on to the country. >> A significant endorsement with you, make a comment? >> Am just saying when you're talking about the visibility of the SAP platform this is something the customers thought about right. Its going to get to all levels of the organization and really they're making critical business decisions off of the SAP HANA platform its got to be there. I mean and that's obviously our challenge to meet that for customers. >> Margaret, HANA Enterprise cloud is the engine and you guys are providing significant on it. How do you see this collaboration playing out for customers? What should they expect from the collaboration of Cisco and CenturyLink? >> Well what we want the customer to have is a seamless experience. We tell them upfront that we have this partnership and that we're going to work together but we really want to keep them focused on the value that they get from running their applications. Because, think about it this way, when you get in the car and you turn on the engine, you want to drive away right? You know the engine is there, you know that the engine, depending on how much horse power you've invested in, depending on what kind of make and model, you get different things from it. But you know it's going to always be there, it's always going to work. Then if you want to enhance the engine, shall we say you want to know that the right people have the skillset for those enhancements. When customers come into the HANA Enterprise Cloud, sometimes they start off with the migration. One of the things you're doing is you're kind of sunsetting all the old stuff and you're helping them move on to our HANA platforms whether is S4, whether it's Suite on HANA, whether it's our VI suite, you're helping the customer get started. But that's the start, because after that there's all this other wonderful stuff that we develop at SAP being that we're a software house, like IoT and our Leonardo that's being announced in Sapphire and we want customers to be ready to take advantage of that. We tell the customers, "You need to move away from all the "old stuff because it's not reliable any more, "we want to move you into a different level "of reliability so that you're ready "to scale up your organization. "And so that you can do more business." And in the end the customer says, "Okay, I need to know the cloud is there for me, "I don't want to have to be thinking about it everyday. "What I want to be thinking about is "how can I do new business, how can I open up offices "in other parts of the world, "how can I transact business globally?" They're not really thinking about, okay, I need more stuff. If they need to expand we call up our partners and we say, Okay the customer wants five more terabits or something, 10 more terabits of whatever, and they just want it to happen. They don't want to have really long projects, they just want it to be there for them, they want to know that they can scale out and scale up. >> One thing just to add, I think Richard mentioned, it just becomes critical that the redundancy is there. This is where the MetroDR capabilities which we bring to the table. That becomes very powerful and if you look at what we have done is, we have created 10 parts, in the US you have those in Santa Clara, Dallas, Chicago and the Dc Sterling area. Then Singapore and the London market. The MetroDr capabilities are available in all the three markets. Which is a very critical element that the customers know. >> This is, the recovery certainly is really a big deal because you can think about after effect, you've got to think about the upfront in the service. You cannot just say, "Oh I forgot that thing about DR." >> The thing is, you get into a lot more preventive maintenance because this is where there are dedicated teams which are doing nothing. Once the bill processes down you get them up and running and how do you ensure we are able to predict before anything? >> I think this news is significant, one the size of the players involved but two, it speaks to the transformation that's happening in the market place. Customers are moving to a new way to operate their business and at the end of the day you guys are making it easier to run some of the core software that can scale. But it comes down to, how do you migrate and scale without having any kind rip and replace or lift and shift. Lift and shift, I would have said is codeword for rip and replace, but customers are on an evolution journey, there is no silver bullet in the cloud in my opinion, some we've covered that with you. You're thoughts on this, do you guys see it the same way? Customers aren't just going to move tomorrow, they're going to want an evolutionary approach, but they're going to want to have a scale. >> It's a journey, oftentimes customers say to us, what's the safest thing to do first? What pieces of my environment can I take into the cloud and then gradually over time, whether it's a few months, whether it's six months increments. It depends on how the customer is running their business. Can I keep moving it in there so I can keep getting value and at some point his is all done, goes away and now I'm fully transformed into the cloud. We see some customers who can do really quick projects, they're very agile and they're very nimble and so we can migrate them in and get them going and running very quickly. We've got other customers who are more risk adverse. They want to proceed a little slowly. We can do all of the flavors, depending on what they want to do and so when we first talk to customers about the HANA enterprise cloud, we talk about the options. We talk about what they can do, we make recommendations from an SAP perspective as to what we think their speed could be and then we help them get into the cloud. Because they might get left behind if they don't make that move. >> The modernization trend is key, people want to be modern, the apps are being written differently, the more the relevance is more towards agile and speed. I think I like this announcement you've got the reliability that Cisco would move in packets around the data center rock solid, the software, core engine on Enterprise cloud and scale the manage service level that can give you the flexibility to run whatever you want. I think that's interesting, did I get that right? >> I think the other thing is, it's not like we've been working on this thing for a week, we've bene working together on this solution for years now that you've got to make it right. There's different stages along the way. >> What are some of those key stages that a customer should know about? >> We were just talking about HANA Enterprise Cloud, could you run HANA in the cloud now? No, that's faded completely, it's already done you certainly can't. Customers can make decisions now to say, "Hey am I going to start on prime, am I going to start "in the cloud?" And go though that whole kind of process of what's the best thing. We're providing that flexibility but this is something we've been working on for a while and I think, when you look at the other solutions out there of customers making the right evaluation, you want to go with a CenturyLink SAP and Cisco to say, "Hey, this is the right muscle, "the right process behind us." >> This is amazing, you guys are a great deal, again Frank, senior vice president Cisco and Gary who is the chief relationship officer and president of the Advanced Solution Group and Margaret. All the senior executives, the principals here congratulation on this news, we'll wait to see how it plays out. >> Margaret: Thank you for having us today. >> Special keep coverage of Sapphire 2017, I'm John Furrier. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)