>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover. Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Everybody welcome back to the Cube's continuous coverage of Discover 2020. That virtual experience. The Cube has been been virtualized really excited to have Marissa Freeman here. She's the chief brand officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And, of course, he joined by Jim Jackson. Who's the CMO of HP? Guys, Great to see you Wish we were face to face. But thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Great to be here. Hope that you and your family and your friends are safe and well, >>and we're back at you both. Jim, let me start with you. So, uh, this kind of got dumped on you with this pandemic. Different mindset. You have to do a bit flip to goto virtual you talk about some of the things that you focused in on some of the things you want to keep. And some of the things you knew you couldn't. And you had to do things differently. >>Yeah, You know, we pretty much had to rethink everything about this event platforms, how we thought about messaging, how we thought about content. Um audience acquisition demos, really everything. And for us, it really all boiled down to having a vision. And our vision was to bring the Discover experience, all that energy, the excitement that you get the in person event. We wanted to bring that to all of our customers and our partners and our team members around the world. So for us, it wasn't about virtualized discover. It was about bringing the Discover experience to a 12 inch screen. In many cases for our customers and our partners and our team members, I think another thing that was really eye opening for us. Waas thinking of opening up the aperture and thinking, Hey, we can now take this and drive. This is the true global events and we can reach people all over the world, reach customers and partners that can't come to discover because they can't physically come to the event. That was a couple of things that really we had to put a lot of thought into, and it was really exciting for us. I think one other thing is now customers, and how we think about their experience at the event became very, very important for us because you know, at an in person event, it's three days, and we can you know, there's a lot of things people can do, but you have three days of content, and then people move on for us. Now. Our customers might go through three weeks or three months, and we really needed to think about that experience in a very simple, seamless, easy way for them so that they could to consume the content digitally in a way that made the most sense for them. So a lot of new thinking for us. But we're really excited about the opportunities that virtual brings in that digital brings >>now immerse. So I gotta ask you so No, no meter boards at least know for a physical meter boards, you know, How did you think about continuing that branding in a virtual event? >>Well, it's, uh, it's really a beautiful experience when you look at the the intro of the platform that we're on. It's beautifully branded all the way throughout. The branding is really coming through, though, in the content, um, and in the people, So we always say, Jim and I always say every year, Gosh, if we could just have every estimate on every prospect come to discover they would see our brand come to life they would feel are our purpose. They would understand, just with a new and different energized and fully charged a company, we are they would get to meet Antonio and Security. And Liz and Jennifer Income are honored and Jim and feel for themselves, uh, the power of the company. And now everyone can So the brand really is coming to life through the people. I appreciate that you love the the beautiful graphics, and we work really hard. Um, I'm all of that stuff, Sure, but the real branding is in the content itself. So >>now, Jim asses. Well, you were kind of lucky in the sense that, you know, this show wasn't in March or April. You had some time. So to see what others were doing. And you saw early on when this thing first hit, there were some the missteps there, There's there, still are even. But So what do you What do you tell people that is really unique about the Discover virtual experience? >>Yeah, I think a couple things and you're right. We did have a little more runway, and that was to our advantage. But we feel like we've taken full advantage of it. I think the first is coming back to that global experience that I talked about. So we're delivering this on 10 different with translating into 10 different languages, and that makes it easy for people to consume our key content around the world. We're truly delivering our content on time zones that are very appropriate, or our customers and our partners again, all around the world, in different Geos, we're bringing in our geo MVS where they are now having geo lounges, um, specific addresses and other things locally that really enables us to have that local experience. But derive it is making it part of a global event. I think another thing, Dave and you've been Teoh Discover. But you've seen that amazing Discover Expo Hall that we have out there with, you know, literally thousands of people and lots of demos. We had to figure out How do we bring that to a a ah, digital or a virtual experience? And I think the teams have done just an amazing job here. So what we did is we have 61 demos, and this is part of really 150 sessions. But if you just think of demos, we're going to deliver these live over 1717 100 times the first week. That's really, really powerful. This is >>live, meaning >>somebody from HP, a subject matter expert, talking to our customers, answering questions in real time. So that's unique. I think another thing that we're doing is we're not stopping after the first week. The first week is going to be extremely powerful and we can't wait for it. And but, you know, we're gonna extend, if you will, the value we're gonna double click and follow on Wave focused on SMB. Focus on software and containers for more of a developer, audience, Cloud services and other things like that, as well as data and storage. And then finally, I'll say, You know, we're really excited about the great speakers that we have Marissa >>talks >>about. You know, Antonio Qwerty, Irv etcetera. But we've got some great outside speakers as well. Lewis Hamilton from Mercedes Formula 16 time Formula One champion Simone Biles, uh, who's Olympian and world champion, 25 medals. We've got Steve Kerr and they're going to be part of a panel talking about performing under pressure, and we're all doing that. But it's gonna be again a great story we've got, um, John Chambers is going to be joining Antonio and talking about what great companies do during a crisis and how they prepare to come out of this kind of a situation to deliver better solutions to their customers. Soledad O Brien, who is moderating, are women leaders in I t session, and this is one of our most powerful sessions. In fact, Marissa is part of that as well. So we're really excited about this, the amount of things that we were able to bring together. And of course, we also have our CEO Summit and our Global Partner Summit happening at the same time. So we've got a lot of things that we've been able to coordinate all of this and really think about the experience from a digital in a virtual expect perspective to make it great for our customers and our partners and our attendees. A >>lot of rich content layers. Yeah. So what if you could talk about that here here to help Sort of the cultural aspects of that. What it means to your customers, your clients, your employees and your just broader community. >>Well, you know, Dave one when covert first hit the United States, we We had a lot of social media out there, a lot of digital media out there. And even before it came to the United States, when Italy and China were really suffering, we gathered as a team and audited every piece of content that we had pulled all back in. I met daily Jim and I and Jennifer temples. Teams met daily to talk about what is our tone of voice? What are we saying? How are we helping our customers get through? This time we knew how difficult it was for us with business continuity, remote workforce, we needed to help our customers and let them know that we were at the ready right now to help. So we chose to speak through the voices of our leaders. Antonio did several blocks and videos, and we rallied and redid the website completely to be all about over response and how we had many solutions for our cost. Most implement immediately from $2 billion financing Teoh setting up remote workforces, too, doing WiFi in parking lots and turning ships into hospitals. It ran the gamut, Um, and so it was really important to us that we conveyed a message of here to help. Ultimately, we ended up doing a television commercial. Antonio's voice. It was a personal letter from Antonio to his fellows, business leaders and engineers and said, Look, we know what you're going through. We're going through it ourselves. We're here to help. Here's how and it's been really motivating and successful and joy and driving people to find out more about what HP could do to help. So >>I would just add >>to what >>Murtha said. She outlined it really well. But we have some great customer examples and great customer stories as well. They're very emotional talking about how customers really needed our help and our combination of technology. People really came together to enable them to get their businesses up and running, or to address a pain point or problem for their audiences. The first point you know, there's the concept of here to help with the recovery and then here to help with the transformation as well as they look to the future. >>So how are you guys thinking about just sort of growth marketing strategies, branding strategies not only for HP but in the spirit of helping customers in this post isolation economy. Merson. Maybe you could start start us off. >>Well, we we've been talking about how this crisis has brought the future forward, nor our doorsteps. So where our customers may have been on a digital transformation path and they were accelerating it. Now there's there's an impetus to do it right now. So whether you're in recovery, um, or whether you're one of the customers for whom this crisis created a surge of demand and you needed to scale way up, these are the moments of transformation that our company is. Is there to help you with Jim? Do you want to build on that? >>Now? I think you hit the highlights there, Marissa, you know, again for us, I think we wanted to just be authentic and true to who we are as a company. And, you know, our purpose is to advance the way people live and work. And I think we live that during this time and will continue to live that as we go forward. It it's really core to who we are. And what we saw is that many of our customers really valued the fact that when they needed us the most, we were there for them and we were there for them all around the world. And, um, you know, and our goal is to continue to do that and continue to delight them and to be the best transformation partner for the future. >>I mean, culturally, we obviously re observe all this stuff, but culturally, you kind of be kind of had a heads down approach to all of this. I mean, there was there was not a hint of ambulance chasing in what you got. How you guys approach this. So I mean, I think I think culturally that here to help message it seemed like a very strong roots in citizenship. Um, you know, And then, of course, with social uprising, respect for individuals that seemed to shine through. I don't know. I know versus deliberate or that's just again cultural. Maybe >>it's it's all of the above. You can't change who you are and we need at Hewlett Packard Enterprise are people who care about other people our purpose. As Jim said, Our purpose is to advance the way people live in or every one of us every day gets up and goes to work or goes to work at home at HP to do just that. That is who we are. And so it would be an authentic for I think, true to this crisis in any other way. >>I think I wanna make an observation and see if you guys to respond. So we always talk about technology disruptions. Mercy you mentioned about, you know, the future was put forward. I'm sure you've seen the wrecking ball. You know, the folks in the building, the executives very complacent. A digital transformation not in my day. And in the 19 wrecking bald covert 19 survey, you probably saw that Who's who's leading your digital transformation CEO CTO or Covert 19. But it's really now. I mean, if you're not digital, you're not doing business. So but my observation is that it seems like despite all this technology that global disruptions are going to probably have a bigger impact in this coming decade, whether it's pandemics of social upheaval, of natural disasters, etcetera. But technology can play a huge role in supporting us through those things. Jim, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that comment. >>I mean, I think it's it's a great question, you know, if you think about it, What what happened with the macro economy Cove? It It's been a catalyst for, I think, everybody to understand that they needed to really accelerate their digital transformation. And, more importantly, they need a partner who can help them on that journey as well. I mean, if you just look at what we're talking about here >>with >>this event, right, most of h p e. And, um, you know, our >>competitors to >>cancel their virtual events >>are canceled their physical >>events rather, and they're moving now to a digital event in any way. This is going to be the new normal for us, right? So I think as we go >>forward, we're gonna >>see this only continue to accelerate. And for us, you know, our edge to cloud platform as a service strategy plays really well to helping customers accelerate that digital transformation. And, you know, it just kind of comes back to what Marissa said. You know, here to help is very very HP in terms of it's authentic and it's here. We want to be here to help our customers in their biggest hour of need. And we're doing everything we can and will continue to do that for the future as well. >>Versus, you know, having done many, many discovers we've noticed over the last several years you guys made a much bigger emphasis on the sort of post discover which a lot of organizations don't have a big physical event, and it's sort of on to the next thing. And how do you see the post from a branding standpoint? Messaging, etcetera. How do you see taking advantage of that from a virtual standpoint? And what have you learned? >>Well, we've been on our own digital transformation journey, and, you know, through Jim's leadership, we have built a pretty serious digital engine, which allows us to have a personal relationship with the customer, meet them where they are on their terms. For example, with this platform, it's even using your now because we we actually will know what content would see what sessions, what demos someone interested in. Maybe they put it, you know, on their schedule, and then didn't get to do it. So we'll go back to them later and say, Hey, we saw that you wanted to do this. It's still here. Why don't you come and have a look and then watch to that We do sort of the Netflix engine, the been newsworthy playlist of If you like that, you like this. And if you like this, you like that and we bring them through the breadcrumbs all the way through. And it's a self directed journey, but we're there to help. And that is really the true power of digital is to have that interaction, that conversation with the customer and where they want to be and with what they want to learn and read about. We'll see. >>Yeah, And everything, of course, is instrumented gym. We'll give you the last word and you were involved, as was Marissa in sort of the new HP. The new branding and the whole purpose of that was really to get Hewlett Packard enterprise focus and really back to sort of the roots of innovation. And I wonder if you could comment on from a strategy standpoint, innovation and from a competitive standpoint, you know where you're at over the last several years, we've obviously transformed as a company and where you see your competitive posture going forward. >>Yeah, you know, for us, um, we're so excited about this event because this is a great opportunity for us to showcase progress against our edge to cloud platform as a service strategy, and we roll this out last year. It's differentiated. It's unique in the marketplace. It demonstrates the transformation happening across as a service and software at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So we are a company in transition, aligned to what we feel, our companies, our customers, biggest pain points. And when you look at some of the acquisitions that we've made some of the organic investments that we've done, we're just very well positioned to deliver against, you know, some very unique pain points that our customers have. Plus, I think another thing is, at the end of the day, really, what our customers are saying is, help me take all this data and translate that data into insight and that insight into action. You're going to hear us talk about the age of insight and how we're really again unifying across edge the cloud to deliver that for our customers. Stone. We're excited for this event because you're going to hear a significant industry revealed, focused around cloud services around software and really a lot of the things that we've been talking about. And we're going to show a lot of progress as we continue on that journey. And then, you know, Murtha mentioned digital. I'm really excited about digital because that enables us to understand and learn and help our customers and deliver a better experience for them. And then finally, you know, huge opportunity for us. Two. Take this message out globally, you know? Ah, great opportunity for people all around the world who maybe haven't heard from HP for a while to see our message, to feel the new energy to see who we are to see. Uh, you know that we're doing some very interesting things that we can help them. So we're excited. There's a lot of energy right now inside the company, and, uh, we're ready to kick it off and get rolling here. >>Well, it's quite amazing. I mean, we started off 2020 with the gut punch, but the reality is, is that 20 twenties? A lot different than 20 pens. If it weren't for technology and companies like HP here to help center, you know, we would not be in such such good shape and good in quotes. But think about it. The technology is really helping his power through this. So Jim Morrison, Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Thank you, HB. Everything you're doing for customers in the community. Really? Thank >>you for having us. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. >>Great to see you guys to and keep it right there. Everybody, this is Dave Volante for the Cube. Our continuous coverage of hpe discover virtual experience in 2020. We're right back right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, (upbeat music) covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Coverage of HP Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier Host of theCUBES. I'm here in the Palo Alto Studios for the remote interviews, were all sheltering in place. And we have two amazing guests on a great topic Women Leaders in Technology Strategy For Growth. Rashmi Kumar, Senior Vice Chief Information Officer at HPE and Marissa Freeman, Chief Brand Officer of HPE. Welcome to theCUBE and looking forward to this great conversation. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, John. >> Before we jump into it, can you guys explain your roles at HPE as The Chief Information Officer role is pretty well defined but it's changing these days Rashmi and as a Brand Officer with the remote workforce, Marissa, these are changing times. Can you guys take a minute to explain your role? Rashmi we'll start with you. >> Yeah, so my organization and my role is in the middle of digital transformation which has become even more critical in these days of landscape level. My team is involved in end-to-end process transformation for HPE as well as key part of the pivot for as a service and running the operations as smoothly or as well as making all 60,000 employee 20,000 partner move to work from home. We are engaged in this from later part of January, so to say then it first started in China. So the organization is supercritical for the success of HPE to keep our operations running as well as all the employees engaged in their work. >> Awesome. Marissa, your role? >> I am the Chief Brand Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and my responsibility is to help tell our story to customers, prospects, analysts and press and beat the drum for our employees. So as we pivot our company and our strategy, we work with Antonio to ensure that everyone understands why HPE and how we can be your best transformation partner. >> One of the exciting things that's coming out of this new reality is that the role of work is changing as the workforce, workplace, workloads, workflows, variety of topics, but one of them is the personnel piece and you guys have Women Leaders In Technology Program is really phenomenal. Can you talk about the Mission and Vision and what are the goals? Women in Technology something this important and leadership as well? Could you guys explain the mission and vision of Women Leaders and Technology? >> Yeah, sure. So the Women Leaders in Technology established by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to connect with our customers at our annual conference who shared our common belief in inclusion and diversity, specifically advancing gender equality and empowering women with the support of the men at the workforce as well. The event is a collaborative forum for women and men allies who are committed to drive, learn and leverage best practices and technology innovations to make a difference in their businesses and communities. Our goal is to unite influential leaders from around the world with a charter to increase, attract and retain diverse talent by showcasing great contributions made by women, while their careers in STEMplusC, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. And I see that all our leaderships are very passionate about making sure that we get the right level of engagement, both from women and men allies to be able to advance this course at the company and with customer says, well. >> Marissa, on the leadership side we've talked about in the past you and I and you're passionate about the women leadership piece. What's your take on this? >> Well, we know that when women leaders are at a company, the company is more financially successful. We know that women lead differently and bring a unique point of view to the table. And so diversity and inclusion generally speaking, is so very important to the success of a company to the happiness and retention of their employees. So, yes, we we focus a lot on that. And I think, importantly, we think about reward, recruit and report. So it's not just something diversity inclusion is not something that we wish for an HP it's something that we action and we work towards, and it's a journey. We weren't we aren't there yet, but we are on path and it's something that we report on internally to each other, we understand exactly where we are. We recruit with purpose and intention of widening the aperture and bringing in people who are different from each other to add to the fabric of our company, and then we also reward our leaders for doing the right thing and being inclusive and hiring diverse talents. So it is very much part of our culture and our performance. >> I always ask the question because I'm male, and I wanted to rush me brought it up as well. How are the HPE male leaders impacting enhancing and participating in this strategy because it takes everyone involvement to make women in leadership successful and beyond, this is super important. Can you share your thoughts on how that's going? >> So as we form our teams as well as these specific, an employee resource group to be able to focus on younger women or women technologists. We do it alongside our men allies, at some point, technology is so critical digitalization is such an hyper-growth mode. If we need to be successful with our products and services in the marketplace, we need to have equal participation from talent from across the bodies of men and women and irrespective if I'm a woman leader or a man leader, I need to be able to tap into that talent to be able to kind of bring our products and services to our markets or run our operations well in the in the company so we we really when we strive to fulfill the causes Marissa mentioned, from a growth perspective, we are equal partner in making this a priority for the company to ensure we get women and both men and smartest men and women from across technology areas to come and work with us. >> Marissa I want to ask you before I go back to Rashmi about the whole workforce and workplace and technology, from a customer perspective, how are you guys seeing their workplace changing from a business perspective? Because you and I, again, talk about about experiences. And that's something that you really believe in having great experiences at the physical events. Now you're doing the virtual event, but your customers are also living a changing workforce and they need to equip themselves with with this how do you see the big picture there because that's a big part of you guys aligning with the customers and I won't say change the experience but align with the new expectations. These are are new things that are happening in real time. >> Part of running the brand is also understanding culture and what's around the corner. And I think that our company does that by nature anyway, because we are a technology company and we have to think about where our customers are going, where they're heading, skate to where the puck is going and meet them there. So translate approximately 50% of workers will probably not go back to the office full time. So we have a whole suite of products and services that we have been talking about very much in recent times that help everyone work from home. So many of the offerings that we have, for example, during COVID, many of our customers couldn't or wouldn't send their employees into the data centers or into their offices to work on their technology. We had ourselves service people able to help them remotely and in some cases actually show up 25,000 people around the globe there to help. In fact, that was our campaign. And it still is. And it's the theme of HPE Discover, HPE is here to help. So as your workplace changes as you go through the recovery, as you're returned to work as you continue your digital transformation, HPE is here to help with very actionable, instantaneous solutions to help with COVID and beyond. >> We've been following HPE, I've been following HP for many many years and decades and I know and for the folks watching that you guys have a really robust internal intranet and system that you guys have built out and you're really on the leading edge as well. Your own HP, equipment and technology and software always been resilient from my perspective. So Rashmi, I got to ask you, this disruption we're seeing hasn't been forecast. It's not like disaster and recovery scenarios. A hurricane is not a flood or a hurricane Sandy, like we saw in the past, this was a new kind of disruption vector not seen on cybersecurity radars. This is new, so at the end of the day, it's still a disruption. It's a challenging time but there is an opportunity for CxOs out there to look at the projects and saying, where are we exposed? Where are the gaps, and I think we're seeing new app development. We're seeing new kinds of technology projects, kind of being tweaked a little bit, some kind of being sunsetted. It's an opportunity for CxOs to really double down on this. I want to get your take on how you see the challenge being met by the customers and the tech opportunities that they can lead through this. >> Absolutely. So anything this pandemic has taught us that digitalization is our way forward, we have been engaged in the transformation for HPE on a journey for last Couple of years of entire quote to cash process as well as our supply chain and fulfillment process, entire experience for our customers has been changing as well as for our employees. So as our customers look at this pandemic and think about what they need to invest in, is the for the employees work from anywhere anytime and be available to work for and we have technologies, which enables that at the same time. We are right in the middle of providing the best ERP solutions best quote to cash type solutions and our infrastructure and capabilities power that if you take our Edge, Aruba solution, we were in the middle of powering up all the makeshift hospitals as well as the cruise ships which were transitioned as hospital to be able to provide them in internet for connectivity, if you look at the initiatives we had here in the South Bay area and on providing WiFi in the parking lot for schools so that students could complete there studies. So he has this kind of end-to-end solutions around these technologies, which could create resiliency in our customers and provide them product and solution to be able to continue their operations seamlessly even during these times. >> It's interesting, I've always loved the future of work kind of scenario and discussions. But they all kind of felt a little bit too fuzzy around just collaboration, future of work, which is cool. I'm not against that. But when you look at what we're living now, what you were just talking about is it's not its work, place, work force, work, loads, workflows. It's not just collaboration. That's just one aspect of it. I think we're seeing now this new reality is that it's going to impact the entire end-to-end as you point out. Other areas that you see are opportunities for customers. Because, we've heard DevOps has always been on the fringe of kind of the tech community, always leading edge in the cloud for the past 10 years. But now you got operations, IT operations, network operations, all these other systems that were kind of on a nice, path before disrupted. This is not just work, collaboration. It's every What's your thoughts? >> Yes, yeah, great point. So if you look at collaboration, collaboration is kind of the facade versus everything that happens behind the scenes. So if you look at the TV show, what you're seeing is the end result, but there was a huge production effort behind it, to be able to get you that content. And if you look at a particular transaction today from ERP perspective, or a customer buying a product from you, this is the facade there's a lot of stuff that goes behind it for providing our employees the right tools, keeping our networks connected, so that employees can use those to successfully as well as securely. So this time has taught us to quickly pivot and bring in some new capabilities from technology and digital capability perspective in every area of the business, starting from the facade, which is the collaboration tool, at the same time ability to run your business through these technology capabilities. And do it very securely providing connectivity from our data center to manufacturing factories, location to now employees home to our partners and as well as clouds. And that has created a very complex ecosystem of connected universe. For every company. I feel. We are a global company. So we were a little lucky in getting early warnings in January and preparing to come to where we were coming and I'm so proud of the IT team here. We did a major release of our transformation program which we call NDIT on 13th 14th 15th March right before we started sheltering in place. And there were thousands of people working globally to bring this capability for our ERP systems and it went flawlessly. And since then we have done four or five releases and the organization has been able to carry through it. >> Preparedness and resiliency, great features Marissa, back to this brand experience in your role the facade or collaboration of the user experience is the front end of the back end. So you don't have a real hyper-digital or hyper-virtual is my word for it environment where people's businesses and the business impact is going to be severely impacted because people can leave a brand. So if I'm a customer of yours, I'm like, look, I need to get busy reinventing and getting my apps meeting the expectations of the customer. So you got to bring the experience piece of it as well as at enablement. This is a new expectation radically more accelerated than it was in the past? What's your thoughts? >> Well, Antonio a couple of years ago said, the action is at the edge and the cloud is an experience, not a destination. So in order to create those very meaningful and differentiated experiences for their customers, our customers need to have one single platform that's open and secure, so that they can innovate from end to end every workflow from beginning to end so that their experiences they deliver their customers are intuitive, intelligent, differentiated. So that is what we have been working for this entire last few years is to provide that cloud experience to our customers wherever their apps and data live so that they can have the freedom to innovate across the entire estate and do it securely. That is the only way you're going to really provide these truly differentiated and insightful experiences at the edge, which is where the action is. >> Yeah, you guys are really putting out some really insight there. And I would just say that this highlights what I've always believed as making the innovation strategy concept, not just a cliche, but you if you don't have an innovation strategy with tech and people, it's going to be exposed and that table stakes are there because of the of the marketplace. If you don't deliver, the stakes are really high. And this brings back to the women leaders in IT, you guys are doing, how do people get involved? I mean, what's the take on this? You guys doing a great job. What's the process is that the adjoin you guys recruit? I mean, how does someone who's watching or participating in HPE Discover Virtual get involved? >> Let me do a quick commercial because it is HPE discover and the best way to get involved with Women Leaders in Technology is to join up register for HPE discover and join us on July 1st, Managing The Workplace in a New Normal, July 8th, Navigating Change the Mindset for Success in Turbulent Times. And the first one Leading Through Recovery with Rashmi right here. And I believe that's on the first Friday, so coming up next week. So those are three ways in to at least be able to get involved with what we're doing. But we also do throughout the year events with our customers in multiple offices around the globe, where we get together as leaders, we talk about leadership we recruit, then there's all of the other things that we support. And Rashmi maybe want to talk about that from Grace Hopper and all the way through some of the other wonderful organizations that our Women Leaders in Technology are supportive of and engaged in. Rashmi? >> Yes, absolutely. So First of all our global women leader ERG as well as there are a couple other ERGs within business unit which works diligently to create engagement for men, allies and women employees. So, my last travel before this pandemic hit and children place came in was for International Women's Day celebration in Sofia, Bulgaria. And what we did as women leaders of the company is created a competition for the location to host that event. There was an enormous amount of energy when I was in Sofia, with guest speakers with executive speakers and our main allies who were speaking at the event as well. And it was webcasted across the globe for all HPE employees to experience. There were watch parties there was enormous amount of energy going into the event. Similarly, when we participate in Grace Hopper, it's like a carnival for us, we have our boots, we do interviews, Marissa hosted a great event at Disney for our college students who were attending Grace Hopper to come experience, what HPE is all about and how dedicated we are to the cause of women and STEM and young women to showcase our leaders there and what you can be once you are at HPE. So a lot of such events also happen at various locations and as being women, we create everything fun, everything more engaging, and everybody wants to participate in these events. >> Well, certainly know you got to do it virtually >> And I think importantly John, I don't want to overlook that the Allyship. The man at HPE are very, very much a part of this and very supportive of everything that we do. It's not just all women, it is a lot of women but our men are definitely part of the part of the whole fabric of it, including Grace Hopper. >> And it's always great talent coming out of schools and seeing a lot of jobs out there right now there's new job so this brings up the shift. You look at cybersecurity and all cross in tech, it's the aperture of computer science has changed. You don't have to be a coder, you can do a lot of different things. This brings up the culture question I really love to get you guys personal opinions on this. For folks watching wants to see the new kind of Instagram picture of HPE if they want to look inside. How would you describe the culture of HPE these days? Obviously, the innovation you guys are super impressive. What's it like inside? What's it like to work there? How would you describe the culture of HPE? >> Well, it's a wonderful place to work and our culture is the primary reason why it is so, it started with Bill and Dave. And were about community. They were not about building a conglomerate. They were about building a community and that has just stayed with us throughout. Innovation is critical to us being bold, being inclusive. These are our values, but they're not just words on a page, they are actually our values, and we live them and our belief system and then they were put down on a page so that we can all look at them, recognize them, celebrate them, and it starts at the very top. Antonio has been with the company 26 years now I think it is. He is a true HPE, died in the role, Engineer himself. And we all feel really good about being here and being with each other. We have a mission and a purpose and that is to advance the way people live and work. That is why every HPE teammate gets up in the morning. That is what we do for a living. And it comes through in everything that we do. >> Rashmi? >> Yeah, I would like to add there is what Bill and Dave created for us, and the good things that is retained by HPE, as well as our ability to change and pivot. So, as you talked about John, we are an innovation company. We are a huge product and research based company. Now with as a service, though, we are also looking at how do we understand more outside in what our customers are looking for? What kind of experiences when they interact with our products, and how do we really understand it and drive alignment early on with our customers to be able to put these as a service products out to them as well as quickly learn and pivot again as needed. So the points that Marissa mentioned about take risk, be bold don't be afraid to be afraid to fail, as well as customer focus, relentless journey to ensure our customers are getting what they need, has has been kind of a new HPE culture manifesto, which is really embodied by Antonio and the leadership team which is then taken by our employees. So while we are keeping what's good from Dave Vellente, we are also augmenting it based on the changing needs of our customers and the industry that we are in where we cannot be stagnant forever. >> I think carrying that mission and spirit of Bill and Dave is great. In fact, John Chamberlin notices on his on the keynote here at Virtual Experience. He said to me privately that he has mad respect for HPE going back, he was hiring all the executives that from Bill and Dave's cloth there and brought them into Cisco now he's out helping companies and I think that is really about the community and the respect for the Individual citizenship. Those are values that I think, stand the test of time. I think that's great that you guys are keeping that going and that's awesome. And we appreciate the community support with theCUBE and collaborate. So thank you very much for that. And don't forget the innovation. I mean, Marissa go back 30 minutes you guys first coined hybrid cloud. I think that was like happening now innovation is still there. You got to be tech leaders. >> Better is yet to come Greenlake, we love our Greenlake. >> Great stuff. Thank you guys so much for this conversation. I really it was so awesome. Great insight there. Congratulations on the Women Leaders in Technology. Final question for you both complete the sentence. Women Leaders in Technology is a competitive advantage to your clients because, blank. >> Because it's one more way that they can partner with HPE to improve the way their customers live ans more. >> Rashmi, complete the sentence Women Leaders and Tech is a competitive advantage to your customers and clients because? >> We can collaborate to bring better products and services for their customers together. >> Awesome. Thank you so much, and congratulations on the Women in Technology, we'll be following it will be if you got to do the virtual events, let us know. We got the remote studio, we always love collaborating and of course, we got women Wednesdays on theCUBE every week on our site. And thanks for again, all your support and this is a great experience. Thanks for spending the time appreciate Marissa and Rashmi. >> Thank you, stay well >> Thank you. >> Stay well. >> Okay, HPE Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE HPE Discover Virtual Experience for bringing you coverage and great interviews from thought leaders, experts, community practitioners and customers. I'm John Furrier, for theCUBE Thanks for watching. (ambient music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin and we are coming to you from AWS re:Invent 19. I'm with Stu Miniman. This is our second day of two sets of theCube coverage. And we are pleased to welcome a couple of guests from Citrix. To my left is Matt Lull Managing Director of Global Strategic Alliances and we have Marissa Schmidt, Senior Director of Product Management. Guys, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thank you. >> So here we are with 65,000 or so of our close friends with AWS. Matt you have been managing the AWS Citrix relationship, I think you said for about 10 years. >> I have. >> Give our audience an overview of what Citrix and AWS are doing and the evolution of this partnership. >> Well 10 years ago when we started Cloud was brand new, Amazon's re:Invent conference hadn't even started yet and nothing Citrix made worked on Amazon. And now we are pleased to say that everything Citrix makes works on Amazon. And we actually have hundreds of customers and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of users using Citrix on AWS everyday. And the pace of innovation in that last decade has accelerated. We've done more net new product innovation in the last 10 years than in the previous 20 before that. It's been a fast-paced environment. >> Well and a strong and growing partnership. I remember the first year I came to the show it was 2013 and I think Citrix had one of the largest booths at the conference there. You keep adding to that. Marissa, let's not bury the lead any further. There is some hard news dropped today. Help understand, help us share the new news today. >> Marissa: Yeah, absolutely. There are many announcements. It started yesterday actually at the keynote with the Outpost announcement. The we have the ADC validation with Outpost and the only ADC in that validation. And then we also have the ingress routing that also was announced yesterday and our solution integration into that. Both blogs went out yesterday. And then we had a press release this morning that talked about our quick starts with AWS quick start for Citrix ADC as well as the rest of the instant site that now we support. >> Okay, so I'd love to dig in a little bit on the Outpost if we can. >> Yes, sure. >> My background is networking too. So people have been geeking out trying to understand this. You know, some of the key, you know, the secret sauce inside of Outpost is that nitro chip from Annapurna help really extend what AWS is doing in the public Cloud to a customer's data center. Reminds me a little bit of what NetWorker has been doing for customer applications for quite a long time. So how do those pieces fit together? >> So for AWS right, the focus is for some of the customers that has more applications-centric that is on-prem, that has regulatory compliance requirements and for those customers that really want to do that hybrid with on-prem and Cloud, this is the best approach for them that they can use the on-prem solution with Outpost but put the VPX, the NetScaler ADC VPX on Outpost and provide that solution for hybrid customers that want to have the enterprise grade solutions on-prem and Cloud. >> I look at Outpost as more strategic than just a conversation or on a new piece of hardware and some new nitro hyper visors, right? This is Amazon's first move into hybrid Cloud which we've been doing since the beginning. And when you look at where Citrix ADC is already deployed, it is a leading piece of technology in the corporate data center in the DMZ, protecting the corporate assets. So now we have a situation where we've been helping Amazon with hybrid for a long time. Now they're moving their infrastructure onto premise and we're starting to combine our on-premise footprint with their on-premise footprint and its really actually an interesting time and place to be working not just with Citrix ADC, which is first, but in the future with things like Citrix SD-WAN, which is the other major piece of our networking portfolio. >> So when theCube was at Citrix energy, I think that was back in, I'm going to guess April, in the Spring. So many Cube shows, I lose track. We, Keith Jones and I were there for several days, got to talk with a lot of your customers, your leaders all about how ultimately the workforce, five generations in the workforce today, which kind of surprised me, but how everybody is distributed and that's how people need to work. Similar with how organizations are now hybrid multicloud. There's all of these technologies that need to work together in order to enable the worker to deliver what that business needs to drive differentiation. Talk to us a little bit about some of the parallels there in terms of what Citrix delivers to the workspace and how what you're doing with Amazon is going to allow businesses, whether its a retail organization or a bank to enable, ultimately, at the end of the day those workers to get stuff done wherever they are, so they can access applications whether they're on-prem or in the Cloud. >> So the workspace conversation is an interesting one and you used a word, hybrid multicloud, which you don't necessarily hear in Amazon circles a lot, they are the largest of the Clouds, right. But that said, our job is to deliver every application known to mankind, and that is those that are built on-premise by IT and those that are running as SaaS from any provider and there are companies that make important applications that also have Clouds. We tie all that together, right. So with the Citrix networking, the ability to terminate the end user's SSL session, we can see all the traffic, regardless of where it originated. We can tell what that user is doing in real time and we can apply new and innovative solutions like things that Amazon is a leader in around machine learning and artificial intelligence at the user level to say, is what this user is doing today normal for that particular user. Not for some other user, normal for you, and are you behaving unusually, cause if you're behaving unusually maybe there's something we need to click down in on. So we're looking really, really closely at how the world is evolving to move to where SaaS is happening. IT is losing control of the application servers and they're moving out into SaaS land. Many of them are on Amazon, some of them are elsewhere, and all of them have to be governed. And that's where we're really investing heavily and redefining what is Citrix for the future. >> Now so Matt, it's always interesting when people look at this space they're like, oh Cloud is changing everything, you know, Amazon is taking over the world. So I mentioned Citrix had the biggest booth back in 2013. There was a little product called AWS WorkSpaces that was announced and everybody was like, well, it was nice that Citrix had a long relationship with Amazon. I guess we won't be seeing them next year. Well, here we are 2019, strong partnership. Help us understand how that dynamic works out and how, you know, you worked through some of these coopetition environments. >> That's a fun one. So we run into coopetition across the board. We have some in the networking arena with core load-balancing services that exist in all the Cloud platforms. And we have a variety of startups in the Daas land. And when I look at WorkSpaces, it's a quality product for a simple user that needs it now and needs a small quantity. Some of the larger enterprises are looking at it for simplicity but when I look at what it's capable of doing and what it's total costs are versus what happens when we can deploy the 30-year mature solution from Citrix on Amazon, we still find a large percentage of the customers needs what Citrix delivers. So we have actually probably more Citrix WorkSpaces users on Amazon than on any other Cloud. It's depending on how you meter it. It's a little hard to say with total accuracy but it's been supported on Amazon for longer than anywhere else. And we know customers appreciate the combination of the two and we look at what AWS is able to provide from a platform perspective, you know, with a built-in high availability, built-in global reach, built-in global performance. Those things are all valuable to our customers and they deliver a great platform at a reasonable price. So we support that. At the same time, we're moving out of that market, that pixel remote presentation market, well, we're not moving out of it, we're moving beyond it. It is still a core part of our portfolio but our investments going forward are in delivering those applications into the intelligent workspace regardless of where they originate. Many of those user sessions won't actually be virtualized at all. They'll be controlled, governed, and secured with Citrix Workspace and Citrix networking technology but won't be dependent on things like DaaS, which is what you get out of those services like AWS WorkSpaces. >> Marissa, when I talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges they have is, you know, the changing portfolio of applications that they're dealing with. It's getting more complicated. It's gone from monolith to microservices, everything is distributed, you know, it's not just my data that's in the public Cloud, Edge now becomes a larger piece of the discussion. These are the types of solutions that Citrix has been helping a long time. What is different now about the application landscape and how Citrix is working with customers than it might have been a few years ago. >> What's different now is definitely the more modernization of the apps, right? The digital transformation was talked about in all the different keynotes yesterday and today. And as we do that we need to help our customers adapt with the applications that they do have whether it's the legacy apps or the more adaptable, flexible apps that can go to the Cloud with Kubernetes and that container environment but with Citrix solutions you can actually do that with Citrix ADC being in a container environment so we can provide that east west traffic with Citrix CPX while we also have the north south traffic for the legacy 3-tier web apps that's always going to be there for the majority of the customers, right. But what makes Citrix unique is that we do have single code base for Citrix ADC that can run in the traditional apps as well as now the east west traffic for all more modernized applications which is critical. And for Citrix overall, it's 3 pillars, right? One is the end user experience that's always got to be stellar. And number two is giving the customer a choice of which environment they want to work with. And lastly, it's providing security. And with the Citrix overall solution where Workspace from an end user perspective and the apps closer to the applications with the Citrix ADC together provides that end-to-end solution for our customers. >> Marissa, can you give us an example of, I presume as the Senior Director of Product Management you're in the field a lot, you talk with customers. Some of the things that AWS showed yesterday on stage, we saw Cerner talking about their healthcare transformation, we saw Goldman Sachs CEO go from D.J. to talking about how they have completely transformed their consumer finance business. What's an example that you think, when you're out in the field, really articulates the value that Citrix delivers enabling a business to truly transform to that? Regardless of the application infrastructure they're able to harness the data, extract insight from it and use it as a business differentiator. >> Yeah, so for our customers it really resonates, the Cerner one and Goldman Sachs because they're, you know, we deal with a lot of our customers that way, Especially in the healthcare industry. Whether they decide to go some of it in the Cloud, you still want to, what's important for them is that compliance, that security, that data protection. It still matters whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud environment. And so in that case, this is where our Citrix solution, as they decide to take some work loads on-prem or on the Clouds, they can still use this same feature-rich capabilities that Citrix ADC or the Workspace have to connect all their applications in one place and still get the initiatives that they need for their company to get the best our-wide as well as not having to do the day-to-day data center changes. Now they can be flexible by putting that in the Cloud. >> So if you look at how customers have been coming across Citrix and which portion of the customer organizations we've historically spoken to, you know, 20 years ago we talked to the desktop team and we were a solution by getting client server applications on the desktops, which was a big problem 20 years ago. It's not as much of a problem today but even as you move to browser-based environments, security and governance are more important than ever, right? We see it every day. Another company got hacked. Another situation happened. There was another consumer privacy breach. We see the rules and regulations coming out in a number of countries about how data has to be protected and companies become liable if there's problems. So, increasingly we're seeing companies come to Citrix and saying we need help with governance compliance and security. And increasingly we're marrying the unique networking capabilities that we have with the unique workspace or application desktop virtualization capabilities to create new and improved solutions that really kind of change the game for how end users get access to applications, remove the need to know passwords, which limits the ability to actually lose them, and simplify the process of making sure your data is where you believe it should be. >> Matt, you know, such a deep partnership, I'm curious, there's so many announcements that Amazon talked about, is there anything that's either jumped out at you or places beyond? We talked about some of the Outpost specific things but I think about machine learning is exciting a lot of people. People want to be able to plug into these environments either natively or through hybrid environments. Where does that play into your discussions with customers? >> So when we look at how Citrix is transforming what we do there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes, we are a substantial Amazon customer. We are one of their largest. So, you can take for granted that we're consuming a lot of their cutting edge capabilities as we build our cutting edge capabilities. We're not necessarily directly exposing something like Amazon machine learning as a button in our environment but when you look at what they're doing with end user computing applications, they're moving into a world where, they mentioned in the keynote yesterday that one of their fastest growing services is Amazon Connect. One of our best use cases is for task workers and call centers. You might imagine that there's going to be a future there that we should be looking at. And so I do see the things that they're innovating becoming relevant to us in ways that are more than just about the infrastructure as a way to power servers, storage, and networking for Citrix environments but also becoming content, rich content, both Amazon-owned rich content and their SaaS ecosystem that's built on Amazon, all those startups they talked about this morning, all of them running in our Citrix Workspace. It requires us to have the right networking solutions in place, the right identify trust solutions in place and make it really easy for customers to consume as a service instead of a pile of bits that they get to construct themselves. >> Well Matt and Marissa, we thank you for joining us on theCUBE today at re:Invent telling us what's new with Citrix and what's new with the evolution of the partnership. Thanks for your time. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from AWS re:Invest 19. We'll be right back.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin in Colorado at convo go 19 I'm assuming a man and stew and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube and Alon my who hasn't visited us in awhile, but he's kind of a big deal is the CEO of Commonwealth's on Jay Mirchandani. Sanjay, welcome back. >>Thank you Lisa. Good to be a good too. >>So exciting. This is the fourth go. I love the name go and lots of stuff. So you have come onboard to combo in about about nine months ago and man, are you making some changes? You know the analysts said combo, you gotta, you gotta upgrade your sales force, you gotta expand your marketing, you've gotta shift gears and really expand your market share. And we've seen what Combolt is doing in all three of those areas along with some pretty big announcements in the last couple of days. Talk to us about this, this first nine months here. And really maybe even, I would start with the cultural change that you have brought to a company that's been run by the Bob hammer for 20 years >>right now. Firstly, I'm very fortunate to be here because the company is, it has incredible foundation. The bones of the company, if you would, are solid a great balance sheet, um, over 800 patents, no debt, cash on the books, profitable. It's just, you know, and great, great technology wrapped around some amazing people. So when I look at the, when I look at it and you go, this is this, this is an incredible asset. My role really when I came in when I transitioned with Bob and Al for a period of time was really about making sure we didn't break anything, making sure that we kept the momentum, understood the culture, took time to talk to customers, talk to partners, talk to our employees, shareholders and understand, um, what are the focus areas that we needed to go after. And the last nine months has been about, you know, a lot of learning on my part. >>But also a very receptive group of employees and partners saying, you know, we'll give you a chance. Let's get this done, let's see where it goes. So that's where the nine months had been around and it's been a, it's been fabulous. >> So that's actually one of the things I've heard from your team is you've come in loud and clear with the voice of the CIO. Having been a CIO yourself, that's something you want them to focus on. Everybody, we always talk about listening to the customers, but you know, the role of the CIO has changed an awful lot. You know, since you first became a CIO, clouds change everything in a Nicholas CARF said for a while, does it even matter? Right. Um, so you know, Ferguson side a little bit as to how you want to make sure you're delivering for what the CIO is need. >>Not necessarily what, you know, they were saying that they want. No, it's fair. And, and as much as the role of the CIO has evolved, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. They still, you know, the guardians of the data, the, you know, the compliance and everything else and of course more than anything else, the productivity and the competitive edge that businesses need, technology and business, regardless of which business you're in, are interested intrinsically tied. Your delivery of anything you do today is tied to technology. If you, if you want to be future proof. So if anything, the role of the CIO has only been elevated. I'm, I say this playfully, but I do say it. I said, if I wasn't running this great company that I am now, I'd love to be the CIO of a dysfunctional it organization at a large company because there's so much you can do. >>Many of the decisions that we would spend an inordinate amount of time on the infrastructure, the application, how do you bind it, what are the protocols? Which data center, how much, who runs it, which partner? I kind of dissipated if you're not going to the cloud in some form of fashion, come on, right? If you're not building cloud native applications, come on. If you're not using dev ops, come on. So you've got all this time back now where you're not hopefully having conversations that don't matter and you're really go and building new things. So I think it matters. That's great stuff. And absolutely we agree. We've talked many times on the cube. It definitely actually matters more than today. If anything. Not only did they need to be responsive to the business, but oftentimes it can be one of those drivers for innovation in change in the business. >>Um, I love something you said in your keynote, you said data is at the center of everything you do because right. Most CEO's, hopefully infrastructure is something they might have under their purview, but it's not what drives the business. It's the data, it's the application, it's their customers that matters. So to speak a little bit to the role of data has changed a lot. You know, you and I worked for that big storage company where we even didn't talk as much about storage back about data back in the day. Today it's the life blood of the company. It's everything like that. >> And you know that that is one of the reasons I'm at Convolt because for the past 30 years I've been in technology, I've done app side, I've done infrastructure side, I've done a mix of all of those. And the more I think of an dev ops, I've done that. >>The more I think about it. If I were, if I was sitting with a CEO today and having a conversation about what matters in technology, who's maybe a CEO is not a technologist, I would say data matters. I would say the asset of your company is the data. It's gone from something that you used to manage down, compress deduplicate and hope it went away and you wanted to minimize its footprint to something where you want to maximize its value. And those aren't just words. I mean that is what makes great companies, great companies today, the way they use data to their competitive advantage. So this is, this is exactly the mindset where the mindset, the Guppy do to convo because all we do, all we do is help our customers be data ready. As I was saying this morning, that's, I love that term because that kind of encapsulates it for me. So that's, that's where my head's at. >> Yeah. I mean, we've always said that the thing that defines a company that's gone through debt, that digital transformation is that data drives the business. >>It, it absolutely should, but we're, when you talk with customers that have, whether it's a big university, a research university, healthcare organization or whatever type of organization that has multiple departments, so much data that potentially has a tremendous amount of value that they actually aren't managing well or can't get visibility out of. When you say we want to help you be data ready, w what does that mean to them? >>It means a few things. You summed it up perfectly. That's the world, the customer, the chaos that customers could live in because fundamentally, Lisa, if I had over-simplified applications, we're intrinsically to date data that you use for tied intrinsically to the application to build. So if you had an SAP system, your data was very tightly tied to that. If an Oracle ERP system, it was very tight detail yet it'll supply chain system. You were tied to that. And once data side of getting released from the abstracted, from the system that was built on, you've got a little bit of chaos, then you had to figure out who had access, where, how, how are you replicating and how are you backing it up over the policies, your plan compliance. And then it became chaos. And what I say to customers being data ready, saying do you have a strategy and a capability, more importantly to protect, manage, control and use that information in the way you wish to for competitive advantage. >>Just protecting it is like a life insurance policy, controlling, managing and using it as where you get the value out of it. Right? And so as companies become more data driven, this is where we help them. So the whole concept of the show, what we're sort of bringing to market is the fact that we can help our customers be data ready. And some of the technologies we've talked about today lend themselves to exactly that. Alright. So Sanjay, one of the questions many of us had coming into the show is how exactly Hedvig your, your first acquisition was going to play out. You made a comment in your, your opening keynote this morning that we need to rethink primary and secondary storage. So some of us read the tea leaves and be like, well, you know, you're selling an SDS storage, your, you're in the primary storage market as we would've called it before. >>Yes, the lines are blurring. I don't think those there. So I want to give you the chance to let us know where we're going. Years primary and secondary storage as we classified them, we're looking grayer and grayer mean they'll always be primary storage because there's always a certain user use cases for, for high-performance scale up capabilities. But a lot of the stuff was getting murky. You know, is it really primary? Is is it lower end primary, is it secondary and it doesn't, it shouldn't really matter. And with that, would that segmentation game a set of other capabilities like Oh, you know, file block, object cloud, more, more segmentation, more silo and more fragmentation. And I'm a big believer that this is all about software. The magic is in the software. And if you, if you forget for a minute that it's software defined storage as we call it today, but a set of capability's, a universal plane that allows you to truly define how customers get that ubiquity between any infrastructure that they run. >>Okay. Which in turn gives them the abstraction from the data that they bill. Okay. We've just taken a lot of workload and pressure off the customer to figure all that stuff out, keep whole manage. So I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get wrapped up on the whole storage thing as much as I would on the SA on the universal data plane or the data brain as I called it, nicknamed it in the show, you know, earlier as the left and right side one size, the data management, the other sizes, you know, traditional storage management. Yeah. Maybe I was reading too much in this. There's two brains. I think you've, you turn them sideways. They look like clouds too. But uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, partners wonder if you could speak, you know, we're talking about obviously the channel hugely important, we're going to talk to a lot of your team, but from a technology standpoint, you've got a lot of those hardware providers as well as different software companies that are here in the expo hall. >>Does metallic and Hedvig in those, you know, how will that change the relationships? I mean there's one, I've never built a business in my life that wasn't partner centric and partnerships to me is where both sides feel like they won. They went together. And so I've been very clear with our team, our channel, our board, our ecosystem that we're not doing this alone. That's not my intent. And our goal is to work together. Now we have partners in across the spectrum, cloud partners, technology partners like NetApp, HPE, Cisco. We've got ecosystem partners, the up the, the startups that are building new capabilities that we want to be, they want to be part of our ecosystem and vice versa. Traditional channel. Okay. so we've got the whole run of those, of those partnerships and we've been very focused. But we've also being very clear that we're in this for the long haul with them. Hedvig is today sold through channel and will continue to and metallic is built to be only sold through the channel. >>And you guys also, I was looking at some of the strategic changes that you've implemented since you've been here. Leadership changes to the sales organization, but even on the marketing side go to market. You mentioned that the channel opportunities for Hedvig as well as metallic, but also you guys have a new partner programmed, really aimed at going after and cultivating those large global enterprises with your SIS. So in terms of of you know, partner first, it really seems like the strategic directions that you're moving in are really underscoring that. >>Absolutely. Everything we do, every single thing we do is, you know, the question, the reviews we do, the internal inspection we do with the business. The, the way I look at the, the, the go to market conversations as to uh, the, you know, the pipeline is always about which partners involved, who's the partner involved, you know, and on an exception where we don't have a partner involved. My um, my F it's a flag to me going why? Um, no, we're, I don't know if you're speaking with Ricardo today or at some point he'll, he'll, he'll let you know exactly what we're doing there and how we think about it. And then we've just hired Marissa Rowe, I don't know, you know, Mercer and so Mercer's just come on board as our sort of partner lead worldwide. Yup. >>We're going to be talking with him as well. >>It's a cultural shift folks and we're completely committed to it. 100% committed. >>So one of the things that, that Stu and I were chatting about earlier today that you guys talked about in the keynote is in terms of how quickly metallic was conceived, design built really fast. Does that come from kind of a nod to your days at puppet where you are used to much shorter cycles? And how did, how did internally, the Combolt folks kind of react and we're able to get that done so quick. >>They embraced it. And I'll tell you, I'm, people will tell you that I'm used to saying this, this, this thing. I say that competition and time are not our friends. So we have to, we have to get out there before somebody else does. And if you're coming out with something, it's gotta be better than anybody else has. And so we all agreed there was a need for world-class solution, but we also understood that we had to do a differently doing it the way we've always built something probably probably wasn't the best answer. We needed to go shake things up because it's a different audience, a different delivery capability. But the beauty of the whole thing was that we had core technology at vault that was truly multi-tenanted, truly secure, truly scalable, which we had. This was years of, of great IP, which we took and we built on top of. >>And so we ended up focusing on the user experience and the capabilities of a SAS solution, the modern SAS solution as opposed to putting a wrapper of SAS around substandard technology. So in full credit to the team, we do 90 day releases on our core technology today. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that refresh cycle is what customers expect of us. That you know the and, and then that's what we do today. Right. So something, I don't think it's, I'm not giving myself any credit for it. Yeah. And Sanjay actually we had a customer on earlier talking about that cadence release cycle and he said to Combolt's credit, they're hitting it and it makes my life more predictable when the channels yeah. You know, and so they know when to expect something. So we have a 90 day and Tom will talk to you about this when he, when he comes on, how we get our channel ready for it, how are we enabled them, our own support so we give, so we are completely buttoned up and taking advantage of that release cycle. >>All right. Great. Sunday, nine months, you've already made quite a few moves in the test board, making a lot of pieces there from what we hear, you know, this is just the beginning. Give us a little bit going forward though those people watching what does Sanjay's next nine to 12 months, you know, foretold and as much as you think it's a lot of moving parts that we've, we've changed, um, there we're all part of a, of a roadmap that and so that, and I've been very open and public about it. When I came in there was a lot we had to do and I wanted to be really focused about getting this company back to growth and really helping you realize the potential that it had with, with its heritage of great technology, great customer base, great ecosystem. So I laid out a very simple three point plan, simplify, innovate, execute and tell. >>People are tired of me talking about it and giving me proof points that I'm done. I'm going to keep talking about it. And so simplify is everything about how we use the product, the user experience with us and how you engage with us. OK. innovators innovate in everything we do, products, experiences, everything we have to, we have to challenge the status quo and say it's a smarter way of doing it. Metallic is a complete encapsulation of that, of that energy. Okay. And the last is execute. It's all about getting out there and getting it done. Doing what we say and saying what we do. Just get it out there, get it done. And um, and I think the team has been amazing. They've just rallied around it. And if I embraced it, this is what I think this is what they want. So the changes, sorry, just sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off but it, I'll sum it up by saying that, you know, the nine months have been very focused in the direction making. Now it's about really making sure we help the company and how customers realize its true potential because the technology is great. The people are great. We're a good company. People love our technology. They stay with us forever. Because it does what it's supposed to. We just think we have a lot more to offer. Now. >>I know we're only day one at the show. Things did kick off a little bit yesterday with partners. What's some of the feedback that you've heard from those customers? Either those that have been using vault for 10 years or those that are maybe newer to the bandwagon? >>Well, somebody asked me if I had 10 cups of coffee before I went on stage in the sporting, but I think it's a good proxy for what I feel on the show. I feel incredible energy. I think that the customers, the partners, our own people, it's just, there's a buzz and you've been to shows before and some of them are just, you know, some of them have that energy and some of them are flat. Well this one's just full of energy and uh, and it's, it feels like a lot of adrenaline here and this people are excited and um, you know, I'm excited to go walk the floor. >>Well, your competitors are taking notice. There was some interesting digital signage yesterday at the airport. I noticed that that wasn't okay. I didn't, I missed it. Invitation. Highest form of flattery. Sanjay, >>I got the notice that there's, there's a lot of investment that goes into this. Uh, this, this segment of the market. It's been really hot. Um, what, what's your take on all the startups in as well as the, the, the big companies that have been putting a lot of it that it's an important space, right? Um, it's, it's, it's in the top three to five depending on which study you look at data protections back because it's one thing to have data and nothing to know that it is the way you want it. It's also a testimony to the a, it's not an easy space to get into when you're telling your customer that you're protecting them. That's a big word. Okay. I believe that you earn your way there day on day release, on release. And we've done that. I mean the animals the same good things about as in half a years we had customers on stage, you know, and it, customers don't just come up on stage and they, they really believe it. We have a, we had a pretty decent turnout at the partner event yesterday. You know, I think we're, we're in a great space at a great time and we've got 20 years of, of great pedigree that I don't take for granted as much as people sort of go, Oh, you're an old company. I go, Oh, don't mistake pedigree for anything else. You know, we've got some incredible IP over 800 active. >>Yes. >>You were sharing some of those thoughts this morning. I was looking to see where I put them. How are you guys leveraging the data that you have under management to make combos technology even better and to help make some of those strategic, >>it's this deep learning. It gives as much, you know, we applying AI implicitly. I don't want it to be an AI washing my technology for my customers. It's in there. It just works for them and it's my job to make my product better so they get more value out of it as opposed to for them to bolt on something to make my product better. So I don't, I really don't care what other shit about it. What I care about is I'm building that right into, into the intelligence. We have all the data, we know we, our customers use it, how they back it up, what their expectations are, what the SLS are, what their protocols are. We know this stuff and you, you have to, you know, we've been around enough to know this stuff. So now we're taking all of that with technologies like deep learning and machine learning and making the product better. >>So Sunday, one of the toughest things to do out there is have people learn, learn about somebody again for the, for the second time, you know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So maybe I'd love your insight. You've been on board for nine months, you know, everybody knows Combolt it has a strong pedigree as you said, has a lot of patents. There's the culture there, but anything you've learned in the last nine months that you didn't know from the outside, he was still a pretty good secret. And there's a lot of people that don't know us as long as even though we've been around in the enterprise and and have have achieved a ton, there's still a ton of customers that don't know us and you know in our chops to get it out there. And if you've looked at our digital presence, if you've looked at how we're engaging online, it's a different Convolt. In fact, one of my favorite hashtags that's a, that that's trending at the show is a hashtag new comm vault. Is that right? I like that one. >>As I say, I might have started it, I don't know. But it is, it's an opportunity, right as to said, you know, we all wish sometimes in certain situations we could make a first impression. Again, I think you have that opportunity is you're saying there's, you have I she was saying close to 80% of, I think I read the other day, 75 80% of Commonweal's revenue comes from the fortune 500 you have the big presence with Bleagh global enterprises. This sustainability initiative that you were doing with the U N that Chris talked about. So there's, there's a lot of momentum behind that as well to take and really kind of maybe even leverage the voice of those enterprises to share with the world the benefits that Convolt provides. Like you said, data protection is hot. Again, if you have the data and it's, and you don't have the insight and it's not protected and you can't recover it quickly, then what value >>or used, if you can't use that know, why does it have to be compartmentalized where you say, Oh, that is my archive. Why can't I, why can't I say that? Yes, it is my archive, but I can, I can leverage that data for other things in my business. Okay. And so our product orchestrate allows customers to discovery to do, sorry, activate, not orchestrate to do eDiscovery, to curate information to use it for R and D to have a policy on sensitive governance needs. There's so much we can do with that, with with the data that's just sitting there, that and from different sources that I believe that at some level, protecting and protecting, managing and controlling our almost table stakes. So I'm raising the stakes uses where the magic is. >>All right, raising the stakes. Well, Sanjay, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on the cube today. Can't wait to see where those stakes are going to be. Combo go 2020 hashtag new comm volt hashtag new comm vault. Thanks Lisa. Thanks. Thank you so much. Hashtag new cobalt for Stewman eman and Sanjay Mirchandani and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from Cannonball. Go.

okay we're back here live at the IBM iod information on demand conference hashtag IBM iod this is the cube so looking the anglo Mookie bonds flagship program we go out for the events extracting from the noise i'm john furrier might join my co-host Davey lonte and we'd love to have analysts in here and in this case former analyst James Cole Beatles welcome to back to the cube thank you very much John thank you Dave pleasure see you again finger of being at IOD you're a thought leader you are an influencer you work at IBM so you you're out there the front lines doing some great work so thank you very much tell us explains the folks out there not about the show because we've had some people coming in last year you were private in but what does this fit what is this vector in context to what's relevant the market obviously big data and analytics is the hottest thing on the planet right now and you got social business now emerging categorically here but it has a couple different flavors to it right within IBM's context yeah but the messaging is simple right you got analytics that drives value outcomes social business is the preferred way of people going to operate their businesses engagement and all that is great stuff new channels marketing eccentric cetera explain to them how I OD is fitting into these megatrends into mega trends I think the hottest trends why our customers caring about what's going on here is a lot of a lot of activity around customers what is what does IOD fit into that a bigger picture yeah well you know the world has changed the world culture has changed radically and really in the last decade or so none is everywhere in the world everything is now online and digital increasingly it's streaming in terms of culture look what's happening to Hollywood is being deconstructed by the netflixs of the world you know movies and TV and music and everything is delivered online now all engagement more more engagements with your employer with your you know with merchants with your family everywhere is online things like streaming media so if you look at how the world culture has changed I yesterday I spoke here on a topic that's near and dear to my heart called big media it's the support of the ascendance of streaming media and not just the area as I laid out but in education like MOOCs distance learning we use it internally at IBM for our think fridays and Ginni Rometty and the executive team you know every Friday its cloud or its big data or whatever you know we need all need to get up to speed on the world culture has changed now analytics is fundamental to that whole proposition in terms of world culture analytics driving gagement analytics in terms of you know in a business context analytics a 360-degree view and you have data warehouses and the master data and you have predictive models to drive segmentation and target marketing and all that good stuff you know that's been in business for a long time that those set of practices they have become prevalent in most industries now not just in say retailing you know the Amazons of the world they're pervasive across all industries big data is fundamental to that you know engagement model its social social in the sense that social is one of many channels through which business is engaged with through which many people engage the social is assumed assuming a degree of importance in the fabric of modern life that goes beyond simple you know engagement with you know brands and whatnot social is how people create is how they declare who they are it's their identity and so social in your personal life we all know about Facebook and Twitter and everything else and YouTube but social has revolutionized enterprise cultures everywhere you know we use social internally of course we use our own Lotus connections most large and even many mid-sized firms now use social for interactions among employees or throughout their Val you chain so social business is about all of that it's the b2c it's the b2b it's the e2e and employ to employ all these different models of engagement they all demand a number of things obviously the social platform they demand the data of various sorts structured unstructured in shared repositories or cubes or Mars or whatnot they it demands the the big data platforms not only at respite in motion the streaming media to make it all happen in real time so at IOD if you see what the themes are this year and really it's been a building for several years cloud everything social is running in the cloud now more and more not just public Claus but Federation's of public and private clouds it's it's all about cognitive computing which is a relatively new term in the Sun sets achieved a certain amount of vogue in the last year or so which is really fundamentally as an evolutionary trend it's basically a I for the 21st century but leveraging unstructured data and and machine learning and so forth and predictive analytics and you know well the whole world learn what metadata was with the whole NSA yeah comments no it's like me and then just to wrap it up in memory real-time blu acceleration you know you need real-time you need streaming you need collaboration and social you know peer-to-peer user-generated content all of that to make this new world culture really take off and IBM provides all that we recognize that that's where the world's going we've been orienting reorienting all of our solutions around these models cloud social increasingly going forward and you know we provide solutions that enable our customers in all industries to go there and big data is fundamental to all of that as we say we're computer science meets social science that's always been Silicon angles kind of masthead view but to unpack what you just said from the market relevance you mentioned Netflix we saw Amazon coming out their own movie they're going to go direct with their own programming so so but that speaks to the direct business model of the web was originally pioneered as hey direct business model cut the middleman out but now that dimension has been explored so that kind of what you're saying there so that's cool the end user pieces interesting image is social so what's your take on the end user orientation what's the expectation because you got social you got a trash you got in motion you got learning machines providing great recommendations got the Watson kind of yeah reasoning for people so personalization recommendation engines the sea change attention time currency big days of all those buzzwords all right what is the expectation for users in the future right now we're moving into this new world where I can self serve myself monologue based the information from the web now it's all coming at everyone real time the alarms are going off as Jeff Jonas says what is that prefer user experience the direct business model people get that I think the business to see that but now the end users are now at the center of the value proposition how do what's the role of the user now they're participating in the media there are also consumers of the media yeah and they now have different devices so what's the sources of data so fundamentally yeah the role of the consumers expectations now is always everything is always on everything is always online everything is all digital everything is all real time and streaming everything is all self-service everything is all available in the palm of my hand and then the back-end infrastructure the cross-channel infrastructure users don't care about individual socials they really don't they don't really fundamentally care about Facebook or Twitter or whatever you have they just care that what their experience is seamless as they move from one channel to another they're not perceived as channels anymore they're simply perceived as places or communities that overlap too in a dizzying array of socials thus social is where we all live and thus social increasingly is mobile increasingly mobile is you know the user expects that the handoff from my smartphone to my tablet to my laptop to my digital TV sentence and so forth that it all happens through the magic of infrastructure that it's being taken care of and they don't have to worry about that handoff it all it's all part of one seamless experience yeah they always just say the search business it's the it's the it's the intersection of contextual and behavioral yeah and now you take that online behaviors community contextual is context to what people are interested at any given time yeah it's so many longtail distributions at any given time so do you see the the new media companies that the new brands that might emerge mean there's all the talk about Marissa Mayer kind of turning over yahoo and yeah she some say putting lipstick on a pig but but but is that they're just an old older branch trying to be cool but is that what users want just like media but just user experience me like we're small media but we got big ideas but the thing is the outcomes right small frying big blues go figure are the outcomes still the same company still want to drive sales for their business sell a product provide great value you just want to find great content and find people I mean the same concept of the old web search find out and run sumit give any vision on how that environment will evolve for a user like is it going to be pushed at me do you see it a new portal developing is mmm Facebook's kind of a walled garden humble don't care about that what's your take on that the future vision of a user experience online user experience online future vision in many ways I think let's talk about Internet of Things because that keeps coming more and more into the discussion it's it's not so much that the user wants a seamless experience across channel cross device all that but a big part of that experience is the user knows that increasingly they'll have some confidence that whatever environments physical environments there in our being obviously there's privacy implications that surveillance here are being monitored and tracked and optimized to meet their requirements to some degree in other words environmental monitoring internet of things in your smart home you want to configure so you smart home so that every room that you walk into is as you as you're moving there even before you get there has already been optimized to your needs that ideally there should prediction Oh Jim's walking into the bathroom so turn the light on and also start to heat up the water because it's ten o'clock at night Jim's usually takes his bath around this time you sort of want that experience to be handled by the internet of things like nest these new tools like nest oh yeah yeah so essentially then it's my user experience is not just me interacting with devices but me simply moving through environments that are continuously optimized to my knees and needs of my family you know the whole notion of autonomous vehicles your vehicle if it's your personal vehicle then you want to always autumn optimize the experience in terms of like you know the heat setting and and the entertainment justement saan the you know the media center and they're always to be tailored to your specific needs at any point in time but also let's say you take a zipcar you rent a zipcar and you've got an ID with that company or any of the other companies that provide those on-demand rental car services ideally in this scenario that whatever vehicle you you rent through them for a few hours or so when you enter it it becomes your vehicle is completely customized to your needs because you're a loyal customer of that firm and they've got your profile information this is just a hypothetical I'm not speaking to anything that I actually know about what they're doing but fundamentally you know ideally any on-demand vehicle or conveyance or other item that you you lease in this new economy is personalized to your needs while you're using it and then as it were depersonalized when you check it back in so the next person can have it personalized to their use as long as they need it that's the vision of a big part of the vision of customer experience management personalization not just of your personal devices but personalization of almost any device or environment in which you are operating so that's one kanodia wants this question no I would ask one more question on that on the user experience came on Twitter from a big data alex says while you're on the subject which a my Alex I don't great great friend of the cube but thanks for the tweet today we don't have our crowd shado-pan we can get the chat going there but why not talk about AR and I've been in reality I mean honestly Internet of Things is now not the palm of your hand it could be on your wrist or on your clothing the wearables on the glasses and just gave out three invites to google glass so this is again another edition augmented reality is software paradigm as well what is that what is it what does that fit into that what's your take on augmented reality augmented reality ok so augmented reality is that which I don't use myself I've just simply seen it demonstrated and plenty of places so augmented reality is all about layers of additional information overlaid on whatever visual video view or image view that you happen to be carrying with you or have available to you while you're walking around in your normal life so right now conceivably if this is an AR a setting that I would environment or enabled device I would be able to see for example that ok who's in this room in the sense that who is declared that they are in this area of Mandalay Bay right now and why specifically are they doing to the extent that they allow that information to be seen and o of these people here which of these people if any might be the person I'm going to be speaking with it for 30 so that if they happen to be in this environment i can see that i can see that they're to some degree they may have indicated status waiting for james could be a list to get done with the Wikibon people oh that's kind of cool so I'd see that overlay and I walk to other parts of the Convention Center I might also see overlays as I walk around like oh there's a course down as several rooms down that I actually put in my schedule it's going to start in about five minutes I'll just duck you into there because it reminds me through the overlay that's the whole notion of personalization of the environment in which you're walking around in real time dynamically and contextual in alignment with your needs or with your requirements are in alignment also with these whatever data those environment managers wish to share to anybody who's subscribing in that contact so that's a context-aware that theme have been talking about here on textual essentially it's a public space that's personalized to your needs in the sense that you have a personalized view in a dynamically update okay that sounds like crowd chat Oh are we running a trip crouched at right now crouch at San overlay so just as lovely overlay so look to the minute social network yeah tailored to the needs of the group yep that adds value on top of that data yeah so James I gotta get your take on something so we had Merv on yesterday great Adrian with my great Buy analyst day and he was on last week at Big Data NYC you know we did our own little vent there Don coincident with hadoop world so Murph said well we're just entering the trough of disillusionment for big data yeah you love those Gartner you know I love medications tools I mean they are genius and I get him but he said that's a good thing because it goes left to right so we're making progress here ok right but I'm getting nervous the internet of things I love the concept we don't we don't work on industrial internet and you know a smarter planet it's in there so I love it but I'm getting nervous here's why I look back at a lot of the promises that were made in the BI days 360-degree other business predictive analytics a lot of things that are now talking about in the hood sort of Hadoop big data movement that we're actually fulfilling with this new wave that the old wave really wasn't able to fill because the cousin sort of distracted doing sarbanes-oxley and reporting in and balanced scorecards so so I'm nervous he's old school now it when he when he referenced is something that was hot in the mid part of the two thousand decade okay go ahead okay we had a guy on today talking about balance core would you know we're just talking about crowd chat that's the hottest day in 2013 like five years or hurt anybody mentions sarbanes-oxley so what kind of saved that whole business Roy thank you and Ron but so heavy right so what I'm nervous about as we as I've seen a number of waves over the years where the the vendor community promises a vision great vision great marketing and then all of a sudden something hotter comes along like Internet of Things and says don't know this is really it so my question to you is will help us it'll help me in my mind you know close that dissonance gap is are these two initiatives the sort of big data analytics for everybody putting analytics in the hands of business users yeah or is that sort of complementary to the internet of thing his internet of things just the new big trillion dollar market that everybody's going to go after and forget about all those promises about analytics everywhere help me sure Jay through that my job is to clarify confusion hey um you know if you look at the convergence of various call them paradigms there's a lot of big data analytics is one of them right now clearly there's cloud clearly their social there's big data analytics in mobile and there's something called Internet of Things so some some talk about smack smac social mobile analytic a que a big data cloud if you add IOT of there it's smack yet I don't think it works or smash yet but fundamentally if you think about Internet of Things it's it's all about machines or automated devices of various sorts probes and you know your smartphone and whatever I know servers or even you know the autonomous vehicles those are things that do things and you know they might be sources of data they would are they might be consumers of data they might conceivably even be intermediaries or brokers or routers or data what I'm getting at is that if you look at big data analytics I always think of it as a pipeline all data it's like data sources and data consumers and then there's all these databases and other functions that operate between them to move data and analytics and insight from one end to the other of the pipe in a conceptual way think of the internet of things as well a new category of sources of data these devices whether they be probes or monitors or your smart phones and new consumers and they all those same things are probably going to be many of them consumers of data and there's message passing among them and then the data that they passed might be passed in real time through streaming like InfoSphere streams it might be cached or stored and various intermediate databases and various analytics performed on them so think of you know I like to think of the internet of persons places and things persons that's human endpoints consumers and and sources of data that's all of us that's social places that's geospatial you know you think about it the Internet of geospatial you know geo spatial coordinates of of data and analytics and then there's things there's you know automated endpoints or you know hardware even Nana from macro to nano devices so it's just a new range of sources and and consumers of data and new types of analytics that are performed in new functions that can be performed and outcomes enable when you as it were stack in and out of things with social with claw with mobile new possibilities in terms of optimization in real time it throughout the you know the smarter planet if you think about the smarter planet vision it's all about interconnected instrumented and intelligent instrumented you know instrumentation that traditionally it suggests hardware instrumentation that's what probes our sensors and actuators that's the Internet of Things it's a fundamental infrastructure within smarter planet I'd love that thank you for clarifying i could write a blog post out of that and i think i'm very well made so um now i want to follow up and bring it back to the users I know snack and I thought you were going to say a story no smack MapReduce analytics and query or sell smack on the cube so so I want bring it back to the users so we had a great conversation yesterday actually last week I'll be met it was on off you know ah be met and he said look why are there any any you know where all the big data apps he said you need three things to for big data apps you need domain expertise you need algorithms which are free and you need data scientists like oh we'll never get there all right oh so rules really free while there are that was this argument yeah it means a source if people charge him for algorithms big trouble was this point I think okay sure so and then we had a discussion yesterday about how in the early days of the automobile industry you know the forecast was this is problematic the gap to adoption is just aren't enough chauffeurs know the premise that we were putting forth in the discussion yesterday I don't know who that was with was that with Judith it was good was that look we've got to figure out a way to get analytics in the hands of the business user we can't have to go through a data scientist or some business analyst no that's not going to work and we'll never get adoption so what what's going to bridge that gap is it is it the things you talked about before all these you know cool solutions that you guys are developing the project neo that you announce today visualization yeah there's another piece of that what puts it in the hands of guys like me that I can actually use the data in new and productive ways yeah well self-service business intelligence and visualization tools that are embedded in the very experience of using apps for example on your smartphone democratization of data science down to all of us you need the right tools you need you need the tools that the new generation of people like my children's generation just adopt and they work in there just a tune from from the cradle to working with data and visualizations and creating visual you know analytics of various sorts though they may not perceive it as being analytics they miss may perceive it as working with shapes and patterns and stuff yeah you would stop yeah so playing around you know in a sandbox i love that terminology data scientists working you know sandboxes which is data that's martes that they build to do regression analysis and segmentation and decision trees and all you know all that good stuff you know the fact is your sandbox can conceivably be completely on your handheld device with all the visualizations built-in you're simply doing searches and queries you know you're asking natural language questions you're looking at the responses you're changing your queries you're changing your visualizations and so forth to see if anything pops out at you as being significant playing around it you know it's as simple a matter that that these kinds of tools such as IBM you know cognos and so forth enable everybody to become as it worried a data scientist without having to you know become a maquette their profession it's just a part of the fabric of living in modern society where data surrounds us people are going to start playing with data and they're going to start teaching themselves all these capabilities in the same way that when they invented automobiles and you know wasn't Henry 42 invented them it was in like the late 1800s by engineers in Europe and America you know it's like we didn't all become auto mechanics you know there are trained auto mechanics but I think most human beings in the modern world know that there's a thing called an automobile that has an engine that needs gasoline and oil and occasionally needs to be brought to a professional mechanic for a repair and so forth we have many of us have a rough idea of something called a carburetor blah blah blah you know in the same way that when computers came up after world war two and then gradually invaded our lives through PCs and everything we all didn't become computer scientist but most of us have an idea of what a hard disk is most of it no most of us know something about something called software and things are called operating systems in the same way now in this new world most of us will become big data analytics geeks practical into the extent that will learn enough of the basic terms of art and the relationships among the various components to live our lives and when the stuff breaks down we call the likes of IBM to come and fix it or better yet they just buy our products and they just work magically all the time without fail conversing and comfortable with the concepts to the point which you can leverage them and what about visualization where does that fit visualization visualization is where the rubber meets the road of analytics is it's where human beings how human beings extract meaning insight fundamentally maybe that's like yeah you extracted inside a lots of different ways you do searches and so forth but to play around it to actually see you know a heat map or a geospatial map or or or you know a pie chart or whatever you see things with your eyes that you may not have realized we're there and if you can play around and play with different visualizations against the same data set things will pop out that you know the statistical model just seek the raw output of a data mining our predictive model or statistical analysis those patterns may not suggest themselves and rows of numbers that would pop out to an average human being or to a data scientist they need the visualizations to see things that you know because in other words when you think about analytics it's all about the algorithms that are drilling through the data to find those patterns but it's also about the visualizations the algorithms and you need the visualizations and of course you need the data to really enable human beings of all levels of expertise to find meaning and fundamentally visualizations are a lingua franca between non-expert human beings and expert eamon beings between data scientists visualizations are a lingua franca Hey look what I saw what do you think you know that's the whole promise of tools like concert for example we demonstrated this this morning it's a collaborative environment as sharing of visualizations and data sets and so forth among business analysts and the normal knowledge worker you know it with it you know like what do you see here's what I see what do you think I don't see that here's another visualization what do you see there oh yeah I think I see what you mean and here's my annotation about what I have broader context I've you know here's what I oh this is great that's the whole notion of humans deriving insight we derive it in socials we derive it in teams of that some Dave might be adept at seeing things that Jim is just absolutely blind to or you know Nancy might see things that both of us are applying to but we're all looking at the same pictures and we're all working with the same data part art yeah it's all so let's talk about some plumbing conversations you know one of the things that we noticed we were at the splunk conference this year's blown came out of nowhere taking log files making them manageable saving time for people so the thing that comes out of the splunk conversation is that it's just so easy to use that their customer testimonials are overwhelmingly positive around the area hey I just dumped my data into this the splunk box and it grid good stuffs happening I can search it it can give me insight save me time so that's the kind of ease of use so so how does IBM getting to that scenario because you guys have some good products we've got on the platform side but you also have some older products legacy Lotus other environments collaborative software that's all coming together in converging so how do we get to that environment where it's just that he just dumped your data in and let it do its magic well Odin go that's the very proposition that we provide with our puresystems puredata systems portfolio tree data system and big insights right for Hadoop so forth big in size you know we have an appliance now yeah we have pdh so that's the whole create load and go scenario that because Bob pidgeotto unless wretched and others demonstrated on the main stage yesterday and today so we did we do that and we are simple and straight being easy to use and so forth that's our value prop that's the whole value prop of an appliance you know simple you don't need a ton of expertise we pre build all the expert in a expertise patterns that you can use to derive quick value from this deployment we provide industry solution accelerates from machine data analytics on top of big insights to do the kinds of things you're talking about with splunk offerings so fundamentally you know that's scenario we all we and we're you know we have many fine competitors we offer that capability now in terms of the broader context you're describing we're a well-established provider of solutions we go back more than a hundred years we have many different product portfolios we have lots and lots of customers who would invested in IBM for a long time they might have our older products our newer products in various combinations we support the older generations we strive to migrate our customers to the newer releases when they're ready we don't force them to migrate so we make very we're very careful in our row maps to provide them with a migration path and to make it worth their while to upgrade when the time comes to the newer feature ok so I got it don't change gears to the to the shiny new toy conversation which is you know you know we love that in Silicon Valley what's a shiny new toy there's always an emerging markets when you have see changes like this where there's a whole the new whole new wave comes in creates new wealth old gets destructed new tags over whatever the conversation goes but I got to ask you okay well Elsa to the IBM landscape that you that you're over overlooking with big data and under the under the hood with cloud etc there's always that one thing that kind of breaks out as the leader the leading toy a shiny object that that people gravitate to as as I'm honest I won't say lost later because you got you know it's not not about giving away free it's it's the product that goes well we this is the lead horse you know and in this game right yeah so what is that what is the IBM thing right now that you're doubling down on is it blu acceleration is it incites is it point2 with a few highlights right now that's really cutting through the new the new the new soil of yeah we're developing our own rip off version of google glass thank you know I'm saying it's always I mean I'm gonna say shiny too but there's always that sexy product well I want that I want L customers name I want that product which leads more you know how she lifts for other products is there one is there a few you can talk about that you've noticed anecdotally is going to be specific data but just observational a shiny toy for the consumer market or for the business business business mark okay yeah yeah is it Watson is Watson the draw is it what's the headline looking for the lead lead dog here what's the attack there's always one an emerging market well you can put your the spot here well you could say that the funny thing is the whole notion of a shiny new toy implies something tangible when the world is gone more and more intangible in the cloud so we are moving our entire portfolio beginning links the big data analytics solutions into the cloud cloud first development going forward our other core principles for the pure data systems portfolio and the light for the shiny the shiny new thing the new cons could be shiny new concept or new paradigm yeah but the shiny new thing is the cloud the cloud is something pervasive and the cloud is something that it really multi form factors that's not very sexy but customers want flexibility you know they want to acquire the same functionality either as a licensed software package and running on commodity hardware we offer that for our big data analytics offerings or as an appliance and one sort or another that specialized particular occurrence or as a SAS cloud offering or as a capability that they can deploy in a virtualization layer on top of IBM or non-ibm hardware or they want the abilities you can mix and match those various deployment form factors so in many ways the whole notion of multi form factor flexibility is the shiny new thing it's the hybrid model for deployment of these capabilities on Prem in the cloud combination thereof that's not terribly sexy because it's totally it's totally abstract but it's totally real I mean demand wise people can see them that drives my business because when you go to the cloud I mean that's where you can really begin to scale seriously beyond the petabytes the whole notion of big media it will exist entirely in the cloud big media I like to think is the next sexy thing because streaming is coming into every aspect of human existence where stream computing a lot of people who focus on Big Data think of volume as being like big headline oh god we'd go to petabytes and exabytes and all that yeah it's important some really fixate on variety all these disparate sources of data and now we have all the sensor data and that's very important we have all the social media and everything all those new sources that's extremely important but look at the velocity everybody is expecting real-time instantaneous continuous streaming you know everything we do all of our entertainment all of our education surveillance you know everything is completely streaming I think ubiquitous streaming to every device and everybody themselves continue to continuing to stream their very lives everywhere all the time is the sexy new thing Dave and I talk about running data we coined that term running data what four years ago so I got to get you got to get kind of a thought leader they're watching us and we're watching streaming data right now from these said these are your guys are streaming this is big media give us some wanna get your thought leader perspective here some thought leader mojo around um the hashtag data economy you know you need now you're moving into a conversation with c-level folks and they said James tell me what the hell is this data economy thing right so what is the data economy in your words kind of like I mean I'll say it's a mindset I'll everything else what's your take on that we've been discussing that internally and externally at IBM we're trying to get our heads around what that means here's my take as one IBM are one thought Leigh right by the way the trick of being a thought leader is just to let your own thoughts lead you where they will turn around where all my followers yeah hopefully they want to lead you to far astray where you're out in the wilderness too long that's an important type of people are talking about because people are trying to put the definition around at economy can you actually have a business construct around yeah data here is my taken on the layers of the meaning of data economy it's monetizing your data the whole notion of monetization of your data data becomes a product that you generate internally or that you source from externally but you repackage it up and then resell with value add the whole notion of data monetization and you know implies a marketplace for data based products you know when I say data I'm using it in the broader context of it could be streaming media as the kind of one is a very valuable category of you know data like you know whatever kollywood provides so there's a whole notion of monetizing your data or providing a marketplace for others to monetize their data and you take a transaction fee from that or it also means in more of a traditional big data or data warehousing bi sense it means that you drive superior outcomes for your your own business from your own data you know through the usual method of better decision if better decisions on trustworthy data and the like so if you look at data monetization in terms of those layers including the marketplace including you know data-driven okay in many ways the whole notion of a data economy hinges on everybody's realization now that the chief resource for betterment of humanity one of the chief resources going forward for us to get smarter as a species on this planet is to continue to harness the data that we ourselves generate you know people stop what data is being the new oil what oil was there before we ever evolved but data wasn't there before we we landed on earth or before we evolved we generate that so it's our own exhaust your own exhaust that's actually a renewable resource data exhaust from data from exhausted gold that's what we say data is the data exhaust it's good if you can harness it and put it together as Jeff Jones says the puzzle piece is the picture the big picture at the smarter picture the smarter planet so on the final question I want to wrap up here to our next guest but what's going on with you these days talk about what's up with you you know you're very active on Facebook will you give a good following I'll be coming up what's happening you know I'll make sure I said big birthday for you on your Facebook page what's going on in your life I'll see you're working at IBM one of the things are interesting what's on your mind these days when you're at leisure are you hanging out you think what are you thinking about the most what are you doing with your you know things with your family's cherith let's see what's going on well I hang out at home with my wife and drink beer and listen to music and tweet about it everybody knows that stuff kind of beer do you drink whatever is on sale I'm not going to say where we buy it but it's a very nice place that whose initials are TJ but fundamentally you know my my mind is an open book because I evangelize I put my thoughts and my work thoughts and love my personal thoughts out there on socials I lived completely ons but I completely unsocial I self-edit but fundamentally the thought leadership I produce that the blogs and whatnot I produce all the time I put them out there for general discussion and I get a lot of good sort of feedback the world and including from inside of IBM I just try to stretch people's minds what's going on with me I'm just enjoying what I'm doing for a living now people save Jim you're with IBM why aren't you an analyst I'm still doing very analyst style work in in a vendor context I'm a thought leader I was a thought leader as I try to be being a thought leader is like being a humorist it's like it's a statement of your ambition not your outcome or your results yeah you can write jokes too you're blue in the face but if nobody laughs then you're not a successful comedian likewise i can write thought leadership pieces till I'm blue in the face but if nobody responds that I'm not leaving anybody anywhere i'm just going around in circles so my my ambition and every single day is to say at least one thing that might stretch somebody's box a little bit wider yeah yeah I think I think IBM smart they've been in social for a while the content markings about you know marketing to individuals yeah with credibility so I love analysts I love all my buds like like Merv and everybody else and I'm you know sort of a similar cat but you know there's a role for X analysts inside of solution providers and we have any number John Hegarty we have we have Brian Hill another X forest to write you know it's it's a you know it's a big industry but it's a small industry we have smart people on both sides of the equation solution provider and influencer my line um under people 99 seats and you know I I suck up to my superiors at IBM i suck up to any analyst who says nice things about me and hosts be on their show and i was going out of my life i'm just a big suck up well we like we like to have been looking forward to doing some crowd chats with you our new crouch an application with you guys lock you into that immediately it's a thought leader haven that the Crouch as as it turns out Dave what's your take on the analyst role at IBM just do a little analysis of the analyst at IBM which you're taken well I think it's under situation I think that the role that they that IBM's put James in is precisely the way in which corporations vendors should use former analysts they should give you a wide latitude a platform and and not try to filter you you know and you're good like that and so guess what I do the usual marketing stuff to the traditional but I do the new generation of thought leadership marketing and there's a role for both of those to me marketing have said this is if I said it was I said a hundred times marketing should be a source of value to people and it's so easy to make marketing a source of value by writing great content or producing great content so yeah that's my take on a jonathan your your marketing is a great explainer you explain the value to the market and thereby hopefully for your company generate demand hopefully in the direction of your cut your customers buying your things but that's what analysts the influencers should be explainers it's you know probably Dave I mean has influenced as influences that we are with with a qu here's my take on it when you have social media of direct full transparency there's no you can't head fake anyone anymore that all those days are gone so analyst bloggers people who are head faking a journalist's head faking the house the audiences will find out everything so to me it's like it's the metaphor of when someone knocks on your door your house and you open it up and they want to sell you something you shut the door in their face when you come in there and they say hey I want to hang out I got you know I got some free beer and a big-screen TV you want to watch some football maybe you invite him in the living room so the idea of communities and direct marketing's about when if you let them into your living room yeah you're not selling right you are creating value see what i do i drop smart i try to drop smart ideas into every conversational contacts throughout socials and also at events like i od so you know a big part of what I do is I thought leadership marketer is not just right you know you're clever blogs and all that but I simply participate in all the relevant conversations where I want I want ideas to be introduced and oh by they want way I definitely want people to be aware that I am an IBM employee and my company's provides really good products and services and support you know that's really a chief role of an evangelist in a high-tech slider that's one of the reasons why we started crouched at because the hashtag get so difficult to go deep into so creates crowd chatter let's go deeper and have a conversation and add some value to it you know it's you thinking about earned media as parents been kicked around but in communities the endorsement of trust earning a position whether you work at IBM people don't care a he works at IBM or whatever if you're creating value and you maybe have some free beer you get an entry but you win on your own merits you know I'm saying at the end of the day the content is the own merits and I think that's the open source paradigm that is hitting the content business which is community marketing if your pain-in-the-ass think you're going to get bounced out right out of the community or if you're selling something you're on so you guys do a great job really am i awesome you thank you James I really love what you add to the iod experience here with this corner and all the interviews is great great material well thanks for having us here really appreciate it I learned a lot it's been great you guys are great to work with very professional the products got great great-looking luqman portfolio hidden all hitting all the buttons there so hitting all the Gulf box so this is the cube we'll be right back with our last interview coming up shortly with Jeff Jonas he's got some surprises for us so we'll we'll see what he brings brings to his a game apparently he told me last night is bring his a-game to the cube so I'm a huge Jeff Jonas fan he's a rock star we love them on the cube iza teka athlete like yourself we write back with our next guest after this short break