(upbeat music playing) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations with Couchbase is here for Couchbase ConnectONLINE. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into it because, Engineering and Operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, engineers and developers have been good, working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >> Great question. And I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the Couchbase journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid, in-office remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in Almaden Valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the East Coast, and so throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adapted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at 5:00 AM in the morning, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive there, doing think time work, and I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. This hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase, I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by Couchbase and what it offered, that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in-person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. We were switching to a remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch Couchbase and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. A remote work model does have its challenges, that's for sure, but it also has its benefits, better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time just to think. We just did a retrospective on a major product release, Couchbase server 7.0, that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >> Well, great story. I love the come back and now you take leverage of all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did they, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react? And were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that? >> The initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person, people had to be in in-person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really helps a lot. Over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. And probably the key. >> What's the DNA of the company there? I mean, every company's got the DNA, Intel's Moore's Law, and what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like, if you could describe it. >> The engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing the next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies, with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackled and solved really hard problems with elegant solutions, long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim Gray, Bruce Lindsay, Don Chamberlin, Pat Selinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike Carey's and the Mohan's and the Lagerhaus's of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging, and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well here. Our two fundamental values on the engineering side, are merit and mentorship. >> One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, there was kind of a small community, now, as databases are everywhere. So you see, there's no one database that has rule in the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database, kinds of things are emerging, more databases than ever before, they are on the internet, they are on the cloud, there are none the edge. It's essentially, we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases because they're everywhere. (laughing) So, I mean, this is kind of where we are at. What's your reaction to that? >> You're absolutely right. There used to be a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same, data integrity, performance and scalability in the face of distributed systems. Those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solved back in the sixties and seventies. They're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >> That's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering of these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in RAM, all these kinds of different memory, you got centralization, you got all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it. >> Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. We have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley, back, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run IT shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the SEC are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed Datacom links. Today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >> Yeah, the key, there has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews and why I got you. I want to ask you if you don't mind, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science. What do you wish you knew when you started your career? And if you could be that person now, what would you say? >> Yeah, well, a lot of things I wish I knew then that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I became a math major is a little convoluted. As a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start, but I've had a great career. And I think there are really two key aspects. First, is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail-oriented and most are, perfectionists. They love elegant, well thought-out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your A-game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation, you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on, say, in your graduate career or when you're starting, over time others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your A-game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. >> That's awesome advice. >> That's... >> All right, continue. >> Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as, say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you getting an A in the class and advancing to seventh grade. They own you for that. But whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your long-term success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve leadership positions or getting more kids into college on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they give great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate. An advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction, I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked. People early on often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advancement. Managers change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey as my father and Mike Stonebraker as my grandfather, and Jim Gray as my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >> That's like a schema and a database. You got to have it all right there, kind of teed up. Beautiful. (laughing) Great advice. >> Exactly. >> Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks, really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have and the situation, and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Mary, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side. Couchbase Capella was launched in conjunction with the event. What is the bottom line for that as, as an Operations and Engineering, built the products and rolled it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >> Yeah. Well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed and automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath, and the operational database management efforts that come with it. As I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a DBA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in IT because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, taking that job away from me. I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >> That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on the company and the public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on theCUBE here. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase ConnectONLINE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music playing)

>>And welcome to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, Mary Roth, VP of engineering operations with couch basis here for Couchbase connect online. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >>Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >>Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into shooting, you know, engineering and operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, you know, engineers and developers have been good working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >>Uh, great question. Um, and I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the couch space journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid in-office rewrote remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in almond and valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the east coast and SU. So throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adopted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at >> 5: 00 AM in the morning, um, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. >>I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive. They're doing think time work. And I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. These hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by couch facing what it offered that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. >>We were switching to a remote remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch cow's face and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. Our remote work model does have its challenges that's for sure, but it also has its benefits better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time, just to think we just did a retrospective on a major product release Couchbase server 7.0 that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >>Well, great story. I love the, um, the, uh, you come back and now you take leverage all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did the, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react and were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that, >>Uh, the, the initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person people had to be in person in person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but the, there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really, really helps a lot over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. >>What's the DNA of the culture. What's the DNA. Every company's got the DNA entails Moore's law. Um, and at what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like if you could describe it. >>Uh, the engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing. The next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackle it and solve really hard problems with elegant solutions long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim gray, Bruce Lindsey, Don Chamberlin, pat Salinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike caries and the Mohans and the lower houses of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well, here are two fundamental values on the engineering side, our merit and mentorship. >>One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, you know, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, Zuri kind of small community now is databases are everywhere. So you see there's no one database that's ruling the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database kinds of things, and more emerging, more databases than ever before. They're on the internet, they're on the cloud. There are none the edge it's essentially we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases cause they're everywhere. So, I mean, this is kind of where we're at. What's your reaction to that? >>Uh, you're absolutely right there. There used to be a, a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same data, integrity, performance and scalability. And in the face of district distributed systems, those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solve back in the sixties and seventies. They're not, they're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >>It's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering, these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in Ram, all these kinds of different memory, you got decentralization and all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the, what's the, what's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it? >>Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. Um, we have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for, for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley back, um, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run it shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the sec, um, are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed data comm links today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >>You know, the key has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews on why I got you. I want to ask you, uh, if you don't mind, um, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science, what do you wish you knew when you started your career? And you could be that person now, what would you say? >>Yeah, well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew then, uh, that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I, I became a math major is a little convoluted. Is it as a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start. Um, but I've had a great career and I think there are really two key aspects first. And is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail oriented and most of our perfectionist, they love elegant, well thought out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your a game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on say, in your graduate career or when you're starting over time, others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your a game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. That's awesome. >>That's >>Fine. Continue. Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you're getting an a in the class and advancing to seventh grade. >>They own you for that. Um, but whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your longterm success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve, we do put sip positions or getting more kids into college, on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they gave great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside of the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. >>That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate, an advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place, great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction. I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked people early on, often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advanced managers, change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey is my father and Mike Stonebraker is my grandfather. And Jim gray is my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >>That's like a scheme and a database. You got to have it all white. They're kind of teed up. Beautiful, great advice. >>Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have a and the situation and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Maira, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side Couchbase Capella was launched, uh, in conjunction with the event. What is, what is the bottom line for that as, as an operations and engineering, you know, built the products and roll it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >>Yeah, well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed in an automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath and the operational database management efforts that come with it. Uh, as I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a UVA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in it because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, you know, taking that job away from me, I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >>That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate congratulations on the company and public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on the QPR. Thank you. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay. Mary Ross, VP of engineering operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase connect online. I'm John furry host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBEs, virtual coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here virtual, we're not face to face obviously because of COVID. So we're doing a virtual event Ansible Fest coverage. We have Mary Johnston Turner, research Vice President of Cloud Management at IDC international data Corp. Mary great to see you, thanks for coming on for Ansible Fest 2020. >> Thanks for inviting me. >> So obviously Cloud Management, everything's Cloud native we're seeing that at VM world, we've got Re-invent coming up, Azure has got growth. The enterprises have gotten some religion on Cloud Native, COVID certainly is forcing that. What are you seeing from your research at IDC around the convergence of Cloud strategies. What's the data tell you, what's the research show? >> Well, obviously with COVID a lot of folks have pivoted or accelerated their move to the Cloud in many ways. And I think what's happening is that we're seeing many, many organizations recognizing they continue to have need for On-prem resources. They're building out edge, they've got remote work from home, they've got traditional VM workloads, They've got modern Cloud Native container-based workloads running On-Prem and in public Clouds and public Cloud services. So it's really kind of a striking world of connected Clouds is how I'm talking about it increasingly. And I think what that means from an operational perspective is that it's getting more and more challenging for organizations to maintain consistent configuration, stable APIs, security, compliance and conformance. And they're really starting to look at Automation as the way to deal with the increasing scale and velocity of change because that's one of the things that's happening. And I think COVID accelerated that is we've seen organizations stand up applications they never thought they were going to have to stand up and they not only stood them up very quickly, but then they continue to update them with great frequency often multiple times a day or a week. And and the infrastructure has had to pivot and the workloads have had to migrate. So it's really been a very challenging time for many organizations. And I think those that are coping the best with it are the ones who have been investing in Automation particularly Automation in CICD pipeline and code based environment. >> Yeah, you know, you're seeing the releases, obviously Automation has helped on the agile side, VMs and containers have been a great way to automate, how are customers looking at this? Because it seems to be Automation is like the first step towards everything as a service, right? So it's XAAS as it's says, as it's called in the industry. Services is ultimately the holy grail in all this because you get, when the Automation and services used to be Automation, Automation, Automation. Now you're hearing as a service, as a service, as a service as the top three priorities. So it seems to be a trajectory. How are customers getting first of all... Do you agree with that? And then how do customers think about this? Cause sometimes we're ahead of the customers. Automation is the first step. What's your take on this, and what are customers planning when it comes to Automation? Are they thinking as a service? What'd you hearing from the customers? >> Let's talk a little bit about what we mean by as a service. Cause that's a really interesting concept, right? And I've been hearing this conversation with folks as a service started a decade or more ago, taking things that particularly software that ran On-prem infrastructure or software. And putting it into share Data Centers where we could run Multi tenant Environments we could scale it, and each Cloud provider basically got that scale by investing in their own set of infrastructure Automation. So whether it was Azure or VMware or whoever, they build a whole repeatable, scalable environment that they could control. What's happening now is that we're seeing these control planes get stretched back to On-prem resources. And I think what's really happening is that the line about where does the thing physically have to run? Becomes more of a discussion around the physics of the matter, Latency, Data Volumes, transaction processing cost of installed equipment. And every organization is making its own choice about what's the right mix, in terms of where physically do things have to run, and how they want to manage them. But I think that we're starting to see a abstraction layer coming in between that. And a lot of that abstraction is Automation that's portable that can be applied across all these environments. And that can be used to standardize configurations, to maintain standard APIs, to deploy at very fast speed and consistency across all these different resources. And so Automation and the related management layer to me is that new abstraction layer that actually is going to allow most enterprises to stop worrying quite so much about (chuckles) what kind of as a service am I buying? And focus more on the economics and the performance and the physics of the infrastructure, and then maintain consistency with highly Automated, Repeatable, Programmable Style Environments that are consistent across all these different platforms. >> Yeah, that's a great point. It's great insight, I love that. It's almost, as you can almost visualize the boardroom. We need to change our business model as a service. Go do it, climb that hill, get it done, what are you talking about? What you're trying to manage workloads inside our enterprise and outside as they started looking at the workload aspect of it, it's not trivial to just say it, right? So your containers has barely filled the void here. How are customers and how are people getting started with this initial building block of saying okay, do we just containerize it? Cause that's another hand waving activity which has a lot of traction. Also you put some containers has got some goodness to it, are many people getting started with solving this problem? And what are some of the roadblocks of just managing these workloads inside and outside the enterprise? >> Well, again I think, yeah many organizations are still in the early stages of working with containers. Right now I think our research shows that maybe five to 10% of applications have been containerized. And that's a mix of lift and shift of traditional workloads as well as net new Cloud Native. Over the next couple of years almost enterprise has tell us to think a third of their workloads could be containerized. So it's ramping very, very quickly. Again, I think that the goal for many organizations is certainly containers allow for faster development, very supportive microservices, but increasingly it's also about portability. I talk to many organizations that say, yeah, one of the reasons I'm moving, even traditional workloads into containers is so that I have that flexibility. And again, they're trying to get away from the tight coupling of workloads to physical resources and saying I'm going to make those choices, but they might change over time or I might need to go what happens. I have to scale much faster than I ever thought. I'm never going to be able to do that my own data center, I'm going to go to the Cloud. So I think that we're seeing increasing investments in, Kubernetes and containers to promote more rapid scaling and increased business agility. And again, I think that means that organizations are looking for those workloads to run across a whole set of environments, geographies, physical locations, edge. And so they're investing in platforms and they count on Automation to help them do that. >> So your point here is that in five, 10% that's a lot of growth opportunity. So containers is actually happening now so you starting to see that progression. So that's great insight. So I've got to ask you on the COVID impact, that's certainly changed some orientation because hey, this project let's double down on this is a tailwind for us, work from home this new environment and these projects, maybe we want to wait on those, how do we come out of COVID? Some people have been saying, some spending in some areas are increasing, some are not, how are customers spending money on infrastructure with COVID impact? What are you seeing from the numbers? >> Well, that's a great question, and I do see one of the major things we do is track IT markets and spending and purchasing around the world. And as you might expect, if you go back to the early part of the year, there was a very rapid shift to Cloud, particularly to support work from home. And obviously there was a lot of investment in virtual desktops and remote work kinds of and collaboration very early on. But now that we're sort of maturing a little bit and moving into more of ongoing recovery resiliency sort of phase, we continue to see very strong spending on Cloud. I think overall it's accelerated this move to more connected environments. Many of the new initiatives are being built and deployed in Cloud environments. But again, we're not seeing a Whole Hog exit from On-prem resources. The other thing is Edge. We're seeing a lot of growth on Edge, both again there's sort of work from home, but also more remote monitoring, more support for all kinds of IOT and remote work environments, whether it's Lab Testing or Data Analysis or Contact Tracing. I mean, there's just so many different use cases. >> I'm going to ask you about Ansible and Red Hat. I see you've been following Ansible since the acquisition by Red Hat. How do you think they're doing Visa Vie the market, their competitors that have also been acquired? What's your take on their performance, their transition, their transformation? >> Well, this infrastructure is code or Automation is code market has really matured a lot over the last 10 or more years. And I think the Ansible acquisition was about five years ago now. I think we've moved from just focusing on trying to build elegant Automation languages, which certainly was an early initiative. Ansible offered one of the earlier human readable Python based approaches as opposed to more challenging programming languages that some of the earlier solutions had. But I think what's been really interesting to me over the last couple years with Red Hat is just what a great job they've done in promoting the community and building out that ecosystem, because at the end of the day the value of any of these infrastructures code solutions is how much they promote the connectivity across networks, Clouds, servers, security, and do that in a consistent, scalable way. And I think that's what really is going to matter going forward. And then that's probably why you've seen a range of acquisitions in this market over the last couple of years, is that as a standalone entity, it's hard to build those really robust ecosystems, and to do the analytics and the curation and the support at large scale. So it kind of makes sense as these things mature that they become fun homes with larger organizations that can put all that value around it. >> That's great commentary on the infrastructure as code, I totally agree. You can't go wrong by building abstraction layers and making things more agile. I want to get your take on some announcements that are going on here and get your thoughts on your perspective. Obviously they released with the private Automation hub and a bunch of other great stuff. I mean, bringing Automation, Kubernetes, and series of new features to the platform together, obviously continuation of their mission. But one of the things when I talked to the engineers is I say, what's the top three things, Ansible Fest, legal collections, collections, collections, so you start to see this movement around collections and the platform. The other thing is, it's a tool market and everyone's got tools we need a platform. So it's a classic tools. As you saw that in big data other areas where need start getting into platform, and you need management and orchestration you need Automation, services. What's your perspective on these announcements? Have they been investing aggressively? What does it mean? What's your take? And what does it mean? >> Yeah, I would agree that Red Hat has continued to invest very aggressively in Red Hat and in Ansible over the last few years. What's really interesting is if you go back a couple years, we had ASML engine, which included periodic, maybe every quarter or even longer than that distributions that pretty much all Ansible code got shipped on. And then we had tower which provided an API and a way to do some audit and logging and integration with source control. And that was great, but it didn't move fast enough. And we just got done talking about how everything's accelerated and everything's now connected Clouds. And I think a lot of what the Red Hat has done is really, approach the architecture for scale and ecosystem for scale. And so the collections have been really important because they provide a framework to not only validate and curate content but also to help customers navigate it and can quickly find the best content for their use cases. And also for the partners to engage, there's I think it's 50 plus collections now that are focused on partner content. And so it's I think it's really provided an environment where the ecosystem can grow, where customers can get the support that they need. And then with the Automation hub and the ability to support really robust source control and distribution. And again, it's promoting this idea of an Automation environment that can scale not only within a data center, but really across these connected environments. >> Great stuff. I want to get your thoughts cause I want to define and understand what Red Hat and Ansible, when they talk about curated content, which includes support for open shifts, versus pulling content from the community. I hear content I'm like, oh, content is that a video? Is that like, what is content? So can you explain what they mean when they say they're currently building out, aggressively building curated content and this idea of what does content mean? Is it content, is it code? >> Yeah, I think any of these Automation as code environments. You really have a set of building blocks that in the Ansible framework would be be modules and playbooks and roles. And those are relatively small stable pieces of code, much of it is actually written by third parties or folks in the community to do a very specific task. And then what the Ansible platform is really great at is integrating those modules and playbooks and roles to create much more robust Automations and to give folks a starting point, and ability to do, rather than having to code everything from scratch to really kind of pull together things that have been validated have been tested, get security updates when they need it that kind of thing. And so the customers can focus on essentially changing these things together and customizing them for their own environment as opposed to having to write all the code from step one. >> So content means what, in this context, what does content mean for them? >> It's Automation building blocks. It's code, it's small amounts of code that do very specific things (chuckles) and in a collections environment, it's tagged, it's tested, it's supported. >> It's not a research report like of a Cube video, it's like code, it's not content. >> Yeah, I know. But again, this is Automation as code, right? So it it's pieces of code that rather than needing an expert who understands everything about how a particular device or system works, you've got reusable pieces of code that can be integrated together, customized and run on a repeatable, scalable basis. And if they need to be updated cause an API changes or something, there's a chain that goes back to the the vendors who, again are part of the ecosystem and then there's a validation and testing. So that by the time it goes back into the collections, the customers can have some confidence that when they pull it down, it's not going to break their whole environment. Whereas in a pure community supported model, the contents made by the community, may be beautiful, but you don't know, and you could have five submissions that kind of do the same thing. How do you know what's going to work and what's going to be stable? So it's a lot of helping organizations get Automation faster in a more stable environment. >> We can certainly follow up on this train cause one of things I've been digging into is this idea of, open source and contribution, integrations are huge. The collections to me is super important because when we start thinking about integration that's one of Cloud native, supposedly strength is to be horizontally scalable, integrated, building abstraction layers as you had pointed out. So I've got to ask you with respect to open source. I was just talking with a bunch of founders yesterday here in Silicon Valley around as Cloud scales and certainly you seeing snowflake build on top of AWS. I mean, that's an amazing success story. You're starting to see these new innovations where the Cloud scale providers are providing great value propositions and the role open source is trying to keep pace. And so I got to ask you is still open source, let me say I believe it's important, but how does open source maintain its relevance as Cloud scale goes on? Because that's going to force Automation to go faster. Okay, and you got the major Cloud vendors promoting their own Cloud platforms. Yet you got the innovation of startups and companies. Your enterprises are starting to act like startups as container starts to get through this lift and shift phase. You'll see innovation coming from enterprises as well as startups. So you start to see this notion bring real value on top of these Clouds. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I think open source and the communities continue to be very, very important, particularly at the infrastructure layer, because to get all this innovation that you're talking about, you act, if you believe you've got a connected environment where folks are going to have different footprints and, and probably, you know, more than one public Cloud set of resources, it's only going to, the value is only going to be delivered if the workloads are portable, they're stable, they can be integrated, they can be secure. And so I think that the open source communities have become, you know, continue to be an incredibly important as a way to get industry alignment and shared innovation on the, on the platform and infrastructure and operational levels. And I think that that's, you know, going to be, be something that we're going to see for a long time. >> Well Mary, I really appreciate your insights, I got one final question, but I'll just give you a plug for the folks watching, check out Mary's work at IDC, really cutting edge and super important as Cloud management really is at the heart of all the, whether it's multicloud, on-premise hybrid or full Cloud lift and shift or Cloud native, management plays a huge important role right now. That's where the action is. You looking at the container growth as Mary you pointed out is great. So I have to ask you what comes next. What do you think management will do relative to Cloud management, as it evolves in these priority environments around Cloud, around on-premise as the operations start to move along, containers are critical. You talked about the growth is only five, 10%, a lot of headroom there. How is management going to evolve? >> Well, again, I think a lot of it is going to be is everything has to move faster. And that means that Automation actually becomes more and more important, but we're going to have to move from Automation at human speed to Automation at container and Cloud speed. And that means a lot is going to have to be driven by AI and ML analytics that can and observability solutions. So I think that that's going to be the next way is taking these, you know, very diverse sources of, of log and metrics and application traces and performance and end user experience and all these different things that tell us, how is the application actually running and how is the infrastructure behaving? And then putting together an analytics and Automation layer that can be a very autonomous. We have at IDC for doing a lot of research on the future of digital infrastructure. And this is a really fundamental tenant of what we believe is that autonomous operations is the future for a Cloud and IT. >> Final point for our friends out there and your friends out there watching who some are on the cutting edge, riding the big wave of Cloud native, they're at Cube calm, they're digging in, they're at service meshes, Kubernetes containers, you name it. And for the folks who have just been kind of grinding it out, an it operations, holding down the Fort, running the networks, running all the apps. What advice do you give the IT skillset friends out there that are watching. What should they be doing? What's your advice to them, Mary? >> Well, you know, we're going to continue to see the convergence of, of virtualized and container based infrastructure operations. So I think anyone out there that is in those sorts of roles really needs to be getting comfortable with programmatic code driven Automation and, and figuring out how to think about operations from more of a policy and scale scalability, point of view. Increasingly, you know, if you believe what I just said about the role of analytics driving Automation, it's going to have to be based on something, right? There's going to have to be rules. There's going to have to be policies is going to have to be, you know, configuration standards. And so kind of making that shift to not thinking so much about, you know, the one off lovingly handcrafted, handcrafted environment, thinking about how do we scale, how do we program it and starting to get comfort with, with some of these tools, like an Ansible, which is designed to be pretty accessible by folks with a large range of skillsets, it's human readable, it's Python based. You don't have to be a computer science major to be able to get started with it. So I think that that's what many folks have to do is start to think about expanding their skill sets to operate at even greater scale and speed. >> Mary, thanks so much for your time. Mary Johnston Turner, Vice President of Research at Cloud for Cloud management at IDC for the Ansible Fest virtual. I'm John Ferrier with theCUBE for cube coverage, cube virtual coverage of Ansible Fest, 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT research summit, presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBEs, coverage of Upgrade 2020. Of course, it's NTT's Global Research Summit. Really excited, we're going to be able to dig into healthcare, the health system of course, something that's been, top of mind for everyone around the globe this year, so happy to welcome you to the program. First time guest Mary Edwards. She is the president of provider at NTT DATA Services. Mary, welcome to the program, saying thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Glad to be here. >> All right. So why don't we start, as I tee it up. We're going to be talking about health care there, just a little bit of your background, your group inside of NTT DATA Services. >> Sure. So I've been at NTT DATA Services for a year, just about a year on the knows. Really glad to be here. I've been healthcare, all of my career over 30 years. At first in the Blues, in underwriting actuarial and strategy, then hop to consulting. I was a partner with Accenture for 20, well, yeah, I think 22 years, I was at Accenture. and then, I was leading a commercial markets portion of a platform as a service company for a couple of years, and then NTT called and I was really impressed with what I learned about NTT and delighted to join the firm as the president of provider. >> Well, Mary, I've got a little bit of background in some of the health I love, I go to innovation conferences, and they're like, "We have the opportunity to really transform markets, but it's so tough to make change." Well, you've been there for a year, and the last year, there's been a force in function to change the advent of telehealth and telemedicine. I've done plenty of interviews, and heck, me and my family have been to doctors, using those services, which, at the beginning of this year, I wouldn't have thought was possible. Some of these might be long term changes in impact on what's happening, but bring us inside, your customers, what are some of the pressing challenges they're facing? And it's been a little bit this, there obviously, are huge challenges, but there's also been an opportunity to make some rapid changes. >> Great question. Well, first of all, there's no place I'd rather be right now, than serving the health systems across the US, and certainly we have impact globally. It's dynamic time, lots of change, and as you say, with change comes opportunity. But also, it's a time of deep fragility, and a time when these clients really need help, not just from NTT, but from a variety of partners. And I know, I feel and my team feels, that it's a privilege to work in supporting them, through this very difficult time. And when I say difficult time, I mean, think about it, even before the pandemic, Chartists research was talking about the fact that likely 25% of rural hospitals would fail. Fast forward only a couple of months from that, research being published and across the industry, outpatient revenues are down 11% year over year, inpatient revenue down as well, labor expenses up by nearly 18%. And so there's a lot of pressures on the industry right now. And that's what I mean by just a very significant time to be in the industry and position to help. There's a huge recovery, that needs to happen from what our clients have experienced. First and foremost, top line. We've got to get the revenue back into the hospitals. The CARES Act funding doesn't last forever, and certainly, brings with it some obligations. So bringing in that top line growth, virtual health, which you mentioned, is a big part of that strategy. At the same time, they've got to deal with all the new delivery models or working models, work from anywhere is something that all businesses have to face, and incredibly, an incredible challenge for our health systems. Because of course, it's not just about how we do our individual work, but the interactions that they have to have in conducting the work that they do. So care from anywhere and work from anywhere, are huge concerns of our health system clients now. And you have to do that in industrialized ways, because you don't know where you're working day to day, you have to be able to have fast switching, right? Because we're not in control of where we work. Cities and states are telling us, what we have to do on a day in day out basis. There's a huge concept - >> Human. >> Oh, go ahead. Sure. >> Yeah, no, I just say, as you say, obviously, healthcare is rightly so a heavily regulated industry. So bring us inside a little bit, what are some of those opportunities, some of those innovations that providers are being able to take advantage? And have we opened the gates a little bit to help things move a little bit faster here in 2020, due to necessity? >> Yeah. Well, virtual care, you mentioned that earlier, has exploded. There's a lot of dialogue right now in the industry about whether that's forever. It will never go back to the low single digits that it was prior to the pandemic. I mean, prior to the pandemic health systems were happy if they could get to 10%. Overnight, virtual care went to 40%, 50%, increase overnight, and just continue to grow. CEOs across the industry prior to the pandemic, were really focused on digital front door strategies, the ability to enable consumers to enter the healthcare system, digitally and virtually. And so probably for the 18 months before the pandemic, most large system CEOs that I talked to, were working on those strategies. They're doubling down on those strategies, because the industry is reshaping around that digital future state. The cost pressures that we're seeing in health care, at the same time, require that they think about new operating and delivery models, certainly the industry will restructure, based on what we've gone through and continue to experience. And that will mean certainly changes in consolidation in the healthcare industry, right? As certainly certain systems will fail, right. Can't support what's happening around the economics of the industry. But also within our delivery and operations, there will be and we're already seeing a trend toward more pervasive outsourcing, moving offshore, taking particularly back office functions, whether it's IT or business processes, and looking for the help that can drive down the cost structure, better automate, and innovate on those processes and delivery models, and accelerate their journey to the digital future state of health. >> So Mary, help us understand NTT DATA Services, and NTT broader, what are the solutions? How are you helping your customers with everything we've discussed here? >> Sure, well, you can't enable those digital front door strategies unless you do things like get your applications to the cloud. You've got to be able to open up your environment to trade, if I say it that way, right? To exchange more broadly, even within your own ecosystem, within your own walls, the ability to connect doctors with doctors that before the pandemic didn't have a need to connect in the same way becomes important. So at NTT, we do everything, journey to the cloud. Certainly the security that's so important to those journey and also the digital future of health care. RPA, the introduction of bots and AI to workflows and operations in order to reduce cost. In my division in provider, we worked for nearly the last year on something we call, nucleus for healthcare, which is that digital front door enabled by digital foundation and which delivers through pre-selected capabilities scheduling, through virtual care visits to care coordination and payment, all integrated across the digital fabric, in order to accelerate the industry and certainly our health system partners achievement of that digital front door vision and the full digital future for healthcare. >> I love you talked about RPA automation, has been one of the top things we've been hearing this year. It's just a top sea level priority. We love coming to events like this, a lot of discussion of research looking a little bit forward down the road. What are some of the items here at Upgrade 2020, you want to make sure our audience get a little peek into? >> Yeah, well, you talk about automation, and I said a moment ago about offshore, we're thinking about no shore, right? So when you think about the application of automation and advanced analytics AI into business processes, it's not about moving business processes to a lower cost geography, it's about automating, and enabling through bots and whatnot, the ability to not have hands touch it, and really conserving your resources for the more complex things that have to happen. So I love that concept of no shoring, and really using technology to position humans for their best possible work, solving the harder problems that we face as an industry. I think about innovations in patient monitoring, and what we can take in terms of IoT, from other industries. And for instance, at NTT, we've been doing smart city with the city of Las Vegas, for a couple of years now. And we've got lots of AI around movement, heat, light, the physical context of things. You think about how you move that into healthcare. And it's certainly about patient observation, and creating safe spaces, where doctors and nurses don't have to travel in and out of rooms when there's a high contagion rate, but it's also about using AI, not just to watch the room, but to allow AI to alert when there's something very significant happening, what kind of movement in the bed, what does that infer in terms of what's happening in the patient's room, and alerting on that basis versus a visual monitor, if you will. There are other innovations. Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> Oh, no, so sorry, I thought you had said, please finish. >> Well, I was just about to say there are other innovations that we're working on, that are really about patient well being, patient companion. I think about the work we're doing at NTT disruption around something called Jibo, which is a robotics, very cool little guy who we've had some experience using it in our children's hospitals, right. It becomes like a really a companion of sorts. There are lots of applications for that kind of technology, especially in a pandemic time, when most of our patients are isolated and craving some human interaction and these capabilities can be like that, they can be companions, and they can provide the social interaction that really lead to health and well being. >> Well, so many important topics. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Great to hear your automation, robotics in the people, at the center, of course, of what we look at in healthcare. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Bye bye. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, It's theCUBE Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco, the 33rd floor of the Salesforce building. This is the San Francisco Accenture innovation hub, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She runs all the innovation hubs in all the Americas. It's Mary Hamilton, the managing director of Accenture Labs for Accenture. Mary, great to see you. We saw you last year. >> Great to see you, yes. >> Great to be back. >> But now you've had this place open for a year. Last year was the grand opening I think. >> It was, it was, and now we're doing all kinds of crazy new things here in our labs and in the hub. >> Yeah, that's great. So we've talked before that, you know, Paul and Mike and the team, they've put together this great vision document. It's very provocative and forward-looking and I think it is actually really thought-provoking. That's great, and we're going to have a nice party here and they're going to present, but how do we get this from this pretty piece of paper into my company or into your clients' companies? How do you and the innovation hub help them execute? >> Yeah, it is my job to bring this to life, all right? So it's all about, how do I do applied research, and how do I do that for our clients in a real way with new and emerging technologies? >> Jeff: Right. >> And so we take all of this vision and say, you know, what are the next round of technologies, and how do we think about it in new and different ways, and how do we do that in kind of a sustained, ongoing innovation direction? >> Right, right. So, you guys work with giant companies. They have millions, if not billions of R&D budgets. Where do you fit and how do you augment that? What's kind of the value add that your special asset brings to this huge investment that they're already making? >> Absolutely, so I think what we bring is the combination of everything that's here in this hub. So we've got business research. You know, what are the paradigms and the trends that we're seeing that are shifting society, politics, economics, and technology? We've got the technologists that are partnering with universities, partnering with startups. You know, think about how we view open innovation. And then, how do we actually build that for real, and how do we do it with that industry lens. We're so fortunate that, you know, out of the 500 thousand people we have here, we have deep, deep, industry expertise. So it's really about bringing all those pieces together and then working with those clients to say, how do we augment? How do we shape your future? How do we figure out what direction to go in, create that roadmap, and then together start to turn the crank on innovation from ideation all the way up through scale, and I think that's something pretty unique that we do really well. >> Right, and is it driven kind of top down from the CEO who says I have innovation kind of prerogative, go forth and innovate? Or do you see it more kind of with product groups that are trying to potentially go a slightly different direction, or incorporate some new technology? How does that actually work, or what are some of the models that you see that are successful, I guess? >> Yeah, and I would say yes, uh, all of those. >> Of course. >> You know, we do some big strategic things that are, you know, our CEO, you know, our client CEO coming together and say, you know, we're rethinking mobility. We're rethinking, you know, how we're going to shape our future, what are extended businesses that we've never thought of before? How do we go from a products to a services company? So there's, you know, the big CEO visions that trickle down, you know. We help them through strategy, through innovation, through the technology pieces to deliver that, and then there's also sort of that grassroots. You know, lab to lab pairing up and saying, okay. Let's create a partnership that, you know, you bring kind of the industry lab piece and we'll bring, you know, our technology labs and the work that we do, and come together to create that relationship. >> Right. >> So we've done both. (laughs) >> They're getting ready to start the program as you can tell. >> Mary: I know. (laughs) >> But I got to get a couple more questions. So there's a lot of different types of technology labs that you guys have in here. You've got a really cool quantum computing thing upstairs. You've got VR and AR and all these different things, but I know your passion, you talk about it every time I see you, is material science, >> Mary: It is. and, you know, I don't think if people, cause it's kind of under the covers, if you will, really appreciate the science advancements that are happening with materials, so when you think of kind of material science, how it's moving, and the opportunities that that's opening up just in the technology of the materials themselves, what gets you excited? What are some of the things that people should know about that maybe they're not paying attention to? >> Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm excited about it because that was my degree in college, and I never thought I would use it here at Accenture. (laughs) >> Jeff: Good lesson for those watching at home. >> Yeah, so I used to you know, work in a wet lab and build hydro gels and all kinds of cool, um... So this has been a journey for me, but what I'm really excited is this is a space that you wouldn't think of Accenture playing in normally, right? You wouldn't think of us having this expertise, but when you think about the proliferation of sensors that we think about today, material science allows you to start to do some of the same things that we see with sensors, and even actuators, but at the molecular level, and we can start to do it at a different scale than what's available today, whether it's at a really small scale, or really big scale with coatings, right, or even paint, that start to create really, truly interactive, connected spaces. You know, we all talk about IOT and connected spaces and connected buildings, and that's great, but imagine if everything's connective, like the walls, the floor, your clothing, and you can start to almost in a way have a conversation with the space, right? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Have an interaction that's super personalized based on everything that's happening. You know, the environment understands everything that's going on, and ideally if we start to apply our research with AI, can start to understand well, what's your intent? What's the context? And then, how do you actually shape and create a super, super personalized experience? >> So just so people understand what you just said, well, let me make sure I understand. Now, you're talking about like in a coating, so instead of a sensor or many sensors, the actual coating, say inside of a pipe that you're trying to keep track of, the whole coating becomes one big sensor? >> Mary: That's right, exactly. >> Yeah, that's a pretty big game changer. (laughs) >> Yeah, yeah. >> And are you seeing the implementation? I mean, what are some of the ones that are actually out in the field today that people probably, you know, are rolling over, walking by, touching, and have no clue that they're really interacting with material science as opposed to electronics, for instance? >> It's still pretty early days, so this is why it's in our incubation stage, and we're playing with things like skin tattoos, right? You've probably, I dunno if you've seen Beyonce's. You know, have those gold leaf tattoos? Well we can do those same cool tattoos but make them controllers for your space, or you know the Levi's jacket that has the jacquard, we actually now have in house one of the teams that worked on that, and so, you know, we're starting to see, you know, in actual clothing, the ability to use that material science, conductive thread to create a whole new way of interacting. (laughs) >> Wow. >> Which is really, really cool, and then, you know, we're thinking about, you know, how do you create those advances? If you can use a stretchy polymer that understands when it's being stretched, you can start to apply that to, you know, maybe an armband or an elbow brace that for physical therapy understands how much you're bending your arm, and are you doing your physical therapy in the right way, so instead of, you know, once or twice going in your doctor and checking, you know, how are things going? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> They can have real time constant updates in a pretty lo-fi way, but it's through these new smart materials. >> Right, such cool stuff. >> Yeah. >> It's like, look at the smile. You love this stuff. >> (laughs) I do. >> All right, well we got to let you go, cause they're getting ready to kick off the big thing. >> I'm getting left behind! (laughs) >> And I don't want to get you the kick, so thank you for taking a few minutes, and thanks for having us back, and congrats to you and the team. >> Thank you, super fun and thanks for having me. >> All right, she's Mary, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with the Accenture Tech Innovation 2020 launch. Check it out online. They'll have all the stuff. It'll make you think, and thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (energetic theme music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering UIPath FORWARD America's 2019. Brought to you by UIPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UIPath FORWARD, here in Sin City, Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Dave Velante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for faculty and academic affairs of the Mason School of Business at the college of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks you for having me. >> Rebecca: And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of learning at UIPath, thank you so much. >> Great to be here. >> You're a Cube alum, so thank you for coming back. >> I've been here a few times. >> A Cube veteran, I should say. >> I think 10 years or so >> So we're talking today about a robot for every student, this was just announced in August, William and Mary is the first university in the US to provide automation software to every undergraduate student, thanks to a four million dollar investment from UIPath. Tell us a little bit about this program, Kurt, how it works and what you're trying to do here. >> Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UIPath for making this happen. This is a bold and incredible initiative, one that, frankly, when we had it initially, we thought that maybe we could get a robot for every student, we weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that, but UIPath was, they see the vision, and so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple, this technology is transforming the world in a way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. But it's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so, we want to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet that actually prepares students not just for the way RPA's being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI three, four, five years down the road. So, we talked to UIPath, they thought it was a really good idea, we went all in on it. Yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now, they've all been trained through the academy live session putting together a course, it's very exciting. >> So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning, here's my question. How come we didn't learn this school stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. >> I don't know, I only learned BASIC, so I can't speak to that. >> So you know last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning some of the open, sort of philosophy that you have. So, give us the update on how you're pushing learning FORWARD, and why the College of William and Mary. >> Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker, or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere a hundred and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA/AI. So if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago we made, we created RPA Academy, UIPath academy, and 100% free. After two and a half years, we have 451,000 people go through the academy courses, that's huge. But we think there's a lot more. Over the next next three years we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still a hundred million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is, we went out, last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university, now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course, and I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more that we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that hundred million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, and we're trying to touch as many people as we can. >> You guys are really out ahead of the curve. Oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science, saw some colleges leaning in. So what lead you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? >> Yeah, I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right buildout of that, how we're going to build a portfolio of bots, how we're going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate, How we're going to balance some processes that might have a nice ROI but be harder for the individual who's process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated, but might not have as great of an ROI. How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is worked with UIPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation, and we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. >> Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean it's not just about using the tooling, it's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. >> I used to cover business education for the Financial Times, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be, and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school, they're graduating from college already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course, what does it look like, how are they using this in the classroom? >> The course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on outside of class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the backend to have proof points on the effectiveness, so you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that, so they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff, so that's on the first half, and to keep them engaged with this software, we're giving them small skills, we're calling them skillets. Small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful in lives as students, and useful in their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures, or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UIPath and with our alums who've implement this, folks at EY, Booz. In fact, we went up to DC, we had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn, and they told us, and so we build these three big classes, each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. >> That's huge because, you know, like, my son's a senior in college. He and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time, but one of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make metrics work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UIPath and is really more about, you know, the category if you will, the potential. Can you talk about that? >> So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities too, and they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing, and you work with engineering, and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses, because it's a really good PNL when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UIPath, or for our customers, or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So, as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. You know, as we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by end of next year, we'll probably have a thousand universities signed up. And so, there's a lot of subject matter expertise, and if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course, we have a four hour course, and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible, because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA, so we might build a course on Lean RPA, because that's really important. Solution architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now so, so we look to where these gaps are, we listen to everybody, and then we just execute. >> Well, it's interesting you said Six Sigma, we have Jean Younger coming on, she's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes in Six Sigma, but you would never spend the time and money, I mean, if it's an airplane engine, for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurt, I'm curious as to how you, as a college, market this. You know, you're very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? >> Well, it's a two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this, and what effects is it having already? Enrollments to the business school, well. Students at William and Mary get admitted to William and Mary, and they're fantastic, amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William and Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason school of business. If you take our undergraduate GPA of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. I don't know that it's a one to one correlation. >> Tom: I think it is. >> I believe it's a strong predictor, right? And part because it's such an easy sell. And so, when we talk to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why our students should do this, they said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid 90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity here for them, that's the easy way to market it internally, it aligns with things that are happening at William and Mary, trying to be innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it, we believe we're getting there, we believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen that this is interesting, and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around, and we are coordinating with UIPath on that. But internally, this sells actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for, we're going to make it ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. >> Well, I imagine the big consultants are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, Hughes and DC, and Excensior, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean it's just, they all want the best and the brightest, and now you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. >> Kurt: That's the plan. >> I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are, these are 19 and 20 year olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So, what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're going to be the be people that sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them, because it is a whole different skill set. >> Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes and the processes that are currently... That currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills, these places where, right now, there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's sill a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. The simple, AI's going to simply put models into those decision nodes. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligent, what would currently be considered human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important, prioritizing is going to be really important, identifying organizations that are ripe for this, at this moment in time, which processes to automate. Those are the kind of skills we're trying to get students to develop, and what we're selling it partly as, this is going to make you ready of the world the way we think it's going to be, a bit of a guess. But we're also saying if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained, or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens, so take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, everything in the course is wrapped in that, and so, at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project, and the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it, don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist and let's imagine, with the potential of RPA, how we would make that happen. That's going to be, we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens even though they are 19 and 20, because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation, while they've never submitted a procurement report. >> Exactly! >> A innovation presentation. >> We'll need to do a Cube follow up with that. >> What Kurt just said, is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way undercounted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces, because they look back they say how big was it last year, how fast are these companies growing, but, to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. >> We agree. >> Yeah, I know you do, but I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. >> You know, when listening to you, Kurt, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part, they'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities, and that's, I think, you're challenging them to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think, is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. >> Piece of cake. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE with a really fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Velante, stay tuned for more of theCUBEs live coverage of UIPath FORWARD. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back everyone it's theCUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia for Red Hat's AnsibleFest. #AnsibleFest, check out all the commentary on Twitter. Of course, we're here for two days, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP Cloud Management International Data Corp IDC. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So IT operations has been an evolving thing. AI and automation really changing the landscape of this data equation. IT operations used to be, "Hey, you go to IT ops, no problem." Now with the world changing to be more software-driven, software-led, a lot's changed. What's your take? What's your research say about the IT ops landscape? >> Well, I mean, you have to put it in the context of what's going on generally with IT, right? I mean, we're clearly seeing DevOps, you know it's either in production or in large scale testing and the majority of enterprises. We've got lots and lots of containers and Kubernetes usage, we've got multiple clouds in just about every enterprise you talk to. It's, you know, well over 90%. And what that all means is that there's just a lot of change on a lot of different levels. And so that's kind of really put stress on traditional, operational approaches on task-oriented automation. you know, siloed approaches to control and monitoring. And what we're really starting to see is now a move to how to become more integrated, more unified and more collaborative across all these teams. And that's actually kind of driving to me for a new generation of monitoring automation and analytics kind of all put together. >> It's interesting how management software has always been part of every IT conversation we've had in over the past decades. And, but recently if you look up the evolution of cloud and hybrid multi-cloud, you mentioned that. CloudOne, Dot, Amazon, public cloud, pretty straightforward to comprehend. Start-up start there. But this whole other cloud paradigm is shifting has taken these categories like network management, turned them into observability. Five companies go public and M&A activity booming. Automation similar kind of vibe to it here. It's got this management piece to it that used to be this white space. Now the aperture seems to be increasing. What's your take on this? Because we're trying to make sense of it. Customers are trying to figure it out, obviously. They've been doing configuration management. But now they got scale, they got some of the things you mentioned. What's this automation category look like or is it a category? >> I don't know if it's a category or not but it's certainly a thing, right? I think what we're seeing with automation is historically, it was very individual driven. It was, "I have a problem", right? I have to configure something or deploy something and I could whip up a script, you know, do a little code and it worked for me and it wasn't documented and that was great, you know. And I think what we're happening now with just the way applications are being architected, I mean, you're moving to very modular, microservices-based approach to applications, the way they're deployed. All the dependencies across all the different tiers from network to storage to public cloud to private cloud. It's really very, very difficult to rely on a bunch of ad hoc tools to do that. And so I think what's happened with automation is it's expanding up to become as much a business collaboration platform, as it is just sort of a task, feeds and speeds sort of control platform. We're kind of in the middle of that evolution. Even, you know, two years ago I don't think you saw the kinds of analytics, you know, and machine learning and AI that we're now starting to see come in as an overlay to the automation environment. >> Mary, one of the things we've been talking about for the last couple of years is that great buzz word of digital transformation. The real driver for that is I need to be a data driven organization, not just ad hoc things. So where does automation fit into that broader discussion of, you know, changing operational models like you were talking about? >> Well I think, you know done right, it can really be a platform for collaboration and accelerating digital transformation across the enterprise. Because rather than having, you know, each team have to do their own thing and then do a manual hand off or a big change control meeting, you know, these things just don't scale and move quick enough in today's environments. Particularly if you're trying to update your applications every five minutes, right? So, I think the collaboration, the different teams and also a creative environment where you can have more generalists too, right? you know, there's collaboration across IT ops and DevOps and sort of the lines start to blur. >> Yeah, you mentioned the word platform and we were talking to the Ansible team, they were very specific as to how they chose that for customers out there. You know, choosing a platform is a bit of a commitment. It's not just a tactical, "We're going to do this." What's your thoughts on the Ansible automation platform and what feedback do you have to customers as to how they're deciding which platforms and how many platforms that they'll develop on? >> Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. I mean, I think one of the things that the Ansible team's really focusing on that's important is the modularity. The fact that you can plug and play and kind of grow over time. And also that it's a very software-driven paradigm with the automation artifacts under source control. Which again is kind of different for a lot of ops teams. They don't have that notion of Git and software development all the time. So I think that having a platform approach that still allows a fair amount of modularity integration, and it lets different parts of the organization decide over time how much they want to participate in a very curated, consistent integration. And at the same time, at least in the Ansible world, because of the way it's architected, they can still have modules that call out to other automation, you know, solutions that are in the environment. So it's not an all or nothing, and I think that's really, really important. And it's also a platform for analytics. I'm sorry, but data, you know, about what's going on with the automation. >> The data's critical, but we had mentioned earlier on our previous interview with Red Hat folks and Stu and I's intro about the cloud and how the complexity that is being introduced, and you mentioned some of those earlier, the complexities are there. Of the automation solutions that you've seen, which one's having the most impact for customers? >> Well that, what do you mean by impact? There's such a, such a range of them. If you look in certainly the configuration, infrastructure as code space, obviously Ansible, there's a couple others. If you look into the CI/CD space, right? I mean there's a whole set of very optimized CI/CD tools out there that are very important to the DevOps environment. And, again, you'll see integrations between the infrastructure and the CI/CD, and they're all kind of blurring. And then you've got very specific, almost domain controllers, whether they're for hardware or converged infrastructure-type platforms, or whether they're for public clouds. And those don't go away, right? You still need something that understands the lower level system. And so, I think what we're seeing is organizations trying to reduce the number of individual siloed automation tools they've got, but they're still probably going to have more than one to do the full stack with something, you know, acting as kind of a policy-driven control plane in analytics-driven control plane in the middle. >> So, you've still got to run the plumbing. >> Right, exactly. >> You've still got to run the system now. >> Yeah, I mean something like 70 to 80% of the customers we talk to that are using one or more of the big public clouds, they're also using a fair amount of control tooling that's provided by those cloud vendors. And those aren't going to go away, because, you know, it's just like a hardware system. You got to have the drivers, right? You got to have the core, but you've got to be able to again have the process flow across it that's really important. >> What's your take on the market place shaking out the winners and losers? Because I know you like to track the marketplace from a research standpoint. It just seems that all the events we go to at theCube, everyone's jockeying for the control plane. >> They are. >> Or something. The control plane of the data. We're the control plane for the management. So, the control plane, meaning horizontally scalable, much more platform-centric. You're starting to see kind of a systems thinking coming back into the enterprise versus the siloed IT, but this illustrious control plane, (Mary laughing) I mean, how many control planes can there be? What's your take on all this craziness? >> That's a good question. I mean again, I think there is a difference between sort of the driver level, right? Which it used to be, again, those scripts. They were kind of like drivers, right? That's almost becoming just the playing field. You've got to have those integrations. You've got to have a nice modular way to architect that. What really is going to be the control plane is the data. It's the metrics around what are you doing. It's the performance, it's the security, and being able to actually optimize a lot of the SLOs that go along with that. That's really where the, you know, being able to do a good thing with the data, and tie it to the business and the app is where the real control is going to be. >> Mary, how's Ansible doing as a business? We saw a lot of proof points in the keynote about the community growth, obviously, adoption is up. But, anything you can share about how, you know, they've been doing really about four years into the Red Hat acquisition? >> Well they're, I mean, they're growing pretty effectively. They, I think this whole category is growing, and so they're benefiting quite a lot from that. I think we are seeing really strong growth in the partner communities. Particularly here at this show we are seeing some really, you know, larger and larger scale partnerships, more and more investment. And I think that is really important, because ultimately for a technology like this to scale, it's got to become embedded in all kinds of solutions. So, I look at much as the partner adoption as a good sign as anything. >> Well it's, you know, I guess two things. One is, the whole market's growing. Is Ansible doing better or worse than that? And what is the impact of those cloud-native tooling that you mentioned is, you know, I looked there's kind of Red Hat, the Ansible traditional competition, which was more in the infrastructure management space and now, yes, they do containerization, and work more in the cloud environment. They're kind of spanning between those environments. >> Well, I think, you know, again I see most organizations using multiple tools. I think, from a revenue and growth rate, I can't really get into it, because, as you know, Ansible is actually part of Red Hat, and Red Hat doesn't report out numbers at that level. But we see certainly see a lot of adoption. And we see Ansible, you know, at least if not the primary, as one of the major tools in more and more organizations. And that's across compute, storage, network, very, very popular in the network space, and then growing. Probably not quite as strong, but growing interest in like security and IoT. >> It's interesting you mention the numbers and how Ansible is now part of Red Hat. When Red Hat bought Ansible a couple years ago, I think the year before Stu and I were talking about how configuration management automation was going to come. We kind of saw it, but one of the things that in the community and Red Hat had publicly talked about is, Red Hat didn't screw it up. They kind of got it right, they kept them alone. They grew organically and this organic growth is kind of a forcing function for these new things. Are you happy with what Red Hat has done here with Ansible and this platform? What's your take on this platform? Because platforms have to enable. Good things and value. >> I think you're right. Ansible grew very virally and organically for a long time, but you kind of hit a wall with that at some point. I think they rightly recognized that they needed to have the kind of tooling, the kind of metrics, the kind of hub and modularity that would allow it to go the next level. So, I'm actually really encouraged by this announcement, and I think it also, again, it positions it I think to make partner driven-solutions much more easily standardized. It opens up, probably more ways for people to contribute to the communities. So I think it's really positive. >> And as a platform, if it's enabling value, what kind of value propositions do you see emerging? 'Cause you've got the content collections, the automation hub, automation analytics. Is it just bolting onto RHEL as value? What is some of the value that you might see coming out of the Ansible automation platform? >> Oh, well I mean Ansible's always been very agnostic. It's always been its own business which certainly can compliment RHEL. There's RHEL rolls and all kinds of stuff. But that's not really the focal point for Ansible. Ansible really is about providing that modular consistent automation approach that can span all these different operational domains, and really reach into the business process. So, I think it's great for the Red Hat portfolio, but now as we start to see them building bridges into the bigger IBM portfolio, you know, we haven't had a lot of IBM/Ansible announcements yet, but I would expect that we're going to see more over time. I think the OpenShift Operator integrations are going to be important as part of the things that IBM is doing with OpenShift. So, I think there's more to come. >> Mary, I wonder what your research finds regarding open source consumption in general. You know, how many of the customers out there are just using the free community addition? You know, Red Hat's very clear, you know, they are not, the open source is not Red Hat's business model. It is the way that they work. >> Mary: It's a development model. >> It's their development model. So, any general comments about open source, and specifically around Ansible, kind of the community free edition versus paid. >> Well, it's obviously been an interesting week in open source world with, not Red Hat, but some other vendors getting a little bit of flack for some of the choices they've made about their business practices. I think, you know, there are many, many organizations that continue to get started with unpaid, unsupported open source. What typically happens is if it gets to a critical mass within a company, at some point they're going to say, either I have to invest a lot of people and time and do all the testing, hardening, integration, tracking the security updates you know, and they're still never going to get notified directly from intel when there's a problem, right? So, I think many organizations as they, if they decide this is mission critical then they start to look for supported editions. And we've done a lot of research looking at the benefits of getting that level of support and typically, it's just 50 to 60% improvements and, you know, stability, security, time-to-market because you're not having to do all that work. So, its a trade-off, but you'll always have some, particularly smaller organizations, individual teams that they're not going to pay for it. But I think its scale is when it really becomes valuable. >> Mary, final question for you, for the folks watching that couldn't make the event or industry insiders that aren't in this area. Why is this AnsibleFest more important this year than ever before? What's the big story? What's the top thing happening now in this world? >> I mean, there's great energy here this year. And I've gone to a couple of these over the years. First of all, it's the biggest one they've ever had. I think really though, it's the story of collaboration, building teams, automating end-to-end processes. And that's really powerful, because it's very clear that the community has stepped up from just saying, I can do a great job with network automation, or I can do a great job with cloud or with server. And they're really saying, this is about transforming the organization. Making the organization more productive, making the business more agile. And I think that is a big step for Ansible. >> You know, I think that is a huge point. I think that's something that's really important, because you know, we've talked about capabilities before. It does this, it does that to your point. This is kind of a testament to the operationalizing of DevOps. 'Cause people have always been the bottleneck. So this seems to be the trend. Is that what you're saying? >> Yeah, I think so. And I also see, again, this community talking so much about upscaling the people. Embracing things like unit testing and source control. And it's a maturation of the whole automation conversation among this community. And remember, this community is only what? Six, seven years old? >> Stu: 2012. >> Yeah, I mean it's really a very, very young community. So I think it's a really important pivot point, just in terms of the scale of the problems they can address. >> Solve for abstractions. Solving big problem, automation will be a great category. Mary, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Sharing your insights and your research and your analysis. I appreciate it. >> Okay, thank you. >> Mary Johnston Turner Research VP of Cloud Management at IDC, here inside theCUBE. Breaking down the analysis of Red Hat's Ansible position vis-a-vis the market trends. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCube. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante on our third day here at IBM Think 2019. The second kind of full day of the event. Dave, here we are with this beautiful San Francisco rain. Much needed in California >> I like being back in Moscone, its good. >> It is nice being back in Moscone. Speaking of being back, we are welcoming back to theCUBE Mary O'Brien, the general manager of IBM security. Mary, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, Dave. >> Mary. >> So we were just talking before we went live, this event is massive, about 30,000 people. It was standing room only to get into Ginni Rometty's keynote yesterday. >> No you couldn't get in. >> Couldn't get in, >> They closed, they shut the doors out >> I think she said this is the closest that she'll ever be to an iPhone launch. That must be like rockstar status. Four campuses, 2,000 different sessions, there is here a Security and Resiliency campus. >> Yes there is. >> Which must be exciting for you, >> It certainly is. >> but talk to us about security is such a pervasive challenge that any organization faces. You were saying, there's nearly two million by the year 2020 nearly two million unfilled security roles. Talk to us about security at IBM and how you're using technologies, like AI, to help combat the problem, this prolific problem that cyber security is bringing. >> Okay, so I can start by saying security is everybody's problem. It's a problem faced by every business, everyday and as businesses modernize and they become more digital and move to the Cloud, there's cyber security nightmares and cyber security problems are only getting greater, okay? So, you know couple that with the fact that, as you say, by 2020, and ever body has a different variation of this statistic, but we're working on the basis that by 2020, there will be in the region of two million, unfilled, cyber security posts around the world. So at IBM Security, we're looking to understand how we can reduce the complexity, reduce the need for vast numbers of staff and augment our capabilities, all of our products and services, with artificial intelligence in order to relieve this gross skills gap. >> Well, I have to say, this is our 10th year now doing theCUBE Lisa and I was downstairs earlier and I saw, I guess I call him my friend, Pat Gelsinger, was walking into the keynote and a little high five and nine years ago I asked Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE, is security a do-over because of Cloud and he said flat out yes, it actually is. So I wonder, so much has changed in the last decade. You mentioned data, you mentioned artificial intelligence, the bad guys have gotten way more sophisticated, you have this new thing called The Edge and so I don't know if it's a do-over or evolving rapidly, but what are your thoughts on the changing nature of security? >> Well I think the security landscape is changing for sure and the attack surface is changing because you've got to remember that as all of our and more and more devices and all of our devices become smarter and become connected to the internet, we're basically just increasing the attack surface and increasing the opportunity for cyber attacks and cyber criminals to hack in and get into our networks. Okay, so you know as we move to the Cloud and we embrace an API economy, so we're using API's to access you know our applications then you know once again, we're opening up our capabilities. Open means open to us and to others and so the need to design security into everything we do and not append security as a perimeter around what we create is becoming more and more important. >> Well we can't do that just 'cause I think something also that you mentioned, sorry David, with the proliferation of devices, you know billions of devices, the perimeter is so amorphis, there's en clays on top of en clays on top of en clays >> Absolutely. >> I'm curious though, how is AI from IBM going to help companies protect themselves from their people, who might not be doing things necessarily maliciously, unintentionally, but that's one of the biggest common denominators I think in security that's the biggest, how do we protect from people? >> You nailed it. I mean I can not remember the stat, but I do know that more than 50% of breeches result from the inside and that's not necessarily people being malicious. I mean you have a combination of people who just don't adopt the best security policies, so they're not using strong passwords, they're clicking on links, they're answering phone calls, they're doing something that's a little bit sloppy or a little bit insecure and then of course you'll have the malicious insider. There aren't very many of them, but they do exist. So the way the security industry is evolving to protect ourselves against the insider is firstly to look at access to our crowned jewels and to make sure that only the people who need access to our crowned jewels and to the most important assets within our businesses have that access. Okay, firstly, now secondly, we are developing capabilities that we call user based analytics, user behavioral analytics. So we actually profile, what is the normal behavior of a user. So a user, in their job role, who works the pattern that is normal for that user. You know, what is a normal behavior for that user so that we allow the machine and the algorithms to learn that normal behavior so that when that behavior becomes different or when that user does something anomalous, that we can trigger an action, we can trigger an alert, we can do something about it. So user behavior analytics is the way we apply machine learning, artificial intelligence, to the problem to keep us safe from the insider fumbling, yes. >> Another big change and I want to make a comment, is the way in which organizations approach security at the board level. It's become a board level topic. The conversation between whether its the CSO or the CIO and the board has evolved from really one of, oh yeah, we're doing everything we possibly can to we're going to get breached, it's all about our response to that breech and here's the response mechanism and so I wonder if based on your conversations Mary, with executives, what you're seeing, what are they asking from IBM, just in terms of helping them specifically respond to the inevitable breaches? >> Okay, so there's a wide range of responses to that question. And it depends where you are on the globe, how sensitized the board is to security situations. They're all sensitized, but there are some parts of the globe where a breach of a regulation can put a board member in prison. So you know, there's a motivation to >> They're paying attention >> They're paying attention okay, but you know across the board, we're seeing that the board has evolved their attention, based on the fact that security used to be driven by compliance. It used to be driven by ticking a box to say you had a database protection in place and you had x, y, z in place. People became more sensitized to the next attack so what was the next threat, what was the next attack on their, the next piece of malware, the next piece of ransomware, but now people have really got to the point and the board have really got to the point where they really realize that this isn't about when an adversary gets into your network or gets into your enterprise or your business. They get in. It's about how you respond to it, how you find them, how you remove them, how you respond to the breach so at IBM security, we put a huge focus on training boards and their teams in how to respond to an instance because we've got to get to a point where the response is muscle memory so that everybody knows their role, they know how they behave and we're back to the people discussion again because everybody, from the person who is at your reception desk, who may be the first person to meet the media as they come in your doors after an event, to the CSO who has responsibility to the President or CEO, needs to understand their role and when they parttake or when they back away and let the experts partake during the course of an incident. >> One of the things too that's been widely known is it's taken upwards of two to 300 days before breaches are detected. How is IBM helping infuse AI into, not just the portfolio, but also the practices and behaviors to start reducing that so it doesn't take as long to identify a breach that can cost millions of dollars? >> So yes, what were doing here is we're working to reduce the complexity in peoples cyber programs. So if you consider that in many of our clients shops, we will find up to 80 different security products from 40 different vendors and that's an average that has been taken over time and we use that statistic all the time. Basically you have all of these tools and all of these products that have been bought to solve a security threat djure over several decades and they're all residing, all of these products, not talking to one another. So at IBM Security, what we're doing is we're applying technology and our capabilities to bring together the insights from all of these tools and to ensure that we can actually knit them together, correlate those insights, to give a more holistic view, a faster view, of what's relevant, what's pertinent to you in your industry, in your geo, in your business. So we look for the insights that are indicative of the most significant threat to you to help you get there, sort it, eradicate it, quarantine, or whatever you need to do to eliminate it. >> How about the skills gap? We talk about that a lot on theCUBE. There's more security professionals needed than are out there. What can you do about that? Is machine intelligence a possible answer? Helping people automate a response? What do you see? >> Absolutely So there's a number of different responses. Absolutely, infusing artificial intelligence and finding ways of reducing the amount of the amount of security data, the amount of security alerts that need to be responded to. So firstly you need to reduce the noise so that you can find the needle in the haystack and our capabilities with machine learning and artificial intelligence and the various different algorithms we build into our products help along the way there. So you have that. In addition to that, you always have a need for the people, for the experts so making sure that we infuse all of our practices, the people who are foot soldiers on the street, our consultants, our practitioners, to make sure that we hire the best, the brightest and we put them around the geo so that they are distributed and able to help our clients. And then you heard Ginni yesterday talk about various different means of accelerating our ability to bring more people into the workforce using our P-TECH initiative within IBM, so we're looking to go out to schools, where you wouldn't necessarily have a feed or kids with an opportunity, to find jobs in the cyber security space or in many professional spaces. Finding them, training them, tapping them, encouraging them and we've seen several people come through the P-TECH schools into the cyber security space and we've also embraced the return to work for people who have taken career breaks either to mind elderly relatives or to bring up kids or whatever, so we have a number of programs running in various parts of the world where we're introducing people back into the workforce and training them to become cyber experts. >> I got to ask you, as a security executive, does Quantum keep you up at night? >> Um, Quantum does not keep me up at night because IBM are the leaders in this space and as leaders in this space, we work with the researchers and developers in the IBM research labs, to ensure that our security practices are keeping in lock-step with Quantum and our algorithms are changing so that we can stay ahead of the Quantum race. >> It's in the hands of the good guys right now. >> It certainly is >> Let's keep it that way if we can. >> Last question Mary, there is, as I mentioned in the very beginning, four campuses here where the 30,000 plus attendees can learn. What are some of the things that you're excited that the attendees here, customers, perspective customers, partners, analysts, press are going to see, touch and feel from the Security and Resiliency Campus? >> At the Security and Resiliency Campus, the people here can see some of our latest innovations and capabilities and they can see our new platform. Our new security platform is called IBM Security Connect and this is you know, our capability that we just launched to actually reduce the complexity in people's cyber programs and help bring lots of these products, these siloed products and the insights from them together, to give a much sharper view of the threat to your business. So there's a very good demonstration of that. You can see a very good demonstration of the breath of our portfolio. You can talk to some of our consultants. Talk to our instant response specialists, you know, you can be scared about what's out there and see that your security is in good hands if you work with us. >> It sounds like a security candy store down there. We should go check it out. >> Yeah >> It sure is. >> Check out the flavors. >> Exactly. Thanks so much for stopping by >> Thank you. >> Sharing with us what's new >> Great to see you again Mary. >> In IBM security and also how you guys are helping to influence behavior. I think that's a really important element. We thank you and we look forward to talking to you again. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, live IBM Think 2019 on theCUBE. Stick around, we'll be right back shortly with our next guest. (tech music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're in downtown San Francisco with the Salesforce Tower. We're in the 33rd floor with the grand opening of the Accenture Innovation hub. It's five stories inside of the Salesforce Tower. It's pretty amazing, couple of work floors and then all kinds of labs and cool things. Tonight they introduce the technology vision. We've been coming for a couple of years. Paul Daugherty and team. Introduce that later, but we're excited to have a couple of the core team from the innovation hub. And we're joined by Mary Hamilton She's a managing director of Accenture Labs. Great to see you Mary. >> Nice to see you too. >> And Teresa Tung also managing director of Accenture Labs. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So it's been quite a day. Starting with the ribbon cutting and the tours. This is quite a facility. So, what does it mean having this type of an asset at your disposal in your client engagements, training your own people, it's a pretty cool spot. >> Yeah, I think it's actually something that's, these innovation hubs are something that we're growing in the U.S. and around the world, but I think here in San Francisco, we have a really unique space and really unique team and opportunity where we're actually bringing together all of our innovation capabilities. We have all of them centered here and with the staircase that connects everyone, we can now serve clients by bringing the best of the best to put together the best solutions that have open innovation and research and co-creation and innovation all in one. >> Right and you had a soft opening how many months ago? So you've actually been running clients through here for a number of months, right? >> We have. So, we've been working here probably about six months in the workspaces. We've been bringing clients through, kind of breaking in the space, but just over the holidays we opened sort of all of the specialty spaces. So, the Igloo, the Immersive Experience, we've got a Makeshop, and those all started to open up so our employees can take advantage and our clients can come in. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> So one of the things that comes up over and over I think in every other interview that we've had today is the rock stars that are available here to help your clients. And Teresa I got to brag on you. >> Got one here. >> You're one of the rock stars, all you hear about is most patents of any services for most patents from this office of all the other offices in Accenture. >> All of Accenture >> You're probably the person. (laughs) So congratulations. Talk about your work. It's funny, doing some research, you have an interview from a long time ago, you didn't even think you wanted to get in tech. >> Yeah. >> Now you're kicking out more patents than anybody in Accenture which has like 600,000 people. Pretty great accomplishment. >> I think it's a great story how a lot about people think about technology as a geek sort of thing and they don't actually picture themselves in that role but really, technology is about imagining the future and then being able to make it happen. You can imagine an idea, and you think Cloud, and AI, VR, it's all so accessible today. You could buy a 3D printer and just print your own idea. >> Right. >> And that's so much different than I think it was even ten, twenty years ago. And so when you think about tech, it's much more about making something happen instead of, just again, coding and math. Those are enablers but that's not the outcome. >> Right, right. So what type is your specialty in terms of the type of patent work that you've done? >> I've done them all. So I start with cloud computing, doing a lot of APIs and AI. Most recently doing a lot of work on robotics and that's the next generation. >> Right. so one of the cool things here is, software is obvious, right? You get to do software development, but there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of tangible stuff. You talked about robotics, there's a robotics lab. Fancy 3D printing lab. >> There's like this, >> Yep. >> I don't know, the maker lab, I guess you call it? >> That's right. >> So, I don't know that most people would think of Accenture maybe as being so engaged in co-creation of physical things beyond software innovation. So, has that been going on for a long time? Is that relatively new? And how is it playing in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so, there's a few things we've been doing. Some of it is the acquisitions we've made, so Mindtribe, Pillar, Matter, that really have that expertise in industrial design and physical products. So we're getting to that space. And then, I'm also, as a researcher's standpoint, I'm really excited about some of the area that you'd never think Accenture would play in around material science. So if you start to combine material science plus artificial intelligence, you start to have smart materials for smart products and that's where we see the future going is what are all the kinds of products and services that we might provide with new material? And new ways to use those materials And, >> Right. >> My original background, my degree is in material science so I feel like I've kind of come full circle and exactly what Teresa was saying is how can you design things and come up with new things? But now we're bringing it from a technology perspective. >> Right, got to get that graphene water filtration system so we can solve the water problem in California. That's another topic for another day. But I think one of the cool things is really the integration of the physical and the software. I think a really kind of underreported impact of what we're seeing today are connected devices. Not that they're just connected to do things, but they phone home at the end of the day and really enable the people that developed the products, to actually know how they're being used. And then the other thing I think is so powerful is you can get shared learning. I think that's one of the cool thing about autonomous cars and Waymo, right? If there's an accident, it's not just the people involved in the accident and the insurance adjuster that learn what not to do but you can actually integrate that learning now into the broader system. Everyone learns from one incident and that is so, so-- >> Right. >> different than what it was before. >> Yeah I mean, it really points to type of shared pursuits of larger business outcomes. By yourself, a company might see their customer and impact their business and their product, but if you think about the outcome for the customer, it's around taking an ecosystem approach. It might be your car, your insurance company, you as an individual, and maybe you might be a hobbyist with the car, you're mechanic. Like this ecosystem that I just described here. It's the same across all of the different types of verticals. People need to come together to share data to pursue these bigger outcomes. >> Right, you need to say? >> I was just going to say, and along those lines, if you're sharing data, those insights go across the legal system. But then they can get plugged back in to thinking about the design, and we're looking at something called generative design where if you have that data, you can start to actually give the designer new creative solutions that they may not have thought about. >> Right. >> So you can kind of say, hey based on these parameters of the data we've received back about this product, here are all the permutations of design that you might want to consider, and here's all the levers you can pull and then the designer can go in and then say, okay, this makes sense, this doesn't. But it gives them the set of here are all of the options based on the data. >> Right. >> And I think that's incredibly brilliant. It's kind of the human plus machine coming together to be more intelligent. >> So, human plus machine, great Segway, right? What we just got out of the presentation and one of the guys said there's three shortages coming up. There's food, water and people. And that the whole kind of automation and machines taking jobs is not the right conversation at all, that we desperately need machines and technology to take many of the tasks away because there aren't enough people to do all the tasks that are required. >> I mean think about it as a good thing. As a human, the human plus workers really enabling your job to be easier, more efficient, more effective, safer. So any task that's dull dirty, dangerous, those are things that we don't want to do as humans. We shouldn't be doing those as humans. That's a great place for the robotics and the machines to really pair with us. Or AI, AI can do a lot of those jobs at scale that again, as a human we shouldn't be doing. It's boring. Now you could have human plus machine whether it's robotics or AI to actually make the human a higher level worker. >> Right, I love the three Ds there. You got to add the fourth D, drudgery. Talking about automation, right, it's like drudgery. Nobody wants to do drudgery work. But unfortunately we still do. I mean, I'm ready for some more automation in my daily tasks for sure. Okay, so before we wrap up. What are you looking forward to? We got through the ribbon cutting. Are there some things coming in the short term that people should know about, that you're excited that you're either doing here, or some of your, kind of research directives now that we got the big five from Paul and team. What are you doing in the next little while that you can share? >> Well, I'm excited to have clients coming in, so >> Yeah. >> Al lot of the innovations that we have like Quantum Computing. This is a big bet for Accenture. At the moment, at the time we started Quantum Computing, our clients weren't begging for it yet. We made that market. We went out and took a bet. We saw how the technology was changing. We saw the investments in Quantum. We made the relationships with 1QBit, with IBM and through that, now we're able to find this client opportunity with Biogen and that's the story that we published a drug discovery method that is actually much better than what would happen before. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Mary? >> For me it's about, it's also the clients and it's thinking about it from a co-research and co-innovation standpoint. So, how do we establish strategic, multiyear, long-term relationships with our clients where we're doing joint research together and we're leveraging everything that's in this amazing center, to bring the best and to kind of have this ongoing cycle of what's the next thing. How are we going to innovate together, and how are we going to transform them, talk about approximately from building physical products to building a set of services. >> Right, right. >> And I think that's just taking advantage of this to make that transformation with our clients is so exciting to me. >> Well, what a great space with great energy and clearly you guys look like you're ready to go. >> Hey, we are. >> So congrats again on the event, and thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing this terrific space with us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. She's Teresa, she's Mary, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube, from San Francisco the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is IBM's inaugural Think event. Companies consolidated about six major events into one We're trying to figure it out, 30-40,000 people there's too many people to count, it's just unbelievable. Mary O'Brien is here, she is the vice president of research and development at IBM in from Cork, Ireland. Mary, great to see you, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you, Dave. >> So tell us a little bit more about your role at IBM as head of research and development. >> Okay so I'm head of research and development for IBM Security explicitly so in that capacity I manage a worldwide team of researchers and developers and we take products from, you know, incubation, initial ideas all the way through to products in the field. Products that help defend businesses against cyber crime. >> So, Jenny was talking today about, you know, security is one of the tenants of your offerings at the core. >> Mary: Yes. >> So, everybody talks about security. >> You can't bolt it on, you know, there's a lot of sort of conversations around that. What does that mean, security at the core from a design and R & D perspective? >> That actually means that the developers of applications are actually aware of security best practices as they design, as they architect and design their applications. So that they don't deliver applications to the field that have vulnerabilities that can be exploited. So, instead of trying to secure a perimeter of an application or a product or, you know, a perimeter full stop they actually design security into the application. It makes it a much more efficient, much cheaper way to deliver security and also, you know, much stronger security base there. >> So, I wonder if you could relate, sort of, what you guys are doing in security with what's happened in the market over the last 10 or 15 years. So, it used to be security was, you know, hacktivists and you know throw some malware in and maybe do some disruption has become cyber criminals, you know, big business now and then of course you've got nation states. >> Mm-hmm How have you had to respond specifically within the R & D organization to deal with those threats? >> So, you know, you have described the evolution of cyber crime over the last years and for sure it's no longer kids in a basement you know, hacking to, for the fun of it. Cyber crime is big business and, you know, there's money to be made for cyber criminals. So, as a result they are looking to hack in and get high value assets out of enterprises, and of course, we as an organization and as a security business unit have had to respond to that. By really understanding, you know, what constitutes a very mature set of security competencies and practices and you know how we break down this massive problem into you know, bite sized consumable pieces that any business can consume and work into their enterprise in order to protect them. So, we have developed a portfolio of products that look at protecting all parts of your enterprise. You know, by infusing security everywhere, you know, on your devices, on the, you know, the perimeter of your business. Protecting your data, protecting all sorts, and we also have developed a huge practice of security professionals who actually will go out and do it for you or will, you know, assess your security posture and tell you where you've got problems and how to fix them. >> I remember a piece that our head of research, >> Peter Burris, wrote years ago and it was entitled something like "Bad User Behavior will Trump Good Security Every Time" and so my understanding is phishing is obviously one of the big problems today. How do you combat that, can you use machine intelligence to help people, you know, users that aren't security conscious sort of avoid the mistakes that they've been making? >> So, before I get into the, the complicated, advanced, you know, machine learning and artificial intelligence practices that we are bringing to bear now, you know, it's important to be clear that you know, a vast number of breaches come from the inside. So, they come from either the sloppy employee who doesn't change their password often or uses the same password for work and play and the same password everywhere. Or, you know, the unfortunate employee who clicks on a malicious link and you know, takes in some malware into their devices and malware that can actually you know, move horizontally through the business. Or it can come from you know, the end user or the insider with malicious intent. Okay, so, it's pretty clear to all of us that basic security hygiene is the fundamental so actually making sure that your laptop, your devices are patched. They have the latest security patches on board. Security practices are understood. Basic password hygiene and et cetera, that's kind of the start. >> Uh oh. >> Okay keep going. >> Okay, so-- >> I'm starting to sweat. >> So, you know, and of course, you know, in this era of cyber crime as we've seen it evolve in the last few years, the security industry has reached a perfect storm because it's well known that by 2020 there will be 1.2 million unfilled security professional roles, okay? Now, couple that with the fact that there are in the region, in the same time frame, in the region of 50 billion connected devices in the internet of things. So what's happening is the attack landscape and you know, the attack surface is increasing. The opportunity for the cyber criminalist to attack is increasing and the number of professionals available to fight that crime is not increasing because of this huge shortage. So, you know, you heard Jenny this morning talking about the era of man assisted by machine so infusing artificial intelligence and machine learning into security products and practices is another instantiation of man being assisted by machine and that is our, our tool and our new practice in the fight against cyber crime. >> So when I talk to security professionals consistently they tell us that they have more demand for their services than supply to chase down, you know, threats. They have, they struggle to prioritize. They struggle with just too many false positives and they need help. They're not as productive as they'd like to be. Can machine intelligence assist there? >> Absolutely, so computers, let's face it, computers are ideally placed to pour over vast quantities of data looking for trends, anomalies, and really finding the needle in the haystack. They have such a vast capacity to do this that's way out, you know, that really surpasses what a human can do and so you know, with, in this era of machine learning you can actually you know, equip a computer with a set of basic rules and you know, set it loose on vast quantities of data and let it test and iterate those rules with this data and become increasingly knowledgeable you know, about the data. The trends in the data, what the data, what good data looks like, what anomalous data looks like and at speed point out the anomalies and find that needle in the haystack. >> So, there's a stat, depending on which, you know, firm you look at or which organization you believe, but it's scary none the less. That the average penetration is only detected 250 or 350 days after the infiltration, and that is a scary stat, it would take a year to find out that somebody has infiltrated my organization or whatever it is, 200 days. Is that number shrinking, is the industry as a whole, not just IBM, attacking that figure? First of all, is it a valid figure, and are you able to attack that? >> Well, the figure is definitely scary. I don't know whether your figure is exactly >> Yeah, well the latest figure but it's a scary figure >> Yeah. and it's well known that attackers will get in. So, of course, there's, uh there's the various phases of, you know, protecting yourself. So, you're going to try to avoid the attackers getting in in the first place. Using the various hygienic means of you know, keeping your devices, you know, clean and free from vulnerabilities and so on. But you've also got to be aware that the attacker does get in so now you've got to make sure that you limit the damage that they can cause when they're in. So, of course, you know security is a, you know you can take a layered approach to security. So you've got to firstly understand what is your most valuable data, where are your most valuable assets and layer up the levels of security around those first. So you make sure that if the attacker gets in, they don't get there and you limit the damage they can do and then of course you limit their ability to exfiltrate data and get anything out of your organization. Because I mean if they are just in there, of course they can do some damage. But, the real damage happens when they can manage to exfiltrate data and do something with that. >> So again Mary, it make sense that artificial intelligence or machine intelligence could help with this but specifically what do you see as the future role of Watson as it relates to cyber security? >> So, I mentioned the shortage of security professionals and that growing problem, okay so Watson in our cyber security space acts as an assistant to the security analyst. So, we have taught Watson the language of cyber security, and Watson manages to ingest vast troves of unstructured security data, that means blogs and you know, written text of security data from, that's available on the internet and out there all day, everyday. It just ingests this and fills a corpus of knowledge with this, with these jewels of information. And, basically that information and that corpus of knowledge is now available to a security analyst who, you know, a junior security analyst could take years to become very efficient and to really be able to recognize the needle in the haystack themselves. But with the Watson assistant they can embellish their understanding and what they see and all of the, all of the relationships and the data that augments the detail about a cyber incident you know, fairly instantaneous. And it, you know, really augment their own knowledge with the knowledge that would take years to generate, you know. >> So, I wonder if we could talk about collaboration a little bit because this is good versus evil. You guys are like one of the super heroes and your competitors are also sort of super heroes. >> Of course. >> You got Batman, you got Superman, Catwoman, and Spiderman, et cetera. How do you guys collaborate and share in a, highly competitive industry? Well, they're vary as far as you know, appearing for sharing okay, so firstly you absolutely nailed the importance for sharing because you know, the cyber criminals share on the dark web. They actually share, they sell their wares, they trade, you know so very important for us to share as well. So, you know, there are various industry forum for sharing and also organizations like IBM have created collaborative capabilities like we have our X-force Exchange which is basically a sharing portal. So, any of our competitors or other security organizations or interested parties can create you know, a piece of work describing a particular incident that they are investigating or a particular event that's happening and others can add to it and they can share information. Now, historically people have not been keen to share in this space so it is an evolving event. >> So speaking of super heroes I got to ask ya, a lot of security professionals that I talk to say well when I was a kid I read comic books. You know, I envisioned saving the world. So, how did you, how did you get into this, and was that you as a kid? Did you like-- >> No, it wasn't. I'm not a long term security professional. But, I've been in technology and evolving products for, you know, in the telecommunication business and now security over many years. So, I got into this to bring that capability of delivering quality software and hardware products to the field back in 2013 when a part of our IBM security business needed some leadership. So, I had the opportunity to take my family to Atlanta, Georgia to lead a part of the IBM security business then. >> Well, it's a very challenging field. It's one of those, you know, never ending, you know, missions so thank you for your hard work and congratulations on all the success. >> Thank you David. >> Alright, appreciate you coming on The Cube, Mary. >> Thank you. >> Keep it right there everybody, we will be back with our next guest, you're watching The Cube. We're live from IBM Think 2018 in Las Vegas, be right back. (pleasant music)

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's inaugural Think conference. Mary Glackin's here, she's the vice president of weather business solutions, public, private partnerships, IBM Watson, and she's joined by Sheri Bachstein as the global head of consumer business at the Weather Company, an IBM company. Ladies, welcome to the Cube, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you, you're welcome. >> Thanks. >> Alright, Mary, going to start with the Weather Company. When IBM acquired the Weather Company, a lot of people were like, "What?", and they said, "Okay, data science, I get that.", and then, there was an IoT spin on that. Obviously, you have a lot of data, but, I got to ask you, what business are you in? >> So, what we like to say is we're in, not in the weather business, we're in the decision business. We're really dedicated, everyday, to help businesses, make the best decisions possible, and Sheri works on the consumer end of the business to do exactly the same thing. >> So, talk about your respective roles. Sheri, you're on the consumer side, as Mary just said, what does that entail? >> So, the consumer side is any touchpoint where we're bringing weather and weather insights to our consumers, whether it's on our weather channel app, whether it's on our web platform, mobile web, on wearables, so, it's anywhere where we're connecting with consumers, and, as Mary said, it's really about helping consumers make decisions. In our field, the forecast and some of the weather data has become a commodity almost, and we've actually shared our weather data with a lot of partners, and, so, now, we're using machine learning and data science to really come up with weather insights to help consumers make decisions, and it could be something just as simple as what to wear today, what's going to happen for a big event, or it can be around how do I keep people safe during severe weather. >> Yeah, I mean, we all look at the weather. I mean, I look at it everyday. >> Yeah. >> Of course, when you travel, like, what do I bring, what do I wear? Living in the East Coast these days, a lot of storms that we've >> That's right. >> encountered in the East Coast. I wonder if you could talk about life at IBM. I mean, again, it was a curious acquisition to a lot of people. Have you guys assimilated, how has it changed your business? >> I would say pretty dramatically. So, coming back to IBM acquiring us, they acquired us, really, for two reasons. One is we had some underlying technology that was really of interest to them that they're leveraging today, but the other part was because weather impacts so many businesses. So, as we've come into IBM, we've had alliances with IBM research. We're working on a pretty exciting project in bringing the next generation weather model to market, using high performance computing there. We've had alliances, definitely, through Watson in bringing AI into our products, and then, our product lines marry up with a lot of IBM product lines. So, we've rolled out a really exciting offering in closed captioning, and it really works well with some of the classical media business, weather media business that we have been providing. >> So, how do you guys make money? Maybe we could talk about the consumer side and the business side. A lot of people must ask that question. >> Yeah. >> They're advertising, okay, fine, >> Yeah. >> but that's not the core of what you guys do. >> Yeah, so, on the consumer side, a big majority of our revenue is drive by advertising, but we had to look at that business as well, 'cause as programmatic advertising has kind of taken up the landscape, how did we pivot to really generate more revenue, and, so, we've done that by creating Watson advertising, and that was one of the first implementations of Watson after the acquisition on the consumer side, and what we've done is we've created an open, scalable environment that, now, we can not only sell meaningful insights on our platform, but we can now give that to our partners, that they can go off our property and use the weather insights, we can use different data around location and media to help our partners really have a better experience, not only on our platform, but on any publisher's platform. >> So, that's your customers using Watson for advertising to drive their business. >> That's right. >> It's not like IBM is getting into the advertising business, per se, directly, is that right? >> Right, well, we're leveraging the power of Watson to create these insights. One of the products we created is called Weather FX, and, really, what it's doing, it's taking predictive analytics on the retail side, which is really an underused technology for retailers, but taking our historical weather data, mixing it with their retail data' to come up with insights so we can come up with interesting things that, say, in the northeast, like right now, during the winter, soda sells tremendously during very snowy or rainy winters. We can look at, you know, strawberry Pop-Tarts sell fairly well right before a hurricane, and, so, these are insights that we can bring to retailers, but it helps them with their supply chain, it helps them with their inventory, it can actually even help them with pricing, and, so, this is one of the ways we're taking our weather technology and marrying it with the advertising world to help provide those insights. >> For real, with the strawberry Pop-Tarts? >> For real, yeah, I guess, you know, you don't have to cook 'em or something. I don't know, so, yeah. >> Right, yeah, it's simple if the lights go out, okay. I mean, we want to ask you about your title, public and private partnerships. It's interesting, what is that all about? >> So, it's really about the fact that weather has really been something that's been shared globally around the world for hundreds of years at this point, and, so, the Weather Company and IBM take it very seriously that we be good partners in that community of weather providers. So, one of the things that we feel passionately about is we have a shared safety mission with national meteorological services globally. So, here in the US, we transmit, Sheri's team does, the warnings that come from the National Weather Service unaltered with attribution to the National Weather Service. We feel that it's really important that there's a sole authoritative voice when there's really danger. So, we share that safety mission, and then, we're trying to help in other parts of the world. We've had some partnerships to try to increase the observing in Africa which is really a part of the world that's under-observed. So, some of IBM's philanthropic efforts have been helping to fill in there and work with those national met services. So, it's really one of the really fun parts of my job. >> You know, we talk a lot about digital transformation, and Ginni Rometty was talking about the incumbent disruptors, and we've been riffing on that all week. We've made the observation that companies that are digital have data at their core, and they've organized, sort of, human expertise around that data. Most companies, Fortune 1000, are built around human expertise and built around other assets, the bottling plant or the factory, et cetera. I look at the Weather Company as a data company, that's probably fair. Did you evolve into that data is clearly at your core? Has it always been, and it's very interesting that IBM has acquired this company as it changes its DNA. I wonder if you could address that. >> Go ahead (laughs). >> So, I think there's a couple aspects around our data. There's obviously the weather data which is really powerful, but then, there's also location data. We're one of the largest location data providers besides Google and some of the others, because our weather accuracy starts with location which is really important. We have 250 million users that use our application, and we want to give them the most accurate forecast, and that starts with location. Because we add value, users will opt in to give us that data which is really important to us that we do keep their data private and opt in to that to get that location data. So, that's really powerful, because, now we can deliver products based on time and location and weather, and it just makes for better weather insights for, not only our consumers, but for our businesses. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Do you use, I mean, how do you use social? I mean, you know how Waze tells you where the traffic is and you report back. Do you guys rely heavily on that, or do you more rely on machines to help you with your forecast? Is it a combination? >> So, I could talk a little bit. One of our new market areas we've been going into is ground transportation. So, we do have a partner that's providing us some transportation, traffic information, but what we bring to it is being able to do, the predictive thing, is to take the weather piece and how that's going to influence that traffic. So, as the storm comes through, we know by looking at past events what that will mean and we bring that piece to the table. So, it's an example of how we go, not just giving you a weather forecast, but really forecasting the impacts and giving you insights, so that if you're running a large trucking operation, you can reroute fleets around it and avoid weather like that and keep people safe. >> Talk about, oh, go ahead, please. >> One of the brands within our portfolio is Weather Underground, and what they brought to the table for us is a personal weather station that works. So, we have about 270,000 around the world, and these are people that just really love the weather. They have a personal weather station in their backyard and they provide that data that then goes into Mary's team in helping looking at the forecast. So, that's one of the ways that we're using kind of a social network in sensoring to influence some of the work that we're doing. >> I mean, the weather forecast, for years, have been the butt of many jokes. You guys are data science oriented, data scientists, the data doesn't lie. We just keep iterating >> Yeah. >> and make it better and better and better. What could you tell us about the improvements of the forecast over the last decade? Maybe Bill Belichick makes jokes about the weather and you hear it, you say, "You know, actually "the weather's predictions have gotten much better." You guys measure it, what can you share with us? >> Oh, it's gotten so much better over the course of my career, it's pretty dramatic and it's getting better still. You're going to see some real breakthroughs coming up. So, one of the things that we've really put a lot of bets on in IBM is the internet of things, >> Dave: Right. >> and, so, we are, today, pulling off of cellphones atmospheric pressure data and that's going into our next generation model. So, this'll be more data than anybody has powering that model. So, you're able to augment traditional data sources like, you may or may not know, we still launch weather balloons twice a day to measure through the atmosphere, but, in our technology, we take data off of airplanes, we take data off of cellphones, we'll soon be taking data off of cars which will tell us when the windshield wipers are moving, is it raining or not, when the anti-lock brakes things lock, that roads are icy, all of that. So, all of that will come in to improve forecasting. >> So, this requires partnerships with all that and amazing supply chain. >> Absolutely. >> I presume IBM helps there as well, but did you have a lot of that in motion prior to the acquisition, how does that all work? >> I think we've really been empowered by IBM. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Yeah. >> There's no question about that, and it's about finding the win-win. When we work with car manufacturers they're looking to have safe experiences for their drivers and we can help in that regard, and, as we move into autonomous vehicles, there's just going to be even more demand for very high resolution, accurate weather information. >> Am I correct at all, the weather data from all these devices actually goes back to the IBM cloud, is that right, and that's where the models are iterated and developed, is that correct, or does some of it stay out in the network? >> It's all a cloud-based operation that's here. We do do some, I mentioned before that we're working with IBM research on next generation high-performance computing which is actually, it can be cloud-based, but it's also on Prim-based, because of the very large cores we need for computing these models. We're going to run a very high-resolution model globally at a very high frequency. >> So, thinking about some of the industries that you're helping, I mean, you mentioned retail before. Obviously, government's very interested in this. I would imagine investors are interested in the weather in a big way. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about some of the more interesting industries, use cases, business models. >> Yeah, there's a lot out there, there's traditional ones we've served for years like energy traders that are very interested in, you know, because they're trying to make decisions about that. The financial services sector is also very interested. When they can get some additional insights through footfall traffic, if they know certain stores are seeing more footfall traffic, that will give them some indication, a little edge up in the marketplace for that. So, we see those kind of things, and other traditional areas as well, agriculture, what you would expect there. >> So people, you know, you hear a lot of talk in the press about artificial intelligence and Elon Musk predictions and the like, but here's an example where machine intelligence, everybody welcomes, keeps getting better and better and better. How far could we take AI and weather? Where do you see this going in the next 10 years? >> So, on the consumer side, I think it's really about transforming the way that we're delivering weather on the digital platform, the new age of the weather app will say, and, really, users want a personalized experience. They want to know how the weather's going to impact me, but they don't want to personalize, right? So, that's where machine learning is coming in, that we can be able to provide those insights. We'll know that, maybe, you're an allergy sufferer or migraine sufferer, and we're going to tell you that the conditions are right for that you might have symptoms related to that around health. So, there's a lot of ways, on the consumer side, more personalized experience, giving you more assurance that you don't have to, necessarily, go to the app to find information. We're going to send it to you more proactively, and, so, machine learning is helping us do that cognitive science as well. So, it's a pretty exciting time to be part of the weather. >> Yeah, that bum knee I have, you know, you might want to get ahead of the pain. >> That's right, with the arthritis, yes, yes, so, definitely. >> Alright, Mary, we'll give you last word on IBM Think and, you know, the whole trend of AI and weather. >> So, I think it's really exciting. I think Ginni says it really well. It's about AI and the person as well. You know, AI doesn't take over. It's really finding the way to AI to really assist decision makers and that's we're going on the business end of things is really sorting through tons and tons of data to really provide the insights that people can make, businesses can make really great decisions. >> Well, it's always been a really fascinating acquisition to me, and, now, just to see how it's evolving is really amazing. So, Sheri and Mary, thanks very much for coming on the Cube >> Thank you. >> and sharing your experiences. >> Thanks so much. >> Great, thank you. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there, everybody, you're watching the Cube. We're live from Think 2018 and we'll be right back. (techno beat)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're downtown San Francisco, the Hotel Nikko, it's International Women's Day, March 8th, there's stuff going on all around the world, but we're excited to be here at the Accenture event, about 400 people, a lot of great panels, some familiar faces, some new faces, and one of those familiar faces joins us in the next segment. He's Marc Carrel, from Accenture, great to see you. >> Great to see you too. >> And a new face, Mary Hamilton, managing director also from Accenture Labs. Mary, great to see you. >> Great to see you too. >> So, first things, just kind of impressions of this event. I don't know if you did it last year, we weren't here, you know, there's a lot of energy, kind of, initial takeaways from some of the early panels. >> I mean, the energy is there, I mean, definitely last year we were here, I mean we do that every year for sure, and last year it was amazing as well, but I think this year is even bigger than we had last year. We have a kind of a hub and spokesmen of our organization where we have also our top leadership to go from different cities and then we celebrate all over the world. So this year the hub is here, and that's the reason why there's so much buzz and so much excitement. So that's pretty cool. >> Yeah, all of our leadership is here, and just phenomenal guests, um, from, yeah, we really aim for diversity, even not just gender diversity but diversity across all of our different panelists, you know, kind of thing they're thinking about, the way they're thinking about diversity, um, and you know, for me just some of those takeaways, you know, Vivian Ming, her point was when she showed up um, and, is there a difference between how men and women are treated? When she showed up as herself, as she is today, as a woman, she said she's never been asked a math question since. And that just blew me away that it's so black and white and they're really you know, from someone who's lived on both sides, there really is a difference. >> Right, right. So what are the topics? You guys are involved in Labs, is innovation, right? So there's digital transformation, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, but really innovation is kind of a more concrete thing that people are trying to achieve. And you guys are a big part of that at Labs, diversity is a big part of being more innovative. >> It's critical. >> So how do you guys see it in your customer base, and how do you see it within the work that you guys do within your own department at the Labs group? >> Well, I'll start, just, you know, you think about innovation that taps diversity is stronger innovation. Right? Our clients are delivering products and services to a diverse audience. And as we serve our clients and try to help them transform and be more digital, we have to reflect, the consumers or the buyers, for their products. And if we don't have that diversity, we're not going to deliver the right kinds of innovation. >> Right. >> I think Mary is absolutely right. And then what's very important to us is that we absolutely demonstrate that through numbers. So, you know, we have like seven labs, two of our leaders are women from those labs, we have five research domains, out of the five research domains, three out of the five are lead by women. >> Right. >> And I think that's pretty amazing. Now you see that from an organization's perspective. But I think if you look at who are the researchers, the most prolific that we have in the labs, from the few hundred people that we have, they're women. Hands down. And I'm going to give you some numbers which is again amazing, we are again publishing about 2,000 patents. I mean from the labs, since we exist. More than thirty eight percent have been driven by women. And then our most prolific labber is a woman. She has many of her, 124 applications and patents. How about that? I mean, she's amazing. >> Well drive is such an important piece, which is one of my favorite quotes. "In God we trust, but everybody else better bring data." Right? So if you don't apply data, if you don't measure the data, and you don't actually put in processes to specifically address the problem, it's just conversation, right? It's just interesting words. >> Absolutely, Jeff. And I think Mary will share with you, I mean also we're putting a process and an approach, a culture that is really changing the mind. >> Yeah. We focus on programs, not just at the junior level of recruiting, we do spend a lot of time and effort on getting out where women are, so we do things like Grace Hopper. We invest a lot to go to Grace Hopper and meet those technical women, we do things with women who code, with girls who code, what's the pipeline going to look like? But then once we have them in, how do we retain them? And so we've created a community and a network where we do a number of things. We mentor them, we create external networks, we create internal networks, we create kind of a social space, a safe social space, where you can bring up questions like "what should I wear to International Women's Day?", without having to feel awkward about asking those kind of things. We create a community that empowers and makes people feel comfortable. >> And do the clients get now that for whatever good, bad or otherwise they just need more good people. I mean we can't just not pull from the greatest population of good people that you can pull from. >> Absolutely, you're absolutely right. And I think another aspect from what I see what's happening in the lab, and I think Mary is a great example of that, we're looking at raw morals. Like, amazing woman like Mary, that is going to be driving, basically striving, and showing our people that you can really have a fantastic capacity as a technology person in the lab and in the Accenture organization overall. And that is very, very important for us. >> Yeah, and for me I'm not just a technologist but I'm also a mother of three small kids and I try to bring that to work, right? I try to show people, you know, I'm not just taking the hardcore path, I'm balancing a family I'm doing all these things that probably the rest of you are trying to do too and I let it show. Right? This is hard, how can I help you, here's what I'm going through, here are the challenges I'm facing, and try to bring others along too. >> So funny I did an interview years ago at an IBM event and there was a great women who was from an HR kind of consultative background, and she said, "You know, we spent all this time trying to find these great people, that have all these great attributes, and then we bring them in and then we just like give them the compliance manual, now you need to not be you, the mom, you've just got to be this little machine." And that's really not the way anymore, not at all. >> And credit to our leadership, to Marc, to Paul, Ellen, all the way up, right? There's true support for being truly human, bringing yourself to the workplace, and they do support it, they encourage it, right? And I think that that culturally seeps in to how we bring diversity to innovation too, right? It's bring your whole self to how you think about innovation. When we're hiring, I mean, I have a great example, I had a client come visit us, and he's been a strong supporter of us within his client space, and he came in and we were talking about you know, his work, and then I took him out to meet the team that was building the proof of concept for him, some tangential areas, and he met people from not just men and women, you know, diverse, but also different backgrounds, engineers, researchers, businessfolks, he met people from all kinds of backgrounds around the world. And he was able to have conversations about sports science, cricket, extended reality, and bring all those conversations back and at the end of his meeting he said "I was just floored at how many engaged conversations I was able to have with different people and the diversity of your workforce." And it's not just male female, right? You need that broad spectrum diversity to fuel innovation. >> Right. >> So -- >> Go ahead. >> Go ahead, Mark. Oh, I was just going to say, so, you know obviously it's a feel-good day today, it's feel-good place right here, but what are some of the significant, is it just execution or are there still some big hurdles that we have to overcome? Let's see, Mary, from your perspective. Marc's got it all figured out so we don't have to worry about him. >> Well, yeah, I mean there absolutely are, right? There is a pipeline problem, there is pipeline problem both from girls in STEM, coming up, right, what culturally we're telling girls and then there's a pipeline problem for, you know, we need to hire today. And I'm actually on the board of Women Who Code because I'm so passionate about their mission is, let's get women to understand that technology is approachable. That it is for all of us. >> Right. >> There's so many, the spectrum of what you can do with technology is so broad and so really if you think about it it's so appealing to so many women if you hit the right focus for them, then I think we can bring more women into tech even now, right? We don't have to wait for the pipe, we have to work on the pipeline, but we don't have to wait for it. We can start now. >> It's great, we do stuff with girls in tech and girls who code and obviously your Grace Hopper too. So you saw, just basing on her name, the gal that got the keynote, from uh, from the UK, who was basically, you know, at her last nickel with her kids, the poorest, homeless, and she learned how to code. And I dunno how old she was but she wasn't -- >> And we have so many stories of women who code. It turns their life around. And maybe the Tech For Good. >> Yeah, I think that's interesting, I mean also the nature of some of the projects we're doing also are driving women to be involved in this project. Do you know what is Tech For Good? I think I discussed that with you for some of these interviews. >> Yes. >> Where we're using technology and innovation to bring change to the world and the society and everything. We really believe, and we're not the only ones who believe that, you know, I mean, there are CEOs from other organizations that believe that, like, women are really on track today to build solutions or projects, with meaningful projects that really have purpose. That are meaningful to the society. And so Tech For Good, that we have launched, first of all got an incredible success, not only within the firm but outside of the firm, and the second thing is that it attracted tons of women talents. They love these kind of things. And then because they loved that, they want to stick with Accenture, and they, you couldn't describe it. >> Yeah, I mean, you get both sides of the coin. You're doing things that are empowering women in many cases, a lot of the projects we're doing. >> Right, right. And then that's also attracting women because we're excited about betterment of society and humanity and -- >> It's interesting, you know I got to give a lot of credit to kind of the younger generation coming up in terms of the prioritization of purpose within their hierarchy in deciding what to do, what companies to work for, how to spend their time, you know, it's very different than when we were, we didn't think about purpose, was trying to get a good job. Pay off the mortgage and then get a car. They don't want a car, they don't want a mortgage, they just want to do good. >> Absolutely, and I'll tell you something Jeff, I mean it's just like the Tech For Good I was just discussing with Mike Sutcliff before that, our chief officer of Accenture, and I was telling him that Tech For Good, the reason why we decided to do the Tech For Good and lab, talking to my leaders and everything is just like because my kids come to me and say "Hey Dad, you have the best job in the firm now, I mean, you need to do something with it." And so obviously we had to do some Tech For Good things. That's it. >> I love it. Alright, we're running out of time so I'll give you the last word, if when we come back a year from now, I'll probably see you in a month since I see you all the time. But a year from now at International Women's Day what are you working on, what are your priorities, how does this integrate into what you guys are doing at Labs, in your brand new space, by the way. >> Yeah, yeah. I mean part of the mission in that brand new space is to create these accidental collisions, right? >> Accidental collisions? >> Collaborative collisions I should say. (laughter) >> I was like, I love that term. >> No, we're not just colliding with each other. We're collaborating in these collisions. >> When atoms collide big things happen, right? >> Exactly. >> I'm sorry, knocked your train of thought. >> No, no, no, that's perfect. Um, and I think that whole mission is about how to create that diversity of thought. How do we bring people together that wouldn't have collaborated in the past? So my mission as we're moving into that new space, is to get my labbers, who are, you know, we're on our own little floor doing our own little thing, to expand our horizons, right? To think about diversity across the spectrum, how are we going to work with other groups, how are we going to bring different pieces to the innovation? So I hope we can reflect than even as we come back next year to this program. >> Great, alright. >> And my job is really to, I mean, as a, to pile on what Mary says, like, I'm going to continue stretching the limit of others' research. Because I think that there's nothing better than to do that hard research to solve that hard problem to elevate our people. And to be honest whether it's woman or man, they're all labbers, they're all part of our family, and there's no better, basically, reward for you to see these people, basically shining and explaining their passion to our clients, changes society and everything. That's what we got to do. >> Love the passion Marc, Mary, it's always great to catch up. >> It's great to see you. (soft music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco , it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay we're back here live in San Francisco at Moscone West for exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference on John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the host of the cube here. Our next guest is Mary Min, Vice President of Global Business Development at SE Works Inc. Former entrepreneur, gamer, still entrepreneurial in her new world, but has seen the evolution of gaming. Here to talk about Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and kind of the trajectory of life in the digital era. Welcome to The Cube. >> Okay thank you. >> So we were just talking before we came on about the evolution of your career. You had a start-up, you sold it. It was a game. You been gaming since the late 90s and looking forward. What is the evolution of gaming and how it relates to Augmented Reality? Because there's a debate that goes on in the industry. Oh, VR is the next big thing, but yet it failed. Tim Cook recently came out and said hey, you know, don't get your hopes up. There's still more head room to do. Not necessarily a bad thing. Because now Augmented Reality is winning. You're seeing it in industrial IOT. You're seeing Augmented Reality. So what's your thoughts about how people should think about the evolution of this new wave of innovation. >> I think that with any new technology that's really life-changing for society as a whole, nothing ever gets done on the first iteration or the first phase. Things will never really take off on the first round especially when you're going mass consumer. Because people need time for learned behavior. People are creatures of habit. They like to stick what's familiar. And in order for them to move from one leap to the next, you need baby steps. And those baby steps unfortunately will include pioneers in whatever field, whether it be AR, or VR, that need to blaze the trail for their successors to come and start building on top of that as well. I read something really interesting this morning coming here where if you have someone who's trying to dig a well, and you need to dig 10 feet, the first person fails because they only dug the first foot. Second person, third person, subsequently until the ninth person, that well is not dug. But that 10th person is who successfully has the water filling the well. That 10th person could not have dug that final last foot if the first nine didn't go before him. And I consider that's really the phase that VR and AR honor as well. We needed that first iteration of VR in order to have the new generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, product people, mindset people, to start thinking about how to shape the future of this ecosystem. And we needed that to have it's course in order for AR to build on top of those learnings. And hopefully as we subsequently start to build on those as well, we don't view this as failures necessarily, but as necessary advancements in order to get to the ultimate goal of integrating more technology into our lives to make it a better life. >> And the relationship between the hardware platforms, whether it's console, PC, handset, or headset, and software, is interesting. And I want to talk about that with you. But first I want to tell you a story. Tell about your entrepreneur story. You were at UC-Berkeley Cal here, University of California - Berkeley, my daughter is a junior there, but... Great school, doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff there at Berkeley, and certainly not a lack of protests either these days. But, tell us the story. You dropped out and started a company. Tell the story. >> So I was attending Berkeley, and I'm very grateful that I was able to go to Cal. Particularly because I grew up in southern California where around the time that I grew up, there really wasn't a lot of start-ups or entrepreneurial minded people. And I came up here and became really immersed in tech and that was my first foray into it. And during college, I was working at a gaming company to help support myself through school. And just really fell in love with it. And decided that was truly what I wanted to do. My parents supported my decision, and so with their help and approval, I started building games. And I've been building games since, again, the mid-to-late 90s until now. Ran a couple of companies. Founded a few of them. And the latest one that I founded was a few years ago called Second-Wave Games. We had sold it to a larger company called World Golf Tour. And here I am now building tools for game developers actually. >> And what an evolution. You go back, I mean, the Nokia phones. You know, then the iPhone hit the scene. The smart phones. So everything in-between has been a balance of being creative with software and art, if you will gaming as art. What has changed? I mean obviously things fail, because it's a content business. Content is games. So there's always that symbiotic relationship between hardware and software. Who pushes who? Is it the yin and the yang? Or is it the good and the bad? What's going on between the relationship these days? Because we certainly see it on the enterprise side. Software at the end is driving infrastructure. What's the relationship from the content, from the artistry standpoint, and the handset. >> From our point, content makers are not very interested in any platform or hardware that doesn't have the distribution. But the hardware manufacturers need the content in order to push the distribution of hardware. So it becomes a chicken and the egg problem. And it really depends on the approach that people will take. The content distributors do not own the platform. They don't own the distribution of the actual devices that will run things. So it really kind of falls on the hardware manufacturers to decide what path they will go down. We will see more aggressive things like Microsoft when they first launched the Xbox for example. They took a heavy loss on every unit that they sold. But they were focused primarily on distribution. And then, they hit on this magic, very very like, really really run-away hit called Halo. You like Halo, you have to play on Xbox. It's not available on the other consoles. >> And Call of Duty right after it. >> Call of Duty right after it. >> The list is endless. >> So that becomes a really excellent example of how content drives adaptation of hardware. Because if you are huge fans of this title, you have to go to this hardware. And there is no other argument about it. >> It's interesting, the evolution of the internet, early adopters you saw as the adult industry. It was a leading indicator of the trends in online advertising. That's a big joke in the industry. Now, you are seeing the leading indicators in terms of cutting-edge pioneer blade trailers is gaming. Virtual communities, virtual currencies, the gaming culture you can almost use as a precursor to what you're seeing on the crypto side with blockchain. You can see on the Augmented Reality. That's a gamification of life where now the content is the real world. So that's super exciting for someone who has been in the gaming era. And software developers got to be sitting there licking their chops saying, hey I want to get in on this. >> So at my current company, SEWORKS, when we started developing our solution, we actually tested it first and foremost with gaming. With gaming apps above everything else. And people were a little puzzled thinking why would you test gaming above finance or healthcare or IOT? And our answer is because gaming is the most complex thing anyone can possibly make. It contains pretty much every single piece of technology that you could ever know. There are communications layers, there have the most sophisticated graphics layers, they have intense AI layers, they have intense algorithms, anything calculated, and it is in itself an inherit small economical ecosystem as well. So it is a very complex mini-world that you are building inside of the constraints of one application which then has to be very sophisticated in technology in order to run on our current set of hardware and devices. So it's the most challenging thing that we could build for and that's why we chose it. And I see the same thing happening. Gaming is life and life is games. Outside of solving your very basic human needs of shelter, food, and sleep, clothing. What's the immediate next thing that you want to do? People want to be entertained in some format or another. And games are really just almost like a primal urge in an instant. >> Yeah, and you said you're seeing the intersection of E-commerce, entertainment, and web services or cloud. Which you can bundle in IOT, all intersecting. And that's really what the real world is. Analog digital coming together is the consumerization of physical and digital. Which Samsung is putting out there. And this is the perfect beginning wave coming. Do you agree? >> I think so. As I was sitting through the keynote today, and I'm just reflecting on the future where I can watch TV and there's this beautiful scene of a local in northern California. Then I say, I want to go! And I jump in my car and the destination is magically loaded on my GPS in my very smart car, and it just takes me there. I don't have think about it. And on the way, they've already made reservations, right? It seems like a very seamless integration of everything if it's ideally done, and part of me, I think the security paranoia in me, is also a little afraid that too much information is going to be not necessarily a good thing in a lot of senses, because what we see, and what I've seen in almost 20 years of tech, is every time we rush to new technology, new platforms, new distribution, methodologies, people rush in and make the same mistakes over and over again. So I am a little afraid that with this era, it's going to be exactly the same. Where we see explosion of growth, we see explosion of content, people coming in with a gold rush, and then a few years later when thing are established, we're going to start to see the security leaks, the data leaks, the breaches. >> It's kind of like you don't know that smoking is bad for you until they realized people die of lung cancer. It's like data is the same thing. You don't know how much privacy you have given up. I mean look at Equifax. There's going to be more of those. So I think permission-less, permission-based data security, huge issue governing. That's big. >> It is, particularly because your average consumer is not very privacy sensitive. If I want to use something, I want to use something and asking me for permissions is just a hurdle that if I'm motivated enough to actually use a service, or use an app, I'm just going to keep brushing aside without really thinking about it. And alarmingly, the number of apps that we look at, the number of permissions that they ask, is kind of scary. >> Mary, great to have you on the cube. Great conversation. Great thought leadership. I'll give you the final word. What are you guys doing at SEWORKS? What are you up to after the event? What are some of the things you're working on? Get the plug in for your company. >> Yeah, so, what SEWORKS does is, we do tools for developers to help you alleviate your security needs when you're developing for mobile apps or for IOT or for connected, anything actually. If you're building on Android or iOS, we have a solution for you. We're essentially like your armory so we outfit you with an incredible shield that protects your application when it ships to the public. Against hacking and reverse engineering. >> So security as a service? >> We're security as a service. Just think of us as your on-call hackers, how's that? >> Great, your white hat shield for the apps, for mobile, mobile development is hot obviously. New user experiences and expectations are here. There's a big wave coming in, we're seeing on machine learning. You're seeing with AI. And certainly Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. All powered by unlimited compute in the cloud. Mary Min, SEWORKS, The Cube, more live coverage here in San Francisco after the short break.

live from san francisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cute covering oracle openworld 2015 brought to you by oracle now your host John furrier okay welcome back everyone we are here live in San Francisco on Howard Street for oracle openworld special presentation of the cube so looking ankles flagship program we go out to the events and extract the system noise i'm john furrier founder of SiliconANGLE join my next to gas prakash ramamurthy senior vice president systems and cloud management basically management cloud at oracle and mary johnson Turner research vice president enterprise systems management IDC welcome to the cube thank you so I think take my glasses off to read read the intro there but I want to just get your take on it because we just had to admit on Lavery talk about the plowed and one question I didn't get to ask him was a success mark hurry was talk about the pipeline of customers already in motion on the cloud so I wanted to ask him which is great timing for you guys is how do they integrate it which he talked about but then how do they manage if this is a big issue and he you know ease of use is something that he was generally throwing around there so what is the status of the management cloud because that will be a differentiator like security and to end as a differentiator management certainly will be to me not just table stakes it's really differentiated absolutely i think we're here because we're launching it today actually the management cloud and the interesting thing is this which is today if you look at it whether it's on our cloud or on-premise the rate of innovation is very very robust right i mean you have a mobile phone you're seeing your apps getting refresh twice a week or or even faster than that so what it means is you need the next generation monitoring solution that can monitor all of that so our goal with oracle management flower is to help you manage and monitor your solutions independent of where they are deployed if you deploy it on oracle cloud you little come bake with it to be able to monitor it right from the get-go or if you still have it on premise we will allow you to monitor it and break down those data I low so it is very effective so like you said is very very critical that people look at what their challenges are today in terms of proactive monitoring and troubleshooting to get to the next generation solutions we are providing theory I want to ask you a question on the trends but before that I want to just say that one of things i love about doing the oracle shells are six year the cube here is that for an old-timer like me seen the client-server live the client-server Revolution which is now kind of almost a point in time now it's almost it's over now we're into the cloud cloud modern error it's interesting to see because the same same things keep coming up again it's like the platform's the tool is so I got to ask you the question on what is the key trends that are driving this new application space because if you look at the client-server one of the big things that really was huge was the application market mean that would grant it was siloed up by you know by vendors but now with open source this is a huge application boom right now that's gonna impact IT operations sure yeah I think that if you look at it there's been like you said a couple of generations of technology we had mainframes things changed really slow right then we had client server which was to give business units and developers more control and things started to speed up and change a little more quickly but now in our current and cloud native cloud based development real-time microservice open source-based kind of world the rating pays the change is almost constant you're seeing so many organizations that are moving to continuous delivery modes much of it hosted on public cloud or hybrid private public cloud and they're changing features and functions every day and that creates huge management challenges in terms of just trying to understand is the end-to-end application performing effectively are the end-users getting what they need are the business decision-makers really understanding the impact of those outages or upgrades and it's so it's very complex and then I think it's raising the set of requirements for a particular application performance monitoring and IT operations and log analytics I was Oracle addressing these trends because one of the things that people like tonight I'd like to put things into two camps rip and replace okay or evolutionary development and we're clearly on the McCloud evolutionary because Oracle has it's not gonna be it's not gonna go away right so you can say Oracle native is the cloud strategy to all the Oracle customers but yet now with open source there's net new applications that do you got cha vows to 20 years anniversary so there's new stuff going on IOT is a huge application market right now now I can run an IOT thing in the cloud somewhere else or maybe on Amazon or somewhere else but the other day I have run through my operational assistance assistance of engagements this is a record which is Oracle right so is it an Oracle native cloud and the cloud data mean it how do you see oracle addressing that dynamic are they well positioned well i think oracle has a pretty broad portfolio you know they've had again from a management perspective they had Oracle Enterprise Manager on Prem for many many years i think that the new offerings that are being announced today really are interesting that they extend Oracles of monitoring and analytics to a whole range of cloud-based solutions many of which may not necessarily have been born on the Oracle platforms so I think it's a good recognition of the need for heterogeneity and the need to recognize that it is going to be a very hybrid world for many many years so I think that those are all real you know positive factors and then the new releases and it was talking about the integrated pass perform as a service Enchantix connect those environments but on the management side what are you guys delivering because that's going to be the challenge Prakash to talk about the specific things that you guys are announcing and delivering the customers today so specifically we are delivering three services first one is around application performance monitoring that allows our customers to stay ahead of their customers and their problems and give them the best user experience and monitor that and troubleshoot that and then the second service is around managing your logs and extracting IT operational data and business data out of it today if you look at it the most common thing people do with the log is to archive them and put it away because they don't want that to interrupt their production systems but that has a ton of good information so we have that second service eight exhaust becomes gold exactly so today what happens is they just get put away they get archived and that has real nuggets of business information and IT information being able to collect all of that and use it for your rapid troubleshooting as well so that's the second service the set third one is around IT analytics I call those first two services kind of like the Fitbit for your applications you're constantly getting vitals out of it and white throw that away if you don't have an issue still use it to run some interesting capacity friends and forecasting and all of that so use your real data to forecast your IT health as opposed to using a spreadsheet with some random data that you collected in a point in time so that's what we are announcing three services application performance monitoring log analytics and long term trending and forecasting with IT analytic Isis plunks been doing some log files how they were born people's blunt their data exactly they are trying to kind of get into that how do you guys compared to things like splunk and other tools I know tableau is a new relationship that was announced for the data visualization yeah Larry kind of talked about that yesterday talk about that how people are using that data exhaust give me some examples so the most fundamental difference in what we are doing is this which is we do not differentiate the sources of data and the classes of data when we bring it to the cloud so it could be metric data but with that you can collect based on your monitoring your health of your applications which splunk doesn't do for example and then log data but collect all of that and correlate it together so that in essence what we want to do is this which is the enterprise's today don't have a really a data problem they'd have an insight problem which is they want to be able to just see the right amount of data when they have a problem not all the data when they have a problem depends how you look at the data problem they'll have a Jerry problems you define that as they get all this data so you're plenty of data that's the problem there's no dearth of data problem yeah so that's what I'm i know i know i just kind of making this fun was good comment because i like that because that's that is really not an issue the data is coming yeah and that's you know Brandon whole know the problem you guys have scale now with that but the I don't Linux is a big thing I wanna talk about that because it can be problematic I'm a talk to some customers all the time and they say if someone comes in here and sells me another dashboard I'm gonna shoot myself exactly so it's like because and I said what do you mean by that he goes well there's so many alarms going off I don't know what to pay attention to that's where we start to see machine learning from these tools can you share any color what your great wine Larry I'm it's exactly right which is one of the underpinnings for us is to be able to automatically generate baseline and detect anomalies the last thing I mean our product support our own public cloud and I hear from the guys who run the cloud saying don't just give me another alert tell me what I need to do with an alert because I need to be able to disposition the alert so what we want to do is to understand the normal behavior of your application and only alerts you when there's an anomaly okay so that's part of our machine learning and prioritisation learning some learning algorithms in volved understand some pattern recognition that's right things and only tell you what the outlier is and when and and ask determine what the outlier is that suppose you setting thresholds for us to know it because sometimes things change if you are an e-commerce application or the day before Thanksgiving would have a different pattern than the third week of January right me just that the way the world works so what I want to talk to you about Larry made a comment yes in the key no I just like to take a dig at work day but you know in the way he likes work day because you know it's competition and also highlights from the features that Oracle has but what work days actually losing some share to service now a company in here in Silicon Valley that is an itsm IT service management company and they have been very successful their developer program which actually is starting to nibble away at work shares market share because they're building these developers are building these really focused age are apps that is not flat point it's a tool I know like an offense report for example and works really really well but work day has a plethora of features and they don't always have the best in class features uh-huh so that brings up the whole developer angle what do you and you guys have a story there for developers api's how do you talk to the absolutely share absolutely we have a rest api that the developers can use to collect the data from there into their own dashboards if they want to and also for example you can automatically deploy our agents when you're using our Java cloud service so that monitoring gets baked into it so we have api's for both inputting data and torque loud and extracting data back from the cloud will have api's for you to take the events that we generate into your own event dashboard that you have I'm a developer have a team like I could do some stuff filled my own kind of visualization UI and just have JSON endpoints come right into the absolution absolutely maybe I know she smirked when I said service now you will share some insight it's a this dynamic because this is kind of what's happening on the cloud these tools are popping up yeah well yeah and again I think what we're talking about today is to be able to monitor and analyze and optimize a lot of those different tools and deliver them via cloud platform and I think that we are finding that DevOps organizations are very interested in cloud-based solutions that help them do this better cheaper or faster so I think that you know I think it's an opportunity service now has currently been a pioneer in the delivery of system management as a cloud based model and I think it's interesting that Oracle is actually choosing to enter that market in in a different place yeah I mean actually I just a strength and you got the systems of record a on the right and and really talk from your really you know to Prakash this point really focusing on data because managing effectively managing the performance and operation of applications and complex environments it's all it is a huge data problem and you've got data coming from so many sources so many formats and being able to take that in rapidly to transform it normalize it and make it digestible for humans it's something that is really important in these complex environments and yes I think it's going to be interesting to see I think it's a great try or agree with you I think it's a great strategy by focusing on the data you have a lot of range and I wrote a blog post in 2007 now I'm going way back date is a new developer kit and now that's actually happening you look at data people are playing with the data like a developer place with function calls if you will so we're seeing now is a data rich environment hence the not not a problem of having enough data laying around the problem is how do you use the data you're getting all the products yeah inside is a huge problem and that's only an accelerated by faster performance machines in easy-to-use environment like I'd better analytics because you you want if the user knows what the problem is that they're looking for there are a lot of tools that will help you find it yeah but if you do not know what the problem is and to guide them towards the problem is is where where there's real opportunity and there's a real pain point in these enterprises especially now that you and I don't tolerate a downtime so you never cut anybody slack saying oh the website is slow but they've been innovating I'm gonna give them some slack nobody does that yeah yeah so and because now everything is measurable now for the first time in the history of business everything is measurable that's right and that's like just mind-blowing to me but i think is a huge app i only get your thoughts on the application market because I just see a massive tsunami coming of third-party developers and I'm not sure Oracle can handle that I didn't that's my personal opinion counter that I mean I people want to know can Oracle handle an ecosystem of third-party developers absolutely we have shown that before with with Java and I think you see every one of four services having open api's we are coating third-party developers we will be continuing to support them and I think we'll be able to handle it and we need to do that as a part of this ecosystem yeah I mean it's a platform yeah so you have to enable absolutely and that's the open message exactly all right so gosh what's your advice for the people at oracle openworld here and the people watching let's start with the people here on site if they catch this video when are we putting up some snippets before you even get off the set here so one what session should they attend what's where should I get more information what sessions and breakouts and then presentations they goes I have a keynote tomorrow at 11am that I would love for them to attend and outside of that there are some hands-on labs here that they should go look at the products and people who are remote they should go to cloud.oracle.com / management where we have all the services listed and take a look at it and we are really really going to be putting out a very differentiated solution than what is available in the marketplace and I would love for them to check it out and give us feedback for the folks watching online and customers in general when they squint through all the activities a lot of bombs dropping here at Oracle I mean a lot of announcements this is pretty pretty unprecedented what should they look for what are the if you at the point of someone to 11 point data point within your world that's going to get their attention and have them dive in deep what should they look at if they're having issues with their applications today if they're hearing about their application issues first from their customers and not by themselves they should be looking at our solutions to see how they can get ahead of the customers and that's what that's one precise message they can take back

(gentle music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I've got a great guest here, CUBE alumni and very impressive, inspiring, Rachel Mushahwar Skaff, who's a managing director and general manager at AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here. You all make such a tremendous impact with reporting out what's happening in the tech space, and frankly, investing in topics like this, so thank you. >> It's our pleasure. Your career has been really impressive. You worked at Intel for almost a decade, and that company is very tech, very focused on Moore's law, cadence of technology power in the industry. Now at AWS, powering next-generation cloud. What inspired you to get into tech? How did you get here and how have you approached your career journey, because it's quite a track record? >> Wow, how long do we have? (Rachel and John laugh) >> John: We can go as long as you want. (laughs) It's great. >> You know, all joking aside, I think at the end of the day, it's about this simple statement. If you don't get goosebumps every single morning that you're waking up to do your job, it's not good enough. And that's a bit about how I've made all of the different career transitions that I have. You know, everything from building out data centers around the world, to leading network and engineering teams, to leading applications teams, to going and working for, you know, the largest semiconductor in the world, and now at AWS, every single one of those opportunities gave me goosebumps. And I was really focused on how do I surround myself with humans that are better than I am, smarter than I am, companies that plan in decades, but live in moments, companies that invest in their employees and create like artists? And frankly, for me, being part of a company where people know that life is finite, but they want to make an infinite impact, that's a bit about my career journey in a nutshell. >> Yeah. What's interesting is that, you know, over the years, a lot's changed, and a theme that we're hearing from leaders now that are heading up large teams and running companies, they have, you know, they have 20-plus years of experience under their belt and they look back and they say, "Wow, "things have changed and it's changing faster now, "hopefully faster to get change." But they all talk about confidence and they talk about curiosity and building. When did you know that this was going to be something that you got the goosebumps? And were there blockers in your way and how did you handle that? (Rachel laughs) >> There's always blockers in our way, and I think a lot of people don't actually talk about the blockers. I think they make it sound like, hey, I had this plan from day one, and every decision I've made has been perfect. And for me, I'll tell you, right, there are moments in your life that mark a differentiation and those moments that you realize nothing will be the same. And time is kind of divided into two parts, right, before this moment and after this moment. And that's everything from, before I had kids, that's a pretty big moment in people's lives, to after I had kids, and how do you work through some of those opportunities? Before I got married, before I got divorced. Before I went to this company, after I left this company. And I think the key for all of those is just having an insatiable curiosity around how do you continue to do better, create better and make better? And I'll tell you, those blockers, they exist. Coming back from maternity leave, hard. Coming back from a medical leave, hard. Coming back from caring for a sick parent or a sick friend, hard. But all of those things start to help craft who you are as a human being, not as a leader, but as a human being, and allows you to have some empathy with the people that you surround yourself with, right? And for me, it's, (sighs) you can think about these blockers in one of two ways. You can think about it as, you know, every single time that you're tempted to react in the same way to a blocker, you can be a prisoner of your past, or you can change how you react and be a pioneer of the future. It's not a blocker when you think about it in those terms. >> Mindset matters, and that's really a great point. You brought up something that's interesting, I want to bring this up. Some of the challenges in different stages of our lives. You know, one thing that's come out of this set of interviews, this, of day and in conversations is, that I haven't heard before, is the result of COVID, working at home brought empathy about people's personal lives to the table. That came up in a couple interviews. What's your reaction to that? Because that highlights that we're human, to your point of view. >> It does. It does. And I'm so thankful that you don't ask about balance because that is a pet peeve of mine, because there is no such thing as balance. If you're in perfect balance, you are not moving and you're not changing. But when you think about, you know, the impact of COVID and how the world has changed since that, it has allowed all of us to really think about, you know, what do we want to do versus what do we have to do? And I think so many times, in both our professional lives and our personal lives, we get caught up in doing what we think we have to do to get ahead versus taking a step back and saying, "Hey, what do I want to do? "And how do I become a, you know, "a better human?" And many times, John, I'm asked, "Hey, "how do you define success or achievement?" And, you know, my answer is really, for me, the greatest results that I've achieved, both personally and professionally, is when I eliminate the word success and balance from my vocabulary, and replace them with two words: What's my contribution and what's my impact? Those things make a difference, regardless of gender. And I'll tell you, none of it is easy, ever. I think all of us have been broken, we've been stretched, we've been burnt out. But I also think what we have to talk about as leaders in the industry is how we've also found endurance and resilience. And when we felt unsteady, we've continued to go forward, right? When we can't decide, the best answer is do what's uncomfortable. And all of those things really stemmed from a part of what happened with COVID. >> Yeah, yeah, I love the uncomfortable and the balance highlight. You mentioned being off balance. That means you're growing, you're not standing still. I want to get your thoughts on this because one thing that has come out again this year, and last year as well, is having a team with you when you do it. So if you're off balance and you're going to stretch, if you have a good team with you, that's where people help each other. Not just pick them up, but like maybe get 'em back on track again. So, but if you're solo, you fall, (laughs) you fall harder. So what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this has come up, and this comes up in team building, workforce formation, goal setting, contribution. What's your reaction to that? >> So my reaction to that that is pretty simple. Nobody gets there on their own at all, right? Passion and ambition can only take you so far. You've got to have people and teams that are supporting you. And here's the funny thing about people, and frankly, about being a leader that I think is really important: People don't follow for you. People follow for who you help them become. Think about that for a second. And when you think about all the amazing things that companies and teams are able to do, it's because of those people. And it's because you have leaders that are out there, inspiring them to take what they believe is impossible and turn it into the possible. That's the power of teams. >> Can you give an example of your approach on how you do that? How do you build your teams? How do you grow them? How do you lead them effectively and also make 'em inclusive, diverse and equitable? >> Whew. I'll give you a great example of some work that we're doing at AWS. This year at re:Invent, for the first time in its history, we've launched an initiative with theCUBE called Women of the Cloud. And part of Women of the Cloud is highlighting the business impact that so many of our partners, our customers and our employees have had on the social, on the economic and on the financials of many companies. They just haven't had the opportunity to tell their story. And at Amazon, right, it is absolutely integral to us to highlight those examples and continue to extend that ethos to our partners and our customers. And I think one of the things that I shared with you at re:Invent was, you know, as U2's Bono put it, (John laughs) "We'll build it better than we did before "and we are the people "that we've been waiting for." So if we're not out there, advocating and highlighting all the amazing things that other women are doing in the ecosystem, who will? >> Well, I've got to say, I want to give you props for that program. Not only was it groundbreaking, it's still running strong. And I saw some things on LinkedIn that were really impressive in its network effect. And I met at least half a dozen new people I never would have met before through some of that content interaction and engagement. And this is like the power of the current world. I mean, getting the voices out there creates momentum. And it's good for Amazon. It's not just personal brand building for my next job or whatever, you know, reason. It's sharing and it's attracting others, and it's causing people to connect and meet each other in that world. So it's still going strong. (laughs) And this program we did last year was part of Rachel Thornton, who's now at MessageBird, and Mary Camarata. They were the sponsors for this International Women's Day. They're not there anymore, so we decided we're going to do it again because the impact is so significant. We had the Amazon Education group on. It's amazing and it's free, and we've got to get the word out. I mean, talk about leveling up fast. You get in and you get trained and get certified, and there's a zillion jobs out (laughs) there in cloud, right, and partners. So this kind of leadership is really important. What was the key learnings that you've taken away and how do you extend this opportunity to nurture the talent out there in the field? Because when you throw the content out there from great leaders and practitioners and developers, it attracts other people. >> It does. It does. So look, I think there's two types of people, people that are focused on being and people who are focused on doing. And let me give you an example, right? When we think about labels of, hey, Rachel's a female executive who launched Women of the Cloud, that label really limits me. I'd rather just be a great executive. Or, hey, there's a great entrepreneur. Let's not be a great entrepreneur. Just go build something and sell it. And that's part of this whole Women of the cloud, is I don't want people focused on what their label is. I want people sharing their stories about what they're doing, and that's where the lasting impact happens, right? I think about something that my grandmother used to tell me, and she used to tell me, "Rachel, how successful "you are, doesn't matter. "The lasting impact that you have "is your legacy in this very finite time "that you have on Earth. "Leave a legacy." And that's what Women of the Cloud is about. So that people can start to say, "Oh, geez, "I didn't know that that was possible. "I didn't think about my career in that way." And, you know, all of those different types of stories that you're hearing out there. >> And I want to highlight something you said. We had another Amazonian on the program for this day earlier and she coined a term, 'cause inside Amazon, you have common language. One of them is bar raising. Raise the bar, that's an Amazonian (Rachel laughs) term. It means contribute and improve and raise the bar of capability. She said, "Bar raising is gender neutral. "The bar is a bar." And I'm like, wow, that was amazing. Now, that means your contribution angle there highlights that. What's the biggest challenge to get that mindset set in culture, in these- >> Oh. >> 'Cause it's that simple, contribution is neutral. >> It absolutely is neutral, but it's like I said earlier, I think so many times, people are focused on success and being a great leader versus what's the contribution I'm making and how am I doing as a leader, you know? And when it comes to a lot of the leadership principles that Amazon has, including bar raising, which means insisting on the highest standards, and then those standards continue to raise every single time. And what that is all about is having all of our employees figure out, how do I get better every single day, right? That's what it's about. It's not about being better than the peer next to you. It's about how do I become a better leader, a better human being than I was yesterday? >> Awesome. >> You know, I read this really cute quote and I think it really resonates. "You meditate to upgrade your software "and you work out to upgrade your hardware." And while it's important that we're all ourselves at work, we can't deny that a lot of times, ourselves still need that meditation or that workout. >> Well, I hope I don't have any zero days in my software out there, so, but I'm going to definitely work on that. I love that quote. I'm going to use that. Thank you very much. That was awesome. I got to ask you, I know you're really passionate about, and we've talked about this, around, so you're a great leader but you're also focused on what's behind you in the generation, pipelining women leaders, okay? Seats at the table, mentoring and sponsorship. What can we do to build a strong pipeline of leaders in technology and business? And where do you see the biggest opportunity to nurture the talent in these fields? >> Hmm, you know, that's great, great question. And, you know, I just read a "Forbes" article by another Amazonian, Tanuja Randery, who talked about, you know, some really interesting stats. And one of the stats that she shared was, you know, by 2030, less than 25% of tech specialists will be female, less than 25%. That's only a 6% growth from where we are in 2023, so in seven years. That's alarming. So we've really got to figure out what are the kinds of things that we're going to go do from an Amazon perspective to impact that? And one of the obvious starting points is showcasing tech careers to girls and young women, and talking openly about what a technology career looks like. So specifically at Amazon, we've got an AWS Git IT program that helps schools and educators bring in tech role models to show them what potential careers look like in tech. I think that's one great way that we can help build the pipeline, but once we get the pipeline, we also have to figure out how we don't let that pipeline leak. Meaning how do we keep women and, you know, young women on their tech career? And I think big part of that, John, is really talking about how hard it is, but it's also greater than you can ever imagine. And letting them see executives that are very authentic and will talk about, geez, you know, the challenges of COVID were a time of crisis and accelerated change, and here's what it meant to me personally and here's what we were able to solve professionally. These younger generations are all about social impact, they're about economic impact and they're about financial impact. And if we're not talking about all three of those, both from how AWS is leading from the front, but how its executives are also taking that into their personal lives, they're not going to want to go into tech. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you mentioned there about getting people that get IT, good call out there, but also, Amazon's going to train 30 million people, put hundreds of millions of dollars into education. And not only are they making it easier to get in to get trained, but once you're in, even savvy folks that are in there still have to accelerate. And there's more ways to level up, more things are happening, but there's a big trend around people changing careers either in their late 20s, early 30s, or even those moments you talk about, where it's before and after, even later in the careers, 40s, 50s. Leaders like, well, good experience, good training, who were in another discipline who re-skilled. So you have, you know, more certifications coming in. So there's still other pivot points in the pipeline. It's not just down here. And that, I find that interesting. Are you seeing that same leadership opportunities coming in where someone can come into tech older? >> Absolutely. You know, we've got some amazing programs, like Amazon Returnity, that really focuses on how do we get other, you know, how do we get women that have taken some time off of work to get back into the workforce? And here's the other thing about switching careers. If I look back on my career, I started out as a civil engineer, heavy highway construction. And now I lead a sales team at the largest cloud company in the world. And there were, you know, twists and turns around there. I've always focused on how do we change and how do we continue to evolve? So it's not just focused on, you know, young women in the pipeline. It's focused on all gender and all diverse types throughout their career, and making sure that we're providing an inclusive environment for them to bring in their unique skillsets. >> Yeah, a building has good steel. It's well structured. Roads have great foundations. You know, you got the builder in you there. >> Yes. >> So I have to ask you, what's on your mind as a tech athlete, as an executive at AWS? You know, you got your huge team, big goals, the economy's got a little bit of a headwind, but still, cloud's transforming, edge is exploding. What's your outlook as you look out in the tech landscape these days and how are you thinking about it? What your plans? Can you share a little bit about what's on your mind? >> Sure. So, geez, there's so many trends that are top of mind right now. Everything from zero trust to artificial intelligence to security. We have more access to data now than ever before. So the opportunities are limitless when we think about how we can apply technology to solve some really difficult customer problems, right? Innovation sometimes feels like it's happening at a rapid pace. And I also say, you know, there are years when nothing happens, and then there's years when centuries happen. And I feel like we're kind of in those years where centuries are happening. Cloud technologies are refining sports as we know them now. There's a surge of innovation in smart energy. Everyone's supply chain is looking to transform. Custom silicon is going mainstream. And frankly, AWS's customers and partners are expecting us to come to them with a point of view on trends and on opportunities. And that's what differentiates us. (John laughs) That's what gives me goosebumps- >> I was just going to ask you that. Does that give you goosebumps? How could you not love technology with that excitement? I mean, AI, throw in AI, too. I just talked to Swami, who heads up the AI and database, and we just talked about the past 24 months, the change. And that is a century moment happening. The large language models, computer vision, more compute. Compute's booming than ever before. Who thought that was going to happen, is still happening? Massive change. So, I mean, if you're in tech, how can you not love tech? >> I know, even if you're not in tech, I think you've got to start to love tech because it gives you access to things you've never had before. And frankly, right, change is the only constant. And if you don't like change, you're going to like being irrelevant even less than you like change. So we've got to be nimble, we've got to adapt. And here's the great thing, once we figure it out, it changes all over again. And it's not something that's easy for any of us to operate. It's hard, right? It's hard learning new technology, it's hard figuring out what do I do next? But here's the secret. I think it's hard because we're doing it right. It's not hard because we're doing it wrong. It's just hard to be human and it's hard to figure out how we apply all this different technology in a way that positively impacts us, you know, economically, financially, environmentally and socially. >> And everyone's different, too. So you got to live those (mumbles). I want to get one more question in before we, my last question, which is about you and your impact. When you talk to your team, your sales, you got a large sales team, North America. And Tanuja, who you mentioned, is in EMEA, we're going to speak with her as well. You guys lead the front lines, helping customers, but also delivering the revenue to the company, which has been fantastic, by the way. So what's your message to the troops and the team out there? When you say, "Take that hill," like what is the motivational pitch, in a few sentences? What's the main North Star message in today's marketplace when you're doing that big team meeting? >> I don't know if it's just limited to a team meeting. I think this is a universal message, and the universal message for me is find your edge, whatever that may be. Whether it is the edge of what you know about artificial intelligence and neural networks or it's the edge of how do we migrate our applications to the cloud more quickly. Or it's the edge of, oh, my gosh, how do I be a better parent and still be great at work, right? Find your edge, and then sharpen it. Go to the brink of what you think is possible, and then force yourself to jump. Get involved. The world is run by the people that show up, professionally and personally. (John laughs) So show up and get started. >> Yeah as Steve Jobs once said, "The future "that everyone looks at was created "by people no smarter than you." And I love that quote. That's really there. Final question for you. I know we're tight on time, but I want to get this in. When you think about your impact on your company, AWS, and the industry, what's something you want people to remember? >> Oh, geez. I think what I want people to remember the most is it's not about what you've said, and this is a Maya Angelou quote. "It's not about what you've said to people "or what you've done, "it's about how you've made them feel." And we can all think back on leaders or we can all think back on personal moments in our lives where we felt like we belonged, where we felt like we did something amazing, where we felt loved. And those are the moments that sit with us for the rest of our lives. I want people to remember how they felt when they were part of something bigger. I want people to belong. It shouldn't be uncommon to talk about feelings at work. So I want people to feel. >> Rachel, thank you for your time. I know you're really busy and we stretched you a little bit there. Thank you so much for contributing to this wonderful day of great leaders sharing their stories. And you're an inspiration. Thanks for everything you do. We appreciate you. >> Thank you. And let's go do some more Women of the Cloud videos. >> We (laughs) got more coming. Bring those stories on. Back up the story truck. We're ready to go. Thanks so much. >> That's good. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. It's not just going to be March 8th. That's the big celebration day. It's going to be every quarter, more stories coming. Stay tuned at siliconangle.com and thecube.net here, with bringing all the stories. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)