>>Mm. Joining me is Aaron Suzuki, founder and CEO of Prowess. >>Aaron. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. >>Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. So let's dive right in. Tell us about prowess. >>Progress has been around for quite a while. We've been serving the technology industry from the very beginning, almost 20 years. We've always been able to bridge the gap between the story of the product and what it actually does. And a lot of times, there's a pretty fundamental disconnect between what engineering says and what marketing wants to claim. And so this is sort of how we got down this road of getting into testing and validation of products such as we do today quite quite extensively. And >>that's really what we're focusing on right now is this idea of your independence as a lab. And in this particular case, uh, it's a series of tests that you've done for, uh, you know, using Dell hardware combined with Broadcom cards. So talk a little more about that. About that the concept of independence and what that means. >>Yeah. You know, it's important to us that we stay vendor, agnostic, platform agnostic. Um, and there are a lot of things happening concurrently in the industry. A lot of people want to get a lot of work done really fast, and most customers are not sort of vendor exclusive. In fact, we're not sure we know of any. We always try to keep this objective point of view. That is to say that we don't allow our customers to buy results when we're doing quantitative testing. We really are out there trying to come up with a story or a narrative, and that really seemed to be The missing link in all of this is that there are the quantitative houses that do traditional benchmark testing on one side and then system integrators and kind of on the other extreme agencies. That would really do the narrative and the system integrator side build out a solution, but they wouldn't be able to tell you how it would perform. And so reconciling those two things really became challenging. So having a source that would be able to give you that insight that goes beyond just transactions, um, you know, per whatever unit of time and finding some of these metrics in between that we're more relevant to people's jobs. Where was really the inspiration for creating this unique practise that we call prowess? Labs? >>So, Erin, when I think about performance testing, uh, it's very easy to think of it from the perspective that it's a bunch of hardware slapped together in Iraq. You get some engineers, scientists to run some tests. Why prowess? What? What do you specifically bring to the table? That's meaningful? >>Performance testing is usually done in one of two ways, predominantly one way. It's a very academic approach, which says this specific benchmark test run this specific way gives us X. Another approach is more narrative in nature and more demonstrative. And there's this huge gap in between, and that's really what prowess labs exist to fulfil. >>So, Erin, give us an idea of the scale of prowess. How many of these projects have you worked on? How many how many customers have you worked with over >>over time? Um, we do this work with most of the leading global hardware and software manufacturers and a select number of emerging providers as well. So for us, you know, year to year dozens of projects of varying scope and scale. Various projects also running kind of programmatic form where we're kind of iterating constantly throughout the year. Um, so it's It's really a lot of fun for our team members to to do this. And some of them have been doing it for 10 or 12 years in continuity. >>Erin, Thanks for joining us to talk about practise today. >>My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Mhm. Yeah.

>>Mm. Joining us now is Mark Van Name, co founder of Principled Technologies. Welcome, Mark. >>Thanks, Dave. It's great to be here. >>It's great to have you here. Uh, we'd like to hear the principled technologies story. We know that you are an independent testing lab, but but tell us. Tell us the story. >>Sure. Here's the short form we're in our 20th year. We created the company with the idea that the best way to sell products was to tell the truth, which may not seem radical, but often is. And so we started out trying to prove the advantages of products. We work primarily in the technical space. We work with most of the big tech companies, and over the years, what we learned was that although we were coming up with great facts that people could use for buying decisions and they were very successful for companies, companies were then having to turn them into marketing materials. So we created a studio team and we started enlarging the range of collateral we delivered so that today we do the testing and research and in some cases, even software development necessary to prove competitive advantages. And then we package that up into compelling collateral that helps companies win in the attention economy and sell their products. All telling the truth. >>Talk to me about the numbers of customers that you work with. The numbers of projects that you do give me, Give me, Give me a sense of the kind of scale we're talking about. >>Sure, we, as I said, I've been in business for 20 years. This our 20th year. We've done at this point, I believe, several 1000 engagements in it. Typical year, we will do more than 100 engagements, each of which will typically have many components and many different tests, different pieces of collateral and so on. We've worked with more than 50 tech leading companies, as well as about as many people in non tech areas with our e learning practise. But for this purpose here, the main audience is 50 plus tech companies. So it's it's many dozen tech companies over the years. >>Have you had challenges over the years maintaining that independence? Uh, what? What do those conversations look like when maybe someone is trying to nudge you? How do you deal with that? >>So this is obviously a key question about our business model and one that we considered when we started the company. The first thing to note is that anybody looking at our results, looking at any report or looking at any company that is paid to do work has the very reasonable question that could come to them, which is why should I trust you? And our answer from the beginning is don't trust us. Verify. So unlike just about anybody else in the industry from the beginning, we give away the entire methodology what we now call the science behind the report for every engagement we do. So we don't say, Hey, we just tested this. If you go to most review sites, they'll tell you a little tiny bit about what they did, and then they'll give you their conclusions. We make available in a separate document attached to the report, the complete methodology, the system, information, software, information, um, everything about what we did, the detailed steps so that if you have the right hardware, software and expertise, you can reproduce what we did. This means you don't have to trust us. You can verify it, and it puts our work out on display for everybody. >>Mark, Thank you so much for spending time with us and telling us a little about what your company does and how you do it. Well, thanks >>for having me. Mm.

(upbeat music) >> The ascendancy of cloud and SAS has shown new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once sought after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays, and maximizing server utilization has been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros, developers with expertise in microservices, container, application development, and like. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. Begs the question, is hardware going the way of Coball? Well, not likely. Software has to run on something, but the labor needed to deploy, and troubleshoot, and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting. At the same time, we've seen the value flow also shifting in hardware. Once a world dominated by X86 processors value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and arm based designs. Moreover, other componentry like NICs, accelerators, and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated, and increasingly important. The question is, does it matter? And if so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs, and the broader society? Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we've organized a special power panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question, does hardware still matter? Allow me to introduce the panel. Bob O'Donnell is president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. David Nicholson is a CTO and tech expert. Keith Townson is CEO and founder of CTO Advisor. And Marc Staimer is the chief dragon slayer at Dragon Slayer Consulting and oftentimes a Wikibon contributor. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending some time here. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay before we get into it, I just want to bring up some data from ETR. This is a survey that ETR does every quarter. It's a survey of about 1200 to 1500 CIOs and IT buyers and I'm showing a subset of the taxonomy here. This XY axis and the vertical axis is something called net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. It's essentially the percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular area than those spending less. You subtract the lesses from the mores and you get a net score. Anything the horizontal axis is pervasion in the data set. Sometimes they call it market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just the percentage of activity in the data set as a percentage of the total. That red 40% line, anything over that is considered highly elevated. And for the past, I don't know, eight to 12 quarters, the big four have been AI and machine learning, containers, RPA and cloud and cloud of course is very impressive because not only is it elevated in the vertical access, but you know it's very highly pervasive on the horizontal. So what I've done is highlighted in red that historical hardware sector. The server, the storage, the networking, and even PCs despite the work from home are depressed in relative terms. And of course, data center collocation services. Okay so you're seeing obviously hardware is not... People don't have the spending momentum today that they used to. They've got other priorities, et cetera, but I want to start and go kind of around the horn with each of you, what is the number one trend that each of you sees in hardware and why does it matter? Bob O'Donnell, can you please start us off? >> Sure Dave, so look, I mean, hardware is incredibly important and one comment first I'll make on that slide is let's not forget that hardware, even though it may not be growing, the amount of money spent on hardware continues to be very, very high. It's just a little bit more stable. It's not as subject to big jumps as we see certainly in other software areas. But look, the important thing that's happening in hardware is the diversification of the types of chip architectures we're seeing and how and where they're being deployed, right? You refer to this in your opening. We've moved from a world of x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD to things like obviously GPUs, DPUs. We've got VPU for, you know, computer vision processing. We've got AI-dedicated accelerators, we've got all kinds of other network acceleration tools and AI-powered tools. There's an incredible diversification of these chip architectures and that's been happening for a while but now we're seeing them more widely deployed and it's being done that way because workloads are evolving. The kinds of workloads that we're seeing in some of these software areas require different types of compute engines than traditionally we've had. The other thing is (coughs), excuse me, the power requirements based on where geographically that compute happens is also evolving. This whole notion of the edge, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more detail later is driven by the fact that where the compute actually sits closer to in theory the edge and where edge devices are, depending on your definition, changes the power requirements. It changes the kind of connectivity that connects the applications to those edge devices and those applications. So all of those things are being impacted by this growing diversity in chip architectures. And that's a very long-term trend that I think we're going to continue to see play out through this decade and well into the 2030s as well. >> Excellent, great, great points. Thank you, Bob. Zeus up next, please. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing when you look at this chart to remember too is, you know, through the pandemic and the work from home period a lot of companies did put their office modernization projects on hold and you heard that echoed, you know, from really all the network manufacturers anyways. They always had projects underway to upgrade networks. They put 'em on hold. Now that people are starting to come back to the office, they're looking at that now. So we might see some change there, but Bob's right. The size of those market are quite a bit different. I think the other big trend here is the hardware companies, at least in the areas that I look at networking are understanding now that it's a combination of hardware and software and silicon that works together that creates that optimum type of performance and experience, right? So some things are best done in silicon. Some like data forwarding and things like that. Historically when you look at the way network devices were built, you did everything in hardware. You configured in hardware, they did all the data for you, and did all the management. And that's been decoupled now. So more and more of the control element has been placed in software. A lot of the high-performance things, encryption, and as I mentioned, data forwarding, packet analysis, stuff like that is still done in hardware, but not everything is done in hardware. And so it's a combination of the two. I think, for the people that work with the equipment as well, there's been more shift to understanding how to work with software. And this is a mistake I think the industry made for a while is we had everybody convinced they had to become a programmer. It's really more a software power user. Can you pull things out of software? Can you through API calls and things like that. But I think the big frame here is, David, it's a combination of hardware, software working together that really make a difference. And you know how much you invest in hardware versus software kind of depends on the performance requirements you have. And I'll talk about that later but that's really the big shift that's happened here. It's the vendors that figured out how to optimize performance by leveraging the best of all of those. >> Excellent. You guys both brought up some really good themes that we can tap into Dave Nicholson, please. >> Yeah, so just kind of picking up where Bob started off. Not only are we seeing the rise of a variety of CPU designs, but I think increasingly the connectivity that's involved from a hardware perspective, from a kind of a server or service design perspective has become increasingly important. I think we'll get a chance to look at this in more depth a little bit later but when you look at what happens on the motherboard, you know we're not in so much a CPU-centric world anymore. Various application environments have various demands and you can meet them by using a variety of components. And it's extremely significant when you start looking down at the component level. It's really important that you optimize around those components. So I guess my summary would be, I think we are moving out of the CPU-centric hardware model into more of a connectivity-centric model. We can talk more about that later. >> Yeah, great. And thank you, David, and Keith Townsend I really interested in your perspectives on this. I mean, for years you worked in a data center surrounded by hardware. Now that we have the software defined data center, please chime in here. >> Well, you know, I'm going to dig deeper into that software-defined data center nature of what's happening with hardware. Hardware is meeting software infrastructure as code is a thing. What does that code look like? We're still trying to figure out but servicing up these capabilities that the previous analysts have brought up, how do I ensure that I can get the level of services needed for the applications that I need? Whether they're legacy, traditional data center, workloads, AI ML, workloads, workloads at the edge. How do I codify that and consume that as a service? And hardware vendors are figuring this out. HPE, the big push into GreenLake as a service. Dale now with Apex taking what we need, these bare bone components, moving it forward with DDR five, six CXL, et cetera, and surfacing that as cold or as services. This is a very tough problem. As we transition from consuming a hardware-based configuration to this infrastructure as cold paradigm shift. >> Yeah, programmable infrastructure, really attacking that sort of labor discussion that we were having earlier, okay. Last but not least Marc Staimer, please. >> Thanks, Dave. My peers raised really good points. I agree with most of them, but I'm going to disagree with the title of this session, which is, does hardware matter? It absolutely matters. You can't run software on the air. You can't run it in an ephemeral cloud, although there's the technical cloud and that's a different issue. The cloud is kind of changed everything. And from a market perspective in the 40 plus years I've been in this business, I've seen this perception that hardware has to go down in price every year. And part of that was driven by Moore's law. And we're coming to, let's say a lag or an end, depending on who you talk to Moore's law. So we're not doubling our transistors every 18 to 24 months in a chip and as a result of that, there's been a higher emphasis on software. From a market perception, there's no penalty. They don't put the same pressure on software from the market to reduce the cost every year that they do on hardware, which kind of bass ackwards when you think about it. Hardware costs are fixed. Software costs tend to be very low. It's kind of a weird thing that we do in the market. And what's changing is we're now starting to treat hardware like software from an OPEX versus CapEx perspective. So yes, hardware matters. And we'll talk about that more in length. >> You know, I want to follow up on that. And I wonder if you guys have a thought on this, Bob O'Donnell, you and I have talked about this a little bit. Marc, you just pointed out that Moore's laws could have waning. Pat Gelsinger recently at their investor meeting said that he promised that Moore's law is alive and well. And the point I made in breaking analysis was okay, great. You know, Pat said, doubling transistors every 18 to 24 months, let's say that Intel can do that. Even though we know it's waning somewhat. Look at the M1 Ultra from Apple (chuckles). In about 15 months increased transistor density on their package by 6X. So to your earlier point, Bob, we have this sort of these alternative processors that are really changing things. And to Dave Nicholson's point, there's a whole lot of supporting components as well. Do you have a comment on that, Bob? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Dave. And one thing to bear in mind as well, not only are we seeing a diversity of these different chip architectures and different types of components as a number of us have raised the other big point and I think it was Keith that mentioned it. CXL and interconnect on the chip itself is dramatically changing it. And a lot of the more interesting advances that are going to continue to drive Moore's law forward in terms of the way we think about performance, if perhaps not number of transistors per se, is the interconnects that become available. You're seeing the development of chiplets or tiles, people use different names, but the idea is you can have different components being put together eventually in sort of a Lego block style. And what that's also going to allow, not only is that going to give interesting performance possibilities 'cause of the faster interconnect. So you can share, have shared memory between things which for big workloads like AI, huge data sets can make a huge difference in terms of how you talk to memory over a network connection, for example, but not only that you're going to see more diversity in the types of solutions that can be built. So we're going to see even more choices in hardware from a silicon perspective because you'll be able to piece together different elements. And oh, by the way, the other benefit of that is we've reached a point in chip architectures where not everything benefits from being smaller. We've been so focused and so obsessed when it comes to Moore's law, to the size of each individual transistor and yes, for certain architecture types, CPUs and GPUs in particular, that's absolutely true, but we've already hit the point where things like RF for 5g and wifi and other wireless technologies and a whole bunch of other things actually don't get any better with a smaller transistor size. They actually get worse. So the beauty of these chiplet architectures is you could actually combine different chip manufacturing sizes. You know you hear about four nanometer and five nanometer along with 14 nanometer on a single chip, each one optimized for its specific application yet together, they can give you the best of all worlds. And so we're just at the very beginning of that era, which I think is going to drive a ton of innovation. Again, gets back to my comment about different types of devices located geographically different places at the edge, in the data center, you know, in a private cloud versus a public cloud. All of those things are going to be impacted and there'll be a lot more options because of this silicon diversity and this interconnect diversity that we're just starting to see. >> Yeah, David. David Nicholson's got a graphic on that. They're going to show later. Before we do that, I want to introduce some data. I actually want to ask Keith to comment on this before we, you know, go on. This next slide is some data from ETR that shows the percent of customers that cited difficulty procuring hardware. And you can see the red is they had significant issues and it's most pronounced in laptops and networking hardware on the far right-hand side, but virtually all categories, firewalls, peripheral servers, storage are having moderately difficult procurement issues. That's the sort of pinkish or significant challenges. So Keith, I mean, what are you seeing with your customers in the hardware supply chains and bottlenecks? And you know we're seeing it with automobiles and appliances but so it goes beyond IT. The semiconductor, you know, challenges. What's been the impact on the buyer community and society and do you have any sense as to when it will subside? >> You know, I was just asked this question yesterday and I'm feeling the pain. People question, kind of a side project within the CTO advisor, we built a hybrid infrastructure, traditional IT data center that we're walking with the traditional customer and modernizing that data center. So it was, you know, kind of a snapshot of time in 2016, 2017, 10 gigabit, ARISTA switches, some older Dell's 730 XD switches, you know, speeds and feeds. And we said we would modern that with the latest Intel stack and connected to the public cloud and then the pandemic hit and we are experiencing a lot of the same challenges. I thought we'd easily migrate from 10 gig networking to 25 gig networking path that customers are going on. The 10 gig network switches that I bought used are now double the price because you can't get legacy 10 gig network switches because all of the manufacturers are focusing on the more profitable 25 gig for capacity, even the 25 gig switches. And we're focused on networking right now. It's hard to procure. We're talking about nine to 12 months or more lead time. So we're seeing customers adjust by adopting cloud. But if you remember early on in the pandemic, Microsoft Azure kind of gated customers that didn't have a capacity agreement. So customers are keeping an eye on that. There's a desire to abstract away from the underlying vendor to be able to control or provision your IT services in a way that we do with VMware VP or some other virtualization technology where it doesn't matter who can get me the hardware, they can just get me the hardware because it's critically impacting projects and timelines. >> So that's a great setup Zeus for you with Keith mentioned the earlier the software-defined data center with software-defined networking and cloud. Do you see a day where networking hardware is monetized and it's all about the software, or are we there already? >> No, we're not there already. And I don't see that really happening any time in the near future. I do think it's changed though. And just to be clear, I mean, when you look at that data, this is saying customers have had problems procuring the equipment, right? And there's not a network vendor out there. I've talked to Norman Rice at Extreme, and I've talked to the folks at Cisco and ARISTA about this. They all said they could have had blowout quarters had they had the inventory to ship. So it's not like customers aren't buying this anymore. Right? I do think though, when it comes to networking network has certainly changed some because there's a lot more controls as I mentioned before that you can do in software. And I think the customers need to start thinking about the types of hardware they buy and you know, where they're going to use it and, you know, what its purpose is. Because I've talked to customers that have tried to run software and commodity hardware and where the performance requirements are very high and it's bogged down, right? It just doesn't have the horsepower to run it. And, you know, even when you do that, you have to start thinking of the components you use. The NICs you buy. And I've talked to customers that have simply just gone through the process replacing a NIC card and a commodity box and had some performance problems and, you know, things like that. So if agility is more important than performance, then by all means try running software on commodity hardware. I think that works in some cases. If performance though is more important, that's when you need that kind of turnkey hardware system. And I've actually seen more and more customers reverting back to that model. In fact, when you talk to even some startups I think today about when they come to market, they're delivering things more on appliances because that's what customers want. And so there's this kind of app pivot this pendulum of agility and performance. And if performance absolutely matters, that's when you do need to buy these kind of turnkey, prebuilt hardware systems. If agility matters more, that's when you can go more to software, but the underlying hardware still does matter. So I think, you know, will we ever have a day where you can just run it on whatever hardware? Maybe but I'll long be retired by that point. So I don't care. >> Well, you bring up a good point Zeus. And I remember the early days of cloud, the narrative was, oh, the cloud vendors. They don't use EMC storage, they just run on commodity storage. And then of course, low and behold, you know, they've trot out James Hamilton to talk about all the custom hardware that they were building. And you saw Google and Microsoft follow suit. >> Well, (indistinct) been falling for this forever. Right? And I mean, all the way back to the turn of the century, we were calling for the commodity of hardware. And it's never really happened because you can still drive. As long as you can drive innovation into it, customers will always lean towards the innovation cycles 'cause they get more features faster and things. And so the vendors have done a good job of keeping that cycle up but it'll be a long time before. >> Yeah, and that's why you see companies like Pure Storage. A storage company has 69% gross margins. All right. I want to go jump ahead. We're going to bring up the slide four. I want to go back to something that Bob O'Donnell was talking about, the sort of supporting act. The diversity of silicon and we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades. You know, we asked, you know, is Moore's law dead? We say it's moderating. Dave Nicholson. You want to talk about those supporting components. And you shared with us a slide that shift. You call it a shift from a processor-centric world to a connect-centric world. What do you mean by that? And let's bring up slide four and you can talk to that. >> Yeah, yeah. So first, I want to echo this sentiment that the question does hardware matter is sort of the answer is of course it matters. Maybe the real question should be, should you care about it? And the answer to that is it depends who you are. If you're an end user using an application on your mobile device, maybe you don't care how the architecture is put together. You just care that the service is delivered but as you back away from that and you get closer and closer to the source, someone needs to care about the hardware and it should matter. Why? Because essentially what hardware is doing is it's consuming electricity and dollars and the more efficiently you can configure hardware, the more bang you're going to get for your buck. So it's not only a quantitative question in terms of how much can you deliver? But it also ends up being a qualitative change as capabilities allow for things we couldn't do before, because we just didn't have the aggregate horsepower to do it. So this chart actually comes out of some performance tests that were done. So it happens to be Dell servers with Broadcom components. And the point here was to peel back, you know, peel off the top of the server and look at what's in that server, starting with, you know, the PCI interconnect. So PCIE gen three, gen four, moving forward. What are the effects on from an interconnect versus on performance application performance, translating into new orders per minute, processed per dollar, et cetera, et cetera? If you look at the advances in CPU architecture mapped against the advances in interconnect and storage subsystem performance, you can see that CPU architecture is sort of lagging behind in a way. And Bob mentioned this idea of tiling and all of the different ways to get around that. When we do performance testing, we can actually peg CPUs, just running the performance tests without any actual database environments working. So right now we're at this sort of imbalance point where you have to make sure you design things properly to get the most bang per kilowatt hour of power per dollar input. So the key thing here what this is highlighting is just as a very specific example, you take a card that's designed as a gen three PCIE device, and you plug it into a gen four slot. Now the card is the bottleneck. You plug a gen four card into a gen four slot. Now the gen four slot is the bottleneck. So we're constantly chasing these bottlenecks. Someone has to be focused on that from an architectural perspective, it's critically important. So there's no question that it matters. But of course, various people in this food chain won't care where it comes from. I guess a good analogy might be, where does our food come from? If I get a steak, it's a pink thing wrapped in plastic, right? Well, there are a lot of inputs that a lot of people have to care about to get that to me. Do I care about all of those things? No. Are they important? They're critically important. >> So, okay. So all I want to get to the, okay. So what does this all mean to customers? And so what I'm hearing from you is to balance a system it's becoming, you know, more complicated. And I kind of been waiting for this day for a long time, because as we all know the bottleneck was always the spinning disc, the last mechanical. So people who wrote software knew that when they were doing it right, the disc had to go and do stuff. And so they were doing other things in the software. And now with all these new interconnects and flash and things like you could do atomic rights. And so that opens up new software possibilities and combine that with alternative processes. But what's the so what on this to the customer and the application impact? Can anybody address that? >> Yeah, let me address that for a moment. I want to leverage some of the things that Bob said, Keith said, Zeus said, and David said, yeah. So I'm a bit of a contrarian in some of this. For example, on the chip side. As the chips get smaller, 14 nanometer, 10 nanometer, five nanometer, soon three nanometer, we talk about more cores, but the biggest problem on the chip is the interconnect from the chip 'cause the wires get smaller. People don't realize in 2004 the latency on those wires in the chips was 80 picoseconds. Today it's 1300 picoseconds. That's on the chip. This is why they're not getting faster. So we maybe getting a little bit slowing down in Moore's law. But even as we kind of conquer that you still have the interconnect problem and the interconnect problem goes beyond the chip. It goes within the system, composable architectures. It goes to the point where Keith made, ultimately you need a hybrid because what we're seeing, what I'm seeing and I'm talking to customers, the biggest issue they have is moving data. Whether it be in a chip, in a system, in a data center, between data centers, moving data is now the biggest gating item in performance. So if you want to move it from, let's say your transactional database to your machine learning, it's the bottleneck, it's moving the data. And so when you look at it from a distributed environment, now you've got to move the compute to the data. The only way to get around these bottlenecks today is to spend less time in trying to move the data and more time in taking the compute, the software, running on hardware closer to the data. Go ahead. >> So is this what you mean when Nicholson was talking about a shift from a processor centric world to a connectivity centric world? You're talking about moving the bits across all the different components, not having the processor you're saying is essentially becoming the bottleneck or the memory, I guess. >> Well, that's one of them and there's a lot of different bottlenecks, but it's the data movement itself. It's moving away from, wait, why do we need to move the data? Can we move the compute, the processing closer to the data? Because if we keep them separate and this has been a trend now where people are moving processing away from it. It's like the edge. I think it was Zeus or David. You were talking about the edge earlier. As you look at the edge, who defines the edge, right? Is the edge a closet or is it a sensor? If it's a sensor, how do you do AI at the edge? When you don't have enough power, you don't have enough computable. People were inventing chips to do that. To do all that at the edge, to do AI within the sensor, instead of moving the data to a data center or a cloud to do the processing. Because the lag in latency is always limited by speed of light. How fast can you move the electrons? And all this interconnecting, all the processing, and all the improvement we're seeing in the PCIE bus from three, to four, to five, to CXL, to a higher bandwidth on the network. And that's all great but none of that deals with the speed of light latency. And that's an-- Go ahead. >> You know Marc, no, I just want to just because what you're referring to could be looked at at a macro level, which I think is what you're describing. You can also look at it at a more micro level from a systems design perspective, right? I'm going to be the resident knuckle dragging hardware guy on the panel today. But it's exactly right. You moving compute closer to data includes concepts like peripheral cards that have built in intelligence, right? So again, in some of this testing that I'm referring to, we saw dramatic improvements when you basically took the horsepower instead of using the CPU horsepower for the like IO. Now you have essentially offload engines in the form of storage controllers, rate controllers, of course, for ethernet NICs, smart NICs. And so when you can have these sort of offload engines and we've gone through these waves over time. People think, well, wait a minute, raid controller and NVMe? You know, flash storage devices. Does that make sense? It turns out it does. Why? Because you're actually at a micro level doing exactly what you're referring to. You're bringing compute closer to the data. Now, closer to the data meaning closer to the data storage subsystem. It doesn't solve the macro issue that you're referring to but it is important. Again, going back to this idea of system design optimization, always chasing the bottleneck, plugging the holes. Someone needs to do that in this value chain in order to get the best value for every kilowatt hour of power and every dollar. >> Yeah. >> Well this whole drive performance has created some really interesting architectural designs, right? Like Nickelson, the rise of the DPU right? Brings more processing power into systems that already had a lot of processing power. There's also been some really interesting, you know, kind of innovation in the area of systems architecture too. If you look at the way Nvidia goes to market, their drive kit is a prebuilt piece of hardware, you know, optimized for self-driving cars, right? They partnered with Pure Storage and ARISTA to build that AI-ready infrastructure. I remember when I talked to Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure about when the three companies rolled that out. He said, "Look, if you're going to do AI, "you need good store. "You need fast storage, fast processor and fast network." And so for customers to be able to put that together themselves was very, very difficult. There's a lot of software that needs tuning as well. So the three companies partner together to create a fully integrated turnkey hardware system with a bunch of optimized software that runs on it. And so in that case, in some ways the hardware was leading the software innovation. And so, the variety of different architectures we have today around hardware has really exploded. And I think it, part of the what Bob brought up at the beginning about the different chip design. >> Yeah, Bob talked about that earlier. Bob, I mean, most AI today is modeling, you know, and a lot of that's done in the cloud and it looks from my standpoint anyway that the future is going to be a lot of AI inferencing at the edge. And that's a radically different architecture, Bob, isn't it? >> It is, it's a completely different architecture. And just to follow up on a couple points, excellent conversation guys. Dave talked about system architecture and really this that's what this boils down to, right? But it's looking at architecture at every level. I was talking about the individual different components the new interconnect methods. There's this new thing called UCIE universal connection. I forget what it stands answer for, but it's a mechanism for doing chiplet architectures, but then again, you have to take it up to the system level, 'cause it's all fine and good. If you have this SOC that's tuned and optimized, but it has to talk to the rest of the system. And that's where you see other issues. And you've seen things like CXL and other interconnect standards, you know, and nobody likes to talk about interconnect 'cause it's really wonky and really technical and not that sexy, but at the end of the day it's incredibly important exactly. To the other points that were being raised like mark raised, for example, about getting that compute closer to where the data is and that's where again, a diversity of chip architectures help and exactly to your last comment there Dave, putting that ability in an edge device is really at the cutting edge of what we're seeing on a semiconductor design and the ability to, for example, maybe it's an FPGA, maybe it's a dedicated AI chip. It's another kind of chip architecture that's being created to do that inferencing on the edge. Because again, it's that the cost and the challenges of moving lots of data, whether it be from say a smartphone to a cloud-based application or whether it be from a private network to a cloud or any other kinds of permutations we can think of really matters. And the other thing is we're tackling bigger problems. So architecturally, not even just architecturally within a system, but when we think about DPUs and the sort of the east west data center movement conversation that we hear Nvidia and others talk about, it's about combining multiple sets of these systems to function together more efficiently again with even bigger sets of data. So really is about tackling where the processing is needed, having the interconnect and the ability to get where the data you need to the right place at the right time. And because those needs are diversifying, we're just going to continue to see an explosion of different choices and options, which is going to make hardware even more essential I would argue than it is today. And so I think what we're going to see not only does hardware matter, it's going to matter even more in the future than it does now. >> Great, yeah. Great discussion, guys. I want to bring Keith back into the conversation here. Keith, if your main expertise in tech is provisioning LUNs, you probably you want to look for another job. So maybe clearly hardware matters, but with software defined everything, do people with hardware expertise matter outside of for instance, component manufacturers or cloud companies? I mean, VMware certainly changed the dynamic in servers. Dell just spun off its most profitable asset and VMware. So it obviously thinks hardware can stand alone. How does an enterprise architect view the shift to software defined hyperscale cloud and how do you see the shifting demand for skills in enterprise IT? >> So I love the question and I'll take a different view of it. If you're a data analyst and your primary value add is that you do ETL transformation, talk to a CDO, a chief data officer over midsize bank a little bit ago. He said 80% of his data scientists' time is done on ETL. Super not value ad. He wants his data scientists to do data science work. Chances are if your only value is that you do LUN provisioning, then you probably don't have a job now. The technologies have gotten much more intelligent. As infrastructure pros, we want to give infrastructure pros the opportunities to shine and I think the software defined nature and the automation that we're seeing vendors undertake, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo take your pick that Pure Storage, NetApp that are doing the automation and the ML needed so that these practitioners don't spend 80% of their time doing LUN provisioning and focusing on their true expertise, which is ensuring that data is stored. Data is retrievable, data's protected, et cetera. I think the shift is to focus on that part of the job that you're ensuring no matter where the data's at, because as my data is spread across the enterprise hybrid different types, you know, Dave, you talk about the super cloud a lot. If my data is in the super cloud, protecting that data and securing that data becomes much more complicated when than when it was me just procuring or provisioning LUNs. So when you say, where should the shift be, or look be, you know, focusing on the real value, which is making sure that customers can access data, can recover data, can get data at performance levels that they need within the price point. They need to get at those datasets and where they need it. We talked a lot about where they need out. One last point about this interconnecting. I have this vision and I think we all do of composable infrastructure. This idea that scaled out does not solve every problem. The cloud can give me infinite scale out. Sometimes I just need a single OS with 64 terabytes of RAM and 204 GPUs or GPU instances that single OS does not exist today. And the opportunity is to create composable infrastructure so that we solve a lot of these problems that just simply don't scale out. >> You know, wow. So many interesting points there. I had just interviewed Zhamak Dehghani, who's the founder of Data Mesh last week. And she made a really interesting point. She said, "Think about, we have separate stacks. "We have an application stack and we have "a data pipeline stack and the transaction systems, "the transaction database, we extract data from that," to your point, "We ETL it in, you know, it takes forever. "And then we have this separate sort of data stack." If we're going to inject more intelligence and data and AI into applications, those two stacks, her contention is they have to come together. And when you think about, you know, super cloud bringing compute to data, that was what Haduck was supposed to be. It ended up all sort of going into a central location, but it's almost a rhetorical question. I mean, it seems that that necessitates new thinking around hardware architectures as it kind of everything's the edge. And the other point is to your point, Keith, it's really hard to secure that. So when you can think about offloads, right, you've heard the stats, you know, Nvidia talks about it. Broadcom talks about it that, you know, that 30%, 25 to 30% of the CPU cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offloads, or networking or security. It seems like maybe Zeus you have a comment on this. It seems like new architectures need to come other to support, you know, all of that stuff that Keith and I just dispute. >> Yeah, and by the way, I do want to Keith, the question you just asked. Keith, it's the point I made at the beginning too about engineers do need to be more software-centric, right? They do need to have better software skills. In fact, I remember talking to Cisco about this last year when they surveyed their engineer base, only about a third of 'em had ever made an API call, which you know that that kind of shows this big skillset change, you know, that has to come. But on the point of architectures, I think the big change here is edge because it brings in distributed compute models. Historically, when you think about compute, even with multi-cloud, we never really had multi-cloud. We'd use multiple centralized clouds, but compute was always centralized, right? It was in a branch office, in a data center, in a cloud. With edge what we creates is the rise of distributed computing where we'll have an application that actually accesses different resources and at different edge locations. And I think Marc, you were talking about this, like the edge could be in your IoT device. It could be your campus edge. It could be cellular edge, it could be your car, right? And so we need to start thinkin' about how our applications interact with all those different parts of that edge ecosystem, you know, to create a single experience. The consumer apps, a lot of consumer apps largely works that way. If you think of like app like Uber, right? It pulls in information from all kinds of different edge application, edge services. And, you know, it creates pretty cool experience. We're just starting to get to that point in the business world now. There's a lot of security implications and things like that, but I do think it drives more architectural decisions to be made about how I deploy what data where and where I do my processing, where I do my AI and things like that. It actually makes the world more complicated. In some ways we can do so much more with it, but I think it does drive us more towards turnkey systems, at least initially in order to, you know, ensure performance and security. >> Right. Marc, I wanted to go to you. You had indicated to me that you wanted to chat about this a little bit. You've written quite a bit about the integration of hardware and software. You know, we've watched Oracle's move from, you know, buying Sun and then basically using that in a highly differentiated approach. Engineered systems. What's your take on all that? I know you also have some thoughts on the shift from CapEx to OPEX chime in on that. >> Sure. When you look at it, there are advantages to having one vendor who has the software and hardware. They can synergistically make them work together that you can't do in a commodity basis. If you own the software and somebody else has the hardware, I'll give you an example would be Oracle. As you talked about with their exit data platform, they literally are leveraging microcode in the Intel chips. And now in AMD chips and all the way down to Optane, they make basically AMD database servers work with Optane memory PMM in their storage systems, not MVME, SSD PMM. I'm talking about the cards itself. So there are advantages you can take advantage of if you own the stack, as you were putting out earlier, Dave, of both the software and the hardware. Okay, that's great. But on the other side of that, that tends to give you better performance, but it tends to cost a little more. On the commodity side it costs less but you get less performance. What Zeus had said earlier, it depends where you're running your application. How much performance do you need? What kind of performance do you need? One of the things about moving to the edge and I'll get to the OPEX CapEx in a second. One of the issues about moving to the edge is what kind of processing do you need? If you're running in a CCTV camera on top of a traffic light, how much power do you have? How much cooling do you have that you can run this? And more importantly, do you have to take the data you're getting and move it somewhere else and get processed and the information is sent back? I mean, there are companies out there like Brain Chip that have developed AI chips that can run on the sensor without a CPU. Without any additional memory. So, I mean, there's innovation going on to deal with this question of data movement. There's companies out there like Tachyon that are combining GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs in a single chip. Think of it as super composable architecture. They're looking at being able to do more in less. On the OPEX and CapEx issue. >> Hold that thought, hold that thought on the OPEX CapEx, 'cause we're running out of time and maybe you can wrap on that. I just wanted to pick up on something you said about the integrated hardware software. I mean, other than the fact that, you know, Michael Dell unlocked whatever $40 billion for himself and Silverlake, I was always a fan of a spin in with VMware basically become the Oracle of hardware. Now I know it would've been a nightmare for the ecosystem and culturally, they probably would've had a VMware brain drain, but what does anybody have any thoughts on that as a sort of a thought exercise? I was always a fan of that on paper. >> I got to eat a little crow. I did not like the Dale VMware acquisition for the industry in general. And I think it hurt the industry in general, HPE, Cisco walked away a little bit from that VMware relationship. But when I talked to customers, they loved it. You know, I got to be honest. They absolutely loved the integration. The VxRail, VxRack solution exploded. Nutanix became kind of a afterthought when it came to competing. So that spin in, when we talk about the ability to innovate and the ability to create solutions that you just simply can't create because you don't have the full stack. Dell was well positioned to do that with a potential span in of VMware. >> Yeah, we're going to be-- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, in fact, I think you're right, Keith, it was terrible for the industry. Great for Dell. And I remember talking to Chad Sakac when he was running, you know, VCE, which became Rack and Rail, their ability to stay in lockstep with what VMware was doing. What was the number one workload running on hyperconverged forever? It was VMware. So their ability to remain in lockstep with VMware gave them a huge competitive advantage. And Dell came out of nowhere in, you know, the hyper-converged market and just started taking share because of that relationship. So, you know, this sort I guess it's, you know, from a Dell perspective I thought it gave them a pretty big advantage that they didn't really exploit across their other properties, right? Networking and service and things like they could have given the dominance that VMware had. From an industry perspective though, I do think it's better to have them be coupled. So. >> I agree. I mean, they could. I think they could have dominated in super cloud and maybe they would become the next Oracle where everybody hates 'em, but they kick ass. But guys. We got to wrap up here. And so what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to go and reverse the order this time, you know, big takeaways from this conversation today, which guys by the way, I can't thank you enough phenomenal insights, but big takeaways, any final thoughts, any research that you're working on that you want highlight or you know, what you look for in the future? Try to keep it brief. We'll go in reverse order. Maybe Marc, you could start us off please. >> Sure, on the research front, I'm working on a total cost of ownership of an integrated database analytics machine learning versus separate services. On the other aspect that I would wanted to chat about real quickly, OPEX versus CapEx, the cloud changed the market perception of hardware in the sense that you can use hardware or buy hardware like you do software. As you use it, pay for what you use in arrears. The good thing about that is you're only paying for what you use, period. You're not for what you don't use. I mean, it's compute time, everything else. The bad side about that is you have no predictability in your bill. It's elastic, but every user I've talked to says every month it's different. And from a budgeting perspective, it's very hard to set up your budget year to year and it's causing a lot of nightmares. So it's just something to be aware of. From a CapEx perspective, you have no more CapEx if you're using that kind of base system but you lose a certain amount of control as well. So ultimately that's some of the issues. But my biggest point, my biggest takeaway from this is the biggest issue right now that everybody I talk to in some shape or form it comes down to data movement whether it be ETLs that you talked about Keith or other aspects moving it between hybrid locations, moving it within a system, moving it within a chip. All those are key issues. >> Great, thank you. Okay, CTO advisor, give us your final thoughts. >> All right. Really, really great commentary. Again, I'm going to point back to us taking the walk that our customers are taking, which is trying to do this conversion of all primary data center to a hybrid of which I have this hard earned philosophy that enterprise IT is additive. When we add a service, we rarely subtract a service. So the landscape and service area what we support has to grow. So our research focuses on taking that walk. We are taking a monolithic application, decomposing that to containers, and putting that in a public cloud, and connecting that back private data center and telling that story and walking that walk with our customers. This has been a super enlightening panel. >> Yeah, thank you. Real, real different world coming. David Nicholson, please. >> You know, it really hearkens back to the beginning of the conversation. You talked about momentum in the direction of cloud. I'm sort of spending my time under the hood, getting grease under my fingernails, focusing on where still the lions share of spend will be in coming years, which is OnPrem. And then of course, obviously data center infrastructure for cloud but really diving under the covers and helping folks understand the ramifications of movement between generations of CPU architecture. I know we all know Sapphire Rapids pushed into the future. When's the next Intel release coming? Who knows? We think, you know, in 2023. There have been a lot of people standing by from a practitioner's standpoint asking, well, what do I do between now and then? Does it make sense to upgrade bits and pieces of hardware or go from a last generation to a current generation when we know the next generation is coming? And so I've been very, very focused on looking at how these connectivity components like rate controllers and NICs. I know it's not as sexy as talking about cloud but just how these opponents completely change the game and actually can justify movement from say a 14th-generation architecture to a 15th-generation architecture today, even though gen 16 is coming, let's say 12 months from now. So that's where I am. Keep my phone number in the Rolodex. I literally reference Rolodex intentionally because like I said, I'm in there under the hood and it's not as sexy. But yeah, so that's what I'm focused on Dave. >> Well, you know, to paraphrase it, maybe derivative paraphrase of, you know, Larry Ellison's rant on what is cloud? It's operating systems and databases, et cetera. Rate controllers and NICs live inside of clouds. All right. You know, one of the reasons I love working with you guys is 'cause have such a wide observation space and Zeus Kerravala you, of all people, you know you have your fingers in a lot of pies. So give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm not a propeller heady as my chip counterparts here. (all laugh) So, you know, I look at the world a little differently and a lot of my research I'm doing now is the impact that distributed computing has on customer employee experiences, right? You talk to every business and how the experiences they deliver to their customers is really differentiating how they go to market. And so they're looking at these different ways of feeding up data and analytics and things like that in different places. And I think this is going to have a really profound impact on enterprise IT architecture. We're putting more data, more compute in more places all the way down to like little micro edges and retailers and things like that. And so we need the variety. Historically, if you think back to when I was in IT you know, pre-Y2K, we didn't have a lot of choice in things, right? We had a server that was rack mount or standup, right? And there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, differences in choice. But today we can deploy, you know, these really high-performance compute systems on little blades inside servers or inside, you know, autonomous vehicles and things. I think the world from here gets... You know, just the choice of what we have and the way hardware and software works together is really going to, I think, change the world the way we do things. We're already seeing that, like I said, in the consumer world, right? There's so many things you can do from, you know, smart home perspective, you know, natural language processing, stuff like that. And it's starting to hit businesses now. So just wait and watch the next five years. >> Yeah, totally. The computing power at the edge is just going to be mind blowing. >> It's unbelievable what you can do at the edge. >> Yeah, yeah. Hey Z, I just want to say that we know you're not a propeller head and I for one would like to thank you for having your master's thesis hanging on the wall behind you 'cause we know that you studied basket weaving. >> I was actually a physics math major, so. >> Good man. Another math major. All right, Bob O'Donnell, you're going to bring us home. I mean, we've seen the importance of semiconductors and silicon in our everyday lives, but your last thoughts please. >> Sure and just to clarify, by the way I was a great books major and this was actually for my final paper. And so I was like philosophy and all that kind of stuff and literature but I still somehow got into tech. Look, it's been a great conversation and I want to pick up a little bit on a comment Zeus made, which is this it's the combination of the hardware and the software and coming together and the manner with which that needs to happen, I think is critically important. And the other thing is because of the diversity of the chip architectures and all those different pieces and elements, it's going to be how software tools evolve to adapt to that new world. So I look at things like what Intel's trying to do with oneAPI. You know, what Nvidia has done with CUDA. What other platform companies are trying to create tools that allow them to leverage the hardware, but also embrace the variety of hardware that is there. And so as those software development environments and software development tools evolve to take advantage of these new capabilities, that's going to open up a lot of interesting opportunities that can leverage all these new chip architectures. That can leverage all these new interconnects. That can leverage all these new system architectures and figure out ways to make that all happen, I think is going to be critically important. And then finally, I'll mention the research I'm actually currently working on is on private 5g and how companies are thinking about deploying private 5g and the potential for edge applications for that. So I'm doing a survey of several hundred us companies as we speak and really looking forward to getting that done in the next couple of weeks. >> Yeah, look forward to that. Guys, again, thank you so much. Outstanding conversation. Anybody going to be at Dell tech world in a couple of weeks? Bob's going to be there. Dave Nicholson. Well drinks on me and guys I really can't thank you enough for the insights and your participation today. Really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching this special power panel episode of theCube Insights powered by ETR. Remember we publish each week on Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com. All these episodes they're available as podcasts. DM me or any of these guys. I'm at DVellante. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai for all the data. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

[Music] does hardware still matter the attractiveness of software-defined models and services that are running in the cloud really make you wonder don't they but the reality is that software has to run on something and that something is hardware and history in the it business shows that the hardware that you purchase today is going to be up against the price performance of new systems in short order and these new systems will be far superior from a price performance standpoint within a couple of years so when it's time to purchase a new system look at whether it's a laptop a mainframe or a server configuring a leading edge product is going to give you the longest useful life of that new system now when i say a system what makes up a system well there's a lot of underlying technology components of course you have the processor you got memories you got storage devices there's networking like network interface cards there's interconnects and the bus architecture like pcie gen4 or whatever these components are constantly in a leapfrog mode like clock speeds and more cores and faster memories and ssds versus spinning disks and faster network cards the whole gamut so you see a constant advancement of the system components it's like it's a perpetual and sometimes chaotic improvement of the piece parts now i say chaotic because balancing these different components such that you're not wasting resources and that you're ensuring consistent application performance is a critical aspect of architecting systems so it becomes a game of like whack-a-mole meaning you're going to find the bottlenecks and you got to stamp them out it's a constant chase for locating the constraints designing systems that address these constraints without breaking the bank and optimizing all these components in a harmonious way hello everyone this is dave vellante of the cube and while these issues may not capture all the headlines except for maybe tom's hardware blog they're part of an important topic that we want to explore more deeply and to do so we're going to go inside some new benchmarking tests with our good friend kim lenar who's principal performance architect at broadcom kim always great to see you thanks so much for coming back on the cube hi there dave good to see you too thanks for having me on you bet hey so last time we met we talked about the importance of designing these balance systems i talked about that in my open and how solid state threw everything out of whack because the system was designed around spinning disk and we talked about nvme and we're here today with some new data an independent performance lab prowess consulting conducted some initial tests i've seen their their white papers on this stuff it compared the current generation of dell servers with previous models to quantify the performance impact of these new technologies and so before we get into that kim tell us a little about your background and your performance chops sure sure so i started my career about 22 years ago back when the ultra 160 scuzzy was out and just could only do about 20 megabytes a second um but i felt my experience really studying that relationship between the file systems and the application the os and storage layers as well as the hardware interaction i was absolutely just amazed with how you know touching one really affects the other and you have to understand that in order to be a good performance architect so i've authored dozens of performance white papers and i've worked with thousands of customers over the years designing and optimizing and debugging storage and trying to build mathematical models like project that next generation product where we really need to land but honestly i've just been blessed to work with really brilliant um and some of the most talented minds in the industry yeah well that's why i love having you on you you can go go really deep and so like i said we've got these these new white papers uh new test results on these dell servers what's the role people might be wondering what's the role broadcom plays inside these systems well we've been working alongside dell for for decades trying to design some of the industry's best uh storage and it's been a team effort in fact i've been working with some of these people for for you know multiple decades i know their their birthdays and their travel plans and where they vacation so it's been a really great relationship between broadcom and dell over the years we've been with them through the sata to the sas to the ssd kind of revolution now we're working from all the way back at that series five to their latest series 11 products that support nvme so it's been it's been really great but it's not just about you know gluing together the latest host or the latest disk interface you know we work with them to try and understand and characterize their customers and our customers applications the way that they're deployed security features management optimizing the i o path and making sure that when a failure happens we can get those raid volumes back optimal so it's been a really really great um you know role between between broadcom and dell got it okay let's get into the tested framework let's keep it at high level and then we're going to get into some of the data but but what did prowess test what was the workload what can you tell us about you know what they were trying to measure well the first thing is you have to kind of have an objective so what we had done was um we had them benchmark on one of the previous dell poweredge our 740xd servers and then we had them compare that to the rs750 and not just one r 750 there was two different configurations of the rs750 so we get to see kind of you know what gen 3 to gen 4 looks like um and upgrading the processor so we kind of got from like a gold system to maybe a platinum system we've added more controllers we add more drives um and then we said you know let's go ahead and let's do some sql transactional benchmarking on it and i'd like to go into why we chose that but you know microsoft sql server is one of the most popular database management platforms in the world and you know there are two kinds ones at oltp which processes records and business transactions and then there's kind of a an oltp which does analytical analytical processing and does a lot of complex queries and you know together these two things they drive the business operations and help kind of improve productivity it's a real critical part for the decision makers in a uh you know for for all of our companies so before we get in share the actual test results what specifically did prowess measure what were some of the metrics that we're going to see here we focused on the transactional workloads so we did something called a tpcc like and let me be really clear we did not execute a tpcc benchmark but it was a tpcc like benchmark and tpcc is one of the most mature standardized industry database benchmarks in the world and what it does is it simulates a sales model of a wholesale supplier so we can all kind of agree that you know handling payments and orders and status and deliveries and things like that those are those are really critical parts to running a business and ultimately what this results in is something called a new order so somebody might go on they'll log on they'll say hey is this available let me pay you um and then once that transaction is done it's called a new to order so they come up with something called a tpmc which is the new order transactions per minute now the neat thing is it's not just a one-size-fits-all kind of benchmark so you get to scale that in the way you scale the database you scale the size and the capacity of the database by adding more warehouses in our case we actually decided to choose 1400 warehouses which is a pretty standardized size and then you can also test the concurrency so you could start from one thread which kind of simulates a user all the way up to however many threads you want we decided to settle on 100 threads now this is very different from the generic benchmarking we're actually doing real work we're not just doing random reads and random rights which those are great they're critical they tell us how well we're performing but this is more like a paced workload it really executes sql i o transactions uh and you know those in order operations um are very different you do a read and then a write and then another read and those have to be executed in order it's very different from just setting up a q depth and a workers and it also provides very realistic and objective measurements that exercises not just the storage but the entire server all right let's get into some of the results so the first graphic we're going to show you is that what you were just talking about new orders per minute how should we interpret uh this graphic kim well i mean it looks like we won the waccamo game didn't we so we started out with with the baseline here the r740xd and we measured the new order transactions per minute on that we then set up the r 750 in the very first rs 750 and we have the very all the details are laid out in the paper that you just referenced there um but we started out with a single raid controller with eight drives and we measured that we got a 7x increase and then in the second test we actually added another rig controller and another eight drives and then we we kind of upgraded the the processor a little bit we were able to even double that over the initial one so and you know how do we get there that's really the more important thing and you know the the critical part of this understanding and characterizing the workload so we have to know what kind of components to balance you know where are your bottlenecks at so typically an oltp online transaction processing is a mix of transactions that are generally two reads to every one and they're very random and the way this benchmark works is it randomly accesses different warehouses it executes these queries when it executes a read query it pulls that data into memory well once the data is into memory any kind of transactions are acted on it in memory so the actual database engine does in memory transactions then you have something called a transaction log that has to record all those modifications down to non-volatile media and that's based on something um you know just to make sure that you have um all the data in case somebody pulls the plug or something you know catastrophic happens you want to make sure that those are recorded um and then every once in a while um all those in-memory changes are written down to the disk in something called a checkpoint and then we can go ahead and clear that transaction log so there's a bunch of sequence of of different kinds of i o um that happen during the course of an oltp kind of transaction so your bottlenecks are found in the processor and the memory and the amount of memory you know the latency of your disks i mean it really the whole gamut everything could be a bottleneck within there so the trick is to figure out where your bottlenecks are and trying to release those so you can get the the best performance that you possibly can yeah the sequence of events that has to take place to do a right we often we take it for granted okay the the next uh set of data we're going to look at is like you said you're doing reads you're doing right we're going to we're going to bring up now the the data around log rights and and log reads so explain what we're looking at here so as i mentioned earlier the even though the transactions happen in memory um those recorded transactions get committed down to down to the disk but eventually they get committed onto disk what we do first is we do something called a log right it's a transaction log right and that way it allows the it allows the transaction to go ahead and process so the trick here is to have the lowest latency fast disks for that log and it's very critical for your consistency and also for rollbacks and something called asset transactions and operations the log reads are really important also for the recovery efforts so we try to manage our log performance um we want low latency we want very high iops for both reads and for rights but it's not just the logs there's also the database disks and what we see is initially during these benchmarks there's a bunch of reads that are going into the database data um and then ultimately after some period of time we see something called a checkpoint and we'll see this big flurry of rights come down so you have to be able to handle all those flurry of rights as they come down and they're committed down to the disk so some of our important design considerations here are is can our processor handle this workload do we have enough memory and then finally we have three storage considerations we have a database disk we have log disk and then of course there's a temp db as well so because we have the industry leading raid 5 performance we were able to use a raid 5 for the database and that's something that you know just years ago was like whoa oh don't ever use raid 5 on your database that is no longer true our raid 5 is is fast enough and has low enough latency to handle database and it also helps save money um and then for the raid 10 we use that for a log that's pretty standardized so the faster your processor the more cores you know when you double the disk um and we get more performance so yeah you know we just figured out where the bottlenecks were we cleared them out we were able to double that that's interesting go back in history a little bit when raid 5 was all the rage uh emc at the time now of course dell when they announced symmetrics they announced it with with raid 1 which was mirroring and they did that because it was heavily into mainframe and transaction processing and while there was you know additional overhead of you do you need two disk drives to do that the performance really outweighed that and so now we're seeing with the advent of new technologies that you you're solving that problem um i i guess the other thing of course is is rebuild times and we've kind of rethought that so the next set of data that we're going to look at is is is how long it takes to rebuild uh around the raid time so we'll bring that up now and you can kind of give us the the insights here well yeah so you can see that we've been able to reduce the rebuild times and you know how do we do that well i can tell you me and my fellow architects we have been spending the last uh probably the last two years focusing on trying to improve the rebuild so we you know it's not just rebuilding faster it's also how to eloquently handle all the host operations you can't just tell those sorry i'm busy doing rebuilds you've got to be able to handle that because business continuity is a very critical component of that so um so we do that through mirroring and preparity data layouts and so the rebuild times if you can if you can do a really good balance of making sure that you are supplying a sufficient host io that we actually very quickly in the background as soon as as we have a moment we start implementing those rebuilds um you know during those law periods and so making sure that we do aggressive rebuilds by while allowing those business operations to continue have always been a real critical part but we've been working on that a lot over the last couple of generations that said we always tell our customers always have a backup that's that's a critical part to uh to business continuity plans great i wonder if we can come back to the components inside the system how does what broadcom is supplying to dell in these servers contribute to these performance results specifically kim okay so specifically um we we provide the perk storage controller and so the dell r740xd actually has their series 10 h740p controller whereas the h the r750 has the generation 11 perc 11 h755n um so we own those um you know in terms of of trying to make sure that they are integrated properly into the system provided the highest possible performance um but not just the storage controller i want to make sure that everybody knows that we also have our broadcom net extreme e series these are gen 4 pcie 25 gig do ported ethernet controllers so in you know in a critical true deployment it is a really important part of the e-commerce uh business solution so we do own the storage um for these as well as the networking excellent okay so we kind of we went deep inside into the system but let's up level why does this matter to an organization what's the business impact of all this tech coming to fruition we you know as everybody always references there's a massive growth of data and data is required for success it doesn't matter if you're a fortune 500 company or you're just a small to medium business you know it that critical data needs protected and needs protected without the complexity or the overhead or the cost of such hyper-converged infrastructures or sand deployments so we're able to do this on bare metal um and it really helps with the tco so you know and the other thing is nvme right now is the fastest growing storage nvme is so fast um as well from a performance perspective as well so that that dell r 750 with the two perc 11 controllers in it it had over 51 terabytes of storage in a single server you know and that's pretty impressive but there's um so many different performance advantages that the rs 750 provides for sql servers as well so they've got you know the gen 3 intel xeon scalable processors we've got ddr4 3200 memory you know the faster memory is very critical for those in memory transactions as well we have gen 4 pcie it really does justify an upgrade and i can tell you dave that a little over a year ago i had you know i had one of these delos 750 servers sitting in my own house and i was testing it and i was just amazed at the performance i was doing different tpcc and tpch and tpce tests on it and i was telling dell wow this is really this is amazing this server is doing so so well so i was so excited could not wait to see it in print so thank you to the prowess team um for actually showing the world what these servers can do combined with the broadcom storage now speaking of the prowess team when you read the white papers um it really is focused on this small and medium-sized business market so people might be wondering well wait a minute why wouldn't folks just spin up this compute in the cloud why am i buying servers well that's a really good question you know that still you know the studies have shown that the majority of workloads are still on-prem um and also you know there's a challenge here with the skill sets there's a lack of developers for cloud and you know cloud architects so keeping these in prem where you actually own it it really does help keep costs down um and just the management of these r750s are fantastic and the support that dell provides as well great kim i love having you on and we'd like to have you back we're going to leave it there for now but thanks so much i really appreciate your time thanks dave so look this is really helpful in understanding that at the end of the day you still need microprocessors and memories and storage devices controllers and interconnects that we you know we just saw pat gelsinger at the state of the union address nudging the federal government to support semiconductor manufacturing and you know intel is going to potentially match tsm's 100 billion dollar capex commitment and that's going to be a tailwind for the surrounding components you know including semiconductor you know component core infrastructure designers like broadcom now this is a topic that we care about and and like i said kim we're going to have you back and we plan to continue our coverage under the hood in the future so thank you for watching this cube conversation this is dave vellante and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>Hello, everyone. My name is John Jane Shake. I work from Iran. Tous Andi. I am here this afternoon very gratefully with Anders Vulcan, who is VP of technology strategy for cloud bees, a Miranda's partner and a well known company in the space that we're going to be discussing. Anders is also a well known entity in this space, which is continuous integration and continuous delivery. Um, you've seen already today some sessions that focus on specific implementations of continuous integration and delivery, um, particularly around security. And, uh, we think this is a critically important topic for anyone in the cloud space, particularly in this increasingly complicated kubernetes space. To understand, um, Miranda's thanks, Uh, if I can recapitulate our own our own strategy and, uh, and language that with complexity on uncertainty consistently increasing with the depth of the technology stacks that we have to deal with consistently, um um elaborating themselves that navigating this requires, um first three implementation of automation to increase speed, which is what C and C d do. Um, and that this speed ba leveraged toe let us ship and iterate code faster. Since that's ultimately the business that all of us air in one way or another. I would like, I guess, toe open this conversation by asking Onders what does he think of that core strategy? >>You know, I think you know, hitting the security thing, right? Right off the bat. You know, security doesn't happen by accident. You know, security is not something that you know, Like a like a server in a restaurant. You know, Sprinkles a little bit of Parmesan cheese right before they serve you the the food. It's not something you Sprinkle on at the end. It's something that has to be baked in from the beginning, not just in the kitchen, but in the supply chain from from from the very beginning. So the you know it's a feature, and if you don't build it, if you're not going to get an outcome that you're not gonna be happy with and I think the you know it's increasingly it's obviously increasingly important and increasingly visible. You know, the you know, the kinds of security problems that we that we see these days can can be, you know, life altering, for for people that are subject to them and and can be, you know, life or death for a company that that's exposed to it. So it's it's it's very, very important. Thio pay attention to it and to work to achieve that as an explicit outcome of the software delivery process. And I think, you know, C i n c d as as process as tooling as culture plays a big part in that because ah, lot of it has to do with, you know, set things up, right? Um run them the same way over and over, you know, get the machine going. Turned the crane. Now, you wanna you wanna make improvements over over time. You know, it's not just, you know, set it and forget it. You know, we got that set up. We don't have to worry about it anymore, but it really is a question of, you know, get the human out of the loop a lot of the times because if if you're dealing with configuring complex systems, you wanna make sure that you get them set up configured, you know, documented Ideally, you know, as code, whether it's a domain specific language or or something like that. And then that's something that you contest against that you can verify against that you can that you can difficult. And then that becomes the basis for for your, you know, for yourself, for pipelines, for your automation around, you know, kind of the software factory floor. So I think automation is a key aspect of that because it, you know, it takes a lot of the drudgery out of it, for one thing, So now the humans have more time to spend on doing on the on the creative things on the things that we're good at a zoo. Humans and it also make sure that, you know, one of the things that computers are really good at is doing the same thing over and over and over and over. Eso that kind of puts that responsibility into the hands of the entity that that knows how to do that well, which is which is the machine eso I think it's, you know, it's a light. It's a deep, deep topic, obviously, but, you know, automation plays into it. Uh, you know, small batch sizes play into it, you know, being able to test very frequently whether that's testing in. You're kind of you're C I pipeline where you're sort of doing building mostly unit testing, maybe some integration testing, but also in layering in the mawr. Serious kinds of testing in terms of security scanning, penetration, testing, vulnerability, scanning. You know those sorts of things which, you know, maybe you do on every single see I Bill. But most people don't because those things tend toe take a little bit longer on. And you know you want your sea ice cycle to be as fast as possible because that's really in service of the developer who has committed code and wants toe kind of see the thumbs up from the system saying it. And, um, so most organizations most organizations are are are focusing on, you know, making sure that there's a follow on pipeline to follow on set of tests that happened after the C I passes successfully and and that's, you know, where a lot of the security scanning and those sorts of things happen. >>It's a It's an interesting problem. I mean, you mentioned, um, what almost sounds like a Lawrence Lessig Ian kind of idea that, you know, code is law in enterprises today, code particularly see, I code ends up being policy, but At the same time, there's, Ah, it seems to me there's a an alternative peril, which is, as you increase speed, particularly when you become more and more dependent on things like containers and layering technology to provide components and capabilities that you don't have to build yourself to your build pipeline, that there are new vulnerabilities, potentially that creep in and can creep in despite automation. Zor at least 1st. 1st order automation is attempts toe to prevent them from creeping in. You don't wanna you wanna freeze people on a six month old version of a key container image. But on the other hand, if the latest version has vulnerabilities, that could be a problem. >>Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's it's a it's a it's a double edged sword. It's two sides of the same coin. I think you know, when I talked to a lot of security people, um, you know, people to do it for a living is supposed to mean I just talk about it, um, that Z not completely true. But, um, the ah, lot of times the problem is old vulnerabilities. The thing that I think keeps a lot of people up at night isn't necessarily that the thing at the tip of the releases for particular, you know, well known open source, library or something like that. But that's gonna burn you all the vast majority of the time. And I want to say, like, 80 85% of the time. The vulnerability is that you that you get hosed by are ones that have been known about for years. And so I think the if I had to pick. So if you know, in that sort of two sides of that coin, if I had to pick, I would say Be aggressive in making sure that your third party dependencies are updated frequently and and continuously right, because that is the biggest, biggest cause of of of security vulnerabilities when it comes to third party code. Um, now you know the famous saying, You know, move fast and break things Well, there's certain things you don't want to break. You know you don't want to break a radiation machine that's going to deliver radio radiotherapy to someone because that will endanger their health. So So those sorts of systems, you know, naturally or subject a little bit more kind of caution and scrutiny and rigor and process those sorts of things. The micro service that I run that shows my little avatar when I log in, that one probably gets a little less group. You know, Andre rightfully so. So I think a lot of it has to do. And somebody once said in a I think it was, Ah, panel. I was on a PR say conference, which was, which was kind of a wise thing to say it was Don't spend a million dollars protecting a $5 assets. You know, you wanna be smart and you wanna you wanna figure out where your vulnerabilities they're going to come from and in my experience, and and you know, what I hear from a lot of the security professionals is pay attention to your supply chain. You're you want to make sure that you're up to date with the latest patches of, of all of your third party, you know, open source or close source. It doesn't really matter. I mean, if anything, you know, open source is is more open. Eso You could inspect things a little bit better than the close source, but with both kinds of streams of code that you consume and and use. You wanna make sure that you're you're more up to date as opposed to a less up to date? Um, that generally will be better. Now, can a new version of the library cause problems? You know, introduce bugs? You know, those sorts of things? Yes. That's why we have tests. That's what we have automated tests, regression, sweets, You know, those sorts of things. And so you wanna, you know, you wanna live in a in a world where you feel the confidence as a as a developer, that if I update this library from, you know, one debt owed at 3 to 1 debt owed at 10 to pick up a bunch of, you know, bug fixes and patches and those sorts of things. But that's not going to break some on demand in the test suites that that will run against that ought to cover that that sort of functionality. And I'd rather be in that world of Oh, yeah, we tried to update to that, but it But it broke the tests and then have to go spend time on that, then say, Oh, it broke the test. So let's not update. And then six months later, you do find out. Oh, geez. There was a problem in one that owed at three. And it was fixed in one. That about four. If only we had updated. Um, you know, you look at the, um you look at some of the highest profile security breaches that are out there that you sort of can trace toe third party libraries. It's almost always gonna be that it was out of date and hadn't been patched. That's so that's my you know, opinionated. Take on that. Sure. >>What are the parts of modern C I c D. As opposed to what one would encounter 56 years ago? Maybe if we can imagine that is being before the micro services and containers revolution really took off. >>You know, I think e think you're absolutely right that, you know, not the whole world is not doing. See, I Yeah, and certainly the whole world is not doing city yet. Um, you know, I think you know, as you say, we kind of live in a little bit of an ivory tower. You know, we live in an echo chamber in a little bit of a bubble Aziz vendors in this space. The truth is that I would say less than 50% of the software organizations out there do real. See, I do real CD. The number's probably less than that. Um, you know, I don't have anything to back that up other than just I talked to a lot of folks and work with, you know, with a lot of organizations and like, Yeah, that team does see I that team does Weekly builds You know, those sorts of things. It's it's really all over the place, Onda. Lot of times there's There's definitely, in my experience, a high correlation there with the amount of time that a team or a code base has been around, and the amount of sort of modern technologies and processes and and and so on that are that are brought to it on. And that sort of makes sense. I mean, if you if you're starting with the green field with a blank sheet of paper, you're gonna adopt, you know, the technologies and the processes and the cultures of today. A knot of 5, 10 15 15 years ago, Um but but most organizations air moving in that direction. Right? Andi, I think you know what? What? What? What's really changed in the last few years is the level of integration between the various tools between the various pieces and the amount of automation that you could bring to bear. I mean, I you know, I remember, you know, five or 10 years ago having all kinds of conversations with customers and prospects and and people of conferences and so on and they said, Oh, yeah, we'd like to automate our our software development life cycle, but, you know, we can't We have a manual thing here. We have a manual thing there. We do this kind of testing that we can automate it, and then we have this system, but it doesn't have any guy. So somebody has to sit and click on the screen. And, you know, and I used to say e used to say I don't accept No for an answer of can you automate this right? Everything. Anything can be automated. Even if you just get the little drinking bird. You know that just pokes the mouse. Everyone something. You can automate it, and I Actually, you know, I had one customer who was like, Okay, and we had a discussion and and and and they said, Well, we had this old Windows tool. We Its's an obscure tool. It's no longer updated, but it's it's it's used in a critical part of the life cycle and it can't be automated. And I said, Well, just install one of those Windows tools that allows you to peek and poke at the, you know, mass with my aunt I said so I don't accept your answer. And I said, Well, unfortunately, security won't allow us to install those tools, Eh? So I had to accept No, at that point, but But I think the big change were one of the biggest changes that's happened in the last few years is the systems now have all I'll have a p i s and they all talk to each other. So if you've gotta, you know, if you if you've got a scanning tool, if you've got a deployment tool, if you have a deployment, you know, infrastructure, you know, kubernetes based or, you know, kind of sitting in front of our around kubernetes thes things. I'll talk to each other and are all automated. So one of the things that's happened is we've taken out a lot of the weight states. A lot of the pauses, right? So if you you know, if you do something like a value stream mapping where you sit down and I'll date myself here and probably lose some of the audience with this analogy. But if you remember Schoolhouse Rock cartoons in in the late seventies, early eighties, there was one which was one of my favorites, and and the guy who did the music for this passed away last year, sadly, But, uh, the it was called How a bill Becomes a Law and they personified the bill. So the bill, you know, becomes a little person and, you know, first time passed by the house and then the Senate, and then the president either signs me or doesn't and or he vetoes, and it really sort of did this and what I always talk about with respect to sort of value stream mapping and talking about your processes, put a GoPro camera on your source codes head, and then follow that source code all the way through to your customer understand all of the stuff that happens to it, including nothing, right? Because a lot of times in that elapsed time, nothing keeps happening, right. If we build software the way we were sorry. If we build cars the way we build software, we would install the radio in a car, and then we would park it in a corner of the factory for three weeks. And then we might remember to test the radio before we ship the car out to the customer. Right, Because that's how a lot of us still develop some for. And I think one thing that's changed in the in the last few years is that we don't have these kind of, Well, we did the bill. So now we're waiting for somebody to create an environment and rack up some hardware and install an operating system and install. You know, this that and the other. You know, that that went from manual to we use Scheffer puppet to do it, which then went to we use containers to do it, which then went to we use containers and kubernetes to do it. So whole swaths of elapsed time in our software development life cycles basically went to nothing, right and went to the point where we can weaken, weaken, configure them way to the left and and and follow them all the way through. And that the artifact that we're delivering isn't necessarily and execute herbal. It could be a container, right? So now that starts to get interesting for us in terms of being able to test against that container scan against that container, def. Against that container, Um, you know, and it, you know, it does bring complexity to in terms of now you've got a layered file system in there. Well, what all is in there, you know, And so there's tools for scanning those kinds of things, But But I think that one of the biggest things that's happened is a lot of the natural pause. Points are no longer natural. Pause points their unnatural pause points, and they're now just delays in yourself for delivery. And so what? What a lot of organizations are working on is kind of getting to the point where those sorts of things get get automated and connected, and that's now possible. And it wasn't 55 or 10 years ago. >>So It sounds like a great deal of the speed benefit, which has been quantified many different ways. But is once you get one of these systems working, as we've all experienced enormous, um, is actually done by collapsing out what would have been unused time in a prior process or non paralyze herbal stuff has been made parallel. >>I remember doing a, uh, spent some time with a customer, and they did a value stream mapping, and they they found out at the end that of the 30 days of elapsed time they were spending three days on task. Everything else was waiting, waiting for a build waiting foran install, waiting for an environment, waiting for an approval, having meetings, you know, those sorts of things. And I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, you know, 90% of the elapsed time is doing nothing. And I was talking to someone Gene Kim, actually, and I said, Oh my God, it was terrible that these you know, these people are screwed and he says, 0 90%. That's actually pretty good, you know? So So I think you know, if you if you think today, you know, if you If you if you look at the teams that are doing just really pure continuous delivery, you know, write some code committed, gets picked up by the sea ice system and passes through CIA goes through whatever coast, see I processing, you need to do security scanning and so on. It gets staged and it gets pushed into production. That stuff can happen in minutes, right? That's new. That's different. Now, if you do that without having the right automated gates in place around security and and and and those sorts of things you know, then you're living a little bit dangerously, although I would argue not necessarily any more dangerously, than just letting that insecure coat sit around for a week before your shipment, right? It's not like that problem is going to fix itself if you just let it sit there, Um, but But, you know, you definitely operated at a higher velocity. Now that's a lot of the benefit that you're tryingto trying to get out of it, right? You can get stuff out to the market faster, or if you take a little bit more time, you get more out to the market in, in in the same amount of time you could turn around and fix problems faster. Um, if you have a vulnerability, you can get it fixed and pushed out much more quickly. If you have a competitive threat that you need to address, you can you know, you could move that that much faster if you have a critical bug. You know, I mean, all security issues or bugs, sort of by definition. But, you know, if you have a functionality bug, you can you can get that pushed out faster. Eso So I think kind of all factors of the business benefit from from this increase in speed. And I think developers due to because anybody you know, any human that has a context switch and step away from something for for for, you know, duration of time longer than a few minutes, you know, you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna have to load back up again. And so that's productivity loss. Now, that's a soft cost. But man, is it Is it expensive and is a painful So you see a lot of benefit there. Think >>if you have, you know, an organization that is just starting this journey What would you ask that organization to consider in orderto sort of move them down this path? >>It's by far the most frequent and almost always the first question I get at the end of the talk or or a presentation or something like that is where do we start? How do I know where to start? And and And there's a couple of answers to that. What one is Don't boil the ocean, right? Don't try to fix everything all at once. You know that because that's not agile, right? The be agile about your transformation Here, you know, pick, pick a set of problems that you have and and make a, you know, basically make a burn down list and and do them in order. So find find a pain point that you have right and, you know, just go address that and and try to make it small and actionable and especially early on when you're trying to affect change. And you're tryingto convinced teams that this is the way to go and you may have some naysayers, or you may have people who are skeptical or have been through these processes before that have been you know failures released, not the successes that they that they were supposed to be. You know, it's important to have some wind. So what I always say is look, you know, if you have a pebble in your shoe, you've got a pain point. You know how to address that. You know, you're not gonna address that by changing out your wardrobe or or by buying a new pair of shoes. You know, you're gonna address that by taking your shoe off, shaking it until the pebble falls out there putting the shoe back on. So look for those kinds of use cases, right? So if you're engineers are complaining that whenever I check in the build is broken and we're not doing see, I well, then let's look at doing C I Let's do see eye, right? If you're not doing that. And for most organizations, you know, setting up C I is a very manageable, very doable thing. There's lots of open source tooling out there. There's lots of commercial tooling out there. Thio do that to do it for small teams to do it for large teams and and everything in between. Um, if the problem is Gosh, Every time we push a change, we break something. You know where every time something works in staging it doesn't work in production. Then you gotta look at Well, how are these systems being configured? If you're If you're configuring them manually, stop automate the configuration of them. Um, you know, if you're if you're fixing system manually, don't you know, as a friend of mine says, don't fix, Repave? Um, you know, you don't wanna, you know, there's a story of, you know how how Google operates in their data centers. You know, they don't they don't go look for a broken disk drive and swap it out. You know, when it breaks, they just have a team of people that, like once a month or something, I don't know what the interval is. They just walked through the data center and they pull out all the dead stuff and they throw it out, and what they did was they assume that if the scale that they operate, things are always going to break physical things are always going to break. You have to build a software to assume that breakage and any system that assumes that we're going to step in when a disk drive is broken and fix it so that we can get back to running just isn't gonna work at scale. There's a similarity. There's sort of ah, parallel to that in in software, which is you know, any time you have these kinds of complex systems, you have to assume that they're gonna break and you have to put the things in place to catch those things. The automated testing, whether it's, you know, whether you have 10,000 tests that you that you've written already or whether you have no tests and you just need to go right, your first test that that journey, you've got to start somewhere. But my answer thio their questions generally always just start small, pick a very specific problem. Build a plan around it, you know, build a burned down list of things that you wanna address and just start working your way down that the same way that you would for any, you know, kind of agile project, your transformation of your own processes of your own internal systems. You should use agile processes for those as well, because if you if you go off for six months and and build something. By the time you come back, it's gonna be relevant. Probably thio the problems that you were facing six months ago. >>A Then let's consider the situation of, ah, company that's using C I and maybe sea ice and C d together. Um, and they want to reach what you might call the next level. Um, they've seen obvious benefits they're interested in, you know, in increasing their investment in, you know and cycles devoted to this technology. You don't have to sell them anymore, but they're looking for a next direction. What would you say that direction should be? I >>think oftentimes what organizations start to do is they start to look at feedback loops. So on DAT starts to go into the area of sort of metrics and analytics and those sorts of things. You know what we're we're always concerned about? You know, we're always affected by things like meantime to recovery. Meantime, the detection, what are our cycle times from, you know, ideation, toe codecommit. What's the cycle? Time from codecommit the production, those sorts of things. And you know you can't change what you don't measure eso so a lot of times the next step after kind of getting the rudimentary zoo of C I Orsini or some combination of both in places start to measure. Stop you, Um, and and then but But there. I think you know, you gotta be smart about it, because what you don't want to do is kind of just pull all the metrics out that exists. Barf them up on the dashboard. And the giant television screens say boom metrics, right. You know, Mike, drop go home. That's the wrong way to do it. You want to use metrics very specifically to achieve outcomes. So if you have an outcome that you want to achieve and you can tie it to a metric start looking at that metric and start working that problem once you saw that problem, you can take that metric. And you know, if that's the metric you're showing on the big you know, the big screen TV, you can pop that off and pick the next one and put it up there. I I always worry when you know a little different when you're in a knock or something like that. When when you're looking at the network stuff and so on. But I'm always leery of when I walk into to a software development organization. You know, just a Brazilian different metrics, this whole place because they're not all relevant. They're not all relevant at the same time. Some of them you wanna look at often, some of them you just want to kind of set an alarm on and make sure that, you know, I mean, you don't go down in your basement every day to check that the sump pump is working. What you do is you put a little water detector in there and you have an alarm go off if the water level ever rises above a certain amount. Well, you want to do the same thing with metrics, right? Once you've got in the water out of your basement, you don't have to go down there and look at it all the time. You put the little detector in, and then you move on and you worry about something else. And so organizations as they start to get a little bit more sophisticated and start to look at the analytics, the metrics, um, start to say, Hey, look, if our if our cycle time from from, you know, commit to deploy is this much. And we want it to be this much. What happens during that time, And where can we take slices out of that? You know, without without affecting the outcomes in terms of quality and so on, or or if it's, you know, from from ideation, toe codecommit. You know what? What can we do there? Um, you start to do that. And and then as you get those sort of virtuous cycles of feedback loops happening, you know, you get better and better and better, but you wanna be careful with metrics, you know, you don't wanna, you know, like I said, you don't wanna barf a bunch of metrics up just to say, Look, we got metrics. Metrics are there to serve a particular outcome. And once you've achieved that outcome, and you know that you can continue to achieve that outcome, you turn it into an alarm or a trigger, and you put it out of sight. And you know that. You know, you don't need to have, like, a code coverage metric prominently displayed you you pick a code coverage number that you're happy with you work to achieve that. Once you achieve it, you just worry about not going below that threshold again. So you can take that graph off and just put a trigger on this as if we ever get below this, you know, raising alarm or fail a build or fail a pipeline or something like that and then start to focus on improving another man. Uh, or another outcome using another matter >>makes enormous sense. So I'm afraid we are getting to be out of time. I want to thank you very much on this for joining us today. This has been certainly informative for me, and I hope for the audience, um, you know, thank you very, very much for sharing your insulin.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80, but startup showcases MarTech is the focus. And this is all about the emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting, fast growing startups from the cloud AWS ecosystem to talk about the future and what's available now, where are the actions? I'm your host John fur. Today. We joined by Cub alumni, Jerry Chen partner at Greylock ventures. Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, >>John. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate you welcome there for season two. Uh, as a, as a guest star, >><laugh>, you know, Hey, you know, season two, it's not a one and done it's continued coverage. We, we got the episodic, uh, cube flicks model going >>Here. Well, you know, congratulations, the, the coverage on this ecosystem around AWS has been impressive, right? I think you and I have talked a long time about AWS and the ecosystem building. It just continues to grow. And so the coverage you did last season, all the events of this season is, is pretty amazing from the data security to now marketing. So it's, it's great to >>Watch. And 12 years now, the cube been running. I remember 2013, when we first met you in the cube, we just left VMware just getting into the venture business. And we were just riffing the next 80. No one really kind of knew how big it would be. Um, but we were kinda riffing on. We kind of had a sense now it's happening. So now you start to see every vertical kind of explode with the right digital transformation and disruption where you see new incumbents. I mean, new Newton brands get replaced the incumbent old guard. And now in MarTech, it's ripe for, for disruption because web two has gone on to web 2.5, 3, 4, 5, um, cookies are going away. You've got more governance and privacy challenges. There's a slew of kind of ad tech baggage, but yet lots of new data opportunities. Jerry, this is a huge, uh, thing. What's your take on this whole MarTech cloud scale, uh, >>Market? I, I think, I think to your point, John, that first the trends are correct and the bad and the good or good old days, the battle days MarTech is really about your webpage. And then email right there. There's, there's the emails, the only channel and the webpage was only real estate and technology to care about fast forward, you know, 10 years you have webpages, mobile apps, VR experiences, car experiences, your, your, your Alexa home experiences. Let's not even get to web three web 18, whatever it is. Plus you got text messages, WhatsApp, messenger, email, still great, et cetera. So I think what we've seen is both, um, explosion and data, uh, explosion of channel. So sources of data have increases and the fruits of the data where you can reach your customers from text, email, phone calls, etcetera have exploded too. So the previous generation created big company responses, Equa, you know, that exact target that got acquired by Oracle or, or, um, Salesforce, and then companies like, um, you know, MailChimp that got acquired as well, but into it, you're seeing a new generation companies for this new stack. So I, I think it's exciting. >>Yeah. And you mentioned all those things about the different channels and stuff, but the key point is now the generation shifts going on, not just technical generation, uh, and platform and tools, it's the people they're younger. They don't do email. They have, you know, proton mail accounts, zillion Gmail accounts, just to get the freebie. Um, they're like, they're, they'll do subscriptions, but not a lot. So the generational piece on the human side is huge. Okay. And then you got the standards, bodies thrown away, things like cookies. Sure. So all this is makes it for a complicated, messy situation. Um, so out of this has to come a billion dollar startup in my mind, >>I, I think multiple billion dollars, but I think you're right in the sense that how we want engage with the company branch, either consumer brands or business brands, no one wants to pick a phone anymore. Right? Everybody wants to either chat or DM people on Twitter. So number one, the, the way we engage is different, both, um, where both, how like chat or phone, but where like mobile device, but also when it's the moment when we need to talk to a company or brand be it at the store, um, when I'm shopping in real life or in my car or at the airport, like we want to reach the brands, the brands wanna reach us at the point of decision, the point of support, the point of contact. And then you, you layer upon that the, the playing field, John of privacy security, right? All these data silos in the cloud, the, the, the, the game has changed and become even more complicated with the startup. So the startups are gonna win. Will do, you know, the collect, all the data, make us secure in private, but then reach your customers when and where they want and how they want it. >>So I gotta ask you, because you had a great podcast just this week, published and snowflake had their event going on the data cloud, there's a new kind of SAS platform vibe going on. You're starting to see it play out. Uh, and one of the things I, I noticed on your podcast with the president of Hashi Corp, who was on people should listen to that podcast. It's on gray matter, which is the Greylocks podcast, uh, plug for you guys. He mentioned he mentions the open source dynamic, right? Sure. And, and I like what he, things, he said, he said, software business has changed forever. It's my words. Now he said infrastructure, but I'm saying software in general, more broader infrastructure and software as a category is all open source. One game over no debate. Right. You agree? >>I, I think you said infrastructure specifically starts at open source, but I would say all open source is one more or less because open source is in every bit of software. Right? And so from your operating system to your car, to your mobile phone, open source, not necessarily as a business model or, or, or whatever, we can talk about that. But open source as a way to build software distribute, software consume software has one, right? It is everywhere. So regardless how you make money on it, how you build software, an open source community ha has >>One. Okay. So let's just agree. That's cool. I agree with that. Let's take it to the next level. I'm a company starting a company to sell to big companies who pay. I gotta have a proprietary advantage. There's gotta be a way. And there is, I know you've talked about it, but I have my opinion. There is needs to be a way to be proprietary in a way that allows for that growth, whether it's integration, it's not gonna be on software license or maybe support or new open source model. But how does startups in the MarTech this area in general, when they disrupt or change the category, they gotta get value creation going. What's your take on, on building. >>You can still build proprietary software on top of open source, right? So there's many companies out there, um, you know, in a company called rock set, they've heavily open source technology like Rock's DB under the hood, but they're running a cloud database. That's proprietary snowflake. You talk about them today. You know, it's not open source technology company, but they use open source software. I'm sure in the hoods, but then there's open source companies, data break. So let's not confus the two, you can still build proprietary software. There's just components of open source, wherever we go. So number one is you can still build proprietary IP. Number two, you can get proprietary data sources, right? So I think increasingly you're seeing companies fight. I call this systems intelligence, right, by getting proprietary data, to train your algorithms, to train your recommendations, to train your applications, you can still collect data, um, that other competitors don't have. >>And then it can use the data differently, right? The system of intelligence. And then when you apply the system intelligence to the end user, you can create value, right? And ultimately, especially marketing tech, the highest level, what we call the system of engagement, right? If, if the chat bot the mobile UI, the phone, the voice app, etcetera, if you own the system of engagement, be a slack, or be it, the operating system for a phone, you can also win. So still multiple levels to play John in multiple ways to build proprietary advantage. Um, just gotta own system record. Yeah. System intelligence, system engagement. Easy, right? Yeah. >>Oh, so easy. Well, the good news is the cloud scale and the CapEx funded there. I mean, look at Amazon, they've got a ton of open storage. You mentioned snowflake, but they're getting a proprietary value. P so I need to ask you MarTech in particular, that means it's a data business, which you, you pointed out and we agree. MarTech will be about the data of the workflows. How do you get those workflows what's changing and how these companies are gonna be building? What's your take on it? Because it's gonna be one of those things where it might be the innovation on a source of data, or how you handle two parties, ex handling encrypted data sets. I don't know. Maybe it's a special encryption tool, so we don't know what it is. What's your what's, what's your outlook on this area? >>I, I, I think that last point just said is super interesting, super genius. It's integration or multiple data sources. So I think either one, if it's a data business, do you have proprietary data? Um, one number two with the data you do have proprietary, not how do you enrich the data and do you enrich the data with, uh, a public data set or a party data set? So this could be cookies. It could be done in Brad street or zoom info information. How do you enrich the data? Number three, do you have machine learning models or some other IP that once you collected the data, enriched the data, you know, what do you do with the data? And then number four is once you have, um, you know, that model of the data, the customer or the business, what do you deal with it? Do you email, do you do a tax? >>Do you do a campaign? Do you upsell? Do you change the price dynamically in our customers? Do you serve a new content on your website? So I think that workflow to your point is you can start from the same place, what to do with the data in between and all the, on the out the side of this, this pipeline is where a MarTech company can have then. So like I said before, it was a website to an email go to website. You know, we have a cookie fill out a form. Yeah. I send you an email later. I think now you, you can't just do a website to email, it's a website plus mobile apps, plus, you know, in real world interaction to text message, chat, phone, call Twitter, a whatever, you know, it's >>Like, it's like, they're playing checkers in web two and you're talking 3d chess. <laugh>, I mean, there's a level, there's a huge gap between what's coming. And this is kind of interesting because now you mentioned, you know, uh, machine learning and data, and AI is gonna factor into all this. You mentioned, uh, you know, rock set. One of your portfolios has under the hood, you know, open source and then use proprietary data and cloud. Okay. That's a configuration, that's an architecture, right? So architecture will be important in terms of how companies posture in this market, cuz MarTech is ripe for innovation because it's based on these old technologies, but there's tons of workflows, but you gotta have the data. Right. And so if I have the best journey map from a client that goes to a website, but then they go and they do something in the organic or somewhere else. If I don't have that, what good is it? It's like a blind spot. >>Correct. So I think you're seeing folks with the data BS, snowflake or data bricks, or an Amazon that S three say, Hey, come to my data cloud. Right. Which, you know, Snowflake's advertising, Amazon will say the data cloud is S3 because all your data exists there anyway. So you just, you know, live on S3 data. Bricks will say, S3 is great, but only use Amazon tools use data bricks. Right. And then, but on top of that, but then you had our SaaS companies like Oracle, Salesforce, whoever, and say, you know, use our qua Marketo, exact target, you know, application as a system record. And so I think you're gonna have a battle between, do I just work my data in S3 or where my data exists or gonna work my data, some other application, like a Marketo Ella cloud Z target, um, or, you know, it could be a Twilio segment, right. Was combination. So you'll have this battle between these, these, these giants in the cloud, easy, the castles, right. Versus, uh, the, the, the, the contenders or the, or the challengers as we call >>'em. Well, great. Always chat with the other. We always talk about castles in the cloud, which is your work that you guys put out, just an update on. So check out greylock.com. They have castles on the cloud, which is a great thesis on and a map by the way ecosystem. So you guys do a really good job props to Jerry and the team over at Greylock. Um, okay. Now I gotta ask kind of like the VC private equity sure. Market question, you know, evaluations. Uh, first of all, I think it's a great time to do a startup. So it's a good time to be in the VC business. I think the next two years, you're gonna find some nice gems, but also you gotta have that cleansing period. You got a lot of overvaluation. So what happened with the markets? So there's gonna be a lot of M and a. So the question is what are some of the things that you see as challenges for product teams in particular that might have that killer answer in MarTech, or might not have the runway if there's no cash, um, how do people partner in this modern era, cuz scale's a big deal, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can measure everything. So you get the combination of a, a new kind of M and a market coming, a potential growth market for the right solution. Again, value's gotta be be there. What's your take on this market? >>I, I, I think you're right. Either you need runway, so cash to make it through, through this next, you know, two, three years, whatever you think the market Turmo is or two, you need scale, right? So if you're at a company of scale and you have enough data, you can probably succeed on your own. If not, if you're kind of in between or early to your point, either one focus, a narrower wedge, John, just like we say, just reduce the surface area. And next two years focus on solving one problem. Very, very well, or number two in this MarTech space, especially there's a lot of partnership and integration opportunities to create a complete solution together, to compete against kind of the incumbents. Right? So I think they're folks with the data, they're folks doing data, privacy, security, they're post focusing their workflow or marketing workflows. You're gonna see either one, um, some M and a, but I definitely can see a lot of Coopers in partnership. And so in the past, maybe you would say, I'm just raise another a hundred million dollars and do what you're doing today. You might say, look, instead of raising more money let's partner together or, or merge or find a solution. So I think people are gonna get creative. Yeah. Like said scarcity often is good. Yeah. I think forces a lot more focus and a lot more creativity. >>Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up up. Cause I didn't think you were gonna go there. I was gonna ask that biz dev activity is going to be really fundamental because runway combined with the fact that, Hey, you know, if you know, get real or you're gonna go under is a real issue. So now people become friends. They're like, okay, if we partner, um, it's clearly a good way to go if you can get there. So what advice would you give companies? Um, even most experienced, uh, founders and operators. This is a different market, right? It's a different kind of velocity, obviously architectural data. You mentioned some of those key things. What's the posture to partner. What's your advice? What's the combat man manual to kind of compete in this new biz dev world where some it's a make or break time, either get the funding, get the customers, which is how you get funding or you get a biz dev deal where you combine forces, uh, go to market together or not. What's your advice? >>I, I think that the combat manual is either you're partnering for one or two things, either one technology or two customers or sometimes both. So it would say which partnerships, youre doing for technology EG solution completers. Like you have, you know, this puzzle piece, I have this puzzle piece data and data privacy and let's work together. Um, or number two is like, who can help you with customers? And that's either a, I, they can be channel for you or, or vice versa or can share customers and you can actually go to market together and find customers jointly. So ideally you're partner for one, if not the other, sometimes both. And just figure out where in your life cycle do you need? Um, friends. >>Yeah. Great. My final question, Jerry, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing your in insight as usual. Always. Awesome final question for the folks watching that are gonna be partnering and buying product and services from these startups. Um, there's a select few great ones here and obviously every other episode as well, and you've got a bunch you're investing in this, it's actually a good market for the ones that are lean companies that are lean and mean have value. And the cloud scale does provide that. So a lot of companies are getting it right, they're gonna break through. So they're clearly gonna be getting customers the buyer side, how should they be looking through the lens right now and looking at companies, what should they look for? Um, and they like to take chances with seeing that. So it's not so much, they gotta be vetted, but you know, how do they know the winners from the pretenders? >>You know, I, I think the customers are always smart. I think in the, in the, in the past in market market tech, especially they often had a budget to experiment with. I think you're looking now the customers, the buyer technologies are looking for a hard ROI, like a return on investment. And before think they might experiment more, but now they're saying, Hey, are you gonna help me save money or increase revenue or some hardcore metric that they care about? So I think, um, the startups that actually have a strong ROI, like save money or increased revenue and can like point empirically how they do that will, will, you know, rise to the top of, of the MarTech landscape. And customers will see that they're they're, the customers are smart, right? They're savvy buyers. They, they, they, they, they can smell good from bad and they're gonna see the strong >>ROI. Yeah. And the other thing too, I like to point out, I'd love to get your reaction real quick is a lot of the companies have DNA, any open source or they have some community track record where communities now, part of the vetting. I mean, are they real good people? >>Yeah. I, I think open stores, like you said, in the community in general, like especially all these communities that move on slack or discord or something else. Right. I think for sure, just going through all those forums, slack communities or discord communities, you can see what's a good product versus next versus bad. Don't go to like the other sites. These communities would tell you who's working. >>Well, we got a discord channel on the cube now had 14,000 members. Now it's down to six, losing people left and right. We need a moderator, um, to get on. If you know anyone on discord, anyone watching wants to volunteer to be the cube discord, moderator. Uh, we could use some help there. Love discord. Uh, Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. What's new at Greylock. What's some of the things happening. Give a quick plug for the firm. When you guys working on, I know there's been some cool things happening, new investments, people moving. >>Yeah. Look we're we're Greylock partners, seed series a firm. I focus at enterprise software. I have a team with me that also does consumer investing as well as crypto investing like all firms. So, but we're we're seed series a occasionally later stage growth. So if you're interested, uh, FA me@jkontwitterorjgreylock.com. Thank you, John. >>Great stuff, Jerry. Thanks for coming on. This is the Cube's presentation of the, a startup showcase. MarTech is the series this time, emerging cloud scale customer experience where the integration and the data matters. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the hottest cloud startups from the ADWS ecosystem. Um, John farrier, thanks for watching.

Upbeat Music >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Day 2 of our coverage. We've been getting a lot of really great perspectives on automation and how it is impacting, significantly, every industry. We're pleased to have, from the keynote stage, Junaid Amed, the corporate Vice President of Finance at Applied Materials. He's going to talk us through why you have a why-can't-we-automate-it-all attitude. Junaid, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> So you have a really aggressive strategy for digital transformation automation led digital transformation. Your keynote this morning was great. It was, I just thought, strategically, it was so well thought out. And then, when you got up here before we went live, you started talking about how fast the time frame was. >> Yes. >> Give the audience an overview of the strategy, what you're aiming to do and how quickly you're expecting to see change. >> Yeah, absolutely. So when we set out, when we launched about two and a half years ago, the company had doubled in size the prior five years. We were looking for it to double again. We were honest with ourselves, with the CFO and the finance leadership team, could we support the new wave of growth? And the answer is no. Okay, what do we do? We knew we had to do something, not just more things but take a complete new view on things. That's how this whole initiative got incubated. And we took a bold approach. We said, we don't want just to cover the next five years, let's cover the next 20 years. Set ourselves up to make sure we do this right for the company and for our people. So, we basically set some very ambitious goals. Which is, the key KPI that we set at our true north is, we're going to get 50 % of finance work effort, all oriented around decision support. That's what helps move the needle for the company. Sure, we have our responsibilities to close the books, to do all the transactional stuff, to do all the reporting stuff. We will do that. But that can't be the mainstay anymore. That's just table stakes. And the business is screaming for this. It's just that we didn't have the levers and the tools to be able to do it. To pivot. But given the technological advancements, we said, "This is possible now." And that's- >> I think we have to set the table here with your industry. Because you started your journey to PA automation in 2019. >> Yes. >> You participate in one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging, industry on the planet. >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Everybody, I don't know, maybe not the insiders but everybody else missed, absolutely no, the insiders missed it too. What was the impact of the pandemic, right? And now, chips are every part of our lives. We've got this massive chip shortage. And you know, Wall Street missed it. They said, "Oh, sell Applied Materials. Sell every semiconductor company." And then they realized, "Oh wow," kind of late into the cycle, that this is like a multi-year, perhaps a decade long transition to, maybe this never ending demand, who knows? So that's the backdrop of your business. That was driving it. What was it like inside your company? >> So Dave, you know, what we could see, obviously we couldn't predict the pandemic. We could see long term growth, right? Really tangible market inflection on the back of AI big data. If you want to say where we made a big bet as a company? We went all in on AI. Right? We believed in that growth, at a time when I think not everyone was so convinced. Okay, is this going to be- How strong is this going to hit us? So, we had the benefit of going all in on AI and saying this is another big computing wave. The next big wave of computing. Coming off of mobile and social media. And Gary Dickerson, our CEO, bet the company that we're going to enable this growth. This is real. This is going to touch the whole global economy. So yes, that's a bet, a successful bet, the company made. No one could foresee what would the pandemic do but we had the good fortune of saying we were reacting to the growth, that we were committed to service. And we knew we had to get ahead of it. So we quickly organized and got finance, our organization well positioned to successfully support the company. Now, we got hit with the pandemic. Luckily for us, we're proactive and then, you know what we did? We accelerated. >> So your move to automation was an offensive move- >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Not a panic move to respond to a pandemic. >> Hundred percent. What do investors want? Operating leverage. Operating leverage. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, right now all the models have a certain baseline. Size of company, complexity. Okay, you need a certain amount of leverage coming out of this model. The models are going to change. Those that don't change ahead of the models, they're going to play catch up. It's not a fun ride. We wanted to be ahead. >> Well, I mean, talk about operating leverage. You're a company with what? 120+ Billion dollar market cap. You've got a 20+ Billion dollar revenue and you sell extremely expensive equipment. >> Extremely. >> And then a 5X revenue multiple. That's a trailing revenue multiple. I mean that's, that's impressive. That's operating leverage. >> Yes and but the bar keeps moving. You've got to stay ahead, right? You've got to be a leader. We're a leader. We've been a leader for five decades. It's the leadership mindset, I would say, in the company and our leadership team, that really propelled us towards this. The leadership of our CFO, Dan Durn, who invested. He made a bet. No one, you know, now we're sitting here, over almost 300,000 hours automated. We didn't have the playbook when we did it. >> You created the playbook. >> We created the playbook. >> Talk to me about the appetite, because obviously aggressive leadership, bold leadership, talk to me about the appetite to be able to be able to transform so quickly. Such that when, as Dave said, you're on the offensive, such that when the pandemic came, you leveraged that as an accelerator of what you've already been doing. Because culturally, that's challenging for folks to get on board to. How did you do that? >> I have to say, it is challenging. And it's at time's it feels counter-intuitive. We were going through the pandemic. We were having a large M&A integration happening, okay and we're transforming finance. And we're a resource constrained organization. Then you tell your people, "We've got more work to do. Transformation." And you're like, "Is that the right thing to do? Isn't everyone going to leave?" But when you dig deep, you say, "How do you get mind share?" How do you, first of all, you have to get people to see the value and then you have to make sure you do it fast enough, where they want to stick around. It's counter-intuitive. "Hey, we're going to launch this new platform. It's going to take three and half years. All right everyone, we're going to do this." What happens? People are like, in-out. Okay yeah, it'll come, we'll deal with it. Then instead, you say, "Hey, we're going to transform the way we plan. Completely. Top to bottom. 10 months. We're going to do it. Here's what you're going to be at your hands- Here's what you're going to have at your disposal in 10 months, all right? Oh, by the way, we're just showing you the high level. You get to really design. What do you want?" Now, when you have credibility, street cred with your organization, and you come out and say, "I'm going to give you top to bottom agility around forecasting and you get to have input on what you really want." Now people get excited. Like, "Oh, I'm going to work 25% more but wait a second, I'm really excited about what I get at the end of 10 months." >> So, the world was betting several years ago on the consolidation of fabs. "Oh, that's bad for Applied Materials." The exact opposite happened. You know, ARM changed the model, WAYFA volume's going through the roof. Now Intel is basically following that playbook, which is wonderful, they're breaking ground in Arizona. Which is, you have these massive tailwinds behind you. So I'm interested in how you forecast that and what role automation plays in that forecasting. >> Well, if you think about it, the fundamental demand isn't changing. Capacity has to go in. People think, wait a second, so and so is going to build less or whatever, The capacity, maybe geographically, is going to get dispersed out but it still has to go in. So I think it doesn't change the fundamental demand statement. Then, how does automation play into- I just thing that the fundamental nature and pace of business is changing. For us. And our customers are going through the same. So we have to be more reactive, we have to be able to respond to their needs. That whole thing cascades down into the organization. All the way deep into finance analyst forecasting, right? So, if everyone has to work off a weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence, you're too slow. Too late. Doesn't matter how good your plan is. It's old. It's stale. We're moving into a time and era where everything happens realtime. It always happened realtime but we just never had the tools to react realtime. Now, we have realtime business performance, enterprise grade dashboards. Any minute of the day you can see what the revenue forecast is, what the margin associated with that is. Yes, when we get into the official commit cycle everything firms up but it's not the big crank, right? You're fine tuning the knobs now. Which is great. What do you want in a plan? You want greater optionality. Is there a perfect plan? Of course there isn't. What is the North Star of forecasting? Give me as much options as- viable options and then let me decide. Because there's trade-offs. There's no one perfect plan. But you were limited. It just took too long to put a plan together. So you had very small degrees of freedom around it. Viable plans. We're changing all of that. >> This might be out of your swim lane but you had a slide up today and it had the IT in the middle- >> Yes. >> So technology's fundamental. And then, you had the elephant. The Hadoop elephant in the room. So I have to ask you, you guys announced this thing earlier this year called AI to the power of X, actionable insights. I remember reading about it, it's like you're collecting data across all the estate. So I'm like, wow this is a data company. Becoming a data company. So we've been talking a lot and of course the CFO purview is the reporting and I get that. The close, daily close, virtual close, all that. But then there's this whole line-of-business data play. >> Yes. >> And I'm wondering how automation fits there. I mean, that's got to be part of the vision. >> Yeah. Now, I can't speak to the capabilities you're talking to but we are leveraging some of that infrastructure, right? We have amazing IT organization. I have to say, we within Applied, we're a latecomer. From a product, customer product standpoint, already there is so much AI work being done. So we had the benefit of leveraging some of their capabilities for finance, when we launched Agile Finance. There is a lot going on over there. I think we actually enhanced that by introducing these RPA capabilities. And we did so from partnering with, I wouldn't say partnering, IT co-piloted this with us. Fundamentally co-piloted this, okay. And now, IT is taking it to other organizations. And they're taking it to product, they're taking it to operation, they're taking it to sales. So it will have a role. Hundred percent. But they're obviously starting, over the past three to six months is when they got started. So the answer is yes, for sure but I can't speak to exactly how it plays into that specific technology. >> But you addressed the dynamic. Which is, it started in a quick wind part of the company, finance. >> Yes. >> Which is logical. That's where I first introduced RPA a decade ago. A CFO conference, right? Then that now applies to the rest of the business. They're talking about operating leverage- >> Fundamental. Yeah. Hundred percent. >> How do you get that buy-in? How do you get finance and how do you get IT to work with finance, such that IT becomes a catalyst in all these downstream reactions to get this going across the company? >> Important question. >> Well they work for you. >> They don't. >> Oh they don't. >> They don't work for us. They work for me. I'm a customer of theirs. >> Okay. >> The first person that I needed to convince that we were serious and we're going to do it is the CIO. Okay, so you ask how do you get IT bought in? Well first thing, you have to get them in the tent. This is not about, "Oh, can you go do this for me? I need this from you. Can you do that?" Too slow, okay? This RPA, especially RPA, fundamentally, is such a, it's a technology that really needs to get embedded throughout the IT operating model. So you really need IT co-piloting this with you. This is how we did it. We said we're going to learn together. This is a must have for finance. We believe strongly this is going to become a must have for the enterprise but we're going to make the investment. In that must have for the enterprise, IT has to play the roll, right? So we started this together and we learned together and they've been fundamental in our being able to get to scale in 12 months. >> How do you federate governance? Who in the organization, what part of the organization owns governance, if you will? >> Yeah. So we created, established an RPA COE. They own the governance, the policies, the processes. Then, obviously there's a role to play for the business side. So we finance a business organization to them and there's roles to play. We actually, like I showed today in the presentation, there's multiple other players across the enterprise that have to vet these automations, right? Especially in finance. We have to be SOX compliant, we have to be data privacy compliant. We set all of those processes up. So, multiple parties have to engage but engage in an efficient way. >> We're seeing the CFO role emerge. I think of you as a CFO. I mean, I just use that umbrella, emerge as an innovator. I see this all of the place now, especially in Silicon Valley. You look at a company like Snowflake, I don't know if you know Mike Scarpelli but he kind of changed the world of software in some ways. So you're seeing very innovative CFOs emerge, that are technology savvy, they understand the operating leverage, we've used that term several times today, that you can get out of technology. It just reminds me, I don't know how long ago it was when Nick Carr wrote the book Does IT Matter. It seems like technology has never been more important. Along with people and process, of course, but in terms of creating that operating leverage, it's really a key part of the equation, the playbook going forward. >> I think it is a mindset change. We're trying to drive mindset change, right? But it's also, I think, come about because I think technology has become more friendly to non IT people. I think that's a fundamental driver. All these SaaS platforms in the market place, right? What did they design for? Business users. Of course IT has a very prominent role in that whole process and supporting it and implementing it. But the target audience is business users. What was the target audience for ERP? IT. Okay. Fundamental, the technology is changing by design and you're seeing now the impact of that. Where, "Hey wait, I can do this. I can do this by myself." Okay. IT always has been and will be a very important partner. They will service your data needs. This is how we're setting up the collaboration, right? But we really want the finance users to be able to iterate, model, analyze on the fly, in the moment. And they need to do it alone. >> Self serve, yeah. >> That's it. >> Self serve in realtime. I think one of the things, you mentioned it this morning, you mentioned it on our program and one of the things we've learned in the pandemic, that realtime and access to realtime data is no longer a nice-to-have. >> Yes. >> It's really a business critical element of any industry. >> Hundred percent. >> When do you think you'll put crypto on your balance sheet? I ask all the CFOs. >> He's been asking everyone that. >> There's an easy answer. I'm not authorized to answer. Above my pay grade. >> That's a good answer. >> That's good. >> Junaid, thank you so much for joining us. Talking to us about the transformation at Applied Materials, how you're partnering with UiPath to achieve that and the aggressive strategy that you've set out and congratulations on the success of it. We'll look forward to see what's going on in the next couple years. >> Great story. >> Of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Day two of our coverage. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with the cube. This is a special week it's Grace Hopper week, and Grace Hopper is the best name in tech conferences. The celebration of women in computing, and we've been going there for years we're not there this year, but one of the themes that comes up over and over at Grace Hopper is women and girls need to see women in positions that they can envision themselves being in someday. That is a really important piece of the whole diversity conversation is can I see people that I can role model after and I just want to bring up something from a couple years back from 2016 when we were there, we were there with Mimi Valdez, Christina Deoja and Dr. Jeanette Epps, Dr. Jeanette Epps is the astronaut on the right. They were there talking about "The Hidden Figures" movie. If you remember it came out 2016, it was about Katherine Johnson and all the black women working at NASA. They got no credit for doing all the math that basically keep all the astronauts safe and they made a terrific movie about it. And Janet is going up on the very first Blue Origin Space Mission Next year. This was announced a couple of months ago, so again, phenomenal leadership, black lady astronaut, going to go into space and really provide a face for a lot of young girls that want to get into that and its clearly a great STEM opportunity. So we're excited to have four terrific women today that well also are the leaders that the younger women can look up to and follow their career. So we're excited to have them so we're just going to go around. We got four terrific guests, our first one is Annabel Chang, She is the Head of State Policy and Government Regulations at Waymo. Annabel great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> from San Francisco >> Jeff: Awesome. Next up is Inamarie Johnson. She is the Chief People and Diversity Officer for Zendesk Inamarie, great to see you. Where are you calling in from today? >> Great to be here. I am calling in from Palos Verdes the state >> Jeff: awesome >> in Southern California. >> Jeff: Some of the benefits of a virtual sometimes we can, we couldn't do that without the power of the internet. And next up is Jennifer Cabalquinto she is the Chief Financial Officer of the Golden State Warriors. Jennifer, great to see you Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, I wish I was coming in from the Chase Center in San Francisco but I'm actually calling in from Santa Cruz California today. >> Jeff: Right, It's good to see you and you can surf a lot better down there. So that's probably not all bad. And finally to round out our panelists, Kate Hogan, she is the COO of North America for Accenture. Kate, great to see you as well. Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, it's good to see you too. I am coming in from the office actually in San Jose. >> Jeff: From the office in San Jose. All right, So let's get into it . You guys are all very senior, you've been doing this for a long time. We're in a kind of a crazy period of time in terms of diversity with all the kind of social unrest that's happening. So let's talk about some of your first your journeys and I want to start with you Annabel. You're a lawyer you got into lawyering. You did lawyering with Diane Feinstein, kind of some politics, and also the city of San Francisco. And then you made this move over to tech. Talk about that decision and what went into that decision and how did you get into tech? 'cause we know part of the problem with diversity is a pipeline problem. You came over from the law side of the house. >> Yes, and to be honest politics and the law are pretty homogenous. So when I made the move to tech, it was still a lot of the same, but what I knew is that I could be an attorney anywhere from Omaha Nebraska to Miami Florida. But what I couldn't do was work for a disruptive company, potentially a unicorn. And I seized that opportunity and (indistinct) Lyft early on before Ride Hailing and Ride Sharing was even a thing. So it was an exciting opportunity. And I joined right at the exact moment that made myself really meaningful in the organization. And I'm hoping that I'm doing the same thing right now at Waymo. >> Great, Inamarie you've come from one of my favorite stories I like to talk about from the old school Clorox great product management. I always like to joke that Silicon Valley needs a pipeline back to Cincinnati and Proctor and Gamble to get good product managers out here. You were in the classic, right? You were there, you were at Honeywell Plantronics, and then you jumped over to tech. Tell us a little bit about that move. Cause I'm sure selling Clorox is a lot different than selling the terrific service that you guys provide at Zendesk. I'm always happy when I see Zendesk in my customer service return email, I know I'm going to get taken care of. >> Oh wow, that's great. We love customers like you., so thank you for that. My journey is you're right from a fortune 50 sort of more portfolio type company into tech. And I think one of the reasons is because when tech is starting out and that's what Zendesk was a few five years back or so very much an early stage growth company, two things are top of mind, one, how do we become more global? And how do we make sure that we can go up market and attract enterprise grade customers? And so my experience having only been in those types of companies was very interesting for a startup. And what was interesting for me is I got to live in a world where there were great growth targets and numbers, things I had never seen. And the agility, the speed, the head plus heart really resonated with my background. So super glad to be in tech, but you're right. It's a little different than a consumer products. >> Right, and then Jennifer, you're in a completely different world, right? So you worked for the Golden State Warriors, which everybody knows is an NBA team, but I don't know that everyone knows really how progressive the Warriors are beyond just basketball in terms of the new Chase Center, all the different events that you guys put on it. And really the leadership there has decided we really want to be an entertainment company of which the Golden State Warrior basketball team has a very, very important piece, you've come from the entertainment industry. So that's probably how they found you, but you're in the financial role. You've always been in the financial role, not traditionally thought about as a lot of women in terms of a proportion of total people in that. So tell us a little bit about your experience being in finance, in entertainment, and then making this kind of hop over to, I guess Uber entertainment. I don't know even how you would classify the warriors. >> Sports entertainment, live entertainment. Yeah, it's interesting when the Warriors opportunity came up, I naturally said well no, I don't have any sports background. And it's something that we women tend to do, right? We self edit and we want to check every box before we think that we're qualified. And the reality is my background is in entertainment and the Warriors were looking to build their own venue, which has been a very large construction project. I was the CFO at Universal Studios Hollywood. And what do we do there? We build large attractions, which are just large construction projects and we're in the entertainment business. And so that sort of B to C was a natural sort of transition for me going from where I was with Universal Studios over to the Warriors. I think a finance career is such a great career for women. And I think we're finding more and more women entering it. It is one that you sort of understand your hills and valleys, you know when you're going to be busy and so you can kind of schedule around that. I think it's really... it provides that you have a seat at the table. And so I think it's a career choice that I think is becoming more and more available to women certainly more now than it was when I first started. >> Yeah, It's interesting cause I think a lot of people think of women naturally in human resources roles. My wife was a head of human resources back in the day, or a lot of marketing, but not necessarily on the finance side. And then Kate go over to you. You're one of the rare birds you've been at Accenture  for over 20 years. So you must like airplanes and travel to stay there that long. But doing a little homework for this, I saw a really interesting piece of you talking about your boss challenging you to ask for more work, to ask for a new opportunity. And I thought that was really insightful that you, you picked up on that like Oh, I guess it's incumbent on me to ask for more, not necessarily wait for that to be given to me, it sounds like a really seminal moment in your career. >> It was important but before I tell you that story, because it was an important moment of my career and probably something that a lot of the women here on the panel here can relate to as well. You mentioned airplanes and it made me think of my dad. My father was in the air force and I remember him telling stories when I was little about his career change from the air force into a career in telecommunications. So technology for me growing up Jeff was, it was kind of part of the dinner table. I mean it was just a conversation that was constantly ongoing in our house. And I also, as a young girl, I loved playing video games. We had a Tandy computer down in the basement and I remember spending too many hours playing video games down there. And so for me my history and my really at a young age, my experience and curiosity around tech was there. And so maybe that's, what's fueling my inspiration to stay at Accenture for as long as I have. And you're right It's been two decades, which feels tremendous, but I've had the chance to work across a bunch of different industries, but you're right. I mean, during that time and I relate with what Jennifer said in terms of self editing, right? Women do this and I'm no exception, I did this. And I do remember I'm a mentor and a sponsor of mine who called me up when I'm kind of I was at a pivotal moment in my career and he said you know Kate, I've been waiting for you to call me and tell me you want this job. And I never even thought about it. I mean I just never thought that I'd be a candidate for the job and let alone somebody waiting for me to kind of make the phone call. I haven't made that mistake again, (laughing) but I like to believe I learned from it, but it was an important lesson. >> It's such a great lesson and women are often accused of being a little bit too passive and not necessarily looking out for in salary negotiations or looking for that promotion or kind of stepping up to take the crappy job because that's another thing we hear over and over from successful people is that some point in their career, they took that job that nobody else wanted. They took that challenge that really enabled them to take a different path and really a different Ascension. And I'm just curious if there's any stories on that or in terms of a leader or a mentor, whether it was in the career, somebody that you either knew or didn't know that was someone that you got kind of strength from kind of climbing through your own, kind of career progression. Will go to you first Annabel. >> I actually would love to talk about the salary negotiations piece because I have a group of friends about that we've been to meeting together once a month for the last six years now. And one of the things that we committed to being very transparent with each other about was salary negotiations and signing bonuses and all of the hard topics that you kind of don't want to talk about as a manager and the women that I'm in this group with span all types of different industries. And I've learned so much from them, from my different job transitions about understanding the signing bonus, understanding equity, which is totally foreign to me coming from law and politics. And that was one of the most impactful tools that I've ever had was a group of people that I could be open with talking about salary negotiations and talking about how to really manage equity. Those are totally foreign to me up until this group of women really connected me to these topics and gave me some of that expertise. So that is something I strongly encourage is that if you haven't openly talked about salary negotiations before you should begin to do so. >> It begs the question, how was the sensitivity between the person that was making a lot of money and the person that wasn't? And how did you kind of work through that as a group for the greater good of everyone? >> Yeah, I think what's really eye opening is that for example, We had friends who were friends who were on tech, we had friends who were actually the entrepreneurs starting their own businesses or law firm, associates, law firm partners, people in PR, so we understood that there was going to be differences within industry and frankly in scale, but it was understanding even the tools, whether I think the most interesting one would be signing bonus, right? Because up until a few years ago, recruiters could ask you what you made and how do you avoid that question? How do you anchor yourself to a lower salary range or avoid that happening? I didn't know this, I didn't know how to do that. And a couple of women that had been in more senior negotiations shared ways to make sure that I was pinning myself to a higher salary range that I wanted to be in. >> That's great. That's a great story and really important to like say pin. it's a lot of logistical details, right? You just need to learn the techniques like any other skill. Inamarie, I wonder if you've got a story to share here. >> Sure. I just want to say, I love the example that you just gave because it's something I'm super passionate about, which is transparency and trust. Then I think that we're building that every day into all of our people processes. So sure, talk about sign on bonuses, talk about pay parody because that is the landscape. But a quick story for me, I would say is all about stepping into uncertainty. And when I coach younger professionals of course women, I often talk about, don't be afraid to step into the role where all of the answers are not vetted down because at the end of the day, you can influence what those answers are. I still remember when Honeywell asked me to leave the comfort of California and to come to the East coast to New Jersey and bring my family. And I was doing well in my career. I didn't feel like I needed to do that, but I was willing after some coaching to step into that uncertainty. And it was one of the best pivotal moment in my career. I didn't always know who I was going to work with. I didn't know the challenges and scope I would take on, but those were some of the biggest learning experiences and opportunities and it made me a better executive. So that's always my coaching, like go where the answers aren't quite vetted down because you can influence that as a leader. >> That's great, I mean, Beth Comstock former vice chair at GE, one of her keynotes I saw had a great line, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that its a really good kind of message, especially in the time we're living in with accelerated change. But I'm curious, Inamarie was the person that got you to take that commitment. Would you consider that a sponsor, a mentor, was it a boss? Was it maybe somebody not at work, your spouse or a friend that said go for it. What kind of pushed you over the edge to take that? >> It's a great question. It was actually the boss I was going to work for. He was the CHRO, and he said something that was so important to me that I've often said it to others. And he said trust me, he's like I know you don't have all the answers, I know we don't have this role all figured out, I know you're going to move your family, but if you trust me, there is a ton of learning on the other side of this. And sometimes that's the best thing a boss can do is say we will go on this journey together. I will help you figure it out. So it was a boss, but I think it was that trust and that willingness for him to stand and go alongside of me that made me pick up my family and be willing to move across the country. And we stayed five years and really, I am not the same executive because of that experience. >> Right, that's a great story, Jennifer, I want to go to you, you work for two owners that are so progressive and I remember when Joe Lacob came on the floor a few years back and was booed aggressively coming into a franchise that hadn't seen success in a very long time, making really aggressive moves in terms of personnel, both at the coaches and the players level, the GM level. But he had a vision and he stuck to it. And the net net was tremendous success. I wonder if you can share any of the stories, for you coming into that organization and being able to feel kind of that level of potential success and really kind of the vision and also really a focus on execution to make the vision real cause vision without execution doesn't really mean much. If you could share some stories of working for somebody like Joe Lacob, who's so visionary but also executes so very, very effectively. >> Yeah, Joe is, well I have the honor of working for Joe, for Rick Welts to who's our president. Who's living legend with the NBA with Peter Guber. Our leadership at the Warriors are truly visionary and they set audacious targets. And I would say from a story the most recent is, right now what we're living through today. And I will say Joe will not accept that we are not having games with fans. I agree he is so committed to trying to solve for this and he has really put the organization sort of on his back cause we're all like well, what do we do? And he has just refused to settle and is looking down every path as to how do we ensure the safety of our fans, the safety of our players, but how do we get back to live entertainment? And this is like a daily mantra and now the entire organization is so focused on this and it is because of his vision. And I think you need leaders like that who can set audacious goals, who can think beyond what's happening today and really energize the entire organization. And that's really what he's done. And when I talked to my peers and other teams in there they're talking about trying to close out their season or do these things. And they're like well, we're talking about, how do we open the building? And we're going to have fans, we're going to do this. And they look at me and they're like, what are you talking about? And I said, well we are so fortunate. We have leadership that just is not going to settle. Like they are just always looking to get out of whatever it is that's happening and fix it. So Joe is so committed His background, he's an epidemiologist major I think. Can you imagine how unique a background that is and how timely. And so his knowledge of just around the pandemic and how the virus is spread. And I mean it's phenomenal to watch him work and leverage sort of his business acumen, his science acumen and really think through how do we solve this. Its amazing. >> The other thing thing that you had said before is that you basically intentionally told people that they need to rethink their jobs, right? You didn't necessarily want to give them permission to get you told them we need to rethink their jobs. And it's a really interesting approach when the main business is just not happening, right? There's just no people coming through the door and paying for tickets and buying beers and hotdogs. It's a really interesting talk. And I'm curious, kind of what was the reception from the people like hey, you're the boss, you just figure it out or were they like hey, this is terrific that he pressed me to come up with some good ideas. >> Yeah, I think when all of this happened, we were resolved to make sure that our workforce is safe and that they had the tools that they needed to get through their day. But then we really challenged them with re imagining what the next normal is. Because when we come out of this, we want to be ahead of everybody else. And that comes again from the vision that Joe set, that we're going to use this time to make ourselves better internally because we have the time. I mean, we had been racing towards opening Chase Center and not having time to pause. Now let's use this time to really rethink how we're doing business. What can we do better? And I think it's really reinvigorated teams to really think and innovate in their own areas because you can innovate anything, right?. We're innovating how you pay payables, we're all innovating, we're rethinking the fan experience and queuing and lines and all of these things because now we have the time that it's really something that top down we want to come out of this stronger. >> Right, that's great. Kate I'll go to you, Julie Sweet, I'm a big fan of Julie Sweet. we went to the same school so go go Claremont. But she's been super aggressive lately on a lot of these things, there was a get to... I think it's called Getting to 50 50 by 25 initiative, a formal initiative with very specific goals and objectives. And then there was a recent thing in terms of doing some stuff in New York with retraining. And then as you said, military being close to your heart, a real specific military recruiting process, that's formal and in place. And when you see that type of leadership and formal programs put in place not just words, really encouraging, really inspirational, and that's how you actually get stuff done as you get even the consulting businesses, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. >> Yeah Jeff, you're exactly right. And as Jennifer was talking, Julie is exactly who I was thinking about in my mind as well, because I think it takes strong leadership and courage to set bold bold goals, right? And you talked about a few of those bold goals and Julie has certainly been at the forefront of that. One of the goals we set in 2018 actually was as you said to achieve essentially a gender balance workforce. So 50% men, 50% women by 2025, I mean, that's ambitious for any company, but for us at the time we were 400,000 people. They were 500, 6,000 globally. So when you set a goal like that, it's a bold goal and it's a bold vision. And we have over 40% today, We're well on our path to get to 50%, I think by 2025. And I was really proud to share that goal in front of a group of 200 clients the day that it came out, it's a proud moment. And I think it takes leaders like Julie and many others by the way that are also setting bold goals, not just in my company to turn the dial here on gender equality in the workforce, but it's not just about gender equality. You mentioned something I think it's probably at as, or more important right now. And that's the fact that at least our leadership has taken a Stand, a pretty bold stand against social injustice and racism, >> Right which is... >> And so through that we've made some very transparent goals in North America in terms of the recruitment and retention of our black African American, Hispanic American, Latinex communities. We've set a goal to increase those populations in our workforce by 60% by 2025. And we're requiring mandatory training for all of our people to be able to identify and speak up against racism. Again, it takes courage and it takes a voice. And I think it takes setting bold goals to make a change and these are changes we're committed to. >> Right, that's terrific. I mean, we started the conversation with Grace Hopper, they put out an index for companies that don't have their own kind of internal measure to do surveys again so you can get kind of longitudinal studies over time and see how you're improving Inamarie, I want to go to you on the social justice thing. I mean, you've talked a lot about values and culture. It's a huge part of what you say. And I think that the quote that you use, if I can steal it is " no culture eats strategy for breakfast" and with the social injustice. I mean, you came out with special values just about what Zendesk is doing on social injustice. And I thought I was actually looking up just your regular core mission and value statement. And this is what came up on my Google search. So I wanted to A, you published this in a blog in June, taking a really proactive stand. And I think you mentioned something before that, but then you're kind of stuck in this role as a mind reader. I wonder if you can share a little bit of your thoughts of taking a proactive stand and what Zendesk is doing both you personally, as well as a company in supporting this. And then what did you say as a binder Cause I think these are difficult kind of uncharted waters on one hand, on the other hand, a lot of people say, hello, this has been going on forever. You guys are just now seeing cellphone footage of madness. >> Yeah Wow, there's a lot in there. Let me go to the mind reader comments, cause people are probably like, what is that about? My point was last December, November timing. I've been the Chief People Officer for about two years And I decided that it really was time with support from my CEO that Zendesk have a Chief Diversity Officer sitting in at the top of the company, really putting a face to a lot of the efforts we were doing. And so the mind reader part comes in little did I know how important that stance would become, in the may June Timing? So I joked that, it almost felt like I could have been a mind reader, but as to what have we done, a couple of things I would call out that I think are really aligned with who we are as a company because our culture is highly threaded with the concept of empathy it's been there from our beginning. We have always tried to be a company that walks in the shoes of our customers. So in may with the death of George Floyd and the world kind of snapping and all of the racial injustice, what we said is we wanted to not stay silent. And so most of my postings and points of view were that as a company, we would take a stand both internally and externally and we would also partner with other companies and organizations that are doing the big work. And I think that is the humble part of it, we can't do it all at Zendesk, we can't write all the wrongs, but we can be in partnership and service with other organizations. So we used funding and we supported those organizations and partnerships. The other thing that I would say we did that was super important along that empathy is that we posted space for our employees to come together and talk about the hurt and the pain and the experiences that were going on during those times and we called those empathy circles. And what I loved is initially, it was through our mosaic community, which is what we call our Brown and black and persons of color employee resource group. But it grew into something bigger. We ended up doing five of these empathy circles around the globe and as leadership, what we were there to do is to listen and stand as an ally and support. And the stories were life changing. And the stories really talked about a number of injustice and racism aspects that are happening around the world. And so we are committed to that journey, we will continue to support our employees, we will continue to partner and we're doing a number of the things that have been mentioned. But those empathy circles, I think were definitely a turning point for us as an organization. >> That's great, and people need it right? They need a place to talk and they also need a place to listen if it's not their experience and to be empathetic, if you just have no data or no knowledge of something, you need to be educated So that is phenomenal. I want to go to you Jennifer. Cause obviously the NBA has been very, very progressive on this topic both as a league, and then of course the Warriors. We were joking before. I mean, I don't think Steph Curry has ever had a verbal misstep in the history of his time in the NBA, the guy so eloquent and so well-spoken, but I wonder if you can share kind of inside the inner circle in terms of the conversations, that the NBA enabled right. For everything from the jerseys and going out on marches and then also from the team level, how did that kind of come down and what's of the perception inside the building? >> Sure, obviously I'm so proud to be part of a league that is as progressive and has given voice and loud, all the teams, all the athletes to express how they feel, The Warriors have always been committed to creating a diverse and equitable workplace and being part of a diverse and equitable community. I mean that's something that we've always said, but I think the situation really allowed us, over the summer to come up with a real formal response, aligning ourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in a really meaningful way, but also in a way that allows us to iterate because as you say, it's evolving and we're learning. So we created or discussed four pillars that we wanted to work around. And that was really around wallet, heart, beat, and then tongue or voice. And Wallet is really around putting our money where our mouth is, right? And supporting organizations and groups that aligned with the values that we were trying to move forward. Heart is around engaging our employees and our fan base really, right? And so during this time we actually launched our employee resource groups for the first time and really excited and energized about what that's doing for our workforce. This is about promoting real action, civic engagement, advocacy work in the community and what we've always been really focused in a community, but this really hones it around areas that we can all rally around, right? So registration and we're really focused on supporting the election day results in terms of like having our facilities open to all the electorate. So we're going to have our San Francisco arena be a ballot drop off, our Oakland facilities is a polling site, Santa Cruz site is also a polling location, So really promoting sort of that civic engagement and causing people to really take action. heart is all around being inclusive and developing that culture that we think is really reflective of the community. And voice is really amplifying and celebrating one, the ideas, the (indistinct) want to put forth in the community, but really understanding everybody's culture and really just providing and using the platform really to provide a basis in which as our players, like Steph Curry and the rest want to share their own experiences. we have a platform that can't be matched by any pedigree, right? I mean, it's the Warriors. So I think really getting focused and rallying around these pillars, and then we can iterate and continue to grow as we define the things that we want to get involved in. >> That's terrific. So I have like pages and pages and pages of notes and could probably do this for hours and hours, but unfortunately we don't have that much time we have to wrap. So what I want to do is give you each of you the last word again as we know from this problem, right? It's not necessarily a pipeline problem, it's really a retention problem. We hear that all the time from Girls in Code and Girls in Tech. So what I'd like you to do just to wrap is just a couple of two or three sentences to a 25 year old, a young woman sitting across from you having coffee socially distanced about what you would tell her early in the career, not in college but kind of early on, what would the be the two or three sentences that you would share with that person across the table and Annabel, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I will have to make a pitch for transportation. So in transportation only 15% of the workforce is made up of women. And so my advice would be that there are these fields, there are these opportunities where you can make a massive impact on the future of how people move or how they consume things or how they interact with the world around them. And my hope is that being at Waymo, with our self driving car technology, that we are going to change the world. And I am one of the initial people in this group to help make that happen. And one thing that I would add is women spend almost an hour a day, shuttling their kids around, and we will give you back that time one day with our self driving cars so that I'm a mom. And I know that that is going to be incredibly powerful on our daily lives. >> Jeff: That's great. Kate, I think I might know what you're already going to say, but well maybe you have something else you wanted to say too. >> I don't know, It'll be interesting. Like if I was sitting across the table from a 25 year old right now I would say a couple of things first I'd say look intentionally for a company that has an inclusive culture. Intentionally seek out the company that has an inclusive culture, because we know that companies that have inclusive cultures retain women in tech longer. And the companies that can build inclusive cultures will retain women in tech, double, double the amount that they are today in the next 10 years. That means we could put another 1.4 million women in tech and keep them in tech by 2030. So I'd really encourage them to look for that. I'd encouraged them to look for companies that have support network and reinforcements for their success, and to obviously find a Waymo car so that they can not have to worry where kids are on for an hour when you're parenting in a few years. >> Jeff: I love the intentional, it's such a great word. Inamarie, >> I'd like to imagine that I'm sitting across from a 25 year old woman of color. And what I would say is be authentically you and know that you belong in the organization that you are seeking and you were there because you have a unique perspective and a voice that needs to be heard. And don't try to be anything that you're not, be who you are and bring that voice and that perspective, because the company will be a better company, the management team will be a better management team, the workforce will be a better workforce when you belong, thrive and share that voice. >> I love that, I love that. That's why you're the Chief People Officer and not Human Resources Officer, cause people are not resources like steel and cars and this and that. All right, Jennifer, will go to you for the wrap. >> Oh my gosh, I can't follow that. But yes, I would say advocate for yourself and know your value. I think really understanding what you're worth and being willing to fight for that is critical. And I think it's something that women need to do more. >> Awesome, well again, I wish we could go all day, but I will let you get back to your very, very busy day jobs. Thank you for participating and sharing your insight. I think it's super helpful. And there and as we said at the beginning, there's no better example for young girls and young women than to see people like you in leadership roles and to hear your voices. So thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay thank you. >> Thank you >> All right, so that was our diversity panel. I hope you enjoyed it, I sure did. I'm looking forward to chapter two. We'll get it scheduled as soon as we can. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios, the COVID crisis continues. Luckily we've got the ability to interview guests from remote and so we're excited to have this next guest. There's a lot of activity going on around equality and gender diversity, Black Lives Matter, and it feels like it really does feel like there's kind of a step function in moving this along. And there's a lot of groups out there that are trying to take a very active role, and one of the things they're trying to do is help women get on more corporate board seats, more representation, and we're really excited to have our next guest. Who's really taking a slightly different approach, a new approach to this, and we're happy to be joined by Rita Scroggin. She is the founder of FirstBoard.io, and she's also the Practice Director, Executive Group at Triad Group. So Rita, great to see you. >> Thank you very much, Jeff, for having me, I'm super excited to be here and to share the story about FirstBoard.io, what we're doing and how hopefully that will change the world just a little bit. >> That's great. Well, the way that this came about is I was on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn all the time, and all of a sudden this big picture hit my feed and a ton of familiar faces. I think that's what it is four by eight. And I see Abby Kearns, Dao Jensen, Eve Maler, Wendy Perilli, Jocelyn is in there Syamla in there. And I thought, wow, I know a bunch of these women, and I'm always happy to promote the women in theCUBE alumni. And I reached out and I think it was Wendy said, "Hey, this is... She said, "I'm a founding member of this thing called FirstBoard.io. And I (indistinct) and she said, we got to talk to Rita. So it was great to meet you. And this is a new organization. I think you said you started at the very beginning of this year. >> Yeah. >> Why? Let's get kind of to the origin story. >> Yeah. >> What gave you the idea? Why did you think that this was something that needed to be done? And what caused you to actually take the leap of faith and start FirstBoard? >> Yeah, very good question. So in the fall of 2019, I did an event in partnership with K&L Gates and it was about how to get on board, and it wasn't gender specific, but I invited a lot of women from my network, and through K&L Gates, there was a speaker on the panel, Cheryl Bolton, who is now a supporter of FirstBoard.io. And we spoke after the panel discussion, so I was the moderator, and she said, "Do you place people or women specifically, "on private company boards? I said, I do now let's have a conversation about that. So we talked some more and we kind of felt like there's really a need for companies to diversify their boards, particularly private tech companies. And so then I thought about more about the idea. I reached out to a few women in my network and I said, hey, I have this idea. I'm thinking about starting an initiative around this topic, would you be interested in being part of it? And a lot of the women who I reached out to said, I'd love the idea, I would love to get involved. So that was really the origin, then we met, we had a little sort of social get together in, I think it was early December in Palo Alto. And then we said, let's launch officially in January, which we did. So in January we had our first and only in-person meeting, the idea initially was that we would meet every quarter in person. So it would be very localized to Silicon Valley and then COVID happened and everything changed. And we are now meeting via Zoom every six to eight weeks. We have members who are in different locations, most of our members are on Silicon Valley, but we also have a member in New York, in Seattle, in Dallas, and I might forget a location, but we're a little bit more distributed right now. And so that is where we are today. >> So you've done it a little bit different. You've got this group of women, there's 32 women in that picture, the founding members. And so you're taking almost like a cohort approach, a group approach. Why that approach? What did you see that wanted you to go that way, versus doing individual searches for individual companies, looking for individual kind of board members. Why the group approach? What type of dynamic does that introduce? How do the women leverage one another inside of this structure? >> Yeah, that's a good question. That's really the idea. The idea is that we work together collaboratively and that we leverage each other's networks. We raise each other's platform. I might know 10 or 15 or whatever, decision makers let's say VCs, CEOs, but the next member might know an equal number or more or less. So what I was thinking is if we leverage each other's network, we exponentially grow our network and we exponentially grow our visibility. So our focus right now is to really raise the profile of FirstBoard.io and the profile of each member of the group. So it it's fundamentally different, 'cause we're working together, kind of almost like a company that can accelerate where if we have a success, it's everybody's success. Because it raises the profile of everybody else. >> Right. >> So that's the idea, which is different than a networking organization, where you are an unknown member. And we're trying to make this in a different way. >> Right, right. And is the goal, within all the women that have joined, the founding members for all of them to get on a board, I mean, is that all of them are >> That's the goal. qualified people to be on a proper board. >> Yeah, that is the goal, that's the idea, we may not accomplish that in the first round because this is a problem that's been going on for a long time, but we're getting close to our first board placement. So that's I think initial great success. And we're working on a number of initiatives right now to raise the profile. We're doing a video interview with all our supporters. We are creating a campaign, how to reach out to CEOs and VCs. So we're working on a number of things right now behind the background to really target our audience, and our audience is specific to the tech world. So we're focusing really on private tech companies and we're focusing on our decision makers within those organizations. So whether it's the investor, the private equity, growth equity, or venture capital community, or the CEO or other board members for that matter, who may be aware that there's an opening and we're trying to tap into those as well. >> Right, right. So you've mentioned Silicon Valley, VCs and private equity a couple of times. So is the focus more in kind of that ecosystem that we're familiar with here in Silicon Valley with more private, kind of private and growth opportunities, or are you also just fully looking for large, regular public companies as well? >> We wouldn't turn down a public company opportunity, but none of our members have been on a board so far. And I think it's probably more realistic that, the first board position might be at a private tech company where the operating experience is particularly valuable. So that's our primary focus in terms of reaching out of the old But if a public company would come our way and say, we absolutely would love to talk to some of your members, of course we wouldn't turn that down. >> Jeff: Right. >> But actively we are going after private tech companies, and they can be located anywhere, so it's not specific this to Silicon Valley, of course a lot of tech companies are clustered there or here, but it could also be company in New York, or Boston, or wherever, but the focus is really on tech versus a broader focus of any kind of company. >> Right, right. So when you're working with these women who've never been on a board, what do you find is kind of the biggest gap that they need to fill, whether that's a real gap or perceived gap in their either skillsets or experience or whatever, to kind of make the jump and get into one of these board seats. Is it in any particular skill, any particular kind of point of view, what are the types of things that you do as a group to help them be better received, I guess, for the opportunities? >> Yeah. What we don't do is we don't really a training program or prep here. There are other organizations who do that, I think we do a very, very good job. Some of our members are part of other organizations as well. So what we're thinking more is the company oftentimes has, in a certain growth stage, has a gap in some form. And in looking at board opportunities, I think it's important to identify where's that gap, maybe it's go to market, or maybe it is a certain technical expertise, and match them up with the experience of our founding members. So we don't have a program to prepare women, we're more focused on... Okay, we're assuming you're prepared, that might be various degrees, and we're just trying to match kind of the operating expertise to the gap on a fully independent board member at any given company. >> Right, right I think we talked before we turned on the cameras, the three things you said you focus on really is, is operational expertise, skill experience, as well as domain expertise. >> Yeah. >> And so you're really trying to kind of map against a gap that the company has against a skillset that one of the members has. >> Yeah. So far I've sort of facilitated three different board opportunities and two of them, what they had in common, that the company was looking for somebody who really had domain expertise with the audience they were looking at, and who understood the buyer, and who had deep expertise in what to market strategies, developing them. So that's one example, right. And the other company, the third one was looking for somebody who had connections in the space who really understood that particular domain. And so it all depends, and I think it also depends on what stage the company's in. And I think the further along the company is, the more it's about governance and regulations. And earlier on, it's really filling a certain gap on the leadership team. >> Right. >> In the private equity world is also very interesting to us because oftentimes there's a timeline and there are certain growth objectives the company wants to reach. And that's a great opportunity, I think, for FirstBoard to bring in a founding member with that particular operating expertise. >> Right, right. So I'm curious, that's a great segue into kind of the customer side, if you will, the people that are looking for board members. Have you seen over the last several months or years, I'll open it up, kind of a shift in terms of people a, just kind of accepting that there are going to be more women and people of color on the board, but also more of kind of an active search and a more kind of progressive goal to make sure that they do increase the diversity on their boards, whether that be for women or people of color or whatever, just to bring more diversity. Have you seen a shift in your customer base, in terms of they're really focused on prioritization on that? >> Well, I think it's certainly on people's mind and I think now more so than ever with the recent changes and sort of uprising of Black Lives Matter, but I wouldn't say that has really transferred over into real meaningful diversity on boards. I think we still have a long, long way to go, and there's an organization, Him For Her, and I think it was the Calyx Management Institute, they did a study last year and they found that privately, heavily funded companies, 60% of those don't have a single woman on the board. And I think women in general held about 7% of board seats at these companies. So I think there's still a long way to go, but I think it's very important that in the future, a larger proportion of the population is reflected in the boards. Right? So whether it's women, women of color, people of color, so everybody should be part of the leadership team on the board level and on the leadership level. And I think that has become certainly more of a topic, I think, especially for large companies. And I think startups are now recognizing that it's important for them too, especially if they want to be perceived as a company, which has fair and equal values. >> Right. Right. So given that kind of landscape, if you will, what are kind of the expectations that you have with this founding member group? And I presume there'll be other groups in the future once these people all find a great board seat and are doing their thing, kind of, is it a really tough road ahead? Do you see that it's really not that tough on maybe in the macro level, but on the micro level there are some real opportunities, how are you as a group of 32 founding members trying to take this Hill, if you will, against pretty tough odds actually. >> But I think we're going to take it one step at a time. We already did a press release, we have a website, we have some visibility on LinkedIn and we already have been able to curate three different board conversations. So I think step by step, I think we will become more visible. I think we will be more known. We will have more opportunities to introduce founding members, this current cohort and future cohorts. And through that, I think we will make progress. So I'm very optimistic that we can make a difference, that we can get more women on boards. And once the founding members have joined a board, the plan is to launch a group where basically we create a peer group, which will then mentor and support the next cohort. And we also have an amazing group of supporters and partners already. We have Steve Singh from Madrona Ventures. We have Rohini from NGP Capital, and we're always looking for more partners and supporters. I'm not going list everybody right now, but I'm very proud about that we have partners and supporters who bought into the mission and who are helping us accomplish the mission. So I feel very optimistic that we will be able to move the needle. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> It might be at slower pace, but it was still the making a difference. >> Right. Right. Well, the hundredth anniversary of women getting the vote is coming up here in a couple of weeks. Right. And that took a long time to get done, So this stuff it does not happen easily. It does not happen overnight. But I would think certainly too with the increasing number of women in VC roles, as partners, and are also getting on board seats that hopefully that the things are starting to fall in the right direction. And hopefully with each progressive placement is a little bit easier than the one before. So Rita it's great to meet you, everyone I talked to you about you is so excited about the work that you're doing and what you're doing with FirstBoard. >> Thank you. >> I want to give you kind of the last word before we sign off, how should people learn more? How can people support the cause? How should people get involved, so that they can move the needle. >> That's great. Thank you. Get in touch with us on, if you go to the website FirstBoard.io, there is a way to partner with us, there's a link to partner with us, there's a link if you are interested in joining the future cohort. Please contact me and I will respond. And we would love to talk to companies, who are thinking about diversifying their board, we would love to talk to VCs for whom this is important. So please get in touch, and we'll figure out how to change the world together. >> Right And, oh by the way, most studies show you get better business outcomes, right. With diversity of opinion, diversity of points of view. So it's not only the right thing to do, it's also very good business. >> And I think the next decade we are ready for change. I think the society, I think is ready for change. And I think how companies run and are operated, I think people are ready for a change too. So I think the timing is really, really right. And I think we can make it happen. >> Great. Well, Rita, thank you again for taking a few minutes >> Thank you >> and telling your story and joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. It was pressure of Jeff and I look forward to talk again. >> Yeah. Maybe in person after we get through all this COVID madness. >> Maybe in person, yeah. >> All right. Well, thanks again, Rita. >> Rita: Thank you very much. >> All right She's Rita, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we're here for a special CUBE Conversation. Obviously we're remote, we're in the studio most of the time but on the weekends I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts. And here I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local communities, especially in this time of COVID. You have local communities where local journalism is suffering, but also connectedness. And connected experience is what's going to make the difference as we come out of this pandemic as a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan Drew who is the vice president of engineering for Clinical Didja, they make an app called Local BTV which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well for local communities. It's a phenomenal project and it's unique. Somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be very important. Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with me. >> Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> Okay so I'm a big fan, I've been using the app in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket, it might even be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new app location, and this is the focus of this conversation in this CUBE Talk. Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local BTV that you are protecting, this platform for broadcast television, it has a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >> Yeah certainly, I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television. So unlike a lot of products on the market, you know like your Hulus or other VMPV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. We have to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each market. Many channels that serve local content are still over the air. And that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. So that sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way, and we do that in our cloud platform which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >> All right let me take a breath here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so since you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture of this ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >> Yeah, so obviously it starts with some of the core services like EC2, S3, RDS, which everybody on the planet uses. We're also very focused on using ECS; we're completely containerized which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. And one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because their container service is wired into all the other services like cloudwatch metrics, auto-scaling policies, IM policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way, and use those services to much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. We also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use Kinesis and Redshift to collect realtime metrics from all of our markets across the U.S. That allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex ETL systems like Kafka and other things. As well as store it in a large data lake like Redshift and Corid for analytics and things like that. We also use technologies like Media Tailor, so for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to is realtime targeted advertising. In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance, and not personalized obviously for that reason. Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide realtime targeted advertising which is a huge win for these stations. >> What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys can offer broadcast station partners 'cause you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast stations as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in as well. What are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering, what is Amazon bringing to the table there and what are you doing that's unique? >> Well again, it allows us, because we can do things centrally as well as the local reception, it allows us to do some interesting things like if we have channels that are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more viewers that way. We have the ability to even do hyper local or community channels that are not necessarily broadcasting all of the standard antennas, but can get us a feed from whatever zip code in whatever market, and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market, in other markets, or even just in their local area. So consider the case where maybe a high school or a college wants to show games or local content, we provide a platform where they can now do that, and reach more people using our app and our platform very very easily. So that's another area that we want to help expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >> Now I think, just going on a side tangent here, I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO, you guys have an amazing business opportunity. Again, I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that someone who follows and has huge passion about local journalism, you know you see awesome efforts out there like Charlie Sennott from the Ground Truth Project Report for America, they take a journalism kind of print view, but if you add that Didja business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app, video. And now COVID more than ever, I really want to know things like there's a mural in downtown Palo Alto, Black lives matter, I want to know what's going on with the local summer restaurants, putting people out on the sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to like next door or very laggy media, whether it's the website, so again, I think this is an opportunity for that, plus education. I mean, Amazon educate for instance, you can get a degree on computing by sitting on the couch. So again, this is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint that you're providing essentially linear TV to that. >> Exactly. >> In the local economy. So I just want to give you a shout-out for that because I think it's super important. I think people should get behind this, so congratulations. Okay I'm off on my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff 'cause I think what's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly, and what you've done here, you've leveraged the benefits of Amazon and the goodness of cloud, you essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly and pretty impressive. So I got to ask you, what Amazon services are most important for your business? >> Well like I said, I think for us, it's managing the central services so we sort of talked about managing the software, the APIs, and those are kind of the glue, so for us standing up a new metro is obviously getting the data center contracts and all the other messy stuff you have to deal with, just to have a footprint. But essentially once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. And we can be starting channels literally within half a day. So that's the real win for us is having all that central glue and that central management system and the scalability where we can just add another 10, 20, 50, 100 markets and the system is set up to scale centrally where we can start collecting metrics through Cloud watch from those data centers, we're collecting logs and diagnostic information so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is sane and not crazy. We don't need a 24/7 knock of a thousand people to do this, you know, and do that in a way that we, as a relatively small company, can still scale and do that in a sensible way, and a cost-effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size, but at any size, you want to make sure if you're going to go into 200 plus markets that you have a really good cost model and that's one of the things where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things, and in an efficient, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small relatively speaking that that's really what allows us to do as a business and now we just opened up New York and we're going to keep expanding on that model so that's been a huge win for us is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties or building our own obviously-- >> So Amazon gives you the knock basically leverage and scale. The data center you're referring to, that's pretty much just to get an origination point in the territory. >> Dan: Exactly, that's right. >> So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in, making sure that they got all the normal path to recovery and the normal stuff, it's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >> Yeah, so one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do transcoding and origination of the video so we receive the video locally and then we want to transcode and deliver it locally and that way we're not sending video across the country and back type of thing. So that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. So we essentially have another container cluster using Kubernetes in this case. But that Kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the Kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the central service, and then from then on, we just go into the central service and say stand up these channels and it all pops up. >> Well my final question on the Amazon piece is really about the future capability besides having a CUBE channel which we'd love to have on there, I told my guys we'll get there. But we're just too busy working around the clock as you guys are with COVID-19. (overlapping chatter) I could almost see a slew of new services coming out, just on the Amazon side. If I'm on the Amazon side I'm thinking, okay I'll post this as an opportunity for me. I can see sage making and machine learning coming in and adding value for the user experience. And also enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with Prime and moving people around and delivering things. I mean the headroom for Amazon in this thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon, I could see them winning with this. I know certainly I know you're using Elemental as well, but for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the roadmap or what you might envision the future looking like? >> Well, I think part of it I think there's two parts. One of it is what are we going to deliver ourselves so we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local BTV product. But we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. For example, you mentioned Prime and a lot of people are now realizing, especially with COVID and what's going on, the importance of local television and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how we can be the provider of that local TV content. And that's really a lot of stations are super excited about that too 'cause you know, again, looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms, and distribution mechanisms, and the viewers obviously at the end of the day, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations but the news is still maybe very focused on LA or San Francisco or whatever. And so being able to enable the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform and viewer perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. Our main focus is make local great and get the broadcast world out there and that's not going anywhere especially with things like HSE3 on the front, and we just want to make sure those people are successful and enrich people and make revenue. >> Yeah, you got a lot of (mumbles) but I think one of the things that's interesting about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on just current market value investing, versus kind of the game-changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism, and I look at that and I'm like, okay that's a huge opportunity just there, changing the game on societal impact on journalism, huge education opportunity for court cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV so I got to ask ya, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Pretend, let's make it, I am an idiot. I don't understand, isn't this just TV? What are you doing different because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco if I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago if I'm in San Francisco, I get that. But why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can't I just get it on YouTube, TikTok, what is this? >> Yes and no. There's TV and then there's TV as you know. If you look at the TV landscape, it's pretty fractured but typically when you're talking about YouTube or Hulu, you're talking about sort of cable TV channels. You know, you're going to get your A&E, you're going to get some of your local through ABC and whatnot, but you're not really getting local content. So for example, in our Los Angeles market, there are about 100 and something over-the-air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like your Hulus or your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen. So we're talking about 90 plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna. And those are hitting the type of demographics that, quite frankly, some of these other players just don't see as important. >> Under different minorities or immigrants, the each entrepreneurs of our country. >> Yes exactly, so we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's, again, why we feel like we've got something that is really unique and that is really under-served as far as on a television standpoint. The other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are under served themselves in terms of technology. If you look at ad insertion and a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there, it's very focused on the OTT market, so again, going back to the Hulus and the YouTubes. >> OTT, over-the-top you mean. >> Over the top, yeah. And so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while and I sort of mentioned the way ad buying works. It's still sort of the traditional ad buying that happens a couple weeks in front, not a lot of targeted or anything ability. And even when we get to HSE3, you're now relying on having an HES3 TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etc, etc, which is, again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies to not only the ad insertion and the stuff we can do for the livestream, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations that they really don't have right now unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do. So we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited about. >> All right, I got to ask you, put you on the spot here, 'cause I always see Andy Jassy at (mumbles) hopefully I'll see him this year if they do an in-person event. He's really dynamic and you should send him an email; he tends to read his emails a lot, and if you're a customer and I know you are, but I've got to ask you, if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevator and he's like, hey why should I pay attention to Didja? Why is it important for Amazon and why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >> Well I think part of what Amazon's goal, especially if you get into their work in public sector and education, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community and local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage and I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergy. As far as our goals in those areas around really helping, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue, it's about how do we help people in communities be better as well? So there's a bottom line in terms of people, benefit, and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. And that's very important to us as a business as well is that's why we're focused on local TV and we're not just doing another Fubo where it's really easy to get an IP national fee. It's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and the local channels and the local viewers to get the content that they're missing out on right now. So I think there's a, I hate it but I'm going to use it, synergy on that front as far as-- >> Synergy and the new normal. >> Synergy and the new normal? I think COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around where local and community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out and having really local things versus I'm just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don't really care about and it's not telling me what's happening down the street like you said. And that's really what we want to help improve and support. >> Yeah it's a great mission, and it's one we care a lot about theCUBE. We've seen the data: content drives community engagement, and community's where the truth is. So in an era when we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things. That's what we're seeing a lot of things. And as more data's exposed, as you turn the lights on, so to speak, that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal, and thrive. So to me, big believer in what you guys are doing. Local BTV has a great mission. I wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case technically. I mean to me, I think the technical superiority of what you've done give ability to stand up to these kinds of network with massive number of potential reach out of the gate, that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Great, thank you very much and thanks for taking the time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is The Cube Conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special live stream here in The Cube Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great panel discussion here for one hour, sponsored by Lumina PR, not sponsored but organized by Lumina PR. An authentic conversation around professionals in the news media, and communication professionals, how they can work together. As we know, pitching stories to national media takes place in the backdrop in today's market, which is on full display. The Coronavirus, racial unrest in our country and a lot of new tech challenges from companies, their role in society with their technology and of course, an election all make for important stories to be developed and reported. And we got a great panel here and the purpose is to bridge the two worlds. People trying to get news out for their companies in a way that's relevant and important for audiences. I've got a great panelists here, Gerard Baker Editor at Large with the Wall Street Journal, Eric Savitz, Associate Editor with Barron's and Brenna Goth who's a Southwest Staff Correspondent with Bloomberg Publications. Thanks for joining me today, guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to break this down, we got about an hour, we're going to probably do about 40 minutes. I'd love to get your thoughts in this power panel. And you guys are on the front lines decades of experience, seeing these waves of media evolve. And now more than ever, you can't believe what's happening. You're seeing the funding of journalism really challenging at an all time high. You have stories that are super important to audiences and society really changing and we need this more than ever to have more important stories to be told. So this is really a challenge. And so I want to get your thoughts on this first segment. The challenge is around collecting the data, doing the analysis, getting the stories out, prioritizing stories in this time. So I'd love to get your thoughts. We'll start with you, Brenna, what's your thoughts on this as you're out there in Arizona. Coronavirus on the worst is one of the states there. What are your challenges? >> I would say for me, one of the challenges of the past couple months is just the the sheer influx of different types of stories we've had and the amount of news coming out. So I think one of the challenging things is a lot of times we'll get into a bit of a routine covering one story. So early on maybe the Coronavirus, and then something else will come up. So I personally have been covering some of the Coronavirus news here in Arizona and in the Southwest, as well as some of the protests we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement. And prioritizing that is pretty difficult. And so one thing that I I've been doing is I've noticed that a lot of my routine projects or things I've been working on earlier in the year are off the table, and I'll get back to them when I have time. But for now, I feel like I'm a little bit more on breaking news almost every day in a way that I wasn't before. >> Gerard, I want to get your thoughts on this. Wall Street Journal has been since I could remember when the web hit the scene early on very digital savvy. Reporting, it's obviously, awesome as well. As you have people in sheltering in place, both journalists and the people themselves and the companies, there's an important part of the digital component. How do you see that as an opportunity and a challenge at the same time because you want to get data out there, you want to be collecting and reporting those stories? How do you see that opportunity, given the challenge that people can't meet face to face? >> First of all, thank you very much for having me. I think as we've all discovered in all fields of endeavor in the last three months, it's been quite a revelation, how much we can do without using without access to the traditional office environment. I think one of the things that Coronavirus, this crisis will have done we all agree I think is that it will have fundamentally changed the way people work. There'll be a lot more people quite a bit more working from home. They'll be a lot more remote working. Generally, there'll be a lot less travel. So on the one hand, it's been eye opening. actually how relatively easy, I use that word carefully. But how we've managed, and I think it's true of all news organizations, how we've managed surprisingly well, I think, without actually being at work. At the Wall Street Journal, we have a big office, obviously in midtown Manhattan, as well as dozens of bureaus around the world. Nobody has really been in that office since the middle of March. And yet we've put out a complete Wall Street Journal product, everything from the print edition, obviously, through every aspect of digital media, the website, all of the apps, video, everything, audio, podcasts. We've been able to do pretty well everything that we could do when we were all working in the office. So I think that will be an important lesson and that will clearly induce some change, some long term changes, I think about the way we work. That said, I'd point to two particular challenges that I think we have not properly overcome. Or if you like that we have, the two impediments, that the crisis has produced for us. One is, as you said, the absence of face to face activity, the hive process, which I think is really important. I think that a lot of the best ideas, a lot of the best, the best stories are developed through conversations between people in an office which don't necessarily we can't necessarily replicate through the online experience through this kind of event or through the Zoom meetings that we've all been doing. I think that has inhibited to some extent, some of the more creative activity that we could have done. I think the second larger problem which we all must face with this is that being essentially locked up in our homes for more than three months, which most of us has been I think accentuates a problem that is already that has been a problem in journalism for a long time, which is that journalists tend to cluster in the major metropolitan areas. I think, a couple of years ago, I read a study which said, I think that more than three quarters of journalists work for major news organizations, print, digital TV, radio, whatever, live and work in one of four major metropolises in the US. That's the New York area, the Washington DC area, the San Francisco area and the LA area. And that tends to create a very narrow worldview, unfortunately, because not enough people either come from those areas, but from outside those areas or spend enough time talking to people from outside those areas. And I think the Coronavirus has accentuated that. And I think in terms of coverage, I'm here in New York. I've been in New York continuously for three and a half months now which is quite unusual, I usually travel a lot. And so my reporting, I write columns now, mainly, but obviously I talk to people too. But the reporting, the editing that we're doing here is inevitably influenced by the experience that we've had in New York, which has obviously been, frankly, devastating. New York has been devastated by Coronavirus in a way that no where else in the country has. And I think to some extent, that does, perhaps have undue influence on the coverage. We're all locked up. We're all mindful of our own health. We're all mindful of people that we know who've gone to hospital or have been very, very sick or where we are, we are heavily influenced by our own immediate environment. And I think that has been a problem if we had been, imagine if the journalists in the country, instead of being clustered in New York and LA and San Francisco had been sort of spread over Texas and Missouri and Florida, things like that. I think you'd have a very different overall accounting of this story over the last three months. So I think it's just, it's accentuated that phenomenon in journalism, which I think we're mindful of, and which we all need to do a better job of addressing. >> It's really interesting. And I want to come back to that point around, who you're collaborating with to get this, now we have virtual ground truth, I guess, how you collaborate. But decision making around stories is, you need an open mind. And if you have this, I guess, I'll call it groupthink or clustering is interesting, now we have digital and we have virtual, it opens up the aperture but we still have the groupthink. But I want to get Eric's take first on his work environment, 'cause I know you've lived on both sides of New York and San Francisco area, as well as you've worked out in the field for agencies, as well on the other side, on the storytelling side. How has this current news environment, journalism environment impacted your view and challenges and your opportunities that you're going after the news? >> Well, so there's there's a few elements here. So one, Barron's Of course, covers the world, looks at the world through a financial lens. We cover the stock market every day. The stock market is not the center of story, but it is an important element of what's been unfolding over the last few months and the markets have been incredibly volatile, we change the way that we approach the markets. Because everything, the big stories are macro stories, huge swings in stock prices, huge swings in the price of oil, dramatic moves in almost every financial security that you can imagine. And so there's a little bit of a struggle for us as we try and shift our daily coverage to be a little more focused on the macro stories as we're still trying to tell what's happening with individual stocks and companies, but these bigger stories have changed our approach. So even if you look at say the covers of our magazine over the last few months, typically, we would do a cover on a company or an investor, that sort of thing. And now they're all big, thematic stories, because the world has changed. And world is changing how it looks at the financial markets. I think one thing that that Gerard touched on is the inability to really leave your house. I'm sitting in my little home office here, where I've been working since March, and my inability to get out and talk to people in person to have some, some interface with the companies and people that I cover, makes it tougher. You get story ideas from those interactions. I think Gerard said some of it comes from your interactions with your colleagues. But some of that also just comes from your ability to interact with sources and that is really tougher to do. It's more formalistic if you do it online. It's just not the same to be on a Zoom call as to be sitting in a Starbucks with somebody and talking about what's going on. I think the other elements of this is that there's, we have a lot of attempts, trying new things trying to reach our readers. We'll do video sessions, we'll do all sorts of other things. And it's one more layer on top of everything else is that there's a lot of demands on the time for the people who are working in journalism right now. I would say one other thing I'll touch on, John, which is, you mentioned, I did use, I worked for public communications for a while, and I do feel their pain because the ability to do any normal PR pitching for new products, new services, the kinds of things that PR people do every day is really tough. It's just really hard to get anybody's attention for those things right now. And the world is focused on these very large problems. >> Well, we'll unpack the PR comms opportunities in the next section. But I want to to just come back to this topic teased out from Gerard and Brenna when you guys were getting out as well. This virtual ground truth, ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to get the stories, you got to report them, they got to be distributed. Obviously, the Wall Street Journal is operating well, by the way, I love the Q&A video chats and what they got going on over there. So the format's are evolving and doing a good job, people are running their business. But as journalists and reporters out there, you got to get the truth and the ground truth comes from interaction. So as you have an aperture with digital, there's also groupthink on, say, Twitter and these channels. So getting in touch with the audience to have those stories. How are you collecting the data? How are you reporting? Has anything changed or shifted that you can point to because ultimately, it's virtual. You still got to get the ground truth, you still got to get the stories. Any thoughts on this point? >> I think in a way what we're seeing is in writ large actually is a problem again, another problem that I think digital journalism or the digital product digital content, if you like, actually presents for us today, which is that it's often said, I think rightly, that one of the, as successful as a lot of digital journalism has been and thank you for what you said about the Wall Street Journal. And we have done a tremendous job and by the way, one of the things that's been a striking feature of this crisis has been the rapid growth in subscriptions that we've had at the Journal. I know other news organizations have too. But we've benefited particularly from a hunger for the quality news. And we've put on an enormous number subscriptions in the last three months. So we've been very fortunate in that respect. But one of the challenges that people always say, one of the one of the drawbacks that people always draw attention to about digital content is that there's a lack of, for want of a better words, serendipity about the experience. When you used to read a newspaper, print newspapers, when may be some of us are old enough to remember, we'd get a newspaper, we'd open it up, we'd look at the front page, we look inside, we'd look at what other sections they were. And we would find things, very large number of things that we weren't particularly, we weren't looking for, we weren't expecting to, we're looking for a story about such. With the digital experience, as we know, that's a much it's a much less serendipitous experience. So you tend to a lot of search, you're looking, you find things that you tend to be looking for, and you find fewer things that, you follow particular people on social media that you have a particular interest in, you follow particular topics and have RSS feeds or whatever else you're doing. And you follow things that, you tend to find things that you were looking for. You don't find many things you weren't. What I think that the virus, the being locked up at home, again, has had a similar effect. That we, again, some of the best stories that I think anybody comes across in life, but news organizations are able to do are those stories that you know that you come across when you might have been looking for something else. You might have been working on a story about a particular company with a particular view to doing one thing and you came across somebody else. And he or she may have told you something actually really quite different and quite interesting and it took you in a different direction. That is easier to do when you're talking to people face to face, when you're actually there, when you're calling, when you're tasked with looking at a topic in the realm. When you are again, sitting at home with your phone on your computer, you tend to be more narrowly so you tend to sort of operate in lanes. And I think that we haven't had the breadth probably of journalism that I think you would get. So that's a very important you talk about data. The data that we have is obviously, we've got access broadly to the same data that we would have, the same electronically delivered data that we would have if we'd been sitting in our office. The data that I think in some ways is more interesting is the non electronically delivered data that is again, the casual conversation, the observation that you might get from being in a particular place or being with someone. The stimuli that arise from being physically in a place that you just aren't getting. And I think that is an important driver of a lot of stories. And we're missing that. >> Well, Gerard, I just want to ask real quick before I go to Brenna on her her take on this. You mentioned the serendipity and taking the stories in certain directions from the interactions. But also there's trust involved. As you build that relationship, there's trust between the parties, and that takes you down that road. How do you develop trust as you are online now? Is there a methodology or technique? Because you want to get the stories out fast, it's a speed game. But there's also the development side of it where a trust equation needs to build. What's your thoughts on that piece? Because that's where the real deeper stories come from. >> So I wasn't sure if you're asking me or Gerard. >> Gerard if he wants can answer that is the trust piece. >> I'll let the others speak to that too. Yeah, it is probably harder to... Again, most probably most people, most stories, most investigative stories, most scoops, most exclusives tend to come from people you already trust, right? So you've developed a trust with them, and they've developed a trust with you. Perhaps more importantly, they know you're going to treat the story fairly and properly. And that tends to develop over time. And I don't think that's been particularly impaired by this process. You don't need to have a physical proximity with someone in order to be able to develop that trust. My sources, I generally speak to them on the phone 99% of the time anyway, and you can still do that from home. So I don't think that's quite... Obviously, again, there are many more benefits from being able to actually physically interact with someone. But I think the level of, trust takes a long time to develop, let's be honest, too, as well. And I think you develop that trust both by developing good sources. and again, as I said, with the sources understanding that you're going to do the story well. >> Brenna, speed game is out there, you got to get stories fast. How do you balance speed and getting the stories and doing some digging into it? What's your thoughts on all this? >> I would say, every week is looking different for me these days. A lot of times there are government announcements coming out, or there are numbers coming out or something that really does require a really quick story. And so what I've been trying to do is get those stories out as quick as possible with maybe sources I already have, or really just the facts on the ground I can get quickly. And then I think in these days, too, there is a ton of room for following up on things. And some news event will come out but it sparks another idea. And that's the time to that when I'm hearing from PR people or I'm hearing from people who care about the issue, right after that first event is really useful for me to hear who else is thinking about these things and maybe ways I can go beyond the first story for something that more in depth and adds more context and provides more value to our readers. >> Awesome. Well, guys, great commentary and insight there on the current situation. The next section is with the role of PR, because it's changing. I've heard the term earned media is a term that's been kicked around. Now we're all virtual, and we're all connected. The media is all virtual. It's all earned at this point. And that's not just a journalistic thing, there's storytelling. There's new voices emerging. You got these newsletter services, audiences are moving very quickly around trying to figure out what's real. So comms folks are trying to get out there and do their job and tell a story. And sometimes that story doesn't meet the cadence of say, news and/or reporting. So let's talk about that. Eric, you brought this up. You have been on both sides. You said you feel for the folks out there who are trying to do their job. How is the job changing? And what can they do now? >> The news cycle is so ferocious at the moment that it's very difficult to insert your weigh in on something that doesn't touch on the virus or the economy or social unrest or the volatility of the financial markets. So I think there's certain kinds of things that are probably best saved for another moment in time, If you're trying to launch new products or trying to announce new services, or those things are just tougher to do right now. I think that the most interesting questions right now are, If I'm a comms person, how can I make myself and my clients a resource to media who are trying to tell stories about these things, do it in a timely way, not overreach, not try insert myself into a story that really isn't a good fit? Now, every time one of these things happen, we got inboxes full of pitches for things that are only tangentially relevant and are probably not really that helpful, either to the reporter generally or to the client of the firm that is trying to pitch an idea. But I will say on the on this at the same time that I rely on my connections to people in corporate comms every single day to make connections with companies that I cover and need to talk to. And it's a moment when almost more than ever, I need immediacy of response, accurate information access to the right people at the companies who I'm trying to cover. But it does mean you need to be I think sharper or a little more pointed a little more your thinking about why am I pitching this person this story? Because the there's no time to waste. We are working 24 hours a day is what it feels like. You don't want to be wasting people's time. >> Well, you guys you guys represent big brands in media which is phenomenal. And anyone would love to have their company mentioned obviously, in a good way, that's their goal. But the word media relations means you relate to the media. If there's no media to relate to, the roles change, and there's not enough seats at the table, so to speak. So getting a clip on in the clip book that gets sent to management, look, "We're on Bloomberg." "Great, check." But is at it? So people, this is a department that needs to do more. Is there things that they can do, that isn't just chasing, getting on your franchises stories? Because it obviously would be great if we were all on Barron's Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, but they can't always get that. They still got to do more. They got to develop the relationships. >> John, one thing I would be conscious of here is that many of our publications, it's certainly true for journalists, true for us at Barron's and it's certainly true for Bloomberg. We're all multimedia publishers. We're doing lots of things. Barron's has television show on Fox. We have a video series. We have podcasts and newsletters, and daily live audio chats and all sorts of other stuff in addition to the magazine and the website. And so part of that is trying to figure out not just the right publication, but maybe there's an opportunity to do a very particular, maybe you'd be great fit for this thing, but not that thing. And having a real understanding of what are the moving parts. And then the other part, which is always the hardest part, in a way, is truly understanding not just I want to pitch to Bloomberg, but who do I want to pitch at Bloomberg. So I might have a great story for the Wall Street Journal and maybe Gerard would care but maybe it's really somebody you heard on the street who cares or somebody who's covering a particular company. So you have to navigate that, I think effectively. And even, more so now, because we're not sitting in a newsroom. I can't go yell over to somebody who's a few desks away and suggest they take a look at something. >> Do you think that the comm-- (talk over each other) Do you think the comms teams are savvy and literate in multimedia? Are they still stuck in the print ways or the group swing is they're used to what they're doing and haven't evolved? Is that something that you're seeing here? >> I think it varies. Some people will really get it. I think one of the things that that this comes back to in a sense is it's relationship driven. To Gerard's point, it's not so much about trusting people that I don't know, it's about I've been at this a long time, I know what people I know, who I trust, and they know the things I'm interested in and so that relationship is really important. It's a lot harder to try that with somebody new. And the other thing is, I think relevant here is something that we touched on earlier, which is the idiosyncratic element. The ability for me to go out and see new things is tougher. In the technology business, you could spend half your time just going to events, You could go to the conferences and trade shows and dinners and lunches and coffees all day long. And you would get a lot of good story ideas that way. And now you can't do any of that. >> There's no digital hallway. There are out there. It's called Twitter, I guess or-- >> Well, you're doing it from sitting in this very I'm still doing it from sitting in the same chair, having conversations, in some ways like that. But it's not nearly the same. >> Gerard, Brenna, what do you guys think about the comms opportunity, challenges, either whether it's directly or indirectly, things that they could do differently? Share your thoughts. Gerard, we'll start with you? >> Well, I would echo Eric's point as far as knowing who you're pitching to. And I would say that in, at least for the people I'm working with, some of our beats have changed because there are new issues to cover. Someone's taking more of a role covering virus coverage, someone's taking more of a role covering protests. And so I think knowing instead of casting a really wide net, I'm normally happy to try to direct pitches in the right direction. But I do have less time to do that now. So I think if someone can come to me and say, "I know you've been covering this, "this is how my content fits in with that." It'd grab my attention more and makes it easier for me. So I would say that that is one thing that as beats are shifting and people are taking on a little bit of new roles in our coverage, that that's something PR and marketing teams could definitely keep an eye on. >> I agree with all of that. And all everything everybody said. I'd say two very quick things. One, exactly as everybody said, really know who you are pitching to. It's partly just, it's going to be much more effective if you're pitching to the right person, the right story. But when I say that also make the extra effort to familiarize yourself with the work that that reporter or that editor has done. You cannot, I'm sorry to say, overestimate the vanity of reporters or editors or anybody. And so if you're pitching a story to a particular reporter, in a field, make sure you're familiar with what that person may have done and say to her, "I really thought you did a great job "on the reporting that you did on this." Or, "I read your really interesting piece about that," or "I listened to your podcast." It's a relatively easy thing to do that yields extraordinarily well. A, because it appeals to anybody's fantasy and we all have a little bit of that. But, B, it also suggests to the reporter or the editor or the person involved the PR person communications person pitching them, really knows this, has really done their work and has really actually takes this seriously. And instead of just calling, the number of emails I get, and I'm sure it's the same for the others too, or occasional calls out of the blue or LinkedIn messages. >> I love your work. I love your work. >> (voice cuts out) was technology. Well, I have a technology story for you. It's absolutely valueless. So that's the first thing, I would really emphasize that. The second thing I'd say is, especially on the specific relation to this crisis, this Coronavirus issue is it's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, make sure that what you're doing what you're pitching is not completely irrelevant right now. The last three months has not been a very good time to pitch a story about going out with a bunch of people to a crowded restaurant or whatever or something like that to do something. Clearly, we know that. At the same time, don't go to the other extreme and try and make every little thing you have seen every story you may have every product or service or idea that you're pitching don't make it the thing that suddenly is really important because of Coronavirus. I've seen too many of those too. People trying too hard to say, "In this time of crisis, "in this challenging time, what people really want to hear "about is "I don't know, "some new diaper "baby's diaper product that I'm developing or whatever." That's trying too hard. So there is something in the middle, which is, don't pitch the obviously irrelevant story that is just not going to get any attention through this process. >> So you're saying don't-- >> And at the same time, don't go too far in the other direction. And essentially, underestimate the reporter's intelligence 'cause that reporter can tell you, "I can see that you're trying too hard." >> So no shotgun approach, obviously, "Hey, I love your work." Okay, yeah. And then be sensitive to what you're working on not try to force an angle on you, if you're doing a story. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on the evolution of some of the prominent journalists that I've known and/or communication professionals that are taking roles in the big companies to be storytellers, or editors of large companies. I interviewed Andy Cunningham last year, who used to be With Cunningham Communications, and formerly of Apple, better in the tech space and NPR. She said, "Companies have to own their own story "and tell it and put it out there." I've seen journalists say on Facebook, "I'm working on a story of x." And then crowdsource a little inbound. Thoughts on this new role of corporations telling their own story, going direct to the consumers. >> I think to a certain extent, that's valuable. And in some ways, it's a little overrated. There are a lot of companies creating content on their websites, or they're creating their own podcasts or they're creating their own newsletter and those kinds of things. I'm not quite sure how much of that, what the consumption level is for some of those things. I think, to me, the more valuable element of telling your story is less about the form and function and it's more about being able to really tell people, explain to them why what they do matters and to whom it matters, understanding the audience that's going to want to hear your story. There are, to your point, there are quite a few journalists who have migrated to either corporate communications or being in house storytellers of one kind or another for large businesses. And there's certainly a need to figure out the right way to tell your story. I think in a funny way, this is a tougher moment for those things. Because the world is being driven by external events, by these huge global forces are what we're all focused on right now. And it makes it a lot tougher to try and steer your own story at this particular moment in time. And I think you do see it Gerard was talking about don't try and... You want to know what other people are doing. You do want to be aware of what others are writing about. But there's this tendency to want to say, "I saw you wrote a story about Peloton "and we too have a exercise story that you can, "something that's similar." >> (chuckles) A story similar to it. We have a dance video or something. People are trying to glam on to things and taking a few steps too far. But in terms of your original question, it's just tougher at the moment to control your story in that particular fashion, I think. >> Well, this brings up a good point. I want to get to Gerard's take on this because the Wall Street Journal obviously has been around for many, many decades. and it's institution in journalism. In the old days, if you weren't relevant enough to make the news, if you weren't the most important story that people cared about, the editors make that choice and you're on the front page or in a story editorially. And companies would say, "No, but I should be in there." And you'd say, "That's what advertising is for." And that's the way it seemed to work in the past. If you weren't relevant in the spirit of the decision making of important story or it needs to be communicated to the audience, there's ads for that. You can get a full page ad in the old days. Now with the new world, what's an ad, what's a story? You now have multiple omni-channels out there. So traditionally, you want to get the best, most important story that's about relevance. So companies might not have a relevant story and they're telling a boring story. There's no there, there, or they miss the story. How do you see this? 'Cause this is the blend, this is the gray area that I see. It's certainly a good story, depending on who you're talking to, the 10 people who like it. >> I think there's no question. We're in the news business, topicality matters. You're going to have a much better chance of getting your story, getting your product or service, whatever covered by the Wall Street Journal, Barron's or anywhere else for that matter, if it seems somehow news related, whether it's the virus or the unrest that we've been seeing, or it's to do with the economy. Clearly, you can have an effect. Newspapers, news organizations of all the three news organizations we represent don't just, are not just obviously completely obsessed with what happened this morning and what's going on right now. We are all digging into deeper stories, especially in the business field. Part of what we all do is actually try to get beyond the daily headlines. And so what's happening with the fortunes of a particular company. Obviously, they may be impacted by they're going to be impacted by the lockdown and Coronavirus. But they actually were doing some interesting things that they were developing over the long term, and we would like to look into that too. So again, there is a balance there. And I'm not going to pretend that if you have a really topical story about some new medical device or some new technology for dealing with this new world that we're all operating in, you're probably going to get more attention than you would if you don't have that. But I wouldn't also underestimate, the other thing is, as well as topicality, everybody's looking at the same time to be different, and every journalist wants to do something original and exclusive. And so they are looking for a good story that may be completely unrelated. In fact, I would also underestimate, I wouldn't underestimate either the desire of readers and viewers and listeners to actually have some deeper reported stories on subjects that are not directly in the news right now. So again, it's about striking the balance right. But I wouldn't say that, that there is not at all, I wouldn't say there is not a strong role for interesting stories that may not have anything to do what's going on with the news right now. >> Brenna, you want to add on your thoughts, you're in the front lines as well, Bloomberg, everyone wants to be on Bloomberg. There's Bloomberg radio. You guys got tons of media too, there's tons of stuff to do. How do they navigate? And how do you view the interactions with comms folks? >> It looks we're having a little bit of challenge with... Eric, your thoughts on comm professionals. The questions in the chats are everything's so fast paced, do you think it's less likely for reporters to respond to PR comms people who don't have interacted with you before? Or with people you haven't met before? >> It's an internal problem. I've seen data that talks about the ratio of comms people to reporters, and it's, I don't know, six or seven to one or something like that, and there are days when it feels like it's 70 to one. And so it is challenging to break through. And I think it's particularly challenging now because some of the tools you might have had, you might have said, "Can we grab coffee one day or something like that," trying to find ways to get in front of that person when you don't need them. It's a relationship business. I know this is a frustrating answer, but I think it's the right answer which is those relationships between media and comms people are most successful when they've been established over time. And so you're not getting... The spray and pray strategy doesn't really work. It's about, "Eric, I have a story that's perfect for you. "And here's why I think you you should talk to this guy." And if they really know me, there's a reasonable chance that I'll not only listen to them, but I'll at least take the call. You need to have that high degree of targeting. It is really hard to break through and people try everything. They try, the insincere version of the, "I read your story, it was great. "but here's another great story." Which maybe they read your story, maybe they didn't at least it was an attempt. Or, "if you like this company, you'll love that one." People try all these tricks to try and get get to you. I think the highest level of highest probability of success comes from the more information you have about not just what I covered yesterday, but what do I cover over time? What kinds of stories am I writing? What kinds of stories does the publication write? And also to keep the pitching tight, I was big believer when I was doing comms, you should be able to pitch stories in two sentences. And you'll know from that whether there's going to be connection or not, don't send me five or more pitches. Time is of the essence, keep it short and as targeted as possible. >> That's a good answer to Paul Bernardo's question in the chat, which is how do you do the pitch. Brenna, you're back. Can you hear us? No. Okay. We'll get back to her when she gets logged back in. Gerard, your thoughts on how to reach you. I've never met you before, if I'm a CEO or I'm a comms person, a company never heard of, how do I get your attention? If I can't have a coffee with you with COVID, how do I connect with you virtually? (talk over each other) >> Exactly as Eric said, it is about targeting, it's really about making sure you are. And again, it's, I hate to say this, but it's not that hard. If you are the comms person for a large or medium sized company or even a small company, and you've got a particular pitch you want to make, you're probably dealing in a particular field, a particular sector, business sector or whatever. Let's say it says not technology for change, let's say it's fast moving consumer goods or something like that. Bloomberg, Brenna is in an enormous organization with a huge number of journalist you deal and a great deal of specialism and quality with all kinds of sectors. The Wall Street Journal is a very large organization, we have 13, 1400 reporters, 13 to 1400 hundred journalist and staff, I should say. Barron's is a very large organization with especially a particularly strong field coverage, especially in certain sectors of business and finance. It's not that hard to find out A, who is the right person, actually the right person in those organizations who's been dealing with the story that you're trying to sell. Secondly, it's absolutely not hard to find out what they have written or broadcast or produced on in that general field in the course of the last, and again, as Eric says, going back not just over the last week or two, but over the last year or two, you can get a sense of their specialism and understand them. It's really not that hard. It's the work of an hour to go back and see who the right person is and to find out what they've done. And then to tailor the pitch that you're making to that person. And again, I say that partly, it's not purely about the vanity of the reporter, it's that the reporter will just be much more favorably inclined to deal with someone who clearly knows, frankly, not just what they're pitching, but what the journalist is doing and what he or she, in his or her daily activity is actually doing. Target it as narrowly as you can. And again, I would just echo what Eric and I think what Brenna was also saying earlier too that I'm really genuinely surprised at how many very broad pitches, again, I'm not directly in a relative role now. But I was the editor in chief of the Journal for almost six years. And even in that position, the number of extraordinarily broad pitches I get from people who clearly didn't really know who I was, who didn't know what I did, and in some cases, didn't even really know what Wall Street Journal was. If you can find that, if you actually believe that. It's not hard. It's not that hard to do that. And you will have so much more success, if you are identifying the organization, the people, the types of stories that they're interested in, it really is not that difficult to do. >> Okay, I really appreciate, first of all, great insight there. I want to get some questions from the crowd so if you're going to chat, there was a little bit of a chat hiccup in there. So it should be fixed. We're going to go to the chat for some questions for this distinguished panel. Talk about the new coffee. There's a good question here. Have you noticed news fatigue, or reader seeking out news other than COVID? If so, what news stories have you been seeing trending? In other words, are people sick and tired of COVID? Or is it still on the front pages? Is that relevant? And if not COVID, what stories are important, do you think? >> Well, I could take a brief stab at that. I think it's not just COVID per se, for us, the volatility of the stock market, the uncertainties in the current economic environment, the impact on on joblessness, these massive shifts of perceptions on urban lifestyles. There's a million elements of this that go beyond the core, what's happening with the virus story. I do think as a whole, all those things, and then you combine that with the social unrest and Black Lives Matter. And then on top of that, the pending election in the fall. There's just not a lot of room left for other stuff. And I think I would look at it a little bit differently. It's not finding stories that don't talk on those things, it's finding ways for coverage of other things whether it's entertainment. Obviously, there's a huge impact on the entertainment business. There's a huge impact on sports. There's obviously a huge impact on travel and retail and restaurants and even things like religious life and schooling. I have the done parents of a college, was about to be a college sophomore, prays every day that she can go back to school in the fall. There are lots of elements to this. And it's pretty hard to imagine I would say to Gerard's point earlier, people are looking for good stories, they're always looking for good stories on any, but trying to find topics that don't touch on any of these big trends, there's not a lot of reasons to look for those. >> I agree. Let me just give you an example. I think Eric's exactly right. It's hard to break through. I'll just give you an example, when you asked that question, I just went straight to my Wall Street Journal app on my phone. And of course, like every organization, you can look at stories by sections and by interest and by topic and by popularity. And what are the three most popular stories right now on the Wall Street Journal app? I can tell you the first one is how exactly do you catch COVID-19? I think that's been around since for about a month. The second story is cases accelerate across the United States. And the third story is New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, tell travelers from areas with virus rates to self isolate. So look, I think anecdotally, there is a sense of COVID fatigue. Well, we're all slightly tired of it. And certainly, we were probably all getting tired, or rather distressed by those terrible cases and when we've seen them really accelerate back in March and April and these awful stories of people getting sick and dying. I was COVID fatigued. But I just have to say all of the evidence we have from our data, in terms of as I said earlier, the interest in the story, the demand for what we're doing, the growth in subscriptions that we've had, and just as I said, little things like that, that I can point you at any one time, I can guarantee you that our among our top 10 most read stories, at least half of them will be COVID-19. >> I think it's safe to say general interest in that outcome of progression of that is super critical. And I think this brings up the tech angle, which we can get into a minute. But just stick with some of these questions I just want to just keep these questions flowing while we have a couple more minutes left here. In these very challenging times for journalism, do byline articles have more power to grab the editors attention in the pitching process? >> Well, I think I assume what the questioner is asking when he said byline articles is contributed. >> Yes. >> Contributed content. Barron's doesn't run a lot of contributing content that way in a very limited way. When I worked at Forbes, we used to run tons of it. I'm not a big believer that that's necessarily a great way to generate a lot of attention. You might get published in some publication, if you can get yourself onto the op ed page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, more power to you. But I think in most cases-- >> It's the exception not the rule Exception not the rule so to speak, on the big one. >> Yeah. >> Well, this brings up the whole point about certainly on SiliconANGLE, our property, where I'm co founder and chief, we basically debate over and get so many pitches, "hey, I want to write for you, here's a contributed article." And it's essentially an advertisement. Come on, really, it's not really relevant. In some case we (talk over each other) analysts come in and and done that. But this brings up the question, we're seeing these newsletters like sub stack and these services really are funding direct journalism. So it's an interesting. if you're good enough to write Gerard, what's your take on this, you've seen this, you have a bit of experience in this. >> I think, fundamental problem here is that is people like the idea of doing by lines or contributed content, but often don't have enough to say. You can't just do, turn your marketing brochure into a piece of an 800 word with the content that that's going to be compelling or really attract any attention. I think there's a place for it, if you truly have something important to say, and if you really have something new to say, and it's not thinly disguised marketing material. Yeah, you can find a way to do that. I'm not sure I would over-rotate on that as an approach. >> No, I just briefly, again, I completely agree. At the Journal we just don't ever publish those pieces. As Eric says, you're always, everyone is always welcome to try and pitch to the op ed pages of the Journal. They're not generally going to I don't answer for them, I don't make those decisions. But I've never seen a marketing pitch run as an op ed effectively. I just think you have to know again, who you're aiming at. I'm sure it's true for Bloomberg, Barron's and the Journal, most other major news organizations are not really going to consider that. There might be organizations, there might be magazines, digital and print magazines. There might be certain trade publications that would consider that. Again, at the Journal and I'm sure most of the large news organizations, we have very strict rules about what we can publish. And how and who can get published. And it's essentially journal editorials, that journal news staff who can publish stories we don't really take byline, outside contribution. >> Given that your time is so valuable, guys, what's the biggest, best practice to get your attention? Eric, you mentioned keeping things tight and crisp. Are there certain techniques to get your attention? >> Well I'll mention just a couple of quick things. Email is better than most other channels, despite the volume. Patience is required as a result because of the volume. People do try and crawl over the transom, hit you up on LinkedIn, DM you on Twitter, there's a lot of things that people try and do. I think a very tightly crafted, highly personalized email with the right subject line is probably still the most effective way, unless it's somebody you actually, there are people who know me who know they have the right to pick up the phone and call me if they really think they have... That's a relationship that's built over time. The one thing on this I would add which I think came up a little bit before thinking about it is, you have to engage in retail PR, not not wholesale PR. The idea that you're going to spam a list of 100 people and think that that's really going to be a successful approach, it's not unless you're just making an announcement, and if you're issuing your earnings release, or you've announced a large acquisition or those things, fine, then I need to get the information. But simply sending around a very wide list is not a good strategy, in most cases, I would say probably for anyone. >> We got Brenna back, can you hear me? She's back, okay. >> I can hear you, I'm back. >> Well, let's go back to you, we missed you. Thanks for coming back in. We had a glitch on our end but appreciate it, bandwidth internet is for... Virtual is always a challenge to do live, but thank you. The trend we're just going through is how do I pitch to you? What's the best practice? How do I get your attention? Do bylines lines work? Actually, Bloomberg doesn't do that very often either as well as like the Journal. but your thoughts on folks out there who are really trying to figure out how to do a good job, how to get your attention, how to augment your role and responsibilities. What's your thoughts? >> I would say, going back to what we said a little bit before about really knowing who you're pitching to. If you know something that I've written recently that you can reference, that gets my attention. But I would also encourage people to try to think about different ways that they can be part of a story if they are looking to be mentioned in one of our articles. And what I mean by that is, maybe you are launching new products or you have a new initiative, but think about other ways that your companies relate to what's going on right now. So for instance, one thing that I'm really interested in is just the the changing nature of work in the office place itself. So maybe you know of something that's going on at a company, unlimited vacation for the first time or sabbaticals are being offered to working parents who have nowhere to send their children, or something that's unique about the current moment that we're living in. And I think that those make really good interviews. So it might not be us featuring your product or featuring exactly what your company does, but it still makes you part of the conversation. And I think it's still, it's probably valuable to the company as well to get that mention, and people may be looking into what you guys do. So I would say that something else we are really interested in right now is really looking at who we're quoting and the diversity of our sources. So that's something else I would put a plug in for PR people to be keeping an eye on, is if you're always putting up your same CEO who is maybe of a certain demographic, but you have other people in your company who you can give the opportunity to talk with the media. I'm really interested in making sure I'm using a diverse list of sources and I'm not just always calling the same person. So if you can identify people who maybe even aren't experienced with it, but they're willing to give it a try, I think that now's a really good moment to be able to get new voices in there. >> Rather than the speed dial person you go to for that vertical or that story, building out those sources. >> Exactly. >> Great, that's great insight, Everyone, great insights. And thank you for your time on this awesome panel. Love to do it again. This has been super informative. I love some of the engagement out there. And again, I think we can do more of these and get the word out. I'd like to end the panel on an uplifting note for young aspiring journalists coming out of school. Honestly, journalism programs are evolving. The landscape is changing. We're seeing a sea change. As younger generation comes out of college and master's programs in journalism, we need to tell the most important stories. Could you each take a minute to give your advice to folks either going in and coming out of school, what to be prepared for, how they can make an impact? Brenna, we'll start with you, Gerard and Eric. >> That's a big question. I would say one thing that has been been encouraging about everything going on right now as I have seen an increased hunger for information and an increased hunger for accurate information. So I do think it can obviously be disheartening to look at the furloughs and the layoffs and everything that is going on around the country. But at the same time, I think we have been able to see really big impacts from the people that are doing reporting on protests and police brutality and on responses to the virus. And so I think for young journalists, definitely take a look at the people who are doing work that you think is making a difference. And be inspired by that to keep pushing even though the market might be a little bit difficult for a while. >> I'd say two things. One, again, echoing what Brenna said, identify people that you follow or you admire or you think are making a real contribution in the field and maybe directly interact with them. I think all of us, whoever we are, always like to hear from young journalists and budding journalists. And again, similar advice to giving to the advice that we were giving about PR pitches. If you know what that person has been doing, and then contact them and follow them. And I know I've been contacted by a number of young journalists like that. The other thing I'd say is and this is more of a plea than a piece of advice. But I do think it will work in the long run, be prepared to go against the grain. I fear that too much journalism today is of the same piece. There is not a lot of intellectual diversity in what we're seeing There's a tendency to follow the herd. Goes back a little bit to what I was saying right at the opening about the fact that too many journalists, quite frankly, are clustered in the major metropolitan areas in this country and around the world. Have something distinctive and a bit different to say. I'm not suggesting you offer some crazy theory or a set of observations about the world but be prepared to... To me, the reason I went into journalism was because I was always a bit skeptical about whenever I saw something in any media, which especially one which seemed to have a huge amount of support and was repeated in all places, I always asked myself, "Is that really true? "Is that actually right? "Maybe there's an alternative to that." And that's going to make you stand out as a journalist, that's going to give you a distinctiveness. It's quite hard to do in some respects right now, because standing out from the crowd can get you into trouble. And I'm not suggesting that people should do that. Have a record of original storytelling, of reporting, of doing things perhaps that not, because look, candidly, there are probably right now in this country, 100,00 budding putative journalists who would like to go out and write about, report on Black Lives Matter and the reports on the problems of racial inequality in this country and the protests and all of that kind of stuff. The problem there is there are already 100,000 of those people who want to do that in addition to probably the 100,000 journalists who are already doing it. Find something else, find something different. have something distinctive to offer so that when attention moves on from these big stories, whether it's COVID or race or politics or the election or Donald Trump or whatever. Have something else to offer that is quite distinctive and where you have actually managed to carve out for yourself a real record as having an independent voice. >> Brenna and Gerard, great insight. Eric, take us home close us out. >> Sure. I'd say a couple things. So one is as a new, as a young journalist, I think first of all, having a variety of tools in your toolkit is super valuable. So be able to write long and write short, be able to do audio, blogs, podcast, video. If you can shoot photos and the more skills that you have, a following on social media. You want to have all of the tools in your toolkit because it is challenging to get a job and so you want to be able to be flexible enough to fill all those roles. And the truth is that a modern journalist is finding the need to do all of that. When I first started at Barron's many, many years ago, we did one thing, we did a weekly magazine. You'd have two weeks to write a story. It was very comfortable. And that's just not the way the world works anymore. So that's one element. And the other thing, I think Gerard is right. You really want to have a certain expertise if possible that makes you stand out. And the contradiction is, but you also want to have the flexibility to do lots of different stories. You want to get (voice cuts out) hold. But if you have some expertise, that is hard to find, that's really valuable. When Barron's hires we're always looking for people who have, can write well but also really understand the financial markets. And it can be challenging for us sometimes to find those people. And so I think there's, you need to go short and long. It's a barbell strategy. Have expertise, but also be flexible in both your approach and the things you're willing to cover. >> Great insight. Folks, thanks for the great commentary, great chats for the folks watching, really appreciate your valuable time. Be original, go against the grain, be skeptical, and just do a good job. I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think the world's changing. Thanks for your time. And I hope the comms folks enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for joining us, everyone. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here in the Cube for this Cube Talk was one hour power panel. Awesome conversation. Stay in chat if you want to ask more questions. We'll come back and look at those chats later. But thank you for watching. Have a nice day. (instrumental music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to Austin. I'm Lisa Martin. With Day Volante were a pure accelerate 2019 the fourth annual event. Getting bigger and bigger and more customers on the Cube. Very excited to welcome the C I. O of Kensington Swan. Nigel Stevenson. Nigel. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Thanks for coming all the way up here or down here, Up here from New Zealand. Give us our audience. A little bit of an overview of Kensington Swan and specifically about your role is CEO. >> Sure again, Just once a top tier law firm in New Zealand. We've got a bit of an announcement from last month Were about to combine with sentence, which you might know more familiar from a brain kind of perspective. Slightly larger than what we are at the moment. We're, ah, a few 100 staffs, but between the officers and opened and Wellington with the focus spawn corporate commercial legal practice is so top tier or high in law expertise. >> So you've been there about three years. Give us a little bit of a picture of Kensington's I T department applications workloads. What's going on? There >> must be a pretty similar Thio emotional films or proficient service. Is firms actually a similar with the coming firms to smell the the most common tools we use around the PR, the practice management systems that we have on in production of documents for the work that we provide to our clients, maintaining those keeping them, searching for them, Actually, in all the emails and everything else that goes along every single matter that we do from a compliance perspective, we need to keep all of that and make sure it's safe and sound and easily searchable. >> So big drivers you got, you got the clients, you got the lawyers, you got the paralegals. It's this machine running you got, you know, to say confidentiality compliance. What are the big drivers in the business that are affecting I t. Strategy? I >> think, especially in the provision service is sick. Just continue to modernize. We've hit systems, and after the last decision, things tighten up a bit for a while, and then we fed a large push over the last few years to really bring things up. Today, bring it Bring it, Making more current on relevant to what's out there. With that, we can then bring on other applications. And I and other tools that would really help us Thio drive the business and different directions >> is the first time your accelerator Yeah, let's talk infrastructure. So it s so paint a picture. What's, uh what's it look like? You know you're here. Obviously you're pure customer, right? So what's the storage infrastructure look like? And >> we've had to guess what you would be a pretty typical infrastructure for many, many years with the two data center model. VM were storage observers and sewn on, then replicated across from a d R perspective to the other data center. They know we've gone through a big decision around. Where do we go with it? Do we take that out to the cloud? Do we keep it on Prem? Do we keep the $2 centers one way? We've ended up deciding this to go with the single Production Data center based in Auckland were we've got some d our capability. They want an office, but then plane to scale up to the cloud. So we've got enough compute to keep us going. The systems that we've got a cz we grow, we'll move. >> So you had to replicated data centers. Essentially. Is that right? You know, expensive. And then you've essentially now got a main data center. You've got some a little bit of lightweight infrastructure for D R purposes. Is that right? Way? >> Previously since he had two of everything. Well, more than two of everything but everything we head of the production, we head of the second read absent a lot of set there a semi idle for quite a lot of time. And as you say, that's quite expensive to have Ah, lot of equipment sitting there not really been used. So moving Maur to single data Seena Mol replicating some of the infrastructure, but not not the full sit. It's moving. >> So the decision to stay on Prem versus Go all in the cloud talk to us about some of the business drivers that led you to say we're going to stay on from and within that what elevated cure storage to the obvious choice >> sure is a little bit if it's old cloud model and I think that's really helped you guess influence were the on prim had we has gone as well, and we'll get that. Get that sick and weird things like the scalability off the simplicity, not having to have very experience experienced stories technicians on and so on. I think back to my days fishing nightie and putting together other brains of storage unit was a multi month process. Certifications after certifications just to be out a plug it together and then configure and coat. The story's all right. You know what the cloud and what we found with pure is. It's just become really simple. Within a couple of hours of the array arriving that was wrecked, it was turned on. It was cut into the pool and presented through TV anyway, so I'm just really, really simple. >> All the bit twiddling of the past really didn't do much for your business, obviously, but then you it shows you chose toe stay on Prem. Many law firms d'oh! Just because of the privacy and confidentiality And yeah, they had some color to that. This is a couple >> of ingles thio. If there's one being performance, wait. I need to make sure that the lawyers get the performance that they need they charging six minute increments like like most. If they can't work, then the building they're not working up providing to the clients and the clients. Also that work done at a at a good speed and returned to them as quickly as possible. And as the world has moved more to that client centric approach, you know, delivering to the client's becomes ultimate impairment to what we do. So performance was definitely key economic self. When we looked at cloud in on a price per gig per month with pure, it worked out very competitive. It wasn't quite there. Toe move into the cloud. New Zealand. We don't have the AWS or is your database data centers based on his own. They're all in Australia, So there's Ah Leighton see aspect of going many thousands of miles across the under the undersea cables to get to that data on payments. Right there, it's fast, is connected waken different, >> so you have essentially replaced your you're spinning disc with flash. Is that correct? >> Yes, that was on the other parts of it. No, you wanted to get something that was definitely modern and set us for the future. For quite a number of years Way didn't look a spinning disc. It'll weigh. Just win. Looked at what flesh rays were available. Way have head spinning this, but I definitely wanted to get your flesh. >> How >> important was the Evergreen model to you? Is it is it how much of it is marketing and how much is it? Is it Is it big business impact for you? >> Quite a few other places of work We've hit that three year or five year support moral challenge where all of a sudden the support can hockey stick up on become really, really expensive to carry on the arrays. So one of the other drivers was from an environmental environmental perspective of if you're gonna throw their equipment out after five years, but it's still working fine. Yeah, that's not really great on the environment. So with the fresh perspective as well as you have a green be able to maintain and keep their equipment running and going for longer than five years without a shop up left on the cost was really, really important. >> Sustainability was important to you guys. So you before we might live, you mentioned that you guys have been pure customers since about December of 2018. So about 10 months or so. So those lawyers that are billing every few minutes I have to get access to data because the clients are demanding kit. What's it been? Their reaction? Thio, the performance that you're delivering to them and a new correlation with revenue that business has made because of the decision to stay on from? >> I'll tell you what the best thing about it is. I don't complain that things are slow anymore, you know? So they say, Nighty, if you're not hearing any issues, that you're doing a good job and I would definitely in that camp The system's running significantly faster than what they were previously on. That was on a five year old array that was reasonable. Let's start as well. So the league Ford has been really recognizable from a performance perspective, so >> you don't get the Atta boy, but you just don't get the grief. >> Yeah, yeah, it's not very often that people come and say that you know, with regulations, and that since a nightie, >> but it sounds like it also simplified your management you described it used to take a long time Thio provisioning array before now it's sort of same day or a part of a portion of what have you done with that additional resource? Did you did your rift people? Did you redeploy them? >> You take the same style of if you do move things to the cloud. You know, with any type of outsourcing model messages freeing up time on the staff have got now work on other things. You know, we're slowly moving up the stack on a valu ed perspective of what we deliver, doubling more into automation integration, digital contract processing, the area that I think we should be working in rather than tweaking the nuts and bolts. Well, that that's where I started. So, yeah, it was good career passing the time >> being able to get to that value at is something that we talked with a lot of customers about that absolutely critical about not spending so much time at managing something. I want to get my job done. So a number of announcements came out today. I'm just curious to get your take on, for example, this kind of customer force that Dave and I were talking about with Charlie Giancarlo their CEO. Just a minute ago about this bridge to hybrid club, you mentioned an acquisition or a merger coming with Denton's. How would something like this hybrid bridge that here announced with AWS How might that be a facilitator of the merger? Or maybe even it's the IittIe foundation that you've established with Pierre. That's going to be a great facilitator of that pending merger. >> I think one of the slides and the Maquis know this morning talked about the on Priam in the cloud world being quite separate and we found that it is We've we've looked Whenever we go out to market, we'll look at both options and take your best of breed approach. Thio what, within a cure or subscribed way got into some cloud solutions. I'm not sure if Aladdin mention brains at all, but s so we have got cloudy >> from our standpoint, but your corporate standpoint, >> So we've got a bit of both, but it has been a bit hard to bridge the two, even even from a backup d R perspective on then also from scaling the the on cream applications into the cloud. Some some things just work better in the cloud or a better architect in the clouds. Fishy, some remote excess solutions were. If we've got issues, we want that separate, Will they dear? Yet between what else? Systems and the excess for staff on this kind of space that we've we've built in two for that be Never join those worlds a lot more seamlessly and through the same management consoles and just gonna make life a lot easier will be out of scale back and forward so we can move the data. I remember years and years ago talking to storage vendors and saying, Well, where can we can't replicate? No, Dad are up to a different brand or a different service In this case with the adoption or on sort of cloud, that's still very prevalent. >> Yes, So I mean, I deal. You'd like a common management framework control playing data plane, Back up framework. Is that right? Is that an objective between cloud and on Prem? I mean, it definitely helps, >> but the other things was mentioned in the keynote is around the availability of skilled people you think with my generation and I started often stopped supporting, then work my way through infrastructure and project management, team management and son. The people coming out of university now don't really have that same career path there from a slot in somewhere up the scared, the stick on >> very started python. And we're working on >> them or in the development of spice rather than the infrastructure space. The ability to find staff that have the knowledge off the system is getting hotter and hotter. Eso so the cloud moral, the almost storage is a service on the on prime since you cut through that and it means that you don't need those staff with the commonality of the tools that also helps us. Well, you don't have to serve someone who's years and years training and a new solution to be out of them have the confidence to move into it. >> What do >> you actually installing from frump? Yours? It is a vile storage block storage combination. We've got the X series of race. Okay, they're going for performance, obviously. And, um, because I was thinking in the cloud, you might you might be more interested in object store because of, you know, your document heaviness. But it depends on the merger, I guess. Where you guys go? >> Yeah, the you mentioned before on this some data sovereignty concerns around. We're that Donald stays. And that's why I think a lot of the law firms it probably are keeping some of their infrastructure on from so for sovereignty, we expect in performance. If it is the air, it's it is performing. The cloud can form in different ways, but having a bit of both gives you really good choice, that best of breed model >> with pure storage. You got the foundation as this acquisition, and this merger comes forward that everything's in place. Feel pretty confident about that. Yeah, we've >> got a lot of work to dio over the next few months while we adjust. What? We've got a software perspective to align with the intense global software suite. But I'm pretty confident that it can be delivered really well. >> So what's in the C I ose mind these days? You know, security cloud hybrid strategies, alignment with the business. What do your top three? >> I think like a mission before I'm really trying to kind of lift what we do to deliver value to the business. It's been John what type of business it is, but it can be seen as a cost center way. Really want to be out? Be more involved in in what, in our case, the lawyers are doing. The main project that we've got on the moment is automating legal processes not to replace any people but to augment what they do on to provide them better tools, more efficient tools. Talks that the younger lawyers, when they come in, can follow their way through and learn what their process is. Also overlaying the legal aspects around there as well. So it's not just online form. It's a it's a training guide. It's It's everything for each of those processes that >> you're deploying any machine learning, artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and in that regard yet is that we haven't quite got >> there. It's definitely on the list. Some of the things that would liketo look at those things, like machine readable software to go through documents, pullout snippets. A lot of time lawyers will spend have to read through a lot of material fine key bits of information and extract that to the news within the documents that we produce, even in simple process, is still doing that they loaned from the rial complex 56 page construction contracts. There's a There's a lot that we could potentially help to find that information for them when it comes into things like he discovery for litigation in the old days. Know that wheel in a truckload of >> paper file boxes? Guys must have loved that building at six minute increments >> way. Get your hard drive with terabytes of data. It gonna troll through all of that and that there's some real space that good I toes can help cut through that significantly faster than your standard kind of funnel based such fools. If >> you think you think software robots have a place like robotic process automation are, I think >> way we're going with it is Thea Pair. You can fit in between the human process. We're mapping out more from a business process. Perspective were there's gonna be some educational steps some human steps mopey a steps on eventually get through an outcome of delivering what the lawyers need for the clients. >> So last question is that I have is, you know, what way do all these shows we do like 100 events a year, everybody you know, the vendors tell you how great they are and what we always like to ask the practitioners your experience with pure relative toe other, you know, stories. And you know, the name names. But just is it substantively different? How much? I guess I ask you again. How much is marketing versus substantive business value for you as a practitioner? >> Yeah. So we've only had the array since December. One of things. I did a case study for Pure just recently in one of things that highlighted and there was the support. When you go on to a new vendor or choose any any different path, you're taking that kind of risk in the step into the unknown way did have an issue a few weeks after we put the first Korean on they came in during Christmas break were we were all off in our case at the beach, which is bit different in the Southern Hemisphere. But they came in flawlessly sort of the issue out gotta back working. Yeah, without necessarily having to do anything apart from let them in the building on, and that really gives the confidence and what they do, how they can deliver going forward. >> I think there's a lot of value and sharing that these things don't always go very smoothly. But you need to have established that relationship with that partner that can be rapidly deployed to help. Ultimately, I'm sure those lawyers either want to start building every three minutes. They want to be able to build more every six minutes. So never a dull moment, Nigel. In your world. But we thank you so much for joining David me on the Cuban. Maybe next year we'll be talking about how a I is helping. Hopefully clients achieve better results. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, per day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

(electronic music) >> Welcome back to London everybody, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We're here with a special session in London, we've been following the career of Teresa Carlson around, we asked, "hey, can we come to London to your headquarters there and interview some of the leaders and some of the startups and innovators both in public sector and commercial?" Andy Isherwood is here, he's the managing director of AWS EMEA. Andy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, thank you very much for your time. >> So you're about a year in, so that's plenty of time to get acclimated, what are your impressions of AWS and then we'll get into the market? >> Yeah, so it's nearly a year and a half actually, so time definitely goes pretty quickly. So I'd say it's pretty different, I'd say probably a couple of things kind of jump out at me. One is, I think we just have a startup mentality in everything we do. So, y'know, if you think about everything we do kind of works back from the customer and we really feel like a kind of startup at heart. And we always say, y'know, within the organization, we should also make it feel like day one. If we get to day two, y'know, the game's over. So we always try and make day one something that's kind of relevant in what we're doing. I think the second thing is customer obsession. I think we are truly customer obsessed. And you could say that most organizations actually say, y'know, they're customer obsessed. I'd say we're truly customer obsessed in everything we do so if you think about our re:Invent program, if you think about, y'know, London, the summit coming up, what you will notice is that there will be customers everywhere, speaking about their experiences and that's really important. So we start with the customer and we always work back. So super important that we never forget that and if you think about how we develop our services, they start with the customer. We don't go out like a product company would and make great products and sell them. We start with the customer, work back, develop the solutions and then let the customer use them, and we iterate on those developments. So I'd say it's pretty different in those two aspects. I'd say the other thing is, it's just hugely relevant. Every customer I go into, and I've seen hundreds of customers in the last year and a half, were hugely relevant. Y'know, we are at the heart of what people want to do and need to do, which makes it important. >> Yeah, so we've been following the career of Andy Jassy for years and we've learnt about the Working Backwards documents, certainly you guys are raising the bar all the time, is sort of the mantra, and yeah, customer centricity, you said it's different, y'know, we do over a hundred events every year and every company out there talks about, "we're focused on the customer", but what makes AWS different? >> I think it's the fact that we truly listen and work back from the customer. So, y'know, we're not a product company, we don't make products with great R&D people and then take them and sell them. We don't obsess about the competition, y'know, we start with the customer, we go and speak to the customer, I think we listen intently to what they need, and we help them look round corners. We help them think about what they need to do for them to be successful, then we work back and probably 90% of what we do is fundamentally developed from those insights that the customer gives us. That's quite different. That really is a working back methodology. >> We run most of our business on AWS and it's true, so I remember we were in a meeting with Andy Jassy one time and he started asking us how we use the platform and what we like about it and don't like about it, and my business partner, John Furrier, he's kind of our CTO, he starts rattling off a number of things that he wanted to see, and Andy pulls out his pad and he starts writing it down, and he was asking questions back and forth, so I think I've seen that in action. One of the things that we've observed is that the adoption of cloud in EMEA and worldwide is pretty consistent and ubiquitous, there's not like a big gap, y'know, you used to see years later, y'know, Europe would maybe adopt a technology and you're seeing actually in many cases, you certainly see it with mobile, you're seeing greater advancements. GDPR, obviously, is a template for privacy, what are you seeing in Europe in terms of some of the major trends of cloud adoption? >> Yeah, I don't think we're seeing major differences, y'know, people talk a lot about, "well, Europe must be two years behind North America" in terms of adoption. We don't see that, I think it is slightly slower in some countries, but I don't think that's kind of common across the piste. So I'd say that the adoption, and if you think back to some customers that were very early adopters, just from an overall global cloud perspective, companies like Shell, for example, y'know they were really early adopters, and those were European-based companies, you could say they're global companies, absolutely, but a lot of what they did was developed in Europe. So I would say that there are countries that are slower to adopt, sometimes driven by the fact that, y'know, security is an issue, or was an issue, that data sovereignty was a bigger issue for some of these countries. But I think all of those are pretty much passed now, so I think we are very quickly kind of catching up with regards to the North American market. So, yeah. >> You mentioned your sort of startup mentality, you mentioned BP. Is it divisions within a large company like that that are startup-like? Is that what you're seeing in terms of the trends? >> No, I'm seeing three patterns. So I'm seeing a pattern which is, y'know, large organizations that go all-in very quickly, typically, y'know, strong leadership, clear vision, need to move quickly. >> Dave Vellante: We're going cloud? >> Yeah, we're going cloud, and we're going all in and that may be, like an NL would be a great example. So NL's a really good example of a top-down approach, very progressive CIO, very clear-thinking CEO that's driven adoption. So I'd say that's pattern one. For me, pattern two is where large organizations create an entity alongside, so almost a separate business. So probably Openbank is probably a good example, part of Santander. And now that organization has about one and a half million customers, obviously started in Spain, but they built a digital bank, clearly tapping into all of the data and customer sets within Santander, but building an experience which is fundamentally different. >> So a skunkworks that really grew and grew? >> Correct, absolutely, a skunkworks that grew, but grew quickly and now it's becoming y'know, a key part of their business. And then the third area, or the third pattern for me is very much a kind of a bottoms-up-led approach. So this is where the developers basically love the services that we have, they use the services, they typically put them on their credit card or AMEX, and then they'll go and use the services and create real value. That value is then seen and it snowballs. So those are kind of the three patterns. I'd say the only outlier to those three patterns is a startup organization, and as you know we've been hugely successful with startups, from, y'know, Pinterest, to Uber, to Careem, to all of these organizations and those organizations it's really important to influence them early on, to make sure that they are aware, and the developer community and the founders are aware of what we can do and we have a number of programs to really help them do that. And they start to use our services, and as those organizations are successful then our business grows alongside them and they, y'know, typically start to use a lot more of the services. >> One of the defining patterns of three, the bottoms-up and four, the start-ups, is they code infrastructure. And, y'know, sometimes the one, the top-down may not have the skillsets and the disciplines and the structure to do that. What are you seeing in terms of that whole programmable infrastructure, the skillsets, programmers essentially coding the infrastructure? Are you seeing CIOs come in and say, "Okay, we need to re-skill", are they bringing in new staff, kind of like number two, the Openbank example might be, y'know, some rockstars that they wanna sort of assign to the skunkwork. How is the number one category dealing with that in terms of their digital transformation? >> Yeah, so y'know, skills is something that is critically important, having the right skills in the right place at the right time. And if you think about Europe it's a big outsourced market, so a lot of those skills were outsourced typically to a lot of the outsourcing companies, as you'd expect. What you're seeing now is organizations, BP's a good example of this, where they're building the innovation capability back into their organizations to make sure that they can create the offerings and create the user experience and create the business models for the new world. And what we're doing is really trying to make sure that we're enabling those organizations to build the skills. So probably at a number of different levels, kind of, y'know, very basic level, or at a very junior level we're kind of influencing people in schools. So, y'know, we're going to be announcing, or announcing at the summit, Guess IT, which is basically a program to train up year eight students. So you start there, and basically you go all the way through to offering training and certification, we have a very big function associated with that to make sure that we're building the right skills for organizations to be successful, and also then working with partners, so all of those training and certification skills, we are working with the partners like the Cloudreaches of this world, but also the DXCs of this world, the Accentures of this world, the Atoses of this world, really to make sure that they have the right skills and capability, not only around our services but around the movement to cloud which is what these organizations need to do to help them innovate. >> And it sounds like your customers wanna learn how to fish, they see that as IP, in a sense, still work with partners, but help them transfer that knowledge and then, y'know, continue to innovate, raise the bars, as we like to say. >> Yes, yes. >> One of the biggest challenges that we see, we talk to customers all the time, is the data challenge. Particularly companies that have been around for a while, they have a lot of technical debt, the data's locked into these hardened silos, obviously I'm sure you see that as a challenge, maybe can you address that, how you're helping customers deal with that challenge and some of the other things that you see cloud addressing? >> Yeah, so y'know, we're really trying to help customers be successful in doing what they do in the timescale that they're setting themselves, and we're helping them be successful. I think from a data point of view, we have a lot of capability, so just to give you a perspective, so since I've been here that year and a half, we started with 125 services. That number of services has gone to 170-odd services now and the innovation that we have within those services has now reached, I think last year, just over the 1900 level so this is iterations on the product. In addition to that, we are continually building new offerings, so if you think about our database strategy, y'know, it's very much to create databases that customers can use in the right way at the right time to do the right job and that's just not one database, it's a number of different databases tuned for specific needs. So we have 14 databases, for example, which are really geared to make customers use the right database at the right time to achieve the right outcome, and we think that's really important, so that's helping people basically use their data in a different way. Obviously our S3, our core storage offering is critically important and hugely successful. We think that as-is, the bedrock for how people think about their data and then they expand and use data lakes, and then underpinning that is making sure that they've got the right databases to support and use that data effectively. >> At the start of this millennium there was like a few databases, databases was a boring marketplace and now it's exploded, as Inova says, dozens a minute it's actually amazing >> Yep >> how much innovation there is occurring in that space. What's your vision for AWS in EMEA? >> Yeah, so you know the overall Amazon vision is to be the world's most customer-obsessed organization, so y'know, here in EMEA, that holds true, so y'know, we start with the customer, we work back, and we wanna make sure that every single customer's happy with what we're doing. I think the second thing is making sure that we are bringing and enabling customers to be innovative. This is really important to us, and it's really important to the customers that we sell to, y'know, there's many insurgents kind of attacking historic business models, it's really important that we give all of the organizations the ability to use technology, whether they're a small company or a big company. And we call that the democratization of IT, we're making things available that were only available to big companies a while back. Now, we have made those services available to pretty much every single company, whether you're a startup in garage, y'know, to a large global organization. So that's really important that we bring and we continue to democratize IT to make it available for the masses, so that they can go out there and innovate and do what ultimately, customers wanna do, y'know, customers want people to innovate. Customers want a different experience. And it's important that we give organizations the tools and the wherewithal to go and do that. >> Well you've been in the industry long enough, and you've worked at product companies prior to this part of your career, and you know the innovation engine used to be Moore's Law. It used to be how fast can I take advantage of that curve, and that's totally changed now. You see a number of things happening, it's get rid of the heavy lifting, so you can focus on your business, that's what cloud does for you, but it's kind of this combination, the cocktail of data, plus machine intelligence, and then the cloud brings scale, it attracts innovative companies. How do you see, first of all do you buy that sort of new cocktail, and how do you see customers applying that innovation engine? >> Yeah, y'know, to answer the first bit first, we definitely see that cocktail. So y'know, the kind of undifferentiated work that was historically done to kind of build servers and make sure that they ran and all of those things, people don't need to do that now. We do that really really effectively. So they can really focus their time, attention, their money, their efforts, their innovation, on creating new experiences, new products, new offerings, for their customers. And they should also work back from customers themselves and work out what's really required. Every single business model, every single offering, needs to be questioned, by every single organization and I think that's what we do. We give the ability to organizations to really think differently about how they use what we have to do the really important things, the things that differentiate them and the things that ultimately give customers a different experience. And that's why I think we've seen so many very successful companies, y'know, from Airbnb, to Pinterest, to Uber. It's giving people a fundamentally different experience and that's what people want, so y'know, we're here to I think give people the ability to create those different experiences. >> Kind of amazing when you go back and you remember the book Does IT Matter? the Havard Business Review famous... It couldn't have been more wrong, at the same time it couldn't have been more right because it really underscored that IT was broken and that preceded 2006 introduction of EC2 and now technology matters more than ever before, every company's a technology company, y'know, you hear Marc Bennioff talk about software's eating the world, it's so true, and so as companies become technology companies, what's your advice to them? I mean obviously you gotta say, "Let us handle the heavy lifting," but what do they have to do to succeed in their digital transformation in your view? >> Yeah, I think it's about changing the mindset and changing the culture of organizations. So I think you can try and instill new processes and new tools on an organization but fundamentally you've gotta change the culture and I think we have to create and enable cultures to be created that are innovative and that requires, I think, a very different mindset. That requires a mindset which is about, "we don't mind if you fail". Y'know, and we'll applaud failure. We in Amazon have had many failures but it's applauded, and if it's applauded, people try again so they'll dust themselves off and they'll move on. You can see this in Israel which is, y'know, very much a startup nation. You can see people start a business, they might fail. Next day, they start a new one. So I think it's having this culture of innovation that allows people to experiment. Experimentation's good, but it's also prone to failure. But, y'know, out of 10 experiments you're gonna get one that's successful. That one could be the make or break for your organization to move forward, and give customers what they actually need, so, y'know, super important. >> Break things, move fast, right? >> Exactly. >> I love it. All right, what should we expect tomorrow at the London summit? We gotta big crowd coming, it's at the ExCeL Center >> Yeah, I think you'll see us continue to innovate, I think you'll see a lot of people, and I think you'll see a lot of customers talk about their experience and share their experience, y'know, these are learning summits, y'know, they're not kind of show and tell, they're very much about explaining what other customers are doing, how people can use the innovation and you'll see lots of experiences from different customers that people will be able to take away and learn from and go back to their offices and do similar things, but probably in a different way. So, y'know there'll be lots of exciting announcements, as you saw from re:Invent, we continue to innovate at a fair clip, as I said, 1950-odd innovations, y'know, significant releases last year, so not surprisingly you'll see a few of those. >> These summits are like mini re:Invents, aren't they? And as you said, Andy, very customer-focused, customer-centric; a lot of customer content. So, Andy Isherwood, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was really great to have you. >> Great >> All right. >> Thank you >> You're welcome Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellente, you're watching theCUBE.

>> 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)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Sands. We're live in Las Vegas here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Dave Shacochis, who is Vice President of Product and Hybrid IT at Centurylink. Dave, good to see you again. >> Yeah, great to be back. Good to be back on theCube, good to talk to you John. >> Excellent. And by the way, you win the GQ award. >> All right. >> Everybody raving about that black, velvet you've got going on. >> 50,000 people here at re:Invent. If I'm in the lead- >> That looks very strong. >> I'm in the lead at the turn, that's good to hear. >> Best Dressed award. >> Very nice. All right, well big news though for you guys. Obviously being designated as the managed services provider, reaching that certification with AWS, tell us about that, about that process and what it's meaning to your business, and what it means to your customers. >> Yeah, AWS is such a customer-focused organization. They're very passionate about their end customers, and solving problems. But they've also built up a huge partner network, and what Terry Wise and the team have built is a real partner-relevant organization. And so what they've really done to make it a level playing field, to be as passionate about their partners as they are about their end customers, hopefully intending to solve problems for customers as well, is really to put a lot of thought into making sure that when they have a competency or a certification, that it's no joke to get through. It's a serious exercise to go through something like a managed service provider or an MSP certification. We had that get finished up for us several months ago, and we've been rolling that into our managed cloud practice, and really helping our customers with the three key criteria of what AWS really wants to have its partners do, which is really design and plan and be able to orchestrate workloads, and model workloads for customers, and understand how and where they're going to deploy and migrate into the cloud. They really want to see and make sure that you're doing next generation work during the operational run phase. Not just are you monitoring and managing those workloads in those environments, but are you doing predictive analytics? Are you starting to take a look at trends inside the data? Are you using Big Data to actually augment your management practices? Right? Not traditional ITEL just in a cloud location, but really next generation managed services. They measure and they certify all that. And then the third thing they want to do is take a look at how are you reporting? How are you helping the customer optimize and analyze cost, and become as efficient as they can with their deployment of AWS services. So it's a significant exercise to go through. It really made our service better. And quite honestly, that's a great example of AWS being customer-focused by making sure that the partners they want to work with can hit a certain level-- >> Step up your game. >> Hit a certain bar to be able to drive that value for their end customers. >> Yep. >> Yeah. So for the customers who were choosing Centurylink to come to something like AWS, what is it about Centurylink that they like? That they would rather deal with you than go, say direct to AWS and try to do everything themselves? >> I think there's really sort of two or three real differentiators for Centurylink when we work with our customers. Probably the first and foremost is that hybrid nature of how we can meet the customers where they are. Centurylink has been running and managing and working in the data center space for a good 15 to 20 years. We've been running and managing private clouds and hosted compute environments for as long as there has been such a category in the industry. With all the different heritage that rolls into Centurylink from an IT Services perspective. So they really come for the experience and the pedigree, and the complexity, friendliness. But they also come for the fact that we can meet them where they are, whether it's inside their current data center, help them do data center consolidation, help them move into hosted centers, and then help them on that journey, 'cause so much of the enterprise is still very much on a journey, right? There may be projects that are firing up to the cloud, there are a lot of organizations that are ready to make the full leap and go all-in on the cloud, but by and large there's some kind of a hybrid environment where they're still looking at the different form factors, and they're very much on a journey to get from where they are today to where they can be more agile. >> Yeah. >> So this is the experience that we have. But then what we really, and there's lots of companies out there that have good experience, they have good tools, they have experience running and managing and monitoring. There's a lot of other companies that have the MSB certification. What Centurylink has that's really a deep investment is all the network optionality and the network control that we have. So not only can we do managed services inside AWS, we can also do the managed network that gets the traffic and gets the workload to AWS. >> Right. >> And that's a real critical differentiator. Not only can we get those connections set up and configured, we can also manage those environments and then secure those environments. So there's a lot of investment that Centurylink has put into our managed cloud practice, augmented by managed networking and managed security. The assets that Centurylink brings to bear with regards to our security portfolio and our network portfolio, come from years of significant investment. One of the largest global IP backbones in the world. We've been gleaming network and security telemetry from that network, and building threat patterns and threat management services inside the core of our network. So really, customers who work with us have a secure, consistent, reliable path to the cloud, and then they get the managed services, the MSB certified managed services, once they're there. >> Yeah. So speaking of connections, I believe that you've announced a product in, I think it was October, called Direct Connections. >> Yes. >> Is that right? Tell me more about what that is. >> Sure so that's that sort of, for those of you tracking my hand waving at home, you know the network stuff over here. Inside our network portfolio there is ... our cloud connect service is one of most deeply connected to AWS services out there. So we're a significant direct connect partner. We drive an ethernet-based service into AWS in all their major regions, and then we have that cloud connect service run to hundreds of global multi-tenant data centers as well as hundreds of thousands of enterprise locations. So we have, what we launched there back in October was the latest version of cloud connect, which we call Dynamic Connections. It's a feature within cloud connect that allows us to take a global ethernet circuit, tying into AWS, and make that happen in minutes. That didn't exist before. So a lot of people think about AWS direct connect, and they can configure direct connect and tie it up to their VPC, then they start the Telecom process that could take weeks and or months, and it depends on who they're working with, and who they're buying from. >> Yeah. >> If you're in a building that's on net with us, or your traditional data center is one of the data centers, the many hundreds of data centers that are on net with us, we can go and get that connection turned up, all of the automation, and once you get that circuit created, you can dial it up and dial it back, a gig, ten gigs, anywhere in between. You can go below a gig, wherever you need to. You have complete control over the creation of a new circuit, which is great for retail locations. Retail customers like this as they're bringing in new facilities, and bringing mixed-use facilities on net, and they're bringing new facilities that they need to be able to trunk back to their data center in the cloud. We can use dynamic connections to go and help them create new locations, but then as the business needs change at those locations, they can dial up and dial down bandwidth, and really have a rich level of control for how the traffic is being routed and passed. >> Yeah, having spoken to customers in the past, that is actually quite valuable. It has been quite painful to go through that process. >> A lot of big cloud migrations, once they're done with them, one of the problems you run into is, "Well, I never really thought through and anticipated what the network path would look like after I made that move to the cloud." >> Yeah. >> And that's one of things we try to do with our customers at the onset of an engagement, is not just say, "Let's start stampeding to the cloud right away." Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but let's think through the network design first. Who are your users? What are the new traffic patterns going to look like? And what are the hybrids that you're going to be building, where something that's in the cloud needs to talk back to your corporate data center? Do you have enough bandwidth and do you have a low enough latency connection between the two? >> Yeah. >> Early this week you were talking about Milliseconds Matter, right? You had a presentation that you were featuring that. So what does that mean to your AWS customers? That's kind of intuitive, they do matter. >> Sure. >> What was the perspective that you were bringing to that and the latency issue? >> Yeah, so we did a presentation here earlier in the show, where we really illustrated that combination I was referring to earlier, of our MSP certified managed offering coupled with our cloud connect network automation. What we've really done a lot of work with around cloud connect is creating a service that has a few different user experiences. If you're a network engineer, if you're somebody who's running a corporate network, you really want to get in and really just get a layer to interface from Centurylink, optimize your BGP routing and do all of those sort of Telecom-grade configurations, you can do that with Centurylink cloud connect. We also have a very straight-forward version. In Andy's keynote this morning, one of the things he was really talking about, it really spoke to me, was this idea of, well there are builders who want to use the tools, and there are builders who just want instructions. >> Yeah. >> Builders who just want to dump the IKEA parts out and put the thing together. And then there's some people that want to sit there with a lathe and handcraft everything. So different types of builders. We have a version of cloud connect that can appeal to the builder who doesn't necessarily want to get down in the weeds of networking, and they just want to basically take a workload and connect it to the right private network link. And so that higher level version of cloud connect is what we demonstrated earlier today, and really the fundamental premise of Milliseconds Matter is network orchestration and cloud orchestration coupled together gives you a whole lot greater level of control. And that's where we're starting to see all these emerging use cases, where you can certainly think about migrating everything to the cloud, but then you have to start thinking about where do those workloads need to run? What does the future look like, in terms of IoT devices and sensors and video telemetry and environmental telemetry, all the different sources of data that organizations can use to go and innovate around. Where you're going to run that business logic is going to run closer and closer to the edge for a lot industries: in retail, in healthcare, in a lot of government institutions, in hospitality. So basically the fundamental premise of Milliseconds Matter is have control of your cloud, but then also have control over your network, and hopefully have the two in concert with one another. And that's what we're fundamentally driving at with our service platform. >> Sounds great. >> And real quick, when you talk about all this, in a 5G world, all of a sudden when you talk about edge, you talk about- >> Sure. >> That's a game changer, is it not? >> Well it is. 5G is still so emergent. There's a lot that's there. There's a lot there that's 5G. There's still 4GLTE. There's still lots of different ways to go and get all that data trunked together. And it doesn't stay on LTE forever, right? Eventually it all starts to get to an IP backbone, and then that's where you still have a lot of latency optimizations and route optimizations that you want to be able to deal with. So we absolutely look at LTE as something that we think is a huge opportunity with a lot of our partners that we're working with across our network footprint, to be able to use LTE as a new access strategy, just like we've used just about all the other access strategies that are out there. >> Excellent. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, great to see you, John. >> See you down the road soon, I hope. >> For sure. >> All right, thank you for joining us. Dave Shacochis joining us here from Centurylink. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCube. (electronic music)