(sparkly music) >> Welcome to the Cube Special Program series "Women of the Cloud", brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm very pleased to welcome Veronica McCarthy to the program, Senior Sales Manager ISB for Amazon Web Services. Veronica, great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks for having me. >> Tell me a little bit about your current role. A little bit about yourself. >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I've been at Amazon just about four years now. I am really passionate about technology. I've been in the tech industry for about 20 plus years. Right now I'm a sales leader, so I lead a team of folks that help software companies build technology in the cloud or move technology to the cloud and help them scale and innovate in the cloud. >> Awesome, I love that. Talk a little bit about for, for those looking to grow their careers in tech, what are some of the tactical recommendations that you have that you think are really, really pertinent for others that are looking to climb that ladder? >> Yeah, it's so important to have that passion for technology 'cause that's what we do every day. It excites me to jump out of bed and learn what's new, what's coming, what we're building together and how early we are in cloud computing and in technology as a whole. So really get curious and even, you know feel free to get, get hands on. I remember early as a kid just building computers with my dad in his room. So get hands on. Today there's so many things available on the internet for free tiers. You can just play with software to get building websites, games, whatever interests you. And oh by the way, watch the Cube 'cause you're going to learn a lot and you're going to get immersed in technology, which is so important when you're learning to grow a career here because it comes across when you're interviewing, when you're talking with others, when you're networking, that you're really interested in the topic and you're really here to, to grow and and help build tech to be what it can be in the future. >> These are all great recommendations for really building that authenticity. I love your advice of really from an immersion perspective. You're right, there's so many opportunities for people of all ages to start playing around with tech and, and, but that your point of opening up your mind and being curious and embracing the different learning paths is also that curiosity. I always think creativity as well are just really important recommendations for others that are looking to grow their career in tech. >> I want to understand some of, based on some of, of those tactical recommendations. Talk to us about a success story that you've had where you've solved problems for customers relating to cloud computing based on some of your recommendations. >> Totally, just picking up on the curiosity theme that we were talking about, one of the things that I did when I was earlier in my career and I was looking after a customer, is I got curious about their business. How did they interact with their customers? And I worked backwards from that experience 'cause they were selling to consumers and I said what if they could do all these other things that could open up the consumer's eyes? So I came up with a zany idea of what if they did a partnership with Amazon and we flew their goods directly to the end consumer by a drone, you know, just crazy stuff. And I wrote something called a PRFAQ which at Amazon we use very often. It's a press release, frequently asked questions. This PRFAQ was, what could you do in the future with tech? What could, you know things what could we unlock with tech in your business? The C-suite of this company said, "You know what, that's really interesting. We're not going to do that crazy drone thing. But we like the thinking, we like the learning we like thinking about the future. How does cloud help us unlock that future?" So the long story short, they had a monolith OnPrem getting their, getting their technology from a OnPrem monolith to microservices in the cloud unlocks and opens up APIs for them to partner with other organizations to grow their customer base and in turn grow their revenue. This company in particular, pandemic hit, market change. They had to pivot or else they were going to go out of business. And because we had moved their technology from an OnPrem monolith to the cloud they were able to make that pivot and they survived the pandemic and are thriving. So it's a real life example of a success story of just getting curious, understanding the customer's business, coming back from that and then aligning for the future and getting a customer to, to get curious with you and build for the future, which worked out. And who could have predicted the pandemic, but it worked >> Right. But getting the the customer to be curious with you kind of leads me into talking about, you know, and, and the customer wanting to embrace and, and embrace cloud computing is really a transformative business model. Also takes cultural impact. Sounds like what you've been able to achieve with this particular success story. The customer had the appetite from a cultural transformation perspective but that's a hard thing to accomplish. Talk a little bit about that maybe from that customer's perspective and how they really were able to transform into a culture that embraces cloud computing. >> Absolutely. You're spot on . With all of these transformations, it's people process technology. Technology's the easy part, right? The cloud's there, we can, the architecture's there, we can build software. It's the people and the process that's hard. So as part of that transformation and part of that engagement, they actually hired me. So I left Amazon and I went and became the VP of technology for this company and I led 650 engineers globally through this transformation from an OnPrem model with microservices in the cloud. So they put faith in me because they knew this was the outcome we needed to get to but they needed the people in the process to change. So bringing the, the engineers on that journey of I know you've been building this way for a really long time and in this place, we're going to bring you into the future and we're all going to do it together. So it's a learning journey because we're all going to learn how to build microservices in the cloud and we're going to do it together and then it opens up their future as well as they continue to grow as engineers. So it's not easy to do, but it takes time. But we were able to do it in that case. >> But you bring up a great point, it's a learning journey. Yeah. And for organizations to have that appetite and that understanding and appreciation, that is as critical as the technology. You talk about, you know, people across technology. The technology is easy, it's really changing the frames of mind at the speed at which they need to change for organizations to be competitive so they can leverage cloud to really help unlock the competitive advantage as as that success story customer that you mentioned. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And building on that innovation, right which innovation is just a, a flywheel of learning. So absolutely. >> It is. Let's shift gears a little bit, but speaking of people and processes, you know, what are some of the challenges that you see from a diversity perspective whether it's thought diversity in tech today? >> Yeah, great question. Tech is an opportunity for a level playing ground because tech is a platform with which you can build things. The important piece of building tech though is we need to make sure that many diversities are represented in the room. So when we're making tech decisions of how we're going to build, what our consumers are going to, how they're going to interact with our technology. Not everyone is one individual person. It's not a monolith out there, you know consuming our technology. So let's make sure we have that diversity in the decision making and building the tech as well as in the user use case and, and working backwards from our end users of our technology. I think one of the most, one of the easiest ways to start to approach, approach that diversity of thought and getting that diversity within your teams is looking at a gender diversity ratio. And, and we've seen historically, whilst we've seen gains in gender diversity and technology over the last few years, it's still not where it needs to be. There's a stat that I read recently in a McKinsey study that only one in four C-suite leaders are women today. And of all of all the entry level jobs from entry level to manager of all, like let's say you take a hundred men only 87 of those are women that are concurrently being promoted. Only 82 are women of color. So it's an opportunity for us to really level the playing field and think about how do we intentionally put people in the room when tech decisions are being made that can make change and build tech for who we, we know is out there to consume and, and are be a part of our tech community. >> Intention you mentioned. That is so critical for organizations really need to be looking at diversity, DEI from a, from an an intentional perspective. It can't just be ad hoc here and there. They really have to have a strategy behind it. And when I see companies, and there are a few that I've worked with that really caught my eye that have done a phenomenal job of that thought diversity, gender diversity, cultural diversity within their leadership even the people that they put on stage to talk to their events, they stand out incredibly well. We also know that there's, you probably have numbers on this, that organizations with women in the C-suite are far more profitable than organizations that don't have that. So the data, we want to talk nerdy tech, the data is there. It's demonstrating what the potentials are the capabilities, the, the opportunities. Yet we're still so far behind and we have so much road to cover. We know the direction we need to go in, we just got to be able to get the teams behind that to get there. >> Absolutely. And data's key. I read a study recently that said if you don't have at least 30% diversity in the room when you're making decisions, you are statistically not going to make the right decision, which is incredible. So the powers and the data. We know better decisions are made. Companies do better when there's diversity in the room of all types. >> Absolutely. And can you imagine the sky's the limit, if organizations are actually able to just start making headway on that percentage number and shifting it towards that diversity. What incredible opportunities and technologies and services and solutions that can be developed and delivered to meet the demanding consumers needs. So much potential there. It's, it's a, it's kind of like a crystal ball. If only we had one, we could actually see what we could actually be. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think thinking about some of the older reasons why maybe women didn't stay in the workforce longer or maybe didn't take a a career in tech, a lot of those were minimized during the pandemic. So we think about the work from home concept, right? Like that's so normal now it's, we're no longer grinding you know, I have to leave early for daycare pickup or whatever the challenges or the perceived challenges there were to women progressing in their careers. A lot of that can be managed now. So there was some good things that have come out of that pandemic time that, you know, it's much more acceptable to be home remote working. I think the balance isn't making sure that we continue our in-person innovation where we can. I find with customers today, bringing executive teams together in a room to have them brainstorm and innovate is still priceless, right? Like we still have to spend that time, we're humans, but as a woman in technology, I love the flexibility that we are now taking and adopting as a norm. And even, you know, some of my male peers that have kids at home, they love being around the kids at home and and it's a, it's a real positive impact I think that we've had amongst a lot of negative impacts by the pandemic as well. >> It is, they're definitely silver linings. That's one of them. I was talking with somebody in, in Italy this morning we were filming and you said, "I don't think my daughters are going to run in here." And I thought, you know what, even if they do that's part of totally the remote workforce, that's part of the hybrid workforce that we're all embracing. But you bring up a great point about the in-person innovation. You know, events are starting to come back, so exciting. There's just certain things about event from an innovation perspective you just can't replicate by video. So getting those executives in a room together. Talk about what you guys are doing there and, and some of the things that you think of over the next few years that will really help drive evolution and innovation of tech. >> Absolutely, yeah. I have a lot of clients that often will say, "Oh well we're we're a remote first company." So it's okay that we do our innovation session online. But then I remind them of when was the last happy hour you had online? Like do you remember the early days of the pandemic? And we all sat on, you know pick your web conferencing platform and we, you know drank wine and but there was only one person that you could hear in that. So when they're, everybody's going around and all the boxes are on the screen, it was difficult to have multiple conversations. If you walk into a happy hour in, in real life people all over the room are having multiple conversations and a lot of different things are happening in the room at the same time. It's the same thing with innovation. If we bring an executive team into the room, guess what? There's going to be a couple sidebar conversations going on as the big room progresses. And that's really healthy and that's a great way to get people that may not be the one, the star of the happy hour that wants to speak the whole time to also get their inputs and their feedback into the innovation process. So that's just an example of why it's so important. One of the things we do here at Amazon is we have so called a digital innovation workshop which is exactly as it sounds, right? Just get in a room with some whiteboards, with some thought leaders and really let's innovate for the future and it's a blank sheet of paper kind of start and out of it we come up with a business plan, a PRFAQ, like a press release I mentioned in my story earlier. That's the seeds of that. So it's really powerful and I'm so excited we're continuing to do those face to face 'cause it's so important. >> It's so important, you know, to have diversity present in the room when decisions are being made, whether it's decisions about technology or not. That thought diversity is, and as the data show that you mentioned, demonstrates how much more successful and profitable organizations can be. I'm going to ask you kind of switching gears again. Last question. If we look kind of down the road from an evolution perspective of of you're in cloud, of your role evolving. What are some of the things that you see down down the pike? >> Yeah, so great question. I am in a field sales organization today, so when the pandemic first hit, I thought, oh boy, that's the end of our career. I think we're not going to be going out and calling on customers face to face anymore. But it's actually been the opposite. I've seen more engagement from our customers. They, they really do want to spend time with us innovating. When we come into those conversations we come in with a curious mindset. So I think from a field sales perspective, it's it's not, you know, going away. And I think it's going to continue to build and it's a great career for women in particular to get into. Super flexible, the privilege of travel which is a nice vacation from home life sometimes. And the, the benefit of working from home as well. So a good balance there. So I think from a, my role specifically it's going to continue to evolve and continue to be a growth area. >> From previous roles I've had where I've worked in technology and, and software development, I think are we're still such at early stages in cloud computing and cloud technology that there is so much technology that we're continuing to build from an engineering standpoint. And I think back to my, you know, 20 year old self if I was in those shoes today and I would absolutely be doing a career in engineering. I think it's such an exciting space and as a person of, of of a, as a female I want to be at the forefront of the engineering team. So I encourage anyone if they're, you know of a diverse background, like you are the people that I want in engineering in the future because that's how you're going to build the future is build the tech, which is really cool. >> So absolutely. It's, it's very cool. I do have one more question for you. What's of your lens, what's next in cloud? What are some of the things that you think are coming down the horizon? >> Yeah, so great question. So I, I actually have a son who's special needs and I think about some of the accommodations that we have to make for him today. And I think about the tech that's coming in terms of personal tech on helping him communicate or helping him read or helping him write. And I'm excited for his future where I think a diagnosis like his, if I'd gotten it many years ago, I would be very fearful about his future. But I know that tech is going to support people like him. So I'm excited for what it's going to do for humanity. I'm excited for what it's going to help us unlock for people that may have been hindered in previous lives. My, my mom grew up with a disability and she had to keep her career relatively low level because she couldn't overcome that disability without tech. And now that she has tech, you know it would've changed the game for her. So I'm excited for my son and his future. That's what inspires me and, and I'm excited about. >> I love that. Well, with a mom like you, he's sure to succeed and fly flying colors. Veronica, it's been such a pleasure having you on the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Exciting special series of women in the cloud. We so appreciate your insights and your time. You'll have to come back. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate it. >> All right, Veronica McCarthy. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube's special program series Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching. (sparkly music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube. With digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. This is The Cube. Cube Virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with The Cube and Silicon Angle. Two great guests here. Two engineers and architects. Michael McCarthy who is a architect at Delivery Engineering, who's giving a talk with Gamesys and Jurgen Grech who's a technical architect for the platform engineering team at Gamesys. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on. >> Hello. >> Nice to see you. >> Coming in from London, coming in from Malta, you guys are doing a lot of engineering. You're a customer of Ansible, want to get into some of the cool things you're doing obviously Kubernetes automation, platform engineering, this is what everyone's working on right now that's going to be positioned for the future. Before we get started though, tell me a little bit about what Gamesys does and you guys' role. Michael, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so we're a gaming operator, we run multiple bingo-led and casino-led gaming websites, some of them are B2B, some are B2C. I think we've been doing it now for probably 14 or 15 years at least. I've been there for 12 and a half of those. So we essentially run gaming websites where people come and play their favorite games. >> And what's your role there? What do you do? >> So I'm in the operation side of things, I used to be a developer for 12 or so years. We make sure that everything's kind of up and running, we keep the systems running. My team in particular focuses on the speed of delivery for developers so we're constantly looking at, how long has it taken to get things in front of the customers, can we make it faster, can we make it easier, can we put cool stuff out there quicker? So it's a kind of platformy type role that I do, and I enjoy it a lot, so it's good. >> Jurgen you're platform engineering that sounds deep. >> Yes. >> Which is your role? (laughing) >> Well, I've been with Gamesys also for eight and a half years now. I hold the position of technical architect at the moment within this platform engineering group which is mostly tasked with all things ops related. I am responsible for designing, implementing and validating strategies for continuous deployment, whilst always ensuring high availability on both production and pre-production systems. I'm also responsible for the design and implementation of automated dynamic environment to support the needs of the development teams and also collaborating with other architects, especially those on the development floors in order to optimize the deployment and operational strategies for both existing and new types of services alike. >> Awesome, thanks for sharing that. Good, good context. Well, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when you talk about gaming it's uptime and a high availability is critical. You know, having people, being the login you got to have the right data strategies, it can't be down, right. (laughs) It's a critical app. People are not going to enjoy it if they're not at, so I can see how scale's huge. Can you guys talk about how Ansible fits in because automation's been the theme here, you guys have been having a journey with automation. What's been your automation solution with Ansible? >> I'll go Michael. >> Yeah sure. >> So, basically back in July 2014, we started to look at Ansible to replace those commonly used, day to day, best scripts, which our ops team use to execute and which could lead to some human error. That was our main original goal of using Ansible at the time. At the time was our infrastructure looked considerably different. Definitely much, much smaller than the current private cloud footprint. And as I said, as early adopters within the operations team it was imperative for us to automate as much as possible. Those repetitive tasks, which involved the execution of various scripts and were prone to human error. Since then however, aware Ansible usage, it worked quickly. Since 2014, we went through two major infrastructure overhauls and automation using Ansible was always at the heart of each of those overhauls. In fact, our latest private cloud which is based on OpenStack is completely built from the ground up using Ansible code. So this includes the provision and co-visual machines, our entire networking stacks, so switches, routers, firewall, the SDN which OpenStack is built up on, our internal DNS system. Basically all you need to have a fully functional private cloud. At Gamesys we also have some workloads running in two different public clouds. And even in this case, we are running against the build code to set up all the required infrastructure components. Again, since we were fairly new adopters at the time of this technology, without all of those Ansible code, using the original as the case, cover now this has worked considerably and with enhancements of litigated modules polished public cloud, we've made the code look much cleaner, readable and ad approved. >> You made some great progress. Michael, you want to weigh in on this? Any thoughts on? >> Yeah, I think it's kind of, I mean, adding to what Jurgen said I think it's kind of everywhere. So, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned high availability, you mentioned kind of uptime, you know, imagine the people that operate the infra, the people who get called out and they're working 24 seven, you know, a lot of the things that they would do, the kind of run books they would use to, you know, restart something they're Ansible as well. So it's the deployment scripts, it's the kind of scripts that keep things running, it's the stuff that spins up the environments as Jurgen said. I've noticed a lot on the development side where, you know, we look at continuous delivery, people are running their own build servers. A lot of the scripting that people do, which, you know you'd imagine, might be done with say Bash, I think I've seen a lot of Ansible being used there amongst developers, I guess. Yeah, it's got an easy learning curve. It's all of those modules. A lot of the scripting around CD I think is Ansible. It plays quite nicely, you know, URI module and file modules and yeah, I think it's kind of everywhere I think. It's quite pervasive. >> Once again I said, when to get something going. Good, it's awesome. >> Yeah. Automation get great success. So it's been a big theme of Ansible Fest 2020 automation collectors, et cetera. But the question I have for you guys as customers, is how large of an IT estate were you looking to automate and where was the most imperative places to automate first? >> The most imperative items we wanted to automate first as I said, were those operational day to day tasks handled by our network operations team. Our estate is massive. So we are running our infrastructure across five different data centers around the world, thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of network components. So we, we deal with customers all around the world. So our point of presence is spread out around the world as well. And you can't really handle such kind of size without some sort of automation. And Ansible fit the bill perfectly, in my opinion. >> And so your goal is to automate the entire landscape. Are you there now? Where are you on that progress? >> I would say we're at a very advanced stage in that process. Since 2014 we've made huge strides. All of our most recent private cloud setups as I said, have been built from the ground up using Ansible. And I would say a good 90% plus of our operational tasks are handled using some kind of Ansible playbook. >> Yeah, that makes total sense. Michael you brought up the, you start early in people's, it spreads. Those are my words, but you were saying that. What kind of systems do people tend to start with at Ansible? And what's, where's that first sticky moment where it lands and expands and which teams jump on it first? Is it the developers? Is it more the IT? Take us through some of the how this all gets started and how it spreads. >> I think in the, the first time I remember using it was probably I think 2014, 2015. And it was what Jurgen mentioned. I was on the Dev side and we wanted a way to have consistency in how we deployed. We wanted to be able to deploy the exact same way, you know into earlier environments, into Dev environments as we did in staging and production. And, you know, someone kind of found Ansible and then someone in operations kind of saw it and they were happy with it and they felt comfortable using the, kind of getting up to speed. And I think it was hard to know where it really started first, but you sort of looked around and every team, every team kind of had it. So, you know, who actually started I'm not sure, but it's all over the place. >> He did. (laughs) >> Yeah. I think, you know, where people start with it first it probably depends if you're on the ops or the dev side, I think on the dev side you know, we're encouraging people to own their own deployment playbooks you know, you're responsible for the deployment of your system to production. Obviously you've got the network operations the not group sort of doing it for you, but you know, your first exposure is probably going to be writing a playbook to deploy your app or maybe it's around some build tooling, spinning up your own build environment but that's something you'll be doing. I know with Ansible and it's especially around this point of stuff because everything's in git, there's that collaboration which I never saw, obviously I saw people chatting over kind of slack in teams but in terms of being able to sort of raise PR's having developers raise PR's, having operations comment on them the same the other way around, that's been a massive change which I think has come from using Ansible. >> The collaboration piece is huge. And I think it's one of those things early on out of all the Ansible friends that I know that use it and customers and in the company product was just good. It just word of mouth, spreads it around and be like, this is workable, saves a lot of time and it's a pain point remover. Also enables some things to happen with now automation, but now it's mature. Right? So Jurgen I got to ask you in the maturation of all this automation you're talking about scale, you mentioned it. OpenStack, you guys got the private clouds, people use it for public cloud, I now see Red Hat has a angle on that. But when you think about the current modern state of the art today, you can't go anywhere without talking about Kubernetes. >> Yup. >> Kubernetes has really emerged on the scene to manage these clusters but yet it's just getting started. You have a lot of experience with Ansible and Kubernetes. Can you share your journey with Kubernetes and Ansible, and what's your reaction to that? >> Yes, so back in June 2016 Gamesys was developing a new gaming platform which was stood on now Kubernetes. Kubernetes at the time was fairly new to many at an enterprise level with only a handful of production systems online. So we were tasked to assess how we're going to bring Kubernetes into production. So we first, we identified the requirements to set up a production grade cluster and given our experience with Ansible, we embarked on a journey to automate the installation process. Again using Ansible this would ensure that all the required installation and configuration parameters as Michael mentioned, we are committing it, the code is shared with all the respective development teams for ease of collaboration and feedback. And we decided to logically divide our code into two. And we said, we're going to have an installation code in order to provide Kubernetes as a service. So this basically installs Docker onto every worker node. It installs cube lit, all the master playing components of Kubernetes installs core DNS, the container storage interface, and they full blown and cluster monitoring stack. Then we also had our configuration code which basically sets up name spaces, it labels nodes for specific uses at certain security policies according to the cluster use case and creates all the required role based access configurations. This need to split the code in two came about really with the growing adoption of Kubernetes because at the inception stage we only had the one team which had a requirement to use Kubernetes. However, with various teams getting on board each required their own flavor with their particular unique configurations. This is of course well managed quite easily to reduce of different Ansible inventories. And it's all integrated now within Ansible Tower with different unique drop templates to install and configure the Kubernetes clusters. We started as I said with just one pre-production or staging cluster in 2010 16. Today we manage 42 different Kubernetes clusters including six which are in production. >> What problems >> So, as I mentioned earlier >> I got to ask you 'cause Kubernetes certainly when it came out, I mean, that was a big fan boy of that. I was promoting Kubernetes from the beginning. I saw it as a really great opportunity to bring things together with containers. It turns out that developers love it for that reason. What, so getting your hands on is great, but as you moved it in to practice, what problems did it solve for you? >> So using Ansible, definitely solve the problem of ensuring that all of our 42 clusters across all the different data centers are running the same configuration. So they're running the same version. They're running the same security policies. They're running the same name space, according to the type. Each team has a similar deployment token. And it's very, very convenient to roll out changes and upgrades especially when all of our code has been integrated with Ansible Tower through a simple user interface click. >> How's Ansible Tower working for you? Is that going well? Ansible Tower? >> Eh, I would say so, yes. Most of our code now is integrated with Ansible Tower. It's allowed us to also share some of the tasks with a wider group of people. Within Peg we are the guardians of the production environments really. However, we share the responsibility of staging environments with the respective development teams, who primarily those environments. So as such, through the use of Ansible Tower we've managed to also securely and consistently share the same way how they can install and upgrade these clusters themselves without our involvement. >> Thank you. Michael you're giving, oh sorry go ahead. Go ahead Jurgen. >> Sorry is no no. >> Michael, you're giving a presentation breakout session at Ansible Fest. Can you give us a sneak peek >> Yup. >> Of what you're going to talk about? >> Yeah sure. So we, I said we've been using Tower for a long time. We've been using it since 2015 I think. Think we've probably made some mistakes along the way, I guess, or we've learned a lot of stuff from how we started then to now. So what it does is it follows this sort of timeline of how we started, why there was this big move to making an effort to put all of our deployment playbooks in Ansible. Why you would go to Tower over and above Ansible itself. It talks about our early interactions with quite an old version of Tower and now version two, things that we struggled with, then we saw version three came out there was loads and loads of really good stuff in version three. And it's really about kind of how we've used the new features, how it's worked out for us. It's kind of about what Gamesys have done with Tower but I think it's probably applicable to everyone and anyone that uses Tower I think will, they'll probably come across the same things, how do I scale it for multiple teams? How do I give teams the ownership to kind of own their own playbooks? How do I automate Tower itself? It talks about that. Sort of check pointing every few years about where we'd got to and what was going well and what was going less well. So, and a bit of a look forward to, what's going to come next with Tower. So we're constantly keeping up to date and we've got kind of roadmap for where we want to go. >> What's interesting about you guys is you think about look at OpenStack and then how Cloud came on the scene and Private Cloud has emerged with hybrid and obviously public, you guys are right on the wave of all this large scale stuff and your gaming app really kind of highlights that. And you've been through the paces with Ansible. So I guess my question, and you've got a lot of scar tissue and you got success to show for it too, a lot of great stuff. What advice would you give people who are now getting on the new wave, the bigger wave that's coming which is more users, more scale, more features more automation, microservices are coming around the corner. As long as I get more scale. What advice would you give someone who's coming on board with Ansible for the first time? >> I think there was, you were talking before about Kubernetes and it was so where we were, I think we'd got into containers kind of relatively early. And we were deploying Docker and we had some pretty big, kind of scary playbooks and they managed low balances and deployed Docker containers. And it was always interesting thinking how is this all going to change when Kubernetes comes along? And I think that's been really smooth. I think there's a really nice Ansible module that's just called gates. And I think it's really simple actually, it simplified a lot of the playbooks. And I think that the technologies can coexist quite happily. I don't think you have to feel like Kubernetes is going to change all of the investment you've made into Ansible. Even if you go down the route of Kubernetes operators, you can write them in Ansible. So I still think it's a very relevant tool even with Kubernetes being so kind of prevalent. >> Jurgen what's your thoughts on folks getting in now, who want to jump in and take advantage of the automation, all the cool stuff with Ansible? What advice would you give them? >> Yes, I would definitely recommend to look at their infrastructure set ups as they would look at their code. So break it down into small manageable components, start small, build your roles, make sure to build your roles properly for each of that small component. And then definitely look at Ansible Tower as a way to visualize and control the execution of your code. Make sure you're running it with the proper security policies with the proper credentials and all, they're not, of course so break anything which is at the production level. >> Michael McCarthy, Jurgen Grech two great engineers at Gamesys. Congratulations on your success and love to unpack the infrastructure and the scale you have and certainly automation, great success path. And it's going to get easier. I mean, that's what everyone's saying, it's going to get easier. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, welcome >> Thank you, take care. Bye bye. >> I'm John Furrier with The Cube here in Palo Alto California. We're virtual, The Cube virtual for Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube at Catalyst Contracts. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's funny, seems something about Phoenix that this is where all the great women in tech conferences are. We were here two years ago for our first Grace Hopper and it's really fun to return now to this one, the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, which, a little bit smaller, about 400 people, their fourth year, but again it's all about empowering girls, empowering women to think differently, to take charge and to be more successful so really excited for our next guest, Jim McCarthy, brought in to motivate the troops. >> That's right. >> So first off, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So-- >> Thanks Jeff. >> Your keynote was all about a career without regret, have a great impact on what you care about. That is so topical right now, and especially these people that talk about, you know, the millennials and you know, kind of the younger generation coming up, they want to do things that they care about >> Yeah, I think all the research indicates millennials, more than maybe prior generations, really are looking for work that has impact and has meaning. >> Is it because they can? You know, that things are a little bit easier, they know they're not necessarily y'know, suffering to get by? Why do you think there's the change and then once you've made that decision, how do you implement that in kind of your day to day life? >> Well I'm not sure I could explain how the millennials are perhaps different, maybe they just see some of the challenges in our world like climate change for example and realize wow, there's some very serious challenges we face. That might be why they're looking for more of an impact, but in terms of what to do to find more meaning in life I always encourage people to do work that they really love, that they're passionate about, and in this conference a lot of the women have talked about passion and what you're good at and really doing that 'cause that's what you're going to be most successful at. >> Right, but that's a really common theme >> Yeah. >> We've heard that forever, to close your parachute, y'know, if you could find something that you get paid well and you're passionate about, but often times there's a conflict, right? Sometimes it's just harder, people get stuck in something that they're not happy with, but they're not really willing to make the change, not really willing to make the investment or take the chance so what are some of the things you tell people that are specific actionable, that will help them y'know, make those changes to get some place where they're y'know, feeling better about what they're working on? >> Well, so for me part of my talk was I talk about how I had a career in Silicone Valley, early employee at Yahoo! and different internet companies and then about three and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and that was a big wake up call for me. And even though my health seems to be okay right now, it really sort of helped me realize that wow, I'm not going to live forever and by embracing my mortality I've started living much more fully and I decided okay, if I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I always wanted to, never had the courage to do it, I thought okay, I'm not going to live forever, I might as well dive into it, have the courage to try even if I fail. But at least I'll be happy and I'm not living a life with regrets. >> Right. >> So that was part of my workshop yesterday. >> So that's really interesting and a powerful story I mean, we often hear when there's these, y'know, kind of life changing events, these big moments, y'know that is the catalyst. Does it take that to make the change? Can people do it without the change? I mean, we can't hardly get anyone to lift up their face out of email. (laughing) I mean, how do we do it without that or does it really take that? I mean, is that really what happens, whether it's yourself or a loved one or someone you care about, it's interesting 'cause that's powerful catalyst >> Yeah so, I think for some people it does take getting, y'know, hit with a ton of bricks like that in order to really realize what they need to do and have the courage to do it and just realize y'know, this may not work out but I'm just going to go for it. In part of my workshops I try to help people think about their mortality, think about if you were to die today, how would you feel about your relationships. If you were to die today, how would you feel about the work that you've done. And then I always have them write out action plans for okay, based on what I wrote, based on what we discussed, what do you want to change in your life and what's the deadline to do it? So that's kind of the process that I use in my workshops so it's not just nice story and inspiration but it's really okay, how can we bring this back to what am I going to do with my career, what am I going to do with my relationships and there's also very practical things that people can do that I think will help them a lot, one is mindfulness to reduce their stress, one is affirmation in which you can actually train your brain to be much more positive thinking and there's a lot of neuroscience behind that today which shows that you can actually sculpt your brain to have a much more positive attitude. So those are some and then the goal setting is important too. So -- and then gratitude, I'm sorry, there's another practice. So these are very, this is not just nice ideas but actually daily practices you can do, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude and affirmations, these are all things that can really have a daily impact in a very positive way. >> Right, and I'm sure people say, "Jim, that sounds great, I printed it out, it's on my fridge, but jeez, I wake up, I have 472 unread emails, the boss is calling me," how do I really actually do it? I want to do it but I'm drowning in email, whoever invented email is problematic, I'm glad that young kids don't use it 'cause it's going to die soon. (laughing) But y'know, practically, what do you tell folks? >> What I tell people is if you meditated 10 minutes a day, that's about 1% of your waking hours and that 1% would improve the other 99% of your waking hours and meditation used to be very weird and funky and new-agey and now you see more and more people saying, "No actually, 10 minutes of mindfulness or meditation or breathing or whatever can make a huge positive impact on your health both physically and mentally". There's all sorts of very serious scientific research, neuroscience, which underscores that. So if you invest 10 minutes of your day in being at peace, reducing stress, focusing on your breathing, then the other 99% of your day is going to be calmer, you're not going to be freaking out so much, you get an email in your inbox that you may not like but you can say, "okay, let me breath, okay let me think about this, okay", don't have to do an immediate flame mail response and then you're doing a lot less damage control in your life and you're being much more focused on how do I want to spend my day. And so that is one way to reduce your stress and yet still get stuff done, the most important stuff done. >> It's interesting, I have an unwritten book that I always wanted to write, kind of on some of the things you said before about y'know, don't forget your death bed, 'cause at some point you're going to be laying on your death bed-- >> That would be the title of your book? >> And you're going to have those questions. >> Yeah >> Yeah Y'know, did I do what I want to do? Did I spend too much time at the office, or too much time at the beach or too much time with the kids or not? >> Well if I can say, there's a woman who wrote a book named "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying" and regret number two was "I wish I had worked less". And every single man in her survey that she talked to said "I wish I had worked less". And these are men on their deathbeds. But it applies to a lot of women as well. >> So I want to shift gears a little bit, back to your tech days, >> Yeah (laughing) >> Just looking at your background, obviously some of our homework and you y'know, you did a summer at McKenzie, you're kind of at the leading edge of business and smart people and you -- >> You're too kind Jeff, okay? (laughing) >> No, and then you decide I haven't finished the story, and then you go to San Jose Mercury News to work in classifieds. >> Actually to do marketing. >> To do marketing >> Yeah >> But you were involved in classifieds and I only bring up the classifieds 'cause it's interesting because then you left and went to Yahoo!, right at the main, I mean really at a pivotal time in the transformation of classifieds moving from the newspaper to online. >> Yes >> So you lived kind of this digital transformation long before Uber and some of the other examples that are so often cited. >> Yeah. >> So I'd just love to get kind of your perspective on, y'know, kind of digital transformation, it happened, this was 97 so what 20 years ago, I can't believe it's 20 years ago, to now and then in the context of what you're doing now. >> So I graduated from business school in 1996, and went to the San Jose Mercury News and was doing marketing things. But right when I was graduating I was like, "Oh jeez, y'know this internet thing is going to be huge!", and after a few months at the Mercury News, I said, "Look, I really want to do something with internet", and they said, "Sorry, can't do that, keep helping us sell papers." And I said, "Well screw this!", and so I went to Yahoo! In July 1997, I was employee number 258 and I was hired to be a product manager for Yahoo! classifieds, so realizing, 'cause I remember sitting in the Mercury News at my computer and looking at, wow, Yahoo! has some like, online classifieds for autos? And careers? And this is way better than the newspaper! I can have long descriptions here and you can even see pictures of things, so I went to Yahoo! classifieds and out of that we created Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Careers Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Real Estate. And yes, this absolutely-- And then later there was the category killers where there was Match.com, where there was Monster or Monster Board, and on down the line-- >> Monster Park, remember Monster Park, one of the first sponsored stadiums back in the day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> After 3Com. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt. >> No it's okay. So it was an amazing transformation and it was one of these things where the internet just does things so much better and you could say it also sort of helped destroy an industry, right? I mean, I'm certainly a big believer in the power of local newspapers and investigative journalism, and that's really been damaged a lot from the last 20 years, but sometimes it's like this technological imperative where the web is so much better, people have to figure out different business models, different ways to fund their journalism, different revenue models that work. But I mean it's just amazing to see what's gone on with how classifieds has developed, e-commerce has developed. I worked later on Yahoo! Auctions and Shopping, you can talk about that more if you want. >> Yeah, a friend of mine works at the Yellow Pages, I was like dude, you probably need to get a new job. >> Really? Still? >> It's YP.com now. Well turns out they have a huge online business which is good for them. No still, I was like c'mon, (laughing) You need to get out of that. >> Gosh (laughing). >> So, anyway. It's just interesting, the digital transformation that we're under now y'know, has happened over and over again, we just happen to be kind of in the current iteration, sometimes people forget-- >> Yes, yeah. >> That there was a time before Google, it was called AltaVista (laughing) or WebCrawler if you want to go back even further. Anyway, we regress. So Jim, what're you working on now, what're you looking forward to in the next six months, any special projects? You just traveling the country and spreading good word? >> I travel the country and I travel internationally doing my workshop. So basically the workshop's where I teach companies how to build happy, high performance teams. >> Awesome. >> And in the workshop, some of them are a little bit more, much more sort of inspirational and about mortality and about what you want to do for life purpose, I have a workshop called, "Happiness Workshop: Keep Calm and Get Stuff Done" and then so there's ones which are much more goal setting, there's more which are inspirational and yeah, I travel and teach companies how to -- whether it's an hour workshop or a six hour workshop, that's what I do. >> Jim, thanks for stopping by, it's a great story and I think it's just so important, y'know there's a lot of great inspirational stories out there but really y'know, how you do you help people, give them actionable things that they can put on the fridge, put on their calender and-- >> And have in their daily routine. >> Right and do it right, and do change behavior 'cause it's hard to change attitude, really hard, and the way you do it is you change behavior, that you can actually change. Thanks for-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Thanks for sharing a few minutes with us. >> Thank you Jeff, very kind of you. >> Absolutely >> Thank you >> Jim McCarthy, I'm Jeff Frick, we're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, you're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Yeah. >>Welcome back for our last session of the day how to deliver career making business outcomes with Search and AI. So we're very lucky to be hearing from Canada. Canadian Tire, one of Canada's largest and most successful retailers, have been powered 4.5 1000 employees to maximize the value of data with self service insights. So today we're joining us. We have Yarrow Baturin, who is the manager of Merch analytics and planning to support at Canadian Tire and then also Andrea Frisk, who is the engagement manager manager for thoughts. What s O U R Andrea? Thanks so much for being here. And with >>that, >>I'll pass the mic to you guys. >>Thank you for having us. Um, already, I I think I'll start with an introduction off who I am, what I do. A Canadian entire on what Canadian pair is all about. So, as a manager of Merch analytics at Canadian Tire, I support merchant organization with reporting tools, and then be I platform to enable decision making on a day to day basis. What is? Canadian Tire's Canadian tire is one of the largest retailers in Canada. Um, serving Canadians with a number of lines of business spanning automotive fixing, living, playing and SNG departments. We have a number of banners, including sport check Marks Party City Phl that covers more than 1700 locations. So as an organization, we've got vast variety of different data, whether it's product or loyalty. Now, as the time goes on, the number of asks the number off data points. The complexity of the analysis has been increasing on banned traditional tools. Analytical tools such as Excel Microsoft Access do find job but start hitting their limitations. So we started on the journey of exploring what other B I platforms would be suitable for our needs. And the criteria that we thought about as we started on that journey is to make sure that we enable customization as well as the McCarthy ization of data. What does that mean? That means we wanted to ensure that each one of the end users have ability to create their own versions off the report while having consistency from the data standpoint, we also wanted Thio ensure that they're able to create there at hawks search queries and draw insights based on the desired business needs. As each one of our lines of business as each one of our departments is quite unique in their nature. And this is where thoughts about comes into play. Um, you checked off all the boxes? Um, as current customers, as potential customers, you will discover that this is the tool that allows that at hawks search ability within a matter of seconds and ability to visualize the information and create those curated pin boards for each one of the business units, depending on what the needs are. And now where? I guess well, Andrea will talk a little bit more about how we gained adoption, but the usage was like and how we, uh, implemented the tool successfully in the organization. >>Okay, so I actually used to work for Canadian tire on DSO. During that time, I helped Thio build training and engaging users to sort of really kick start our use cases. Andi, the ongoing process of adopting thought spot through Canadian Tire s 01 of the sort of reasons that we moved into using thought spot was there was a need Thio evolve, um, in order to see the wealth of data that we had coming in. So the existing reporting again. And this is this sort of standard thoughts bought fix is, um, it brings the data toe. Everyone on git makes it more accessible, so you get more out of your data. So we want to provide users with the ability to customize what they could see and personalized three information so that they could get their specific business requirements out of the data rather than relying on the weekly monthly quarterly reporting. That was all usually fairly generic eso without the ability to deep dive in. So this gave the users the agility thio optimize their campaigns, optimize product murder, urgency where products are or where there's maybe supply chain gaps. Andi just really bring this out for trillions of rose to become accessible. Thio the Canadian tire. That's what user base think. That's the slide. >>That's the slight, Um So as Andrea talked about the business use of the particular tool, let's talk a little bit about how we set it up and a wonderful journey of how it's evolved. So we first implemented 5.3 version of that spot on the Falcon server on we've been adding horsepower to it over time. Now mhm. What I want to stress is the importance off the very first, Data said. That goes into the tool toe. Actually engage the users and to gain the adoption and to make sure there is no argument whether the tool is accurate or not. So what we've started with is a key p I marked layer with all the major metrics that we have and all the available permutations and combinations off the dimensions, whether it's a calendar dimension, proud of dimension or, let's say, customer attribute now, as we started with that data set, we wanted to make sure that we're we have the ability to add and the dimensions right. So now, as we're implementing the tool, we're starting to add in more dimension tables to satisfy the needs off our clients if you want to call it that way as they want to evolve their analytics. So we started adding in some of the store attributes we started adding in some of the product attributes on when I refer to a product attributes, let's say, uh, it involves costs and involves prices involved in some of the strategic internal pieces that we're thinking about now as the comprehensive mark contains right now, in our instance, close to five billion records. This is where it becomes the one source of truth for people declaring information against right so as they go in, we also wanted to make sure when they Corey thought spot there, we're really Onley. According one source of data. One source of truth. It became apparent over time, obviously, that more metrics are needed. They might not be all set up in that particular mark. And that's when we went on the journey off implementing some of the new worksheets or some of the new data sets particularly focused on the four looking pieces. And uh, that's where it becomes important to say This is how you gain the interest and keep the interests of the public right. So you're not just implementing a number off data sets all at once and then letting the users be you're implementing pieces and stages. You're keeping the interest thio, the tool relevant. You're keeping, um, the needs of the public in mind. Now, as you can imagine on the Falcon server piece, um, adding in the horsepower capacity might become challenging the mawr. Billions of Rosie erratic eso were actually in the middle of transitioning our environment to azure in snowflake so that we can connect it. Thio embrace capability of thoughts cloud. And that's where I'm looking forward to that in 2021 I truly believe this will enable us Thio increase the speed off adoption Increase the speed of getting insights out of the tool and scale with regards Thio new data sets that we're thinking about implementing as we're continuing our thoughts about journey >>Okay, so how we drove adoption Thio 4500 plus users eso When we first started Thio approach our use case with the merchants within Canadian Tire We had meetings with these users with who are used place is gonna be with and sort of found out. What are they searching for, Where they typically looking at what existing reports are available for them. Andi kind of sought out to like, What are those things where you're pulling this on your own or someone else's pulling this data because it's not accessible yet And we really use that as our foundation to determine one what data we needed to initially bring into the system but also to sort of create those launchpad pin boards that had the base information that the users we're gonna need so that we could twofold, make it easy for them, toe adopt into the tool and also quickly start Thio, deactivate or discontinue those reports. And just like these air now only available in thought spot because with the sort of formatting within thought spot around dates, it's really easy to make this year's report last year report etcetera. Just have everything roll over every month or a recorder s. So that was kind of some of the pre work foundation when we originally did it. But really, it's been a lot of training, a lot of training. So we conducted ah, lot of in person training, obviously pre co vid eso. We've started to train the group that we targeted, which was the merchants and all of the like, surrounding support groups. Eso we had planners going in and training as well, so that everyone who was really closely connected to the merchants I had an idea of what thoughts about what was and how to use it and where the reports were, and so we just sort of rolled it out that way, and then it started to fly like wildfire. Eso the merchants start to engage with supply chain to have conversations, or the merchants were engaging with the vendors to sort of have negotiations about pricing. And they're creating these reports and getting the access to the information so quickly, and they're sharing it out that we had other groups just coming to us asking, How do I get into thoughts about how can I get in on DSO on top of those groups, we also sought out other heavy analytics groups such a supply chain where we felt like they could have the same benefits if they on boarded into thought spot with their data as well on Ben. Just continuing to evolve the training roll out. Um, you know, we continued to engage with the users, >>so >>we had a newsletter briefly Thio, sort of just keep informing users of the new data coming in or when we actually upgraded our system. So the here are the new features that you'll start seeing. We did virtual trainings and maintaining an F A Q document with the incoming questions from the users, and then eventually evolved into a self guided learning so that users that were coming to a group, or maybe we've already done a full rollout could come in and have the opportunity to learn how to use thought spot, have examples that were relevant to the business and really get started. Eso then each use case sort of after our initial started to build into a formula of the things that we needed to have. So you need to understand it. Having SMEs ready and having the database Onda worksheets built out sort of became the step by step path to drive adoption. Um, from an implementation timeline, I think they're saying, Took about two months and about half of that waas Kenny entire figuring out how figuring out our security, how to get the data in on, Do we need the time to set up the environment and get on Falcon? So then, after that initial two months, then each use case that we come through. Generally, we've got users trained and SMEs set up within about 2 to 3 weeks after the data is ingested. It's not obviously, once snowflakes set up on the data starts to get into that and the data feeds in, then you're really just looking at the 2 to 3 weeks because the data is easily connected in, >>um, no. All right, let's talk about some of the use cases. So we started with what data we've implemented. Andrea touched upon what Use a training look like what the back curate that piece wants. Now let's talk a little bit about use cases and how we actually leverage thoughts bought together the insights. So the very first one is ultimately the benefit of the tool to the entire organization. Israel Time insights. To reiterate what Andrea said, we first implemented the tool with our buyers. They're the nucleus of any retail organization as they work with everybody within the company and as the buyer's eyes, Their responsibility to ensure both the procurement and the sales channel, um, stays afloat at the end of the day, right? So they need information on a regular basis. They needed fast. They needed timely, and they needed in a fashion that they choose to digest it. It right? Not every business is the same. Not every individual is the same. They consume digest, analyze information differently. And that's what that's what allows you to dio whether it's the search, whether it's a customized onboard, please now supply chain unexpected things. As Andrea mentioned Irish work a lot of supply chain. What is the goal of supply chain to receive product and to be able to ship that product to the stores Now, as our organization has been growing and is doing extremely well, we've actually published Q three results recently. Um, the aspect off prioritization at D C level becomes very important, And what drives some of that prioritization is the analysis around what the upcoming sales would be for specific products for specific categories. And that's where again thoughts. But is one of the tools that we've utilized recently to set our prioritization logic from both inbound and outbound us. It's right because it gives you most recent results. It gives you most granular results, depending on the business problem that you're trying to tackle. Now let's chat a little bit about covert 19 response, because this one is an extremely interesting case as a pandemic hit back in March. Um, as you can imagine, the everyday life a Canadian entire became as business unusual is our executives referred to it under business unusual. This speed and the intensity of the insights and the analytics has grown exponentially. And the speed and the intensity of the insights is driven by the fact that we were trying Thio ensure that we have the right selection of products for our Canadian customers because that's ultimately bread and butter off all of the retailers is the customers, right? So thoughts bought allowed us to have early trends off both sales and inventory patterns, where, whether we were stalking out of some of the products in specific stories of provinces, whether we saw some of the upload off different lines of business, depending on the region, ality right as pandemic hit, for example, um, gym's closed restaurants closed. So as Canadian pack carries a wide variety of different lines of business, we actually offer a wide selection of exercise equipment and accessories, cycling products as well as the kitchen appliances and kitchen accessories pieces. Right? So all of those items started growing exponentially and in certain areas more than others. And this is where thoughts about comes into play. A typical analysis on what the region ality of the sales has been over the last couple of days, which is lifetime and pandemic terms, um, could have taken days weeks for analysts to ultimately cobbled together an Excel spreadsheet. Meanwhile, it can take a couple of seconds for 12 Korean tosspot set up a PIN board that can be shared through a wide variety of individuals rather than fording that one Excel spreadsheet that gets manipulated every single time. And then you don't get the right inside. So from again merch supply chain covert response aspect of things. That spot has been one of those blessings and one of those amazing tools to utilize and improve the speed off insights, improved the speed of analytics and improve the speed of decision making that's ultimately impacting, then consumer at the store level. So Andrea talked about 4500 users that we have that number of school. But what I owe the recently like to focus on, uh, Andrew and I laughing because I think the last time we've spoken at a larger forum with the fastball community, I think we had only 500 users. That was in the beginning >>of the year in in February, we were aiming to have like 1000 >>exactly. So mission accomplished. So we've got 4500 employees now. Everybody asked me, Yeah, that's a big number, but how many times do people actually log in on a weekly or daily basis? I'm or interested in that statistic? So lately, um, we've had more than 400 users on the weekly basis. What's what's been cool lately is, uh, the exponential growth off ad hoc ways. So throughout October, we've reached a 75,000 ad hoc ways in our system and about 13,000 PIN board views. So why is that's that's significant? We started off, I would say, in January of 2020 when Andrea refers to it, I think we started off with about 40 45,000 ad hoc worries a month. So again, that was cool. But at the end of the day, we were able to thio double that amount as more people migrate to act hawk searches from PIN board views, and that's that's a tremendous phenomena, because that's what that's about is all about. So I touched upon a little bit about exercise and cycling. So these are our quarterly results for Q two, um, that have showed tremendous growth that we did not plan for, that we were able to achieve with, ultimately the individuals who work throughout the organization, whether it's the merch organization or whether it's the supply chain side of the business. But coming together and utilizing a B I platform by tools such a hot spot, we can see triple digit growth results. Eso What's next for us users at Hawks searches? That's fantastic. I would still like to get to more than 1200 people on the weekly basis. The cool number to me is if all of our lifetime users were you were getting into the tool on a weekly basis. That would be cool. And what's proven to be true is ultimately the only way to achieve it is to keep surprising and delighting them and your surprising and delighting them with the functionality of the tool. With more of the relevant content and ultimately data adding in more data, um, is again possible through ET else, and it's possible through pulling that information manually. But it's expensive, expensive not from the sense of monetary value, but it's expensive from the size time, all of those aspects of things So what I'm looking forward to is migrating our platform to azure in snowflake and being able thio scale our insights accordingly. Toe adding more data to Adam or incites more, uh, more individual worksheets and data sets for people to Korea against helps the each one of the individuals learn. Get some of the insights. Helps my team in particular be, well, more well versed in the data that we have existing throughout the organization. Um, and then now Andrea, in touch upon how we scale it further and and how each one of the individuals can become better with this wonderful >>Yeah, soas used a zero mentioned theater hawk searches going up. It's sort of it's a little internal victory because our starting platform had really been thio build the pin boards to replicate what the users were already expecting. So that was sort of how we easily got people in. And then we just cut off the tap Thio, whatever the previous report waas. So it gave them away. Thio get into the tool and understand the information. So now that they're using ad hoc really means they understand the tool. Um, then they they have the data literacy Thio access the information and use it how they need. So that's it's a really cool piece. Um, that worked on for Canadian tire. A very report oriented and heavy organization. So it was a good starting platforms. So seeing those ad hoc searches go up is great. Um, one of the ways that we sort of scaled out of our initial group and I kind of mentioned this earlier I sort of stepped on my own toes here. Um is that once it was a proven success with the merchants and it started to spread through word of mouth and we sought out the analyst teams. Um, we really just kept sort of driving the insights, finding the data and learning more about the pieces of the business. As you would like to think he knows everything about everything. He only knows what he knows. Eso You have to continue to cultivate the internal champions. Um Thio really keep growing the adoption eso find this means that air excited about the possibility of using thought spot and what they can do with it. You need to find those people because they're the ones who are going to be excited to have this rapid access to the information and also to just be able to quickly spend less time telling a user had access it in thought spot. Then they would running the report because euro mentioned we basically hit a curiosity tax, right? You you didn't want to search for things or you didn't want to ask questions of the data because it was so conversed. Um, it was took too much time to get the data. And if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for, it was worse. So, you know, you wouldn't run a query and be like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me let me now run another query of all that information to get more data. Just not. It's not time effective or resource effective. Actually, at the point, eso scaling the adoption is really cultivating those people who are really into it as well. Um, from a personal development perspective, sort of as a user, I mean, one who doesn't like being smartest person in the room on bought spot sort of provides that possibility. Andi, it makes it easier for you to get recognized for delivering results on Dahlia ble insights and sort of driving the business forward. So you know, B b that all star be the Trailblazer with all the answers, and then you can just sort of find out what really like helping the organization realized the power of thought spot on, baby. Make it into a career. >>Amazing. I love love that you've joined us, Andrea. Such a such an amazing create trajectory. No bias that all of my s o heaps of great information there. Thank you both. So much for sharing your story on driving such amazing adoption and the impact that you've been able to make a T organization through. That we've got a couple of minutes remaining. So just enough time for questions. Eso Andrea. Our first questions for you from your experience. What is one thing you would recommend to new thoughts about users? >>Um, yeah, I would say Be curious and creative. Um, there's one phrase that we used a lot in training, which was just mess around in the tool. Um, it's sort of became a catchphrase. It is really true. Just just try and use it. You can't break. It s Oh, just just play around. Try it you're only limitation of what you're gonna find is your own creativity. Um, and the last thing I would say is don't get trapped by trying to replicate things. Is that exactly as they were? B, this is how we've always done it. Isin necessarily The the best move on day isn't necessarily gonna find new insights. Right. So the change forces you thio look at things from a different perspective on defined. Find new value in the data. >>Yeah, absolutely. Sage advice there. Andan another one here for Yaro. So I guess our theme for beyond this year is analytics meets Cloud Open for everyone. So, in your experience, what does What does that mean for you? >>Wonderful question. Yeah. Listen, Angela Okay, so to me, in short, uh, means scale and it means turning Yes. Sorry. No, into a yes. Uh, no, I'm gonna elaborate. Is interest is laughing at me a little bit. That's right. >>I can talk >>Fancy Two. Okay, So scale from the scale perspective Cloud a zai touched upon Throw our conversation on our presentation cloud enables your ability Thio store have more data, have access to more data without necessarily employing a number off PTL developers and going toe a number of security aspect of things in different data sources now turning a no into a yes. What does that mean with more data with more scalability? Um, the analytics possibilities become infinite throughout my career at Canadian Tire. Other organizations, if you don't necessarily have access thio data or you do not have the necessary granularity, you always tell individuals No, it's not possible. I'm not able to deliver that result. And quite often that becomes the norm, saying no becomes the norm. And I think what we're all striving towards here on this call Aziz part the conference is turning that no one say yes on then making a yes a new, uh, standard a new form. Um, as we have more access to the data, more access to the insights. So that would be my answer. >>Love it. Amazing. Well, that kind of brings in into this session. So thank you, everyone for joining us today on did wrap up this dream. Don't miss the upcoming product roadmap eso We'll be sticking around to speak thio some of the speakers you heard earlier today and I'll make the experts round table, and you can absolutely continue the conversation with this life. Q. On Q and A So you've got an opportunity here to ask questions that maybe keep you up at night. Perhaps, but yet stay tuned for the meat. The experts secrets to scaling analytics adoption after the product roadmap session. Thanks everyone. And thank you again for joining us. Guys. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and as part of my CEO and CXO series I've been bringing in leaders around the industry and I'm really pleased to have Sudheesh Nair, who is the CEO of ThoughtSpot Cube alum. Great to see you against Sudheesh, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure Dave. Thank you so much for having me. I hope everything is well with you and your family. >> Yeah ditto back at you. I know you guys were in a hot spot for a while so you know we power on together, so I got to ask you. You guys are AI specialists, maybe sometimes you can see things before they happen. At what point did you realize that this COVID-19 was really going to be something that would affect businesses globally and then specifically your business. >> Yeah it's amazing, isn't it? I mean we used to think that in Silicon Valley we are sitting at the top of the world. AI and artificial intelligence, machine learning, Cloud, IOT and all of a sudden this little virus comes in and put us all in our places basically. We are all waiting for doctors and others to figure these things out so we can actually go outside. That tells you all about what is really important in life sometimes. It's been a hard journey for most people because of what a huge health event this has been. From a Silicon Valley point of view and specifically from artificial intelligence point of view, there is not a lot of history here that we can use to predict the future, however early February we had our sales kick off and we had a lot of our sellers who came from Asia and it became sort of clear to us immediately during our sales kick off in Napa Valley that this is not like any other event. The sort of things that they were going through in Asia we sort of realized immediately that us and when it gets to the shores of the US, this is going to really hurt. So we started hunkering down as a company, but as you mentioned early when we were talking, California in general had a head start, so we've been hunkered down for almost five weeks now, as a company and as the people and the results are showing. You know it is somewhat contained. Now obviously the real question is what next? How do we go out? But that's probably the next journey. >> So a lot of the executives that I've talked to, of course they start with the number one importance is the health and well-being of our employees. We set up the work from home infrastructure, et cetera. So that's I think, been fairly well played in the media and beginning to understand that pretty well. Also, you saw I talked to Frank Slootman and he's sort of joked about the Sequoia memos, that you know eliminate unnecessary expenses and practices. I've always eliminated unnecessary expenses, keep it to the essentials, but one of the things that I haven't probed with CEOs and I'd love your thoughts on this is, did you have to rethink sort of the ideal customer profile and your value proposition in the specific context of COVID? Was that something that you deliberately did? >> Yeah so it's a really important question that you asked, and I saw the Frank interview and I a 100% agree with that. Inside the company we have this saying, and our co-founder Ajeet actually coined the phrase of living like a middle-class company, and we've always lived that, even though we have, 300 plus million dollars in the bank and we raised a big round last year. It is important to know that as a growth stage company, we are not measured on what's in the bank. It's about the value that we are delivering and how much I'll be able to collect from customers to run the business. The living like a middle-class family has always been the ethos of the company and that has been a good thing. However, I've been with ThoughtSpot for a little more than 18 months. I joined as the CEO. I was an early investor in the company and there are a couple of big changes that we made in the last 18 months, and one of is moving to Cloud which we can talk. The other one has been around narrowing our focus on who we sell to, because one of the things that, as you know very well Dave, is that the world of data is extremely complex. Every company can come in and say, "We have the best solution out there" and it can just be in the world, but the reality is no single product is going to solve every problem for a customer when it comes to a data analytics issue. All we can hope for is that we become part of a package or solution that solves a very specific problem, so in that context there's a lot of services involved, a lot of understanding of customer problems involved. We are not a bi-product in the sense of Tableau or click on Microsoft, but they do. We are about a use case based outcomes, so we knew that we can't be everywhere. So the second change we made is actually a narrower focus, exclusively sell to global. That class, the middle class mentality, really paid off now because almost all the customers we sell to are very large customers and the four work verticals that we were seeing tremendous progress, one was healthcare, second was financial sector, the third was telecom and manufacturing and the last one is repair. Out of these four, I would say manufacturing is the one where we have seen a slowdown, but the other verticals have been, I would say cautiously spending. Being very responsible and thus far, I'm not here to say that everything is fine, but the impact if you take Zoom as a spectrum, on one end of the spectrum, where everything is doing amazingly well, because they are a good product market fit to hospitality industry on the other side. I would say ThoughtSpot and our approach to data analytics is closer to this than that. >> That's very interesting Sudheesh because, of course health care, I don't think they have time to do anything right now. I mean they're just so overwhelmed so that's obviously an interesting area that's going to continue to do well I would think. And they, the Financial Services guys, there's a lot of liquidity in the system and after 2009 the FinTech guys or the financial, the banks are doing quite well. They may squeeze you a little bit because they're smart negotiators, but as you say manufacturing with the supply chains, and in retail, look, if your ecommerce I mean Amazon hit, all-time highs today up whatever, 20% in the last two weeks. I mean just amazing what's happening, so it's really specific parts of those sectors will continue to do well, won't they? >> Absolutely, I think look, I saw this joke on Twitter, what's the number one cost? What is in fact (mic cuts out). Very soon people will say it is COVID and even businesses that have been tried to, sort of relatively, reluctant to really embrace the transformation that the customers have been asking for. This has become the biggest forcing function and that's actually a good thing because consumers are going to ultimately win because once you get groceries delivered to you into your front doors, it's going to be hard to sort of go back to standing in the line in Costco, when InstaCart can actually deliver it for you and you get used to it, so there are some transformation that is going to happen because of COVID. I don't think that society will go back from, but having said that, it's also not transformation for the sake of transformation. So speaking from our point of view on data analytics, I sort of believe that the last three to four years we have been sort of living in the Renaissance of enterprise data analytics and that's primarily because of three things. The first thing, every consumer is expecting, no matter how small or the big business, is to get to know them. You know, I don't want you to treat me like an average. I don't want you treat me like a number. Treat me like a person, which means understand me but personalize the services you are delivering and make sure that everything that you send me are relevant. If there's a marketing campaign or promo or customer support call, make sure it's relevant. The relevance and personalization. The second is, in return for that. customers are willing to give you all sorts of data. The privacy, be damned, so to a certain extent they are giving you location information, medical information,-- And the last part is with Cloud, the amount of data that you can collect and free plus in data warehouse like Snowflakes, like Redshift. It's been fundamentally shifted, so when you toggle them together the customers demand for better actors from the business, then amount of data that they're willing to give and collect to IOT and variables and then cloud-based technologies that allows you to process and store this means that analyzing this data and then delivering relevant actions to the consumers is no longer a nice to have and that I think is part of the reason why ThoughtSpot is finding sort of a tailwind, even with all this global headwind that we are all in. >> Well I think too, the innovation formula really has changed in our industry. I've said many times, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data plus AI applied to that data and Cloud for scale and you guys are at the heart of that, so I want to talk about the market space a little bit. You look at BI and analytics, you look at the market. You know the Gartner Magic Quadrant and to your point, you know the companies on there are sort of chalk and cheese, to borrow a phrase from our friends across the pond. I mean, you're not power BI, you're not SaaS. I mean you're sort of search led. You're turning natural language into complex sequel queries. You're bringing in artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to really simplify and dramatically expand and put into the hands of business people analytics. So explain a little bit. First of all, do I have that sort of roughly right? And help us frame the market space how you think about it. >> Yeah I mean first of all, it is amazing that the diverse industry and technologies that you speak to and how you are able to grasp all of them and summarize them within a matter of seconds is a term to understand in itself. You and Stew, you both have that. You are absolutely right. So the way I think of this is that BI technologies have been around and it's played out really well. It played it's part. I mean if you look at it the way I think of BI, the most biggest BI tool is still Excel. People still want to use Excel and that is the number one BI tool ever. Then 10 years ago Tableau came in and made visualizations so delightful and a pic so to speak. That became the better way to consume complex data. Then Microsoft came in Power BI and then commoditized and the visualization to a point that, you know Tableau had to fight and it ended up selling to the Salesforce. We are not trying to play there because I think if you chase the idea of visualization it is going to be a long hard journey for ThoughtSpot to catch Tableau in visualization. That's not what we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is that you have a lot of data on one hand and you have a consumer sitting here and saying data doesn't mean you treated me well. What is my action that is this quote, very customized action quote. And our question is, how does beta turn into bespoke action inside a business? The insurance company is calling. You are calling an insurance company's customer support person. How do you know that the impact that you are getting from them is customized. But turning data into insight is an algorithmic process. That's what BI does, but that's like a few people in an organization can do that. Think of them like oil. They don't mix with water, that's the business people. The merchandising specialist who figures out which one should become site and what should be the price what should be ranking. That's the merchandiser. Their customer support person, that's a business user. They don't necessarily do Python or SQL, so what happens is in businesses you have the data people like water and the business people who touch the customer and interact with them every day, they're like the water. They don't mix. The idea of ThoughtSpot is very simple. We don't want this demarcation. We don't want this chasm. We want to break it so that every single person who interact with the customer should be able to have an interactive storytelling with the data, so that every decision that they make takes data into insight to knowledge to action, and that decision-making pipeline cannot be gut driven alone. It has to be enabled by data science and human experience coming together. So in our view, a well deployed data platform, decision-making platform, will enhance and augment human experience, as opposed to human experience says, this data says that, so you've got to pick one. That's an old model and that has been the approach with natural language based interactive access with the BI being done automated through AI in the backend, parts what we are able to put very complex data science in front of a 20 year experienced merchandising specialist in a large e-commerce website without learning Python, without learning people, without understanding data warehouse >> Right so, a couple of things I want to pick up on. I mean data is plentiful, insights aren't. That's really the takeaway from one of the things that you mentioned and this notion of storytelling is very, very important. I mean, all business people, they better be storytellers in some way shape or form and what better way to tell stories than with data, and so, because as you say it's no longer gut feel, it's not the answer anymore. So it seems to me Sudheesh, that you guys are transformative. The decision to focus on the global 2000 and really not, get washed up in the Excel, well I could just do it in Excel, or I'm going to go get Power BI, it's good enough. It's really, you're trying to be transformative and you've got a really disruptive model that we talked about before, search led and you're speaking to the system, or, typing in a way that's more natural, I wonder if you could comment on that and particularly that disruption of that transformation. >> Remember we are selling to global 2000. Almost all of them will have Tableau or one of these power BI or one of these solutions already, so you're not trying to go right and change that. What we have done is very clearly focus on use cases. We're transforming data into action. We will move the needle for the bit, but for example with the COVID situation going on, one of the most popular use cases for us is around working capital management. Now a CFO who's been in the business for 20 or 30 years is an expert and have the right kind of gut feeling about how her business is running when it comes to working capital. However, imagine now she can do 20 what-if scenarios in the next five seconds or next 10 minutes without going to the SPN 18, without going to the BI team. She can say what if we reduce hiring in Japan and instead we focus them on Singapore? What if we move 20% of marketing dollars from Germany to New York? What would be the impact of AR going up by 1% versus AP going down by 1%? She needs to now do complex scenarios, but without delay. It's sort of like how do I find a restaurant through Yelp versus going to the lobby to talk to a specialist who tells me the local restaurant. This interactive database storytelling for gut enhances the decision-making is very powerful. This is why, customer have, our largest customer has spent more than $26 million with ThougthSpot and this is not small. Our average is around close to 700k. This week for example, we are having a webinar where Verizon's SVP of Analytics specifically focused on finance. He's actually going to be on a webinar with our CFO. Our CFO Sophie, one of our financial specialists and Jeff Noto from Verizon are going to be on this talking about working capital management. What parts ThoughtSpot is a portion of, but they are sharing their experience of how do we manage, so that kind of varies, like extremely rigid focus on use cases, supply chain, modeling different things so that someone who knows Asia can really interact with the data to figure out if our supply chain from Bangladesh is going to be impacted because of COVID can we go to Ecuador? What will that look like? What will be the cost? What's the transportation cost, the fuel cost, Business has become so complex you don't have time to take five, six days to look at the report, no matter how pretty that report is, you have to make it efficient. You need to be able to make a lightning fast decision and something like COVID is really exposing all of that because day by day situation on the ground is changing. You know, employees are calling in sick. The virus is breaking out in one place, other place. If it's not, curves are going up and down so you cannot have any sort of delay between human experience and data signs and all of that comes down to your point telling visual stories so that the organization can rally behind the changes that they want to make. >> So these are mission-critical use cases. They are big problems that you're solving and attacking. As you said, you're not all things to all people. One of the things you're not is a data store, right? So you've got a partner, you've got to have an ecosystem, whether it's cloud databases, the cloud itself. I wonder if you could talk about some of the key partnerships that you're forming and how you're going to market and how that's affecting your business. >> Yeah, I mean one of the things that I've always believed in Silicon Valley is that companies die out of indigestion, not out of starvation. You try to do everything. That's how you end up dying and for us in the space of data, it's an extremely humbling space because there is so much to do, data prep, data warehousing, you know a mash-up of data, hosting of data, We have clearly decided that our ability is best spent on making artificial intelligence to work, interactive storytelling for business use and that's it. With that said, we needed a high velocity agility partner in the back end and Cloud based data warehouse have become a huge tailwind for us because our entire customer deployments are on Cloud, and the number one, obviously as you know from Frank's thing, the Snowflake has actually given, customers have seen Snowflakes plus ThoughtSpot is actually a good thing and we are exclusive in global 2000 and the Snowflake is climbing up there and we are able to build a good mutual partnership, but we are also seeing a really creative partnership all the way from product design to go to market and compensation alignment with Amazon on their push on Redshift as well. Google, we have announced partnership. There is a little bit of (mic cuts out) in the beginning we are getting, and just a couple of weeks ago we started working with Microsoft on their Azure Synapse algo. Now I would say that it's lagging, we still have work to do but Amazon and Snowflake are really pushing in terms of what customers want to see, and it completely aligns with our value popular, one plus one equals three. It really works well for our customers >> And Google is what, BigQuery plus Google Cloud, or what are you doing there? >> Yep so both Amazon and Google. Well, what we are doing at three different pieces. One if obviously the hosting of their cloud platforms. Second is data warehouse and enterprise data warehouse, which is Redshift and BigQuery. Third, we are also pretty good at taking machine learning algorithms that they have built for specific verticals. We're going to take those and then ingest them and deliver better. So for example if you are one of the largest supply companies in the world and you want to know what's the shipment rate from China and it shows and then the next thing you want to know is what the failure rate on this based on last behavior when you compressed a shipment rate, and that probably could use a bit of specific algorithms and you know Google and others have actually built a library of algorithms that can be injected into ThoughtSpot. We will simply answer the question of we may have gotten that algorithm from the Google library, sort of the business use is concerned. It doesn't really matter, so we have made all that invisible and we are able to deliver democratized access to Bespoke Insights to a business user, who are too sort of been afraid to deal with the sector data. >> Since you mentioned that you've got obviously several hundred million dollars in cash. You've raised over half a billion. You've talked previously about potential acquisitions, about IPO, are you considering acquisitions? M&A at this point in time? I mean there may be some deals out there. There's certainly some talent out there, but boy the market is changing so fast. I mean, it seems to, certain sectors are actually doing quite well. Will you consider M&A at this point? >> Yes, so I think IPO and M&A are two different-- IPO definitely, it will be foolish to say that this hasn't pushed our clients back a little bit because this is a huge event. I think there will be a correction across valuation and all of that. However, it is also important for us we use this opportunity to look at how we are investing our resources and investment for long-term versus the short-term and make sure that we are more focused and more tightening at the belt. We are doing that internally. Having said that, being a private company our valuation is, you know at least in theory, frozen, and then we have a pretty good cash position of close to $300 million, which means that it is absolutely an opportunity for us to seriously consider M&A. The important thing going back to my adage of, companies don't die out of starvation. It is critical to make sure that whatever we do, we do it with clarity. Are we doing it for talent? Are we doing it for tech? Or are we doing it for market? When you have a massive event like this, it is a poor idea to go after new market. It is important to go to our existing customers who are very large global 2000 firms and then identify problems that we cannot solve otherwise and then add technology to solve those problems, so technology acquisitions are absolutely something to consider, but it needs some more time to settle in because, the first two weeks were all people who were blindsided by this, then the last two weeks we have now gotten the mojo back in sales and mojo back in engineering, and now I think it is time for us to digest and prepare for these next two, three quarters of event and as part of that, companies like us who are fortunate enough to be on a good cash position, we'll absolutely look for interesting and good deals in the M&S space. >> Yeah, it makes sense, is tell and tech and, post IPO you can worry about Tam expansion. You'll be under pressure to do that as the CEO, but for now that's a very pragmatic approach. My last question is, there's some things when you think about, you say five weeks now you've been essentially on lockdown. You must, as many of us start thinking about wow, a lot of this work from home which came so fast people wouldn't even think about it earlier. You know, some companies mandated the beehive approach. Now everybody's open to that. There are certain things that are likely to remain permanent post COVID. Have you thought much about that? Generally and specifically how it might affect your business, the permanence of post COVID. Your thoughts. >> Yeah I've thought a lot about it. In fact, this morning I was speaking with our CRO Brian McCarthy about this. I think the change will happen, think of like an onion's inner most layer, I think the most, my hope is, that the biggest change will be in every one of us internally, as a what sort of a person am I and what does my position in the world means. The ego of each one of us that we carry because if this global event in one shot did not make you rethink your own sort of position in this big universe I think that's a mess. So the first thing has to be about being a better person. The second thing is, I had this two, three days of fever which was negative for COVID but I isolated myself, but that gave me sort of an idea of dipping in the dark room where I'm hoping my family won't get infected and you know my parents are in India so I sort of also realized that what is really important for you in life and how much family should mean to you, so that goes to the first, yourself second, your relationship with family, but having said that, the third thing when it comes to business building is also the importance for building with quality people, because when things go wrong it is so critical to have people who believe in the purpose of what you are trying to build. People with good faith and unshakable faith, personal faith and unshakable faith in the purpose of the company and most importantly you mentioned something which is the story telling. People, leaders who can absolutely communicate with clarity and certainty. It becomes the most important thing to lead an organization. I mean, you are a small business owner. You know we are in a small company with around 500 people. There is nothing like sitting at home waiting to see how the company is doing over email if you're a friend line engineer or a seller. Communication becomes so critical, so having the trust and the respect of organization and have the ability to clearly and transparently communicate is the most important thing for the company and over communicating due to the time of crisis. These things are so useful even after this crisis is over. Obviously from a technology point of view, you know people have been speaking a lot about working remotely and technology changes, security, those things will happen but I think if these three things were to happen in that order. Be a better person, be a better family member and be a better leader, I think the world will be better off and the last thing I'll also tell you, that you know in Silicon Valley sometimes we have this disregard for arts and literature and fight over science. I hope that goes away, because I can't imagine living without books, without movies, without Netflix and everything. Art makes yourself creative and enriches our lives. You know, sports is no longer there on TV and the fact that people are able to immerse their imagination in books and fiction and watch TV. That also reminds you how important it is to have a good balance between arts and science in this world, so I have a long list of things that I hope we as a people and as a society will get better. >> Yeah, a lot more game playing in our household and it's good to reconnect in that regard. Well Sudheesh, you've always been a very clear thinker and you're in a great spot and an awesome leader. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really great to see you again. All the best to you, your family and the broader community in your area. >> Dave, you've been very kind with this. Thank you so much, I wish you the same and hopefully we'll get to see face-to-face in the near future. Thanks a lot. >> I hope so, thank you. All right and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from Las Vegas. It's the cues covering quality security Conference 2019. Bike. Wallace. >>Hey, welcome back it. Ready? Geoffrey here with the Q worth the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas for the quality security conference. This thing's been going on for 19 years. I had no idea. It's our first time here, but it's pretty interesting out. Felipe and the team have evolved this security company over a lot of huge technological changes and security changes, and they're still clipping along, doing a lot of cool things in cloud and open source. We're excited of our next guest. She's Laurie McCarthy, the EVP of worldwide field >>operations. Lori, great to see you. >>Thanks. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So first off, congratulations in doing some homework for this. I was going through the earnings call. The last turning call, which A was a nice earnings call. You're making money buying back stock. Also, you were promoted or the announcement of your promotion on that call and really some nice, complimentary words from Philippe and the team about the work that you've done actually >>very grateful. Thank you. And >>one of the things we >>talked about, which is unique in your background as you came from a customer. Not It's always a day ago. These shows we have people that I came from customers that went to the vendor, and then we have people that rest of Endor and they went over to the customers. There's a lot of that kind of movement, but he really complimented your execution at CVS as a big reason why you got the promotion that you did. So again. Congrats. But let's talk about, you know, kind of the CVS experience from when you were running it. Not when you're on the quality side. Yeah, that the threats. And CBS is in class nationwide, all kinds of stuff. >>Yeah, well, I mean, you know, just like any other company that's in that health care vertical, you've got so many different things to think about. Additionally, we were also in the retail vertical, so we had a lot of compliance. E's to worry about p c p c i p. I s O. A lot of the programs had been very much, uh, checkbox driven prior to the team that moved in there, including myself, and kind of changed that. So I helped to rebuild the vulnerability program there. And we started to do it in such a way that it was for the sake of security, not just checking a box. And we were really innovated how they do things. A lot of my friends are still there, and they have their own stock now, and we kind of brought everything in house. So a lot of that was outsourced. >>So what was the catalyst to make the change To move from beyond simple compliance and check in the box, Actually making a strategic part of the execution? >>Yeah, at the time and a new sea so had been put into place. And it was someone with that vision, and I think that's what really drove it. I came in just after that and was brought in on the premise that this is what we're going to change and move toward. So I was part of that process from that >>point, right? It clearly, qualities was part of the solution. So what? What did you use calls for their and how is the solution changed? You know, kind of >>so back then when >>you want to call it, >>we're talking. In 9 4010 2011 Right around there. If you opened up the quality platform, you had three things to choose from. Versus today, when you log in, you've got 18 or more, depending. And S O CVS used a little bit of all of that with the mainstay having been the vulnerability management. So I ran to full vulnerability management programs there because we had to keep our pharmacy benefit company and our retail companies separate. So I sort of did double duty, >>Right? So what you doing now on field operations? >>So is the E V p of worldwide for Wallace. I'm running all of the technical account managers for our company way have a unique sales model here, so it's a little different. So everyone in the field to service is our clients rolls up to me, and then that also includes some additional teams, like our federal team, our strategic alliances team and also our subject matter experts >>today. So you said a couple >>times you guys have your account management structure is different than maybe traditional. Kind of >>walk through. Yeah, absolutely. So versus a traditional sales model. We have a salesperson. You have client service person. You have a technical, you know, social architect kind of person. We service our clients all with one person. We have a technical account manager. We break them up into two flavors. We have a presales who are very technical folks that go out and help us get our business. And then those accounts get handed over to our post sales, who are basically the farmers in our business, maintaining and growing our existing clients. What that allows for, which is really special, is we can go in and really build a relationship built on trust and understanding and strategy, because we bring people into our company like myself who have done this, who have sat on that side of the table. So you know, someone comes in and says What? You know, how would you like to buy one of my gizmos? It's a lot different conversation when it's like, Look at what I do with this gizmo like it's amazing. So it's It's kind of a similar feeling that you guys >>have your kind of platform with application strategy enables you to kind of do a land and expand, and in fact you even a something that people can try for free. >>Yeah, absolutely. So we review our model as, like, try and buy. So for both our non clients are freemium service is that we offer our, you know, out of this world for people being able to just log in without even being a client and start to evaluate their environment. And then when they see the value that we bring, it's very easy to translate that into a buy and then likewise, for our clients who sign up for a service or two enabling additional trials and having them work within our new service is as they're being rolled out, is very, very simple, the way our platform is built. So it's just it's a really effortless, very natural progression of business that we that we built. And it's one of the reasons that I work here because as a client, I really enjoyed my relationship with this company because it never felt like I was being sold anything. It always felt like I was being handed solutions to my challenges, and that's what we tried to do. And that's how I lead everyone today is Let's get out, Let's listen, let's strategize and let's see where we fit in with folks, right strategies for, you know, the coming >>future. So must be a team >>approach, though, right? Because one person you know to say, trying to manage the CVS account, that would be, >>Oh, so we have a little bit of a break out in our post side. We have what a new role that I helped get implemented here at the company, which is a major account solution architect they handle are bigger, more complex accounts. So as our platform has matured, so have our clients are bigger. Clients are using more of our platform. They're using it in a more expert way. So we had to answer that with the right kind of people who could speak to that expert level of usage and be able to finance that. So that's a little bit part of it. And on our bigger clients, we do have more of a team approach. We have a product management, a project management organization. The S M E team are subject matter. Experts roll up under me. They're experts in each of our solutions. So it's a sizeable team and they are liaise between product management, engineering our fields and our clients. And that's another support mechanism. And then our support at Wallace is also something that augments our technical account managers jobs on a daily basis. >>So new opportunity with a sure that was recently announced a bundle. Yeah, you're bundled in kind of under the covers, not not really under the covers. So a little bit about how that's gonna work from kind of an account management and and from your kind of point of view, >>So it's It's actually not gonna change much of anything on the way that we are. Mom are our model is a hybrid, right? So we have direct sales that we have indirect sales, even honor in direct sales through partners through relationships like we've just built with azure MSs peas and reach whatever. We still treat every end customer and every partner like a direct customer. So we work very hard to educate her partners, to work with them, to make sure they're successful with our clients. And we're also treating our clients who are through that avenue the same way. So it's it's just gonna blend right in with what we >>d'oh Yeah, that's great, but hopefully it's a sales channel and they get more than they just bought it under the covers and start implementing. >>It's easy for them to jump in with us. And then from there we can build those relationships with perhaps, you know, prospects and folks that aren't our clients now and be able to show them more things that we do. Besides just, you know, the one thing that they might be signing up for at that time, >>right? Right. Okay, great. I want to shift gears a little bit. >>We had windy by front earlier from from Nutanix. When he's a fantastic lady, yes, and she is super super involved in in girls Who Code and women in Tech and trying to drive that kind of forward along a number of parameters everything from the board to getting people jobs, training little girls to staying at staying in the industry. I know that's a big, passionate area of yours. I wonder if you could share some of the activities you guys were doing around women. I could think more specifically, and security is a subset of all tech, but share the some of the activities you have going on. >>So personally, I try to be very involved locally. Four Children. One of them is a daughter. She's too little, quite yet for getting into tact. I have two older sons and s so I try to be really involved in middle school high school. Hey, put me in, Coach, I'll come in and talk to the kids. Generating interest in getting into this field at a young age is what we need to do. They're still aren't enough gals and, honestly, guys heading into our business in college. So I I really take it upon myself as a security professional to try to promote that specifically around women. I'm really pleased that our company supports an organization which I've been a part of for a while, and that's the Executive Woman's Forum, and we sponsor their conference every year, and we sponsor events with them. I personally am part of their mentor program, so that allows me a channel. Thio have ah, unassigned person to work with, and I really enjoy that, and our company itself is just very excellent at promoting and enabling women within our organization. And it's another reason that I really loved working here for the past eight years, >>right? Well, from the top. Because the board, I think, is either for more than half. Yemen, which is certainly half >>women CEO, is very supportive. Our presidents, two men way have a great environment. Thio grow women professionally here in my company, >>right? That's great. So, ah, year from now, when we come back, what are we gonna be talking about? What's kind of on a road map? For the next year, >>we're going to be talking about our data leak efforts, or Sim. We're gonna be talking about our improved Edie, our capabilities that are really gonna put us in the position to be a major player in that market. Um, and who knows? We have such a quick turnaround of innovation here and what we do by the way we do our business. So starting with the technical account manager's boots on the ground with our clients, when we're there listening to all of their challenges, we're also taking that back, and that drives our innovation that the company so we hear what they need, and that's what we provide. So as things changed, we're going to continue to do that digital transformation, of course, is is making that something that we have to be even quicker about. And I think we're doing a good job >>keeping up well. 19 years and counting, making money. Find back, buying back shares to help everyone else's stock delusion. So not that, but nothing but good success. It's all right. Well, Laurie, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. And again, congratulations on your promotion as well as a terrific event. >>Thank you very much. >>All right. She's Laurie. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube with the quality security conference at the Bellagio and lovely >>Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault GO, and you are watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program, this is a user conference, so we love digging in with the users. I've got David Mccurdy, who's the CTO from the great state of Colorado. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. It's a great event, I'm happy to be here. We're here to evangelize the great work Colorado's been doing, with Commvault, and just in general. >> Alright great, so we're from Chicago, Boston, and Colorado, Denver. So we're not going to talk football, but tell us a little bit about, you know, you're CTO, love talking to the CTOs. What's your technology charter? Give us a little bit of the thumbnail, as to kind of, you know, what divisions you support, how many people you have, that sort of thing. >> Yeah, so the way the state's set up is I work underneath the Governor. We're an office of the Governor, so it's actually the Governor's Office of Information Technology. We support all the traditional branches of government, that people think of, in terms of agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicaid, Department of Corrections, DMV, Department of Revenue. So all the big agencies all fall under our department. And then about 800 of the 900 staff inside of OIT report to me directly. And that's all the infrastructure and application stacks, all the strategy. Chief Data office, Chief Transformation office. A lot of responsibility, lots of fun, lots of long weekends, but it's been a good row for the last four years. >> David before we dig into some of the data protection stuff, I love, you talk about innovation. You talk about technology transformation. First of all, IT in general, and government specifically, often get, you know, labeled with the, oh well they do things the old way, and they've got no budgets, and they never make any changes. I've had some great case studies. I've talked with people in roles like yours, so give us a little bit of, what's it like to be working under state government this day and age, with 2018, with technology. >> It's very exciting. It's very exciting to work for Colorado specifically. I don't know if it translates to all other states. I've talked to other CIOs and CTOs around the country, but we have a very supportive governor. He just announced his campaign to run for president, maybe, we'll see how that goes. But outside of that, he's very innovative. He took a business trip to Israel, came back, and set up a cyber security lab in the state, because he thinks there's a major need for more cyber security and those disciplines. In Colorado, today, we're running negative 14% unemployment for security jobs, so it's just, huge opportunity. Outside of that, my boss, Suma Nallapati, is state CIO. Right underneath him, is all about innovation. How can we make Colorado number one in everything we do. And that's really the goal. What the governor said, the way he talks about technology, he wants technology to be elegant. That's not word you hear a lot. But when you think about that and apply it to technology, there's a very specific outcome you're trying to get out of that. >> Alright, well David, at this show, we're all talking about data. And everybody's, you know, it's what can I do with my data? And how do I make sure that things don't get wrong? Well, anybody that's been in the IT for a while is, Murphy's Law sometimes does play out. So you've actually had a couple of experiences. Some good things you've learned, but some challenges that you had, maybe share with us what happened. >> Yeah, I mean one of the things I'm here to talk about is we kicked off an initiative called Backup Colorado. And what it was is, it was consolidating all the backup and recovery services for all those agencies I just named, plus some more, right. Monster project, monster task. It was all born out of a major data failure the state had. We were a fairly new organization. We were immature. We were still running things in a siloed environment. Most of the country, most large organizations have gone down the IT consolidation path. We were a few years down the road, and we got hit with a major data loss event. And it was specific to marijuana data, which makes some people smile, some people frown, but it's a very interesting topic. It wasn't interesting to lose customer data though. I don't care if you're a private organization, or a public organization, this was real data loss. And it highlighted the need for a focused approach to solving those problems. So we went about just kind of transforming the whole space. First, put a proposal on the table. Going to the general assembly. Going to the Governor saying, this is what we need to do. They signed off on it, and then we implemented it, right. We got tens if not hundreds of people together around the state. We coordinated agencies. We got people on board that didn't want to be on board. They liked the silo approach. They liked their agencies doing their own thing. But you can't do anything right 16 different ways. You don't have to do it one way, but it can't be 16. But we took a standardized approach, and we worked with Commvault as our partner to deploy a complete backup and recovery system for the state. Highly successful project. Rolled out, standardized. Everything you could want. While we're doing that, we are completely changing our application and infrastructure stacks. We are consolidating all of our servers into three data centers in the state. We're bursting into the cloud. We're replatforming on software, the service. You know, all those. I'm responsible for each one of those stacks. My guidance was just go and change the world, right. In a very non-senile way, we went out there, and we were like, how can we do this thoughtfully. How can we do it, but push, blaze new trails, that type of thing. And the story that I've been sharing is, we got to see the end results of that. What kicked it off, was a public disaster, but the state was hit with a ransomware attack. Very targeted, very coordinated. They hit one of our larger agencies. We had good security in place, but there's always stuff that can happen, as you've kind of eluded to. And because of this project, because of the team coordinated effort, because of the technology, because of the stuff we were leveraging, we were able to bring that agency back whole. Which a lot of organizations cannot say. A lot of the technologies cannot say, with as many systems that were impacted for the time period they were, to bring that agency back whole, and actually have the executive director of that agency, doing very similar conversations as we're doing now. How can dots around the country, roll out a plan very similar to this? >> Well David, people process technology, you guys are changing processes, you're changing technology, extremely disruptive. Talk about the impact on your people. What mindset, or what changes did you have to make organization wide. 800 people was a lot of people to get in line. What did you start, what did you do? What was successful, well not so much. >> Well first I had to get my customers on board, right. And compelling events helped bring customers on board. I don't think that's the best way of doing it, but always leverage a compelling event. In this case, we had a compelling event. We had the onus from our executive branch and a legislative branch. So we had the hammer if we needed it to get it done. The team actually came together. We ran a very successful RFP. We baked off competitors in the space. And it was a beautiful thing to see all my server engineers, all my desktop guys, all my database guys and gals comin' in and working together to make this project happen. I didn't have to sell them on it. They came to me and said, we think this is the best technology stack for the state. When I recognized, when I heard them, they all got on board and we were able to roll it out. And so I think it was that team approach, not top down, but you know, let's all come together and find the right thing for the state. I think that was why it was so successful. It was a team approach, and we had executive buy in, we were able to get it done. >> You talked about how Commvault helped with that transition, 16 different backup products, if the state was like any other organization, there's at least 15, 16 different backup products, people like what they use. And transitioning to something new requires training, support. How did Commvault help you guys in that transition? >> You know, they were a great partner, all the way through the RFP process, to bringing it in and doing training. We have a big thing at the state, the technology stack, we do luncheon learns, so there's lots of training. Commvault brought a lot of resources. We had engineers specifically assigned from Commvault to help with the project, the roll out, and then the transition. So a very effective partner, in terms of helping us along the way. It never helps to have that kind of hammer, as I said before, to push it forward. I really couldn't have asked for anything more. I spoke a little bit about this the other day. When we had this compelling event with the ransomware this year, I picked up the phone, and I got an answer right away. And I said we're going to need you once again. And they showed up. Commvault showed up. The great thing was, we didn't need them, right. My engineers had an effective turnover and training. They got the initial alerts before anybody did, before any of our security groups, anybody, Commvault detected this ransomware really before any of my tool suites because of the way it came into our organization. Which was kind of cool. But just in general, a great partnership. They were there all the way through the recovery of CDOT as support for our team. Really weren't needed just because of the effective transition. >> That's an interesting point. You talk about, you would think it would be the security tool that would be alerting you. Commvault and companies like it, sit in an interesting position. You've got data, you've got metadata. That surprise you that that was the tool that helped alert you in the first? >> Shocked me, shocked me, right. I mean we spent a lot of money building stacks of tools to protect the state, and very effective tools. There's nothing against those tool suites specifically. We were actually rolling out another tool that week that ultimately would've prevented it. That being said, stuff happens and the way this ransomware came in, bypassed that visibility. But Commvault, looking at our backups every night, taking differentials of 'em, saw encrypted files on disk, sent out an alert. The teams knew exactly what to do. Got executives on the phone. Got security ops on the phone. And it kicked off from there, so yeah, shocked, you know, happy that we caught it. Not the way I would have wanted, but that's why you've got layers of security. That's why you've got layers of teams to support each other. >> So specifies, outside of the support capability that Commvault provided and one, helping you guys get alerted to the event, and then the support reacting to the event, talk to us. What did they take to recover from the event? Was this a multi-month thing? Multi-week, multi-hour? How did you guys recover and how much did you recover? >> It took us a little over a month to recover. It's actually a great conversation maybe for another time. But building a structure in an open attack. Like when you have a coordinated resources from other countries, trying to do the United States, or the state of Colorado harm, the first thing you're going to do is make sure they're outside of your environment. So for about the first two weeks, we had everybody from the National Guard to the Defense Department there, helping us evaluate the situation. Getting it to a place where we felt comfortable bringing the department back up. Once we reached that point, and there is never a clear line in the sand. There's a role for the CIO and the CTO in that place to say, hey, now's time we've done everything we can and then we've very methodically started bringing desktops online and servers online. And Commvault played a huge role in that as well as some other vendors. But, in all, we restored about 192 servers. Some were infected, some weren't, but just from a sensibility stake, we wanted to go back to clean backups, clean restores, a place where the customer felt comfortable. We were able to do it in a way that there was no data loss to the customer or at least manage data loss. Meaning, in some cases, their systems, they wanted to go really back on, because their data didn't change very much in there. My biggest pinpoint in this whole process is, I want to bring that department up much faster, right. There's two sides that you're looking at: How do you protect the department in the short term? And how do you protect them in the long term? So I had to look at both sides of it. Very interesting experience. Don't wish it on anybody. >> David, last thing I want to ask is, the role of data, how do you, inside the state of Colorado, look at the role of data and the changing role of data? And if you look at Commvault, they are really expanding where they play. They're playing in multi-cloud. They've got artificial intelligence helping them. They're helping with governance and compliance. How do you see them lined up? Where do you see your relationship going with them in the future? >> Well, obviously, I like to stay with partners that take care of me, so there's obviously an affinity there, in terms of how they've helped the state in the last year. The data is really two parts, the agencies data, and then the resident, and the customers of the state of Colorado's data, right. So you first got to look at who owns and who is the steward of the data. And as IT for the state, our role is protecting that data, both in the short and long term. But as it becomes more and more of an asset, and we all know data is an asset today, it's almost the most critical asset. So protecting it is just as important as how you're going to innovate with it. So we are very excited about how we're going to be leveraging data in the future. Some of the issues we're talking about, the Department of Transportation wants to take their data for Road X and change how people drive. You know, very similar as to how you may use Waze and stuff like that. The DOTs around the country want to take that data and leverage it all over the place. So you're not only taking an asset that was leveraged for a very different purpose 10 years ago and completely transforming industries, you're doing that all across state government, right. The impetus, the need for protecting it, using it, I'm very excited with where they're going and how they look at data, Commvault specifically. I had a great conversation with our CTO last year about, I'm storing all this data on FASTDISK anyway. Why can't I use this as a data lake? How can I get metadata for your customers? How can I take this in places where maybe the founders of this company didn't even envision 20 years ago. It's very exciting how they're looking at the technology and where they can take it. AI is one of my focus areas for the year. I'm going to listen to everybody's pitch and I'm going to choose the right ones, because I do think it's transformative. If they can do it correctly and ultimately lessen the burden on IT, that's what we're looking for, right. That's what AI should bring to the table, is the ability for IT to do more with less. So that's what we're looking for and I'm excited what they're going to do with it. >> Alright, well David Mccarthy, we really appreciate you joining us, sharing your story. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> David: Thank you. (lively tech music)

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, the Cube at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, about 400 people, a great show, they're fourth year in existence. Back in the Bay Area next year, wanted to come down and check it out. So we're really excited to be here, and our next guest Mercedes De Luca, the Chief Operating Officer from Base Camp, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Base Camp, everybody knows Base Camp. >> Everybody knows Base Camp, it's been around for a long time. >> Absolutely, we use it and a lot of people use it, just one of those kind of tools that's ubiquitous, it's all over the place. >> Yeah, we just introduced our Base Camp 3 version, and now it's something we operate the business on. >> Excellent, so we talked a little bit off camera about your session, which is really about career pivots, and there's probably no place more important to be able to execute a successful career pivot than Silicon Valley. We hear about it often with companies, and usually it's associated when things aren't going so well that you have to do some type of a business model pivot or design pivot. But from a career perspective, super important. So what are some of the lessons that you shared here in your talk? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we did, was how do you sort of take the risk out of pivots, and what vectors do you move along. Basically recommending that people sort of take one vector at a time. I think getting the industry right is really important, and when I first started I had an opportunity to work in financial service or high-tech. I chose high-tech and that formed my career. And so I think getting the industry right's important. I think when you want to move to different functions, there's ways to do that inside companies, there's ways to do that when you move to a different company. >> It's interesting, there's so much pressure with kids and young people trying to figure out, you know, what's the right decision. I got to make the right decision. You don't really need to make the right decision. You just need to make a decision and get on your path, right? >> Exactly, you just want to make that next move. That's really where you want to focus your energy because as long as you're moving toward your strengths, you're beginning to amplify those, it's just about making that next step. And it's really important to talk to other people and verify that what you think you're going to be moving to is actually what's going to be happening. >> Right, so when you define some of these vectors, what are some of the vectors that are consistent or adjacent that make some of these moves easier or more successful? >> So one would be industry vector, so if you want to get out of the industry you're in, but you may still do the same function in that industry. There's the function vector, which says, I'm in a function of engineering and I want to get into marketing, or I'm in project management and I want to do engineering. And then the third has more to do with how you contribute the level you're at. Vice president, director, size of company, individual contributor versus line management. So there's a lot of different vectors, there's three basically, is how I think about it. And it's just a recommendation of how to think about making moves. >> Now, we had Jim McCarthy on earlier, who was a speaker, and he talked about making the big shift, you know. You have a life changing event, and you just decide this is not what I want to do, I want to do something different. How does that play into what you're trying to help people do, to make it successful? So you don't just drop everything and change buildings. You have to kind of work your way over I would imagine. >> Right, I think the most important thing though is focusing on your strengths, really figuring out what is it in your career. For me it's been emerging technology, it's been consumer, and it's been leadership. And culture, so when I look at those things together, it's always making sure that that next step is moving you even closer and closer to that ultimate place. Base Camp is known for its culture. So one of the things that was really important to me in this last move, was to make sure that I wound up in a company that really walked the walk. That was important to me. >> So what tips do you give to people when they're thinking about that, to figure out culture? It's hard to figure out culture. You go through an interview process, and you get to meet the person across the table, and you do a little investigative work, but a lot of times you don't really know what you've got into until you got into it. So how do you coach people to try to figure out some of that culture fit, and again what are the vectors of culture that are the big ones that you should be aligning to? >> Well, we're lucky today because there's Twitter, and there's Facebook, and there's all sorts of social media that allows us to really learn a lot more about the company and the culture, check out what the people in the company are saying about the company. In my case, super lucky, because both of the founders blog a lot on our Signal Versus Noise. They do a lot of writing, so I almost felt like I knew the culture going into it. They've written books, et cetera. But for companies that haven't written books and haven't blogged, I think you can absolutely get that by also talking to people inside the company and being clear about what you're looking for. I think that's a big part of it. >> Okay, well Mercedes, I'll give you the last word. What is your kind of parting tip to people who are looking to make a move, or just concerned, oh my gosh, I'm just locked up cause I think I have to get it right the first time? >> Don't let others define you. (laughing) >> Short and sweet. I should have asked you the bumper sticker question, give me the bumper sticker for it. Don't let others define you, that's perfect. Well Mercedes, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Thank you Jeff. I appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Nice to meet you. >> So Jeff Frick here, at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)