>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to you by spunk. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone secures live coverage in Las Vegas response dot com. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. We're here for three days is a spunk. Spunk dot com 10 anniversary of their end user conference way Got some great guests here. They talk about diversity, inclusion breaking the barrier. Women in tech We got some great guests. Jane Heights, I add Si io National government service is Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Carol Jones, CEO Sandy and National Labs from Albuquerque Think coming on to CEOs of excited Suzanne McGovern. Diversity and inclusion talent leader for Splunk Thanks for guys joining us. Really appreciate it. I want to get into a panel you guys discuss because this is the area of really important to the workforce. Global workforce is made up of men and women, but most of the software text built by mostly men. But we get that second. I want to get in, find out what you guys are doing in your rolls because you guys, the journey is breaking through the barrier. Start with you. What's your role. What do you do? Their CEO. >>So I am CEO for National Government Service Is we do Medicare claims processing for the federal government. We also have a number of I t contracts with CMS. And, um, I organ. I have an organization of 331 people. Very different organization, Data center, infrastructure security gambit of I t, if you will. A great group of people divers were in Baltimore. Where? In Indianapolis. We're out of the kingdom office. How >>long have you been in 19 >>My career. So yes. Yeah. The waves. Yes. I have seen the waves have Daryl >>Jones and I'm c i o same National Laboratories. It's a federally funded research and development center. So we do research and development from on behalf of the U. S. Government. I have about 500 employees and 400 contractors. So we provide the I T for Sadia, all gametes of it, including some classified environments. >>A lot of security, your role. What's wrong? >>I'm the chief diversity officer. It's Plus I get the pleasure to do that every day. A swell, a cz. It's everyone's job. Not just magically explode. But I'm very honored to do that. How to look after talent. >>I want to compliment you guys on your new branding. Thank not only is a cool and really picking orange, but also that position is very broad and everything is trade message. But the big posters have diversity. Not a bunch of men on the posters. So congratulations, it's anger. Representative is really important. Worth mentioning. Okay, let's start with the journey. The topic you guys just talked about on a panel here in Las Vegas is female leaders smashing the glass ceiling. So when you smash his last ceiling, did you get caught? Was her bleeding? What happened? Take us for your journey. What was big? Take away. What's the learnings? Share your stories. >>Well, a lot of it, as I shared today with Panel, is really learning and be having that Lerner mindset and learning from something that you do, which is part of your life. And I use the example of I'm married to an Indian Muslim, went to India, spent some time with his family, and they told me Let's be ready at 6 30 and I said, Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready. Dressed in 6 30 nobody else was ready. And everyone in the room said, Well, we're gonna have Chai first we're gonna have some tea And I was like, Well, you said 6 30 and I'm ready And, um, everyone said, Well, you know, we need to relax. We need to connect. We need to have some time So I took that back and said, You know what? We all need to make time for tea Way. All need to connect with our people and the individuals that work with us, And I've kind of taken that on through the last 20 years of being married, Tim. But connecting with individuals and your teams and your partner's is what's important and as what Lead Meeks. I've built those allies and that great group of people that >>being people centric, relationship driven, not so much chasing promotions or those kinds. >>That's what's worked for me. Yes, >>Carol, it's been your journey. Stories >>start a little bit of beginnings. I've been in Tech over 30 years. I got a bachelor's and marketing, and then I was looking to get my master's. So I got, um, I s degree, but I didn't know even to go into that field. So my professor said you needed to go into my s, so don't know that's too hard. You can't do that. You know, you could do it. So it's always been challenging myself and continuing learning. I worked at IBM then I was there in the time when they did great layoffs. So no, e he was 93 right to left. Only wonder he's gonna be left by the end of the year. >>You know, for the younger audience out there M I s stands from management information systems. Before that, there was data processing division which actually relevant today. Quite a journey. What a great spirit. What's the one thing that you could share? Folks, this is a lot of young women coming into the workforce, and a lot of people are looking at inspirational figures like yourselves that have been there and done that. There's a lot of mentoring going on is a lot of navigation for young women and understand minorities. And they just you guys, there's no real playbook. You guys have experiences. What's your advice, folks out watching >>my number one advice. And I gave this to people who are wanting to go into leadership. Trust yourself. Trust to you. Are you all got to this place because of the successful person you are and just continue to trust yourself to take advantage of those opportunities. Take a risk. I took a risk when my total focus was in Medicare. I was asked to do another job and I took another, you know, position. And it wasn't in Medicare. So you have to take those opportunities and risk and just trust that you're gonna get yourself. >>Carol. You're >>similar. It's to continue to grow and to be resilient, there'll be times in your career like a layoff where you don't know what you're gonna do. You bounce back and make it into uneven. Better job on. Take risks. I took a risk. I went into cybersecurity. Spent 10 years there, continuing learning and the Brazilian >>learnings key, right? I mean, one of the things about security mentioned 10 years. So much has changed, hasn't it? >>Well, it's bad. Guys still outnumber the good guys. That has changed faster. Exactly. Technologies change. >>Just talk about the diversity inclusion efforts. You guys have a Splunk Splunk cultures very open transparent on the technology solutions very enabling you actually enabling a lot of change on the solution side. Now we're seeing tech for good kind of stories because Texas Tech Tech for business. But also you're seeing speed and times value time to mission value, a new term way kicked around this morning. It's time to mission value. >>Yes. So I'm glad you mentioned data, right? We're data company, and we're very proud that we actually whole star diversity inclusion numbers, right? So way moved the needle 1.8% on gender last year, year on year pride, but not satisfied. We understand that there's much more to diversity inclusion than just gender, But our strategy is threefold for diversity. Inclusion. So it's work force, workplace marketplace farces around just where talk is improving our representation so that these women are no longer the only. These are in the minority that were much more represented, and we're lucky we have three women and our board. We have four women in our C suite, so we're making good good progress. But there's a lot more to do, and as I say, it's not just about gender. We want to do way, nor the innovation is fueled by diversity. So we want to try. You know, folks of different races, different ethnicity, military veterans, people with disability. We need everyone. It's belongs to be, since >>you guys are all three leaders in the industry, Thanks for coming on. Appreciate that. I want to ask you guys because culture seems to be a common thread. I mean, I do so money talks and interviews with leaders for all types, from digital transformation to Dev ops, the security and they always talk speeds in fees. But all the change comes from culture people on what I'm seeing is a pattern of success. Diversity inclusion works well if it's in the culture of the company, so one filter for anyone a woman or anyone is this is a company culturally aligned with it. So that's the question is what do you do when you have a culture that's aligned with it? And what do you do? There's a culture that's not allow, so you want to get out. But how do you unwind and how do you navigate and how do you see the size of signals? Because the date is there >>a way to certainly really harness and failed a culture of inclusion. And that's through employee resource groups in particular. So it's plunks. More than 50% of our spelunkers are actually members. Followers are allies on employee resource. So gives community. It gives that sense of inclusion so that everyone could bring their whole Selves to work. So, to your point, it really does build a different culture, different level of connection. And it's super different. >>Any thoughts on culture and signals look for good, bad, ugly, I mean, because you see a good ways taken right. Why not >>take a chance, right? Right. No, I think, you know, like you look at it and you decide, like some young women we were talking to, You know, Is this the right company for you? And if not, can you find an ally? You know, it's a feeling that the culture isn't there and helped educate him on help to get him to be Jack of what does he and his leaders, I think we have to always ask ourselves, Are we being inclusive for everyone >>and mine? I would spend it a little bit. Is that diversity and thoughts And how? When I joined this organization. Culture is a big factor that needs to change and some of the things that I'm working on, but to bring people to the table and hear those different thoughts and listen to them because they all do think differently. No matter color, race, gender, that sort of thing. So diversity and thought is really something that I try to focus in on >>carry. Palin was just on the Cuban CMO of Splunk and top of the logo's on the branding and, she said, was a great team effort. Love that because she's just really cool about that. And she said we had a lot of diversity and thought, which is a code word for debate. So when you have diversity, I want to get your thoughts on this because this is interesting. We live in a time where speed is a competitive advantage speed, creativity, productivity, relevance, scale. These air kind of the key kind of modern efforts. Diversity could slow things down, too, so but the benefit of diversity is more thought, more access to data. So the question is, what do you guys think about how companies or individuals could not lose the speed keep the game going on the speed and scale and get the benefits of the diversity because you don't want things to grind down. Toe halts way Slugs in the speed game get data more diverse. Data comes in. That's a technical issue. But with diversity, you >>want a challenge that, to be honest, because we're a data company in the details. Irrefutable. Right? So gender diverse Teams up inform homogeneous teams by about 15% if you take that to race and ethnicity was up to 33%. Companies like ourselves, of course, their numbers see an uptick in share price. It's a business imperative, right? We get that. It's the right thing to do. But this notion that it slows things down, you find a way right. You're really high performance. You find a way best time. So it doesn't always come fast, right? Sometimes it's about patients and leadership. So I'm on the side of data and the data is there. If you tickle, di bear seems just perform better, >>so if it is slowing down, your position would be that it's not working >>well. Yes, I know. I think you got to find a way to work together, you know? And that's a beautiful thing about places like spun were hyper cool, right? It's crazy. Tons of work to do different things were just talking about this in the break way have this unwritten rule that we don't hire. I'll see jerks for >>gender neutral data, saris, origin, gender neutral data. >>Yeah, absolutely no hiring folks are really gonna, you know, have a different cultural impact there. No cultural adds the organization way. Need everyone on bats. Beautiful thing. And that's what makes it special. >>I think you know, is you start to work and be more inclusive. You start to build trust. So it goes back to what Jane was talking about relationships. And so you gotta have that foundation and you can move fast and still be reversed. I >>think that's a very key point. Trust is critical because people are taking chances whether they're male or female. If the team works there like you see a Splunk, it shouldn't be an issue becomes an issue when it's issue. All right, so big Walk away and learnings over the years in your journey. What was some moments of greatness? Moments of struggle where you brought your whole self to bear around resolving in persevering what were some challenges in growth moments that really made a difference in your life breaking through that ceiling. >>Wow. Well, um, I'm a breast cancer survivor, and I, uh, used my job and my strength to pull me through that. And I was working during the time, and I had a great leader who took it upon herself to make sure that I could work if I wanted. Thio are not. And it really opened that up for me to be able to say, I can still bring my whole self, whatever that is today that I'm doing. And I look back at that time and that was a strength from inside that gave me that trust myself. You're going to get through it. And that was a challenging personal time, But yet had so many learnings in it, from a career perspective to >>story thanks for sharing Caroline stories and struggles and successes that made him big impact of you. Your >>life. It was my first level one manager job. I got into cybersecurity and I didn't know what I was doing. I came back. My boss of Carol. I don't know what you did this year, and so I really had to learn to communicate. But prior to that, you know that I would never have been on TV. Never would have done public speaking like we did today. So I had to hire a coach and learn hadn't forward on communications. Thanks for sharing stories, I think a >>pivotal moment for me. I was in management, consultants say, for the first half of my career, Dad's first child and I was on the highway with a local Klein seven in the morning. Closet Night started on a Sunday midday, so I didn't see her a week the first night. I know many women who do it just wasn't my personal choice. So I decided to take a roll internal and not find Jason and was told that my career would be over, that I would be on a track, that I wouldn't get partner anymore. And it really wasn't the case. I find my passions in the people agenda did leadership development. I didn't teach our role. I got into diversity, including which I absolutely love. So I think some of those pivotal moments you talked about resilient earlier in the panel is just to dig, dying to know what's important to you personally and for the family and really follow your to north and you know, it works out in the end, >>you guys air inspiration. Thank you for sharing that, I guess on a personal question for me, as a male, there's a lot of men who want to do good. They want to be inclusive as well. Some don't know what to do. Don't even are free to ask for directions, right? So what would you advise men? How could they help in today's culture to move the needle forward, to support beach there from trust and all these critical things that make a difference what you say to that? >>So the research says that women don't suffer from a lack of mentorship. The sucker suffer from a lack of advocacy. So I would say if you want to do something super easy and impactful, go advocate for women, go advocate for women. You know who is amazing I there and go help her forward >>in Korea. And you can do that. Whatever gender you are, you can advocate for others. Yeah, also echo the advocacy. I would agree. >>Trust relationships, yes, across the board >>way, said Thio. Some of the women and our allies today WAAS bring your whole self. And I would just encourage men to do that, to bring your whole self to work, because that's what speeds up the data exchange. That's what it speeds up. Results >>take a chance, >>Take a chance, bring your whole self >>get trust going right. He opened a communicated and look at the date on the photo booth. Datable driver. Thank you guys so much for sharing your stories in The Cube, you think. Uses the stories on the Cube segments. Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for the 10th stop. Compass Accused seventh year John Ferrier with Q. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, their structure, or their fundamental business model. You don't need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. You have to fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard-hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It's called "Amp It Up, Leading for Hypergrowth "by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, "and Elevating Intensity." Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was asked to interview Frank on stage about his new book. I've read it several times. And if you haven't read it, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis, we'll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and nuances directly from Slootman himself from my one-on-one conversation with him. My first question to Slootman was why do you write this book? Okay, it's kind of a common throwaway question. And how the heck did you find time to do it? It's fairly well-known that a few years ago, Slootman put up a post on LinkedIn with the title Amp It Up. It generated so much buzz and so many requests for Frank's time that he decided that the best way to efficiently scale and share his thoughts on how to create high-performing companies and organizations was to publish a book. Now, he wrote the book during the pandemic. And I joked that they must not have Netflix in Montana where he resides. In a pretty funny moment, he said that writing the book was easier than promoting it. Take a listen. >> Denise, our CMO, you know, she just made sure that this process wasn't going to. It was more work for me to promote this book with all these damn podcasts and other crap, than actually writing the book, you know. And after a while, I was like I'm not doing another podcast. >> Now, the book gives a lot of interesting background information on Slootman's career and what he learned at various companies that he led and participated in. Now, I'm not going to go into most of that today, which is why you should read the book yourself. But Slootman, he's become somewhat of a business hero to many people, myself included. Leaders like Frank, Scott McNealy, Jayshree Ullal, and my old boss, Pat McGovern at IDG, have inspired me over the years. And each has applied his or her own approach to building cultures and companies. Now, when Slootman first took over the reins at Snowflake, I published a Breaking Analysis talking about Snowflake and what we could expect from the company now that Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli were back together. In that post, buried toward the end, I referenced the playbook that Frank used at Data Domain and ServiceNow, two companies that I followed quite closely as an analyst, and how it would be applied at Snowflake, that playbook if you will. Frank reached out to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, "I don't use playbooks. "I am a situational leader. "Playbooks, you know, they work in football games. "But in the military, they teach you "situational leadership." Pretty interesting learning moment for me. So I asked Frank on the stage about this. Here's what he said. >> The older you get, the more experience that you have, the more you become a prisoner of your own background because you sort of think in terms of what you know as opposed to, you know, getting outside of what you know and trying to sort of look at things like a five-year-old that has never seen this before. And then how would you, you know, deal with it? And I really try to force myself into I've never seen this before and how do I think about it? Because at least they're very different, you know, interpretations. And be open-minded, just really avoid that rinse and repeat mentality. And you know, I've brought people in from who have worked with me before. Some of them come with me from company to company. And they were falling prey to, you know, rinse and repeat. I would just literally go like that's not what we want. >> So think about that for a moment. I mean, imagine coming in to lead a new company and forcing yourself and your people to forget what they know that works and has worked in the past, put that aside and assess the current situation with an open mind, essentially start over. Now, that doesn't mean you don't apply what has worked in the past. Slootman talked to me about bringing back Scarpelli and the synergistic relationship that they have and how they build cultures and the no BS and hard truth mentality they bring to companies. But he bristles when people ask him, "What type of CEO are you?" He says, "Do we have to put a label on it? "It really depends on the situation." Now, one of the other really hard-hitting parts of the book was the way Frank deals with who to keep and who to let go. He uses the Volkswagen tagline of drivers wanted. He says in his book, in companies there are passengers and there are drivers, and we want drivers. He said, "You have to figure out really quickly "who the drivers are and basically throw the wrong people "off the bus, keep the right people, bring in new people "that fit the culture and put them "in the right seats on the bus." Now, these are not easy decisions to make. But as it pertains to getting rid of people, I'm reminded of the movie "Moneyball." Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland As, he refused to play Scott Hatteberg at first base. So the GM, Billy Bean played by Brad Pitt says to Peter Brand who was played by Jonah Hill, "You have to fire Carlos Pena." Don't learn how to fire people. Billy Bean says, "Just keep it quick. "Tell him he's been traded and that's it." So I asked Frank, "Okay, I get it. "Like the movie, when you have the wrong person "on the bus, you just have to make the decision, "be straightforward, and do it." But I asked him, "What if you're on the fence? "What if you're not completely sure if this person "is a driver or a passenger, if he or she "should be on the bus or not on the bus? "How do you handle that?" Listen to what he said. >> I have a very simple way to break ties. And when there's doubt, there's no doubt, okay? >> When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Slootman's philosophy is you have to be emphatic and have high conviction. You know, back to the baseball analogy, if you're thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game, take 'em out. Confrontation is the single hardest thing in business according to Slootman but you have to be intellectually honest and do what's best for the organization, period. Okay, so wow, that may sound harsh but that's how Slootman approaches it, very Belichickian if you will. But how can you amp it up on a daily basis? What's the approach that Slootman takes? We got into this conversation with a discussion about MBOs, management by objective. Slootman in his book says he's killed MBOs at every company he's led. And I asked him to explain why. His rationale was that individual MBOs invariably end up in a discussion about relief of the MBO if the person is not hitting his or her targets. And that detracts from the organizational alignment. He said at Snowflake everyone gets paid the same way, from the execs on down. It's a key way he creates focus and energy in an organization, by creating alignment, urgency, and putting more resources into the most important things. This is especially hard, Slootman says, as the organization gets bigger. But if you do approach it this way, everything gets easier. The cadence changes, the tempo accelerates, and it works. Now, and to emphasize that point, he said the following. Play the clip. >> Every meeting that you have, every email, every encounter in the hallway, whatever it is, is an opportunity to amp things up. That's why I use that title. But do you take that opportunity? >> And according to Slootman, if you don't take that opportunity, if you're not in the moment, amping it up, then you're thinking about your golf game or the tennis match that's going on this weekend or being out on your boat. And to the point, this approach is not for everyone. You're either built for it or you're not. But if you can bring people into the organization that can handle this type of dynamic, it creates energy. It becomes fun. Everything moves faster. The conversations are exciting. They're inspiring. And it becomes addictive. Now let's talk about priorities. I said to Frank that for me anyway, his book was an uncomfortable read. And he was somewhat surprised by that. "Really," he said. I said, "Yeah. "I mean, it was an easy read but uncomfortable "because over my career, I've managed thousands of people, "not tens of thousands but thousands, "enough to have to take this stuff very seriously." And I found myself throughout the book, oh, you know, on the one hand saying to myself, "Oh, I got that right, good job, Dave." And then other times, I was thinking to myself, "Oh wow, I probably need to rethink that. "I need to amp it up on that front." And the point is to Frank's leadership philosophy, there's no one correct way to approach all situations. You have to figure it out for yourself. But the one thing in the book that I found the hardest was Slootman challenged the reader. If you had to drop everything and focus on one thing, just one thing, for the rest of the year, what would that one thing be? Think about that for a moment. Were you able to come up with that one thing? What would happen to all the other things on your priority list? Are they all necessary? If so, how would you delegate those? Do you have someone in your organization who can take those off your plate? What would happen if you only focused on that one thing? These are hard questions. But Slootman really forces you to think about them and do that mental exercise. Look at Frank's body language in this screenshot. Imagine going into a management meeting with Frank and being prepared to share all the things you're working on that you're so proud of and all the priorities you have for the coming year. Listen to Frank in this clip and tell me it doesn't really make you think. >> I've been in, you know, on other boards and stuff. And I got a PowerPoint back from the CEO and there's like 15 things. They're our priorities for the year. I'm like you got 15, you got none, right? It's like you just can't decide, you know, what's important. So I'll tell you everything because I just can't figure out. And the thing is it's very hard to just say one thing. But it's really the mental exercise that matters. >> Going through that mental exercise is really important according to Slootman. Let's have a conversation about what really matters at this point in time. Why does it need to happen? And does it take priority over other things? Slootman says you have to pull apart the hairball and drive extraordinary clarity. You could be wrong, he says. And he admits he's been wrong on many things before. He, like everyone, is fearful of being wrong. But if you don't have the conversation according to Slootman, you're already defeated. And one of the most important things Slootman emphasizes in the book is execution. He said that's one of the reasons he wrote "Amp It Up." In our discussion, he referenced Pat Gelsinger, his former boss, who bought Data Domain when he was working for Joe Tucci at EMC. Listen to Frank describe the interaction with Gelsinger. >> Well, one of my prior bosses, you know, Pat Gelsinger, when they acquired Data Domain through EMC, Pat was CEO of Intel. And he quoted Andy Grove as saying, 'cause he was Intel for a long time when he was younger man. And he said no strategy is better than its execution, which if I find one of the most brilliant things. >> Now, before you go changing your strategy, says Slootman, you have to eliminate execution as a potential point of failure. All too often, he says, Silicon Valley wants to change strategy without really understanding whether the execution is right. All too often companies don't consider that maybe the product isn't that great. They will frequently, for example, make a change to sales leadership without questioning whether or not there's a product fit. According to Slootman, you have to drive hardcore intellectual honesty. And as uncomfortable as that may be, it's incredibly important and powerful. Okay, one of the other contrarian points in the book was whether or not to have a customer success department. Slootman says this became really fashionable in Silicon Valley with the SaaS craze. Everyone was following and pattern matching the lead of salesforce.com. He says he's eliminated the customer service department at every company he's led which had a customer success department. Listen to Frank Slootman in his own words talk about the customer success department. >> I view the whole company as a customer success function. Okay, I'm customer success, you know. I said it in my presentation yesterday. We're a customer-first organization. I don't need a department. >> Now, he went on to say that sales owns the commercial relationship with the customer. Engineering owns the technical relationship. And oh, by the way, he always puts support inside of the engineering department because engineering has to back up support. And rather than having a separate department for customer success, he focuses on making sure that the existing departments are functioning properly. Slootman also has always been big on net promoter score, NPS. And Snowflake's is very high at 72. And according to Slootman, it's not just the product. It's the people that drive that type of loyalty. Now, Slootman stresses amping up the big things and even the little things too. He told a story about someone who came into his office to ask his opinion about a tee shirt. And he turned it around on her and said, "Well, what do you think?" And she said, "Well, it's okay." So Frank made the point by flipping the situation. Why are you coming to me with something that's just okay? If we're going to do something, let's do it. Let's do it all out. Let's do it right and get excited about it, not just check the box and get something off your desk. Amp it up, all aspects of our business. Listen to Slootman talk about Steve Jobs and the relevance of demanding excellence and shunning mediocrity. >> He was incredibly intolerant of anything that he didn't think of as great. You know, he was immediately done with it and with the person. You know, I'm not that aggressive, you know, in that way. I'm a little bit nicer, you know, about it. But I still, you know, I don't want to give into expediency and mediocrity. I just don't, I'm just going to fight it, you know, every step of the way. >> Now, that story was about a little thing like some swag. But Slootman talked about some big things too. And one of the major ways Snowflake was making big, sweeping changes to amp up its business was reorganizing its go-to-market around industries like financial services, media, and healthcare. Here's some ETR data that shows Snowflake's net score or spending momentum for key industry segments over time. The red dotted line at 40% is an indicator of highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see for the key areas shown, Snowflake is well above that level. And we cut this data where responses were greater, the response numbers were greater than 15. So not huge ends but large enough to have meaning. Most were in the 20s. Now, it's relatively uncommon to see a company that's having the success of Snowflake make this kind of non-trivial change in the middle of steep S-curve growth. Why did they make this move? Well, I think it's because Snowflake realizes that its data cloud is going to increasingly have industry diversity and unique value by industry, that ecosystems and data marketplaces are forming around industries. So the more industry affinity Snowflake can create, the stronger its moat will be. It also aligns with how the largest and most prominent global system integrators, global SIs, go to market. This is important because as companies are transforming, they are radically changing their data architecture, how they think about data, how they approach data as a competitive advantage, and they're looking at data as specifically a monetization opportunity. So having industry expertise and knowledge and aligning with those customer objectives is going to serve Snowflake and its ecosystems well in my view. Slootman even said he joined the board of Instacart not because he needed another board seat but because he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and expose himself to other industries as a way to learn. So look, we're just barely scratching the surface of Slootman's book and I've pulled some highlights from our conversation. There's so much more that I can share just even from our conversation. And I will as the opportunity arises. But for now, I'll just give you the kind of bumper sticker of "Amp It Up." Raise your standards by taking every opportunity, every interaction, to increase your intensity. Get your people aligned and moving in the same direction. If it's the wrong direction, figure it out and course correct quickly. Prioritize and sharpen your focus on things that will really make a difference. If you do these things and increase the urgency in your organization, you'll naturally pick up the pace and accelerate your company. Do these things and you'll be able to transform, better identify adjacent opportunities and go attack them, and create a lasting and meaningful experience for your employees, customers, and partners. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. And thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our EIC over at Silicon Angle who does some wonderful and tremendous editing. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in enterprise tech. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> In 1946, the acerbic manager of the Dodgers, Leo the Lip Durocher famously said of baseball, great Mel Ott who was player manager of the Giants at the time. You know what happens to nice guys. They finished in last place. The phrase nice guys finish last was born. It became popular outside of baseball. Well joining me today is someone who was a consummate gentlemen and a nice guy who proves that idiom absolutely isn't true at all. He's also written a new book "Play nice and Win" Michael Dell chairman and CEO of Dell technologies, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, Dave, always great to be with you. Wonderful to be on the CUBE and thanks for your great coverage of Dell technologies world. >> Yeah. We're very excited to be covering the virtual version this year, next year we're back face to face I'm Sure. And we're going to talk about your book but I want to start by asking you to comment on the past 12 months, how are you going to remember 2020? >> I'm going to remember it by the resiliency of the world and our team, the adaptability the acceleration of digital transformation which is pretty amazing around the world. The vital role that technology played in addressing some of the biggest challenges, whether it was the creation of vaccines or, you know, decoding the virus itself or just addressing all the challenges that the world had. You know, I think it's a game changer in terms of disease identification and how we prevent these kinds of things going forward. You know, there's still a long way to go in terms of how do we get 7.5 billion people vaccinated and safe. I also think it exposed, you know some of the fault lines in our society. And that's a great learning for all of us in terms of access to healthcare and education and, you know, the digital resources that power the world. And so, yeah, those are some of the things that really stand out for me. >> Well, I mean, I think leaders like yourself and position of influence, absolutely passionate about some of those changes that we see coming in society. So hopefully we'll have time to talk about that but I wanted to get into the business. I think a lot of people, myself included felt that 2020 was going to be a down year for big tech companies like yours and that relied heavily on selling products that data centers and central offices but the remote work trend and the laptop, boom offset, some of those on-prem softness and headwinds combined with VMware the financial performance of Dell technologies was actually quite amazing. Why were you able to do so well last year? >> Well, first of all, you're right. We did, we had record pretty much everything record revenues, record operating income, record cashflow and be also paid down a record amount of debt. And so I think the strength and resiliency of our supply chain, as well as the broad diversified nature of what we provide our customers continue to serve us very well as they moved to this sort of do anything from anywhere in the world. And it continues the first part of this year, business is very strong >> You know, a few weeks ago, of course you officially announced the spinoff of Dell technologies. Wasn't a huge surprise but the 81% equity ownership of VMware are you worried about untethering VMware from Dell or maybe you can share more on what this means for the future of, your two companies and your customers. >> Right? So, I think this will drive additional growth opportunities for both Dell Tech and VMware, while it unlocks a lot of value for our stakeholders. What we've done is to formalize the commercial relationship into a series of agreements and those are unique and differentiated and they provide lots of flexibility and we've driven a tremendous amount of innovation together and that's going to continue and it will, one of the things we said back in 2015 you'll remember is our commitment to keep the VMware ecosystem open and independent and working across the whole industry. We've done that. You'll continue to see us innovate together with Edge solutions, certainly all the great work we've done with VxRail SD LAN, you know Tanzu creates this platform to modernize applications and VMware Cloud and Dell technologies are the easy path to a multi-cloud architecture. And, that continues to work super well and is not going to be slowed down at all. So... and of course, I'll continue to be a chairman of both companies and we're not selling VMware we're distributing our ownership to our shareholders. >> Well, of course, Dell is the largest sort channel if you will, for VMware. So that's ... you guys got a tight relationship but I want to ask you about digital transformation and everybody talked about it pre COVID but nobody really knew exactly what it was but COVID sort of brought that into focus very quickly. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So going forward, how do you see that whole digital transformation playing out? >> You know I think the plot of any company is to figure out how it can use its data and turn that into insights and outcomes and better results and ultimately competitive advantage faster. And as you said, you know, if it's not able to do that, it's probably going to go out of business. And that agenda just got massively accelerated because it was kind of digital was sort of the only thing that worked during this, this past period. So every organization has figured out that technology is not the IT department, it's actually the fulcrum of progress in the entire company. And so we're seeing sort of across the board a dramatic acceleration in the investment in digital technologies, you know, Edge is growing very fast. I think 5G just accelerates this and, you know you're seeing it in all the demand trends. It's quite positive and, you know, I think you'll see even a more rapid separation from those companies that are able to take advantage of this and quickly adjust their businesses their organizations, and those that are >> You better hop on board or get left behind, you know, the Edge. You mentioned the Edge it's a little bit like digital transformation, you know kind of pre COVID and even post COVID. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people but the telecoms transformation and 5G they have there certainly real. How do you see the Edge? >> You know, the Edges is ... think of it as actually the real world, right? It's, not a data center sitting in the center of the universe somewhere. And look today, you know only 10% of data is processed outside of the data center, but, you know, it's estimated by 2025 you got 75% of enterprise data will be processed outside of a traditional data center or a Cloud. And so as everything becomes intelligent connected 5G accelerates that it's going to be a huge acceleration of this whole process of digital transformation. And you know, again, think about this. I mean, the cost of making something intelligent used to be really expensive. Now it's asymptotically approaching zero. And of course all those things are connected. They're talking to each other and exactly what does this mean for every industry. Nobody's really quite sure and not everything is going to work, but, you know we're seeing it in manufacturing, in retail, in healthcare and the growth on the Edge is really accelerating in a meaningful way. And it's not so much about, you know people talking people with machines, we know how to do that. Now it's about the thing right And, you know you've got like 200 billion arm processors, you know out there in the last couple of years, all those things talking to the other things, generating data it happens in the real world. That's what the Edge is. >> Yeah as you know, we're a big fans of the arm model. And I think it just presents huge opportunities for companies like Dell. I want to ask you about Cloud. And I have to say, I think, you know companies like Dell have been maybe a little bit defensive over the last several years when it comes to Cloud but I think you starting to see the Cloud as a gift with all that CAPEX that's being built out by these hyperscalers. You know, thank you. It seems to me, you can build on top of that. How are you thinking about the Cloud as an opportunity for you and your customers especially as the definition of Cloud evolves? >> Well, first, you know, what we see is and the Edge is kind of the third place or the third premise, right? You got Clouds in the public form, you've got the Colo which is really growing fast and, you know the private hybrid Clouds, and now you've got the Edge. And so you've got infrastructure all over the place with Edge being the fastest growing. You know, one of the big things we see is that customers want a consistent way to operate and execute across that whole platform. And, you know, one of the other things that we've been focused on at Dell technologies is how can we move our business to more of a service and subscription on demand and provide customers that flexibility to to pay as they consume. And so, to some extent this is an evolution of, you know, products to services to managed services, to everything as a service. And so, you know, looking at our balance sheet you'll see over $40 billion in remaining performance obligations as we moved the business to that kind of model and it's been growing double digits for several quarters in a row. And so, you know, we're embracing Cloud and on-demand, and as a service, and obviously here at Dell technologies world we're talking a lot about Apex and our continuing initiatives to move our whole business in that direction. >> Yeah. Apex is a real accelerator for that model. I want to switch topics a little bit. I got a long list of things I want to talk about ESG, sustainability, inclusion, you know, is another topic that, that I'm interested in. I want it. And I said before, people like yourself in a position of influence to influence public policy and obviously the employees and your ecosystem why is it not just the right thing to do? Why is... why are those things good business, Michael? >> Well, it's good business because people want to be part of something that is important and purposeful. You know, it's not just make a profit and earn a living right? You know, people want to be inspired and feel that they're part of something special. And look, I think if you look at the positive changes that have occurred in the world certainly you could turn on the news and see the horrible things that happened in the last 24 hours or something like that. But if you step back and think about the amazing progress that's happened in the last several decades, you know a lot of it's been driven by technology and by businesses that have stepped up and made a difference and made commitments. And, you know, we're one of those companies that has made a series of commitments you know, 10 years ago, we set out with our 2020 goals. We accomplished significant majority of those retired those. Now we set out our progress made real 2030 goals all around the ESD themes. And it's not only the right thing to do but it is good for business. It inspires our team members, our customers and I think initiatives like progress made real at Dell and thousands of other companies. Ultimately, those are the things that are going to drive progress forward. I believe, you know, more so than government edicts or regulation, those can play a role. But I think, companies voluntarily driving things like the circular economy and how we include everyone in our business and provide opportunities for everyone to succeed no matter where they come from. I think those are the things that are really going to drive the world forward. >> Well, I want to ask you about public policy because as you say, it's not just the government, but of course sometimes the government can get in the way. You're seeing a lot of vitriol around Val break up big tech but the same time, you're seeing the US government and the EU very willing to help out with the semiconductor competitiveness in the like I know you were tapped with the new administration President Biden, tapping, you know, the best minds in tech and you were asked to part sort of participate give feedback. What can you tell us about, you know your advice to the US government? >> Well, you know, lots of great discussion with the new administration and it's a delight to see that they're focused on semiconductors and sort of the industries of the future. This is a big deal. I mean, you know, we've got some big global competitors out there other nations that are with a deterministic strategy very focused on the industries of the future. But US, you know if you think about the atomic age and, you know the Apollo missions that created the whole semiconductor industry ARPANET and ultimately the Internet and that kind of stopped right there, you know, there wasn't as much government investment in some of those big R and D initiatives that really drove an enormous creation of industries and success for the United States and its citizens. And so I think focusing on semiconductors and how you build the infrastructure of the future really important for the United States to continue to be a leader in that you know, we were, you know, producing a one point about 37% of the world's semiconductors. It's now down to 12% and dropping and really important that more investments are made in that area. It's a combination of capital, talent, you know education knowledge, and also, you know, the policies that promote the development of these kinds of businesses. >> Yah well, Pat's got a very big challenge ahead of them. And so that's why but we've said Intel's too strategic to fail in our view but I wanted to plug your book a little bit. My former boss, you and I have talked about this. He was also a gentleman who proved Leo Durocher wrong. He was very nice guy, but also a winner, Play Nice But Win, why did you decide to write another book? >> Well, you know, Dave, a lot has happened in the last 20 years and especially the last nine or so years since we went private and, you know merged with EMC and VMware and went public again. And, you know, I'd say we... first of all, you know when I wrote the first book in 1998 I wasn't comfortable disclosing a lot. And, and I wasn't vulnerable enough and didn't feel, you know, able to do that. Now I do, you know, I'm older, you know hopefully a little wiser. And so I think everybody's going to like hearing some of the fun stories about not only my childhood but you know, the dorm room and beyond, and leading up to, you know the pivotal changes that have occurred the last decade my alligator wrestling with Carl Icahn and other, you know there's lots of fun stories in there. I got arrested one time. It was only for speeding tickets, don't worry but you know, lots of fun. I'm really looking forward to the book coming out and being able to talk about it. >> I can't wait. You know, I've said many times anybody who could beat the great icon is interesting to me. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned my old boss, Pat McGovern. I used to say to them all the time, "Pat how come you don't buy more companies?" And he'd say," Dave, you know the vast majority of acquisitions and mergers they failed to meet their objectives." Did you ever imagine, I mean... I did the EMC acquisition. Did... how could it not have exceeded your expectations? I wonder if you could give us your final thoughts on that. >> You know, and I talk about this a lot in the book. I mean, these are kind of the ultimate considered decisions. And in the case of the EMC combination it was something that we had thought about going back to 2008, 2009. And then, you know, started thinking about it in 2014 worked on it for a full year before it got announced in 2015 and finally closed in 2016. But yeah, I mean, you know, we thought it would be great. It turned out to be even better than We thought the revenue synergies were far greater. The teams were quite energized. Customers liked what we were providing and you know it's ... and, of course the markets were supportive Right? You know, we were paying close attention to interest rates and how we could structure the merger in a attractive way. And, you know, thank goodness, lots of hard work lots of determination, you know, it's worked out quite well. >> Yeah, great commitment from the Dell team as well. Congratulations on that. Go ahead, please. >> And any adventure continues right? It's...( both chuckles) >> I can't wait to see the next chapter and I can't wait to get the book, but congratulations on that, all your tremendous success you're you are a winner and a gentleman and a friend of the CUBE, Michael Dell. Thanks so much. >> Thank you so much Dave. >> And thank you for watching. And this is the CUBE continuous coverage of Dell tech world 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE and welcome to this conversation. With me is Anil Singhal, who is the CEO of NETSCOUT. Anil, it's a pleasure to speak with you today. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> Thank you. >> So I want to talk a little bit about NETSCOUT. We're kind of at theCUBE, we're sort of enamored by founder-led companies. I mean, you started NETSCOUT right around the same time that I entered the tech business, and you remember back then it was an industry dominated by IBM, monolithic systems were the norm, in the form of mainframes, you had mini computers, PCs, and things like PC local area networks, they were in their infancy. In fact, most of the PCs, as you remember, they didn't even have hard disks in them. So I want to start with, what was it that you saw 35 years ago that led you to start NETSCOUT and at the time, did you even imagine that you'd be creating a company with a billion dollars worth of revenue and a much larger market cap? >> Well, certainly I had not imagined where we'll be right now, and we didn't know that this'll be the outcome. I mean, we just happened to be at the right place at the right time, but we did have a vision. Some of you had the feeling, we are enamored by networking, and we thought that network will be the business. In fact, our business card in 91 said, "Network is the business." And so somehow we got that right, and we said, these things will be connected. And overall, we found then that the IP convergence first in the enterprise in 90s, and then internet, and carriers moving from analog to digital, (indistinct) talk about digital transformation in last few years, but this has been going on for the last 30 years. And as we add what we were doing, become relevant to more and more people over time. For example, now even power companies use our product. And we have IoT devices coming in. So basically what we do is we said we are going to provide visibility through looking at the traffic, through the lens and the vantage point of the network. A lot of people think we are just doing network monitoring or had been doing that. But actually we use the network as a vantage point, which other people are not doing, most of the people have accidental data from devices as the basis of visibility. And that turned out to be very successful, but at some point, different points in our life, we became responsible for the market, not just for NETSCOUT. And that changed the shape of the company, and what we did and how we drove the innovation. >> I want to get into some of that, but I'm still really enamored of and fascinated by the beginnings. I mean, I worked for a founder-led, a chairman, a guy named Pat McGovern who built a media empire. He had these 10 sort of core principles, he used to test us on 'em, we'd carry around little note cards, things that today still serve us. You know, stay close to the customer, you know, keep the corporate staff lean, promote from within, respect for individuals, things that are drilled into your head. I wonder, you know, what are the principles that, you know, sometimes they become dogma, but they're good dogma. I don't mean that as a pejorative. What are the things that you built your business on, the principles that you're sort of most proud of? >> Well, I think there is, so there are five, in fact, we call some of these tenets our five tenets. We call this high ambition leadership, which is more than just about making money. And just like the US is the leader of the free world, we have a responsibility beyond US. Same way, NETSCOUT has a responsibility beyond our own company and revenue and our stakeholders. So with that in mind, we have these five things, which I think I wouldn't have been able to articulate that 20 years ago, like this. But they were always there. So firstly, there's guardians of the connected world, which you see it on our website, guardians care about their asset, it's not just about money. We are going to solve problems in the connected world, which nobody else is able to solve, or have the passion or have the resources and willpower to do it. So that's the overall theme of the company. Guardians of the connected world, connected world is changing, new problems are coming. Our goal is there are pros and cons of every new thing. Our goal is to remove all the cons so you can enjoy the pros. So that's guardian of the connected world. Then our mission is accelerate digital transformation, meaning remove the roadblocks. People are looking at enablers, but there are barriers also. How do you remove the barriers for our customers, so they can improve the fruits of digital transformation? For example, going to the cloud allows you to outsource some of us, especially in these times of agility and dependency, you can cut your costs, but that comes with a price that you lose control. So our product brings the control back. So now you can enjoy the pros and the cons and I call it sometimes how do you change the wheels of your car while driving? If you change four wheels, then car is going to fall down, but how do you put one wheel in the cloud? Well, that's what our vision is. Visibility without borders. We'll give you the same information, which is the third part. That's why we have this tagline and therefore the company. And then we have the mission, accelerating digital transformation, but our vision is visibility without borders. When you run your application, no matter where you run, we'll give you the same piece of information. That allows the people to make this migration transparent from a monitoring and visibility point of view. And then the fourth area is about our technology. We call it smart data technology, and the whole world is talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning. But what are you going to learn, is your AI really authentic or is it truly artificial? And that comes from smart data. Data is the oil of the new industry. That's the oil, and people are not focusing on that. They're saying, "I have lots of data," but you don't have the data which we have. In the past, we said, we are not going to share the data with third parties. And recently we have changed that, and say, "Yeah, there is a price for that. We'll do that." So we are branding ourselves as a smart data company, where the whole industry is talking about smart analytics. And I said, "We make smart people smarter." And lastly, the value system of NETSCOUT is called lean, but not mean, okay? Anybody can get lean. If you get fat, you can get the operation. But how do you do lean decision making so you never have to be in mean? Like NETSCOUT never had to lay off in the last 35 years, we have ups and down, our stock has gone to $3 and has gone to $40, but companies continued to invest, and that's why we have this reputation we have, whether it's (indistinct). The tenure at NETSCOUT is 10, 15 years minimum, even in sales, and people don't realize the power of that because some of our customers tell us, "Hey, your salespeople are around longer than our employees." And that (indistinct) builds a franchise of loyalty in the customer base. We underestimate that, this continuity part. So that in many aspect of not, what is the definition of not being mean, that lean and mean is sort of people are very proud of that. And I think you can be lean without being mean. And then how do you become lean, is don't hire when in good times, unless you need them. The reason people are able to do it, is because they think "I can fire anytime, so let's build up the fat." So there a lot of decision-making we do around this, and that's what I talk about in the book, it's not about technology, and this is, I would say is just one of the five tenets, but it's probably one of the most important ones. And it's one of the biggest differentiators of NETSCOUT. >> Well, it's obviously served you well, I mean, no layoffs in 35 years, the retention metric is very impressive. I mean, again, I go back to my experience. I was at IDG for 15 years. My passion was always to start my own company, but I didn't want to leave 'cause it was such a great culture, and it seems like you've created something similar. You know, I talk to CIOs and CTOs a lot too about, it's always people, process, technology. And of course we want to talk about tech 'cause we love talking about tech, but they always tell me, "Look, tech comes and goes," it's the processes that you put in place, the culture that you have in place, we could deal with the tech, and it sounds like you've created a similar dynamic. And I think back again, when you started, there were proprietary networks, it was IBM SNA, DEC network, every mini computer had its own network. Then, you know, TCP/IP came in and the whole world changed and exploded. But yet you said guardians of the connected world, and that's kind of been your focus from really day one. You know, I loved what you said about the business. The network is the business. Remember the network is the computer that Scott McNealy popularized. So really kind of a similar dynamic there. So it seems, Anil, that that framework that you just laid out, those core principles, have actually allowed you to ebb, to flow, to deal with stock prices and still retain people for very long periods of time. >> Maybe one more thing to add there is that on the lean but not, many talk about generalities. We don't look any different. Like everyone cares about happy customers. They care about happy employees and they care about happy stakeholders, shareholders. Everyone, including us. But what's the order? Where do you start? So we start with employees. We say happy employees, then we get happy customers. And then because of that, they buy more stuff and we create happy shareholders. Whereas if you start with happy shareholders, you may not get happy employees. And so all I'm saying is that everyone probably believes in what we are saying or what I'm saying, but how they implement it, and then like really walking the talk is the most important part. >> Well, I think you're right. I mean, I think the financials is a by-product of happy employees, which drive happy customers. If you take care of employees and customers, then good things will happen. If you start with trying to micromanage the finances. Of course, we all attempted to do that. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, so just to bring it forward a little bit, we're talking about how NETSCOUT has essentially from a cultural standpoint, been able to withstand the ups, the downs, I mean, you've seen since, you know, it's over 35 years, a lot of the downturns and the tech softness, the tech bubbles, the great recession. Obviously now we're in the middle of a pandemic. And I wonder if you could talk to that specifically. So the data that we have from our survey partner, ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, shows that before the pandemic around 16% of employees worked from home, we're talking about truly remote workers, not, you know, a couple of days a week. And when we talk to CIOs today, they tell us it's well over 70% now, but they fully expect that when, you know, the world comes back to the new abnormal, I call it, that number's going to, that 16% is going to double to, more than double to 34%. So it puts stress on the network. It changes the direction of the traffic. It changes the security emphasis. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that just in terms of how you are helping your customers respond, specifically. >> So I always talk about like, is this a new problem or is the bad problem getting worse? So I contend that bad problem getting worse. So if you make the bad to zero, then you can't multiply. So I think it's highlighting some of the problems which are already there, are being highlighted by, a lot of people are telling, "Are you seeing more attacks?" No, we are becoming more conscious of the attacks we always had. We have more time, by the way, hackers have more time too, because they're also sitting at home doing things. So what I feel is that, two parts. One is that I think people should not, when the new normal comes, or new abnormal, then I think people should not make people work from home for the wrong reason. Certain people are saying, "Oh, I can save money." That's the wrong reason. But if it's efficient, we should do that. So we are doing some interesting things for home users to feel how they can feel that they're really working from the office. And so, yeah, there are some new challenges on how we monitor, because when the user complains now about the performance to IT, because they can't get their work, they don't know whether it's our network or is the ISP, or is their wifi network. So we try to provide the root cause analysis as quickly as possible, which we call mean time to know. And one of the things I didn't mention earlier, about what is the uniqueness of our technology when we use the network vantage point to drive visibility, it's almost like the blood test. When you have a problem, if you tell the doctor, I say "Hey, what is my problem?" And they start looking at all kinds of things. It's going to take forever. But if I take the blood test, I will know what the next thing to do. So in a way, we are doing the blood test of the user experience, security problems. And when we do that, we can come up with some very unique things. So we think that we'll be moving on into other areas, or the visibility is the means to an end, the end could be performance management, could be visibility, troubleshooting, and could be security forensics. Like blood tests can be used for DNA evidence also. And so we have all the technology, so we are moving on, as we move to the home user, we are applying that our techniques, not just for service assurance or end user experience monitoring, but also for security forensics. And one example I give you the, I always talk more than you'll see that in my book, being different before being better. First be different, get the ear flecks out of the ideas before you tell the story. And you don't do that, even though we are very big, we are very small compared to a lot of companies in the industry, compared to big players like Cisco, IBM, and all those. So the new thing which we are looking at in security is, the security industry is catching the act. We are going to catch the actors. If I can get into the, what they were doing before the act, before they did the ransomware, what were they doing? Well, that requires continuous monitoring of the traffic. And that's what we do. So when we do catch the actor, catching the thief, not what they're stealing, then you're preventing tomorrow's attack. And that's basically the innovation part of NETSCOUT, which we have been pushing for. But we somehow decided not to apply that to security because we had other problems to be solved as guardians of the connected world from a monitoring point of view. And so those are some of the things we'll be applying as we move forward. And I feel that those are equally applicable before the pandemic and after the pandemic. And it's just polarized more, because more people are working from home. >> It's interesting what you're saying about the blood test. That's a great analogy because it kind of eliminates the guesswork, and removes the opaqueness. It goes right to sort of the heart of the matter, you called it mean time to know. And it's interesting too, to look at productivity. I mentioned some of the survey work, when we talk to organizations, they say to us that actually productivity has gone up since the pandemic. And my response to that is, "Yeah, no kidding. 'Cause people are working 15 hour days." You can't keep that up. And the silent killer of productivity is the not, having an elongated mean time to know, and having to guess. And so my premise is that this productivity gain, if in fact it exists, is not sustainable because we're doing it on the backs of our employees and it's going to burn 'em out. >> I'm not sure whether it's real also, see, there are both sides. It's not possible, practical, as you are saying, because for example, you are a salesperson and you are working six, seven hours and you're traveling six hours. You can't be on the phone for 12 hours with a customer right now. So I don't talk and then be productive, there are both sides going, some people are overworked. And so definition of productivity itself is in question. And how do you measure that? And so that's what we'll have to look, I think basically all I'm saying is we should do it, whatever we do after the pandemic is over, about how many people work from home, should be based on your business model, your expectation, not just based on cost. And a lot of people are looking at once again, "Oh, this is another cost saving exercise." And that should not be the reason, that's the wrong reason, because then they're measuring the productivity in terms of reduced cost, not everything else. Plus at least in NETSCOUT, is a company which, I mean, every meeting I go to, I use chalkboard, and it's very very hard for other companies, somebody like IBM, where most of the people work, there are 50 offices. What is the easy transition? It's not easy for NETSCOUT. And so right now we focus on safety, but we need to come up with a good hybrid model later on, and different people will set up differently. But what we do will be relevant in all cases. >> Yeah, but I think you're making a good point that it's not some kind of mandate to drive costs down. Or we saw last decade, there were a couple of prominent companies that were mandating actually working in the office, eliminating work from home. So obviously the wrong side of history, you know, they didn't know a pandemic was coming, but so how will you make that decision? Will you, is it really a discussion case by case with the employees or what's the framework for you guys to decide that? >> Well, I think so right now, our focus is on safety. So it's completely optional. In fact, we don't even allow more than 20%, and that's only in the headquarters, other places, we have less than 5% people coming, and only essential workers, manufacturing and all those. So right now it's completely optional. But my personal preference when there is no risk is people should come to work like they were coming before. We like to make it as close as possible to the old normal, but that's not going to be the case for other companies because they're bigger in size, they have other things at play, but certainly we are not going to do it, "Oh, because it's cheaper for NETSCOUT, when people work from home." And so we we'll see how it goes. I think it will be a transition, but I can see going back to new normal in a year from now, if things start winding down in six months, within a year or so, we should be getting back to some normalcy. But that doesn't mean going to be true for our customers. So from a product point of view, we are doing several things so we can help the customer through this transition. And by the way, one other thing I wanted to mention earlier, when we talk about the blood test, how does it relate to guardians of the connected world? If you believe in that, what did the industry do? They made sure needles were not painful. That blood test was reliable. There is no hygiene issues or no issues like that. The cost has come down. As the guardian of the connected world, because we do that, that's what we have been doing. We are removing the barriers to a great idea, but not all other companies give up. And then they have different strategies and some of them are successful, some are not. So as the guardian of the connected world, our goal is to continue to make this practical use. Imagine if blood test industry had not done that, where we'll be right now. And that's what I meant by guardian of the connected world. This is not easy to do and sustain that for a period of 20, 30 years. But we have been able to do that, and we get a lot of challenges from naysayers, "Oh, this will not work at high speed." When I started NETSCOUT, it was 10 megabit internet. Now we have 100 gig internet, and we are still able to handle it. And nobody had thought in those days that you can even get to 100 megs. People were questioning us. But what happens is other things keep working in the market. Intel is making improvements, lot of people are doing work to solve the problem, and we leverage that. And that's how we are able to sort of sustain this guardian of the connected world team. >> The other key aspect of the guardian of the connected world, and again, not to overdo the blood test analogy, but the time to results is very important. If you have an issue and you have to wait weeks for the results and your doctor, you can't get ahold of her. And so you're successfully dealing with that in real time or near real time, and that to me is critical. >> Very important point, thanks for reminding because I forgot today, that's one of the things I say all the time, "Hey, this one of the big thing we have done, and blood test industry has done it. How long take to get results?" Nowadays you can get results done in like two hours, and doctors can get a report in couple of hours. That's what we had done. That's like mean time to know, which we talked about. With our technology, I think we had basically all the issues, you can't even breathe without doing something on the network. So if you're listening to the traffic or hearing what the conversation, you can form an independent view of what is happening. And that's the smart data, which then becomes the basis of analytics, whether analytics in the security space or not. And so that one thing we have not changed, this technique. Now, the outcomes are different. What are we doing with our visibility is different. Is keep changing the number of customers and the type of customers are different. But ultimately that part interestingly has not changed. >> I wonder if I could ask you, I'd like to ask CEOs, especially those that are technologists and business leaders, their thoughts on the cloud. I mean, our data shows that the public cloud is growing in the 30% plus range annually, the big three public cloud players now account this year, probably for close to $75 billion in revenue, maybe even a little bit more, what do you see driving this growth? What does it mean for your customers? >> I think first of all, we have a big announcement coming out called smart cloud monitoring to address this. But what's the meaning of that? I think what our customers are looking for is that it's not all or nothing. It's not that everything is in the cloud or everything is in the on-prem, it could be private cloud, public cloud, (indistinct), the way VPNs are laid out. So they want to make sure that they can use our technology to do this (indistinct) and analytics, regardless of what decision they make. And even five years from now, there'll be enough non-cloud stuff, okay? So that's what we are striving to do. That's what is visibility without borders, and when they do that, they're saying that helps them decide what's the best mode of operation for them, for what application. Moving blindly to the cloud is a problem. Not going into that area is also a problem. But I think this, the two new things that have happened recently, I will say one is sort of, because of this crisis, people don't want to own, like the hospitality industry. This would, I mean, they're obviously having big issues with them, but if they own a lot of the infrastructure, they could have turned off some of that. And so that's driving more movement to the cloud, but I think there is now other choices available, about a year or two ago, I think affordable pricing model, multiple choices, not just AWS, and technology maturing where you can really implement and have a good experience. I think those have become big enablers. And so I think now it is possible to get to massive movement to the cloud, but then they want to make sure that I'm outsourcing my problem, but I'm not outsourcing my vision to the cloud vendors, because previously the way in the IT industry, a lot of problems were solved is, it was called the war room. Let's get everyone who reports to me and everyone who reported to you, but now everyone doesn't report to you. So how do you maintain the control? Man, I complain to my CIO, "Hey, my WebEx is slow," or "Office (indistinct)," and how do they resolve that problem? Because they cannot tell me, "Oh, we outsourced them, so I can't tell you that," well, we should not have outsourced them to the cloud. So how do you drive this collaboration between the providers and the consumers? Is going to be key to accelerating this transformation. Because otherwise the cost of CapEx cost of a deduction of moving to the cloud will be offset by the increase in OpEx and customer satisfaction for the customer. And so if we can help deal with one of the parts, industry is already doing the other big part of making cloud work, I think then we'll have the best chance of success. >> Yeah. And of course the security has implications on the security model. You were talking earlier about that, as an opportunity, people sometimes think, "Oh yeah, I put my data in the cloud. I'm good on security." But there's a shared responsibility. Again, we talked about different traffic patterns. You've got work from home going on. And it's interesting when you juxtapose the sort of industry narrative on security, which is it gets harder and harder and harder, and you hear some of the cloud players say, "Hey, the state of security is really good," but when you talk to CISOs, they'll talk about the lack of talent, the challenges they have, the tools creep, the fact that they spend more, but the adversaries just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger. It's a really serious problem. I mean, maybe we close there. I mean kind of, how do you see it from your vantage point? >> Let's look at the blood test. So I look at, if you do the technique which we are talking about, at least in the dimension of security monitoring, then you are going to do a lot of little things, because you're doing little things, you're going to be (indistinct) tool creep, and because of that, you have a talent issue. And I think if we can make the right stuff work, then you will not have this talent issue, and I feel that we are always looking at solving yesterday's problem, okay? Because we are not watching what led to the attack. We are just dealing with the attack as an incident, a security issue. So I think continuous monitoring of traffic allows you to look at the deviation of the normal. So signature-based security is a big portion, but how do you know the signature of tomorrow? And while you know that because you know the normal, but the only way you know normal is if you have been monitoring what was going on, not for a specific event, but deviation from normal. That's what our approach is going to be, anomalous behavior detection through our smart data. And then you apply machine learning and AI algorithms to that. I think that would be Nirvana. But we don't have all the smart people for analytics, but we can feed our data to those smart people. And that's something we are going to bring up, and the reason I feel it will be successful because this idea has been wildly successful for NETSCOUT in the non-security space. >> Yeah. I think you're bringing up another point that I've talked about a lot, which is the industry has gone from sort of an industry of products to platforms, and now ecosystems is really driving a lot of the innovation. That's exactly what you're talking about. Feeding data to other partners, data partners. Now you start thinking about IoT and the edge, and machines talking to machines. I mean, I put video cameras up in my house to make my environment more secure, but of course I'm scared to death that those things could get hacked. It's a very complicated situation, and the power of many is going to trump the resources of one. And so I'm glad you brought that out. Maybe give us your final thoughts, Anil. It really has been a pleasure talking to you. >> Well, I think one of the things people ask me is, "Why didn't you start another company?" Especially in Silicon Valley, I say, "We did start many companies, but they all happen to be called NETSCOUT." NETSCOUT 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0, actually, we are into the 4.0. I sometimes say, "You know George Foreman's four sons, they're all called George Foreman." So every time we do something different, and now we are in the process of launching NETSCOUT 5.0, it was partly because, maybe accelerated because of what's going on with the pandemic, because there are some new challenges which (indistinct), and we are entering the security space. So I'm very excited about repeating what we did in the traditional monitoring space, service insurance space, both for enterprise and carriers, to the security space. And people will question us how come it took so long. Well, we were solving other problems, which are more interesting than this for NETSCOUT. And now we want to bring that technology and all of our tenets, guardian of the connected world, smart data, to the security space. And also, I mean, people are around for long term, we are also building the next generation of leaders at NETSCOUT. And so we have our hands full over the next two, three years, in building the next generation of NETSCOUT, solving some of the problems the industry is facing, without abandoning our tenets and the culture. And if we can do that, I think there'll be, we'll be going to the next level, in terms of NETSCOUT branding and leadership. >> Well, given the guiding principles that you shared with us earlier, the fundamental technology that you have around visibility, I think that's served you very well. And I think there's no shortage of opportunity for NETSCOUT. So, Anil, thanks so much for sharing your story and coming on theCUBE. >> Good. Thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hello everyone this is dave vellante with the cube and welcome to this conversation with me is anil singal who is the ceo of netscout anil it's a pleasure to speak with you today thanks so much for coming on the program thank you so i want to talk a little bit about uh netscout we're kind of at the cube we're sort of enamored by founder-led companies i mean you started net scout right around the same time that i entered the tech business and you remember back then it was an industry dominated by ibm monolithic systems were then with a norm in the form of mainframes you had mini computers pcs and things like pc local area networks they were in their infancy in fact most of the pcs as you remember they didn't have hard disks in them so i want to start with what was it that you saw 35 years ago to let you let that led you to start net scout and at the time did you even imagine that you'd be creating a company with a billion dollars worth of revenue and a much larger market cap well certainly i'd not imagine where we'll be right now and uh we didn't need we didn't know that this will be the outcome where i mean we just happened to be at the right place at the right time but we did have a vision some of you had the feeling we are enamored by networking and we thought that network will be the business in fact our business card in 91 said network is the business and so somehow we got that right and and we said these things will be connected and overall we found then that with the ip convergence first in the enterprise in 90s and then internet and then carriers moving from analog to digital we call talk about digital transformation in last few years but this has been going on for the last 30 years and as we add what we were doing become relevant to more and more people over time for example right now even power companies use our product okay and we have iot devices coming in so so basically what we do is we we said we're going to provide visibility through looking at the traffic through the lens and the vantage point of the network a lot of people think we're just doing network monitoring or have been doing that but actually we use the network as the vantage point which is other people are not doing most of the people have accidental data from devices at the basis of visibility and that turned out to be a very successful and but at some point different points in our life we became responsible for the market not just for netscope and that changed the shape of the company and what we did and how we drove the innovation yeah now i want to get into some of that but i i i'm still really enamored of and and fascinated by by the beginnings i worked for a founder led a chairman a guy named pat mcgovern who built the media empire he had these 10 sort of core principles we he used to test us on him we'd carry him around a little little note card things that today still serve us you know stay close to the customer uh you know keep the corporate staff lean promote from within respect for individuals the things that are drilled into your head i wonder you know what are the principles that you know sometimes they come become dogma but they're good dogma i don't mean that as a pejorative what are the things that that you built your business on the principles that you're sort of most proud of well i think there is so there are five in fact we call um uh some of the standards so five tenants we have we call we call this high ambition leadership which is more than just about making money and as just like the us is the leader of the free world we have a responsibility beyond u.s same way netscout has a responsibility beyond our own company and and revenue and our stakeholders so with that in mind we have these five things which i think i wouldn't have been able to articulate that 20 years ago like this and but they were always there so first is this guardians of the connected world which you see it on our website guardians care about their asset it's not just about money we are going to solve problems in the connected world which nobody else is able to solve or have the passion or have the resources and willpower to do it so that's that's the overall theme of the company guardians of the connected world connected world is changing broad new problems are coming our goal is there are pros and cons of every new thing our goal is to remove all the cons so you can enjoy the pros so that's guardian of the connected world then our mission is accelerate digital transformation meaning remove the road blocks people are looking at enablers but there are barriers also how do you remove the barriers for our customers so they can improve the fruits of digital transformation for example going to the cloud allows you to outsource some of the stuff especially in this time of agility and and dependency you can cut your cost but that comes with the price that you lose control so our product big bring the control back so now you can enjoy the pros and the cons and i call it sometime how do you change the wheels of your car while driving well if you change the four wheels then carve is going to fall down but how do you put one wheel in the cloud well that's what the our vision is visibility without water we'll give you the same information which is the third part so we have this uh tagline and for the company and then we have the mission accelerating digital transformation our vision is visibility without border when you run your application no matter where you run we'll give you the same piece of information that allows the people to make this transparent transparent migra that's migration transparent from a monitoring and visibility point of view then the fourth area is about a technology we call it smart data technology the whole world is talking about artificial intelligence machine learning but who are you going to learn for is your ai really authentic or is it truly artificial and that comes from smart data data is the oil of the new industry that's the oil and and people are not focusing on that they're saying i have lots of data but you don't have the data which we have in the past we said we are not going to share the data with third parties so in recently we have changed that you say yeah we'll there is the price for that we'll do that so we are branding ourselves as a smart data company where the whole industry is talking about smart analytics and i said we make smart people smarter and lastly uh the the value system of netscout is called lean but not mean okay and uh anybody can get lean if you get fat you can get your operation but how do you do lean decision making so you never have to be in me like net score never had delay in the last 35 years we have ups and down our stock has gone to three dollars and has gone to forty dollars but company continued to invest and uh and that's why we have this reputation we have with this tom here or steve here the tenure at netscout is 10 15 years minimum even in sales and people don't realize the power of that because some of our customers tell us hey your sales people are around longer than our employees and that how it builds a franchise of loyalty in the customer base we underestimate that this continuity part so there are many aspects of not what is the definition of not being mean the lean and mean is is sort of people are very proud of that and i think you can be lean without being mean and how do you become lean is don't hire when in good times unless you need them the reason people are able to do it is because they think i can fire any time so let's build up the fact so there are a lot of decision making we do around this and that's what i talk about in the book it's not about technology and this is i would say it's just one of the five diamonds but it's probably one of the most important ones and is one of the biggest differentiator of netscope well it's obviously served you well i mean no layoffs in 35 years the the retention metric is is very impressive i mean again i go back to my experience i was at idg for 15 years my passion was always to start my own company but i didn't want to leave because it was such a great culture and it seems like you've created something similar you know i talk to cios and ctos a lot too about about you know it's always people process technology and of course we want to talk about tech because we love talking about tech but they always tell me look tech comes and goes it's the processes that you put in place the culture that you have in place we could deal with the tech and it and it sounds like you've created a similar dynamic and i think back again when you started there were proprietary networks it was ibm sna dec network every mini computer had its own network then you know tcpip came in the whole world it changed and exploded but yet you said guardians of the connected world and that's kind of been your your focus from really day one you know i i loved what you said about the business the the network is the business remember the network is the computer that scott mcneely popularized so really kind of a similar dynamic there so it seems anneal that that framework that you just laid out those core principles have actually allowed you to ebb to flow to deal with stock prices and still retain people for very long periods of time maybe one more thing to add there is that on the lean but not when you talk about generalities we don't look any different like everyone cares about happy customers they care about happy employees and they care about happy stakeholders shareholders everyone including us but what's the order what's uh what's where do you start so we start with employees we say if they're happy employees they create success happy customers and then because of that they drive they buy more stuff and we create happy shareholders whereas if you start with happy shareholders you may not get happy employees and so and so all i'm saying is that everyone probably believes in what what we are saying or what i'm saying but how they implement it and then like really walking the talk is the most important part well i think you're right i mean i think you know the financials is a byproduct of happy employees which drive happy customers if you take care of employees and customers then good good things will happen uh if you start with trying to micromanage the finances of course we all attempted to to do that um i i wonder if we could talk a little bit about so just to bring it forward a little bit we're talking about how netscout has essentially from a cultural standpoint been able to withstand the ups the downs i mean you've seen since since you know over 35 years a lot of the the the downturns and the the tech softness the tech bubbles the great you know recession obviously now we're in the middle of the pandemic um i and i wonder if you could talk to that specifically so the data that we have from our survey partner etr enterprise technology research shows that before the pandemic around 16 of employees worked from home we're talking about truly remote workers not you know a couple days a week and when we talked to cios today they tell us it's you know well over 70 percent now but they fully expect that when you know the world comes back to the new abnormal i call it that it's it's that number is going to that 16 is going to double to more than double the 34 so it's it puts stress on on the the network it changes the the direction of the traffic it changes the security uh emphasis maybe you could talk a little bit about that just in terms of how you you are helping your customers respond specifically so i always talk about like is this a new problem or is the bad problem getting worse and so i put it in that bad problem getting worse so if you make the bad to zero then you can't multiply it so i think it's highlighting some of the problems which are already there are being highlighted by a lot of people are telling are you seeing more attacks no we are becoming more conscious of the attacks we always had we have more time by the way hackers have more time too because they are also sitting at home doing things so what i'm saying what i feel is that two parts one is that i think people should not in the when the new normal comes or new abnormal then i think people should not make people work from her for the wrong reason certain people are saying oh i can save money that's the wrong reason but if it's efficient we should do this so we are doing some interesting things for home users to feel how they can feel that they're really working from the office and so yeah there are some new challenges on how we monitor because when a user complains now about a performance to it because they can't get their work they don't know whether it's our network or is the isp or is their wi-fi network so we try to provide the root cause analysis as quickly as possible which we call mean time to know and one of the things i didn't mention earlier about the what is the uniqueness of our technology when we use the network vantage point to drive visibility it's almost like the blood test when you have a problem if you tell the doctor i said hey what is my problem and they start looking at all kinds of things it's going to take forever but if i take the blood test i'll be able to do the i will know what the next thing to do so in a way we are doing the blood test of the user experience security problems and when we do that we can come up with some very unique things so in the we think that we'll be moving on into other areas so the visibility is the means to an end the end could be performance management could be visibility troubleshooting uh and could be security forensics like blood tests can be used for dna evidence also and so we have all the technology so we are moving on as we move to the home user we are applying that our techniques not just for service assurance or end user experience monitoring but also for security financing and one example i give you the i always talk about and you'll see that in my book being different before being be better first be different get the earplugs out of the audience before you tell the story and you don't do that even though we are very big we are very small compared to a lot of companies in the industry compared to big players like cisco ibm and all those so the new thing which we are looking at in security is the security industry is catching the act we are going to catch the actor if i can get into the what they were doing before the act before they did the ransomware what were they doing well that required continuous monitoring of the traffic and that's what we do so when we do catch the actor catching the thief not what they're stealing then you're preventing tomorrow's attack and that's basically the innovation part of netscout which we have been pushing for but we somehow decided not to apply that to security because we had enough problems to be sold as guardians of the connected world from a monitoring point of view and so those are those are some of the things we'll be applying as as we move forward and i feel that those are equally applicable before the pandemic and after the pandemic and it's just polarized more because more people are working from home it's interesting what you're saying about the blood test uh that's a great analogy because it kind of eliminates the guesswork uh and and removes the opaqueness uh goes right to sort of the hard heart of the matter you call it mean time to know um and and it's interesting too to look at productivity i i mentioned some of the survey work when we talked to organizations they say to us that actually productivity has gone up since the the pandemic and my response to that is yeah no kidding because people are working 15-hour days you can't keep that up and and the silent killer of productivity is is the the not has having an elongated mean time to know um and having to to guess and so my premise is that this productivity gain if in fact it exists is not sustainable because we're doing it on the backs of our employees and it's going to it's going to burn them out i'm not sure whether it's real also see there are both sides it's not possible practical as you are saying because for example you're a sales person and you're working six seven hours and you're traveling six hours you can't be on the phone for 12 hours with the customer right now right how can they be productive is there both sides going some people are overworked and so definition of productivity itself is in question and how do you measure that and so that's what we'll have to look i think basically what i'm saying is we should do it whatever we do after the pandemic is over about how many people work from home should be based on your business model your expectation not just based on cost and a lot of people are looking at once again oh this is another cost saving exercise and that should not be the reason that's the wrong reason because then they're measuring the productivity in terms of reduced cost not everything else plus at least in net stock is a company which i mean every meeting i go to i use chalkboard and it's very very hard as a for our company like somebody like ibm where most of the people were there 50 offices they were remote is the easy transition it's not easy for netscout and so right now we focus on safety but we need to come up with a good hybrid model later on and different people will set up differently but what we do will be relevant in all cases yeah but i think you're making a good point that it's not some kind of mandate to drive your costs down or we saw last decade there were a couple of prominent companies that were mandating actually working in the office eliminating work from home so obviously the wrong side of history you know who they didn't know a pandemic was coming but so so how how will you make that decision uh will you is it really a discussion case by case with the employees or how what's the framework for you guys to decide that well i think so right now our focus is on safety so it's completely optional in fact we don't even allow more than 20 percent and that's only in the headquarters other places we have less than five percent people coming right and only essential workers manufacturing and all those so right now is completely optional but my personal preference when there is no risk these people should come to work like they were coming before we like to make it as close as possible to the old normal but that's not going to be the case for other companies because they're bigger in size they have other things at play but certainly we are not going to do it or because it's cheaper for net scores because we when people work from home and so we will see how it goes i think it will be a transition but i can see we going back to new normal in a year from now if the things start winding down in six months within a year or so we should be getting back to uh some normalcy and but that doesn't mean it's going to be true for our customers so from a product point of view we are doing several things so we can help the customer through this transition and by the way one other thing i wanted to mention earlier when we talk about the blood test how does it relate to guardians of the connective connected world if you believe in that what did the industry do they made sure needles were not painful that blood test was reliable you could there is no hygiene issues or no issues like that the cost has come down as a guardian of the connected world because we do that that's what we have been doing we are removing the banners to a great idea but lot of other companies gave up and then they have different strategy and some are successful some are not so as a guardian of the connected wall our goal is to continue to make this practical use imagine if blood test industry has not done that where we'll be right now and that's what what i meant by guardian of the connected world this is not easy to do and sustain that in for a period of 20 30 years but we have been able to do that and we get a lot of challenges from naysayers or this will not work at high speed when i started mad scout it was 10 megabit ethernet now we have 100 gigs 100 gig ethernet and we are still able to handle it and nobody thought in those days that you can even get 200 likes people were questioning us but what happens is other things keep working in the market intel is making improvements a lot of people are doing work to solve the problem and we leverage that and and that's how we are able to uh sort of sustain this guardian of the connected world team yeah you know the other key aspect of the guardian of the connected world again not to overdo the blood test analogy but the time to results is very important if you if you have an issue and you have to wait wait weeks for the results and your doctor you can't get a hold of her and so you're you're successfully dealing with that in real time or near real time and that that to me is is critical a very important point thanks for reminding me because i forgot today that's one of the things i say all the time hey this one of the big things we have done if blood test industry has done it how long take to get results nowadays you can get results done in in like two hours and doctors can get a report in couple of hours that's what we have done that's like mean time to know which we talked about with our technology i think we're basically the all the issues that you can't even breathe without doing something on the network so if you're listening to the traffic or hearing that uh what the conversation you can form an independent view of what is happening and that could be the that's the smart data which then becomes the basis of analytics whether analytics in the security space or not and so that's uh and that one thing we have not changed this technique now the outcomes are different what are we doing with the visibility is different is keep changing the number of customers and the type of customers are different but ultimately that part has interestingly has not changed i wonder if i could ask you i'd like to ask ceos especially those that are technologists and business leaders you know their thoughts on on the cloud i mean our data shows that the public cloud is growing in the 30 plus range annually the big three cloud public cloud players now account this year probably for close to 75 billion dollars in revenue maybe even a little bit more you know what what do you see driving this growth what does it mean for your customers well i think so forth we have a big announcement coming out called smart cloud monitoring to address this but what's the meaning of that i think what our customers are looking for is that it's it's not all or nothing it's not that everything is in the cloud or everything is in the program it could be private cloud public cloud colos the way vpns are laid out so they want to make sure that they can use our technology to do this react and analytics regardless of what decision they make and even five years from now there'll be enough non-cloud stuff okay so that's what we are trying to do we want to that's what is visibility without water and when they do that they say that helps them decide what's the best mode of operation for them for what application moving blindly to the cloud is a problem not going into that area is is also a problem but i think this the two new things have happened recently i would say one is sort of because of this crisis people don't want to own uh like hospitality industry okay this would i mean they're obviously having a big big issues with them but if they want a lot of the infrastructure they could have turned off some of that and so that's driving more movement to the cloud but i think there is a lot of choices available about a year or two ago i think affordable pricing model multiple choices not just aws and technology maturing where you can you can really implement and have a good experience i think those have become big enablers and so i think now it is possible to get to massive movement to the cloud but then they want to make sure that i'm now i'm outsourcing my problems but i'm not also outsourcing my vision to the cloud vendors because previously the way in the iit industry a lot of problems were solved is it was called the war rule let's get everyone who reports to me and everyone who reported to you but now that everyone doesn't report to you so how do you maintain the control when i complain to my ci hey my webex is slow or office three seriously and how does it resolve that problem because they cannot tell me oh we outsource them so i can't tell you that well we should not have outsourced them to the cloud so how do you drive this collaboration between the providers and the consumers is going to be key to accelerating this transformation because otherwise the cost of capex cost of reduction of moving to the cloud will be offseted by the increase in operax and customer satisfaction for the customer and so if we can help deal with one of the parts industry is already doing the other big part of making cloud work i think then we'll have the best chance of success yeah and of course the security has implications on the security model you were talking earlier about that as an opportunity people sometimes think oh yeah i put put my data in the cloud i'm good on security but there's there's a shared responsibility uh again we talked about different traffic patterns uh you've got work from home going on uh so and it's interesting when you juxtapose a sort of industry narrative on security which is it's it gets harder and harder and harder and you hear some of the cloud players say hey the state of security is really good uh but when you talk to csos you know they'll talk about the lack of talent uh the challenges they have the tools tools creep the fact that they spend more but the adversaries just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger it's a really serious problem i mean maybe we close there i mean kind of how do you see it from your your vantage point let's look at the blood test so i look at if you don't the technique which we are talking about at least in the dimension of security monitoring then you are going to a lot of little things because you are doing little things you are going to be do a tool creep and because of that you have a like a talent issue and i think if you can make the right stuff work then you will not have this this talent issue and i feel that we are always looking solving yesterday's problem okay because we are not watching what led to the attack we are just dealing with the attack as an incident a security issue so i think continuous monitoring of deviation traffic allows you look at the deviation of the north so signature based security is a big portion but how do you know the signature of tomorrow and well you know that because you know the normal but only way you know normal is if you have been monitoring what was going on not for a specific event but deviation from normal that's what our approach is going to be anomalous behavior detection through our smart data and then you apply machine learning and ai algorithms to that i think that could be nirvana and but we don't have all the smart people for analytics but we can feed our data to those smart people and that's something we are going to bring up and the reason i feel it will be successful because this idea has been widely successful for netscout in the non-security space yeah i think you're bringing up another point that i've talked about a lot which is we've the industry has gone from sort of an industry of products to platforms and now ecosystems is really driving a lot of the innovation it's exactly what you're talking about feeding data to other partners data partners and now you start thinking about iot and the edge and machines talking to machines i mean i put you know video cameras up in my house to to make my environment more secure but of course i'm scared to death that those things can get hacked um it's a very complicated situation and the the power of many is going to trump the the the resources of one and so i'm glad you you brought that out um maybe give us your final thoughts anil it really has been a pleasure talking to you well i think the vr one of the things people have asked me is uh is why did you start another company especially in silicon valley i said with this spot many companies but they all happened to be called netstar netscout 1.0 2.0 3.0 actually we we are into the 4.0 i sometimes say you know george foreman's four sons they're all called george foreman so it's like one and so every time we do something different and now we are in the process of launching netscore 5.0 it was partly because maybe accelerated because of what's what's going on with the pandemic because there are some new challenges which we then here for and we are entering the security space so i'm very excited about repeating what we did in the traditional monitoring space service assurance space both for enterprise and carriers to the security space and people will question us how come it took so long while we were solving other problems which were more interesting than this for netscout and now we're going to bring that technology and all the tenants guardian of the connected world smart data to the security space and also i mean people are around for a long time we are also building the next generation of leaders at netstar and and so we have our hands full over the next two three years in uh building the next generation of net scout solving some of the problems which industry is facing without abandoning our tenants and the culture and if we can do that i think uh there'll be uh we'll be going to uh to the next level in terms of netscore branding and leadership well given given the guiding principles that you shared with us earlier the the the fundamental technology that you have around visibility uh i think that's served you very well and i think there's no shortage of of opportunity uh for netscout so neil thanks so much for sharing your story and coming on thecube good thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is dave vellante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>already. Welcome back, Cube alum Dave Volante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Specifically focused on really, what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers and with me to explore that a little bit of Sherry Latin back. She is the senior vice president of Cloud Key accounts at Oracle, and we're also joined by Pat McGovern. Who's the group? EVP for the North American Cloud strategy. Also Oracle folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks >>for having us. >>You're welcome. So, Sheri, you're out talking to customers a lot. Um, I'm curious as to what that conversation is like specifically as it relates to consulting. I talked about the rebirth of Oracle consulting. You? Probably not, you know, earlier, years ago, leading with staff augmentation. That's not strategic. But are you bringing Oracle consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >>Absolutely. In fact, every conversation we have relating to our cloud strategy. Oracle consultants part and parcel to that they are not staff augmentation. They're actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do it Oracle from just a software company to really transform into. I thought provider >>and Chris I'm interested in Sorry, pat. I'm interested in your title group. VP Cloud strategy. Right? So gravity, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? One of the catalysts that are driving their their technology spending decisions? >>Yeah, it's a great question, and I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now depends upon the industry that they're in. But, um, most importantly, what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers of our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery business continuity. Um, in this stage, right now, it's less about expansion per se. Unless in an industry that's uniquely positioned for that more about durability, of the overall strategy that when we look at that, your ability, we think about kind of the core missions we think about, um so the back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation. And so when we partner with us, yes, we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. So >>I want to ask you both. Um, you know, it was a lot of we have a lot of talk about in our community about cloud first. Um, big oracle is sort of put forth the gauntlet of Look, we're we're leading now with cloud. You both have cloud in your title. But obviously being cloud first is is more than that sharing. What if you could talk about your customers and your cloud journey and share with us and convince us that you are cloud first? >>That's a great question. And in fact, I joined Oracle about 11 months ago, was in the industry for about 25 years and enjoying simply because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this journey. We're in our second generation of cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we realized that where cloud started and where we are today, are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security viability extensions with autonomous that other cloud providers just simply don't have built these ground up to make sure that we can run Oracle for blitz databases and applications far better than any other cloud provider. So that's super exciting time you got Oracle, and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are going to a doctor. Apology? >>Yes, so s so pat. I wanna ask you, Ah, sort of similar question. How fundamental is, uh, you know, Cloud to organizations, strategies, and obviously everybody is a cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission critical workloads because, let's face it, that's been the hardest to move into the cloud. So when you're out talking to customers about their strategy and obviously dovetailing at the Oracle strategy, how do you align those two views? >>Yeah, so it's actually really fascinating question. So first I think I would respond in the following away. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say cloud First, I say customer first, and I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that. Think of the customer whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or, you know, any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle's one of the very few, uh, you know, enterprise Last Mile providers that has obviously on premise capabilities as well. And so 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S and B five folks that are born in the cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid cloud model anyway. And so that's the kind of the first order priorities what's right for the customer. And let's make sure that we get the appropriate I'm all for that customer in terms of enterprise essentially the workloads that we have, whether it's cloud or on Prem or enterprise workloads. And those were kind of separated into two buckets, one of the core mission of the revenue generation side. And what would be mission critical sort of the back office, the oracles historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running supply chain, you know, doing those things that are mission critical on the core mission side. That's really where we're starting to focus now, which is getting out into the revenue generation. The mission of the entity with things like high performance. Compute on making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of those. >>You got a follow up question on strategy. You talked about hybrid. And you know the hybrid. Clearly, riel, whatever the big buzzword today is multi cloud. My question is, is multi cloud the actual strategy of customers or is it actually just an outcome of multi vendor and and shadow I t. But what if you could address that? Yeah, >>So another great question. So I think if you're on one side of the fence, you call it a strategy on maybe risk mitigation on the other side of the fence, you could say, you know, I don't When people talk about multi cloud, they tend to say, Hey, you know that one of the big names that you hear, whether it's Oracle or aws, um you know Microsoft etcetera? Uh huh. But the reality is anybody who's running those are also running, you know, hundreds of father for SAS applications. Whether the department allowed sort of that shadow, I t. I think in part you call it a strategy. In part, you'd say it's just sort of propagation of cloud capabilities that have sprung up, Do you think? Based on, you know, security integration, performance considerations as well as sort of the general expansiveness of enterprise class capabilities? You probably see if you're niche players over time and you'll see kind of the broader bets happening around enterprise class capabilities. >>So, Sheri, you're relatively new to the oracle of just under a year. But you've been around the industry, and you know that the chairman of a horrible loves technology you love speeds and feeds and shares that Oracle Open World but and, you know or was a product company. But the conversation is changing. You kind of alluded to that before. It's not just about feature function speeds and feeds. Maybe you could address that. And where does Oracle consulting fit in that equation? >>Right, So it kind of detail of what Pat was just saying around the hybrid notion. We firmly believe that every customer is gonna wanna have different options for what they do in the cloud and based on the providers. So we want. We've partnered with Microsoft. We actually can interconnect are clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers. Yeah, it is a key component of that Azure customers and talk about. I'm going to stop integration. Our partnership or consultant is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come, come about in a much different way in a way that's different, you know? And other consulting, you know, staff augmentation firms. >>Well, that Microsoft is interesting to us. Uh, actually, a lot of people in the press might have put food. It saw that and said, Wow, this is This is pretty curious both from a strategy standpoint, but it really. But I think it's premature on Oracle. So you got the Number one database. Everybody knows Oracle's got the native get this hyper cloud partner now saying, Yeah, we can run. You're kind of seamlessly. I know that's an overused word, but what is the reaction been in the customer base? That deal? >>It's phenomenal. It's infinite, especially for a lot of our retailers that are being Microsoft Cloud companies. They're seeing that they can put their Microsoft applications in the Microsoft class. They can run the Oracle databases in the Oracle Cloud and Inter Operability is tremendous and they're not any sort of service as it relates to putting, you know, using a multi cloud strategy. And for us, we're seeing that as a differentiator for us in the market. >>So what's the strategy behind that? I want you to talk about that a little bit, because, I mean, you know, it was it was an interesting chess move by Oracle you got, you know, Amazon's out there doing their thing, and there's plenty of Oracle running on on AWS. But there's a lot of head bashing going on, and then you guys partner up with Microsoft that caught a lot of people off guard. Can you help us, You know, give us a little color on the strategy behind that? >>Yeah, so I think that there's a There's a technical component of the strategy which Sherry alluded to, but I also think that there's a cultural component of the strategy and so, you know, obviously Microsoft has been around for a long time. ESX has Oracle that they have a substantial on from this friend. But as much as any other company on the Lana, probably Microsoft has this hybrid strategy just like Oracle. And so, as we look at, you know, the partner ecosystem and what makes sense the partner and how can we diversify the workloads like Microsoft is one of those companies? That's just sort of, Ah, very vertical industry focused great portfolio products. I'm slightly differentiated in terms of the space that they would buy in versus an Oracle. As you pointed out, So, uh, cultural standpoint, I think it's quite a good fit for us to find, you know, as we look at partners to find a partner like Microsoft to work with an integrated workloads. It >>was kind of a judo move for both companies in my mind, because you see a lot of companies that are predominantly on Prem, just like Oracle has been historically saying with Microsoft and basically kind of going on to hybrid, obviously they want on Prem and multi Cloud, which is okay, we're going to span multiple clouds. But both Oracle Now and Microsoft, with its hybrid strategy, as I call it, a judo move because essentially you're doing things that maybe some of the other cloud providers can't do because of your own prim present. So you're turning what may have been perceived as a disadvantage, you know, a legacy business. You know, it's funny in our business legacies of >>a >>bad word, but but it's usually as good connotations. But turning that on Prem legacy into an advantage. Cherry. Is that a reasonable premise that I'm putting forth and you having conversations with customers in that regard? >>Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a very fair statement to make, because we do have again. I oversee the top 120 Oracle's and in that they have years and years of investment in Oracle databases in Oracle applications and for us agreeable by the capabilities to move that to your cloud. Integrate with other things such as Microsoft, you know, applications and whatnot is huge issue, and no other cloud provider can say that. So I do think that good to see that we are uniquely differentiated. >>I want to ask you about lock in because that's always the criticism of Oracle. I talked to a lot of work with customers in particular exit data. People say, Why would anybody buy exit data locks in what you by AWS and why would you buy any product. You, uh, disk drive a lock in. So So I want to ask you about that because my research shows that while there's a there's a segment of customers that are very much concerned about that, and that's a primary concern you lock in. It's actually a small percentage, maybe 10 15%. Most of the customers that I to talk to the Oracle world will say, Listen, I'm willing to risk that lock in If if If the business value overwhelms that And again I ask you, Is that is that something that is a viable conversation with your customers? Do you see the same thing? I mean, I see it as kind of a strong indication. If they kind of poo poo the lock in pieces, they look at the business value that I'm driving from my organization. I wonder if you could >>Yes. So I think value is the crux of the conversation. And if you look at sort of the legacy business, just put it that for a second. You know that what people would call legacy, uh, the US is a tremendous asset because we have 400,000 customers or so around the world. Those are folks that we're giving choice. You can run on Prem. You can run in the cloud. You can find an engineered systems or into the data box behind your firewall. You can run it as a data cloud at customer, which is behind your firewall, but leveraging Native Public Cloud services. Or you can run that same capability and exit out of service. So really again, that deployment model choice about what, folks? You how folks wanna consume their services in terms of lock in. I don't think it's so much lock in, as you point out, is value if a customer's deriving value from a given solution, especially in the cloud world, they're going to consume right, and if they're going to consume the probability and higher likelihood is that they'll expand as well. So I look it. I essentially look at consumption in the cloud world being value that's been realized, and once you have value that's been realized, it's critical conversation. I don't I don't view it is lock. In fact, there's a lot of fun, mobility and portability that can occur when you talk about hybrid cloud multi cloud environments. I view it much more is identifying the value and then executing against that value so that folks consume cloud services. >>Why, Cheri, why are customers wanting to put mission critical workloads in the cloud? Is it the same sort of cloud, agility and cost, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, why not just leave it on Prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission Critical workloads? >>Well, I think it's it's dependent upon you know what? The initiatives are in the company right now. They're looking for cost reduction for top line growth, either looking for different capabilities around security that the cloud provides. The great thing about what we do is we have optimized all of our work lives but our database and our applications into our class of providing additional capabilities. But we're also seeing a lot more. So we, uh we say all the time you put us to the test, let us, you know, quantify what we would look like in the cloud with our workloads versus competitors, er and we will guarantee that will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one. It starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle consultant provides in terms of business value in the cloud is transformative for our customers. >>Well, that this is valued to is a component of the business case that has to be risk mitigation. And, you know, if you just want to buy some object storage, you know, probably not gonna work is not going to be my first call. But if I have a mission critical set of workloads that are running on Oracle, I'm really going to think twice about migrating that, you know, somewhere else I'm either gonna leave it on, Prem, or I'm gonna look look hard that Oracle's same same approach. And we've done some research on this that the risk and cost of actually migrating to a new environment is is potentially really detrimental to companies. I wonder if you could talk about how that plays into your and customers strategies. >>Yeah, and I think, you know, is, um, reference in what? What Kerry said. So it depends on the choice of the customer, but what I would say is if a customer is driving a lot of value on premise, um, that might look something like exists ts and the cloud for D. R. So they're actually have a disaster recovery plan that's file based. I think Cloud is one of these sort of unicorn conversations. Everybody, everybody wants to have a cloud conversation. And so, making sure that that cloud of conversation in the context of the customer, um, is what's crucial for us. And so, you know, as you look at mission critical workloads, those are the workloads that we want. We want either core mission, our mission critical. It's just object storage or just something, you know, that people want to spin up and spin down. Yeah, that's interesting to Oracle, but for us, as a B two b, your B two b enterprise class, um, software company, we want to be in your core mission or in your back office, you know, helping you execute against that mission. >>So share here, going in with a stacked deck. I mean, you're not going in trying to go head to head with the hyper scale you going in saying, Look, this is our wheelhouse, and I think I'm hearing in your wheelhouse you'll take anybody on. But I wonder if you could sort of affirm that and maybe talk about how you lead in these customer conversations, >>right? Well, normally, our entry point is one. Understanding with business drivers are right. It has to be a business led recession. Really? Isn't a technology starting point right? It really is around what business problems we're trying to solve and how can we help you solve them? And because we know your environments, we know what data bases air deployed in. Other public. What is your lover? Dji to run your business? We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very, very competitively against other cloud providers. And I think that is something that resonated incredibly well with our customers and back. >>Yes, So it seems like Oracle Consulting is an important ingredient as part of that strategy, Cause again, If it was, you know, five years ago it was just stack staff augmentation. That's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with A with the mindset of strategic partner you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with with Oracle, that is, that's a nice lever that your you can take advantage of. >>Absolutely. And in fact, we've seen that that is a huge opportunity. For one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM Candidly and Oracle is consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and the line they have with our customers is really based. Yeah, >>I want to end on a growth path and maybe talk about everyone wants to weaken. Cloud Cloud is the growth business. You look at Oracle's business, you know everybody's business. This cloud is growing. Everything else is either hanging on or declining. So it's all about growth. How do you drive growth? What what is Cloud's role in terms of, you know, the growth strategy and maybe had some color to that narrative? >>Yeah, so from a from an execution standpoint, how we drive growth is we have a kind of a core part capability, its value volume, velocity burger. Those are very simplistic approach that we take in each of our line of businesses and then across each of the segments of the market size pass and I as an engineer systems as well. The values crucial If you're not, you're not selling with value and kind of positioning value at the up front part of it. You know, the customers may book, but it won't consume and don't consume. They're not going to renew. So ensuring that customers are realizing value from the process is essential. And then with volume and velocity, you know, our legacy business was much more kind of chunkier, so you could focus on big quarter ends or a big year end on. You had impending events through, you know, started compliance considerations or contract negotiations, etcetera. We have to be in a volume and velocity business in order to scale out and also the average transaction sizes. Historically, although it's growing for us, >>it >>is slightly lower than what a license on premise capability would be. As you'd expect, um, from, uh, from a product perspective, I think, you know, we were sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capabilities. If you haven't so that's something that's incredibly unique. Oracle. You know, the Economist database and all the economist services that we're rolling out and that Autonomous gets back to what we talked about earlier, around security, around performance, around scale, ability and all these things. Ultimately, we're positioning the capabilities of the future, but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. You're not only is the Oracle database. As you pointed out, the market leader were market leaders here. If you found a bunch of the SAS areas, this eponymous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >>Yeah, it really isn't enabling. What I've been saying. That you it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the cloud because it gives you that automation and that that scale. But you're talking about also setting up, you know, some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data. The combination of data ai and Cloud is the new superpower with within the industry. Sherry, I want O end on you. 11 months in an oracle. Let's say things work out great. You're here 234 years down the road. You look back. What does success look like? >>Success looks like everyone of our customers moving to the Oracle cloud and see incredible business value from that partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my successful curious >>guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube where we've been we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle consulting and one of the things that's very clear. There was Oracle's obviously serious about cloud, but also seriously about bringing in new talent and new skill sets really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers. So thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks so much. >>You bet. Thank you. >>All right. Thank you. Everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back theCUBE's live coverage here for day two, were kickin' it off, for wall-to-wall coverage, three days of CUBE interviews here in the VMware village, the VMworld village. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest is a special guest CUBE alumni Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, Founder of Dell, Michael Dell, named after the company. Great to see you again, thanks for comin' on. >> Great to be with you guys, and thank you as always for the incredible coverage you provide for our events, and so many great events across the whole industry. You got two two teams goin' here at the same time. >> It's great, isn't it? >> Tremendous coverage. >> Thank you. >> Great community. What's interesting is this is our ninth year doing VMworld, and we've gotten to know the community really well, and it's just been so much fun and it's been great to see everyone, and more exciting now is this years keynote which I thought was pretty interesting. You know you look back just four years ago the cloud, and what was doing cloud, who wasn't doing cloud, and everyone's throwin' around "well they don't have a cloud strategy" what does that mean, right? So it's very clear what's happening with cloud right, everyone knows the cloud's going to be there, but the role of infrastructure hasn't changed, so, at the end of the day you made a big bet, going taking Dell private, and the things that you've been doing certainly with VMware and others; infrastructure is never going away, so, that was a good bet. I mean, storage doesn't go away, all these things are still happening, and Amazon announcing RDS on VMware on-premises is absolute validation from the customers that on-premises activity is still going to be super relevant in a cloud world, and so it's not like anything's really changed it's just the rearranging of the resources. Your thoughts on this trend, and your bet on infrastructure? >> It's a data economy, right, it's a multi-cloud world, that's a two way street. And if you think about the billions of connected devices, the explosion in data, overlay on top of that, all the new computer science, that requires all kinds of new infrastructure, there's a boom on the edge. And so, absolutely, this is why you see our business growing so quickly, and doing as well as it's doing and we're investing in innovation, strongly, you saw it you know yesterday, today in the keynotes and, it's resonating extremely well with customers. And so, I think we're very well positioned, we've been gratified by the response you know from customers and partners around the world and look you know the you know every business is increasingly recognizing the importance of you know technology and data, and, you know that requires lots of new tools and technology, and it's why we created Dell Technologies, right, to be the essential infrastructure company and you know it's working well, it's actually working better than we thought it would work. So, it's all good guys. >> Well, you know, my old boss, whom I think you knew Pat McGovern used to say that 90% of mergers and acquisitions failed to meet their objectives, so then we have many, many examples of that. In roughly 36 months from when you announced the merger/acquisition, you've completely transformed Dell, you went from a company that was like sort of a half super power obviously in client, and you were relevant in other areas, but you weren't number one. To like number one in all the magic quadrants and in record time, it was one of the most amazing transformations I've ever seen. >> Thank you, thank you. >> You're welcome, but, I'd really like to understand, you know, what were the conditions that allowed you to do it, obviously they say it's better to be lucky than good, you're both good and there's probably some luck involved. What were the conditions that allowed you to make that transformation in such record time? >> Well certainly a big one was the acquisition of EMC. >> Well right. (all laugh) >> And along with it, you know VMware and Pivotal, right? And we theorized, and actually as you guys know, this story goes back a long way, right? It actually goes back to 2001 when Dell and EMC started working together, when VMware it was just a little, you know, when Sanjay showed the slide about the server virtualization; actually before VMware was server virtualization it was workstation virtualization. >> Workstation, that's right. (laughs) >> And we were an investor in VMware, and we thought that was cool. Anyway, so you fast forward to 2013, we go private, 2014, Joe Tucci and I restart the discussion that we'd had earlier back in 2009 about combining together, 2015 we announced it, and we thought that if we could combine everything together that customers would really like it. And, you know, thankfully as we've found that's been true, it's been more true than we thought, and, and the innovation engines are crankin' on high, you know $12.8 billion in R&D invested in the last three years. And you see here at VMworld and at Dell Technologies World, the strength of the roadmaps, so, every turn of the crank we're just getting stronger and stronger. We never believed that you know everything was going to go one place or the other, okay, it's actually great that the edge is booming. Now if you said "Did you know that five or 10 years ago?" No, I didn't really know (laughs) but you could kind of see some things starting to happen. Look, you know distributed computing will be even more distributed in the future. (laughs) >> And so you had good products, you had a great combination, that makes a lot of sense, and you know we were. >> And incredible people too, >> The team. >> The quality of the talent that we are blessed with is amazing, and it's a flywheel, because you can attract the people, and the very best people, and develop them and train them, and they want to come be part of the winning company. >> And we saw a lot of, and they saw that on theCUBE we commented about the synergies that were probably unrealized or unrecognized by others, you obviously saw that. But then also there's the other side of the equation of the financial opportunity, you took a financial risk, you put your own money into the deal, there's a lot of engineering going on- >> We took the risk, it's the man in the arena, you know, and not everybody wanted to take the risk, and, you know I, I'm happy to take some risk. >> Yeah, but the rewards are lookin' good, I mean, I mean if you're keepin' score, which I'm sure you are, the numbers are lookin' pretty good, so. >> This has been good. >> There's the financial side of it, and then also risk/reward payouts are also part of the entrepreneurial thing. (laughs) >> Yeah, I mean if you look at our last quarter, you know, gap revenues up plus 19%, non-gap revenues up 17%, data center, ISG business up 25%, right? I mean we're clearly gaining share, number one in storage, in all flash, in NAS, you know in backup and data protection; and every category of storage unstructured, you know, we're bigger than number two, and number three, and number four, all combined together! (John laughs) Number one in servers, right? Number one in virtualization in all flavors, you saw what Pat showed you know with the progress with NSX, with Workspace ONE, obviously server virtualization. You know, number one in client as well, right? In you know client revenue, so. The business is quite strong and healthy, and what's really interesting is if you look at it across customer types, you know the very largest, the small, the medium, the government, the state, local, top 50 countries, pretty much everything is growing double digits all across the world; every customer, every route to market, every channel. So, you know, I think the industry is stronger than people understand, that's the first point, I think there's this data economy, and this tsunami of data that's being created, and that's driving demand for infrastructure products and solutions, which we have the best in the world, and then on top of that, we're gaining share. >> These market forces are interesting. >> So all of this together is, it's a good news story. >> And the market forces you mentioned that really were somethin' that I think a lot of people in the industry at the time that you were contemplating the deal. And we talked privately about this, so I want to kind of bring this up here on theCUBE, way back when. The industry pundits were looking at the industry almost like a siloed map of TAM, total addressable market. And these other forces, if you factor those in as a market force, it changes the analysis of what you talk about, and we talked privately many times, but one time we were talkin' about the maturity and size of the on-premises IT market, it wasn't "Oh, IT's dying!" It's like huge! (laughs) I mean it's massively mature, so, and we talked privately about that; that's somethin' that a lot of people missed, they didn't miss that the size of the market was so big, might've been you know flat, but it's a ature market, but then these outside forces transform, and now the deal with Amazon highlights that bet. >> It's a two way street, now it's goin' the other way. And look, if it's obvious, there's probably no opportunity, right? (laughs) And so, you know I've kind of made my life of doin' stuff that maybe wasn't quite obvious to everyone, okay fine, that's just how it goes. So, maybe it wasn't obvious to everyone, and I remember when we announced, you know in 2015, everyone was like "Whoa, whoa, what are you doing?" right, so why are you doing it? And now it's kind of like oh, that seems like a really good idea, right? (John laughs) Look, I'll tell ya what I think is maybe not so obvious right now, although I think people are startin' to figure it out, is boom on the edge, I think the edge will be bigger than the cloud. The private cloud, the public cloud, the SaaS, the edge will be bigger. >> And what are some of the tell signs on that? How can you tell? >> Okay. Very very simple, go to ARM, and say how many microprocessors, and sensors and controllers should be sold? 120 billion, okay. Seven billion people in the world, 120 billion, that's already sold! Okay. This isn't the next five years or 10 years, the numbers are only going to go up; and that's just ARM! So, you think about everything becoming intelligent, the cost of making something intelligent going to zero, the cost of prediction, in the form of AI, and learning, and inference going to zero, and how that refactors the economy and the explosion in data as a result. Oh my God. (laughs) >> So that's a- >> Incredible opportunity for infrastructure. >> So that's a factor that makes that AWS VMware deal more sensible, because the conventional wisdom was just that, it was a one way trip to the cloud; it's turned out to be a boom for the data center. So, edge is maybe one reason why, but, perhaps there are others, your thoughts? >> Well it's, you know, look at TensorFlow, you know we, let's just go back to our last quarter, right? Server and networking business grew plus 41%. Well if server and networking business is growing plus 41%, everything can't be going to the big three public clouds, it's not. So there is a boom on the edge, it's the AI, it's the ML, it's the software-defined data center, cloud is an operating model not just a place, right? And, you know, again, you know big growth in our appliances, you know taking all the innovations of VMware and expressing those in you know consumption models and you know making it easy for customers to deploy, it's all workin' quite well. >> You mentioned the- >> And we're uniquely positioned you know as Dell Technologies to be the best choice for customers. >> Yeah, you're the store for all of us. I want to drill down on the IOT edge boom, the tell sign you mentioned is really interesting, I like that, but also I want to tease out what Pat Gelsinger said on stage yesterday, he said, you know IOT, 'cause you know we're being kind of critical of the IOT, not super critical but, it's maturing, but there's no real products yet available in a true sense. But Pat said "It's being connected now." So you mentioned ARM, penetration used to be, you know that from the PC game, everyone should have a PC, now everyone's got PC's and laptop's; so the penetration game is not the issue, they're already there. So as things be fully connected with mobile, it's not so much the penetration numbers per se, it's the network ability, and the intelligence, so. >> Yes, that's right. >> AIOps on the IT side, AI in apps, and Pat said the apps are the networks, so this is a new networking dynamic, networking things together, making them more intelligent is the new metric, do you agree? >> Absolutely, and look, most of the 120 billion aren't connected, but, you know they're going to be connected >> They have phones. (laughs) >> And there's going to be 1.2 trillion, right, it's just going to keep growing. You know in five years, in 10 years, it's going to be way way more, and then you got 5G coming, and it'll be node-to-node connection. And so, yeah, and then you overlay the AI, it's, all of this is reinforcing itself. You know at the center of this there's a relatively simple thing that's happening, right? And it starts with data, right? And you know this is no different than it was in the '60s or '70s, right? With the beginnings of IT, it's just now, the cycle is going much faster. Starts with data. With your data, you make better products and services, right, and when you make better products and services you attract more customers, and you get more data. It's just now, right, the number of devices, number of nodes, and the network connectivity, and then you insert AI and machine learning and neural networks, you know etc, on top of the data, and then it goes even faster. And that wheel's just spinning faster and faster and faster and it's not going to slow down. >> It's causing a renaissance. >> You talk about networks, and I, there's a metaphor, I like the metaphor of networks of data. And you talk about you know you lived for decades on the cadence of Moore's Law, well that's not the innovation anymore, John calls it the innovation sandwich data plus AI, and cloud for scale. >> And you'll take your intelligence, and your compute, and your infrastructure to your data, that's why there'll be a boom on the edge; we're already seeing it in manufacturing, in retail, and you know, anybody that thinks that everything's goin' to the center of the universe somewhere, it's jut not right. But hey look, when there's some disagreement there's opportunity, and I'm perfectly willing to step into that opportunity. >> Opportunist! (all laugh) >> So obviously you're doing well on the upside, and the rest of your take, and what I think the operating model's interesting, you mention that cloud and DevOps flipped everything upside down, where apps are now programming networks. What you're talking about with data is a sideways force coming in, that's disrupting IT's footprint as well as the operating model, and I think this is what, I think it's compelling what this new flywheel between cloud, mobile, ML, AI, and edge, is that that integrated flywheel is this vitreous circle. More compute, faster access to data, faster access to data, better AI. So better, more data, more accurate data, better AI, that circles around, that's a flywheel. This is coming sideways, this is not an upside down, this is just a ... >> And what our customers are realizing is that because of all this, they need to have more developers, right? And they need to express their competitive advantage in the form of their data and with software. And, so what they want is a developer friendly, developer ready secure infrastructure that is cloud agnostic, cloud neutral, and can operate in an autonomous fashion; and they can decide exactly where to put workloads, based on security, performance, cost, you know, etc, right? And it'll be a workload dependent type discussion. And you know again, with Pivotal, with VMware, with Dell EMC, we are really well positioned to help our customers with that. >> So I got to ask you, so if, what you just described, to me, is a new era, it's not a cloud of remote services anymore, it's this ubiquitous, intelligent platform; and it feels like it requires a new brand. (laughs) And we're seeing the evolution of the Dell brand, the Dell EMC brand, now Dell Technologies brand; talk about the brand, and what we can expect going forward. >> I would say, light touch, right? (laughs) And so, you know we, revealed the Dell Technologies brand when we did the combination, but we also kept the you know important brands that've been part of the companies history, in the form of VMware, and Dell EMC, and Pivotal, and so. >> RSA. >> Exactly. SecureWorks, and Boomi. >> Boomi, yeah. >> And so, if you've got a business that's you know close to $90 billion, and it's growing at 17, 19%, you know you don't really sit around and say "Hey, let's change a bunch of stuff!" Right? (all laugh) So, I think people are understanding what we're doing, they understand what Dell Technologies is more and more, and the brand is resonating well; so we feel very good about how all that's working. >> You said on theCUBE here that VMware's the crown jewel of Dell Technologies, obviously you can see the results. Elaborate on that now, give us the updated answer today, 'cause obviously, you look at some of the things that are goin' on. You know NSX has turned out to be a very good investment payout from VMware as kind of an interconnection point between multiple clouds, the Amazon relationship is deeper, and it's very clear for the field sales teams, it's great go-to-market from what we're hearing. And then the senior managements are involved in both levels of those companies. So VMware actually is interesting position in going to a whole nother level. Update us on the crown jewel status of VMware. >> So, you know within the world of infrastructure, in the software domain, a software-defined data center, you know VMware is the successful company, by far, right? And, the level of innovation that is coming from VMware is really profound, I mean it's the highest it's ever been, 'til next year, right? (laughs) Just go back and look at Pat's keynote and the things that've been rolled out, and you know we're completely and tightly aligned you know as a Dell Technologies family, so. You know VMware is at the center of everything we're doing, in all of the areas that we've talked about. At the same time, right, we've kept the ecosystem open, you see here on the show floor, the whole industry well represented, and participating and engaged, and that's been an important part of VMware's success from the beginning, and will be forever. >> Well we used to laugh out loud, belly laugh when people said you were going to sell VMware, I mean it was just like that made no sense, (John laughs) but it's given you incredible financial flexibility, it throws off cash, it accounts for nearly, I think roughly half of the profits, and now you're taking the $11 billion dividend which gives you the ability to clean up the capital structure, create more clarity, and then become a public company again; so can you talk about that a little bit? I don't know how much you can say but, you know we used to joke about the 90 day shot clock, seems like that's where you're goin', you're obviously comfortable there, you're a well run company. Your thoughts? >> So, you know, I've been doin' this for almost 35 years (laughs) and 25 years of it, you know, we were a full public company, we're actually a public company now, right? We make all the public filings, it's all out there and available; but the equity of Dell Technologies so that the, we have a proposed transaction, which you've seen. The proposed transaction will have the effect of retiring the tracking stock, which we created in the combination. >> At a great premium. >> Exactly. And that, you know, retiring the stock, it'll be replaced with a combination of cash and equity in Dell Technologies. What I see is no change in how we're operating, and our strategy, our relationship with our customers and partners, and in VMware's independence. You know, what I would tell ya, if you've got any further questions we have SEC filings, you can refer to those, we've got all kinds of answer in those, and we have an investor day coming up you know in September where you know we'll go into more detail. >> Is that at HQ, the investor day, is that in New York? >> That's in New York City. >> Well, products drive value, value provides customers the ability to pay you for those valued services, that's called a business model, you've got a good one goin' on. Congratulations, congratulations on the great bet, and it's great to see the results and it's fun to keep in touch, thanks for comin' on theCUBE, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, congrats! >> Thank you guys very much, thank you. >> Thanks for spendin' the time. >> Thanks for the great coverage. Alright. >> Great to see ya. >> Michael Dell here on theCUBE at VMworld 2018, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, more live coverage after this short break, stay with us, we've got full day two and day three coming two CUBE's here in Las Vegas, stay with us, we'll be right back. (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Jeff Frick. We're joined by Megan Smith. We're very excited to have you on the show. >> It's good to be here >> She is the third US CTO and also the CEO of a new company, Shift7.co, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to be here. It's so fun to be at Hopper, >> Rebecca: It is, it is! >> It's cool, it's the Grace Hopper celebration, because we're trying to celebrate women in computing, and we're what, at 18 thousand people now, >> The biggest ever, >> Plus I think, 6 thousand people joining on the livestream, which is great. >> Before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about your role as the 3rd US CTO, and just talking about getting more technology into government to help leaders work together, and move faster. Tell us a little about this initiative. >> What's so great, is it's not partisan, fixing the government and making it work better, so all the work that we were doing continues. What we were able to put in place, during the Obama administration, and continues to Trump, were things like, the CT office. Having technical people, so I worked at Google, people work at Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, these companies who have that background, to join in on policy conversations, one, to join in on capacity building the government, so data sciences and tech and, let's have our services be as great as Amazon, or as Twitter, or Oracle, and not be sort of retro, really serve the American people. And then also, helping the American people in general, with capacity building, things like computer science for all. So that was an initiative that continues to get all of our children to have coding at school. That all children, you couldn't graduate from high school without having had some experience on learning of coding Coding is a 21st century fluency, it's a skill we all need, Like freshman biology. You want to know some biology, you want to know some coding, you want to know how to write, so making sure they have is tech-up, which was a program we started to help train Americans, there's six hundred thousand jobs open, in the United States, and they pay 50% more than the average American salary. The companies are starving. How do we rapidly get more Americans into these jobs? It turns out that people have, of course, created these fabulous code boot camps, you can train in three months for these jobs, some of them are paid, some times they pay you, all different kinds, some are online, some are offline, they're all over the country. So we're able to get more people to consider, a job like that, culturally they think, Well I don't, why would I, I don't know how to do that. Well you can, this is a fun and interesting and exciting career, you can do digital marketing, you can do user interface design. You can get involved in front end or back end coding, product management, all those things, sales. And so, how do you pull lots more Americans in, get our companies fueled so we have really the economic opportunity, and they're all over the country. Location wise, and topic wise. So we did tech hour now, and a tech jobs tour, which is not what we did in government, but we continue some of that work. >> This weird dichotomy, because on one end, people are worried about tech taking jobs, on the other hand, there's a ton of open tech jobs. And there's this transition period, that's difficult, obviously for people that didn't grow up, but one of the keynote speakers today, told a really heartening story, that she didn't get into it until the day she had to leave her abusive husband, and now she is a coder >> That's Doctor Sue Black, who was just given the Order of the British Empire, I mean, she is an incredible computer scientist. Yes, she escaped an abusive marriage with three small children, in her early 20s, I think. Ended up moving into public housing, and dealing with three children only being the school from 9 until 3, and eventually getting her PhD in computer science, and really, she started Techmoms now, she continues to do research in other things, but she's really trying to use her story, and her organizing capacity, to have more people realize this isn't hard like figuring out gravity waves that won the Nobel prize. This is hard like writing a hard essay, so we all can learn to write an essay. It takes some mastery work, you don't learn it in kindergarten but by the time you're in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th grade, you can do it. >> It's not rocket science. >> Right, so coding is like that. >> The other piece you said that's very interesting, is the consumerization of IT. We've seen it at enterprise, a huge trend. But, now I expect everything that's on my phone, when I interact with Facebook or Amazon, or whatever, to be in all the applications, so, as you said, that's influencing government, and the way they have to deliver services, and I would imagine, too, with kind of the next wave of kids coming in, graduating, going into public service, they certainly have that expectation, right? They've been working on their phone forever of course it should be on the phone. >> And so we want everybody in our country fluent in computer science and coding at a basic level, like again, like freshman biology or takin' chemistry in high school, or taking writing. So that everyone could realize this is not rocket science we could have these kinds of capabilities as part of our services, from Housing and Urban Development, from the Department of Education. You know, a lot of us use our phones to get places, you know, on our maps, and so that's actually data coming from the US Geological survey, if you're looking at the weather, you're looking at NOAA's satellites, this is open government data. We were able to open over two hundred thousand data sets, from all over government, not private data, but public data, that you could make an entire app store, or Google play set of products on top of that. Government wouldn't have to pay for that, it just packages up the API as well. A really good example of that, is the US census team. There's nothing more big data than census, they have all of our information from a data perspective, and so they did opportunity.census.gov, and they said to various agencies, let us help you bridge these data sets into something that someone could build on top of, like we're seeing from the courses sector, we saw wonderful things like, Housing and Urban Development said, okay, our challenges are housing affordability, mobility, these are the challenges instead of having HUD make an app for Americans to come to, they just can explain what their problem is, what data sets, and then engage extraordinary companies, like airbnb, Redfins, Zillow, these fabulous tech companies, who can make instead a product for 100% of the Americans, rather than only wealthy or middle class Americans, and so they did things like, opportunity score, and airbnb helping you figuring out, if I rent a room in my house I can make my rent more affordable, very creative apps, that we can see, same thing for the Department of Ed or Department of Labor, and as the data gets out there, and as apps come, also the opportunity for data science and machine learning. What if, as much as we serve ads to ourselves, in these algorithms, what if we use the algorithms to help Americans find a job that they would love? You know, job matching, and these kinds of opportunities. of the problems in the world, and helping government get more fluent at that. And the way to do that is not so much, jam the government You have to do this, but find terrific talent like we see at Hopper, and have them cycle into the government, to be co-leaders just like a surgeon general would come. >> Are you facing recruitment challenges in that same way though? In the sense that technology is having a hard enough time recruiting and retaining women, but the government, too, is that seen as enough of an employer of choice for young talented, bright ambitious, young women? >> I'm not in government now, but when we were in there, we found a very interesting thing. Alex Mcgovern, who had been the general counsel of Twitter who was Stephanie's CTO with me and led a lot of our tech quals we called TQ like tech IQ in policy, together with economists and lawyers and others have if we're going to decide net neutrality, let's include everyone, including computer scientists, and we're going to sue bridge and open source, So we talked about that, and on the way going in Mcgovern, he said, wouldn't it be cool if, just like when you look at a lawyer's resume, you might see that they clerk and they served their county through clerking and through the judicial system, as well as being a private lawyer, they were a public defender, that's a pretty normal thing to see on a legal resume. If you looked at medical, you might see them going into NIH or doing some research, if you looked at a scientist, they might have gone to, done some NSF work or others. But for the tech crew, there is of course amazing technical people in NASA, NAH and the Department of Energy, and there's great IT teams, but there's not this thing that the Silicon Valley crew resume would say, oh, yeah, I served my country. So that's why, under President Obama, we were able to create these incredible programs. The Presidential Innovation Fellows, which was a one year term of service, The United States Digital Service, which is a three months to a two year term of service in the VA. What's more amazing if you build Amazon, than to go as a second act and help our veterans? It's an incredible honor, to the point of, will they come? Yes, that's what we were hoping, could we have that be a normal thing, and yes it's become a normal thing. And the Trump administration continues it. The 18F team is in the general services administration, they're on 18th and F so they have a code name. But that particular team is located around the country, not only in DC but in San Francisco, in Chicago, and others. So you see this tech sector flowing now into the government on a regular basis, and we welcome more peoples. The government is who shows up to help, so we need the tech sector to show up cause we've got a lot of money as a country, but if we're not effectively using it we're not serving the American people and foster children, veterans, elders, others need the services that they deserve and we have the money, so let's make it happen the way the tech sector is delivering Amazon packages or searches. >> What is your feeling, this is not your first Grace Hopper obviously, but what is your feeling about this conference, and advice that you would give to young women who are here, maybe for their first or second time, in terms of getting the most their time here? >> You know, I think the main thing is, it's a celebration, that's fun and you can walk up to anyone, so just talk to everyone. I've been talking to a million people on the floor, fabulous. Students are here, more senior technical leaders are here. We've been running speed mentoring, we're running a program called the Tech Jobs Tour, it's at Techjobstour.com, it's a #Americanshiring, and we've been going to 50 different cities and so we're running a version of that, and we do speed mentoring, so come to the speed mentoring sessions, it's a five minute pop, talk to someone about what you're tryin' to do. Lot's of programs like that, get into the sessions, come to the keynotes which are so inspiring, and Melinda Gates was amazing today, Dr. Fefe Lee was incredible, just across aboard, Dr Sue Black was here, I thought it was great today, actually, just to reflect on Melinda's keynote, I think this might have been the first time, I was talking to her, that she's really talked about her own technical experience >> That struck me, too! As a coder, starting in computer science. I didn't really understand that she had really started very early, with Apple 3 and the story of her dad >> And her love of her Apple 3, right! and really high school coding, which is so important for young people in high school and middle school, even younger. The Muscogee Creek Tribe, in Oklahoma, is teaching robotics in head start, so we can start in preschool. Just make it fun, and interesting. They're funny, they don't do battle bots, because you don't really want to teach 3 and 4 year olds to fight, so instead they have collaborative robots. >> Robots who work together Age appropriate. >> Well Megan Smith, this has been so fun talking to you, thanks so much for coming on our show. >> Thanks for having me. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this, I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick (music)