>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube and Horizon three.ai special presentation. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We with Chris Hill, Sector head for strategic accounts and federal@horizonthree.ai. Great innovative company. Chris, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >>Yeah, like I said, you know, great to meet you John. Long time listener. First time call. So excited to be here with >>You guys. Yeah, we were talking before camera. You had Splunk back in 2013 and I think 2012 was our first splunk.com. Yep. And boy man, you know, talk about being in the right place at the right time. Now we're at another inflection point and Splunk continues to be relevant and continuing to have that data driving security and that interplay. And your ceo, former CTO of Splunk as well at Horizons Neha, who's been on before. Really innovative product you guys have, but you know, Yeah, don't wait for a brief to find out if you're locking the right data. This is the topic of this thread. Splunk is very much part of this new international expansion announcement with you guys. Tell us what are some of the challenges that you see where this is relevant for the Splunk and the Horizon AI as you guys expand Node zero out internationally? >>Yeah, well so across, so you know, my role within Splunk was working with our most strategic accounts. And so I look back to 2013 and I think about the sales process like working with, with our small customers. You know, it was, it was still very siloed back then. Like I was selling to an IT team that was either using us for IT operations. We generally would always even say, yeah, although we do security, we weren't really designed for it. We're a log management tool. And you know, we, and I'm sure you remember back then John, we were like sort of stepping into the security space and in the public sector domain that I was in, you know, security was 70% of what we did. When I look back to sort of the transformation that I was, was witnessing in that digital transformation, you know when I, you look at like 2019 to today, you look at how the IT team and the security teams are, have been forced to break down those barriers that they used to sort of be silo away, would not communicate one, you know, the security guys would be like, Oh this is my BA box it, you're not allowed in today. >>You can't get away with that. And I think that the value that we bring to, you know, and of course Splunk has been a huge leader in that space and continues to do innovation across the board. But I think what we've we're seeing in the space that I was talking with Patrick Kauflin, the SVP of security markets about this, is that, you know, what we've been able to do with Splunk is build a purpose built solution that allows Splunk to eat more data. So Splunk itself, as you well know, it's an ingest engine, right? So the great reason people bought it was you could build these really fast dashboards and grab intelligence out of it, but without data it doesn't do anything, right? So how do you drive and how do you bring more data in? And most importantly from a customer perspective, how do you bring the right data in? >>And so if you think about what node zero and what we're doing in a Horizon three is that, sure we do pen testing, but because we're an autonomous pen testing tool, we do it continuously. So this whole thought of being like, Oh, crud like my customers, Oh yeah, we got a pen test coming up, it's gonna be six weeks. The wait. Oh yeah. You know, and everyone's gonna sit on their hands, Call me back in two months, Chris, we'll talk to you then. Right? Not, not a real efficient way to test your environment and shoot, we, we saw that with Uber this week. Right? You know, and that's a case where we could have helped. >>Well just real quick, explain the Uber thing cause it was a contractor. Just give a quick highlight of what happened so you can connect the >>Dots. Yeah, no problem. So there it was, I think it was one of those, you know, games where they would try and test an environment. And what the pen tester did was he kept on calling them MFA guys being like, I need to reset my password re to set my password. And eventually the customer service guy said, Okay, I'm resetting it. Once he had reset and bypassed the multifactor authentication, he then was able to get in and get access to the domain area that he was in or the, not the domain, but he was able to gain access to a partial part of the network. He then paralleled over to what would I assume is like a VA VMware or some virtual machine that had notes that had all of the credentials for logging into various domains. And so within minutes they had access. And that's the sort of stuff that we do under, you know, a lot of these tools. >>Like not, and I'm not, you know, you think about the cacophony of tools that are out there in a CTA orchestra architecture, right? I'm gonna get like a Zscaler, I'm gonna have Okta, I'm gonna have a Splunk, I'm gonna do this sore system. I mean, I don't mean to name names, we're gonna have crowd strike or, or Sentinel one in there. It's just, it's a cacophony of things that don't work together. They weren't designed work together. And so we have seen so many times in our business through our customer support and just working with customers when we do their pen test, that there will be 5,000 servers out there. Three are misconfigured. Those three misconfigurations will create the open door. Cause remember the hacker only needs to be right once, the defender needs to be right all the time. And that's the challenge. And so that's why I'm really passionate about what we're doing here at Horizon three. I see this my digital transformation, migration and security going on, which we're at the tip of the sp, it's why I joined say Hall coming on this journey and just super excited about where the path's going and super excited about the relationship with Splunk. I get into more details on some of the specifics of that. But you know, >>I mean, well you're nailing, I mean we've been doing a lot of things around super cloud and this next gen environment, we're calling it NextGen. You're really seeing DevOps, obviously Dev SecOps has, has already won the IT role has moved to the developer shift left as an indicator of that. It's one of the many examples, higher velocity code software supply chain. You hear these things. That means that it is now in the developer hands, it is replaced by the new ops, data ops teams and security where there's a lot of horizontal thinking. To your point about access, there's no more perimeter. So >>That there is no perimeter. >>Huge. A hundred percent right, is really right on. I don't think it's one time, you know, to get in there. Once you're in, then you can hang out, move around, move laterally. Big problem. Okay, so we get that. Now, the challenges for these teams as they are transitioning organizationally, how do they figure out what to do? Okay, this is the next step. They already have Splunk, so now they're kind of in transition while protecting for a hundred percent ratio of success. So how would you look at that and describe the challenges? What do they do? What is, what are the teams facing with their data and what's next? What do they, what do they, what action do they take? >>So let's do some vernacular that folks will know. So if I think about dev sec ops, right? We both know what that means, that I'm gonna build security into the app, but no one really talks about SEC DevOps, right? How am I building security around the perimeter of what's going inside my ecosystem and what are they doing? And so if you think about what we're able to do with somebody like Splunk is we could pen test the entire environment from soup to nuts, right? So I'm gonna test the end points through to it. So I'm gonna look for misconfigurations, I'm gonna, and I'm gonna look for credential exposed credentials. You know, I'm gonna look for anything I can in the environment. Again, I'm gonna do it at at light speed. And, and what we're, what we're doing for that SEC dev space is to, you know, did you detect that we were in your environment? >>So did we alert Splunk or the SIM that there's someone in the environment laterally moving around? Did they, more importantly, did they log us into their environment? And when did they detect that log to trigger that log? Did they alert on us? And then finally, most importantly, for every CSO out there is gonna be did they stop us? And so that's how we, we, we do this in, I think you, when speaking with Stay Hall, before, you know, we've come up with this boils U Loop, but we call it fine fix verify. So what we do is we go in is we act as the attacker, right? We act in a production environment. So we're not gonna be, we're a passive attacker, but we will go in un credentialed UN agents. But we have to assume, have an assumed breach model, which means we're gonna put a Docker container in your environment and then we're going to fingerprint the environment. >>So we're gonna go out and do an asset survey. Now that's something that's not something that Splunk does super well, you know, so can Splunk see all the assets, do the same assets marry up? We're gonna log all that data and think then put load that into the Splunk sim or the smoke logging tools just to have it in enterprise, right? That's an immediate future ad that they've got. And then we've got the fix. So once we've completed our pen test, we are then gonna generate a report and we could talk about about these in a little bit later. But the reports will show an executive summary the assets that we found, which would be your asset discovery aspect of that, a fixed report. And the fixed report I think is probably the most important one. It will go down and identify what we did, how we did it, and then how to fix that. >>And then from that, the pen tester or the organization should fix those. Then they go back and run another test. And then they validate through like a change detection environment to see, hey, did those fixes taste, play take place? And you know, SNA Hall, when he was the CTO of JS o, he shared with me a number of times about, he's like, Man, there would be 15 more items on next week's punch sheet that we didn't know about. And it's, and it has to do with how we, you know, how they were prioritizing the CVEs and whatnot because they would take all CVS was critical or non-critical. And it's like we are able to create context in that environment that feeds better information into Splunk and whatnot. That >>Was a lot. That brings, that brings up the, the efficiency for Splunk specifically. The teams out there. By the way, the burnout thing is real. I mean, this whole, I just finished my list and I got 15 more or whatever the list just can, keeps, keeps growing. How did Node zero specifically help Splunk teams be more efficient? Now that's the question I want to get at, because this seems like a very scalable way for Splunk customers and teams, service teams to be more efficient. So the question is, how does Node zero help make Splunk specifically their service teams be more efficient? >>So to, so today in our early interactions with building Splunk customers, what we've seen are five things, and I'll start with sort of identifying the blind spots, right? So kind of what I just talked about with you. Did we detect, did we log, did we alert? Did they stop node zero, right? And so I would, I put that at, you know, a a a more layman's third grade term. And if I was gonna beat a fifth grader at this game would be, we can be the sparring partner for a Splunk enterprise customer, a Splunk essentials customer, someone using Splunk soar, or even just an enterprise Splunk customer that may be a small shop with three people and, and just wants to know where am I exposed. So by creating and generating these reports and then having the API that actually generates the dashboard, they can take all of these events that we've logged and log them in. >>And then where that then comes in is number two is how do we prioritize those logs, right? So how do we create visibility to logs that are, have critical impacts? And again, as I mentioned earlier, not all CVEs are high impact regard and also not all are low, right? So if you daisy chain a bunch of low CVEs together, boom, I've got a mission critical AP CVE that needs to be fixed now, such as a credential moving to an NT box that's got a text file with a bunch of passwords on it, that would be very bad. And then third would be verifying that you have all of the hosts. So one of the things that Splunk's not particularly great at, and they, they themselves, they don't do asset discovery. So do what assets do we see and what are they logging from that? And then for, from, for every event that they are able to identify the, one of the cool things that we can do is actually create this low-code, no-code environment. >>So they could let, you know, float customers can use Splunk. So to actually triage events and prioritize that events or where they're being routed within it to optimize the SOX team time to market or time to triage any given event. Obviously reducing mtr. And then finally, I think one of the neatest things that we'll be seeing us develop is our ability to build glass tables. So behind me you'll see one of our triage events and how we build a lock Lockheed Martin kill chain on that with a glass table, which is very familiar to this Splunk community. We're going to have the ability, not too distant future to allow people to search, observe on those IOCs. And if people aren't familiar with an ioc, it's an incident of compromise. So that's a vector that we want to drill into. And of course who's better at drilling in into data and Splunk. >>Yeah, this is a critical, this is awesome synergy there. I mean I can see a Splunk customer going, Man, this just gives me so much more capability. Action actionability. And also real understanding, and I think this is what I wanna dig into, if you don't mind understanding that critical impact, okay. Is kind of where I see this coming. I got the data, data ingest now data's data. But the question is what not to log, You know, where are things misconfigured? These are critical questions. So can you talk about what it means to understand critical impact? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, going back to those things that I just spoke about, a lot of those CVEs where you'll see low, low, low and then you daisy chain together and you're suddenly like, oh, this is high now. But then to your other impact of like if you're a, if you're a a Splunk customer, you know, and I had, I had several of them, I had one customer that, you know, terabytes of McAfee data being brought in and it was like, all right, there's a lot of other data that you probably also wanna bring, but they could only afford, wanted to do certain data sets because that's, and they didn't know how to prioritize or filter those data sets. And so we provide that opportunity to say, Hey, these are the critical ones to bring in. But there's also the ones that you don't necessarily need to bring in because low CVE in this case really does mean low cve. >>Like an ILO server would be one that, that's the print server where the, your admin credentials are on, on like a, a printer. And so there will be credentials on that. That's something that a hacker might go in to look at. So although the CVE on it is low, if you daisy chain was something that's able to get into that, you might say, ah, that's high. And we would then potentially rank it giving our AI logic to say that's a moderate. So put it on the scale and we prioritize though, versus a, a vulner review scanner's just gonna give you a bunch of CVEs and good luck. >>And translating that if I, if I can and tell me if I'm wrong, that kind of speaks to that whole lateral movement. That's it. Challenge, right? Print server, great example, look stupid low end, who's gonna wanna deal with the print server? Oh, but it's connected into a critical system. There's a path. Is that kind of what you're getting at? >>Yeah, I used daisy chain. I think that's from the community they came from. But it's, it's just a lateral movement. It's exactly what they're doing. And those low level, low critical lateral movements is where the hackers are getting in. Right? So that's what the beauty thing about the, the Uber example is that who would've thought, you know, I've got my multifactor authentication going in a human made a mistake. We can't, we can't not expect humans to make mistakes. Were fall, were fallible, right? Yeah. The reality is is once they were in the environment, they could have protected themselves by running enough pen tests to know that they had certain exposed credentials that would've stopped the breach. Yeah. And they did not, had not done that in their environment. And I'm not poking. Yeah, >>They put it's interesting trend though. I mean it's obvious if sometimes those low end items are also not protected well. So it's easy to get at from a hacker standpoint, but also the people in charge of them can be fished easily or spear fished because they're not paying attention. Cause they don't have to. No one ever told them, Hey, be careful of what you collect. >>Yeah. For the community that I came from, John, that's exactly how they, they would meet you at a, an international event introduce themselves as a graduate student. These are national actor states. Would you mind reviewing my thesis on such and such? And I was at Adobe at the time though I was working on this and start off, you get the pdf, they opened the PDF and whoever that customer was launches, and I don't know if you remember back in like 2002, 2008 time frame, there was a lot of issues around IP being by a nation state being stolen from the United States and that's exactly how they did it. And John, that's >>Or LinkedIn. Hey I wanna get a joke, we wanna hire you double the salary. Oh I'm gonna click on that for sure. You know? Yeah, >>Right. Exactly. Yeah. The one thing I would say to you is like when we look at like sort of, you know, cuz I think we did 10,000 pen test last year is it's probably over that now, you know, we have these sort of top 10 ways that we think then fine people coming into the environment. The funniest thing is that only one of them is a, a CVE related vulnerability. Like, you know, you guys know what they are, right? So it's it, but it's, it's like 2% of the attacks are occurring through the CVEs, but yet there's all that attention spent to that. Yeah. And very little attention spent to this pen testing side. Yeah. Which is sort of this continuous threat, you know, monitoring space and, and, and this vulnerability space where I think we play such an important role and I'm so excited to be a part of the tip of the spear on this one. >>Yeah. I'm old enough to know the movie sneakers, which I love as a, you know, watching that movie, you know, professional hackers are testing, testing, always testing the environment. I love this. I gotta ask you, as we kind of wrap up here, Chris, if you don't mind the benefits to team professional services from this alliance, big news Splunk and you guys work well together. We see that clearly. What are, what other benefits do professional services teams see from the Splunk and Horizon three AI alliance? >>So if you're a, I think for, from our, our, from both of our partners as we bring these guys together and many of them already are the same partner, right? Is that first off, the licensing model is probably one of the key areas that we really excel at. So if you're an end user, you can buy for the enterprise by the enter of IP addresses you're using. But if you're a partner working with this, there's solution ways that you can go in and we'll license as to MSPs and what that business model on our MSPs looks like. But the unique thing that we do here is this c plus license. And so the Consulting Plus license allows like a, somebody a small to midsize to some very large, you know, Fortune 100, you know, consulting firms uses by buying into a license called Consulting Plus where they can have unlimited access to as many ips as they want. >>But you can only run one test at a time. And as you can imagine when we're going and hacking passwords and checking hashes and decrypting hashes, that can take a while. So, but for the right customer, it's, it's a perfect tool. And so I I'm so excited about our ability to go to market with our partners so that we underhand to sell, understand how not to just sell too or not tell just to sell through, but we know how to sell with them as a good vendor partner. I think that that's one thing that we've done a really good job building bringing into market. >>Yeah. I think also the Splunk has had great success how they've enabled partners and professional services. Absolutely. They've, you know, the services that layer on top of Splunk are multifold tons of great benefits. So you guys vector right into that ride, that wave with >>Friction. And, and the cool thing is that in, you know, in one of our reports, which could be totally customized with someone else's logo, we're going to generate, you know, so I, I used to work at another organization, it wasn't Splunk, but we, we did, you know, pen testing as a, as a for, for customers and my pen testers would come on site, they, they do the engagement and they would leave. And then another really, someone would be, oh shoot, we got another sector that was breached and they'd call you back, you know, four weeks later. And so by August our entire pen testings teams would be sold out and it would be like, wow. And in March maybe, and they'd like, No, no, no, I gotta breach now. And, and, and then when they do go in, they go through, do the pen test and they hand over a PDF and they pat you on the back and say, there's where your problems are, you need to fix it. And the reality is, is that what we're gonna generate completely autonomously with no human interaction is we're gonna go and find all the permutations that anything we found and the fix for those permutations and then once you fixed everything, you just go back and run another pen test. Yeah. It's, you know, for what people pay for one pen test, they could have a tool that does that. Every, every pat patch on Tuesday pen test on Wednesday, you know, triage throughout the week, >>Green, yellow, red. I wanted to see colors show me green, green is good, right? Not red. >>And once CIO doesn't want, who doesn't want that dashboard, right? It's, it's, it is exactly it. And we can help bring, I think that, you know, I'm really excited about helping drive this with the Splunk team cuz they get that, they understand that it's the green, yellow, red dashboard and, and how do we help them find more green so that the other guys are >>In Yeah. And get in the data and do the right thing and be efficient with how you use the data, Know what to look at. So many things to pay attention to, you know, the combination of both and then, then go to market strategy. Real brilliant. Congratulations Chris. Thanks for coming on and sharing this news with the detail around this Splunk in action around the alliance. Thanks for sharing, >>John. My pleasure. Thanks. Look forward to seeing you soon. >>All right, great. We'll follow up and do another segment on DevOps and IT and security teams as the new new ops, but, and Super cloud, a bunch of other stuff. So thanks for coming on. And our next segment, the CEO of Verizon, three AA, will break down all the new news for us here on the cube. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

welcome back everyone to thecube's live coverage in san francisco for vmware explorer 2022 formerly vmworld i'm john furrier david live dave 12 years we've been covering this event formerly vmware first time in west now it's explore we've been in north we've been in south we've been in vegas multi-cloud is now the exploration vmware community is coming in john siegel svp at dell cube alumni dave mccraw vp at vmware guys thanks for coming back both cube alumni it's great to see you very senior organizations senior roles in the organizations of vmware and dell one year since the split great partnership continuing i mean some of the conversations we've been having over the past few years is that control plane the management layer making everything work together it's essentially been the multi-cloud hybrid cloud story what's the update what's how's the partnership look yeah i you know i just to start off i mean i would say i don't think our partnership's been any has ever been any better um if you look at you mention our vision very much a shared vision in terms of the multi-cloud world and i don't think we've ever had more joint innovation projects at one time i think we have over 40 now dave that are going on across multi-cloud ai cyber security uh modern applications and and uh you know here just at you just vmworld vmware explorer we have over 30 uh vmware sessions that are featuring dell um and this is i think more than we've ever had so look i think um there's a lot of momentum there and we're really looking forward to what's to come so you guys obviously spent a lot of time together when vmware was part of dell and then you've been it's been a year since the spin and then you codified i think it was a five-year agreement you know so you had some time to figure that out and then put it into paper so you just kind of quantified some of the stuff that's going on but now we're entering a yet another phase so that that that that agreement's probably more important than ever now i mean list in terms of getting it documented and an understanding right yeah that agreement really defines a framework for solution development and for go to market so we've been doing it and refining it for the last five years so now you know putting and codifying it into a written signed agreement it basically is instantiating what we've been doing that we know works uh where we can drive uh solution development we can drive deep architectural co-innovation together as well and as john said across multiple you know project and solution areas so we we've been talking to years to you know a lot of these strat guys guys like matt baker about things like you know you see aws do nitro and then of course project monterey and and i know that you guys have had a you know a big sort of input into that and so now to see it come to fruition is is huge because you know from our view it's the future of computing architectures how do you handle you know data rich applications ai applications that's what are your thoughts on here i couldn't agree more uh project monterey is a great example of how we're innovating together we just talked about i mean first of all it's all so we have vxrail which let's let's start there right we have over 19 000 joint customers right now we continue to innovate more and more on the vxrail architecture great example of that as our partnership with project monterey and taking essentially vsphere 8 and running it for the first time on an hci system directly on the dp used itself right on the dpus ability now to offload nsxt from from the cpus to the dpus uh hope you know in the short term first of all great benefits for customers in terms of better performance but as you just mentioned it's game changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on together helping out customers there's one other dynamic for you on is um and it's not unique to dell but dell's the biggest you know supply supplier partner etc but you're able to take vmware software and drive it through your business and and that enables you to get more subscription revenue and makes it stickier and that's a really important change from you know 10 years ago yeah and it's it's a combination as you know of dell software and vmware software together absolutely and i think what's with this is a game-changing innovation that you can run on top of our joint system vxrail if you will um and now what our customers can expect is life cycle automation of now you know the dpus as well as tanzu as well as everything else we layer on top of that core foundation that we have over 19 000 customers running today so i mean like that 19 000 number i want to get back up to the vx rail and you mentioned vsphere that's big news here this year vsphere 8 big release a lot of going on what's the hci angle you mentioned that what's in it for the customer what does that mean for the folks here because let's face it the vsphere aids got everyone in that they've all the v-sections are going going crazy right another vsphere release getting training they have the labs here what's it mean for the customers what's the value there with that hci solution with the gpus well first of all vsphere 8 as we know it has a lot of goodies in it but you know what what i think to me what's been most powerful about this is the ability to run vsphere 8 uh and and specifically on the dpus now you can run it it is open up all new possibilities now and so that nsxt that i mentioned you know running that on gpus opens up a whole new uh architecture now for our customers going forward and now really sets us up for modern distributed architecture for the future so like edge okay yeah and vsphere 8 brings in you know cloud connectivity as well so you know customers can run in a cloud disconnected mode they can run in a cloud connected mode so you know that's going to bring in the ability to do specialized things on security cycle management there's a whole series of services that can now be added as well as you know leveraging you know vcenter management capabilities so what's happening at the edge we had i think it was lows on hotel tech world right okay good not the other one um but so so that's got to be exploding now with that with that because it just changes the game for for these stores there's i mean retail uh manufacturing maybe you can give us an update on there's so much happening on the edge side as you know i mean that's where most of the a lot of the innovations happening right now is at the edge and a lot of the companies we talked to 8x right 8x expectation of increase in uh edge workloads over the next and the data challenge too and the data challenge is huge so you heard about the innovations with vsphere 8. in addition to that we just introduced today as well the smallest vx rail for the edge ever this thing is it's like think picture a couple eight and a half by 11 notebooks not much not much you know maybe a little wider than that but not much more um you know these these are stacked on top of each other these are you can rack and stack and mount these things anywhere and it also is the first aci system that has you know a built-in hardware witness so this helps set it up for environments that are you know network bandwidth constrained or have high high latency no longer an issue next gen app is going to want to have a local data server at the edge right and with compute there right high performance right right so now you're getting it across the wire yes you get racket stack a couple of these small things i mean they can they can fit into like a you know clark kent's briefcase right these things are so small um you want to do the analytics on site and return responses back you don't want to be moving massive data payloads off the egg so you got to have the right level of compute to run machine learning algorithms and and do the analytics type work that you want to do to make local decisions yeah i mean we just had david lithimon who was one of the keynote speakers here at the event and we've been talking about super cloud and multi-cloud meta cloud all the different versions of what we see as this next-gen and this brings up a point of like his advice to young people learn how multi-cloud learn about system architecture because if you can figure out how to put it together you're going to have to make more money anyway that this whole edge piece opens up huge challenges and opportunities around how do you configure these next-gen apps what does the ai look like what's the data architecture this is not like get some training curriculum online and you get you know 101 and you're getting a job no this is more complicated but with the hardware you guys make it easier so where's the complexity shift between having a powerful edge device like the vxrail with the vsphere what's the ec button on that like how do you guys what's the vision because this is going to be a major battleground this whole edge piece yeah it's going to be huge well i think when you look at the innovation that dell is bringing to market with technologies like outlander and then designing that into vxrail and then you combine that with our tonzu capabilities to manage development and deployment of applications this is about heterogeneous deployment and management at scale of applications with technologies like tons of mission control then deploying service mesh right for security being able to use sassy to be able to secure you know with cloud security over the wire so it's bringing together multiple technologies to deliver simplicity to the customer the ability to go one to many you know in terms of being able to deploy and manage and update whether that's a security patch or an application update and do that very rapidly at a low cost so the benefit with this solution now just putting this together is i can ship a box small and or stack them and essentially it's done remotely it's that's provision the provisioning issues not a truck roll as they say or professional services enabled you can just drop that out there and this is where the customers need to be yeah that absolutely is that the vision don't get that right exactly you don't you don't need the you don't need the skills yeah you don't need the specialized skills you don't need a lot of space you don't need you know high network bandwidth all these things right all these innovations that we're talking about here um really combined into really enabling a whole new whole new future here for edge is are you doing apex now is that i think thickest part sure part of yours okay so um is apex fitting into the to the edge how does it fit yeah i mean well first of all you know a lot of what we talked with apex is really about a consumption a way to ensure there's a common cloud experience wherever the data is and where the applications are and so absolutely edge fits into this as well and so we have we have common ways to consume our infrastructure today our joint infrastructure whether it's in the data center at the edge um or you know uh in the cloud usain ragu when he was on i said it was great keynote loved it one of the things that i didn't think there was enough of was security and he's like yeah we only had so much time but vmware is a very strong security story we heard a really strong security story at dell tech world i mean half the innovations and the new you know storage products were security and the new os's and it was impressive what what's how are you guys working together on security is that one of those let me give you a few key things you know our teams are working together at the engineer to engineer level you know reference architectures for zero trust as an example being able to look you know hardware root of trust up into the application layer right so we're looking at really defense in depth here you know i mentioned what we're doing with sassy right with cloud security capabilities so you really have to look at this from the edge to the core with the you know from a networking perspective getting the network the insights on things that maybe anomalies that may be happening on the network so using our network insight technology you know uh nsx and then being able to ultimately uh have a secure development pipeline as well i mean you we all know about the supply chain attacks that happen right and so being able to have a you know secure pipeline for development is critical for both of our companies working together i think the tan zoo and you mentioned the developer self-service that experience combined with kind of the power of the dell you know let's face it the boxes are awesome hardware matters and software matters so bringing that expertise together michael daley always used to say on thecube better together in respect to vmware and dell a lot of fruit has been born from that labor right specifically around and now when you add the tan zoo and you get vsphere you got the operational excellence you got the you got the performance and scale with the dell boxes and hardware and software and now you've got the tan zoo what's missing or is it all there now i mean where how would you how would you guys peg the progress bar is it like it's all rocking right now or or i'd say you're never done first of all but i you know i look at some of the innovations that we've brought to market recently where we've are combining and stacking these technologies into a more defense in-depth like solution you know bringing nsx onto vxrail so that you can flip a switch easily and light up the firewall the new plug-in yeah that's a great example simple simple um carbon black workload another example where we're taking carbon black technology that was typically on endpoints you know on pcs bringing that into the data center right and leveraging all the analytics and insights around you know being able to identify anomalies and then remediate those anomalies so we're seeing very good traction with those and the cloud native developers containers they're all native container working with compute and container storage object store in the cloud kubernetes we've embraced it yeah i mean yeah containers running containers and vms on the same infrastructure common way to manage it all i mean that that's been a big part of it as well obviously a lot of the focus that dell's bringing here as well is is the inability to run that stack easily right you heard the announcement on uh tanzu for kubernetes operators right earlier today tko we call it uh you know that running on vxrail now is really targeted at the i.t operator in allowing them to easily stand up a self-service developer devops environment on vxrail going forward and then a piece that might be invisible to them is back to monterey isolation right encryption and data moving you know absolutely storage the security the compute right the management right that's that's a complete and it's about reducing attack services as well right the security perspective as well when you when you're moving nsxt onto a dpu you're doing that as well so there's it takes the little things right at the end of the day security is a mindset up across both companies in terms of how we approach our architectures um and it's the you know a lot of times it's the little things as well that we make sure right so shared vision working at the engineering levels together for many many years know that you guys are validating more of that coming what's next take us through okay we're here 2022 we got super cloud multi-cloud hybrid full throttle right now it's hybrid's a steady state that's cloud operations infrastructure as code has happened it's happening what's next for you guys in the relationship can you share a little bit that you can if you can what we can expect what you see uh with monterrey is the start of a re-architecting of i.t infrastructure not just in the data center but also at the edge right these technologies will move out and be pervasive you know across i think edge to colo to core data center to cloud right and so that's a starting point now we're looking at memory tiering right i think we talked last time about capitola and memory tiering and you know being able to bring that forward uh being able to do more with confidential computing as an example right secure enclaves and confidential computing so you know a lot of this is focused around simplicity and security going forward and ease of management around take the heavy lifting away from the customer abstract that in offer the power and performance that's right and it's going to come down to delivering time to value for our customers you know can we cut that time to value by 25 50 percent so they can be in production faster yeah i think project monterey is something we'll be building on for a long time right i mean this is the start of a major new future architecture of these companies so if you had to pick one we have 40 initiatives that are joined together real literally project monterey is one of my favorites for sure in terms of what it's going to do not just for that common cloud experience but for the edge and and we talked a lot about the edge today and where that's headed you think it's going to explode up new apps i really do think so well it's going to put you in a new it's going to put in curve yeah absolutely right and operationally uh security wise um from a modern apps perspective i mean all it checks all the boxes and it's going to allow us to to help and take our existing customers on that journey as well what's great about this conversation we've been following both you guys for a long time and your companies and and technology upgrades and and the business impact and open source and all doing all this for customers but the wave that's coming we're seeing the expo hall here i mean it's people are really excited they're enthused they're committed highly confident that this this wave is coming they kind of see it people kind of seeing the fog lift they're seeing money making value creation people kind of feeling more comfortable but still a little nervous around you know what's coming next because it's still uncertainty but pretty good ecosystem i'd have to say that's pretty pretty interesting yeah a lot of them are excited about you know what they can do at the edge and how they can differentiate their businesses i mean that's right well congratulations guys thanks for coming on thecube and sharing the update thank you it more innovation it's not stopping here at vmware explorer dell and vm we're continuing to have that kind of relationship joint engineering it's all coming together and you can mix and match this and the stack but it's ultimately going to be cloud operations edge is the action of course hybrid cloud as well it's thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

>>The >>Cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by >>HPE. Hi everybody. Welcome back to day three, the Cube's continuous coverage wall to wall coverage of HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with John furrier. Dave McGraw is here. He's the vice president in the office of the CTO at VMware. And he's joined by Scott. We, the vice president and CTO of global sales for Hewlett Packard enterprise. And we're gonna talk tech, we're gonna talk integration. Co-creation gens. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you so much, >>Scott, let me, let me ask you a question on the Scott side on the HP, we had the sales executives on the leaders on the sales side. You're on the CTO side with customers. You're in the front lines with customers green. Lake's got traction. I got this 1600 plus customers, 70 services we heard. And just the beginning, when you're out front of customers, you've got the old HPE now the new HPE kind of developing, what are they talking to you guys about? Cause now you have this cloud layer. I call it cloud operations, architecture shift. Yeah. What is the main conversation that you're involved in? >>I think it's driven by fundamentally that customers want to consume differently, right there workloads are ever evolving. You guys have evolved to meet those and since their consumption methods have changed on how they want and right. A lot of it's agility and, and speed of business right. Has, has dramatically shifted. So I think you'll see HPE GreenLake, you know, obviously as the cloud that comes to you, try to meet the problem where the cloud experience is needed. And I think that's the fundamental shift we've seen. I spent a lot of time with customers here at this conference. And as we've moved from cloud first to cloud smart to cloud everywhere, we're sitting in the intersection of cloud ever and delivering the experience together. And I think that's the heart of most of the conversations that are going on. >>Well, VMware, you guys are on, on a cloud. You guys shifted up with the cloud play. That's accelerated the VMware proposition. Now we have yesterday, we were talking to the city, the storage folks, they're provisioning single pane of glass or storage to customers. And whether they wanna pipe it to S3 or develop at the edge, doesn't matter. It's one console. Yeah. That's brand new. That's shipping. >>Yeah. And you know, a lot of it's driven too. I think the days of trap silos of resources that support one line of business are over. So we're talking about cloud agility everywhere, right. And to be able to embrace the cloud in all the locations. Right. And you kind of see folks move beyond just like there's the cloud, it's everywhere. It's the cloud. And so things like storage and fundamental compute and fundamental network operations that we're working on together, I think are where the customers expect us to be. We no longer can just show up. We have to show up and solve and solve before their needs. And I think that's a unique shift in the experience that's going >>On. So when you go back to, you know, Antonio four years ago now said, okay, we're all in. Yeah. On as a service. And so when you do that, you say, okay, we're gonna, we have services. They're gonna help do that. We have financial models that we can take to market immediately. So let's start there. And I would imagine take, so take us back. That's the point at which, you know, you're, you got email, phone ring, whatever let's integrate from an engineering standpoint go yeah. You know, as fast as you can. So what did that mean in terms of an engineer from an engineering perspective between HPE and, and VMware take us through that progression. >>Yeah. No, thanks for the question in your spot on it started with flexible financing models around metered usage. That was sort of the need at the time to now the expectation of engineered integrated solutions where customers don't wanna be in the system integration business anymore. And that requires engineering right. Requires deep innovation partnership to evolve to where the customer's headed, like before they've thought about it. And you'll see, you know, what we've done with vCloud foundation together and the integration within the HP GreenLake ecosystem, what we're doing with unified hybrid cloud views of what's going on, I think requires deep innovation things we're doing with other projects that we're gonna talk about today. Like Monterey capital thunder, our deep integrative innovation projects, where we've got together to try to solve a big problem cross industry that our customers are expecting us to do. And I think that speaks to the spirit of our long partnership together too. It's a business partnership. Of course it's a customer partnership to solve, but it's an innovation partnership. >>I gotta, I gotta ask about the, um, hybrid, obviously hybrids, the steady state. We're all seeing that now multi-cloud is being kicked around, but it's not, multi-cloud in the sense of workload portability so much. It's more of hybrid stitched together. Um, but it's coming fast with a data plane and yeah. The fabric and control planes. Uh, VMware, you guys are talking heavy about cross cloud or multicloud. Absolutely. So this is now brings up the old school interoperability question, right? So GreenLake sits here on premise. You guys have the edge, you get public cloud together. Where's the cross cloud come in. Where are customers doing when they think about cross cloud or, or multicloud? What is that conversation? Is it, Hey, I got Azure cause I got office and teams and I got Amazon over here and I got my on premise edge. Are they moving towards just being agnostic on cloud or is what's the environment? What, what are you crossing in the cloud? What does that mean across the cloud? Can >>You, I mean, from, from our perspective at VMware on premises, it's VMware cloud foundation, having that available, it's a VMware cloud instance, full STD STDC stack, uh, that is interoperable with our VMware cloud instances at the hyperscalers. And so for us, it's really about putting the management and control planes around that so that customers can easily determine where they wanna place workloads and when they need to burst, they need to scale up scale down. They have the flexibility and we wanna make sure all of these capabilities are available with HPE >>Going forward. What's interesting is that, you know, with, with GreenLake, what I like about what I'm seeing is is that, um, the leveling up of the cloud operation model, it's always been DevOps. We've always saw dev stack ops, clearly being operationally with cloud now on premise and edge with public cloud, it's full end to end operational cloud. If you wanna call it that, what is a key technical issue the customers need to do to get that in place? Is it to be DevOps, is that have cloud native applications, um, what kind of managed services, what's the makeup of that operating model for cloud look like? >>Yeah. I think if you talk to any enterprise commercial account, a top account, they'll they'll, if you, they think about how they run their functions, right. And you got, and you spoke to one of them, you have it ops at the bottom, it's a layer cake, right? You have it ops, everybody's deeply looking for AI ops that can remediate and orchestrate and you guys are on that journey as we are, as you move up to devs and dev SecOps, cuz security's critical, you got financial ops cuz we know economic value matters all the way clear up to cloud ops and Mo ops. What we're talking about is building hybrid operating model cause hybrid, it is simplified it where you're out of the stack, we're doing that together as partners and hybrid cloud is multiple consumption methods, but an operating model is encompass encompassing, cyber resiliency, compliance, economic, operational control. >>That's what we're built and edges in there as well. Right? Folks is, and it's not OT and it touching that's happening too, as we build edge tax, but folks need a simplified way. And as you saw in a lot of announcements here, our job was to bridge the cloud locations, right? So the customer didn't have to back to the portability statement you made, we announced a lot here that will allow you to float back and forth. So you have choice, choice and control control is the me is what every customer wants and they want the right workload at the right place at the right time at the right economic with the right capability. So I think that's in our mission together. Right? So, and >>A big part of engineering obviously is, is futures and roadmap. Yeah. Thought you mentioned Monterey cap thunder, you know, Monterey's kind of the smart Nick. One of the mega trends in the industry is Silicon diversity that handle all these new workloads to help with the edge. You know, capital is like the VSAN of memory as I, I would describe it. It obviously fits in there as well. So talk a little bit about the engineering roadmap, whatever you can share with us and how you guys are working together on that. Yeah. >>Yeah. I mean, those are three key projects for us. So there's constant interaction and integration with the HPE engineering team and the VMware team to make sure we bring those solutions to market with full capability. And for us, ultimately it's taking that technology and having it available in a VMware cloud context so that customers can have a, a consistent experience on premises running VMware cloud running with HPE GreenLake and then two are various VMware cloud suppliers around the world. And it's not just the hyperscalers, right? There's thousands of VMware cloud, uh, you know, partners that we work with manage service providers across the board. So it's, it's a very significant network of cloud. And you know, being consistent allows for mobility of workloads allows for consistency and skill sets for it operators as well. Mm-hmm >><affirmative> yeah. I wanna get into that, um, manage service trend around skill sets, but yeah, I have a, the number one thing that we've got in our, my notes here on multi-cloud challenges and I wanna get your reaction to it real quick, inconsistent infrastructure, API database network, and security constructs are different by cloud. How do you guys view that? And when you go to customers and they say, well, I got APIs that are different. I got different security constructs. What do I do? What does that, how do you answer that, that, that, that objection. >>Well, it's, it's a great call out cuz it is still the ongoing challenge, right? To gets to some of the portability, some of unified model and how they treat resources and consumption. Right? And so we're, we've all gotten together as an industry. You'll see purposely that the hyperscalers are all here at, at the conference, right? We're working on deep integration with all of our partners to make sure the customer doesn't have to. And I think it does extend to the different security models are troubling for customers. We're all working hard on unified security models as well. It's not just a developer saying, I like this set of APIs anymore, right? Or this framework customers need to run tier zero tier one, tier three applications when it really comes down to it and we need to create that unified model together. So, and I think that's really what the, the spirit or the embodiment of hybrid really is. >>When you talk to any customer, who's running a big operation, they're running in that model, right? They're not just doing cool. They want operationally simplicity. And I think you'll see these, these things we're engineering together are going after some of the hard problems, applications are hungry or all the time customers need more and more resources. And I think we would all agree. We've spent a lot of time in industry together when we're all working on sort of systems of record. What I call the shift ride effect is happening. Now we're in systems of interaction and systems of engagement out at the edge. That's the creation point of data. We need to be able to have that unified model all the way through the data path for the customer so they can monetize business value. >>And the data model is coming together. That's right. Where all three of those types of work that's right. There's two iconic names. And the other thing is that their trusted names and you're right, you're solving some of those hard problems making it simpler, but also you people trust that if something goes wrong, you're gonna be able to recover. So guys. >>Yeah. And I, and I'll tell you on the security front, you know, we've worked closely together here. If you look at, you know, VMware strategy of intrinsic security, it's really around going back to the development of our products, making sure there's a secure bill of materials, working with these guys on route of trust. Right? Making sure there's a full stack, uh, solution for our customers. Ultimately >>That's a whole nother cube segment that's bombs and shifting left and supply chain. Absolutely >>Shifting game. Absolutely. Right. Shifting >>Lift we're >>Shifting. Right guys. Awesome story. Congrats on the collaboration. Really appreciate your time in the cube. Thank you so >>Much. Thank you so >>Much. All right. You're very welcome. Okay, John and I will be back right after this short break. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas, right back.

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. It's a hybrid world, we're still doing remote in news. Of course, events are coming back in person, but more importantly conversations continue. We've got two great guests here, John Siegal, SVP ISG Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Dave McGraw, office of the CTO at VMware. Gentlemen, great to see you moving forward. Dell Technologies and VMware great partnership. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Yeah, hi, John, thanks for having us. >> You know, the world's coming back to kind of real life, Omnicon virus is out there, but people say it's not going to be as bad as we think, but it looks like events are happening. But more importantly, the cloud native, cloud operations is definitely forcing lots of great new things happening, new innovations on-premises and at the Edge. A lot of new things happening in Dell and VMware, both have been working together for a long time now. VMware a separate company, we'll get to that in a second, but let's get to the partnership. What's new, what's changed with the relationship? >> Yeah, so I mean, just to kick that off and certainly Dave can chime in, but I think in a word, you know, John, nothing changes in terms of my customer's perspective. I mean, in many ways our joint relationship has never been stronger. We've put a ton of investment in both joint engineering innovation, Joint Go To Market over the last several years. And we're really been making what was our vision a couple of years ago a reality, and we only expect that to continue. And I think much of the reason we expect that to continue is because we have a shared vision of this distributed multi-cloud, you know, cloud native, modern app environment that customers want to drive. >> Yeah, and John, I would add that we've been building platforms together for the last five years, a great example is VxRail. You know, it's a market-leading technology that we've co-engineered together. And now it's a platform that we're actually building out use cases on top of whether it's multi-cloud solutions, whether it's private and hybrid cloud or including Tansu for developer environments. You know, we're using the investments we made and then we're layering in and building more value into those investments together. And we put agreements in place by the way that, you know, multi-year agreements around commercial arrangements and partnering together as well as our technology collaboration together. So we feel really confident about the future and that's what we're communicating to our customer base. >> Yeah, indeed just go ahead sorry, John. >> No, good. >> I was going to say just to build on that, as he said, I really, when I say not much changes, I mean, VMware has always been an open ecosystem partner, right? With its OEM vendors out there. And I think the difference here is Dell has made a strategic choice and a decision to make a significant investment in joint innovation, joint engineering, joint testing for VMware environments. And so I think a lot of this comes down to the commitment and focus that we've already made. You mentioned VxRail, which is a fantastic example where we at Dell, we've invested our own IP. You know, HCI systems software, that's sort of the secret ingredient that the secret sauce that delivers that single click, you know, automated lifecycle management experience. And we're investing lots of dollars in test labs just to ensure that customers always have that, you know, that seamless experience. >> You know, one of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 11 years now, it's just been that long, both EMC World and Dell World back in the day was our first events we went to. We've watched you guys together over the years. One of the things that strikes to be consistently the same is this focus of end to end, but also modularity, but also interoperability and kind of componentizing kind of the solution, not to oversimplify it, but this is kind of the big discussion right now as cloud scale, horizontal scale is with cloud resources are being put into the development stream where modern applications now are clear using only cloud native operations. That doesn't mean it's just cloud. I mean, it's cloud everywhere, but it's distributed computing. So this is kind of the original vision if you go back even five years or more. You guys have been working on this. This is kind of an important inflection point because now it's well known that the modern application is going to have to be programmable under the hood. Meaning everything's going to be scaling and rise of superclouds or new Edge technologies, which is coming fast. This is the new normal. This is not something that we were talking about mainstream five years ago, but you guys have been working on this kind of simplicity solutions-based approach. What's your reaction? >> That's right, John, I'll tell you, you might remember at VMworld a couple of years ago we announced Project Monterey. And now this was really a redefining architecture for not only data center, core data centers, but also for cloud and Edge environments. And so it's leveraging technology, you know, data processing units also known as smart NICs. You know, we're essentially redefining what that infrastructure looks like, making it more efficient, more performance, depending on the use case. So we've been partnering very closely with Dell to develop that technology and it's going to really transform what you see at the Edge and what you also see in core data centers going forward. >> Yeah, and there's so many of those. I mean, I think it seems Monterey is a great example of one that we continue to invest in. I think there's also NBME over TCP is another, if you will key ingredient to how customer is going to essentially get the performance they need out of the infrastructure going forward. And so we were proud to be a partner there, at most recent VMware where we announced, you know, the ability to essentially automate the integration of MBME over TCP with Dell EMC system integrated with vSphere. And that's a great example as well, right? I think there's countless. >> John: Yeah. >> And I'll tell you, we are so excited to see what Dell has done in the storage business with PowerStore X, where they've integrated vSphere ESXi into a storage array. And, you know, that creates all kinds of opportunities going forward for better integration and really for plug and play of, you know, the storage technology into cloud infrastructure. >> What's interesting about what you guys talking about is remember the old DevOps moving infrastructure as code. Okay, that became DevSecOps. That's big part of Tansu and security. Now it's all about devs, right? So now devs have all that built in and now the operations are the big conversation because one of the things we pointed out in the theCUBE recently is that, you know, VMware has owned the IT operations world, in our opinion for a long, long time. Dell has owned the enterprise for a very long time in terms of infrastructure in front solutions. The operational efficiency of cloud hybrid is really kind of what's the gateway to multi-cloud. This has been a big part of IT transformation. Can you guys share how you guys were working together to make that flexibility to transform from the old IT to the new IT? And what are some of the things that you're seeing with your customers that can give them a map of how to do this? >> Yeah, so I would say, you know, one area in particular that we're really coming together is around APEX, right? From an as a service perspective. I think what APEX is really doing is really unifying much of what you just described. It's taking as a service, it's taking multi-cloud, it's taking cloud native development if you will, and modern app development. And we together partner to ensure that's a consistent experience for customers. And we have a number of new APEX cloud services that keep that in mind and that are built on joint innovations, like frankly, VxRail at the bottom of that as they've said earlier. So for customers are looking to get, you know, item managing infrastructure altogether, which we, you know, we're seeing more and more now, we recently announced the APEX Cloud Services With VMware Cloud you know, which is again, a joint solution that'll be available soon. And it's one that is managed by Dell, but, you know, it gives customers that simplicity and scale of the public cloud, but certainly that control and security and performance, if you will, that they prefer to have in the private club. >> Yeah, and I think because, you know, the APEX Cloud Service is designed with the VMware Cloud, you have a capability that drives consistency and portability of workloads for customers. So they don't have to re-skill and retrain to be able to manage the environment. They also are not locked in to any particular solution. They have this ability to move workloads depending on what their needs are; economically, performance, you know, logistics requirements, and they can react accordingly as they digitize their business going forward. >> It's interesting, you guys are talking about this demand in a way, addressing this demand for as a service, which is, you know, it can be one cloud or multiple clouds, but it's really more of an abstraction layer of what you deploy to essentially create that connective tissue between what's existing, what's new and how to make it all work together to again, satisfy the developer 'cause the new apps are coming, right? They want more data is coming into them. So this has been, is this the as a service focus, is that what's happening? >> Yes, absolutely, yeah. The, as a service focus is, you know, at the end of the day is how are we going to really simplify this. We've been on this journey now for at least a year and much more to go. And VMware has been a key partner here, you know, on that journey. So a number of cloud services. We've had APEX Hybrid Cloud, APEX Private Cloud, you know, out there for some time. In fact, that's where we're getting a lot of the traction right now, and this new offering that's going to come out soon that we just mentioned with VMware cloud is just going to build on that. >> And VMware is a super cloud, isn't it Dave? Because you guys would be considered by our new definition of Supercloud because you can sit on Amazon. You also have other clouds too, so your customers can operate on any cloud. >> Our view is that, you know, from a multi-cloud future for customers to be able to be on-premises with a, you know, APEX service, to be able to be operating in a Colo, to be able to operate in one of many different hyperscalers, you know, providing that consistency and flexibility is going to be key. And I think also you mentioned Tansu earlier, John. You know, being able to have the customer have choice around whether they're operating with VMs and containers is really key as well. So, you know, what Dell has done with APEX is they set up again, another platform that we can just provide our SASE offerings to very simply and easily and deliver that value to customers in a consistent fashion going forward here. >> You know, I just love the term Supercloud. Actually, I called it subclass, but Dave Vellante called them Superclouds. But the idea is that you can have all the super power in the cloud capabilities, but it's also distributed clouds, right? Where you have Edge, you've got the Core and the notion of a cloud isn't like one place in which there's distributed computing. This is what the world now realizes. Again, we've talked about in theCUBE many times. So let's discuss this whole Core to Edge dynamic because if everything's cloudified, if you will, or cloud operations, you've got devs and ops kind of working together with security, all that good stuff. Now you have almost a seamless environment where code can run anywhere, data should traverse anywhere, but the idea of an Edge changes dramatically and certainly with 5G. So can you guys tie that Edge computing story together how Dell and VMware are addressing this massive growth at the Edge? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, first and foremost, we are seeing a major shift. As you mentioned today, the data being generated at the Edge it's, I think Michael Dell has actually gone on record talking about the next frontier, right? So it's especially happening because we're seeing all these smart monitoring capabilities, IOT, right? At almost any end point now from retail, traffic lights, manufacturing floors, you name it. I think anywhere where data is being acted upon to generate critical insights, right? That's considered an Edge now and we're expecting to see, as ITC has already gone out there on record as saying 50% of the new infrastructure out there will be deployed at the Edge in the next couple of years, so. And it's a different world, right? I mean, I think in terms of what's needed and what the challenges are, there's certainly a lack of specialized technical resources, typically at the Edge, there's typically a scaling issue. How do you manage all those distributed endpoints and do so successfully? And how do you ensure you lay any concerns around security as well? So, you know, once again, we've had a very collaborative approach when it comes to working on challenges like Edge, and, you know, we, again, common theme here, but the VxRail, which is a leading, you know, joint ACI off in the market is the foundation of many of our Edge offerings out there in the market today. The new satellite nodes that we just announced just a few months ago, extends VxRail's, you know, value proposition to the Edge, using a single node deployment. And it's really perfect for customers that don't have that local technical resource expertise or specialized resources. And it still has cyber resilience built right in. >> And John, just to follow up on that real quick, before Dave chimes in. On the Edge, compute has been a huge issue. And I've talked with you guys about this too. You guys have the compute, you have the integrated systems now, any update there on what VxRail is doing different or other Edge power (John laughs) PowerEdge sounds familiar? We need some more power at the Edge. So what's new there? >> Well, you know, first of all, we had new PowerEdge platforms of course, come out in this past year, and, you know, there's, we're building on that. I mean, the latest VxRail is of course, leveraged that power of PowerEdge. Yeah, lots of a good naming arrogance, right? PowerEdge. >> John: I love that. And, but, you know, it's, you know, it's at the heart of much of what we're doing. We're taking a lot of our capabilities that have been IP, like streaming data platform, which enables streaming, video and real-time analytics and running that on a VxRail or PowerEdge platform. You know, we're doing the same thing, you know, with, in the manufacturing side. We're working with partners that have IOT Edge platforms, you know, and running those on VxRail and PowerEdge. So we are taking very much the idea here that, yes, you're right with our rich resources of infrastructure, both with PowerEdge and VxRail, you know, building on that. But working with partners like VMware and others to collapse an integrated solution for the Edge. And so we're seeing really good uptake so far. >> Dave, what's your take on the Dell Edge with VMware, because automation is big theme, not moving data across an internet that's obviously huge. And you got to have that operational stability there. >> Absolutely, and, you know, to your point, being able to do the processing at the Edge and move results around versus moving massive amounts of data around is really key to the future going forward. And, you know, we've taken an approach with Dell where we're working with customers, we're having detailed conversations, really using a "Tiger Team Approach" around the use cases; manufacturing and retail being two of the real key focuses, healthcare another one where we're understanding customer requirements, it's both today and where they want to go. And, you know, so it's about distributed computing, certainly at the Edge. Dell is coming out with some great new platforms that we're integrating our software with. At the same time, we have technology in STWIN and SASE that become part of that solution as well, with VeloCloud. And we're developing a global network of points of presence that really will help support distributed application environments and Edge-native Application environments working with Dell going forward. >> That's great stuff. The next ending question is what's next. I want to just tee that up by bringing up what you kind of made me think of there, Dave, and this is key supply chain on both hardware and software talking about security. So when you say those things you're talking about in terms of functionality, the question is security, right? Both hardware and software supply chain with open source, with automation. I mean, this is a big discussion. What do you guys react to that about what's next.. >> Yeah, I can tell you from a central engineering perspective, you know, we're looking at security compliance and privacy every day, we're working closely with Dell. In fact, we're in the middle of meetings today in this area. And, you know, I look at a few key areas of investment that we're making collectively together. One is in the area of end to end encryption of data. For virtualized environments or containerized environments, being able to have end-to-end encryption and manage a very efficient way, the keys and maintain the data compression and deduplication capabilities for customers, you know, efficiency and cost purposes while being very secure. The second area we're working closely on is in Zero Trust. You know, being able to develop Zero Trust infrastructure across Edge, to Core, to Colo, to Cloud and making sure that, you know, we have reference designs available to customers with procedures, policies, best practices, to be able to drive Zero Trust environments. >> John what you're (indistinct) is huge and you guys have, literally could be the keys to the kingdom pun intended. You guys are doing a lot of great security at the Edge too, whether the traffic stays with the Edge or goes across the network. >> That's all right, I'm as curious, like you said, it's been a joint focus and initiative across much of our portfolio for quite a while now. And I think, you know, you asked what's next and I think, you know, sky's the limit right now. I mean, we've got the shared vision, right? I think at the end of the day, you know, we've shared a number of joint initiatives that are ongoing right now with Project Monterrey. Obviously our integration with Tansu and a number of solutions we have there, work around APEX, et cetera. I think we have complimentary capabilities. You mentioned, you know, areas like supply chain, areas like security, you know, and I think these are all things that we both do well together. And the thing I will say that I think is probably the most key to us sustaining this great execution together is our collaborative cultures. I think, you know, there's something to be said for what we built, you know, all these last several years, you know, around these collaborative cultures, working together on joint roadmaps and focusing on really end of the day solving our customer's biggest challenges, whatever those may be, you know? And so at the end of the day behind us, we have the greatest supply chains, you know, services, support, and innovation engines. But I think, you know, I think that the passion, our groups working together I think is going to be key to us going forward. >> Well, great stuff moving forward together with Dell Technologies and VMware. David, thanks for coming on. John, great to see you. Thanks for sharing insight. Great CUBE conversation talking encryption, we've spoken about Edge and supply chain as well. Great stuff, great conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, with theCUBE. You're watching CUBE coverage. Thank you so much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Dave Vellante: Okay. We're back with Mark Hill. who's the Director of IT Operations at Digital River. Mark. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Hey, tell us a little bit more about Digital River, people know you as a, a payment platform, you've got marketing expertise. How do you differentiate from other e-commerce platforms? >> Well, I don't think people realize it, but Digital River was founded about 27 years ago. Primarily as a one-stop shop for e-commerce right? And so we offered site development, hosting, order management, fraud, expert controls, tax, um, physical and digital fulfillment, as well as multilingual customer service, advanced reporting and email marketing campaigns, right? So it was really just kind of a broad base for e-commerce. People could just go there. Didn't have to worry about anything. What we found over time as e-commerce has matured, we've really pivoted to a more focused API offering, specializing in just our global seller services. And to us that means payment, fraud, tax, and compliance management. So our, our global footprint allows companies to outsource that risk management and expand their markets internationally, um very quickly. And with low cost of entry. >> Yeah. It's an awesome business. And, you know, to your point, you were founded way before there was such a thing as the modern cloud, and yet you're a cloud native business. >> Yeah. >> Which I think talks to the fact that, that incumbents can evolve. They can reinvent themselves from a technology perspective. I wonder if you could first paint a picture of, of how you use the cloud, you use AWS, you know, I'm sure you got S3 in there. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, exactly. So when I think of a cloud native business, you kind of go back to the history. Well, 27 years ago, there wasn't a cloud, right? There wasn't any public infrastructure. It was, we basically stood our own data center up in a warehouse. And so over our history, we've managed our own infrastructure and collocated data centers over time through acquisitions and just how things worked. You know those over 10 data centers globally. for us it was expensive, well from a software hardware perspective, as well as, you know, getting the operational teams and expertise up to up to speed too. So, and it was really difficult to maintain and ultimately not core to our business, right? Nowhere in our mission statement, does it say that we're our goal is to manage data centers? So, so about five years ago, we started the journey from our hosted into AWS. It was a hundred percent lift it and shift plan, and we were able to bleed that migration a little over two years, right. Amazon really just fit for us. It was a natural, a natural place for us to land and they made it really easy here for us to not to say it wasn't difficult, but, but once in the public cloud, we really adopted a cloud first vision. Meaning that we'll not only consume their infrastructure as the service, but we'll also purposely evaluate and migrate to software as a service. So I come from a database background. So an example would be migrating from self deployed and managed relational databases over to AWS RDS, relational database service. You know, you're able to utilize the backups, the standby and the patching tools. Automagically, you know, with a click of the button. And that's pretty cool. And so we moved away from the time consuming operational tasks and, and really put our resources into revenue and generate new products, you know, like pivoting to an API offering. I always like to say that we stopped being busy and started being productive. >> Ha ha. I love that. >> That's really what the cloud has done for us. >> Is that you mean by cloud native? I mean, being able to take advantage of those primitives and native API. So what does that mean for your business? >> Yeah, exactly. I think, well, the first step for us was just to consume the infrastructure right, in that, but now we're looking at targeted services that they have in there too. So, you know, we have our, our, our data stream of services. So log analytics, for example, we used to put it locally on the machine. Now we're just dumping into an S3 bucket and we're using Kinesis to consume that data, put it in Eastic and go from there. And none of the services are managed by Digital River. We're just utilizing the capabilities that AWS has there too. So. >> And as an e-commerce player, retail company, we were ever concerned about moving to AWS as a possible competitor, or did you look at other clouds? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah. And, and so I think e-commerce has really matured, right? And so we, we got squeezed out by the Amazons of the world. It's just not something that we were doing, but we had really a good area of expertise with our global seller services. But so we evaluated Microsoft. We evaluated AWS as well as Google. And, you know, back when we did that, Microsoft was Windows-based. Google was just coming into the picture, really didn't fit for what we were doing, but Amazon was just a natural fit. So we made a business decision, right? It was financially really the best decision for us. And so we didn't really put our feelings into it, right? We just had to move forward and it's better than where we're at. And we've been delighted actually. >> Yeah. It makes sense. Best cloud, best, best tech. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I want to talk about ChaosSearch. A lot of people describe it as a data lake for log analytics. Do you agree with that? You know, what does that, what does that even mean? >> Well, from, from our perspective, because they're self-managed solutions were costly and difficult to maintain, you know, we had older versions of self deployed using Splunk, other things like that, too. So over time, we made a conscious decision to limit our data retention in generally seven days. But in a lot of cases, it was zero. We just couldn't consume that, that log data because of the cost, intimidating in itself, because of this limit, you know, we've lost important data points use for incident triage, problem management, problem management, trending, and other things too. So ChaosSearch has offered us a manageable and cost-effective opportunity to store months, or even years of data that we can use for operations, as well as trending automation. And really the big thing that we're pushing into is an event driven architecture so that we can proactively manage our services. >> Yeah. You mentioned Elastic, I know I've talked to people who use the ELK Stack. They say you there's these exponential growth in the amount of data. So you have to cut it off at whatever. I think you said seven days or, or less you're saying, you're not finding that with, with ChaosSearch? >> Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that was one of the huge benefits here too. So, you know, we were losing out if there was a lower priority incident, for example, and people didn't get to it until eight, nine days later. Well, all the breadcrumbs are gone. So it was really just kind of a best guess or the incident really wasn't resolved. We didn't find a root cause. >> Yeah. Like my video camera down there. My, you know, my other house, somebody breaks in and I don't find out for, for two weeks and then the video's gone. That kind of same thing. >> Yep So, so, so how do you, can you give us some more detail on how you use your data lake and ChaosSearch specifically? >> Yeah, yeah. Yep. And, and so there's, there's many different areas, but what we found is we were able to easily consolidate data from multiple regions, into a single pane of glass to our customers. So internally and externally, you know, it relieves us of that operational support for the data extract transformation load process, right? It offered us also a seamless transition for the users, who were familiar with ElasticSearch, right? It wasn't, it wasn't difficult to move over. And so all these are a lot of selling points, benefits. And, and so now that we have all this data that we're able to, to capture and utilize, it gives us an opportunity to use machine learning, predictive analysis. And like I said, you know, driving to an event driven architecture. >> Okay. >> So that's, that's really what it's offered. And it's, it's been a huge benefit. >> So you're saying that you can speak the language of Elastic. You don't have to move the data out of an S3 bucket and you can scale more easily. Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, so for us, just because we're running in multiple regions to drive more high availability, having that data available from multiple regions in a single pane of glass or a single way to utilize it, is a huge benefit as well. Just, you know, not to mention actually having the data. >> What was the initial catalyst to sort of rethink what you were doing with log analytics? Was it cost? Was it flexibility? Scale? >> There was, I think all of those went into it. One of the main drivers. So, so last year we had a huge project, so we have our ELK Stack and it's probably from a decade ago, right? And, you know, a version point oh two or something, you know, anyways, it's a very old, and we went through a whole project to get that upgraded and migrated over. And it was just, we found it impossible internally to do, right? And so this was a method for us to get out of that business, to get rid of the security risks, the support risk, and have a way for people to easily migrate over. And it was just a nightmare here, consolidating the data across regions. And so that was, that was a huge thing, but yeah, it was also been the cost, right? It was, we were finding it cheaper to use ChaosSearch and have more data available versus what we're doing currently in AWS. >> Got it. I wonder if you could, you could share maybe any stories that you have or examples that, that underscore the impact that this approach to analytics is having on your business, maybe your team's everyday activities, any, any metrics you can provide or even just anecdotal information. >> Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think, you know, one coming from an Oracle background here, so Digital River historically has been an Oracle shop, right? And we've been developing a reporting and analytics environment on Oracle and that's complicated and expensive, right? We had to use advance features in Oracle, like partitioning materialized views, and bring in other supporting software like Informatica, Hyperion, Sbase, right? And all of these required our large team with a wide set of expertise into these separate focus areas, right? And the amount of data that we were pushing at the ChaosSearch would simply have overwhelmed this legacy method for data analysis than a relational database, right? In that dimension, the human toll of, of the stress of supporting that Oracle environment, meant that a 24 by seven by 365 environment, you know, which requires little or no downtime. So, just that alone, it's a huge thing. So it's allowed us to break away from Oracle, it's allowed us to use new technologies that make sense to solve business solutions. >> I, you know, ChaosSearch is really interesting company to me. I'm sure like me, you see a lot of startups, I'm sure they're knocking on your door every day. And I always like to say, okay, where are they going after? Are they going after a big market? How are they getting product market fit? And it seems like ChaosSearch has really looked at, hard at log analytics and kind of maybe disrupting the ELK Stack. But I see, you know, other potential use cases, you know, beyond analyzing logs. I wonder if you agree, are there other use cases that you see in your future? >> Yeah, exactly. So I think there's, one area would be Splunk, for example, we have that here too. So we use Splunk versus, you know, flat file analysis or other ways to, to capture that data just because from a PCI perspective, it needs to be secured for our compliance and certification, right? So ChaosSearch allows us to do that. There's different types of authentication. Um, really a hodgepodge of authentication that we used in our old environment, but ChaosSearch has a more easily usable one, One that we could set up, one that can really segregate the data and allow us to satisfy our PCR requirements too. So, but Splunk, but I think really deprecating all of our ElasticSearch environments are homegrown ones, but then also taking a hard look at what we're doing with relational databases, right? 27 years ago, there was only relational databases; Oracle and Sequel Server. So we we've been logging into those types of databases and that's not, cost-effective, it's not supportable. And so really getting away from that and putting the data where it belongs and that was easily accessible in a secure environment and allowing us to, to push our business forward. >> Yep. When you say, where the data belongs, right? It sounds like you're putting it in the bit bucket, S3, leaving it there, because it's the the most cost-effective way to do it and then sort of adding value on top of it. That's, what's interesting about ChaosSearch to me. >> Yeah, exactly. Yup. Yup. Versus the high priced storage, you know, that you have to use for a relational database, you know, and not to mention that the standbys, the backups. So, you know, you're duplicating, triplicating all this data too in an expensive manner, so yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Copy. Create. Moving data around and it gets expensive. It's funny when you say about databases, it's true. But database used to be such a boring market. Now it's exploded. Then you had the whole no Sequel movement and Sequel, Sequel became the killer app. You know, it's like full circle, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Well, anyway, good stuff, Mark, really, really appreciate you coming on the Cube and, and sharing your perspectives. We'd love to have you back in the future. >> Oh yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. (upbeat music) >> Okay. So that's a wrap. You know, we're seeing a new era in data and analytics. For example, we're moving from a world where data lives in a cloud object store and needs to be extracted, moved into a new data store, transformed, cleansed, structured into a schema, and then analyzed. This cumbersome and expensive process is being revolutionized by companies like ChaosSearch that leave the data in place and then interact with it in a multi-lingual fashion with tooling, that's familiar to analytic pros. You know, I see a lot of potential for this technology beyond just login analytics use cases, but that's a good place to start. You know, really, if I project out into the future, we see a trend of the global data mesh, really taking hold where a data warehouse or data hub or a data lake or an S3 bucket is just a discoverable node on that mesh. And that's governed by an automated computational processes. And I do see ChaosSearch as an enabler of this vision, you know, but for now, if you're struggling to scale with existing tools or you're forced to limit your attention because data is exploding at too rapid a pace, you might want to check these guys out. You can schedule a demo just by clicking the button on the site to do that. Or stop by the ChaosSearch booth at AWS Reinvent. The Cube is going to also be there. We'll have two sets, a hundred guests. I'm Dave Volante. You're watching the Cube, your leader in high-tech coverage.

(gentle music) >> Okay, we're back with Mark Hill who's the director of IT operations at Digital River. Mark, Welcome to "The Cube." Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Hey, tell us a little bit more about Digital River, people know you as a payment platform. >> You've got marketing expertise. >> Yeah. >> How do you differentiate from other e-commerce platforms? >> Well, I don't think people realize it, but Digital River was founded about 27 years ago primarily as a one-stop shop for e-commerce, right? And so we offered site development, hosting, order management, fraud, expert controls, tax, physical and digital fulfillment as well as multilingual customer service, advanced reporting and email marketing campaigns, right? So it was really just kind of a broad base for e-commerce. People could just go there. Didn't have to worry about anything. What we found over time as e-commerce has matured, we've really pivoted to a more focused API offering specializing in just a global seller services. And to us that means payment, fraud, tax and compliance management. So our global footprint allows companies to outsource that risk management and expand their markets internationally very quickly and with the low cost of entry. >> Yeah, it's an awesome business. And, you know, to your point, you were founded way before there was such a thing as the modern cloud, and yet you're a cloud native business. >> Yeah. >> Which I think talks to the fact that incumbents can evolve, they can reinvent themselves from a technology perspective. I wonder if you could first paint a picture of how you use the cloud, you use AWS, you know, I'm sure you got S3 in there. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, exactly. So when I think of a cloud native business, you kind of go back to the history. Well, 27 years ago, there wasn't a cloud, right? There wasn't any public infrastructure. We basically started our own data center up in a warehouse. And so over our history, we've managed our own infrastructure and co-located data centers over time through acquisitions and just how things works, you know, those are over 10 data centers globally for us. For us it was expensive, well from a software, hardware perspective, as well as, you know, getting the operational teams and expertise up to speed too. And it was really difficult to maintain and ultimately not core to our business, right? Nowhere in our mission statement does it say that our goal is to manage data centers. (laughing) So, about five years ago we started the journey from our host into AWS. It was a hundred percent lift and shift plan and we were able to complete that migration a little over two years, right? Amazon really just fit for us, it was a natural, a natural place for us to land in and they made it really easy here for us to, not to say it wasn't difficult, but once in the public cloud, we really adopted a cloud first vision, meaning that we'll not only consume their infrastructure as the service, but we'll also purposely evaluate and migrate to software as a service. So, I come from a database background. So an example would be migrating from self deployed and manage relational databases over to AWS RDS, relational database service. You know, you're able to utilize the backups, the standby and the patching tools auto magically, you know, with a click of a button. And that's pretty cool. And so we moved away from the time consuming operational task and really put our resources into revenue and generating the products, you know, like pivoting to an API offering. I always like to say that we stopped being busy and started being productive. (laughing) >> I love that. >> And that's really what the cloud has done for us. >> Is that what you mean by cloud native? I mean, being able to take advantage of those primitives and native API. So what does that mean for your business? >> Yeah, exactly. I think, well, the first step for us was just to consume the infrastructure, right? But now we're looking at targeted services that they have in there too. So, you know, we have our data stream of services. So log analytics, for example, we used to put it locally on the machine. Now we're just dumping into an S3 bucket the way you're using Kinesis to consume that data and put it in elastic and go from there. And none of the services are managed by Digital River. We're just realizing the capabilities that AWS has there too. >> And as an e-commerce player, retail company, were you ever concerned about moving to AWS as a possible competitor, or did you look at other clouds? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, and so, I think e-commerce is really mature, right? And so we got squeezed out by the Amazons of the world. It's just not something that we were doing, but we had really a good area of expertise with our global seller services. So we evaluated Microsoft, we evaluated AWS as well as Google and, you know, back when we did that, Microsoft was Windows-based. Google was just coming into the picture, really didn't fit for what we're doing, but Amazon was just a natural fit. So, we made a business decision, right? It was financially really the best decision for us. And so we didn't really put our feelings into it, right? We just had to move forward and it's better than where we're at and we've been delighted actually. >> Yeah, makes sense, best cloud, the best tech. >> Yeah. >> You know, I want to talk about Chaos Search. A lot of people describe it as a data lake for log analytics. Do you agree with that? You know, what does that even mean? >> Yeah, well, from our perspective because the self-managed solutions are costly and difficult to maintain. You know, we had older versions of self deployed using Splunk, other things like that too. So over time, we made a conscious decision to limit our data retention in generally seven days. But in a lot of cases, it was zero. We just couldn't consume that log data because of the cost, intimidating in itself, because of this limit, you know, we've lost important data points, use for incident triage problem management, trending and other things too. So, Chaos Search has offered us a manageable and cost-effective opportunity to store months or even years of data that we can use for operations as well as trending automation. And really the big thing that we're pushing into is in the event of an architecture so that we can proactively manage our services. >> Yeah, you mentioned elastic. So I know I've talked to people who use the Elk Stack. They say, yes, this is exponential growth in the amount of data. So you have to cut it off at whatever. I think you said seven days, >> Yeah. >> Or less, you're saying you're not finding that with Chaos Search? >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that was one of the huge benefits here too. So, you know, we we're losing out if there was, you know, a lower priority incident for example and people didn't get to it until eight, nine days later. Well, all the bread crumbs are gone. So it was really just kind of a best guess or the incident really wasn't resolved. We didn't find a root cause. >> Yeah, like my video camera's down you know, by your other house, is that when somebody breaks in, I don't find out for two weeks and then the video's gone, kind of like same thing. >> Yeah. >> So, how do you, can you give us some more detail on how you use your data lake and Chaos Search specifically? >> Yeah, yeah. Yep and so there's many different areas, but what we found is we were able to easily consolidate data from multiple regions into a single pane of glass to our customers. So internal and externally, you know, it really does serve that operational support for the data extract transformation load process, right? It offered us also a seamless transition for the users who were familiar with elastic search, right? It wasn't difficult to move over. And so all these are a lot of selling points benefits. And so now that we have all this data that we're able to capture and utilize, it gives us an opportunity to use machine learning, predictive analysis. And like I said, you know, driving to an event driven architecture. >> Okay. >> So that's really what is offered and it's been a huge benefit. >> So you're saying you can speak the language of elastic. You don't have to move the data out of an S3 bucket and you can scale more easily. Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is so for us just because running in multiple regions to drive more high availability, having that data available from multiple regions in a single pane of glass or a single way to utilize it is a huge benefit as well, just to, you know, not to mention actually having the data. >> What was the initial catalyst to sort of rethink what you were doing with log analytics? Was it cost, was it flexibility scale? >> There was, I think all of those went into it. One of the main drivers, so last year we had a huge project, so we have our Elk Stack and it's probably from a decade ago, right? And, you know, a version point or two or something, you know, anyways, it's very old and we went through a whole project to get that upgraded and migrated over. And it was just, we found it impossible internally to do, right? And so this was a method for us to get out of that business, to get rid of the security risks and support risk and have a way for people to easily migrate over. And it was just a nightmare here consolidating the data across regions. And so that was a huge thing. But yeah, it has also been the cost, right? We're finding that cheaper to use Chaos Search and have more data available versus what we were doing currently in AWS. >> Got it, I wonder if you could share maybe any stories that you have or examples that underscore the impact that this approach to analytics, >> Yeah >> Is having on your business, maybe your team's everyday activities, any metrics you can provide, >> Yeah. >> Or even just anecdotal information? >> Yeah, yeah. And and I think, you know, one, coming from an Oracle background here, so Digital River historically has been an Oracle shop, right? And we've been developing a reporting and analytics environment on Oracle and that's complicated and expensive, right? We had to use advanced features in Oracle like partitioning materialized views and bringing other supporting software like Informatic, Hyperion, Essbase, right? And all of these require a large team with a wide set of expertise into the separate focus areas, right? And the amount of data that we were pushing at the KF search would simply have overwhelmed this legacy method for data analysis than a relational database, right? In that dimension, the human toll of the stress of supporting that Oracle environment than a 24 by seven by 365 environment, you know, which requires literal or no downtime. So just that alone, it was a huge thing. So, it's allowed us to break away from Oracle, it's allowed us to use new technologies that make sense to solve business solutions. >> You know, Chaos Search is just a really interesting company to me, I'm sure like me, you see a lot of startups. I'm sure they're knocking on your door every day. And I always like to say, "Okay, where are they going after? "Are they going after a big market? "How are they getting product market fit?" And it seems like Chaos Search has really looked that hard at log analytics and sort of maybe disrupting the Elk Stack. But I see, you know, other potential use cases, you know, beyond analyzing logs. I wonder if you agree, are there other use cases that you see in your future? >> Yeah, exactly. So, I think there's one area would be Splunk for example. We have that here too. So we use Splunk versus, you know, flat file analysis or other ways to capture that data just because from a PCI perspective, it needs to be secured for our compliance and certification, right? So Chaos Search allows us to do that. There's different types of authentication, really a hodgepodge of authentication that we used in our old environment, but Chaos Search has a more easily usable one, one that we could set up, one that can really segregate the data and allows to satisfy our PCR requirements too. But Splunk, I think really, deprecating all of our elastic search environments are homegrown ones, but then also taking a hard look at what we're doing with relational databases, right? 27 years ago, there was only relational databases, Oracle and SQL server. So we've been logging into those types of databases and that's not cost-effective, it's not supportable. And so really getting away from that and putting the data where it belongs and that is easily accessible in a secure environment and allowing us to push our business forward. >> And when you say where the data belongs, it sounds like you're putting it in the bit bucket S3, leaving it there, >> Yeah. >> And this is the most cost-effective way to do it and then sort of adding value on top of it. That's what's interesting about Chaos Search to me. >> Yeah, exactly, yup, yup versus the high price storage, you know, that you have to use for a relational database, you know, and not to mention the standbys, the backups. So, you know, you're duplicating, triplicating all this data in here too in expensive manner. So yeah. >> Yeah, copy creating, moving data around and it gets expensive. It's funny when you say about databases, it's true. But database used to be such a boring market now it's exploded. Then you had the whole no SQL movement and SQL became the killer app, you know, it's like full circle. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> Well, anyway, good stuff Mark, really, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" and sharing your perspectives. We'd love to have you back in the future. >> Oh yeah, yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts on getting more value out of your growing data lakes. You're watching "The Cube," you're leader in high-tech coverage. (gentle music)

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine nonprofit brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back and ready Geoffrey here with the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle, actually, right on the water from the AWS. Imagine nonprofit event. We're here a couple weeks back for the education version of this event. First time to come into the non profit of it, and >> we're really excited to have our next guest. I knew a little bit about this organization before. Now we know a lot more. As he came off his keynote, he's brought Excuse me, Byron Hill, global head of >> technology for the Movember Foundation. By a great job on the keynote >> in the bay here to talk to you. >> And I think you came further than anybody did. Any other hands come up? I couldn't see the audience. 1000 miles, one >> I actually asked with from. So my whole stick around, you know, being from Australia 8140 miles to Seattle lost its appeal. If I'd said half Are you from 10,000 miles? >> Yes. Yes. We're glad we're glad you made it so that for the people that aren't >> familiar with them. Forgive him. Kind of a quick overview, Absolutely so in November >> is one of the world's largest men's health charities. We focus on three areas of men's health. Prostate cancer, mental health and testicular cancer. And every year we have annual fundraising campaign where we encourage men and women to fund. Rise for our cause is >> so Men's health is a really tricky situation. Let's met with GAL. She's like, Yeah, I'm going to do this. Start up. I'm gonna help. I'm gonna help all my male friends get to their doctor. Please. I was like, That's not the problem. The problem is, I never want to go in the first place. I don't want to talk about it. They want to acknowledge it. You know, they don't want to get their colonoscopy. They've heard horrible things about the prostate exam. So this is a really challenging thing to tackle. So how did you guys decide to go after it? How are you doing it a little bit differently so that you can have some success and he's not easy to operate areas. >> We realize that men's health was in a state of crisis. Men live on average sixties. Lesson. Women. And as you say, it's because way sit on the couch. We don't let things. We don't take action as opposed to women who always talk to themselves and should get out there and get something checked. So focusing on areas such as prostate cancer, where we know the family, history and ethnicity really important factors around these disease types and really targeting those populations and making sure we can have a big impact. We also spend a lot of time looking at survivorship. But how we can help people through that journey and understand what that journey looks like and help them actually have a really positive outcome At the end of it. My oh suicide is a huge area. Focus. One man every minute globally will die by suicide. And while that's not a uniquely mild disease, three out of four suicides a mile to really try to develop unique messaging, to talk to men in a very direct way is being one way we've I tried to get a cut through to really make a difference, right? >> So the mustache is in November in November, How did that come together? So you know, you've got these very serious diseases that we're trying to address a really big global problem. And you're coming at it with this kind of fun, kind of tongue in cheek thing. Movember. So for the folks that aren't familiar, what is movin, roll about? How did it come about? And really, what's the impact that actually, he has a huge impact with you outlined in the keynote? >> Absolutely So remember, started with two guys in a pub talking about fashion trends. They got onto the fact that the mustache had been the mainstay of seventies and eighties fashion and all but disappeared in the nineties. They just started to bring the mustache back as a gag. They got 30 mites, my yoga, robust ashes. They raise $0. They realized that papal complete strangers in the street. We're coming up to them asking about the mustache. What's that thing when you leave? And they realize the power of the mustache was something much more created conversations and allowed people to connect with one another to create an environment. We were able to talk about men's health. That's where we started. We never intended to become a men's health charity, but fast forward to 2009 and we've had over 6,000,000 people participating in a fundraising campaigns in the top 45 engineers globally and have funded over 1200 men's health programs. And again, all starting with two guys and pub. Having having a conversation about fashion trends >> you have, The numbers are amazing. I >> think you said S O start in 2004 and you guys were raising over $100,000,000 a year. How does it tie back to the mustache? Is just a conversation starter? No, by the way, this is why I'm doing it and please go go to the Web site. One of the mechanics. >> It's all about fun. Originally, the idea of the moustache was just fun. Just grow a mustache. Race and funds. That's it. We've really matured and progress in the last few years around really focusing in on the importance of men's health. So it started as a fun thing back in the day, and now we still try to maintain the fund. We also have a serious message to get through. So, quite literally, will ask people to grow a mustache last. Him too host and van will ask them to move. We've got a whole range of different fundraising ideas, and the idea is to absolutely get people raising funds in November. Getting as many people as we can to sign up and to grow moustache is and two doughnuts. So that's quite literally how we do it. And then we invest those funds back into women's health records. A >> great Well, I can assure you, after today we will be. The Q team will all be doing their best to get them. The mustache is there in a couple of months, but >> you had a >> lot of other really interesting messages within your within. You're talking about a culture of innovation, Mom. And everyone is always struggling. How do I and still a culture of innovation, especially in a large organization? You had a great quote. You're not the 1st 1 ever say it, but you said it with such passion, and clearly it's fall in love with the problem, not the solution to many people especially intact. Yeah, they want to talk about the attack. They don't want to talk about the problem. How do you know X ticket that? How do you instill that in your team. And how's that be really been a great driver for your success in development as a zone organization? >> Absolutely. So you're quite right. Paper will jump to the solution. And it's not just technical. People, like most people will come to you with a solution because I think they're actually helping. They think that they know exactly what the problem is to really just trying to position that to say, Well, let's get really clear and say Fall in love with problem Get really clear around the outcomes, withdrawn and deliver. Think about the experience is withdrawn. Give people here and then think about the technology. I talked about bringing the community into the conversation. Imagine the power you can have by bringing the community at the table when you're designing a new product. We try to do that all the time having a man in the room that suffered from prostate cancer. The insights they give you. We're very quickly highlight that you may have absolutely no idea of what the problem is. I talked a lot about assumptions. We form assumptions in her mind that crystallized. We have this bias and you have to challenge yourself to constantly go back to the coalface and look at those assumptions. Are they right? Are we solving completely the wrong problem Here you can deliver a great solution that completely misses a problem. So how do we do that? We encourage people to think about the problem. Immersed herself in the research. I talked about an example in testicular cancer. We spent three months on understanding the problem. Three months we spent four weeks on building a solution, and that was for a feeling that we didn't quite have the confidence that we knew what the problem. Waas. We wanted to know what itwas who wanted to delve into that research and really engage with people. Engage the community to get a deep seated understanding of what we were trying to solve. Right? >> Another PC talked about Is the community the importance of the community and really said the community is the why really powerful statement And I don't know people. Sometimes I think, think of community 10 gentle They're not really is the purpose for what? You know why you get up in the morning every day and why you do what you do. You have that come about. And how do you make sure that that stays, You know, clearly in focus for everyone. >> It's a really important point, and it's why we exist. And for us, it's a mobile rose and most sisters and the men that we serve. So how do we do it? We have to constantly anchor ourselves back to the point that there are means and means of men out there suffering from this desert diseases that we support. We want to create a better world for them so we can a line around the Y. If everyone in the organization understands why we're doing the work, it helps us deliver some amazing outcomes and again, the context of having people in the room, the community being part of the conversation that you're having gives that really sense of context. And it hasn't been easy. It's taken time to get there and you can't involve. I give an example of 20,000 people responded to a survey. You know, it doesn't have to be huge amounts of data. The voice of one or two people could be enough to provide unique insights. They give you a real sense of purpose and really give you a sense of what you're trying to change >> right? The third piece, he talked about the third leg of the stool, if you will. His culture. Onda geun driving, innovation of culture and your example you gave him the key note was phenomenal, which is when your team, you know, found a problem and asked you for approval on the $500 fixes. And you said, you know, empower your people to find the problem to solve the problems out Me and I think it's such a great message. And you spoken depth about learning about a screw up a failure and really identifying that as a terrific learning opportunity. You know, where did you learn about that kind of cultural approach? How do you keep that up? Because that is really the key to scale. And I think so many people are afraid to trust and afraid to have kind of blameless. Blameless postmortems is another phrase that we've heard so important to enabling your people to actually go out and accept. It's not easy, >> and how do we learn, Like all good things we did on the fly like if you're facing a situation where you've got a major piece of work that's kind of screwed up, and it doesn't do what you think it's gonna do. We had two choices. We could try to fix it, and I just knew we weren't gonna get there. It's a really using it as an opportunity toe positively reinforce what we should be doing that was learning. We had a really narrow opportunity to learn and learn in an in depth way. And how do we develop that culture we had to spend that time? It was really consciously thinking about when you got a team who are not feeling a lot of love there really worried. They actually concerned for their jobs, refocusing their their effort, giving them conference, telling them I've got your back and ultimately it helped us create this coach where people can proactively go out there and solve problems and my example of the business case or a showcase every single time we will go for the showcase, getting people to talk about how they're solving these problems, what is the problem and actually putting a proof of concept in or showing us that an example of what it looks like that's taken a long time to develop that culture, however, it's been absolutely worth it. >> Yeah, that's great. And you gave you gave the audience three challenges. At the end of the day, I was pretty interesting that weren't in there because they kind of encapsulated there kind of your key three themes that was, you know, really understand the problem you're trying to solve. I talked to people in the community. I like that. Don't presume you know what's going on. Talk to people. And then the last thing is encouraged. Three people to start working on the problem. Don't start working on it yourself. But again, you know you're going to have such a good grasp on engaging the team to the benefit of the whole great great messages >> over the year. Or didn't appreciate the homework I gave them to go. Go back to their desks on Monday morning and try these things. But I firmly believe that you know those three challenges and they're only small like this is not about trying to solve world hunger. This is just starting with something small in your business that you can look at. You can get two of your people 23 other people to focus on that validated the problem and look for ways around it. So it doesn't have to be a huge a group of people just getting a stock. And I've already talked to a number papal off to the canine who who really said that really resonated just starting that conversation. Small in that that I did a snowball and eventually growing as part of the organization. Right culture is something which takes a huge amount of time to get right, and I go in starting small one and letting that grow and permeate and do as much as you can do to reinforce that culture within your organization. Really living and breathing that cultures is important. But >> even those starting small your guys goals were huge. I mean, your goals are to cut to cut the prostate and the testicular percent, 50% and drop the suicides by 3/4. So, you know, it's a really interesting approach. Start small, you know, focus on the small, but but you clearly have a really big goal is my >> goal, and we know we can't achieve those goals by ourselves so way collaborate as much as we can with others who have similar missions and trying to band together. And we realized very early on that bringing together the best and brightest minds in the world to solve these problems was absolutely essential. We couldn't do it myself. So forming those network says global networks of experts researching constantly evaluating that research, making sure we're having to cut through and with nests in the process of scale in those programs that have shown great outcomes to reach the lives of means of men. So it's again starting small, proving these ideas out there looking to scour those ideas to reach frankly means in England. >> All right, Byron, we're almost out of time. We've got about 10 weeks until the month. Formally. No, it's November for >> me knowing this. So how do >> people get involved? What should people do? Give us give us some concrete tips for the audio? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, first of all, you want to go to moveon dot com and you want to sign up, Sign up to be a mobile. Almost Easter, you can either grow a mustache. You can host in the van. You can move for Movember start donating, and it's like any people to die tonight. So grow a mustache and asking me to give you money. That's the 1st 1 to do it. Second tip is what sort of moustache gonna grow. There's so many styles. There's the >> little style guide on the course, But not everyone >> can go. We could, Tash, but, uh, we do have wards for the line, Mark. So some of those >> little lame of the Lane >> Mart I can always always recommend some augmentation of the mustache if you got a few gray hairs and maybe bush it out. A little bit of color lamentation. Something like that. Um, but above all else, it doesn't live. Use one message. It's about getting yourself checked. When things don't feel normal, go to the doctor, have that positive impact on your life. And, of course, Movember dot com is full of really useful tips and great content to help you on that journey. >> All right. Well, Byron, thanks to you very much. And again. Congrats on the keynote. Thank you. Seem really enjoyed the time. Excellent. Thank you. Alright, He's tired. I'm Jeff. You're watching The key were eight of us imagined nonprofit in Seattle, Washington. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Mosconi North here in San Francisco, California. I'm student of my co host, A Volante. We're in day three of four days live. Walter. Wall coverage here at IBM think happened. Welcome back to the program. Talk about one of our favorite topics. Cube alarm. Steve Hill, who's the global head of innovation. That topic I mentioned from KPMG, Steve, welcome back to the program. >> Seems to have made good to see you. >> All right. So, you know, we know that the the only constant in our industry is change. And, you know, it's one of those things. You know, I look at my career, it's like innovation. Is it a buzz word? You know? Has innovation stalled out of the industry? But you know, you're living it. You you're you're swimming in it. Talkinto a lot of people on it. KPMG has lots of tools, so give us the update from from last year. >> Well, I think you know, we talked about several things last year, but innovation was a key theme. And and when I would share with you, is that I think across all industries, innovation as a capability has become more mature and more accepted, still not widely adopted across all industries and all competitors and all kinds of companies. But the reality is, innovation used to be kind of one person's job off in the closet today. I think a lot of organizations or realizing you have to have corporate muscle that is as engaged as in changing the status quo as the production muscle is in maintaining the status quo has >> become a cultural. >> It's become part of culture, and so I think innovation really is part of the evolution of corporate governance as far as I'm >> concerned. What one thing I worry about a little bit is, you know, I see a company like IBM. They have a long history of research that throws off innovation over the years. You know, I grew up, you know, in the backyard of Bell Labs and think about the innovation a drove today, the culture you know, faster, faster, faster and sometimes innovation. He does sit back. I need to be able to think longer, You know? How does how does an innovation culture fit into the ever changing, fast paced you? No need to deliver ninety day shot clock of reality of today. >> Well, I think innovation has to be smart, meaning you have to be able to feed the engines of growth. So your horizon one, if you will, of investments and your attention and efforts have to pay off the short term. But you also can't be strategically stupid and build yourself into an alleyway or to our corner, because you're just too short term thought through. Right? So you need to have a portfolio of what we call Horizon three blended with Horizon one and Horizon two types investment. So your short term, your middle term and your longer term needs are being met. Of course, if you think about it like a portfolio of investments, you're going tohave. Probably a smaller number of investments that air further out, more experimental and a larger proportion of them going to be helping you grow. You could say, almost tactically or sort of adjacent to where you are today, incrementally. But some of those disruptive things that you work on an H three could actually change your industry. Maybe you think about today where we are. Azan Economy intangibles are starting to creep into this notion of value ways we've never seen before. Today, the top five companies in terms of net worth all fundamentally rely on intangibles for their worth. Five years ago, it was one or two, and I would argue that the notion of intangibles, particularly data we'll drive a lot of very transformative types of investments for organizations going forward. So you've got to be careful not to starve a lot of those longer term investments, >> right? And it's almost become bromide. Large companies can innovate, but those five companies just mentioned well alluded to Amazon. Google, etcetera Facebook of Apple, Microsoft there, innovators, right? So absolutely and large companies innovate. >> Yes, clearly, yeah, but you have to have muscle, but it doesn't happen by accident, and you do put discipline and process and rigor and tools and leadership around innovation. But it's a different kind of discipline than you need in the operation, so I'll make him a ratio that makes sense. Maybe ninety five percent production, five percent innovation in an organization. That innovation engine is always challenging that ninety five percent Are you good enough? Are you relevant enough? Are you fast enough? Are you agile enough? You need that in every corporate organization in terms of governance to stay healthy and relevant overtime. >> So it's interesting. You know, I was in a session that Jack Welch talk wants, and he's like, I hear big companies can innovate is like big companies made up of people. People are the things that can innovate absolute. But, you know, I've worked in large organizations. We understand that the fossilization process and the goto market that you have, you know, will often kill, you know, those new flowers that are blooming, what separates the people that can drive innovation on DH? You know, put those positive place and kind of the also rans that, you know get left behind window disruption. >> Well, there's several. There's a couple things that I would highlight of a longer list, one of them we culture. I mean, I think innovation has been part of a culture. People in the institution have value innovation and want to be part of it. And there is, you know, a role that everyone can play. Just because you're in operations, if you will, doesn't mean you ignore change or you ignore the opportunity to improve the status quo. But you still have you get paid to operate what I find that is related to culture that gets a lot of people, you know, slow down or or roadblock is the disconnect between the operating part of the business and the innovative part of the business. If you try, if you build them to separately, what happens is you have a disconnection. And if you innovate the best idea in the world over here. But you can't scale it with production, you lose. So you have to make sure that, as as a leader overall, the entire enterprise you build those connections, rotations, leadership, You know, How do you engage the production, you know, engine into the innovation engine? It's to be very collaborative. It should be seamless. You know, everyone likes to say that, but that word, but relative seamlessness is, is heavy architecture. You've gotto build that, you know, collaboration into your model of of how you innovate >> and >> don't innovate in the vacuum. >> And it comes back to the cultural aspects we're talking about. Do you mentioned the ninety day shot? Clocks were here in the Bay Area. Silicon Valley. The most innovative place in the world. They've lived along the ninety day shot clock forever, and it seems to have not heard that so called short term thinking. Why is that? >> Well, there's so much start up here. I mean, at the end of the day, there is so much churn of new thinking and start up in V C. And there's so much activity that it's almost a microcosm, right? Not every place in the world smells, feels, looks like Silicon Valley, right? And the reason for it is in part because there's just so much innovation in what happens here. And these things change me. If you think about, uh, these unicorns that we have today. Today there's about three hundred ninety one unicorns. Just five years ago, there were one hundred sixty globally on before that. Hardly people didn't know they were hardly recognized. But that's all coming from pockets of innovation like Silicon Valley. So I'd argue that what you have here is an interesting amalgamation of culture being part of a macro environment region that that really rewards innovation and demonstrates that in in market valuations in capital raises, I mean, today one hundred million dollars capital raise is pretty common, especially for unicorns. Five, ten years ago. You never see me. It was very difficult to get a hundred million dollars capital, right? >> You mean you're seeing billion dollar companies do half a billion dollars raises today? I mean, it's >> all day, right? And some of them don't make a profit. Which is I mean, and that's kind of the irony, Which is, Are those companies? What did they get that the rest of us, you know, there was that live on Wall Street right out of in New York. What do we not see? Is that some secret that downstream there will be some massive inflow? Hard to say. I mean, look at Amazon is an example. They've used an intangible to take industries out that they were never in before they started selling books, and they leverage customer behavior data to move into other spaces. And this is kind of the intangible dynamic. And the infection >> data was the fuel for the digital disruption to travel around the world. You see that folks outside of Silicon Valley are really sort of maybe creating new innovation recipes? >> Yes. I think that what you see here is starting to go viral right on DH way that KPMG likes to share a holistic way to look at this for our clients. What is what we call the twenty first century enterprise. So the things that we used to do in the twentieth century to be successful, hire people, build more machines, right? You know, buy more assets, hard, durable assets. Those things don't necessarily give you the recipe for success in the twenty first century. And if you look at that and you think about the intangibles work that's been well written about there's there's all kinds of press on this today. You'll start to realize that the recipe for success in this new century is different, and you can't look at it in a silo to say, Okay, so I've gotta change my department or I've got a I've got to go change, You know, my widgets. What you've got to think is that your entire enterprise and so are construct called the twenty first Century prize. Looks at four things. Actually, it's five, and the fifth one is the technologies to enable change in the other four. And those technologies we talk about here and I have made him think which are, you know, cloud data, smart computers or a blockchain, etcetera. But those four pillars our first customer. How do you think about your customer experience today? How do you rethink your customer experience tomorrow? I think the customer dynamic, whether it's generational or it's technologically driven, change is happening more rapidly today than ever. And looking at that front office and the customer dementia, it is really important. The second is looking at your acid base. The value of your assets are changing, and intangibles are big category of that change. But do your do your hard assets make the difference today and forward. Or all these intangibles. Companies that don't have a date a strategy today are at peril of falling victim to competitors who will use data to come through a flank. And Amazons done that with groceries, right? The third category is as a service capabilities. So if you're growing contracting going into new markets are opening new channels. How do you build that capability to serve that? Well, there's a phenomenon today that we know is, you know, I think, very practised, but usually in functions called as a service by capability on the drink instead of going out and doing big BPO deals. Think about a pea eye's. Think about other kinds of ways of get access to build and scale very fucks Pierre your capabilities and in the last category, which actually is extremely important for any change you make elsewhere is your workforce. Um, culture is part of that, right? And a lot of organizations air bringing on chief culture officers. We and KPMG did the same thing, but that workforce is changing. It's not just people you hire into your four walls today. You've got contingent workforce. You have gig economy, workforce a lot of organizations. They're leveraging platform business models to bring on employees to either help customers with help. Dex needs or build code for problems that they like to solve for free. So when you talk about productivity, which we talked about last year and you start thinking about what's separating the leaders from a practical standpoint from the laggers from practically standpoint, a lot of those attributes of changing customer value of assets as a service growth and workforce are driving growth and productivity for that subset of our community and many injured. >> So when you look at the firm level you're seeing some real productivity gains versus just paying attention to the macro >> Correct, any macro way think proactive is relatively flat, and that's not untrue. It's because the bottom portion the laggards aren't growing. In fact, productivity is in many ways falling off, but the ones that are the frontier of those top ten percent fifteen hundred global clients we've looked at, uh, you know, you see that CD study show that they're actually driving growth and productivity substantially, and the chasm is getting larger. >> So, Steve, Steve, it's curious what this means for competition. I think about if I'm using external workforces in open source communities, you know, Cloud and I, you know, changes in the environment. A supposed toe I used to kind of have my internal innovation. Now I'm out in these communities s O You know, we're here than IBM show. You know, I think back the word Coop petition. I first heard in context of talking about how IBM works with their ecosystem. So how did those dynamics change of competition and innovation in this? You know, the gig. Economy with open source and cloud. May I? Everywhere. >> Big implications. I mean, I I think you know, and this is the funny point you made is nontraditional competitors, because I think most of our clients and ourselves recognized that we haven't incredible amount of nontraditional competitors entering our space in professional services. We have companies that are not overtly going after our space, but are creating capabilities for our clients to do for themselves what we used to do for them. Data collection, for example, is one of those areas where clients used to spend money for consultants coming in to gather data into aggregate data with tools today that's ah, a very short process, and they do it themselves. So that's a disintermediation or on bundling of our business. But every business has these types of competitive non Trish competitive threats, and what we're seeing is that those same principles that we talked about earlier of the twenty first century surprise applies, right? How are they leveraging there the base and how they leveraging their workforce? Are they? Do they have a data strategy to think through? Okay, what happens if somebody else knows more about my customers than I do? Right? What does that do to make those kinds of questions need to be asked an innovation as a capability I think is a good partner and driving that nothing I would say, is that eco systems and you made you mention that word, and I want to pick up on that. I mean, I think eco systems air becoming a force in competitive protection and competitive potential going forward. If you think about a lot of you know, household names relative Teo data, you know Amazon's one of them. They are involved in the back office in the middle ofthis have so many organizations they're in integrated in those supply chains. Value change, I think services firms, and particularly to be thinking about how do they integrate into the supply chains of their customers so that they transcend the boars of, you know, their four walls, those eco systems and IBM was We consider KPMG considers IBM to be part of our ecosystem, right? Um, as well as other technology. >> So they're one of one of the things we're hearing from IBM. Jenny talked about it yesterday, and her keynote was doubling down on trust. Essentially one. Could you be implying that trust is a barrier to ay? Ay adoption is that. Is that true? Is that what your data show? >> We we we see that very much in spades. In fact, um, you know, I I if you think about it quite frankly, our oppa has driven a lot of people to class to class three. Amalgamation czar opportunities. But what's happening is we're seeing a slowdown because the price of some of these initials were big. But trust, culture and trust are big issues. In fact, we just released recently. Aye, Aye. And control framework, which includes methods and tools assessments to help our clients that were working with the city of Amsterdam today on a system for their citizens that helped them have accountability. Make sure there's no bias in their systems. As a I systems learn and importantly, explain ability. Imagine, you know. Ah, newlywed couple going into a bank to get a house note and having the banker sit back and have his Aye, aye, driven. You know, assessment for mortgage applicability. Come up moored. Recommend air saying no. You Ugh. I can't offer you a mortgage because my data shows you guys going to be divorced, right? We don't want to tell it to a newlywed couple, right? So explain ability about why it's doing what it's doing and put it in terms that relate to customer service. I mean, that's a pretty it's a silly example, but it's a true example of the day. There's a lot of there's a lack of explain ability in terms of how a eyes coming up with some of its conclusions. Lockbox, right? So a trusted A I is a big issue. >> All right, Steve, Framework that you just talked about the twenty first century enterprise. Is there a book or their papers? So I just go to the website, Or do I need to be a client? Read more about, >> you know, absolutely. You can go to our website, kpmg dot com and you can get all the della you want on the twenty first century enterprise. It talks to how we connect our customers front to middle toe back offices. How they think about those those pillars, the technologies we can help them with. Make change happen there, etcetera. So I appreciate it that >> we'll check it out that way. Don't be left in the twentieth century. Come on. >> No, you can't use twentieth century answers to solve twenty first century challenges, right? >> Well, Steve, he'll really appreciate giving us the twenty first century update for day. Volante on student will be back with our next guest here. IBM think twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching you.

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit '18. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018 at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, San Francisco. Great event, 900 people, we're excited to be here, it's our second year, and now we get to talk to some customers, which we are always excited to do. And our next guest is Alan Alderson. He is the Director of IT Ops for William Hill. Great to see you. >> Afternoon, it's great to be here. >> Absolutely, so for people that aren't familiar with William Hill, what are you guys all about? >> So William Hill offer customers opportunities to place bets on sporting events, presidential elections, snow at Christmas, you name it. We present about a million opportunities every week for customers to have a bet on. >> A million opportunities a week? >> Yeah, so picking on football matches, you know the game of the ramble. So we have opportunities for people to bet playing up to the game, and then once the game kicks off, we transition into what's called in play, so people can then place a bet on who's going to score the next goal, and about another 120 markets within that one game whilst the game's in play. >> Wow, so what's the average duration of the window to put a bet down? >> So generally leading up to the match it's as much time as you want, as soon as the markets are out there you can place the bet before the game kicks off. >> Okay. >> But once the game kicks off, you can, right up until about towards the last few minutes of the game, there'll be markets available to have a bet on. >> Okay, and then what percentage is kind of things that I would guess easily, like sporting events or those types of things, versus you know, whether it's going to snow or not? >> Well we provide the opportunities on the website, so you can have a look and, you know it's snow on Christmas day is a popular bet. People do their research, and they like to have a bet on it. There is a lot of novelty bets. There used to be, you know, life being found on Mars, Elvis being found, et cetera. So there's a lot >> Still taking action on Elvis? >> I don't think so. >> I thought we'd find him. So we're here at PagerDuty Summit. What are you doing here at PagerDuty Summit? >> So I've just come back from a stint in Australia, working for the William Hill business over there. So we introduced PagerDuty over there to help out with just getting the right message out to the right support teams quickly. So we deployed it out there, and we just brought it in to do infrastructure to start with but once we deployed it, it's a bit of a ripple effect. So it was like dropping a pebble into a pool, the ripple effect, and everybody, they seem to be doing all right over there, they use it now for the support models and so those sorts of questions. It's very quick how the other teams decided to latch onto PagerDuty as well. So I since moved back to the UK. So I moved back in January, took on this role back in the Leeds office in the north of England, and one of the first things I said is, guys, start having a look at PagerDuty, we've deployed it successfully in Australia, so let's have a look at what it can do for us. And so management works at William Hill. So I'm not trying to fix anything that's broken. So, it works. But what we can do is increase its speed of how we deal with things. So there's a lot of manual tasks in there that PagerDuty will come in and automate. It will take the pressure off the incident analysts 'cause, you know if there's an incident at two o'clock in the morning, we have 24 by seven business, so if there's an incident overnight, we've got to get on it and start fixing, resolving the incident. And if there's one guy who's trying to call out a number of responders, calling out a duty manager, trying to get comms out, it's a lot of pressure on one person to do that, and when there's pressure mistakes happen. I want PagerDuty to take away the possibility of the mistakes, take the pressure of the incident analyst, so they can focus on resolving the incident and getting service back to our customers as quickly as possible. >> I'm curious though when you said that other people and other groups saw PagerDuty in action. What were some of the other tasks that were not the primary tasks that you brought it in, where people saw value and are implementing it for some other types of activities? >> So initially when we put it in, we put it in purely for service. So for looking at the CPU disk and memory alerts. And we were getting our acknowledgements down from minutes to seconds in Australia. So the other teams are watching in, and within their applications there was a lot of alerts just landing as an email and not getting actioned upon very quickly. So we brought PagerDuty in, they said, can this help out in this space, and they started integrating it into their applications. So through hooking it into their applications they could get the alerts directly from PagerDuty, rather than it going through knocks and service decks et cetera, so it's just a quicker response and get 'em onto the issue quicker. >> And do you have it integrated in with some of your other development tools so it's just kind of part of whole process, or is it more kind of standalone notification system? >> It was integrated straight into ServiceNow and PagerDuty. PagerDuty would integrate with ServiceNow, raise the ticket, and then the things started moving. But the big win was getting the guys the call straight away as that alert happened. Otherwise you're relying on people watching screens, watching queues, waiting for that to happen, and then make the call. So if the call's gone straight to the engineer, he's on it immediately. >> Right, right, right. So what are some of your impressions here? Seeing kind of the ecosystem, what's behind PagerDuty, some great keynotes earlier today, really in terms of, again, the mission it sounds like it's very much in line with what you're trying to do, which is to help teams be more effective. >> Yeah, and what I like about PagerDuty is their passion. You just get a sense of urgency about this place, and you get a sense of passion and commitment, and they want to help people out, and that's what's drawn me to PagerDuty. The guys I worked with in Australia, the guys I worked with in the UK, they just can't do enough for you, and they want to help you succeed as well. You know, you deals with some companies that, they just want to sell you something and move on. These guys are, you know, they look after you, they work with you and they make sure that you're getting the value out of their product. >> It's a pretty interesting culture, 'cause when I talked to Jennifer Tejada a couple of years ago, I used to tease her, I'm like, nobody here knows what a pager is, right? Nobody was born when pagers were >> I had one. >> the rage. >> You had one, yeah, I had one. Shell Oil upside down, I think it says hello, I can't remember, I have to check that. But it's an interesting, there's kind of culture around what a pager represents, and the work that they have duty in there as well, which is a very different kind of level of responsibility when you are the person with the pager on, and that seems to have really carried forward in the way that they deliver the services. >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, on-call has people running, doesn't it? When people, you know when they join a job and go, "Oh you might be expected to be on call", they run a mile, and they think that's not for me. But as we go down more of a DevOps transformation and we get a lot more down the we code it, we own it model, I think it'll change people's perceptions of being on call and just doing the right thing for the business, rather thank, you know, delivering something and expecting the Ops team to fix it all the time and call out the developers at a third line. We should be, we are heading towards being a team, where the alerts go to the right people at the right time, and we get issues resolved as soon as possible. >> Right. I'd just love to get your take on, a lot of talk about digital transformation, and the modernization of IT, and kind of expected behavior on apps going on. You're right in the middle of it. >> Massively in the middle of it. >> Massively in the middle of it, right. I'm sure, what percentage of your bets come in via mobile versus... >> On the digital platform, over 56%. >> A lot, right, a lot. >> And we've got, just said in the last session we had is, we've got competition. So if our app isn't performing, it isn't quick, or it's down, people will go elsewhere. They've got options, they've got choices, and they'll just go elsewhere. And the challenge is getting those customers back. We want to have a stack that just is available and is performing, so we don't drive customers away, or we make sure that things are available at peak times, so when they are wanting to bet on the Super Bowl, the Grand National, the three o'clock kickoffs on a Saturday afternoon in the UK, it's available for them and people can get the bet on as quickly as possible. >> Right. So do you have all your own infrastructure, or do you leverage public cloud? I'm just thinking as you're talking about Super Bowl and some of these other big events, you must have just crazy big spikes. >> You know we've, in the UK it's all on-premise, so we've got to build an infrastructure to cope with that one day of the year, which is Grand National. In the US, we've just opened up in New Jersey. The front end of that stack is in AWS, so we can scale, so when Super Bowl does turn round next January, February, we should be able to scale with the load. >> Right, last question before I let you go. What are your priorities next? What are some of the things that you're working on with your team, to kind of stay at the leading edge of this very competitive space? >> Yeah we're heading into AWS. So we're looking to move into Amazon next year, start migrating some applications in there, and we're looking to get some applications in there the back end of this year, but migrate the existing apps from the start of next year. We're going through a DevOps transformation. We've been doing an agile transformation as well over the last 12 to 18 months, so there's a huge amount of digital transformation going on at William Hill at the moment. It's a very, very exciting place to be. The US expansion, the place has just gone mad, you know. There's a lot going on, it's just a great place to be. >> Yeah, I mean significant changes obviously in the US attitude, I think you guys are a little more progressive on that side of the Atlantic. Big changes happening here. >> 14th of May was a big day, PASPA being repealed has opened up the betting opportunities in any state that wants to regulate. And we are leading the way in that charge at the moment, so it's very exciting. >> All right, well I'm going to let you go so you can get some sleep, 'cause I'm sure you're a very busy man. Alan, thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, he's Alan, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at PagerDuty Summit 2018, thanks for watching.

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. (light electronic music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering day one of the LiveWorx conference that's hosted by PTC. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Professor Linda A. Hill is here. She's the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Professor Hill, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, innovation, lot of misconceptions about innovation and where it stems from. People think of Steve Jobs, well, the innovation comes from a single leader and a visionary who gets us in a headlock and makes it all happen. That's not really how innovation occurs, is it? >> No, it is not, actually. Most innovation is the result of a collaboration amongst people of different expertise and different points of view, and in fact, unless you have that diversity and some conflict, you rarely see innovation. >> So this is a topic that you've researched, so this isn't just an idea that you had. You've got proof and documentation of this, so tell us a little more about the work that you do at Harvard. >> So really over 10 years ago, I began to look at the connection between leadership and innovation, because it turns out that like a lot of organizations, the academy is quite siloed, so the people studying innovation were very separate from the ones who studied leadership, and we look at the connection between the two. When you look at that, what you discover is that leading innovation is actually different from leading change. Leading change is about coming up with a vision, communicating that vision, and inspiring people to want to fulfill that vision. Leading innovation is not about that. It's really more about how do you create a space in which people will be willing and able to do the kind of collaborative work required for innovation to happen? >> Sometimes I get confused, maybe you can help me, between invention and innovation. How should we think about those two dimensions? >> Innovation and invention. The way I think about it is an innovation is something that's both an invention, i.e. new, plus useful. So it can be an innovation or it can be creative, but unless it's useful and addresses an opportunity or a challenge that an organization faces, for me, that's not an innovation. So you need both, and that is really the paradox. How do you unleash people's talents and passions so you get the innovation or the invention or the new, and then how do you actually combine that, or harness all of those different ideas so that you get something that is useful, that actually solves a problem that the collective needs solved? >> So there's an outcome that involves changing something, adoption, as part of that innovation. >> For instance, one of the things that we're doing a lot right now is we're working with organizations, incumbents, I guess you'd call them, that have put together these innovation labs to create digital assets. And the problem is that those digital assets get created, they're new, if you will, but unless the core business will adopt them and use them, they get implemented, they're not going to be useful. So we're trying to understand, how do you take what gets created in those innovation labs, those assets, if you will, and make sure that the organization takes them in and scales them so that you can actually solve a business problem? >> Professor Hill, a fascinating topic I love digging into here. Because you see so many times, startups are often people that get frustrated inside a large company. I've worked for some very large companies, so which have had labs, or research division, and even when you carve aside time for innovation, you do programs on that, there's the corporate antibodies that fight against that. Maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic. Can large companies truly innovate? >> Yes, large companies can truly innovate. We do see it happening, it is not easy by any means, and I think part of the dilemma for why we don't see more innovation is actually our mindset about what leadership is about and who can innovate. So if I could combine a couple of things you asked, invention, often when we talk to people about what is innovation, they think about technology, and they think about new, and if I'm not a technologist and I'm not creative, then I can't play the game. But what we see in organizations, big ones that can innovate, is they don't separate out the innovators from the executors. They tell everybody, guess what, your job no matter who you are, of course you need to deal with making sure we get done what we said we'd deliver, but if we're going to delight our customers or we're ever going to really get them to be sticky with us, you also need to think about not just what should you be doing, but what could you be doing. In the literature, in the research, that's called how do you close an opportunity gap and not just a performance gap? In the organizations we look at that are innovative, that can innovate time and again, they have a very democratic notion: everybody has a role to play. So our work, Collective Genius, is called Collective Genius because what we saw in Pixar was the touchstone for that work, is that they believe everybody has a slice of genius. They're not equally big or whatever, but everybody has a contribution to make, and you need to use yours to come up with what's new and useful. A lot of that will be incremental, but some of it will be breakthrough. So I think what we see with these innovation labs and the startups, if you will, is that often people do go to start them up, of course they eventually have to grow their business, so a part of what I find myself doing now is helping startups that have to scale, figure out how to maintain that culture, those capabilities, that allowed them to be successful in the first place, and that's tough one for startups, right? >> Yeah, I think Pixar's only about a 1,500 person company and they all have creativity in wat they do. I'm wondering if there's some basic training that's missing. I studied engineering and I didn't get design training in my undergraduate studies. It wasn't until I was out in the workforce that I learned about that. What kind of mindset and training do you have to do to make sure the people are open to this? >> One of the things that I did related to this is about five years ago, I told our dean of Harvard Business School that I needed to join the board of an organization called Arts Center. I don't know if you were aware of Arts Center in Pasadena. It's the number one school of industrial design in the U.S., and people don't know about it 'cause I always laugh at them. The man who designed the Apple store is a graduate there. The man who designed Tesla car and et cetera, so they're not so good at it, but one of the things that we've all come to understand is design thinking, lean startup, these are all tools that can help you be better at innovation, but unless you create an environment around that, people are going to be willing to use those tools and make the missteps, the failures that might come with it, know how to collaborate together, even when they're a large organization, I mean it's easier when you're smaller. But unless you know how to do all that, those tools, the lean startup or digital or design thinking or whatever, ' cause I'm working with a lot of the people who do that, and deep respect for them, nothing gets done. In the end, we are human, we all need to know first off that it's worthwhile to take the risk to get done whatever it is you want to get done, so what's the purpose of the work, how's it going to change the world? The second thing is we need to share a set of values about learning because we have to understand, as you well know, you cannot plan your way to an innovation, you have to act your way. And with the startup, you act as fast as you can, right, so somebody will give you enough money before you run out of money. Same similar process you have to do in a large company, an incumbent, but of course it's more complicated. The other thing that makes it more complicated is companies are global, and the other part of it that makes it more complicated that I'm seeing like in personalized medicine: you need to build an ecosystem of different kinds, of nanotechnologists, biotechnologists, different expertise to come together. All of this, frankly, you don't learn any of it in school. I remember learning that you can't teach anyone how to lead. You actually have to help people learn how to lead themselves and technologists will frequently say to me, i don't know why, you're a leadership professor? Well, this is a technical problem. We just haven't figured out the platform right, and once we get it right, all will be. No, once you get it right, humans are still going to resist change and not know how to necessarily learn together to get this done. >> I wonder if, are there any speacial leadership skills we need for digital transformation? Really kind of the overarching theme of the show here, help connect the dots for us. >> So the leading change piece is about having a vision, communicating it, and inspiring people. What it really does turn out when we look at exceptional leaders of innovation, and all of us would agree that they've done wonderful things time and again, not just once, they understand that is collective. They spend time building a culture and capabilities that really will support people collaborating together. The first one they build is, how do we know how to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse? Yeah, you can brainstorm, but eventually, we have to abrade and have conflict. They know how to have healthy debates in which people are taught terms of skills, basic stuff, not just listening and inquiring, but how to actively advocate in a constructive way for your point of view, these leaders have to learn how to amplify difference, whereas many leaders learn how to minimize it. And as the founder of Pixar once said, you can never have too many cooks in the kitchen. Many people believe you can. It's like today, you need as much talent as you can get. Your job as a leader, what are the skills you need to get those top cooks to be able to cook a meal together, not to reduce the amount of diversity. You got to be prepared for the healthy fight. >> You've pointed this out in some of your talks is that you've got to have that debate. >> Yes, you have to. >> That friction, to create innovation, but at the same time it has to be productive. I know it can be toxic to an organization, maybe talk about that a little. >> I think one of the challenges is what skills do people need to learn? One is, how do you deal with conflict when people are very talented and passionate? I think many people avoid conflict or don't know how to engage that constructively, just truly don't, and they avoid it. I find that many times organizations aren't doing what they need to do because the leadrr is uncomfortable. The other thing, and I'm going to stereotype horribly here, but I'm an introvert, that book quiet is wonderful, but one of the challenges you have if you're more introverted or if you're more technical and you tend to look at things from a technical point of view, in some ways is that you often find the people with that kind of, that's what drives them, there's a right answer, there's a rational answer we need to get through or get to, as opposed to understanding that really innovative ideas are often the combination of ideas that look like they're in conflict initially, and by definition, you need to have the naive eye and the expert working together to come up with that innovative solution, so for someone who's a technologist to think they should listen to someone who's naive about a technical problem, just the very basic mindset you have about who's going to have the idea. So that's a tricky one, it's a mindset, it's not even just a skill level, it's more, who do you think actually is valuable? Where is that slice that you need at this moment going to come from? It may not be from that expert, it may be from the one who had no point of view. I heard a story that I was collecting my data, and apparently, Steve Jobs went to see Ed Land. We're here in Boston over Polaroid, which is one of our most innovative companies, right, in the history. And he said, what do I need to learn from you? And what Land said to him is, whenever my scientist and technologist get stuck, I have some of the art students or the humanities students come in and spend time in the lab. They will ask the stupid question because they don't know it's stupid. The expert's not going to ask the stupid question, particularly the tech expert, not going to ask it. They will ask the question that gets the first principles. I think, but I wouldn't want to be held to this, the person who was telling me the story, that's partly how they came up with the instant camera. Some naive person said, why do I have to wait? Why can't I have it now? And of course, silly so-and-so, you don't know it takes this, that, and the others. Then someone else thought, why does she have to wait? I think it was really a she who asked the question, the person telling me this, and they came up with a different way. Who said it has to be done in a darkroom in that way? I think that there's certain things about our mindset independently of our skill, that get in the way of our actually hearing all the different voices we need to hear to get that abrasion going in the right way. >> Listening to those Columbo questions, you say, can sometime lead to an outcome that is radically different. There's a lot of conversation in our industry, the technology industry, about, we call it the cordially shock clock, the companies are on a cordially reporting mechanism or requirement from the SEC. A lot of complaints about that, but at the same time, it feels like at least in the tech business, that U.S. companies tend to be more innovative. But again, you hear a lot of complaints about, well, they can't think for the long term. Can you help us square that circle? >> It's funny, so one thing is you rarely ever get innovation without constraint. If you actually talk to people who are trying to innovate, there needs to be the boundaries around it in which they're doing the constraint. To be completely free rarely leads to, it is the constraint. Now we did do a study of boards to try to understand when is a board facilitating innovation and when is a board interfering with it? We interviewed CEOs and lead directors of a number of companies and wrote an article about that last year, and what we did find is many boards actually are seen as being inhibitors. They don't help management make the right decision. Then of course the board would say now management's the one that's too conservative, but this question about how the board, with guidance, and all of these issues have come up when you're looking at research analysts and who you play to, and I've been on corporate boards. One thing is that the CEO needs to know that the board is actually going to be supportive of his or her choices relative to how you communicate why you're making the choices you're making. So there is pressure, and I think it's real. We can't tell CEOs, no, you don't need to care about it, 'cause guess what, they do get in trouble if they don't. On the other hand, if they don't know how to make the argument for investing in terms of helping the company grow, so in the long run, innovation is not innovation for innovation's sake, it's to meet customer needs so you can grow, so you need to have a narrative that makes sense and be able to talk with people, the different stakeholders, about why you're making certain choices. I must say that I think that many times companies may be making the right choice for the long haul, and get punished in the short run, for sure that happens, but I also think that there are those companies that get a way with a lot of investment in the long haul, partly because they do, over time, deliver, and there is evidence that they're making the right choices or have built a culture where people think what they're saying might actually happen or be delivered. What's happening right now because of the convergence of industries, is I think a lot of CEOS, it's a frightening time, it is difficult to sustain success these days, because what you have to do is innovate at low cost. Going back to some other piece about boards, one of the things we've found is so many board members define innovation as being technology. Technology has a very important enabling role to play in otherwise, but they have such a narrow definition of it in a way that again, they create a culture to let the people in the innovation lab innovate, but not one where everybody understands that all of us, together, need to innovate in ways that will also prepare us to execute better. They don't see the whole culture transformation, digital transformation often requires cultural transformation for you to be able to get this stuff done, and that's what takes a long time. Takes a long time to get rid of your legacy systems and put in these new, or get that balance right, but what takes even longer is getting the culture to be receptive to using that new data capability they have and working in different ways and collaborating when they've been very siloed and they're paid to be very siloed. I think that unless you show, as a CEO, that you are actually putting all of those building blocks in place, and that's what you're about, you understand it's a transformation at that level, you're just talking to the analysts about, we're going to do x, and there's no evidence about your culture or anything else going on, how you're going to lead to attract and retain the kind of talent you need, no one's buying that, I think that that's the problem. There's not a whole story that they're telling about how this goes together and they're going to move forward on it. >> To your other point, is there data to suggest, can you quantify the relationship between diversity and innovation? >> There are some data about that, I don't have it. I find it's very funny, as you can see, I'm an African-American woman. My work is on leadership globalization and innovation. I do a lot of work on how you deliver global strategies. I often find when I'm working with senior teams, they'll ask me, would you help us with our inclusion effort? And I think it's partly because of who I am and diversity comes up in our work, and if you actually build the environments for talking about, they tend to be more inclusive about diversity of thought. Not demographic diversity, those can be separate as we well know because we know Silicon Valley is not a place where you see a lot of demographic diversity, but you might see diversity of thought. I haven't asked, it's interesting, I have had some invitations by governments, too. Japan, which has womenomics, which is a part of their policy If they need to get more women in the economy, frankly, otherwise they can't grow as an economy. It turns out that the innovation story is the business case that many businesses or business people find one that they can buy into, doesn't feel like you're doing it 'cause it's the right thing, or not that you shouldn't do the right thing, but helping them understand how you really, really make sure that the minority voice is heard, and I mean minority of thought, independent of demographic, but if you create an environment as a leader where you actually run your team so that people do feel they can speak up, as you all know. It's so often, I'll talk to people afterwards and they'll say, I didn't say what I really thought about those ideas because I didn't want to be punished or I didn't want to step in that person's territory. People are making decisions based on varying complete information everyone knows. What often happens is it gets escalated up. We had this one senior team complaining, everything is so slow here, a very big bank, not the one I'm on the board of, another very big bank we're working with. Everything's so slow, people won't do anything. So when we actually ask people, what's happening? Why aren't you making decisions? First off, decisions making rights are very fuzzy in this organization, except for at the very top, so what they say is all decisions, actually, they're made on the 34th floor. We escalate 'cause if you make a decision, they're going to turn it over anyway, so we've backed off, or we don't say what we think 'cause I don't want them to say what they think about my ideas 'cause we actually have very separate business units here. >> We might get shot. >> You might get shot. That's the reality that many people live in, so we're not surprised to see that not very many organizations can innovate time and again when we think about the reality of what our contexts are. The good news for us is that in part, millennials won't tolerate some of these environments in the same way, which is going to be a good thing. I think they're marvelous to work with, I'm not one of them obviously, but I think a lot of what they're requesting, the transparency, the understanding the connections between what they do and are they having impact, the desire to be developed and be learning, and wanting to be an organization they're not ashamed of but in fact they're very proud to be a part of what's happening there, I think that that requires businesses and leaders to behave differently. One of the businesses we studied, if the millennial wants to know who's on the front line, he or she is making a difference. They had to do finance differently to be able to show, to draw the cause and effect between what that person was doing every day and how it impacted the client's work. That ended up being a really interesting task. Or a supply chain leader, who really needed them to think very differently about supply chain so they could innovate. What he ended up doing is, instead of thinking about our customers being the pharmaceutical company, the CBS or the big hospital chain or whatever it is, think about the end customer. What would we have to do with supply chain to ensure that that end patient took his or her pill on time and got better? And when they shifted the whole meaning of the work to that individual patient in his or her home, he was able, over time, to get the whole supply chain group organization to understand, we're not doing what we need to do if we're really going to reduce diabetes in the world because the biggest problem we have is not when they go and get their medication, it's whether they actually use it properly when they're there. So when you switched it to that being the purpose of the work, the mindset that everyone had to have, that's what we're delivering on. Everyone said, oh, this is completely appropriate, we needed digital, we need different kind of data to know what's going on there. >> Don't get me started on human health. Professor Hill, for an introvert, you're quite a storyteller, and we appreciate you sharing your examples and your knowledge. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. It was great to meet you. >> Been my pleasure, glad to know you, thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back right after this short break. You're watching the Cube from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back. (light electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon '18, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at DockerCon 2018 on a stunning day in San Francisco at Moscone West. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer and we're excited to welcome two new folks to theCUBE from Skytap. We've got Lucas Welch, the senior director of communications and Hamish Hill, technical product marketing manager. Hey, guys. >> Great to be here, thanks for having us. >> And thanks for adding a lot of color, Lucas, to our set. >> Well, I just wanted to bring enough flair that you could realize I might have something interesting to say. >> Awesome, so speaking of interesting things, tell us about Skytap, what do you guys do, who are you, where are you based? >> Great, so Skytap. Founded in 2006, so relatively old by start-up standards but it's allowed us to learn a lot about where clouded option has been going. And what we've seen is there really is an overlooked challenge that enterprises are facing today, right? So, cloud native development, growing rapidly, gonna continue to develop, but what do you do with all your old stuff, your existing applications? And so Skytap is a cloud purpose-built for modernizing those traditional applications and we do that through a process we call IPA, although we don't advocate that you drink on the job. It's Infrastructure, Process, and Architecture. And the idea is to really get yourself to true modernization and making the most of cloud, and containers, and all of the modern technologies we can see on the show floor behind us, you first need to modernize the infrastructure, get yourself out of the data center. From there, in eliminating that barrier, you're gonna be able to modernize the processes. How do you develop, how do you change your applications? And by getting better in that regard, adopting things like DevOps and agile methodologies, finally you can start to make changes to the application themselves. So, in short order, we are the cloud for modernizing traditional applications and we like to see ourselves as complementary to the folks at AWS behind us and others who are best for that cloud native web scale development of new applications. >> Great conversation this morning at the Key Note about modernizing applications. I think it's on everybody's mind because the world does not start fresh and new every day, right? We all are working with things that we've been carrying, for some cases, for years and decades. So Docker is talking about, in fact we modernized a .NET application, I think, this morning so they showed a little bit of a demo with that and kubernetes. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with Docker and, you know, some of the challenges that you work with in terms of modernizing applications? >> Yeah, Docker has a great framework with what they have with their MTA. Actually, our VP of Product, Dan Jones, presented yesterday on making modernization magical and really looking at how Skytap complements what Docker has with their MTA framework. And I think Skytap provides, with our IPA approach, a great platform for enterprises to execute the Docker MTA approach and beyond that, sort of what Skytap provides is the abilities, sort of, to move out of the data center and get away from the hardware side of things, and start to leverage some of the scale that you can get out of the cloud. >> What are some of the things that an enterprise, that a legacy application expects that it's not gonna have if you just lift and shift it. You know, why do we need Skytap? >> Yeah, I think what's important to remember is often, even just lifting and shifting it is very difficult because if you want a monolithic or traditional application that's very much wed to the infrastructure it was built on five, 10, 15 years ago, taking that and putting it in a hyper scale provider often means you gotta rewrite from scratch and that's a really arduous process, often one that creates a skills challenge in and of itself because not only do you need people to manage the existing application, you need a whole set of new skills to take a cloud-like approach to that development. So that can create a lot of challenges and so what we see here at DockerCon, really the reason we're here, is both Docker and Skytap see the next wave of cloud, the next wave of modern development, is gonna be, "How do we bring all these benefits we've seen "in Cloud Native development "to those existing applications?" and what we see ourselves doing is eliminating that infrastructure barrier so then you can really start using containers to their full benefit, whether it's in Skytap cloud, in another cloud, or both. >> So, just to follow up a little bit. So it's not just some services like, I don't know, you've gotta have authentication, and you've gotta have storage, and you've gotta have all the things that an old legacy application, sitting in a data center, expects. But it sounds like, also, there's operational services as well and being able to operate with that kind of cloud-level agility? >> Yeah, what we provide with Skytap is, you know, we have a concept of a Skytap environment and so within that environment, you can have your traditional X86, sort of, VMware-based workloads. We also support IBM power systems. So we're the only cloud that can run AIX workloads and Linux on power and so alongside that, what we get is sort of the combination of being able to bring in containers as well and so as organizations go through that modernization journey, being able to receive or see value in the hybrid applications, sort of, along the way. >> We saw a lot of stats, thanks Lucas, this morning I think one of the first ones that I saw was in the press release that Docker released which was, this morning, 85% of enterprise organizations are running a multi-cloud strategy, so that's pretty pervasive. We're also seeing stats like, up to 90%, we had Scott Johnston on earlier, their Chief Product Officer, up to 90% of enterprises are spending, sorry. Enterprises are spending up to 90% of their IT budgets just keeping the lights on for traditional applications. As you said, lift and shift isn't practical for a number of reasons. You also talked about, you know, skill-set changes there. So I'm curious, what are some of the, kind of, common challenges you're seeing in the customer environment where they might be trepidatious to go to the container journey and how specifically does Skytap and Docker knock those out of the park? >> Yeah, well those stats, I think, are really indicative of the challenge and then the new approaches that companies are trying to take to solve that challenge which is, you have so much invested in what's made your company successful, and if you're a long-standing enterprise doing well on your market, you've been doing this for 10, 15, 20, maybe more, years and you've done very well to get yourself to where you are. You've invested millions, if not billions in your infrastructure, your talent, and the people that build the systems that run your business so to burn that all to the ground and start from scratch doesn't make a lot of sense and so, I think, one challenge you run into is inertia, right. It's like "Hey, we did well to get here, "why do we need to suddenly change everything we're doing?" And Skytap's recommendation is you don't need to change everything, but you do need to prepare to be able to change much more rapidly as our economy continues to be more driven by digital technique. So you have inertia as a challenge. I think you also have that idea that if you're spending 90%, as you said, right, of what you just got with the lights on, where's the money and where's the time gonna come for net new and how can you bring those two together? And so that's really where I think Skytap would play a big role is bridging that gap from where you are today, allowing you to leverage the people that you have, the skills that they have, the technology that you have invested in. So you don't have to throw that all out overnight. And instead you can get more and more value out of it as you bring it into the cloud, gain incremental agility, and then, over time, make the modernization and evolutionary changes you want to make based on business needs, not having technology drive what your business does. >> How much of that is a cultural change that you guys can help companies understand is essential? Because culture, change in culture is obviously, especially with large enterprises, they can't pivot that quickly, but culture is essential for a company to successfully undergo digital transformation. I'm just wondering, what kind of conversations are you seeing with that inertia? How much of it is culture needs to change and mindsets to embrace, you know, moving forward? >> Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of this in the conversations we have with customers. We see a lot of it comes out of the market from what analysts sort of have to say as well and I think reasons out of an analyst article that was shared sort of publicly so it talks about, actually, enterprises who have adopted DivOps first are actually more successful in the move to containerization and that's what we see, sort of, with the customers that come to us. And what we're able to provide and what the customers see in Skytap is, actually, the simplicity of the UI that we provide is, actually, a good step from what they currently have without sort of needing to get into what can often be multiple UI's and screens in some of the hyper scale cloud providers. And then on top of that, sort of, the on-demand access to environment so you're taking away, sort of, what is typically a reactive approach from corporate IT when they need to reach out and go, "Hey, I need "another environment or I need another BM like this." And these organizations, it's often taking maybe six to eight weeks to get those environments turned around. We can provision a complex environment in less than, sort of, 30 seconds in Skytap. So it enables those teams to be a lot more productive in what they're doing. And there's sort of the first phase of deciding to sort of adopt the changing culture before sort of even getting into that move from, sort of, after linking in with legacy applications, you've gotta waterfall SDLC, and so actually moving from there into, sort of, more agile approaches and looking at how you can increase release cadence and what, sort of, comes into that from a people aspect, and a process change, and a methodology, and how Skytap, sort of, supports that along with integration with other third party's automation tools as well. >> Yeah, I think you nailed it on the culture point and I just wanted to not forget about people as being a big part of culture, right? And you have, fear is a very real thing, right? Fear of change, fear of net new. And so in our own adoption of Docker, and containers, and kubernetes internally. SO our cloud runs on a very large kubernetes cluster of containerized services so internally, over the last few years, we went through our own modernization journey. And I think that, paired with some research we've seen, we recently did a study with 451 Research looking at what enterprise tech leaders are experiencing. The fear of change, the reticence to change, and then just the lack of knowledge of, "Okay, what is required of me?" Like, "You're asking me to change overnight. "All of a sudden I have to take classes at night "while I do my day job." I think these are really, very realistic and human questions to ask and I think you need to take that into account when you're looking at digital transformation, modernization, so thinking about, "Hey, how do we communicate, "with transparency, what we expect and the time frame?" Let's be upfront about the challenges we expect to run into and where we're gonna have problems and how we'll deal with those together. And make sure the communication is crisp, and clear, and consistent, so that people at least know what's going on, even if they may not like it upfront. >> Well, Lucas, you brought up kubernetes and containers, right? We're here at DockerCon, so, obviously, containers on the tip of everybody's tongue. But you also work with legacy apps, which traditionally, I suppose at this point, traditional means a VM. So how does that go together? What are you looking at your customers? Are they able to transition to more containerized infrastructure? Are they sticking with VMs? I mean, how do modern containers fit into the Skytap platform here? >> Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of adoption with our customers who are moving into Skytap with their traditional applications and we continue to, sort of, learn and observe what they're doing. For us, there's two types of customers that move to Skytap. The first of those are really looking to migrate their whole data center or evacuate the data centers going, "Where can I put these legacy applications?" You know, there's not many places they can sort of go and so they move them into Skytap, get them up and running in there, and sort of see some benefits in that. And then, almost organically, start to look at going, well how else can I make, or get my team to be sort of more cloud-native or cloud reading. It's sort of an evolution of the people component we were talking about before and sort of going, all right, well as I get my teams more ready for cloud native, they start to sort of move towards containers and cloud native services. For our, sort of, other organizations that come in are those who already know and probably have already experienced, you know, other cloud, sort of, modernizations and are looking at what have they been able to achieve and what do they learn from that. And seen the value in actually Skytap and actually come to us with the approach of going, "Right, we want to come in here. "We want to move to more agile sort of methods. "We want to, sort of, start to take our traditional "monolithic applications, break it down "into into microservices, and move it into containers." >> I'm curious. One of the things that Steve Singh, the CEO of Docker, said this morning during his keynote was, about half the room, there's about five to six thousand people here at DockerCon, their fifth conference, that only about half of them are already on this containerization journey. I'm curious, and I know there's no one-size-fits-all, but when you're talking to customers who are at the preface of going, "All right, we've gotta do this. "This is really an essential component "of our transformation." What's the time frame that they could look to see measurable business impact once they start working with Skytap and Docker on this container journey? >> Yeah, well, I think we've gotta move away collectively as an industry from the idea that there's a Big Bang or silver bullet approach to change, right? I spent the five previous years before joining Skytap last year at a company called Chef Software, competes with Puppet, who's here on the show floor. Automation software. And what I saw there in terms of both DevOps adoption, adoption of automation, and the transition to the cloud, is that if you think you can get everybody full sale on the same amount of change at the same time, to do that effectively in a relatively reasonable amount of time, you're going to not only fail, but by failing, you actually set yourself further back than had you taken a more iterative approach. So I think from a time perspective, I think the first answer is you'll never be done so presume that the journey will continue into perpetuity because continuing to gain agility, continuing to get better at delivering software, to deliver value to customers, I don't see an end to that in any sort of near-term in our economy so I think that's gonna go on for a long time. So digital transformation, modernization, whatever buzz word people may want to use, the idea of evolving and changing is an ongoing process. I think, then, business leaders will say, "Well, that's baloney, I need change now. "I want results." I think, start with a project that has a deadline associated with it, alright? We need to be able to deliver our customer banking app online, via mobile, by January. Okay, well, bite that off singularly and so that you focus on that first, you learn from how you do that process, and then you can take those learnings, communicate them, and pick another project and another project. So we recommend kind of an iterative, progressive approach that will put time and measurable goals around a specific project, meet those deadlines, hopefully, if you're successful, and then give you a lot to learn and operate off of the next time. >> That's great. I'm really kind of curious about looking forward and economic models. You know, everything is as a service at this point. You have a lot of traditional providers, the Dells and HPEs of the world who sell a lot of hardware still and sell a lot of things upfront and they, the analysts and everyone else scratching their heads about how they get to sell more services along with that. Skytap's already there. You're selling your cloud provider, you're selling a service, in some ways you're replacing some of the infrastructure or, you know, an adjunct to it. I'm just kind of curious, going forward, I mean, is this the future of cloud? As a service provider, how do you see the economic model of the DNA of Skytap partnering with people? We've ended up talking about process and people more than we've ended up talking about technology today. Which is kind of fascinating. But is that, project us into the future, what do you all see? >> Yeah, I think what we see today with cloud, and the microservices and container model is really the evolution of what was sort of the virtual data center and developing in sort of VMs. And so sort of going a step beyond that, we're seeing the container model grow and as you rightly pointed out, we talked a lot about people and process and I think that sort of was what's holding back a little of the enterprise adoption today and I think as organizations get into this sort of process and mindset, almost and sort of going, "Hey, things are gonna continue to evolve over time "and our organizations need to be "ready to adopt a lot of these." And this isn't just sort of your development level as well as looking at right, well how does your corporate IT teams, how do your security teams and other parts of the business realize this is gonna continue to evolve really quickly? And I think that's what we're gonna continue to see, sort of up front and it's gonna drive a lot of the adoption of the cloud native services and containers but it's gonna take a bit of time for some organizations to get there. >> Yeah, I have a soapbox, I want to stand on it real quickly. I think cloud is the way forward, right? So no one wants to be in the infrastructure business long-term. So I think regardless of what your deployment model will be, most businesses, five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, I don't see them owning a lot of data center real estate, right? So make the infrastructure someone else's problem. Whether that's Skytap, whether that's AWS, whether that's Azure, or, frankly, whether that's all of us, to your multi-cloud statistic, right? We see the same thing. It's much like the data center was today and has been for a long time. Use the right tool for the right job. You've got a mix of technologies so you're not locked in to any single vendor and you're able to fit technology to your business needs so I think, one, we're going cloud and that's gonna be the way it is. I think, two, is open source, right? I mean, that's where containers gained all their momentum where Docker did a fantastic job of really giving a vibrant community of developers an opportunity to do their work much more easy, much easier and much faster. And so I think you'll continue to see open source play a much larger component in how, even very large, long-standing businesses, develop what they're doing. And then you bring those two together, right? You look at, how can the cloud ecosystem best support open source tools to deliver and develop software that's gonna add value at the end of the day. >> Guys, I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us what Skytap is doing and how you're enabling customers to not just evolve from a technology standpoint but, I think, as we've all talked about here, really, what might even be more important is evolve the people and the processes. So thanks Lucas, thanks Hamish. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference, Spring, San Francisco, its theCUBE. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer event in San Francisco, Spring, 2018. About 100 people, predominantly practitioners, which is a pretty unique event. Not a lot of vendors, a couple of them around, but really a lot of people that are out in the wild doing this work. We're really excited to have a return guest. We last saw him at Spark Summit East 2017. Can you believe I keep all these shows straight? I do not. Alfred Essa, he is the VP, Analytics and R&D at McGraw-Hill Education. Alfred, great to see you again. >> Great being here, thank you. >> Absolutely, so last time we were talking it was Spark Summit, it was all about data in motion and data on the fly, and real-time analytics. You talked a lot about trying to apply these types of new-edge technologies and cutting-edge things to actually education. What a concept, to use artificial intelligence, a machine learning for people learning. Give us a quick update on that journey, how's it been progressing? >> Yeah, the journey progresses. We recently have a new CEO come on board, started two weeks ago. Nana Banerjee, very interesting background. PhD in mathematics and his area of expertise is Data Analytics. It just confirms the direction of McGraw-Hill Education that our future is deeply embedded in data and analytics. >> Right. It's funny, there's a often quoted kind of fact that if somebody came from a time machine from, let's just pick 1849, here in San Francisco, everything would look different except for Market Street and the schools. The way we get around is different. >> Right. >> The things we do to earn a living are different. The way we get around is different, but the schools are just slow to change. Education, ironically, has been slow to adopt new technology. You guys are trying to really change that paradigm and bring the best and latest in cutting edge to help people learn better. Why do you think it's taken education so long and must just see nothing but opportunity ahead for you. >> Yeah, I think the... It was sort of a paradox in the 70s and 80s when it came to IT. I think we have something similar going on. Economists noticed that we were investing lots and lots of money, billions of dollars, in information technology, but there were no productivity gains. So this was somewhat of a paradox. When, and why are we not seeing productivity gains based on those investments? It turned out that the productivity gains did appear and trail, and it was because just investment in technology in itself is not sufficient. You have to also have business process transformation. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So I think what we're seeing is, we are at that cusp where people recognize that technology can make a difference, but it's not technology alone. Faculty have to teach differently, students have to understand what they need to do. It's a similar business transformation in education that I think we're starting to see now occur. >> Yeah it's great, 'cause I think the old way is clearly not the way for the way forward. That's, I think, pretty clear. Let's dig into some of these topics, 'cause you're a super smart guy. One thing's talk about is this algorithmic transparency. A lot of stuff in the news going on, of course we have all the stuff with self-driving cars where there's these black box machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence, or augmented intelligence, bunch of stuff goes in and out pops either a chihuahua or a blueberry muffin. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Really, it's important to open up the black box. To open up so you can at least explain to some level of, what was the method that took these inputs and derived this outpout. People don't necessarily want to open up the black box, so kind of what is the state that you're seeing? >> Yeah, so I think this is an area where not only is it necessary that we have algorithmic transparency, but I think those companies and organizations that are transparent, I think that will become a competitive advantage. That's how we view algorithms. Specifically, I think in the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's skepticism, and that skepticism is justified. What are these machines? They're making decisions, making judgments. Just because it's a machine, doesn't mean it can't be biased. We know it can be. >> Right, right. >> I think there are techniques. For example, in the case of machine learning, what the machines learns, it learns the algorithm, and those rules are embedded in parameters. I sort of think of it as gears in the black box, or in the box. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> What we should be able to do is allow our customers, academic researchers, users, to understand at whatever level they need to understand and want to understand >> Right. >> What the gears do and how they work. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> Fundamental, I think for us, is we believe that the smarter our customers are and the smarter our users are, and one of the ways in which they can become smarter is understanding how these algorithms work. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> We think that that will allow us to gain a greater market share. So what we see is that our customers are becoming smarter. They're asking more questions and I think this is just the beginning. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> We definitely see this as an area that we want to distinguish ourselves. >> So how do you draw lines, right? Because there's a lot of big science underneath those algorithms. To different degrees, some of it might be relatively easy to explain as a simple formula, other stuff maybe is going into some crazy, statistical process that most layman, or business, or stakeholders may or may not understand. Is there a way you slice it? Is there kind of wars of magnitude in how much you expose, and the way you expose within that box? >> Yeah, I think there is a tension. The tension traditionally, I think organizations think of algorithms like they think of everything else, as intellectual property. We want to lock down our intellectual property, we don't want to expose that to our competitors. I think... I think that's... We do need to have intellectual property, however, I think many organizations get locked into a mental model, which I don't think is just the right one. I think we can, and we want our customers to understand how our algorithm works. We also collaborate quite a bit with academic researchers. We want validation from the academic research community that yeah, the stuff that you're building is in fact based on learning science. That it has warrant. That when you make claims that it works, yes, we can validate that. Now, where I think... Based on the research that we do, things that we publish, our collaboration with researchers, we are exposing and letting the world know how we do things. At the same time, it's very, very difficult to build an engineer, an architect, scalable solutions that implement those algorithms for millions of users. That's not trivial. >> Right, right, right. >> Even if we give away quite a bit of our secret sauce, it's not easy to implement that. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> At the same time, I believe and we believe, that it's good to be chased by our competition. We're just going to go faster. Being more open also creates excitement and an ecosystem around our products and solutions, and it just makes us go faster. >> Right, which gives to another transition point, which would you talk about kind of the old mental model of closed IP systems, and we're seeing that just get crushed with open source. Not only open source movements around specific applications, and like, we saw you at Spark Summit, which is an open source project. Even within what you would think for sure has got to be core IP, like Facebook opening up their hardware spec for their data centers, again. I think what's interesting, 'cause you said the mental model. I love that because the ethos of open source, by rule, is that all the smartest people are not inside your four walls. >> Exactly. >> There's more of them outside the four walls regardless of how big your four walls are, so it's more of a significant mental shift to embrace, adopt, and engage that community from a much bigger accumulative brain power than trying to just trying to hire the smartest, and keep it all inside. How is that impacting your world, how's that impacting education, how can you bring that power to bear within your products? >> Yeah, I think... You were in effect quoting, I think it was Bill Joy saying, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, they're always, you have smart people in your organization, there are always more smarter people outside your organization, right? How can we entice, lure, and collaborate with the best and the brightest? One of the ways we're doing that is around analytics, and data, and learning science. We've put together a advisory board of learning science researchers. These are the best and brightest learning science researcher, data scientists, learning scientists, they're on our advisory board and they help and set, give us guidance on our research portfolio. That research portfolio is, it's not blue sky research, we're on Google and Facebook, but it's very much applied research. We try to take the no-knowns in learning science and we go through a very quick iterative, innovative pipeline where we do research, move a subset of those to product validation, and then another subset of that to product development. This is under the guidance, and advice, and collaboration with the academic research community. >> Right, right. You guys are at an interesting spot, because people learn one way, and you've mentioned a couple times this interview, using good learning science is the way that people learn. Machines learn a completely different way because of the way they're built and what they do well, and what they don't do so well. Again, I joked before about the chihuahua and the blueberry muffin, which is still one of my favorite pictures, if you haven't seen it, go find it on the internet. You'll laugh and smile I promise. You guys are really trying to bring together the latter to really help the former. Where do those things intersect, where do they clash, how do you meld those two methodologies together? >> Yeah, it's a very interesting question. I think where they do overlap quite a bit is... in many ways machines learn the way we learn. What do I mean by that? Machine learning and deep learning, the way machines learn is... By making errors. There's something, a technical concept in machine learning called a loss function, or a cost function. It's basically the difference between your predicted output and ground truth, and then there's some sort of optimizer that says "Okay, you didn't quite get it right. "Try again." Make this adjustment. >> Get a little closer. >> That's how machines learn, they're making lots and lots of errors, and there's something behind the scenes called the optimizer, which is giving the machine feedback. That's how humans learn. It's by making errors and getting lots and lots of feedback. That's one of the things that's been absent in traditional schooling. You have a lecture mode, and then a test. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So what we're trying to do is incorporate what's called formative assessment, this is just feedback. Make errors, practice. You're not going to learn something, especially something that's complicated, the first time. You need to practice, practice, practice. Need lots and lots of feedback. That's very much how we learn and how machines learn. Now, the differences are, technologically and state of knowledge, machines can now do many things really well but there's still some things and many things, that humans are really good at. What we're trying to do is not have machines replace humans, but have augmented intelligence. Unify things that machines can do really well, bring that to bear in the case of learning, also insights that we provide. Instructors, advisors. I think this is the great promise now of combining the best of machine intelligence and human intelligence. >> Right, which is great. We had Gary Kasparov on and it comes up time and time again. The machine is not better than a person, but a machine and a person together are better than a person or a machine to really add that context. >> Yeah, and that dynamics of, how do you set up the context so that both are working in tandem in the combination. >> Right, right. Alright Alfred, I think we'll leave it there 'cause I think there's not a better lesson that we could extract from our time together. I thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day, and great to catch up again. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, he's Alfred, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on Day One of our three days of coverage of IBM Think, the inaugural single event from IBM. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're at the Mandalay Bay in beautiful sunny Las Vegas, and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Steve Hill, the Global Head of Innovation at KPMG. Welcome. >> Thanks for having me here. >> So you are giving a talk Wednesday, you said, at the event. >> Yes. >> I want to get a little bit into your role at KPMG, as well as your session. So talk to us a little bit about what your role as the Global Head of Innovation. >> So Innovation is an overused word. I don't particular like the word innovation, but in the context of my role, it really is taking a look at our business and our clients, and saying what it is that our clients need for their futures. What's going to create relevance for our clients as we go forward, and how does our portfolio of services relate to that relevance? And if we have gaps where we see our services not serving them best, or not going to serve them best in the future, my job responsibility is to help for strategy purposes and for investment purposes, bring those points to bear, and to get either investment into those areas, right, or changes in the business as appropriate to make KPMG more relevant to our clients, and to their relevance to their clients, right, that's the whole idea. >> So, Lisa and I talk to a lot of people in theCUBE, and we talk lots about invention, startups inventing something or new technology that gets invented, but innovation to us, and I think KPMG is at the heart of this is taking an invention and actually applying it to effect change, getting it adopted, >> That's right. >> and changing a business, a societal change potentially, is that-- >> That's right, I mean, our short phrase for it is idea to cash for our clients, right. I mean at the end of the day, and I think this is profound in certainly corporate governance evolution, right. We've seen the advent of lots of escrow changes of how companies have been managed, enterprise has been managed, right. The Dutch started with the East Indian Trading Company, one of the first large global enterprises, and since that time we've seen the maturation, the new roles. The CIO role didn't exist much prior to 1950, right. Today we're starting to see innovation to be a very important skill and capability for all corporations, all enterprises, including government, right. And I think we're starting to see a maturation of corporate capability, I would say, in the innovation space, because the pace of change is so fast today, the political, economic, technological, social trends are so complex that you've got to get something in your muscle memory that helps you change your business as much as operate it effectively. >> I'd love to know who you're talking to within organizations. You mentioned CIO role, the CISO role, chief data officer. >> Steve: Right. >> Who are the minds that you're helping to bring together so that an enterprise that needs to digitalize to be competitive will survive, right, really survive these days? How do you help them really embrace a culture of innovation as really there's no other choice? How do you get these minds collectively agreeing, yes, this is the direction we need to go in? >> Yeah, I think, I mean first of all, this is a C-suite conversation and a board conversation in many cases, but the reality is when you start to look at the lack of innovation in an organization, right, and when the environment changes, competitors start to change, and the more complex it is, it's harder and harder for companies to pivot and to reinvent themselves. And we're seeing a lot of unbundling of businesses in today's environment, whether it's a company that moves packages, right, or a professional services firm, or a company that used to distribute videos, right. I mean things change and some of the irony is that sometimes the innovation in companies like Kodak, Steve Sasson invented digital camera, it took eight minutes to go from a snap to a picture, but they invented digital technology from cameras, and that the distribution of digital videos is that it actually would help to, further the demise of that organization. So that notion of how do you take change going on in the environment that you're working at, and more importantly your customers and clients, how does that convert into your business, that's a C-suite conversation, and I think innovation can be embodied in a person to help build process, meaning how do you take an idea, how do you look at the marketplace and get sensory input, convert that to ideas for strategy and for investment, and the investments have to be deployed to the field to the business, and that relationship, that whole lifecycle of innovation requires a lot of people from the enterprise to be involved in it. And I would argue the culture has to evolve because until recently most people, in fact, I would say, including current times, most people in organizations are rewarded for doing what they do well, not breaking what they do, not rethinking what they do. And the more you get into that operational mindset, that I want to wring all the efficiencies out of this process that I can. Right, the more you're wed to the status quo, the more somebody comes in from the side and takes you out. >> So I love this conversation 'cause Steve you're able to take the long view and then I want to sort of shorten it up, and then maybe put it into a longer term context. So over our, your guys 20-plus-year careers, mine a little longer, most of this industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law, that's where innovation came from. >> Yes. >> How do you take advantage of Moore's Law? How do you go to client server software, whatever it was, the innovation equation is changing now. It seems to be a function of, these guys have been hearing me say this all day but data that's not siloed, but data that you have access to, applying machine intelligence-- >> Yep. >> And then getting cloud, scale, economics and network effects, and then applying it to your business. >> Bingo. >> So talk about how you see the new wave of innovation in this world of digital or however you phrase it. >> Well, it's interesting, I mean, I don't hear a lot of people phrase it the way you do which I think is spot on which is, and my words are, ubiquitous access to technology which is cloud, data, and that's a huge question mark and a big C-suite conversation. Having a lot of data isn't the key, having the right lot of data is the key. Right so Dyson is moving into auto-making today, right. They have a lot of data and it's very different from what the incumbents have. Is it better or worse? We're going to see, right. And then of course smart computers which is the machine intelligence, right. Those three elements, I think they're fundamentally changing labor productivity. And what I would say is to your question is that innovation is really important here because if all you do is take those three elements and you just digitize a status quo process, you might get marginal benefits, you might get some labor productivity enhancement, you may get some marginal improvement, you may change an outsourcing agreement to an onshore RPA deal, but if that's all you do, you're setting yourself up for a disappointment because what's really going to happen with thinkers, i.e., those that have innovations, they're going to rethink the process. Most of our analog systems are created around people checking people, so you may have nine steps, I'm making it up, in a process, that in a digital world only requires one or two or zero when launching in some cases. And so if you can rethink that process to go from a nine-step to a zero-step process or a one-step that's a nano second long, that changes the dynamic of the process. In fact that's not even nirvana, right, the real nirvana is can you change your business model, right? And I would use IBM, since we're here, as an example of going from a big box with a lot of people running around it, called IBM of the past, Watson, to an API engine that David Kenny has helped to build that says, we're going to have a platform business model leveraging network effects, and I want to have a supply and a demand curve that are much faster growing than my sort of organic ways of growing a network could be, right, through people point clicking. That's innovation. >> IBM is an interesting company because it is a company with a lot of legacy, but I think gets, as you just described it, but you look at the top five companies by market value today, they're six, 700-billion dollar market companies, they are data companies not just with a lot of data, but they've put data at the core, so it's Amazon, it's Apple, it's Facebook, it's Google, et cetera. They've put data at the core whereas most organizations, I'm sure many that you deal with, they have human expertise built around other assets that aren't data. It might be factories, it might be the bottling plants, et cetera. So there's a gap, I don't know, machine, AI gap between sort of those that are innovating today, now granted the stock market can change and, >> Sure. >> Who knows, maybe the oil companies will be back involved, not to drop but how do you deal, how do you advice your clients on how to close that gap? That seems like a huge challenge. >> Well it is a huge challenge, and I think, going back to the three elements, it would be very easy for you to dive bomb into a transformation effort and say, I'm going to go and get some smart computers and hire a bunch of people that know machine intelligence and natural language process, and all that stuff, and put them in a room, and go create some applications, the bottom line is, that's not unimportant. You got to get your hand on the mountain and start climbing, but the data piece, I mean, if you don't understand how data is going to be relevant to your business and to your clients and their clients, right, in the future, you lose. And the reason why those five that you talked about earlier are so successful is they think a couple of steps ahead on the data strategy, right, and they're not thinking about, most organizations by the way, they'll say we want a data strategy and then they'll relegate the strategy thinking part to their businesses which are bifurcated, and they look at the world in silos. And they're doing exactly what they should do which is take care of those businesses, but when you step back into those five companies you've talked about, they step back from those silos and say, what is the enterprise implications, and how do I create new businesses with correlations of data that I didn't have before? I think that requires a whole different level of strategy. It's C-suite and board that has to guide those kinds of decisions. You don't see a lot of people really getting their hands dirty around intense forward-thinking data strategies at the enterprise level like we're talking about here. >> You believe we are entering or going to enter shortly a productivity renaissance. >> I agree, yes. >> That's sort of I'm talking about our off-camera conversation. Explain why you think that, compare it to sort of the Industrial Revolution. Take us through your scenario. >> Sure. So, I mean, when you think about labor, I mean, what are the things that I think those three elements will give us as a society, as a global community, is a pretty big S curve jump in labor productivity. In fact we have at KPMG some efforts to quantify what that might be, looking at what we call frontier firms, and applying those practices back to incumbents. 90% of most industry players is saying what are those differences that we can model. The fact of the matter is when you go back to the Mechanical Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, people did everything by hand prior, right. Equipment helped them do things whether it was, even the printing press saw changes in society and labor, but when you start to getting into heavy manufacture in the Industrial Revolution, productivity was enhanced dramatically, and instead of putting all of these people who were doing things by hand out of business and out of work, it actually created more jobs, a lot more jobs, and a lot more wealth for society. I think we're heading for a similar S-curve change with smart computers, cloud, and with data. And that the roboticism of people is going to be automated, and people are going to be allowed to practice and use what's between their ears a lot more. That's going to create value, insight, new questions to be asked. I mean, how many times have you ever heard this? Every time you answer a question on something that's very important, you want to understand there's two more questions to be asked. Medicine is that way for sure. But you're going to start to see massive advancement in areas where people have had to use a lot of cognitive skills, right. It's severely under-leveraged because they were doing so much roboticism and doing things that computers can start to do now. So I think you're going to start to see a renaissance, if you will, of people using their nogers in ways we haven't seen before, and that's going to change the dynamics of productivity and labor in a way that's going to create wealth for everyone. >> And it's going to change industry. So, okay, so I got a bunch of questions for you then. >> Steve: Yep. >> Here we go. And I asked this earlier but I didn't really get an answer. Will machines? >> Steve: From me or from somebody else? >> No, from somebody else. >> Steve: Okay. >> Will machines make better diagnoses than doctors and when? >> I mean, what's the regression line? I mean, the samples said, I think today you'll find machines giving better diagnoses than doctors in some cases. >> Dave: Okay. >> I don't know where the regression line sits today, but if you look at the productivity of doctors going a hundredfold, and the morals scattering around lung cancer, it's impressive. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And do you want a doctor involved? Yes, you do, because part of it is in an orthodoxy of trust which by the way ten years ago, you wouldn't put your credit card online to buy anything, right. It's the same kind of orthodoxy. But I do think that machines can read so much more data, interpolate so many more correlations than people that when you add that to an oncologist for example and cancer, you have a super oncologist capabilities which is really what you're looking for. We're not looking to replace the oncologist per se, what we're looking to do is get the productivity of the oncologist from two to 200. >> I was talking about diagnoses. So you would say yes, okay. >> Yep. >> Will large retail stores mostly disappear in your opinion? >> No, I think they'll change. I think that the customer experience is still, we're still people, we need physical space, and we need physical things to touch, smell, and feel. I think those things will change, but we'll still need experiences. >> I'm going to keep going 'cause Steve's playing along. Will driving and owning your own car become an exception? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> I can elaborate if you want. >> Please, yeah, go ahead. >> So, I mean, the first, I mean, we actually did at KPMG a study called islands of autonomy which modeled LA and San Diego, Atlanta and Chicago, and we modeled how do people move. And we did this for a reason because autonomous vehicles are often times amalgamated as one thing. Oh well autonomous vehicle is coming so you better sell your sports cars and your SUVs, not so fast. The reality is mobility is very different based on where you are. If you're in the middle of Kansas or something, you're going to need a truck to run around in your farm, but if you're in LA or Atlanta or Chicago, you're going to move with autonomy, with autonomous vehicles, and then you're going to really enable mobility as a service very clearly, but differently. The way people move in these cities is different, and if the US auto industry understands those differences, and extrapolates those to a global marketplace, they're going to be very advantaged as mobility as a service becomes real, but the first car that goes, I hate all of the viewers that love this category, but sedan is the first cars to go. I would say sports cars, I race cars, so I love sports cars. People still ride horses today but they don't need them for transportation. And SUVs, right, specialty vehicles that you may, it may not, the economies may not be there, but as we know transportation and car ownership, it's going to change fundamentally, and that's going to have a massive effect on FS, right, insurance companies, banks that are doing loans today. It's going to have a big effect on healthcare. Mobility as a service is going to transcend to healthcare, mobile healthcare in ways that we can't see. >> You got great perspective. I got one more for you, maybe a couple more. Do you think traditional banks will lose control over payment systems? >> Well, a lot of them are already nervous about that, wouldn't you think? >> Yeah, but it hasn't happened yet though. >> I understand, the bottom line is no 'cause I think the traditional banks are getting smarter and they're leveraging their own innovation horsepower to understand things like Blockchain, and how to incorporate those things into their business models. So the answer is I think the way they do, look, banks exist because of one reason, trust. They have trusted brands, right. As long as they can stay current enough to be relevant to your banking needs, you're going to stay with that trusted brand. I think the trick for banks is how do they move fast enough, leverage the technologies that make your life easier, and not waiting three or four days for bank clearing of a check, for example. >> That's they say if you're-- >> And get to that trust in a new way. >> Unless you're a Bitcoin millionaire or a billionaire. >> You still need a bank. >> Maybe somewhere down the line. >> Yeah. >> Okay, last one, I promise. Will robots and maybe even RPA reverse offshore manufacturing advantages? >> Yes. >> Can you elaborate and give us a sense of-- >> I think, first of all, if you really look at what RPA is doing in many ways, is disintermediating the value of geographic location in many ways, right. So where I may have had, again this is important that you understand, so I can still go offshore today and get labor arbitrage and get margin, but I'm not rethinking the business. What I really want to do is own, I want to have more control and I want to have more flexibility and growth in that back office function. So it would behoove when you think about our RPA, and bring in our RPA technology so I have it one onshore, two, leverage the data more securely potentially, and then leverage that data as part of my lake to say how do I use that data to correlate to get to what I really need which is customer relevance at the front office, right. So, look, I think that this whole notion of you're in a different country, and therefore the labor pools are different, and therefore their arbitrage will get benefits from that, those days are over. I mean, it's just a question of when does it die. >> Dave: The data value offsets that arbitrage advantage. >> Well, forget that. The arbitrage is dead itself because the machines, >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> You're talking about orders that have made it to a cheaper per unit cost for an RPA, for a bot to do something than it is for a person that has to eat, sleep, take vacation, and get sick, and all that stuff. And so no matter where they are in the world. So what I would say is that notion is dead. It's just not buried. And overtime we're going to migrate again to machines doing all that robotic stuff. But, again, those people, they're going to do different things. It's not like we're going to see hordes, hundreds of thousands and millions of people not be able to work, I think they're going to be doing different things using their heads in different ways. >> Lisa: I like that answer. >> That's a plan. >> Dave: It's good. >> There's a price somewhere? >> I'm absolutely wrong, I just don't know how wrong, right. >> Well, it's fun to think about, and you provided some context. It was very useful. So, thank you. >> And I imagine folks that are attending your session at IBM Think on Wednesday are going to hear a little bit more into that. So thanks for sharing. >> We going to see some specifics, yeah. >> Thanks for sharing your insights, Steve, and for joining us on theCUBE. You guys, the innovation equation is changing, and I thank you for letting me sit between a very innovative and informative conversation. >> Thank you both. It was fun. >> Thanks Steve. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live on Day One of IBM Think 2018. Head over to thecube.net to watch all of our videos with our guests, and siliconanglemedia.com for all the written articles about that. Also check out Wikibon, find out what our analysts are saying about all things digital transformation, Blockchain, AI, ML, et cetera. Dave and I are going to be right back after a short break with our next guest. We'll see you then. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our special coverage of SAP Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier, here in theCUBE's studios of Palo Alto for our three days of wall to wall coverage, breaking down all the news with analysis. Our next guest here on theCUBE is Emily Mui, Senior Director of HANA Cloud Product Marketing at SAP, and Michael Hill, Senior Director of Product Marketing and SAP Cloud Platform. I had a chance to have a conversation around the big news around SAP Cloud Platform and what it means. I had a chance to ask Emily and Michael about the Sapphire impact around this new strategy, and the impact of multi-cloud. Here's the conversation with Michael and Emily. >> Three things to remember, three Cs, it's about helping accelerate cloud adoption, consumption, as well as-- >> [Michael And John] Choice. >> Choice, because of multi-cloud. >> So this is interesting. So the three Cs, I love that, very gimmicky marketing thing that I like. It gets to the point. Choice is huge. Multi-cloud is what everyone's talking about, in essence is what hybrid cloud's turning into. I mean, hybrid cloud has been the defacto norm now everyone's talking about, that is the preferred way most enterprises are using the cloud on premise and some public cloud, call it hybrid. But now, the mobile cloud's out here. There's Amazon Web Service, you've got Google, Azure, so there's a lot of, so the choice is critical, where to put what were clothes. >> And that's what we're hearing from our customers, and that's why we're moving in that direction. Not everyone wants to stick to one infrastructure as a service provider, they've got multiple clouds to manage, and we're enabling that. >> So choice I get. Cloud adoption is essentially creating those APIs to give them that accelerated approach. More cloud adoption means what? I've got be able to run stuff in the cloud faster, so that means getting their apps API, the API economy. And the consumption, is that on the interface side, or what's the consumption piece of it? >> Well, I'm going to let Michael have a swing at it now. >> It's consumption of innovation. So here we're talking about helping companies with digital transformation with things like Internet of Things, which we had in beta, which is now generally available, so customers can intelligently connect people, things, and business processes, all together now. In addition, we've added other great technologies like SAP CoPilot, which is allowing you to talk to your enterprise systems. So initially, that's what with SAPS for HANA. And you can say, "I'm interested in, "tell me all the open orders from the last quarter." And it will intelligently go get that information. >> It's like a voice recognition, all kinds of news things are coming out. >> Absolutely. >> As a user interface, or interface on cloud. >> They're for the enterprise. >> Or IT interface. >> On your phone or on your computer. >> So it's all being automated. We all know AI, that's just, "All our jobs are being automated." But this is specific. You're saying you're going to interface in with like CoPilot. >> Exactly. So you've got that business context. >> All right, let's step back and look at the Lego blocks. The cloud choice, multi-cloud. Let's get in, and then we'll talk about the adoption piece, how you guys are accelerating that through the marketplaces and APIs, and then the consumption through the new interfaces. So start with multi-cloud. What are the big points there? >> Well, the first is the agility that your platform as a service is now available on not just SAP data centers, but Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, being delivered. Amazon Web Services is now generally available, Azure is now beta, and there's a preview of Google Cloud Platform. And here you have one cockpit in SAP Cloud Platform to manage this multi-cloud infrastructure. >> So your strategy is to put your platform as a service on the clouds that customers want to run their workloads on? >> Exactly. So customers may already have specific workloads, or they may be working with partners that have workloads in those particular clouds. And now, SAP Cloud Platform can run in that same infrastructure. >> So the plan is to support the platform as a service from SAP on the clouds of choice for the customer. So they want to put stuff on Azure, if it's related to Office 365, or something going on with that, they could put it there. If they want to put some cloud-native on Amazon Web Service, they can. If they want to use Spanner and some TensorFlow, they could put that on Google. >> And to make this happen was really cool thing, is that we did this through our work in Cloud Foundry, and this allows you to bring your own development language, so BYOL. So if you have developers that are working in a particular language that's not supported natively by SAP previously, they can now be instantly productive on building applications on SAP Cloud Platform. >> So Cloud Foundry is the key to success on this? >> Yeah. Exactly. And that bring things like Node.js, and Python, as well as SAPs. >> All the cloud-native goodness that people want from a developer standpoint. >> Exactly. >> But yet, you guys allow it to run on Prim within the SAP constructs. >> Yep. >> All right, let's talk about cloud adoption, 'cause this is where the big rubber hits the road. Emily, we've been talking about the API economy for years. In fact, SAP was early on, and Web Services going through bankrupt. But there's some real value in here, because SAP runs software in some of the biggest businesses, so there's a lot of nuances to SAP. But when you go cloud and cloud-native, you've got to balance preexisting install base legacy with new apps that are being developed, how are you guys going to do that? >> So we announced the API Business Hub around a year ago at Sapphire in 2016, and it has grown tremendously in terms of content. So we had a lot of new APIs that keep getting added every month. And we're into the hundreds now. But it's not just the APIs, we've got integration workflows, there's all kinds of different content that's being added in there to make easier for our customers and partners to be able to leverage, and integrate, and connect, these different application with SAP back-end. So lot of exciting things happening on that end. >> So this allows them to go to the cloud business model. >> Emily: Exactly, right. >> Okay, now back to the consumption pieces, CoPilot. So is this where you guys are looking at where the dynamic nature of cloud can take advantage of the customers, because not only interfacing with, say, voice, for instance, there's others things, like, "Okay, I want to change processes. "I have the Workflow, or I'm doing something, "I want to just, "I'm not a developer, a Python developer, "I want to go in and make some rule changes, "or things of that nature." >> Yeah, so we have the Workflow service, that's also available. We've got a whole host of new capabilities that are coming out, and we'll call it digital edge, giving our customers a digital edge with these new innovative services. >> Edge as the user and also machines. >> Yes. >> That's where the IoT piece comes in. >> Exactly. >> So decision maker or customer says, "Hey, I've done all this stuff in the cloud." All of a sudden, someone says, "Well, we've got to bolt on some industrial data "from machines in our plant or factory." >> In fact, our IoT, the newest set of capabilities for IoT services is available at Sapphire. >> Okay, s\o what's the big takeaway from this? Let's just boil it down. Bottom line, this announcement impacts customers in what way? >> In many ways. We see many of customers wanting to become digital. And we've talked about how we think the benefits of cloud platform has to do with helping our customers become much more agile in how they do business, and SAP is in perfect position to do that. We've been working with companies, enterprises for years with their business processes, helping them optimize it. So that's the other bit, to be able to optimize all their business processes, and through the cloud. And then lastly, digital is the way to that they want to go. They know they want to be able to adopt all these new technologies. AI is so exciting. The CoPilot, if you've seen the demo, and you can see it at show floor here at Sapphire, it's amazing. Just the fact that you can talk to it, create an order, do some search, talk to it. I know that's how my kids, how they get through everyday life. They don't go look up anything anymore, they don't even Google, just talk. >> It's very dynamic. Certainly, the kids are an indicator, that you see if they want things, have the ability to move things around like the Lego blocks or composability. >> Yeah, so the speed, so that's why we love talking about accelerating consumption, and choice, and cloud adoption, because the speed of which everyone is adopting new technologies is just astronomical. >> Michael, comment on that point, because I always, this is our eight year covering Sapphire with theCUBE. It's our first year we're doing it from the studio as well. But Bill McDermott has always been on this with the whole dashboarding thing. If you look at SAP, the speed of business, how (mumbles) year that was. But each year, he never really changed, it's been the same arc, might've been a zigzag here and there, a little success factors here and there, all this kind of integration you guys have done. But it's been the same message, data's at the heart of the customers' outcomes. And the dashboards of old were data warehouses. But now he was showing a vision where, with the speed of data, the speed of software, you can get your business dashboard at your fingertips. That's what the customers are looking for. Your thoughts? >> It's not only being able to get that information at your fingertips, but actually being able to do something about it. So you can build those applications that can make an impact. So if you have, you're using our iOS SDK, and you've build that Apple interface, you have a nice interface that you can move an order, or you can do something about it while you're traveling. So you have this great dashboard, but now it's actionable. >> And this is the big difference, this is what makes his original vision, which certainly you can replicate with SAP's suite of data, and data and software, to a whole nother dimension of new apps. So app developers can come in and create these apps, and create new value propositions. >> Absolutely. >> All right, so how do they do that? What's the advice the customers, as they look at this new announcement, the impact of them, what does it mean to customer? Pick your cloud of choice? Use the APIs? >> Plenty of choices, and of course, we offer them a lot of guidance too, right? Because we've got a lot of great customers that are using the cloud platform today, some of which are presenting here at Sapphire. Karma Automotive, we love their story. They used to be Fisker Automotive, an all electronic vehicle. And it's amazing that the things that they want to do, and they're using the cloud platform in order to do that. But it's just another example of an innovative company that's looking to work with a company like SAP, and do everything in the cloud, building an application that will make it easier in terms of IoT, the sensors, and things like that, so they can track it to be able to take action on it. So it's very exciting. So lots of new things that are happening. >> I think there's two things that jump out at me, just to summarize the freedom that developers in the cloud-native world can do to create new apps, that also blend in on all of the existing value that SAP's already doing in the marketplace, that's always been, that was something that I observed last year, this is now a realization of that. But two, is now the customers now have a choice to put whatever they want in whatever cloud. And to me, what we've seen on theCUBE over the many interviews we've done, people who follow theCUBE know we've talked to a lot of people, is the workloads find their homes, some like Amazon, some like Azure, some like Google, and I think that is what customers are telling us, and you guys are now offering that choice. "Hey, put some workloads over there. "It doesn't matter where you want to put 'em, "we're just going to run 'em with--" >> And where we can help is really on the business service side. We have the right types of application services within the platform as a service offering, to enable them to create those types of apps to support their business. >> Applications, data, value for customers. >> And it's the integration of data into the application, because that's what's important. >> There'll be a new generation of application developers. We're standing up application like PowerPoint slides, really composing apps, that is the DevOps mainstream trend. Emily, thanks so much for sharing the great news. Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage. Breaking the news of the three Cs, multi-cloud, SAP's new announcement in Orlando. This is theCUBE coverage. More coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts this is the CUBE covering Spark Summit East 2017 brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody this is the CUBE. We're live here at Spark Summit East in the Hynes Convention Center. This is the CUBE, check out SiliconANGLE.com for all the news of the day. Check out Wikibon.com for all the research. I'm really excited about this session here. Al Essa is here, he's the vice president of analytics and R&D at McGraw-Hill Education. And I'm so excited because we always talk about digital transformations and transformations. We have an example of 150 year old company that has been, I'm sure, through many transformations. We're going to talk about a recent one. Al Essa, welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> So you heard my little narrative up front. You, obviously, have not been with the company for 150 years (laughs), you can't talk about all the transformations, but there's certainly one that's recent in the last couple of years, anyway which is digital. We know McGraw Hill is a print publisher, describe your business. >> Yeah, so McGraw Hill Education has been traditionally a print publisher, but beginning with our new CEO, David Levin, he joined the company about two years ago and now we call ourselves a learning science company. So it's no longer print publishing, it's smart digital and by smart digital we mean we're trying to transform education by applying principles of learning science. Basically what that means is we try to understand, how do people learn? And how they can learn better. So there are a number of domains, cognitive science, brain sciences, data science and we begin to try to understand what are the known knowns in these areas and then apply it to education. >> I think Marc Benioff said it first, at least the first I heard he said there were going to be way more Saas companies that come out of non-tech companies than tech companies. We're talking off camera, you're a software company. Describe that in some detail. >> Yeah, so being a software company is new for us, but we've moved pretty quickly. Our core competency has been really expert knowledge about education. We work with educators, subject matter experts, so for over a hundred years, we've created vetted content, assessments, and so on. So we have a great deal of domain expertise in education and now we're taking, sort of the new area of frontiers of knowledge, and cognitive science, brain sciences. How can learners learn better and applying that to software and models and algorithms. >> Okay, and there's a data component to this as well, right? >> So yeah, the way I think about it is we're a smart digital company, but smart digital is fueled by smart data. Data underlies everything that we do. Why? Because in order to strengthen learners, provide them with the optimal pathway, as well as instructors. We believe instructors are at the center of this new transformation. We need to provide immediate, real-time data to students and instructors on, how am I doing? How can I do better? This is the predictive component and then you're telling me, maybe I'm not on the best path. So what's my, "How can I do better?" the optimal path. So all of that is based on data. >> Okay, so that's, I mean, the major reason. Do you do any print anymore? Yes, we still do print, because there's still a huge need for print. So print's not going to go away. >> Right. Okay, I just wanted to clarify that. But what you described is largely a business model change, not largely, it is a business model change. But also the value proposition is changing. You're providing a new service, related, but new incremental value, right? >> Yeah, yeah. So the value proposition has changed, and here again, data is critical. Inquiring minds want to know. Our customers want to know, "All right, we're going to use your technology "and your products and solutions, "show us "rigorously, empirically, that it works." That's the bottom line question. Is it effective? Are the tools, products, solutions, not just ours, but are our products and solutions have a context. Is the instruction effective? Is it effective for everyone? So all that is reliant on data. >> So how much of a course, how much of the content in a course would you prepare? Is it now the entire courseware and you instrument the students interaction with it? And then, essentially you're selling the outcomes, the improved outcomes. >> Yeah, I think that's one way to think about it. Here's another model change, so this is not so much digital versus non-digital, but we've been a closed environment. You buy a textbook from us, all the material, the assessments is McGraw Hill Education. But now a fundamental part of our thinking as a software company is that we have to be an open company. Doesn't mean open as in free, but it's an open ecosystem, so one of the things that we believe in very much is standards. So there's a standard body in education called IMS Global. My boss, Stephen Laster, is on the board of IMS Global. So think of that as, this encompasses everything from different tools working together, interoperability tools, or interoperability standards, data standards for data exchange. So, we will always produce great content, great assessments, we have amazing platform and analytics capability, however, we don't believe all of our customers are going to want to use everything from McGraw Hill. So interoperability standards, data standards is vital to what we're doing. >> Can you explain in some detail this learning science company. Explain how we learn. We were talking off camera about sort of the three-- >> Yeah, so this is just one example. It's well known that memory decays exponentially, meaning when you see some item of knowledge for the first time, unless something happens, it goes into short-term memory and then it evaporates. One of the challenges in education is how can I acquire knowledge and retain knowledge? Now most of the techniques that we all use are not optimal. We cram right before an exam. We highlight things and that creates the illusion that we'll be able to recall it. But it's an illusion. Now, cognitive science and research in cognitive science tells us that there are optimal strategies for acquiring knowledge and recalling it. So three examples of that are effort for recall. If you have to actively recall some item of knowledge, that helps with the stickiness. Another is space practice. Practicing out your recall over multiple sessions. Another one is interleaving. So what we do is, we just recently came out with a product last week called, StudyWise. What we've done is taken those principles, written some algorithms, applies those algorithms into a mobile product. That's going to allow learners to optimize their acquisition and recall of knowledge. >> And you're using Spark to-- >> Yeah, we're using Spark and we're using Databricks. So I think what's important there is not just Spark as a technology, but it's an ecosystem, it's a set of technologies. And it has to be woven together into a workflow. Everything from building the model and algorithm, and those are always first approximations. We do the best we can, in terms of how we think the algorithm should work and then deploy that. So our data science team and learning science team builds the models, designs the models, but our IT team wants to make sure that it's part of a workflow. They don't want to have to deal with a new set of technologies, so essentially pressing the button goes into production and then it doesn't stop there, because as Studywise has gone on the market last week, now we're collecting data real-time as learners are interacting with our products. The results of their interactions is coming in to our research environment and we're analyzing that data, as a way of updating our models and tuning the models. >> So would it be fair to say that it was interesting when you talked about these new ways of learning. If I were to create an analogy to Legacy Enterprise apps, they standardize business transactions and the workflows that went with them. It's like you're picking out the best practices in learning, codifying them into an application. And you've opened it up so other platforms can take some or all and then you're taking live feedback from the models, but not just tuning the existing model, but actually adding learning to the model over time as you get a better sense for how effort of recall works or interleaving works. >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I do want to emphasize something, an aspect of what you just said is we believe, and it's not just we believe, the research in learning science shows that we can get the best, most significant learning gains when we place the instructor, the master teacher, at the center of learning. So, doing that, not just in isolation, but what we want to do is create a community of practitioners, master teachers. So think of the healthcare analogy. We have expert physicians, so when we have a new technique or even an old technique, What's working? What's not working? Let's look at the data. What we're also doing is instrumenting our tools so that we can surface these insights to the master practitioners or master teachers. George is trying this technique, that's working or not working, what adjustments do we need to make? So it's not just something has to happen with the learner. Maybe we need to adjust our curriculum. I have to change my teaching practices, my assessments. >> And the incentive for the master practitioners to collaborate is because that's just their nature? >> I think it is. So let's kind of stand back, I think the current paradigm of instruction is lecture mode. I want to impart knowledge, so I'm going to give a lecture. And then assessment is timed tests. In the educational, the jargon for that is summit of assessments, so lecture and tests. That's the dominant paradigm in education. All the research evidence says that doesn't work. (laughs) It doesn't work, but we still do it. >> For how many hundreds of years? >> Yeah. Well, it was okay if we needed to train and educate a handful of people. But now, everyone needs to be educated and it's lifelong learning rate, so that paradigm doesn't work. And the research evidence is overwhelming that it doesn't work. We have to change our paradigm where the new paradigm, and this is again based on research, is differentiated instruction. Different learners are at different stages in their learning and depending on what you need to know, I'm at a different stage. So, we need assessments. Assessments are not punitive, they're not tests. They help us determine what kind of knowledge, what kind of information each learner needs to know. And the instructor helps with the differentiated instruction. >> It's an alignment. >> It's an alignment, yeah. Really to take it to the next stage, the master practitioners, if they are armed with the right data, they can begin to compare. All right, practices this way of teaching for these types of students works well, these are the adjustments that we need to make. >> So, bringing it down to earth with Spark, these models of how to teach, or perhaps how to differentiate the instruction, how to do differentiated assessments, these are the Spark models. >> Yeah, these are the Spark models. So let's kind of stand back and see what's different about traditional analytics or business intelligence and the new analytics enabled by Spark, and so on. First, traditional analytics, the questions that you need to be able to answer are defined beforehand. And then they're implemented in schemas in a data warehouse. In the new order of things, I have questions that I need to ask and they just arise right now. I'm not going to anticipate all the questions that I might want to be able to ask. So, we have to be enable the ability to ask new questions and be able to receive answers immediately. Second, the feedback loop, traditional analytics is a batch mode. Overnight, data warehouse gets updated. Imagine you're flying an airplane, you're the pilot, a new weather system emerges. You can't wait a week or six months to get a report. I have to have corrective course. I have to re-navigate and find a new course. So, the same way, a student encounters difficulty, tell me what I need to do, what course correction do I need to apply? The data has to come in real-time. The models have to run real-time. And if it's at scale, then we have to have parallel processing and then the updates, the round trip, data back to the instructor or the student has to be essentially real-time or near real-time. Spark is one of the technologies that's enabling that. >> The way you got here is kind of interesting. You used to be CIO, got that big Yale brain (laughs) working for you. You're not a developer, I presume, is that right? >> No. >> How did you end up in this role? >> I think it's really a passion for education and I think this is at McGraw Hill. So I'm a first generation college student, I went to public school in Los Angeles. I had a lot of great breaks, I had great teachers who inspired me. So I think first, it's education, but I think we have a major, major problem that we need to solve. So if we look at... So I spent five years with the Minnesota state colleges and university system, most of the colleges, community colleges are open access institutions. So let me just give you a quick statistic. 70% of students who enter community colleges are not prepared in math and english. So seven out of 10 students need remediation. Of the seven out of 10 students who need remediation, only 15% not 5-0, one-five succeed to the next level. This is a national tragedy. >> And that's at the community college level? >> That's at the community college level. We're talking about millions of students who are not making it past the first gate. And they go away thinking they've failed, they incurred debt, their life is now stuck. So this is playing itself out, not to tens of thousands of students, but hundreds of thousands of students annually. So, we've got to solve this problem. I think it's not technology, but reshaping the paradigm of how we think about education. >> It is a national disaster, because often times that's the only affordable route for folks and they are taking on debt, thinking okay, this is a gateway. Al, we have to leave it there. Awesome segment, thanks very much for coming to the CUBE, really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, my buddy, George and I will be back with our next guest. This is the CUBE, we're live from Boston. Be right back. (techno music) >> Narrator: Since the dawn of the cloud