>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back at UI path forward to five. This is Dave Ante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Mu is here. He's automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you, by the way, for, you know, all you guys do, and thank you Dave for having in the, in the, in the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the cube. He's the director at cgi. Guys, good to see you again. >>Good to see you. Thank >>You. So Merrick, Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? >>Well, Dave, I mean as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like Gabriel Antiviral Pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But, you know, is during these can last few years that, you know, we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey, you know, so just like the theme of this conference we're we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. >>Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. >>Sure. No, it's, it's definitely not. So cgi, we're a global consultancy about 90,000 folks across the world. We're a, we're both a product company and a services company. So we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government EER P platform. And so outside of that, we, my team does automation and so we wrap automation around R IP and deliver that to our clients. >>So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, right? So, so let's go back. Yep. Derek said four years I think. Yep. Right, You're in. So take us through what was the catalyst, how did you get started? Obviously it was pre pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the Catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path, >>Right. So I, I would say it started pretty niche in our company. Started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking in technology evaluating different companies, Blue Prism, ui P. Ultimately we chose UI p did it on-prem to start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work. That's when the team, the COE continued to scale up, especially during pandemic. We were trying to automate more and more processes given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they reprocesses. How, how do you do events? You know, part of our livelihood is, is meeting with engaging with customers. Customers in this case is, are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, you know, you know, a lot of the face to face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital, digital way. And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. >>You, you, I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. Yep. So, so describe your approach to implementing automation. It's, that sounds like when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized as, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction >>Look like? We do have both. I would say in the beginning was more decentralized, but over time we, over the few years as, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between four to 500 bots. We now have sort of internal to the company functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function. So there's, there's a team building engaging with the animal health business to build animal health box. There's human health, which is what I work on as well as hr, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business. Then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. >>So you started in finance common story, right? I'm sure you hear this a lot Belt, How did you decide what to target? Was it, was it process driven decision? Was it, was it data oriented? Like some kind of combination? How did you decide, Do you remember? Or do you, could you take >>Us back to Oh yeah. So for, for cgi how we started to engage with MER is, you know, we, we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work on all their different business lines and we, we understand the business process. So we, we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and, and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there the journey just continued to expand, you know, looking for those use cases that, that, you know, fit the mold for, for, for RPA to start. And now the evolution is to go to broader hyper automation. >>And, and was it CFO led into the finance department and then, or was it sort of more bottoms >>Up? Yeah, so, so I think it started in, in finance and, and, but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory clinical, that's, that's where we, we have the life science expertise that are embedded. And so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say submission archiving. So when, when submissions come back from the fda, they need to be archived into, you know, the, their system of record. So that's, those are the types of use cases that, that we helped automate. >>Okay. Cause you're saying a human had to sort physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay. And you started with software robots, obviously rpa and now you're expanding into, we we're hearing from UI this the platform message. How does that coincide Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are, are you adding? >>Yeah, no, I mean we are, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform, but some of the cool things we just had, another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things we're, we're doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, that that, you know, cuz these bots only in some cases run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're, we're soon of doing all on demand, you know, start up a server, run the bot when it's finished, you know, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole >>Lot of money. Serverless bots. So you, but you're doing that OnPrem, so you >>No, >>No, but >>That's >>Cloud. We, >>We, we we're doing it OnPrem, but our, our bot machines that actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs it finish, Let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. >>Okay. So you mentioned SAP earlier you mentioned Blue Prism when you probably looked at other competitors too. You pull the Gartner Magic quadrant, blah, blah, you know, with the way people, you know, evaluate technology, but SAP's got a product. Why UI path mean? Is it that a company like SAP two narrow for their only sap you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then four years ago they probably weren't. Right? But I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. >>Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. You know, SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to, to workday, to service Now. It's, it cuts across every function that we have in the company as well as you're the most mature. I mean, you're the market leader, right? So Right. Definitely you, you continue to build upon those capabilities and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. >>And what do you see Bill in the marketplace? Are you, are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of all in on? I >>Would say we are, we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of a, as an automation practice lead, you know, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are gonna benefit them as a whole. So looking at UI path, you know, that this platform is, it covers the end to end spectrum of, of automation. So I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that, that delivers value. And so that's, that's where I see the value in UI path and that's why CGI is, is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched probably SALT in the, in the market last week, expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI, Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients whole UI path infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them and they just get the value outta >>Automation. Nice, nice. Love >>It. Derek, you mentioned, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Yeah. Sounds like it's also ethereal possibility possibly you're saying, you, you're saying you have processes that are running on premises, right? But then you reach out to have an automation process run that's happening off pre and you're, and you're sort of, >>It's on the cloud, so, so yeah, so we have a in-house orchestrator, so we don't, we're not using your sort of on the cloud orchestrator. So, so we brought it in-house for security reasons. Okay. But we use, you know, so inside the vpn, you know, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So, so that's, that's the ephemeral side of the, of the >>Infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, are you, is it a, is it a pay by the drink or by the, by the CPU >>Hours, if you can imagine like we, you know, like I mentioned where somewhere between four to 500 bots and every bot has a time slot to run and takes a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we in the old days have to have to buy and procure and, you know, staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all, all of bots this in ephemeral infrastructure, right? So these, okay, these machines, these bot machines are, you know, spun up. They run the, they, they run their automation and then they spin >>Down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is in your >>Purview and they spun up on aws. Yeah. Okay. And then they spin down. Okay, got >>It. Got it. Interesting. Four >>To 500 bots. You know, Daniel one point play out this vision of a bot chicken in every pot, I called it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world, not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How, how are you thinking about that? >>That's a good question. So obviously the, the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bonds versus attended bonds, right? That, that we also have a citizen developer, sort of a group team. We support that as well from a coe. So, you know, we see the future as a mix. There's, there's a spectrum of, we are the professional development team. There's also, we support and nurture the personal automation and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help, you know, reduce the, you know, the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But you know, for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transfer transformational automations that really drive process efficiencies and, and savings. >>And what's the, what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings and maybe there's other sort of productivity. How do you measure the benefit, the ROI and, and >>Quantify that we, you know, I, I don't, I don't profess I don't think we have all the right answers, but yeah, simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement sort of in like an nps, internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. But we definitely see automation demand coming from our, our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's, it's continued to be a hot area and hopefully we, we can, you know, like, like what the key message and theme of this, of this conference. Essentially we want to take and build upon the, the good work that we've done in terms of rpa and we want to drive it more towards digital transformation. >>So Bill, what are you seeing across the, your customer base in terms of, of, of roi? I'm not looking for percentages there. I'm sure they're off the charts, but in terms of, you know, you can optimize for fast payback, you know, maybe lower the denominator, you know, or you can optimize for, you know, net benefit over time, right? You know, what are you seeing? What are customers after they want fast payback and little quick hits? Or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise wide impact? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they, you know, they want an roi and just depending upon the use case, that's gonna vary in terms of the, the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in in life sciences it may be around, you know, compliance like GXP compliance is huge. And so that may may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're, they're running their processes and they're being compliant with, you know, federal standards. So that's, that's one aspect to it. But you know, to, you know, a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and and so on. But yeah, I think, I think the other, the other part of it is, you know, impacting broader business processes. So taking that top down approach versus kind of bottom up, you know, doing ta you know, the ones you choose the tasks is not as impactful as looking at broader across the entire business process and seeing how we can impact >>It. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm gonna go write a, you know, software robot. I'm gonna go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw her to the defense? You guys, you guys send me a video on how to do it. Hold my hand. How's that work? >>Yeah, I mean, good question. So, so we obviously direct them to the UI path Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We, we go through, we have writeups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials, and then ultimately how do we deploy bot inside the MER ecosystem. But I, I, maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. Yeah. I'll also say because we're, we're a pharmaceutical company. I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if, if, if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a, a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to, to our patients and, and healthcare professionals. And that's, that, that's immeasurable benefit. >>Yeah, I bet if you compress that ELAP time of, of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've gotta go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank >>You so much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. >>Appreciate it. All right. Thank you for watching this Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson, The cubes coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward, five. We'll be right back right after the short break. Awesome. >>Great.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante at UI path forward for, we have had it all today. Lots of great guests. We've had weather, we've had rain. We are outside and lots of great conversations going on. Next up, we're going to be talking about automation at healthcare giant. Merck. Joining us from merch is Dan Boyd automation leader, and from CGI partner of UI paths, bill angles, senior automation architect, guys, welcome to the program. >>Thanks for having us. >>So Dan, we'll go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about Merck and the implement and the adoption of automation, such a history company. >>Yeah. Thank you. Um, our journey started about two years ago and started with the small team and has evolved ever since we started just the handful of folks we've evolved, uh, from the size of our team, matured, operationally and expanded our capabilities along that journey to where we are today. And it continues to evolve as the technology changes. And it's been exciting to see the adoption at Merck over, you know, across the enterprise. Um, it's been an educational process, but it's been exciting just to see that understanding of the power that automation can deliver to them. And they see the value in making it real to them has been key. Um, then once it's real and they get excited and the word spreads and they appreciate the value right before their eyes and bill, are you, >>Uh, industry specialized or more automation specialist? >>Yeah. Yeah. So I'm more, uh, automation specialized, but uh, you know, CGI, we partner with our industry experts to identify use cases for automation and I help kind of, you know, solution the best approach to automation. Uh, and you know, so I actually started, you know, with, with Merck a little bit earlier before it was really formalized and, uh, just CGI is a large partner of merch and embedded within various areas of business. And, you know, I, I ended up educating, uh, CGI on automation and here's what to look for, you know, in a, in a, in a great use case for automation and, you know, really, we started to drum up some internal excitement and then came up with some actual real use cases within Merck, proved it out early. And then we began to partner with, uh, Dan and his team. >>Can you share a little bit about some of those use cases? Yes. >>So, you know, the ones that, uh, we've worked on are really specific within, uh, various areas, uh, within the division. So Dan, you want to talk about some of the >>You're working on yeah, I'll share one use case within a specific market of merch, and it's a commercial area where they were embarking on a revision in their customer engaged engagement approach in this market and where the, they had a problem. They, they needed to get the invoices out of SAP for customers. So that was on the one side of the process on the other was a customer portal where the customers needed access near real time to those invoices. So when they came to us, they had the invoices kind of set up to be emailed out of SAP. So they had that process set up. The problem is how do they get them over here into this customer portal? Say the backup plan was to have a temporary workers come on and do that manually handle the open emails with the invoices attachments and get them loaded. >>So we came in, uh, they called us in, in the 11th hour and we were able to, fortunately that the process was straightforward, uh, whereas invoices were coming through, uh, an email attachment and that was set up. So basically we automated the reading of the emails, the processing of the PDF attachments and saved them into a shared drive where there was another process to load them into SAP. So the volume was really large on a daily basis. Initially it was estimated at approximately 2,500 emails per day with these invoices. Um, so that would estimate it would take about 125 hours of people time to do that manually. Um, so that's what we automated. And in the end it was the averages it's over 3000 a day. So, um, the solution really came in and, and we were able to deliver that. And it's been a really, they were, they were static with what they could do, and then they saw the art of the possible with, with this automation. So it's a good success story. And, um, it's exciting to see, and they were thrilled >>And it's not an uncommon story, right. Where you're automating mundane tasks that was pushing a lot of paper, a lot of copy and pasting. Um, do you see how far away, and maybe we're there already? You think about mark it's it's uh, in a, in a unique industry, we've got, got highly skilled scientists too in serious R and D high risk trials. You got partners, you do some organic, some inorganic, you've got the manufacturing components. So a lot of different parts to the business. And when you think about saving time, as you think about some of the, the scientists that are working on various pipeline products, highly paid, if you can save more of their time, wow. That even drops more to the bottom line. Are we at that point yet? We heard the stats this morning. It was 2% or some single digit percentage of our processes are automated. How far away are we from attacking those types of automations? Are we there today? >>Uh, we do automations for all the, all the functions across Merck. Um, in some places adoption is farther along than others in their journey, but yeah, um, from the shop floor and the manufacturing sites, we found opportunities to, to introduce automation there. And even in the, in the labs in various capacities, see the use cases continue to grow and the adoption continue. We see that growing as well. >>Do you find that the, the highly skilled, uh, automations targeted at highly skilled folks are, are harder to sort of get your hands around, but they give you bigger ROI? Or is it not the case? Is it all sort of earn and burn? >>Yeah, from my perspective, I think it's, you know, use case by use case. Like if it's a, a complex use case, it requires, you know, more advanced capabilities, uh, you know, machine learning models, you know, leveraging, uh, you know, AI center within UI path, uh, you know, those they can, you know, provide, you know, fairly sizeable ROI, but I think is for those highly skilled workers, I'll give one example is, you know, out in, out in the labs, we, we helped, you know, automate some things that, you know, just made their life easier, right. Uh, you know, tests running overnight, if something failed, uh, with, with a test that was happening, then, you know, they, they wouldn't know about it and they lose critical data for, for these early tests that they're doing in, in the, in the preclinical cycle. So we actually put in a UI path robots to, to monitor and send alerts and provide recovery to make their lives a lot easier. Uh, so they don't have to worry about things, you know, failing in the middle of the night, you have a UI path robot, you know, supporting them in that map, that aspect, >>What's an automation, architecture look like we, where do we start architecting automation? >>Well, I think the journey, uh, so where do you start with an automation? Right. It's really understanding the use case. It comes down to what is the, the end to end process, and then where, where can we automate, uh, within that process and what is the right set of automation capabilities? So, you know, RPA is great for, you know, um, where we get, where we need to interact with user interfaces. But if we can, uh, you know, interact with API APIs, we would do that. You know, preferably over a UI is, is to keep, keep it more of a seamless integration. But I think it's about understanding the process, laying out the right solution, uh, if there's an opportunity to improve the process prior to automating it, you know, if there's, if there is that ability, then we'll look to do that. And we've done that. We may change that process, uh, up a little bit, just to make automation more efficient, more effective. Uh, and so, and then it just, we built it and we deploy it and they start to realize the value >>Hard. Is it dental prove the, on the versus just automating what's, what's known. In other words, you've got dependencies and there are complexities there w what's your experience in terms of how you approached it >>From my experience and what we found to be best practice and bill touched on it. But every use case is of course different than the, the corresponding process. Very, very varied, but really what's key, I think, is to right upfront, understand the end to end process. And a lot of cases, my team it's new to us, right. But the process owners, they live it every day. So understanding, partnering with them to really understand the end to end solution in the form of like a process map. So you can kind of echo back your understanding of their process and get that nod of the head from them and say, yes, you understand that this is an accurate representation. Then we can with the spirit of trying to get it right the first time. And, but it really, I think is incumbent upon us to really get that in-depth understanding upfront. And a lot of cases, if there's time sensitivity in the end, it's just more efficient and saves a lot of rework. So, >>So working backwards, sorry, at least working backwards from the known existing process and then implementing an automation is probably the best starting point, as opposed to trying to work backwards from some kind of the outcome that you envision. But, but I would think there's attractiveness in the, in the ladder. Right. So that you're not just repeating a process that may be outdated. >>Yeah. So your, uh, it comes down to a couple of things. So when you're initially looking at a process, you know, should we automate this or not? And how complex is it? You need to understand what is the potential benefit. So, you know, how much, uh, you know, how much time am I able to, uh, you know, have those workers reinvest into other areas of work, right. Or what other, what are some other benefits? Uh, you know, there, there may be some, uh, you know, compliance fines that were experienced through automation, we're able to, you know, to make sure we're meeting SLS and so on. Uh, so you is a lot to, you know, defining the benefits, the automation, putting a value to that. And then the process of going through the actual process, understand the complexity, right? And then you can come up with, you know, here's, here's what it's gonna take to build this thing. Here's the potential value. And then we have ways where we track, you know, what's, how has that ROI trending once it's in production? Uh, so we'll be, that gives us more insight. >>Dan, I've got a question for you. One of the conversations that Dave and I had earlier on the program was about automation as a boardroom topic. I'd love to get your perspectives. Merck is a history organization, been around for a long time. Cultural change is incredibly challenging, but I'd love to get your perspective on where is automation at Merck's board. Is that something that is really key to transformation? >>I'd say automation falls under our strategic initiative, just around digital digital transformation, right? So it's a sub pillar of that. So that is a strategic imperative and very important. And just being a more efficient and, and leveraging technology effectively, um, just to make merch more efficient and, and, and optimized and RPA and automation plays a part in that. I mean, >>That's what I suspected Lisa this morning when we have in that conversation, it seems to me that you wouldn't necessarily create an automation stove pipe at the board meeting. You might want to report on how these automations have affected, whether it's the income statement or the health of the company, et cetera. But it seems to me to be a fundamental part of the digital transformation, um, which involves a lot of different things, data and cloud and strategy and it et cetera. So is that pretty >>Common bill? Yeah, I, yes, it is. I mean, when, when an organization is looking to automate there's, you know, various angles are coming out, they're coming from the top-down approach where, you know, management saying, Hey, we need to, we need to automate what's, let's look across all the divisions and, and figure out where, where we should go. But then it's also, you know, bottom up where, you know, folks out in, out within the various lines of business know, they, they know the problems. They know, they know the business processes. So there's a couple of different angles where, you know, you you're able to discover new opportunities to automate. Uh, but those also those smaller ones opened the door to understanding, you know, much larger processes where we can look, you know, automate more of the upstream or downstream in that process. Are there variations of the process? So >>Was, was merch more bottom-up or top-down or middle out? I wouldn't say it's >>Started bottoms up. That's really out there. It came from the top-down. So as bill touched on, I think it's really key that we do have, uh, from, from this coming from the top, from our leadership is endorsing it and advocating it, but also we're on the, on the ground floor and educating. So the people with the hands-on doing the process, they understand it and the word is spreading. They see we've, we've made it real for them. Now it's real for them, and they can appreciate the value. And they're happy to be able to do more, to be freed up from the tedious tasks and do more interesting work. >>So we did start in the department, there was a champion with a budget who said, Hey, I'm going to try this and then look what I got. Yeah, >>Yeah. You definitely need the champion. So part of that is creating champions out in the different business lines to truly own the pipeline and understand the opportunities are out there and say, yeah, this is a good opportunity. This, this one let's look at it later. So you definitely have to have those folks out there that, that understand the technology, but also understand the business. >>How has that changed in the last 18 months with healthcare care undergoing such? I mean, my goodness, the things that have happened in a healthcare organization, how has that accelerated the need for things like automation, Christian, for both of you and for mark as well? Yeah. >>Yeah. So mark initiated, uh, like most companies that digital transformation, three, three plus years ago, and this just became an extension of that. And, and it's, it's a, it's a must, right? Just to stay up with the, the digital transformation and everything that's happening in this world. And, and obviously, uh, COVID accelerated, helped accelerate it in certain areas and made it real for a lot of people and appreciate the value and the need for it. >>Yeah. W within CGI, just across all of our clients, it's automation is really towards the top of the list of strategic priorities. So it's, so we've seen this massive just acceleration of, of needing to automate more and more and more, you know, which is, which is great. >>What's it like inside a merch these days, you guys must be really excited with all that. I mean, I know it's early days and nothing has been fully blessed yet, but I mean, you know, some of the big has got a lot of headlines and obviously, you know, we've been taking jabs, et cetera, but, but now here's Merck in the headlines. It's, it's gotta be an exciting time for you guys. >>Yeah. It's, it's great to be part of a company whose mission is to save and improve lives and right. It's um, with today, it's, it's really becoming real and more relevant, uh, of that mission and vision. So it's exciting. >>There were any gotchas when you go into this, I'm sure there are into this automation journey. What kinds of things would you advise people, Hey, make sure that you deal with these, whether it's an audit scope, consideration or things that you definitely don't want to do, or do you want to do? >>Yeah. It just comes down to the, you know, choosing the right use case to start with. Right. Making sure that you, if you're just starting out in your automation journey, you know, start with those use cases that you can quickly prove value for and then tackle the more complex ones. That's good >>For folks to know where to start, especially when there's still such a tumultuous environment that we're living in. Dan and bill. Thank you for joining Dave and Manet, talking about automation, the innovation that you're doing at Merck partnering with CGI really appreciate >>Your time. Thanks for having us >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you from windy, chilly Las Vegas. We are at UI path forward for stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Man: Live from Washington DC it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017, brought to you by splunk. >> Welcome back to Washington DC, Nations capital. Here for dotconf2017 as the Cube continues our coverage. The flagship broadcast of silicon idol tv. Along with Dave Alonte, I am John Walls. Glad to have you with us after we've had a little lunch break. Feeling good? >> Feel great, good conversation with customers, dug into the pricing model, got some good information. >> What did you learn at lunch? >> Well talk about it at the end of the day. >> Alright, good, look forward to it. Let's talk healthcare right now. Derek Merck is with us right now. He is the director of computer vision and imaging analytics at the Rhode Island Hospital. Which is the teaching hospital for Brown University. Derek thanks for joining us here on the Cube. Good to see ya. >> Absolutely, very excited to be here. >> So, well and as are we to have you. Director of computer vision and image analytics, so let's talk about that. What falls under your portfolio, and tell us where does Splunk come into that picture? >> It's been an interesting journey, Rhode Island hospital is a huge clinical service. Takes really good care of the people of Rhode Island. I'm in diagnostic imaging, so I work with all the CT scans, the MR's, radiography, ultrasonography, and what I try to do is automate the data that is coming off all of these machines as much as possible. So, you know typically the patient will come in, they'll get imaged for some reason, the physician will take a look at that image and make a diagnosis, and then that image goes into an archive. It may be used again later if the patient comes back but other than that it is not really used at all. With these sort of emergence of computer vision access to training images, sets of data, has become really critical. Diagnostic imaging has become really interested in taking better account of what imaging they have so that they can try to answer questions like what's alike about these images. What is different about these images, and automate diagnosis. What's similar about all the images of patients who have cancer, versus patients who don't have cancer. Which is basically what a radiologist job is, is to go and look at this patients image and figure out does this patient have cancer or not. SO that is the way you would teach a computer how to do it in an automated fashion. SO I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how do you keep, how do you take, keep better track of what is available and be able to ask these sort of population based questions about what we have in our portfolio of data, our data portfolio. I spent a lot of time writing systems by hand in python, or other kinds of scripting tools. I spent a lot of time trying to interface with the hospital informatics systems, the electronic medical record. The electronic medical record again really meant for taking care of patients it is not meant for population analytics. We ended up basically building our own health care analytic system just to keep track of what we had. What were the doctors saying about different cases. Show me all the cases where the doctors think that some particular thing happened. And be able to ask these questions in real time, generate huge data sets, anonymize them, run them through computer vision algorithms, train classifiers. Diagnostic imaging is really excited about this kind of technology. There has been a lot of interesting side projects as well. One of the most, one of the things that administration is the most interested is because of these kinds of systems we are keeping a lot better track of radiation exposure, per image, so the CT scanners will tell you how much radiation was used for an individual study. But again our analytic systems historically you have no way of saying what's the average? What's high, what's low? Its months of latency, six months of latency between when you run a scan and when American College of Radiology comes back and says some of your scans were a little high in radiation exposure. Whereas now because we keep track of all this data we have this real time dashboards and that is the kind of thing we use Splunk for. WE keep track of all the data we are collecting and then we create these dashboards and give them to people who haven't had access to this kind of analytics before. For looking at utilization, optimizing work flow, things like that. >> I am just kind of curious when you mention like x-rays and maybe Dave you know more about this than I do. But it seems like it is kind of a standard practice you have a certain amount of exposure for a certain amount of test, and that data I don't know how but it sounds like it is more critical to have that kind of data than someone a layman might think. I was curious of the analytics of that. What are you using to determine there in terms of that exposure? >> There's always a trade off with radiation based imaging. There is a lot of non radiation based imaging. Like you may have heard of magnetic resonance imaging, or MR. Those are thought to be perfectly safe. You can get MR's all day long. If fact they do give MR's to people all day long for research purposes sometimes. >> You climb in the tube, I don't want to climb in the tube. >> You get a little claustrophobic >> They are expensive >> That is the thing, we don't have very many of them. They are very slow but they're safe. Ultrasounds very safe, we give ultrasounds to pregnant women all the time very safe, but they don't give you very quality images back. They give you a very small field of view and things are wiggling around. A CT scan is super fast and it gives a physician all the information they need in a snap shot. CT scanners are so fast now they can freeze your beating heart. They can make a revolution around your body of thickness so they can capture your heart while it is in motion. You know like with anything if you have a camera and you take a picture of someone running across the screen you don't see the person you just see this sort of blur, right? Now with modern fast aperture cameras you can take a picture of nutrinos and things that are impossibly fast. I don't know that that's actually true. You might wand to edit that out. (laughing) >> But conceptually >> A CT scan is the same sort of thing. Your heart is beat all the time, your lungs are moving all the time. Your bowls are moving all the time. Your blood is coursing through your veins all the time. It is so fast it can freeze it and give you this volumetric data back. They use that for all kinds of different things. They're not able to do with other kinds of imaging modalities The downside is that they're potentially somewhat dangerous, right? People have known since the 1890's when x-rays were first discovered by Wilhome Rankin that if you put somebody under an x-ray beam for too long, your hair will fall out, you'll get skin burns, all kinds of things that these early pioneers of x-ray did to themselves without realizing it. Documenting all of these problems that can happen, and a CT can uses ionizing radiation if you get too many CT scans you'll get skin reactions, or other kinds of things. It is really important to keep track of the risk to benefit ratio there. People give you a CT scan if you fall down and you hurt your head. They give you a CT scan cause they're worried that you are going to die if you don't get the CT scan. Along with that is this idea of how do you track how many CT scans an individual patient gets in a year. Right now the hospital has a hard time keeping track if somebody comes into the emergency room of automatically identifying oh this patients already had six CT's should we put them in line for a MR instead of another CT. Again these are the kinds of things that we are able to get at through using, through better management of our data and organization of our data. >> You mentioned that you're doing more of this real time analysis, Splunk is obviously a tool that helps do that. Other tooling, are you using cloud based tools? >> We have to be really careful about cloud based stuff. There is this protected health information that everyone's really concerned about. Working with data at the hospital is really walking a fine line you need to be very conscious of security. There really reluctant to let non anonymized data out to cloud sources for storage. There are some ways of getting around that, but basically we run all of our servers in house. There's a couple of big data centers down in the basement of the hospital. Mostly they have clinical duties but we have a number of research servers that are installed down there as well. They're managed by the same IT staff in this sort of hardened architecture. I actually can't do any work from home which is an unusual kind of experience, I am used to being able to log in remotely. >> Oh darn (laughing) >> Or you spend too much time on the job. >> Some times you'd like to >> I'm ambivalent about it, there's goods and bads about it. >> So how do you deal with that streaming infrastructure and real time analysis. Do you guys sort of build your own? Any kind of resource tools, or >> I use a lot of open source tools. Traditionally the hospital wants to pay for everything. They feel like if they pay for things then it comes with uptime guarantees. When I build my systems though, because I'm working on shoestring budgets, And because I believe in open source. I use open source where ever I can. I wanted to mention we're actually for a lot of the work that we do supported through Splunk for good. So I don't pay for a full Splunk license, Cory Marshal who runs Splunk for good, has sort of recognized the value of some of the stuff that we're doing with dealing with non traditional data. It's not the sort of standard things that the other people who are working in the healthcare space with splunk are working with. We are working with imaging data. We are working with patient bedside telemetry data, you know the EKG signals and the heart rate signals. And aggregating all this stuff in to one place to make more sensible alerts and alarms. Oh this patient set off an alarm three times in the last hour I should send a page to the nurse who is taking care of this person. It's different that the kind of business optimism that I think a lot of people in the healthcare space are using splunk for. >> SO you have your core mission around diagnostic imaging. As we sort of touched on you have all these other peripheral factors in your industry. The affordable care act, obviously there's HIPPA, there's EMR, there's meaningful use. How much does that affect your mission? Does it get in the way? Is it something you have to be cognizant of like constantly, obviously HIPPA. Other factors? >> I try to just be cognoscente, I try not to let anything get in my way. Almost all of these things that you talk about they're really meant to protect the patient. I make sure that everything that I do is working with data is that we are anonymizing things, were using data securely, and we are trying to help the patients. I think I just have this moral check in my head of what is what I am doing right now good for my department, good for my institution, good for my patient. Then because I am aware of all these other rules they are very complicated and hard to navigate. At the end of the day I can say I understood that rule, I followed that rule, and what I did was the appropriate thing to do. >> It's like house rules. >> Yeah >> Okay, talk a little bit more about splunk, how are you using it, what it does for your mission, for your operation. >> What I came to the conference this year to talk about is this dose management system that we built that I think is really important. We've had vendors coming in and telling us that medicare isn't going to pay hospitals, or is going to reduce reimbursement to hospitals who can't prove that they're using ionizing radiation imaging appropriately. So what does that mean? No body quite knows exactly what that means. How do I tell whether my hospital is adhering to these rules that are ill defined and these vendors are coming in and they're trying to sell us solutions that are like a hundred thousand dollar a year licenses. Administration is taking this seriously, they're trying to figure out which of these vendors are we going to give money to. In the mean time a bunch of the CT technology staff and I basically put together a system that answers all these questions for them using Splunk. We use splunk to collect meta information about how all the scanners system wide are being use. We have 12 CT scanners, they shoot 90,000 different studies every year. Each one of those studies may be hundreds or even thousands of slices of data in these volumetric data sets. It's a huge amount of data to keep track of. Your not using Splunk to keep track of the imaging per se. Your using splunk to keep track of what imaging you collected. So it is a small fraction, it is just the metadata about each one of the studies. That metadata comes with a bunch of interesting information about what the radiation exposure for each one of those studies was. Splunk has these wonderfully adaptable easy to use tools. That once we covert our strange dicom, device independent communications in medicine data, we flatten it, normalize it, turn it into generic data, it is Json, it's dictionary files. Then splunk has these great tools that can be applied instead of to business analytics and optimization to image analytics and optimization. We build our dashboards on top of splunk to show per institution what was the average dose? Per protocol, per body type, you can track which technologist have the lower doses and higher doses. We found all kinds of interesting things. My favorite story the chief technologist was just telling me. I was putting together my slides for this presentation that I did here about this. I said we need an example of a does outlier. Some time when we had a higher than expected radiation event. We never have dangerously high radiation events. >> Good caveat, thank you. >> All the machines care about is whether you're harming some one and we never harm anyone. The machines don't track, this one is a little higher than you would expect it so that you can say why is that, what happened there? But now we do using our splunk dashboards. So I asked him can you get me an example for my slide deck. He literally just looked over to the monitor that he had open and he says oh right here. Here is a patient who had a 69. These numbers are irrelevant, they're supposed to be 50. He knows what the numbers are supposed to be, to me numbers are just numbers. This patient had a 69 and he picks up the phone, this was 5 minutes ago, he calls down to the control room. He says I'm not blaming anyone but why did Mrs So and So have a little bit higher radiation dose? 69 is not dangerous by the way, alarms don't go off until like 75 or 80 or something like that. So he just called and he asked what was going on with this patient. She had a dislocated arm. Okay I understand. This was a head scan, I was like Scott what does a dislocated arm have to do with a head scan? He said well she went through the CT bore with her arm up over her head which is not the way but it was the only way she would tolerate. So the CT thought she was this big and it had to raise the amount of radiation that it was putting into her to go through a larger object. So he documented that, he put it down, and again we used splunk for ticketing for outlier identification. So he put this one into the outlier identification database that we have, he picked other for the reason because we don't have a drop down menu with dislocated arm. Marked it as closed and it is justified, so when the JCO Joint commission on hospital accreditation comes trough and they say well what do you do to manage your higher than expected radiation exposures? We can both say well we never have unsafe radiation exposures it is all documented right here. When it is higher than usual this is the way we document it, and here are examples of ten or twenty of these odd instances where something happened. Either it was completely justified like this lady where the machines were used appropriately, that was appropriate. Or very occasionally we'll find something strange like an improper head holder was being used at one site for a while. It was resulting in these head CT's should usually be around 45 or 50 and instead they were 55 or 60. They went and they took the metal head holder and replaced it with a carbon fiber head holder that they should have been using and then all of a sudden our doses came down, and we documented it. >> It was a dislocated arm, let's leave it at that alright and we are happy with that. Derek thanks for being with us >> Oh absolutely >> Appreciate the time here on the cube and glad to have you here. Continued good luck with your work at Rhode Island. >> Thank you very much, you guys have a good day. >> Very good thank you. Derek Merck joining us here on the cube. We'll continue live from Washington DC right after this. (upbeat music)

(steady music) >> Oh, welcome back here on theCUBE. I'm John Walls, we're in The Venetian and day one of a jam-packed three days here at AWS re:Invent '22. This is the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture, and it is Merck time. And I mean, it is loaded with Merck time. We have quite the panel here, in fact. First threesome of the day, by the way. I see you guys have really loaded up nicely. Ron Kim is with us, the SVP and CTO of Merck. Ron, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks, John. >> Also, Fran Gaetens, who's the VP of Technology Infrastructure, Operations, and Experience, which I want to hear more about. Love that job title, Fran. >> Thanks, John. >> And Sean Finnerty, VP of Cloud and Infrastructure Technology. Again, everybody here from Merck. So fellows, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks, John. >> Appreciate the time. >> Yeah. >> So let's just talk about Merck, first off in general in terms of what's happening with the cloud. And Ron, I'll let you jump onto that first. I realize this talk of journey, right? >> Mm-hm. >> It's different for everybody, different slices depending upon where you are, where you start, where you need to finish. Where are you right now in terms of what you're doing with the cloud? >> Yeah, John, we've been on this journey for about two years, have done some great work and achieve some great results in proving we could move to the cloud, moving to the cloud at scale, achieving really measurable financial and operational results. Where we're focusing now going forward is transforming the business. And as you know, our business is saving and improving lives. And so when we talk about moving things to the cloud, it's much more than just moving servers or things like that. It's really contributing towards our business that saves and improves lives. So for our work that we work on together moving into the cloud, the stakes are high, but we think the opportunity's great. And the way to seize that opportunity is what we're doing now, is our BlueSky program and working with AWS and Accenture on it. >> Yeah, so two years, you're two years in. It's like nascent stage still, right? I mean, and it never ends, (laughs) frankly. >> Yeah. >> But talk about that progression and was it, you know, baby steps, was it diving in? I mean, how do you decide, you know, the batting order basically here about how you're going to get things going? >> The early parts of the the two-year journey so far, we're really starting small, primarily driven by a central team. And we did that consciously to get momentum, build the foundation, prove again we could move things to the cloud with success, we could start to scale. And then as that journey went on, now instead of just relying on the central team, we're starting to get the rest of the company involved. So this is not just this team doing the cloud journey. It's the whole company, and that's an ongoing journey, getting all the different stakeholders involved and things like that. But I think that's where we are on the journey now, is look, let's lock arms with everybody in the company. So it's a Merck-wide cloud transformation, not just the BlueSky team. >> Right, and of course, as you know, the C-suite's got to be behind all this. And we hear about how that it's now being driven in some cases, you know, these kind of transformations, whether it's from CEO level down the CTO and CIO and what have you. Fran, the experience part of your job. I just want to get to that real quick. So you know, how do you define that? >> Yeah. First of all, I'm delighted you asked. >> Okay. (laughs) >> And the focus on experience that my team's accountable for transcends, you know, our cloud journey. We have held for the last three years within my organization a priority that's focused on improving the experience that colleagues in our company have with workplace technology and services. And so I'd come into this role at the time and thought carefully, you know, about how to best title our organization in a way that would draw curiosity or inquisition. >> Sure. >> A very creative colleague that we have an opportunity to work with in our company suggested the term, and I loved it and ran with it. And today, it's, you know, still something that we spend a significant portion of cycles focused on. >> Well, it's a very clear signal, right? And a reminder as well that ultimately the experience whether it's your internal stakeholders or external, your customers, right, that you're delivering a very pleasant and efficient, and hopefully you said life-saving >> Yeah. >> experience as well. And I think that'd be a pretty good reminder for your team, isn't it? >> It is. >> "Hey, we're all part of the experience here." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Right, so Sean, let's talk about some of the things that we've discussed here, branching out within Merck. >> Yep. >> You know, and making it a company effort, not just an IT effort. Right, now all of a sudden, you're into everybody's business and everybody is sharing this. I mean, is there buying that's necessary here? I mean, how do you bring that bunch along? You've all lived it, you know it. They're experiencing it for the first time. >> Yeah, it's a great question and it's one we get quite a bit walking the halls here at re:Invent. We're very lucky in that we do have, you mentioned earlier, top-down support, right? So when we're talking about moving to the cloud, we're not just running around the halls of the technology, you know, cubes of all the people that are sitting there at computers banging away every day. We're meeting with the CEO and a significant portion of the executive team, talking about how does our cloud journey underpin our business transformation aspirations? How do we speed up scientific research? How do we do clinical trials more effectively? How do we manufacture medicine more effectively, more reliably? Those are all underpinned by this technology transformation that we're embarking on sort of from the bottoms up, and meeting in the middle with the top-down strategic imperative to transform the business by leveraging technology. So that clear and unambiguous support coming from the C-suite at our company allows us to prioritize very aggressively and point at that mission to say, "Hey, we're not just here to talk about moving a server or two. We're here to talk about how we transform scientific research and discovery in the interest of our patients and delivering medicine more effectively, more quickly." So it's really, really interesting. >> Yeah, and so being on one side of that, you know, obviously you're dealing with people, whether chemists, scientists, whomever doing computational chemistry whatever it might be. They know their business and you're trying to integrate these new capabilities into their business, right? How do you do that? I mean, how do you know what they need and how do they tell you what they need when they don't know what you have? (laughs) >> That's quite a question. >> Yeah. I got there. >> Yeah, I mean, my initial thought is, you know, there has to be a compelling value to anybody getting impacted by this. And that's what we all work to do. So whether it's faster, less lead time, reducing cycle times, more reliability, innovation, I mean, there has to be something in it for them, and the work we're doing crosses that whole spectrum. So some of the efforts we have, "Hey, this is a cost-savings effort, this is for agility, this is for speed." So you know, it can't be just we're just doing this for the sake of moving of the cloud. There has some business value in it. And you know, Sean and the team have done a great job on kind of putting the rigor behind how do we describe that value so people then say, "Is that value really there or not? And does it really add up?" And I think that's been one of the keys to our success, is the work that Sean and members of his team have been doing is there's a pretty rigorous way we track our progress. And we've involved finance from day one in that. So having their buy in, you know, gives the whole set of results a lot of credibility. >> But tell me about that, Sean, about in terms of identifying value and quantifying it, in terms that a bottom line can orient to that. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've been at the cloud migration game myself personally for years, right? I got into this game back in 2011. The challenge of those programs has always been articulating the value associated with migrating stuff. It's easy to say, "I'm going to take a server. I'm going to move it from here to here. Then that difference is X, point at that." That's easy, everyone can understand that. But the labor efficiencies and the business value and the business transformation that comes with moving a capability from on-prem or from another hosting service to the cloud and transforming how we deliver, manage, operate, and scale those solutions, that's really where the power of this comes from, is business value tied to discrete actions, moving systems with a plan from one point to another point. And then being able to clearly articulate the value by implementing, as Ron mentioned, models we've created. So we've created actually financial calculation models to put dollars and cents next to labor efficiencies, time liberated, you know, the ability to deliver with higher velocity, higher quality, higher reliability. Those now have dollar values associated with them, which we're able to take, apply to our portfolio, and look for those opportunities that jump out as, "Hey, you know, that one's worth a million bucks. Let's prioritize that one. The ones that maybe have lower value or less business impact, you know, let's put those to the side and get to those later." So we can constantly demonstrate that not only are we raising our ability to deliver for our patients, but we're also delivering value back to the corporation to invest in other things that need focus and attention. >> Yeah, so talk about AWS and Accenture a little bit about, I mean, obviously big players with this. I'm assuming that interaction, maybe Fran, you know, talk about the partnership and again, how they have helped you get to the point that where you currently reside. >> Yeah, our partnership with both firms has been longstanding. That said, you know, what's changed in a market way happened a couple years ago when we originated this cloud acceleration program that we called BlueSky. We worked directly with Accenture to develop a comprehensive business case that, you know, fundamentally lined out the detail of our intention, how we would prosecute this work, and you know, among other things be crystal clear about the value at stake and how we would capture and realize that over time. So you know, through that lens, it's really taken a village with parties from all three firms, you know, to come together, prosecute this important work, but likewise, as I like to say, keep score, you know, in the context of value because ultimately, it's the one thing that we can talk about unambiguously with the program in the context of measurable results. >> Because of the work you do, obviously, you know, invaluable in many respects. But just the thought about cloud, and I know governance, security, compliance, all these things are critical. You know, how do those weigh in, in terms of considerations you have to make? And especially going forward as you develop new ideas, new things, ideas you're trying to bring to market, >> Yeah. >> I mean, how much does that play and the cloud and what exposures there might be? >> Yeah, it plays in quite a bit. And no matter what type of work we do, cloud or on-premise, I mean, security is of utmost importance. That's how we operate. Now what's interesting is when we think about in AWS, you know, AWS has the ability, they have the the scale and the learnings from multiple clients, right? So rather than a single company like us trying to figure out security on our own, we can benefit from what are all the lessons that they've learned that they bake back into their platform. So that's been a great benefit. But regardless of our partner, we'll always be very, a lot of scrutiny about security no matter what. And that's how we should operate. But the benefits of the platform within AWS, I mean, there's a lot of security intelligence built in from their experience, so that's- >> If I can add to that- >> Sure. >> Yeah. To build on prior remarks that Sean had articulated, this migration to the cloud, right, happens to be a catalyst for a broader transformation. One where we're fundamentally changing our ways of working. Ways that consider, you know, topics like security, compliance, documentation, regulatory requirements. And choosing to bake those in to these solutions from the onset rather than consider them as an appendage or an afterthought. So you know, the cloud is a really important part of this. You know, there's no mistake about it, but it's also a powerful catalyst for something that's broader. >> Tremendously more efficient, right? With our thinking and how we're going to plan and how we're going to execute. >> Yeah, and to build on that even more, we view it as an opportunity to raise the bar on our compliance, security, and regulatory readiness game. As we're touching applications across our portfolio, rearchitecting, leaning in on things like the well-architected framework and other things that AWS and Accenture bring to bear. We set the bar higher when we move things from where they are today to a new destination and introduce automation so that that uplift of control does not come at the cost of additional time or labor. It's simply we're raising the bar in ourselves. We're using this transformational opportunity to implement that change. Our customers are along for the ride and reap the benefits of the fact that, you know, we've raised the bar on ourselves, basically. >> Well, you said two years, so the first steps, and I'm sure the next ones are going to be just as successful. I really appreciate the time. Thanks for sharing that and for bringing so much expertise at the table. >> Thanks, John. >> Appreciate that, good to have you guys with us. >> Thanks. >> Talking about Merck and their cloud transformation. Love that word, we've been talking a lot about it this week. You're watching theCUBE, of course, here at the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And theCUBE being, of course, the leader at tech coverage. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV brought to you by UiPath. >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, and users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dines the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel, great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's good to see you again. >> You are, this is your fifth... >> Fifth time on theCUBE. >> Fifth time, yes. >> Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers. You're a public company now, ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? >> Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it, and we invested a lot in the last 5-6 years because in the beginning when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe like a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important that you look at your roots and who are you? What defines you? So we ended up of this really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble, but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew onboard. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory with life and jobs is in whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life-work balance. I believe in life-work cycles, in life-work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture, that nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UiPath and we appointed her as Chief Culture Officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a Chief Culture Officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we're really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they have the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that fosters these values. >> I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility. Because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on talking about how UiPath is fundamental in their transformation. I think that the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. >> Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. Maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, "Yes, we are here for you." And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric Yuan is a friend of mine, but a combination I think, and going into this hybrid world, I think it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year, then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's, Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events 'cause they can't get their customers here. You got 2000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers. I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies, always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, I've never bought into the narrative about replacing jobs. I'd never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable, but I think the way you've changed the market, I wonder if you could comment is... You had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome. And so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money you can actually try it even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off, and so people then said, "Oh, wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, but making my life better." And you've always said that. And that's I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically, and now you have a lot of people following that path. >> That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value and actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, and we always start with this high level, how can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value and that serves us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go side by side with other competitors. It was a very simple strategy for us. Asking customers, "Just go and test it side-by-side and see," and they see. We implement the same process in halftime, half of resources involved. It's an easy math multiplied by a thousand processes and it's done. >> When theCUBE started Daniel in 2010. It was our first year. And so it coincided with big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way now the problem with big data was too complicated, right? There were only a few big internet giants who could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation, I think is even bigger in a way, 'cause it involves data. It involves AI, it's transformative. And so we're saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. But coming back to you 'cause I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stove pipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is feels like you have the potential to build a next great software company and with the founder as the CEO, and there aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there, Marc Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UiPath? Are you envisioning building the next great software company, may take 20 years? >> People were asking me for a long time. Did you envision that you'd get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no. Otherwise I would have been considered mad. (Lisa and Dave laughing) So you build the vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, "We are going to change the world." This is not how the world works. Really, you build and you understand the customer and you build more. But at some point I realized we change so much how people work, we get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual, repetitive, low value tasks that we have to do. And it took the humanity of us. And I talked to Tom Montag about with this book "Sapiens". It's interesting and that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So, in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generation of software company. >> How do you like... That's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90-day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? You've never been a CEO of a public company, the street's getting to know you like, "Who is this guy?" I'll give you another cute story. There were three companies in the early CUBE days, Tableau, Splunk, and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau now part of Salesforce. I think Splunk was under capitalized, but we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company, except the street's getting to know you a little bit. They're like, "Hmm, how do we read the guy?" All that stuff. That'll sort itself out. But so what's life like on the public markets? >> Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public company. (Dave laughing) I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not, because we were used to deal with private investors and it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to like a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a split. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from how I dress, how do I say this word? They watch the FED announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the shim we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us and like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough, but you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model, and they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. >> It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. >> You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So, the DNA I think is there at UiPath to be able to build that trust with the street. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. This is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. >> Lisa: It does. >> Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is that you look at the productivity decline and particularly in Western countries over the last two decades. Now I know with the pandemic and especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. It has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But does that resonate with you? >> It totally resonates with me. Look at US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. It's just obvious. Like it plateaued in Japan, in Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our case and restart the engine. So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. >> Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? >> I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain is fascinating technology, but crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the very same. Look, Daniel, from Americans perspective we have the dollars, and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Columbia or Venezuela, countries where there people don't have so much trust in their currency, and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be able to be capable of putting them into something else that is outside government context. I believe this is a good use case but I still don't believe that crypto is that type of asset that you know will survive the test of time. I think it's really too much... To me the difference between gold and Bitcoin is that it's too... You cannot replicate gold whatever you... It's impossible, unless you are God you cannot create gold two, right? It's impossible, but you can create Bitcoin 2. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3. So I don't think the value that you can build in one particular crypto currency right now will stay over time. But it's just me. I was the wrong so many times in my life. >> You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. >> I agree, totally agree. (Lisa and Dave laughing) >> What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here. We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? >> Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I don't know, I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. Suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So, I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really awesome. And the transition to a platform, from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers because even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them, what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. You've seen them now. So I think even the next evolution of semantic automation, this one is very well with our customers. >> Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here, and I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies. Although as I wrote, you had a long, strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. >> Absolutely. >> And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple, and that you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success and you can see it and so congratulations, but many more years to come and we're really watching. >> Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you, that was awesome really. Great discussion. >> Exactly, good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to FORWARD V. >> You will be invited forever. Thank you, guys, really. >> Forever, did you hear that? All right, for Daniel Dines and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV day two. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for day two. Live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, Dave. We had a great action packed day yesterday. We're going to have another action packed day today. We've got the CEO coming on. We've got customers coming on, but there's been a lot in the news last 24 hours. Facebook, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, so wall street journal today, headline Facebook hearing fuels call for rain in on big tech. All right, everybody's going after big tech. Uh, for those of you who missed it, 60 minutes had a, uh, an interview with the whistleblower. Her name is, uh, Francis Haugen. She's very credible, just a little background. I'll give you my take. I mean, she was hired to help set Facebook straight and protect privacy of individuals, of children. And I really feel like, again, she, she didn't come across as, as bitter or antagonistic, but, but I feel as though she feels betrayed, right, I think she was hired to do a job. They lured her in to say, Hey, this is again, just my take to say, Hey, we want your help in earnest to protect the privacy of our users, our citizens, et cetera. And I think she feels betrayed because she's now saying, listen, this is not cool. >>You hired us to do a job. We in earnest, went in and tried to solve this problem. And you guys kind of ignored it and you put profit ahead of safety. And I think that is the fundamental crux of this. Now she made a number of really good points in her hearing yesterday and I'll, and we'll try to summarize, I mean, there's a lot of putting advertising revenue ahead of children's safety and, and, and others. The examples they're using are during the 2020 election, they shut down any sort of negative conversations. They would be really proactive about that, but after the election, they turned it back on and you know, we all know what happened on January 6th. So there's sort of, you know, the senators are trying that night. Um, the second thing is she talked about Facebook as a wall garden, and she made the point yesterday at the congressional hearings that Google actually, you can data scientists, anybody can go download all the data that Google has on you. >>You and I can do that. Right? There's that website that we've gone to and you look at all the data Google has and you kind of freak out. Yeah, you can't do that with Facebook, right? It's all hidden. So it's kind of this big black box. I will say this it's interesting. The calls for breaking up big tech, Bernie Sanders tweeted something out yesterday said that, uh, mark Zuckerberg was worth, I don't know. I think 9 billion in 2007 or eight or nine, whatever it was. And he's worth 122 billion today, which of course is mostly tied up in Facebook stock, but still he's got incredible wealth. And then Bernie went on his red it's time to break up big tech. It's time to get people to pay their fair share, et cetera. I'm intrigued that the senators don't have as much vigilance around other industries, whether it's big pharma, food companies addicting children to sugar and the like, but that doesn't let Facebook. >>No, it doesn't, but, but you ha you bring up a good point. You and I were chatting about this yesterday. What the whistleblower is identifying is scary. It's dangerous. And the vast majority, I think of its users, don't understand it. They're not aware of it. Um, and why is big tech being maybe singled out and use as an example here, when, to your point, you know, the addiction to sugar and other things are, uh, have very serious implications. Why is big tech being singled out here as the poster child for what's going wrong? >>Well, and they're comparing it to big tobacco, which is the last thing you want to be compared to as big tobacco. But the, but the, but the comparison is, is valid in that her claim, the whistleblower's claim was that Facebook had data and research that it knew, it knows it's hurting, you know, you know, young people. And so what did it do? It created, you know, Instagram for kids, uh, or it had 600,000. She had another really interesting comment or maybe one of the senators did. Facebook said, look, we scan our records and you know, kids lie. And we, uh, we kicked 600,000 kids off the network recently who were underaged. And the point was made if you have 600,000 people on your network that are underage, you have to go kill. That's a problem. Right? So now the flip side of this, again, trying to be balanced is Facebook shut down Donald Trump and his nonsense, uh, and basically took him off the platform. >>They kind of thwarted all the hunter Biden stuff, right. So, you know, they did do some, they did. It's not like they didn't take any actions. Uh, and now they're up, you know, in front of the senators getting hammered. But I think the Zuckerberg brings a lot of this on himself because he put out an Instagram he's on his yacht, he's drinking, he's having fun. It's like he doesn't care. And he, you know, who knows, he probably doesn't. She also made the point that he owns an inordinate percentage and controls an inordinate percentage of the stock, I think 52% or 53%. So he can kind of do what he wants. And I guess, you know, coming back to public policy, there's a lot of narrative of, I get the billionaires and I get that, you know, the Mo I'm all for billionaires paying more taxes. >>But if you look at the tax policies that's coming out of the house of representatives, it really doesn't hit the billionaires the way billionaires can. We kind of know the way that they protect their wealth is they don't sell and they take out low interest loans that aren't taxed. And so if you look at the tax policies that are coming out, they're really not going after the billionaires. It's a lot of rhetoric. I like to deal in facts. And so I think, I think there's, there's a lot of disingenuous discourse going on right now at the same time, you know, Facebook, they gotta, they gotta figure it out. They have to really do a better job and become more transparent, or they are going to get broken up. And I think that's a big risk to the, to their franchise and maybe Zuckerberg doesn't care. Maybe he just wants to give it a, give it to the government, say, Hey, are you guys are on? It >>Happens. What do you think would happen with Amazon, Google, apple, some of the other big giants. >>That's a really good question. And I think if you look at the history of the us government, in terms of ant anti monopolistic practices, it spent decade plus going after IBM, you know, at the end of the day and at the same thing with Microsoft at the end of the day, and those are pretty big, you know, high profiles. And then you look at, at T and T the breakup of at T and T if you take IBM, IBM and Microsoft, they were slowed down by the U S government. No question I've in particular had his hands shackled, but it was ultimately their own mistakes that caused their problems. IBM misunderstood. The PC market. It gave its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft for its part. You know, it was hugging windows. They tried to do the windows phone to try to jam windows into everything. >>And then, you know, open source came and, you know, the world woke up and said, oh, there's this internet that's built on Linux. You know, that kind of moderated by at T and T was broken up. And then they were the baby bells, and then they all got absorbed. And now you have, you know, all this big, giant telcos and cable companies. So the history of the U S government in terms of adjudicating monopolistic behavior has not been great at the same time. You know, if companies are breaking the law, they have to be held accountable. I think in the case of Amazon and Google and apple, they, a lot of lawyers and they'll fight it. You look at what China's doing. They just cut right to the chase and they say, don't go to the, they don't litigate. They just say, this is what we're doing. >>Big tech, you can't do a, B and C. We're going to fund a bunch of small startups to go compete. So that's an interesting model. I was talking to John Chambers about this and he said, you know, he was flat out that the Western way is the right way. And I believe in, you know, democracy and so forth. But I think if, to answer your question, I think they'll, they'll slow it down in courts. And I think at some point somebody's going to figure out a way to disrupt these big companies. They always do, you know, >>You're right. They always do >>Right. I mean, you know, the other thing John Chambers points out is that he used to be at 1 28, working for Wang. There is no guarantee that the past is prologue that because you succeeded in the past, you're going to succeed in the future. So, so that's kind of the Facebook break up big tech. I'd like to see a little bit more discussion around, you know, things like food companies and the, like >>You bring up a great point about that, that they're equally harmful in different ways. And yet they're not getting the visibility that a Facebook is getting. And maybe that's because of the number of users that it has worldwide and how many people depend on it for communication, especially in the last 18 months when it was one of the few channels we had to connect and engage >>Well. And, and the whistleblower's point, Facebook puts out this marketing narrative that, Hey, look at all this good we're doing in reality. They're all about the, the, the advertising profits. But you know, I'm not sure what laws they're breaking. They're a public company. They're, they're, they have a responsibility to shareholders. So that's, you know, to be continued. The other big news is, and the headline is banks challenge, apple pay over fees for transactions, right? In 2014, when apple came up with apple pay, all the banks lined up, oh, they had FOMO. They didn't want to miss out on this. So they signed up. Now. They don't like the fact that they have to pay apple fees. They don't like the fact that apple introduced its own credit card. They don't like the fact that they have to pay fees on monthly recurring charges on your, you know, your iTunes. >>And so we talked about this and we talk about it a lot on the cube is that, that in, in, in, in his book, seeing digital David, Michelle, or the author talked about Silicon valley broadly defined. So he's including Seattle, Microsoft, but more so Amazon, et cetera, has a dual disruption agenda. They're not only trying to disrupt horizontally the technology industry, but they're also disrupting industry. We talked about this yesterday, apple and finances. The example here, Amazon, who was a bookseller got into cloud and is in grocery and is doing content. And you're seeing these a large companies, traverse industry value chains, which have historically been very insulated right from that type of competition. And it's all because of digital and data. So it's a very, pretty fascinating trends going on. >>Well, from a financial services perspective, we've been seeing the unbundling of the banks for a while. You know, the big guys with B of A's, those folks are clearly concerned about the smaller, well, I'll say the smaller FinTech disruptors for one, but, but the non FinTech folks, the apples of the world, for example, who aren't in that industry who are now to your point, disrupting horizontally and now going after individual specific industries, ultimately I think as consumers we want, whatever is going to make our lives easier. Um, do you ever, ever, I always kind of scratch my nose when somebody doesn't take apple pay, I'm like, you don't take apple pay so easy. It's so easy to make this easy for me. >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. I, I do think, um, you know, it begs the question when will banks or Willbanks lose control of the payment systems. They seem to be doing that already with, with alternative forms of payment, uh, whether it's PayPal or Stripe or apple pay. And then crypto is, uh, with, with, with decentralized finance is a whole nother topic of disruption and innovation, >>Right? Well, these big legacy institutions, these organizations, and we've spoke with some of them yesterday, we're going to be speaking with some of them today. They need to be able to be agile, to transform. They have to have the right culture in order to do that. That's the big one. They have to be willing. I think an open to partner with the broader ecosystem to unlock more opportunities. If they want to be competitive and retain the trust of the clients that they've had for so long. >>I think every industry has a digital disruption scenario. We used to always use the, don't get Uber prized example Uber's coming on today, right? And, and there isn't an industry, whether it's manufacturing or retail or healthcare or, or government that isn't going to get disrupted by digital. And I think the unique piece of this is it's it's data, data, putting data at the core. That's what the big internet giants have done. That's what we're hearing. All these incumbents try to do is to put data. We heard this from Coca-Cola yesterday, we're putting data at the core of our company and what we're enabling through automation and other activities, uh, digital, you know, a company. And so, you know, can these, can these giants, these hundred plus year old giants compete? I think they can because they don't have to invent AI. They can work with companies like UI path and embed AI into their business and focused on, on what they do best. Now, of course, Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft there may be going to have the best AI in the world. But I think ultimately all these companies are on a giant collision course, but the market is so huge that I think there's a lot of, >>There's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think one of the things that was exciting about talking to one, the female CIO of Coca-Cola yesterday, a hundred plus old organization, and she came in with a very transformative, very different mindset. So when you see these, I always appreciate when I say legacy institutions like Coca-Cola or Merck who was on yesterday, blue cross blue shield who's on today, embracing change, cultural change going. We can't do things the way we used to do, because there are competitors in that review mirror who are smaller, they're more nimble, they're faster. They're going to be, they're going to take our customers away from us. We have to deliver this exceptional customer and employee experience. And Coca-Cola is a great example of one that really came in with CA brought in a disruptor in order to align digital with the CEO's thoughts and processes and organization. These are >>Highly capable companies. We heard from the head of finance at, at applied materials today. He was also coming on. I was quite, I mean, this is a applied materials is really strong company. They're talking about a 20 plus billion dollar company with $120 billion market cap. They supply semiconductor equipment and they're a critical component of the semiconductor supply chain. And we all know what's going on in semiconductors today with a huge shortage. So they're a really important company, but I was impressed with, uh, their finance leaders vision on how they're transforming the company. And it was not like, you know, 10 years out, these were not like aspirational goals. This is like 20, 19, 20, 22. Right. And, and really taking costs out of the business, driving new innovation. And, and it's, it was it's, it's refreshing to me Lisa, to see CFOs, you know, typically just bottom line finance focused on these industry transformations. Now, of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line, but they see technology as a way to get there. In fact, he put technology right in the middle of his stack. I want to ask him about that too. I actually want to challenge him a little bit on it because he had that big Hadoop elephant in the middle and this as an elephant in the room. And that picture, >>The strategy though, that applied materials had, it was very well thought out, but it was also to your point designed to create outcomes year upon year upon year. And I was looking at some of the notes. I took that in year one, alone, 274 automations in production. That's a lot, 150,000 in annual work hours automated 124 use cases they tackled in one year. >>So I want to, I want to poke at that a little bit too. And I, and I did yesterday with some guests. I feel like, well, let's see. So, um, I believe it was, uh, I forget what guests it was, but she said we don't put anything forward that doesn't hit the income statement. Do you remember that? Yes, it was Chevron because that was pushing her. I'm like, well, you're not firing people. Right. And we saw from IDC data today, only 13% of organizations are saying, or, or, or the organizations at 13% of the value was from reduction in force. And a lot of that was probably in plan anyway, and they just maybe accelerated it. So they're not getting rid of headcount, but they're counting hours saved. So that says to me, there's gotta be an normally or often CFOs say, well, it's that soft dollars because we're redeploying folks. But she said, no, it hits the income statement. So I don't, I want to push a little bit and see how they connect the dots, because if you're going to save hours, you're going to apply people to new work. And so either they're generating revenue or cutting costs somewhere. So, so there's another layer that I want to appeal to understand how that hits the income state. >>Let's talk about some of that IDC data. They announced a new white paper this morning sponsored by UI path. And I want to get your perspectives on some of the stats that they talked about. They were painting a positive picture, an optimistic picture. You know, we can't talk about automation without talking about the fear of job loss. They've been in a very optimistic picture for the actual gains over a few year period. What are your thoughts about that? Especially when we saw that stat 41% slowed hiring. >>Yeah. So, well, first of all, it's a sponsored study. So, you know, and of course the conferences, so it's going to be, be positive, but I will say this about IDC. IDC is a company I would put, you know, forest they're similar. They do sponsored research and they're credible. They don't, they, they have the answer to their audience, so they can't just out garbage. And so it has to be defensible. So I give them credit there that they won't just take whatever the vendor wants them to write and then write it. I've used to work there. And I, and I know the culture and there's a great deal of pride in being able to defend what you do. And if the answer doesn't come out, right, sorry, this is the answer. You know, you could pay a kill fee or I dunno how they handle it today. >>But, but, so my point is I think, and I know the people who did that study, many of them, and I think they're pretty credible. I, I thought by the way, you, to your 41% point. So the, the stat was 13% are gonna reduce head count, right? And then there were two in the middle and then 41% are gonna reduce or defer hiring in the future. And this to me, ties into the Erik Brynjolfsson and, and, and, uh, and, and McAfee work. Andy McAfee work from MIT who said, look, initially actually made back up. They said, look at machines, have always replaced humans. Historically this was in their book, the second machine age and what they said was, but for the first time in history, machines are replacing humans with cognitive functions. And this is sort of, we've never seen this before. It's okay. That's cool. >>And their, their research suggests that near term, this is going to be a negative economic impact, sorry, negative impact on jobs and salaries. And we've, we've generally seen this, the average salary, uh, up until recently has been flat in the United States for years and somewhere in the mid fifties. But longterm, their research shows that, and this is consistent. I think with IDC that it's going to help hiring, right? There's going to be a boost buddy, a net job creator. And there's a, there's a, there's a chasm you've got across, which is education training and skill skillsets, which Brynjolfsson and McAfee focused on things that humans can do that machines can't. And you have this long list and they revisited every year. Like they used to be robots. Couldn't walk upstairs. Well, you see robots upstairs all the time now, but it's empathy, it's creativity. It's things like that. >>Contact that humans are, are much better at than machines, uh, even, even negotiations. And, and so, so that's, those are skills. I don't know where you get those skills. Do you teach those and, you know, MBA class or, you know, there's these. So their point is there needs to be a new thought process around education, public policy, and the like, and, and look at it. You can't protect the past from the future, right? This is inevitable. And we've seen this in terms of economic activity around the world countries that try to protect, you know, a hundred percent employment and don't let competition, they tend to fall behind competitively. You know, the U S is, is not of that category. It's an open market. So I think this is inevitable. >>So a lot about upskilling yesterday, and the number of we talked with PWC about, for example, about what they're doing and a big focus on upscaling. And that was part of the IDC data that was shared this morning. For example, I'll share a stat. This was a survey of 518 people. 68% of upscaled workers had higher salaries than before. They also shared 57% of upskilled workers had higher roles and their enterprises then before. So some, again, two point it's a sponsored study, so it's going to be positive, but there, there was a lot of discussion of upskilling yesterday and the importance on that education, because to your point, we can't have one without the other. You can't give these people access to these tools and not educate them on how to use it and help them help themselves become more relevant to the organization. Get rid of the mundane tasks and be able to start focusing on more strategic business outcome, impacting processes. >>We talked yesterday about, um, I use the example of, of SAP. You, you couldn't have predicted SAP would have won the ERP wars in the early to mid 1990s, but if you could have figured out who was going to apply ERP to their businesses, you know what, you know, manufacturing companies and these global firms, you could have made a lot of money in the stock market by, by identifying those that were going to do that. And we used to say the same thing about big data, and the reason I'm bringing all this up is, you know, the conversations with PWC, Deloitte and others. This is a huge automation, a huge services opportunity. Now, I think the difference between this and the big data era, which is really driven by Hadoop is it was big data was so complicated and you had a lack of data scientists. >>So you had to hire these services firms to come in and fill those gaps. I think this is an enormous services opportunity with automation, but it's not because the software is hard to get to work. It's all around the organizational processes, rethinking those as people process technology, it's about the people in the process, whereas Hadoop and the big data era, it was all about the tech and they would celebrate, Hey, this stuff works great. There are very few companies really made it through that knothole to dominate as we've seen with the big internet giants. So you're seeing all these big services companies playing in this market because as I often say, they like to eat at the trough. I know it's kind of a pejorative, but it's true. So it's huge, huge market, but I'm more optimistic about the outcomes for a broader audience with automation than I was with, you know, big data slash Hadoop, because I think the software as much, as much more adoptable, easier to use, and you've got the cloud and it's just a whole different ball game. >>That's certainly what we heard yesterday from Chevron about the ease of use and that you should be able to see results and returns very quickly. And that's something too that UI path talks about. And a lot of their marketing materials, they have a 96, 90 7% retention rate. They've done a great job building their existing customers land and expand as we talked about yesterday, a great use case for that, but they've done so by making things easy, but hearing that articulated through the voice of their customers, fantastic validation. >>So, you know, the cube is like a little, it's like a interesting tip of the spirits, like a probe. And I will tell you when I, when we first started doing the cube and the early part of the last decade, there were three companies that stood out. It was Splunk service now and Tableau. And the reason they stood out is because they were able to get customers to talk about how great they were. And the light bulb went off for us. We were like, wow, these are three companies to watch. You know, I would tell all my wall street friends, Hey, watch these companies. Yeah. And now you see, you know, with Frank Slootman at snowflake, the war, the cat's out of the bag, everybody knows it's there. And they're expecting, you know, great things. The stock is so priced to perfection. You could argue, it's overpriced. >>The reason I'm bringing this up is in terms of customer loyalty and affinity and customer love. You're getting it here. Absolutely this ecosystem. And the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions in the, in the event last night, it was walking around. I saw a couple of wall street guys who came up to me and said, Hey, I read your stuff. It was good. Let's, let's chat. And there's a lot of skepticism on, on wall street right now about this company. Right? And to me, that's, that's good news for you. Investors who want to do some research, because the words may be not out. You know, they, they, they gotta prove themselves here. And to me, the proof is in the customer and the lifetime value of that customer. So, you know, again, we don't give stock advice. We, we kind of give fundamental observations, but this stock, I think it's trading just about 50. >>Now. I don't think it's going to go to 30, unless the market just tanks. It could have some, you know, if that happens, okay, everything will go down. But I actually think, even though this is a richly priced stock, I think the future of this company is very bright. Obviously, if they continue to execute and we're going to hear from the CEO, right? People don't know Daniel, Denise, right? They're like, who is this guy? You know, he started this company and he's from Eastern Europe. And we know he's never have run a public company before, so they're not diving all in, you know? And so that to me is something that really pay attention to, >>And we can unpack that with him later today. And we've got some great customers on the program. You mentioned Uber's here. Spotify is here, applied materials. I feel like I'm announcing something on Saturday night. Live Uber's here. Spotify is here. All right, Dave, looking forward to a great action packed today. We're going to dig more into this and let's get going. Shall we let's do it. All right. For David Dante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the cube live in Las Vegas. At the Bellagio. We are coming to you presenting UI path forward for come back right away. Our first guest comes up in just a second.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by, >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of forward for UI path forward for live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with David. David's great to be back sitting at an anchor desk. >>Yeah, good to see. This is my first show. Since June, we were at mobile world Congress and I've been, I've been doing a number of shows where they'll they'll the host myself would be there with some guests as a pre-record to some simulive show, but this is real live awesome to be working with you again. So we did live last week at a DC public sector summit for AWS next week's cube con. So it's three in a row. So maybe it's a trend. It we'll see. >>Well, the thing that was really surprising was that we were in the keynote briefly this morning. It was standing room only. There are a lot of people at this conference. They think they were expecting about 2000. And to me it looked like there were at least out, if not more >>Funny leases, most companies, if not virtually all of them, except for a handful are canceling physical events. And because they're saying their customers aren't traveling, but I've talked to over a dozen customers here. I just got here yesterday afternoon. I've talked about 10 or 12 customers who are here. They're flying, they're traveling. And we're going to dig into a lot of that. Today. We have Uber coming on the program. We have applied materials coming on, blue cross blue shield. I'm really happy that UI path decided to, to put a number of customers on the cubes so we can test what we're hearing, you know, in the marketing. >>Well, one of the first things that they said in the keynote this morning was we want to hear from our customers, what are we doing? Right? What are we not doing enough of? What do you want more? They've got eight over 8,000 customers. You mentioned some of the ones that are going to be on the program this week, including Chevron and Merck who are on today. And 70% of their revenue comes from existing customers. This is a company that has, is really kind of a use case in land and expand. Yeah. >>And I think you're going to see this trend. You know what it's like with COVID it's day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right model. Clearly hybrid is the, is the new abnormal, if you will. And I think we're going to see is, is you're going to have VIP events and this is kind of a VIP event. It's not, you know, 5,000 people, it's kind of 1500, 2000, but there are a lot of VIP customers here. Obviously the partners here. So what they did before the show is they had a partner summit. It was packed. You talk about standing room only. They had a healthcare summit, it was packed. And so they have these little VIP sections, little events within the event, and then they broadcast it out to a wider audience. And I think that's going to be the normal one. I think you're going to see CEO's in a room, maybe in a hotel and in wherever in Manhattan or, or San Francisco. And then they'll broadcast out to that wider audience. I think people are learning how to build better hybrid events, but by the way, this is all new. As I said, hybrid events, I meant virtual events. And now they're learning to learn how to build hybrid events. And that's a nother new process. >>It is, but it's also exciting to see the traction, the momentum that is here from, uh, you know, they, and they IPO at about what six months ago, you covered that your breaking analysis that you did right before the IPO and the breaking analysis that you did last last week, I believe really fascinating. Interesting acceleration is, is a theme. We're going to talk about the acceleration of automation and the momentum that the pandemic is driving. But this is a company that's accelerated everything. As you said on your breaking analysis, lightning in a bottle, this is a company that went global very quickly. We're seeing them as some of the leading companies. We can probably count on one hand who are actually coming back to these hybrid events and say, we want to be with our customers again and learn from you what you're doing, what's going on. And we've got a lot of news to share. >>Yeah, we've been covering UI path since 2015. And the piece we wrote back at IPO was, uh, you, you bypass long, strange trip to IPO and it, and it was strange. And that they kind of hung out as a software development shop for the better part of a decade. And then just listening and learning, writing code, they were kind of geeks writing code and loved it. And then they realized, wow, we have something here we can. And they, their uniqueness is they have a computer vision technology. They have the ability to sort of infer what a form looks like and then actually populated. And the thing that UI path did that was different was they made sound, sounds crazy. They made the product really simple to use, right? And we know simplicity works. We see that with best example in storage, storage, complicated business, pure storage, right? >>They pop it in. You kind of Veeam is another one. It just works. And so they, they created a freemium model that made it easy for departments to start small, you know, maybe for 15, 20, 20 $5,000, you could get a software robot and then it would do things like whatever it, it would pull data out of one spreadsheet, put it into another pull date out of one, SAS populated and people then realize, wow, I am saving a ton of time. I can do some other things. I'm more productive. And other people looking over her shoulder would say, Hey, what is that you're using? Can I get that? And then all of a sudden, like you said, lightning in a bottle and it exploded, not a conventional Silicon valley, you know, funded company, even though they got a lot of funding, they got, they raised close to a billion dollars before they went public. Um, and now they're public went public in April. The stock has been sort of trending downward for the last four or five months, a little bit off on sympathy, but you know, >>What do you think that is? They had such momentum going into it. They clearly have a lot of momentum here. 8,000 plus customers. They've got over 1200 customers with an ARR above a hundred thousand. Why do you think the stock is? >>So I think a couple of things, at least, I think first of all, the street doesn't fully understand this company. You know, Daniel DNAs has never been the CEO of a public company. He's not from Silicon valley. He's, you know, from, from, uh, Eastern Europe and they don't know him that well, uh, they've got, you know, the very, very capable, and so they're educating the streets. So there's a comfort level there. They're looking at their growth and they're inferring from their billings that their growth is, is declining. The new growth from new customers in particular. But there, the ARR is still growing at 60% annually. They also guided a little bit conservatively for the street. And the other thing is they've been profitable. I'm not if a cashflow basis. And then they guided that they would actually be, be somewhat unprofitable in the coming quarter. >>People didn't like that. They don't care about profits until you're somewhat profitable. And then you say, Hey, we're going to be a little less profitable, but of course they get events like this. So that I think it's just a matter of the street, getting to understand them. And I will say this, and you know, this, they're getting a lot of business from their existing customers. We saw this with snowflake, uh, Cleveland research, put out a note saying, oh, Snowflake's new customer growth is slowing. We published research from our friends at ETR that showed well, they're getting a lot of business from existing customers that sort of fat middle is really where they're starting to mind. And you can see this with UI path. The lifetime value of the customers is just growing and growing and growing. And so I'm not as concerned. The stocks, you know, we don't, we don't, we're not the stock advisors, but the stock is just over 50. >>Now it wasn't 90 at one point. So it's got a valuation of somewhere around 26 billion, which was closer to 50 billion. So who knows, maybe this is a buying opportunity. There's not a lot of data. So the technical analyst are saying, well, we really don't know where it's going to cook it down to 30. It could go, could go rock it up from here. I think the point Lisa is, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint, it's a long-term play. And these guys are the leaders. And they're, I think moving away from the pack. And the last thing is this concern about competition from Microsoft who bought a company last year to really in earnest, get into this business. And everybody's afraid of Microsoft. >>Well, one thing that we know that's growing considerably is the total addressable market pre pandemic. It was about 30 billion. It's now north of 60 billion. We've seen the pandemic accelerate a lot of things. Talk to me a little bit about automation as its role in digital transformation from your side. >>Yeah, I think, you know, this is again, it's a really good question because when you look at these total available market numbers, the way that companies virtually all companies, whether it's Dell or Cisco or UI path or anybody, they take data from like Gartner and IDC and they say, okay, these are the markets that we kind of play in, and this is how it's growing. What's really happening. Lisa's all these markets are converging because of digital. So to your question, it's a di what's a digital business. A digital business is a data business and they differentiate by the way in which they use data. And if you're not a digital business during the pandemic, you're out of business. So all of these markets, cloud machine intelligence, AI automation, orchestra, uh, container orchestration, container platforms, they're all coming together as one, it's all being built in as one. >>So 60 billion up from 30 billion, I think it could be a hundred billion. I think, you know, they threw out a stat today that 2% of processes are automated, uh, says to me that, I mean, anything digital is going to be automated. So that is hundreds of billions of dollars of, of market opportunity, right? And so there's no shortage of market opportunity for this company. And that's why, by the way, everybody's entering it. We saw SAP make some acquisitions. We S we see in for talking about it, uh, uh, Salesforce service now, and these SAS companies are all saying, Hey, we can own the automation piece within our stack, what UI path is doing. And the reason why I liked their strategy better is they're a specialist in automation horizontally across all these software stacks. And that's really why their Tam I think is, >>And that gives them quite a big differentiator that horizontal play >>It does. I think I see. So I don't see, I think there's a continuum and I think you got Microsoft over here with Azure and personal productivity in their cloud. And then you've got the pure plays, which are really focusing on a broader automation agenda. That's UI path, that's automation, anywhere I would put blue prism in that category, the blueprints, and by the way, is getting, getting acquired by Vista. And they're gonna merge them with Tipco company that, you know, quite a bit about, and that's an integration play. So that's kind of interesting. I would put them as more of a horizontal play. And then in the fat middle, you've got SAP and in four, and, and, you know, IBM's getting into the game, although they, I think they OEM from a lot of different companies and all those other companies I mentioned before, they're kind of the walled gardens. >>And so I think that UI path is less of a head-to-head competitor with Microsoft today anyway, than it is for instance, with automation anywhere. And it's, and it's growing faster than automation, anywhere from what we can tell. And it's, it's still leader in that horizontal play. You know, you never discount Microsoft, but I think just like for instance, Okta is a specialist in, in, in access identity, access management and privileged, privileged access management and access government, they compete with Microsoft's single sign on, right. But they're a horizontal play. So there's plenty of room for, for both in my view. Anyway, >>Some of the things that you can you think that we're going to hear, you know, seem to be at this inflection point where UI path wants to move away from being an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform they made, they made some announcements about vision a couple of years ago at the last in-person event. What are some of the things you think that are going to be announced in the next couple? >>That's a really good question. I'm glad you picked up on that because they started as a point tool essentially. And then they realized, wow, if we're really going to grow as a company, we have to expand that. So they made acquisite, they've been making acquisitions. One of the key acquisitions they made was a company called process gold. So it's funny when we've done previous, uh, RPA events, I've said RPA in its early days was kind of scripts paving the cow path, meaning you're taking existing processes of saying, okay, we're just going to automate them where UI path is headed in others is they're looking across the enterprise and how do we go end to end? How do we take a broader automation agenda and drive automation throughout the entire organization? And I think that's a lot of what we're going to hear from today. We heard that from executives, APAR co co Kaylon, and, um, and, and, and Ted Kumar talked about their engineering and their product vision. And I think you iPad test to show that that's actually what's happening with customers and they have the portfolio to deliver >>Well, those two executives that you just mentioned, and a lot of others are going to be on the program. The next couple of days jam packed. Dave, I'm looking forward to unpacking what UI path is doing. The acceleration in the automation markets. We're going to have a fun couple of days. >>Thanks for coming on here for David >>Lente. I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be back live from Las Vegas at UI path forward for in just a minute.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by, >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of forward for UI path forward for live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with David. David's great to be back sitting at an anchor desk. >>Yeah, good to see. This is my first show. Since June, we were at mobile world Congress and I've been, I've been doing a number of shows where they'll they'll the host myself would be there with some guests as a pre-record to some simulive show, but this is real live awesome to be working with you again. So we did live last week at a DC public sector summit for AWS next week's cube con. So it's three in a row. So maybe it's a trend. It we'll see. >>Well, the thing that was really surprising was that we were in the keynote briefly this morning. It was standing room only. There are a lot of people at this conference. They think they were expecting about 2000. And to me it looked like there were at least out, if not more >>Funny leases, most companies, if not virtually all of them, except for a handful are canceling physical events. And because they're saying their customers aren't traveling, but I've talked to over a dozen customers. I just got here yesterday afternoon. I've talked about 10 or 12 customers who are here. They're flying, they're traveling. And we're going to dig into a lot of that. Today. We have Uber coming on the program. We have applied materials coming on, blue cross blue shield. I'm really happy that you AIPAC decided to, to put a number of customers on the cubes so we can test what we're hearing, you know, in the marketing. >>Well, one of the first things that they said in the keynote this morning was we want to hear from our customers, what are we doing? Right? What are we not doing enough of? What do you want more? They've got eight over 8,000 customers. You mentioned some of the ones that are going to be on the program this week, including Chevron and Merck who are on today. And 70% of their revenue comes from existing customers. This is a company that has, is really kind of a use case in land and expand. Yeah. >>And I think you're going to see this trend. You know what it's like with COVID it's day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right model. Clearly hybrid is the, is the new abnormal, if you will. And I think we're going to see is, is you're going to have VIP events. And this is kind of a VIP event. It's not, you know, 5,000 people, it's kind of 1500, 2000, but there are a lot of VIP customers here. Obviously the partners here. So what they did before the show is they had a partner summit. It was packed. You talked about standing room only. They had a healthcare summit, it was packed. And so they have these little VIP sections, little events within the event, and then they broadcast it out to a wider audience. And I think that's going to be the normal one. I think you're going to see CEO's in a room, maybe in a hotel and wherever in Manhattan or, or San Francisco. And then they'll broadcast out to that wider audience. I think people are learning how to build better hybrid events, but by the way, this is all new. As I said, hybrid events, I meant virtual events. And now they're learning to learn how to build hybrid events. And that's a whole nother new process. >>It is. But it's also exciting to see the traction, the momentum that is here from, you know, they and they IPO at about what six months ago, you covered that your breaking analysis that you did right before the IPO and the breaking analysis that you did last last week, I believe really fascinating. Interesting acceleration is a theme. We're going to talk about the acceleration of automation and the momentum that the pandemic is driving. But this is a company that's accelerated everything. As you said on your breaking analysis, lightning in a bottle, this is a company that went global very quickly. We're seeing them as some of the leading companies. We can probably count on one hand who are actually coming back to these hybrid events and say, we want to be with our customers again and learn from you what you're doing, what's going on. And we've got a lot of news to share. >>Yeah, we've been covering UI path since 2015. And the piece we wrote back at IPO was, uh, you, you bypass long, strange trip to IPO and it, and it was strange. And that they kind of hung out as a software development shop for the better part of a decade. And then just listening and learning, writing code, they were kind of gigs writing code and loved it. And then they realized, wow, we have something here we can. And they, their uniqueness is they have a computer vision technology. They have the ability to sort of infer what a form looks like and then actually populated. And the thing that UI path did that was different was they made it sound, sounds crazy. They made the product really simple to use, and we know simplicity works. We see that with best example in storage storage, a complicated business, pure storage, right? >>They pop it in. You kind of Veeam is another one. It just works. And so they, they created a freemium model. It made it easy for departments to start small, you know, maybe for 15, 20, 20 $5,000, you could get a software robot and then it would do things like whatever it, it would pull data out of one spreadsheet, put it into another pull date out of one, SAS populated and people then realize, wow, I am saving a ton of time. I can do some other things I'm more productive. And then other people looking over her shoulder would say, Hey, what is that you're using? Can I get that? And then all of a sudden, like you said, lightning in a bottle and it exploded, not a conventional Silicon valley, you know, funded company, even though they got a lot of funding, they got, they raised, I think, close to a billion dollars before they went public. Um, and now they're public went public in April. The stock has been sort of trending downward for the last four or five months, a little bit off on sympathy, but you know, >>What do you think that is? They had such momentum going into it. They clearly have a lot of momentum here. 8,000 plus customers. They've got over 1200 customers with an ARR above a hundred thousand. Why do you think the stock is? >>So I think a couple of things, at least, I think first of all, the street doesn't fully understand this company. You know, Daniel DNAs has never been the CEO of a public company. He's not from Silicon valley. He's, you know, from, from, uh, Eastern Europe and they don't know him that well, uh, they've got, you know, the very, very capable, and so they're educating the streets. So there's a comfort level there. They're looking at their growth and they're inferring from their billings that their growth is, is declining. The new growth from new customers in particular. But there, the ARR is still growing at 60% annually. They also guided a little bit conservatively for the street. And the other thing is they've been profitable. I'm not if a cashflow basis. And then they guided that they would actually be, be somewhat unprofitable in the coming quarter. >>People didn't like that. They don't care about profits until you're somewhat profitable. And then you say, Hey, we're going to be a little less profitable, but of course they get events like this. So that, that, I think it's just a matter of the street getting to understand them. And I will say this, and you know, this, they're getting a lot of business from their existing customers. We saw this with snowflake, uh, Cleveland research, put out a note saying, oh, Snowflake's new customer growth is slowing. We published research from our friends at ETR that showed well, they're getting a lot of business from existing customers that sort of fat middle is really where they're starting to mind. And you can see this with UI path. The lifetime value of the customers is just growing and growing and growing. And so I'm not as concerned. The stocks, you know, we don't, we don't, we're not the stock advisors, but the stock is just over 50. >>Now it wasn't 90 at one point. So it's got a valuation of somewhere around 26 billion, which was closer to 50 billion. So who knows, maybe this is a buying opportunity. There's not a lot of data. So the technical analyst are saying, well, we really don't know where it's going to cook it down to 30. It could go, could go rock it up from here. I think the point Lisa is, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint, it's a long-term play. And these guys are the leaders. And they're, I think moving away from the pack. And the last thing is this concern about competition from Microsoft who bought a company last year to really in earnest, get into this business. And everybody's afraid of Microsoft. >>Well, one thing that we know that's growing considerably is the total addressable market pre pandemic. It was about 30 billion. It's now north of 60 billion. We've seen the pandemic accelerate a lot of things. Talk to me a little bit about automation as its role in digital transformation from your side. >>Yeah, I think, you know, this is again, it's a really good question because when you look at these total available market numbers, the way that companies virtually all companies, whether it's Dell or Cisco or UI path or anybody, they take data from like Gartner and IDC and they say, okay, these are the markets that we kind of play in, and this is how it's growing. What's really happening leases. All these markets are converging because of digital. So to your question, it's a di what's a digital business. A digital business is a data business and they differentiate by the way in which they use data. And if you're not a digital business during the pandemic, you're out of business. So all of these markets, cloud machine intelligence, AI automation, orchestra, uh, container orchestration, container platforms, they're all coming together as one, it's all being built in as one. >>So 60 billion, you know, up from 30 billion, I think it could be a hundred billion. I think, you know, they threw out a stat today that 2% of processes are automated says to me that, I mean, anything digital is going to be automated. So that is hundreds of billions of dollars of, of market opportunity, right? And so there's no shortage of market opportunity for this company. And that's why, by the way, everybody's entering it. We saw SAP make some acquisitions. We S we see in for talking about it, uh, uh, Salesforce, uh, service now, and these SAS companies are all saying, Hey, we can own the automation piece within our stack, what UI path is doing. And the reason why I liked their strategy better is they're a specialist in automation horizontally across all these software stacks. And that's really why they're Tam, I think is, >>And that gives them quite a big differentiator that horizontal play >>It does. I think I see. So I don't see, I think there's a continuum and I think you got Microsoft over here with Azure and personal productivity in their cloud. And then you've got the pure plays, which are really focusing on a broader automation agenda. That's UI path, that's automation, anywhere I would put blue prism in that category blueprints. And by the way, he's getting, getting acquired by Vista, and they're gonna merge them with TIBCO company that, you know, quite a bit about, and that's an integration play. So that's kind of interesting. I would put them as more of a horizontal play. And then in the fat middle, you've got SAP and in four and, you know, IBM is getting to the game. Although they, I think they OEM from a lot of different companies and all those other companies I mentioned before, they're kind of the walled gardens. >>And so I think that UI path is less of a head-to-head competitor with, with Microsoft today anyway, than it is for instance, with automation anywhere. And it's, and it's growing faster than automation, anywhere from what we can tell. And it's, it's still a leader in that horizontal play. You know, you never discount Microsoft, but I think just like for instance, Okta is a specialist in, in, in access identity, access management and privileged, privileged access management and access government, they compete with Microsoft's single sign on, right. But they're a horizontal play. So there's plenty of room for, for both in my view. Anyway, >>Some of the things that you can you think that we're going to hear, you know, seem to be at this inflection point where UI path wants to move away from being an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform they made, they made some announcements about vision a couple of years ago at the last in-person event. What are some of the things you think that are going to be announced in the next couple? >>That's a really good question. I'm glad you picked up on that because they started as a point tool essentially. And then they realized, wow, if we're really going to grow as a company, we have to expand that. So they made acquisite, they've been making acquisitions. One of the key acquisitions they made was a company called process gold. So it's funny when we've done previous, uh, RPA events, I've said RPA in its early days was kind of scripts paving the cow path, meaning you're taking existing processes of saying, okay, we're just going to automate them where UI path is headed in others is they're looking across the enterprise and how do we go end to end? How do we take a broader automation agenda and drive automation throughout the entire organization? And I think that's a lot of what we're going to hear from today. We heard that from executives, APAR, co Kaylon, and, um, and, and, and Ted Coomer talked about their engineering and their product vision. And I think you iPad has to show that that's actually what's happening with customers and they have the portfolio to deliver >>Well, those two executives that you just mentioned, and a lot of others are going to be on the program. The next couple of days jam packed. Dave, I'm looking forward to unpacking what UI path is doing. The acceleration in the automation market. We're going to have a fun >>Couple of days. Thanks for coming on here for David >>Lante. I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be back live from Las Vegas at UI path forward for in just a minute.

>>covering the space and cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal poly. Hold on. Welcome to this special presentation with Cal poly hosting the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 virtual, um, John for your host with the cube and Silicon angle here in our Palo Alto studios with our remote guests, we couldn't be there in person, but we're going to be here remotely. Got a great session and a panel for one hour topic preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow, but a great lineup. Bill Britain, Lieutenant Colonel from the us air force, retired vice president for information technology and CIO and the director of the California cyber security Institute for Cal poly bill. Thanks for joining us, dr. Amy Fisher, who's the Dean of the college of engineering at Cal poly and trunk fam professor and researcher at the U S air force Academy. Folks, thanks for joining me today. >>Our pleasure got a great, great panel. This is one of my favorite topics preparing students for the next generation, the jobs for today and tomorrow. We've got an hour. I'd love you guys to start with an opening statement, to kick things off a bill. We'll start with you. Well, I'm really pleased to be, to start on this. Um, as the director for the cybersecurity Institute and the CIO at Cal poly, it's really a fun, exciting job because as a Polytechnic technology, as such a forefront in what we're doing, and we've had a, a wonderful opportunity being 40 miles from Vandenberg air force base to really look at the nexus of space and cyber security. And if you add into that, uh, both commercial government and civil space and cybersecurity, this is an expanding wide open time for cyber and space. In that role that we have with the cyber security Institute, we partner with elements of the state and the university. >>And we try to really add value above our academic level, which is some of the highest in the nation and to really merge down and go a little lower and start younger. So we actually are running the week prior to this showing a cybersecurity competition for high schools or middle schools in the state of California, that competition this year is based on a scenario around hacking of a commercial satellite and the forensics of the payload that was hacked and the networks associated with it. This is going to be done using products like Wireshark autopsy and other tools that will give those high school students. What we hope is a huge desire to follow up and go into cyber and cyber space and space and follow that career path. And either come to Cal poly or some other institution that's going to let them really expand their horizons in cybersecurity and space for the future >>Of our nation. >>Bill, thanks for that intro, by the way, it's gonna give you props for an amazing team and job you guys are doing at Cal poly, that Dex hub and the efforts you guys are having with your challenge. Congratulations on that great work. Thank you >>Star team. It's absolutely amazing. You find that much talent in one location. And I think Amy is going to tell you she's got the same amount of talent in her staff. So it's, it's a great place to be. >>Amy flasher. You guys have a great organization down there, amazing curriculum, grazing people, great community, your opening statement. >>Hello everybody. It's really great to be a part of this panel on behalf of the Cal poly college of engineering here at Cal poly, we really take preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow completely seriously. And we claim that our students really graduate. So they're ready day one for their first real job, but that means that in getting them to that point, we have to help them get valuable and meaningful job experience before they graduate, but through our curriculum and through multiple internship or summer research opportunities. So we focus our curriculum on what we call a learn by doing philosophy. And this means that we have a combination of practical experience and learn by doing both in and out of the classroom. And we find that to be really critical for preparing students for the workforce here at Cal poly, we have more than 6,000 engineering students. >>We're one of the largest undergraduate engineering schools in the country. Um, and us news ranks us the eighth best undergraduate engineering program in the, in the country and the top ranked state school. We're really, really proud that we offer this impactful hands on engineering education that really exceeds that of virtually all private universities while reaching a wider audience of students. We offer 14 degree programs and really we're talking today about cyber and space. And I think most of those degree programs can really make an impact in the space and cybersecurity economy. And this includes not only things like Aero and cyber directly, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, materials, engineering, even manufacturing, civil and biomedical engineering. As there's a lot of infrastructure needs that go into supporting launch capabilities. Our aerospace program graduates hundreds of aerospace engineers, and most of them are working right here in California. >>I'm with many of our corporate partners, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon space, X, Virgin, galactic JPL, and so many other places where we have Cal poly engineer's impacting the space economy. Our cybersecurity focus is found mainly in our computer science and software engineering programs. And it's really a rapidly growing interest among our students. Computer science is our most popular major and industry interest and partnerships are integrated into our curriculum. And we do that oftentimes through support from industry. So we have partnerships with Northrop Grumman for professorship and a cyber lab and from PG and E for critical infrastructure, cybersecurity lab, and professorship. And we think that industry partnerships like these are really critical to preparing students for the future as the field's evolving so quickly and making sure we adapt our facilities and our curriculum to stay in line with what we're seeing in industry is incredibly important. >>In our aerospace program, we have an educational partnership with the air force research labs. That's allowing us to install new high performance computing capabilities and a space environments lab. That's going to enhance our satellite design capabilities. And if we talk about satellite design, Cal poly is the founding home of the cube sat program, which pioneered small satellite capabilities. And we remain the worldwide leader in maintaining the cube set standard. And our student program has launched more cube sets than any other program. So here again, we have this learn by doing experience every year for dozens of aerospace, electrical, computer science, mechanical engineering students, and other student activities that we think are just as important include ethical hacking through our white hat club, Cal poly space systems, which does really, really big rocket launches and our support program for women in both of these fields like wish, which is women in software and hardware. >>Now, you know, really trying to bring in a wide variety of people into these fields is incredibly important and outreach and support to those demographics. Traditionally underrepresented in these fields is going to be really critical to future success. So by drawing on the lived experiences by people with different types of backgrounds, while we develop the type of culture and environment where all of us can get to the best solution. So in terms of bringing people into the field, we see that research shows, we need to reach kids when they're in late elementary and middle schools to really overcome that cultural bias that works against diversity in our fields. And you heard bill talking about the cyber cybersec, the California cybersecurity institutes a year late cyber challenge. There's a lot of other people who are working to bring in a wider variety of, uh, of people into the field, like girl Scouts, which has introduced dozens of new badges over the past few years, including a whole cybersecurity series of badges and a concert with Palo Alto networks. So we have our work cut out for us, but we know what we need to do. And if we're really committed to prep properly preparing the workforce for today and tomorrow, I think our future is going to be bright. I'm looking forward to our discussion today. >>Yeah, you got a flashy for great, great comment, opening statement and congratulations. You got the right formula down there, the right mindset, and you got a lot of talent and community as well. Thank thank you for that opening statement. Next step from Colorado Springs, trunk fam, who's a professor and researcher. The us air force Academy is doing a lot of research around the areas that are most important for the intersection of space and technology trunk. >>Good afternoon, first electric and Cal poli for the opportunity. And today I want to go briefly about cyber security in S application. Whenever we talk about cyber security, the impression is got yes, a new phew that is really highly complex involving a lot of technical area. But in reality, in my personal opinion, it is in be complex because involve many disciplines. The first thing we think about is computer engineering and computer networking, but it's also involving communication sociology, law practice. And this practice of cyber security goes in on the info computer expert, but it's also info everybody else who has a computing device that is connected to the internet. And this participation is obviously every body in today's environment. When we think about the internet, we know that is a good source of information, but come with the convenience of information that we can access. >>We are constantly faced in being from the internet. Some of them, we might be aware of some of them we might not be aware of. For example, when we search on the internet, a lot of time, our browser will be saved and gotten this site is not trusted. So we will be more careful. What about the sites that we trusted? We know getting those salad chicken sites, but they're not a hundred percent good at proof. What happened? It was all side, uh, attack by hacker. And then they will be a silent source that we might not be aware of. So in the reality, we need to be more practicing the, um, cyber security from our SIBO point of view and not from a technical point of view. When we talk about space application, we should know that all the hardware, a computer based tool by computer system and therefore the hardware and the software must go through some certification process so that they can be record that air with the flight. >>What the, when we know that in the certification process is focusing on the functionality of the hardware and software, but one aspect that is explicitly and implicitly required is the security of those components. And we know that those components have to be connected with the ground control station and be communication is through the air, through the layby or signal. So anybody who has access to those communication regular signal will be able to control the space system that we put up there. And we certainly do not want our system to be hijacked by a third party. >>I'm not going to aspect of cybersecurity is we try to design the space system in a very strong manner. So it's almost impossible to hack in, but what about some August week system that might be connected to so strong system? For example, the spare system will be connected to the ground control station and on the ground control station, we have the human controller in those people have cell phone. They are allowed to use cell phones for communication, but at the same time, they are connected to the internet, to the cell phone and their cell phone might be connected to the computer that control the flight software and hardware. So what I want to say is that we try to build strong system and we protected them, but there will be some weaker system that we could not intended, but exists to be connected to our strong system. And those are the points that hacker will be trying to attack. If we know how to control the access to those points, we will be having a much better system for the space system. And when we see the cybersecurity that is requiring the participation everywhere, it's important to Merck that there is a source of opportunity for students to engage the workforce. To concede the obviously student in engineering can focus their knowledge and expertise to provide technological solution, to protect the system that we view. But we also >>Have students in business who can focus to write a business plan to reach the market. We also have student in law who can focus policy governing the cyber security. And we also have student in education who can focus the expert. She should be saying how to teach cyber security practice and students can focus the effort to implement security measures and it implies job opportunity. >>Thank you trunk for those great comments, great technology opportunities, but interesting as well as the theme that we're seeing across the entire symposium and in the virtual hallways that we're hearing conversations and you pointed out some of them, dr. Fleischer did as well. And bill, you mentioned it. It's not one thing. It's not just technology, it's different skills. And, um, Amy, you mentioned that computer science is the hottest degree, but you have the hottest aerospace program in the world. I mean, so all of this is kind of balancing it's interdisciplinary. It's a structural change before we get into some of the, um, how they prepare the students. Can you guys talk about some of the structural changes that are modern now in preparing, um, in these opportunities because societal impact is a law potentially impact it's, it's how we educate there's no cross-discipline skillsets. It's not just get the degree, see out in the field bill, you want to start. >>Well, what's really fun about this job is, is that in the air force, uh, I worked in the space and missile business and what we saw was a heavy reliance on checklist format, security procedures, analog systems, and what we're seeing now in our world, both in the government and the commercial side, uh, is a move to a digital environment. And the digital environment is a very quick and adaptive environment. And it's going to require a digital understanding. Matter of fact, um, the, uh, under secretary of the air force for acquisition, uh, rev recently referenced the need to understand the digital environment and how that's affecting acquisition. So as, as both Amy, um, and trunk said, even business students are now in the >>Cybersecurity business. And, and so, again, what we're seeing is, is the change. Now, another phenomenon that we're seeing in the space world is there's just so much data. Uh, one of the ways that we addressed that in the past was to look at high performance computing. It was a lot stricter control over how that worked, but now what we're seeing these adaptation of cloud cloud technologies in space support, space, data, command, and control. Uh, and so what we see is a modern space engineer who asked to understand digital, has to understand cloud and has to understand the context of all those with a cyber environment. That's really changing the forefront of what is a space engineer, what is a digital engineer and what does a future engineer, both commercial or government? So I think the opportunity for all of these things is really good, particularly for a Polytechnic air force Academy and others that are focusing on a more, uh, widened experiential level of cloud and engineering and other capabilities. >>And I'll tell you the part that as the CIO, I have to remind everybody, all this stuff works for the it stuff. So you've got to understand how your it infrastructures are tied and working together. Um, as we noted earlier, one of the things is, is that these are all relays from point the point, and that architecture is part of your cybersecurity architecture. So again, every component has now become a cyber aware cyber knowledgeable, and in what we'd like to call as a cyber cognizant citizen, where they have to understand the context, patients chip software, that the Fleischer talk about your perspective, because you mentioned some of the things that computer science. Remember when I'm in the eighties, when I got my computer science degree, they call the software engineers, and then you became software developers. And then, so again, engineering is the theme. If you're engineering a system, there's now software involved, um, and there's also business engineering business models. So talk about some of your comments was, you mentioned, computer science is hot. You got the aerospace, you've got these multidisciplines you got definitely diversity as well. It brings more perspectives in as well. Your thoughts on these structural interdisciplinary things. >>I think this is, this is really key to making sure that students are prepared to work in the workforce is looking at the, the blurring between fields no longer are you just a computer scientist, no longer are you just an aerospace engineer? You really have to have an expertise where you can work with people across disciplines. All of these, all of these fields are just working with each other in ways we haven't seen before. And bill brought up data, you know, data science is something that's cross cutting across all of our fields. So we want engineers that have the disciplinary expertise so that they can go deep into these fields, but we want them to be able to communicate with each and to be able to communicate across disciplines and to be able to work in teams that are across disciplines. You can no longer just work with other computer scientists or just work with other aerospace engineers. >>There's no part of engineering that is siloed anymore. So that's how we're changing. You have to be able to work across those, those disciplines. And as you, as Tron pointed out, you know, ethics has to come into this. So you can no longer try to fully separate what we would traditionally have called the, the liberal arts and say, well, that's over there in general education. No ethics is an important part of what we're doing and how we integrate that into our curriculum. So it was communication. So is working on public policy and seeing where all of these different aspects tied together to make the impact that we want to have in the world. So it, you no longer can work solo in these fields. >>Great point. And bill also mentioned the cloud. One thing about the cloud that showed us as horizontal scalability has created a lot of value and certainly data is now horizontal Trung. You mentioned some of the things about cryptography for the kids out there. I mean, you can look at the pathway for career. You can do a lot of tech and, but you don't have to go deep. Sometimes you can go, you can go as deep as you want, but there's so much more there. Um, what technology do you see, how it's going to help students in your opinion? >>Well, I'm a professor in computer science, so I'd like to talk out a little bit about computer programming. Now we, uh, working in complex project. So most of the time we design a system from scratch. We view it from different components and the components that we have either we get it from or some time we get it from the internet in the open source environment, it's fun to get the source code and then work to our own application. So now when we are looking at a Logie, when we talk about encryption, for example, we can easily get the source code from the internet. And the question is, is safe to use those source code. And my, my, my question is maybe not. So I always encourage my students to learn how to write source score distribution, where that I learned a long time ago before I allow them to use the open source environment. And one of the things that they have to be careful, especially with encryption is be quote that might be hidden in the, in the source, get the download here, some of the source. >>So open source, it's a wonderful place to be, but it's also that we have to be aware of >>Great point before we get into some of the common one quick thing for each of you like to get your comments on, you know, the there's been a big movement on growth mindset, which has been a great, I'm a big believer in having a growth mindset and learning and all that good stuff. But now that when you talk about some of these things that we're mentioning about systems, there's, there's an, there's a new trend around a systems mindset, because if everything's now a system distributed systems, now you have space in cyber security, you have to understand the consequences of changes. And you mentioned some of that Trung in changes in the source code. Could you guys share your quick opinions on the, the idea of systems thinking, is that a mindset that people should be looking at? Because it used to be just one thing, Oh, you're a systems guy or galley. There you go. You're done. Now. It seems to be in social media and data. Everything seems to be systems. What's your take dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you. >>Uh, I'd say it's a, it's another way of looking at, um, not being just so deep in your discipline. You have to understand what the impact of the decisions that you're making have on a much broader, uh, system. And so I think it's important for all of our students to get some exposure to that systems level thinking and looking at the greater impact of the decision that they're making. Now, the issue is where do you set the systems boundary, right? And you can set the systems boundary very close in and concentrate on an aspect of a design, or you can continually move that system boundary out and see, where do you hit the intersections of engineering and science along with ethics and public policy and the greater society. And I think that's where some of the interesting work is going to be. And I think at least exposing students and letting them know that they're going to have to make some of these considerations as they move throughout their career is going to be vital as we move into the future. Bill. What's your thoughts? >>Um, I absolutely agree with Amy and I think there's a context here that reverse engineering, um, and forensics analysis and forensics engineering are becoming more critical than ever, uh, the ability to look at what you have designed in a system and then tear it apart and look at it for gaps and holes and problem sets, or when you're given some software that's already been pre developed, checking it to make sure it is, is really going to do what it says it's going to do. That forensics ability becomes more and more a skillset that also you need the verbal skills to explain what it is you're doing and what you found. So the communication side, the systems analysis, >>The forensics analysis side, >>These are all things that are part of that system >>Approach that I think you could spend hours on. And we still haven't really done great job on it. So it's a, it's. One of my fortes is the really the whole analysis side of forensics and it reverse engineering >>Try and real quick systems thinking. >>Well, I'd like to share with you my experience. When I worked in the space patient program at NASA, we had two different approaches. One is a down approach where we design it from the system general point of view, where we put components to complex system. But at the same time, we have the bottom up approach where we have Ken Chile who spent time and effort the individual component. And they have to be expert in those Chinese component. That might be general component the gallery. And in the space station program, we bring together the welcome up engineer, who designed everything in detail in the system manager who manage the system design from the top down. And we meet in the middle and took the idea with compromise a lot of differences. Then we can leave a display station that we are operating to be okay, >>Great insight. And that's the whole teamwork collaboration that, that was mentioning. Thanks so much for that insight. I wanted to get that out there because I know myself as a, as a parent, I'm always trying to think about what's best for my kids in their friends, as they grow up into the workforce. I know educators and leaders in industry would love to know some of the best practices around some of the structural changes. So thanks for that insight, but this topics about students and helping them prepare. Uh, so we heard, you know, be, be multiple discipline, broaden your horizons, think like systems top down, bottom up, work together as a team and follow the data. So I got to ask you guys, there's a huge amount of job openings in cybersecurity. It's well documented and certainly at the intersection of space and cyber, it's only gonna get bigger, right? You're going to see more and more demand for new types of jobs. How do we get high school and college students interested in security as a career at the flagship? We'll start with you in this one. >>I would say really one of the best ways to get students interested in the career is to show them the impact that it's going to have. There's definitely always going to be students who are going to want to do the technology for the technology sake, but that will limit you to a narrow set of students. And by showing that the greater impact that these types of careers are going to have on the types of problems that you're going to be able to solve and the impact you're going to be able to have on the world, around you, that's the word that we really need to get out. And a wide variety of students really respond to these messages. So I think it's really kind of reaching out at the, uh, the elementary, the middle school level, and really kind of getting this idea that you can make a big difference, a big positive difference in the field with some of these careers is going to be really critical. >>Real question, follow up. What do you think is the best entry point? You mentioned middle squad in here, elementary school. This comes, there's a lot of discussions around pipelining and we're going to get into women in tech and under-represented matters later, but you know, is it too early or what's the, what's your feeling on this? >>My feeling is the earlier we can normalize it the better the, uh, if you can normalize an interest in, in computers and technology and building an elementary school, that's absolutely critical. But the dropoff point that we're seeing is between what I would call like late elementary and early middle school. Um, and just kind of as an anecdote, I, for years ran an outreach program for girl Scouts in grades four and five and grade six, seven, and eight. And we had a hundred slots in each program. And every year the program would sell out for girls in grades four and five, and every year we'd have spots remaining in grades six, seven, and eight. And that's literally where the drop-off is occurring between that late elementary and that middle school range. So that's the area that we need to target to make sure we keep those young women involved and interested as we move forward. >>Bill, how are we going to get these kids interested in security? You mentioned a few programs you got. Yeah. I mean, who wants to, who wouldn't want to be a white hat hacker? I mean, yeah, that sounds exciting. Yeah. Great questions. Let's start with some basic principles though. Is let me ask you a question, John, a name for me, one white hat, good person hacker. The name who works in the space industry and is an exemplar for students to look up to, um, you, um, Oh man. I'm hearing really. I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't imagine because the answer we normally get is the cricket sound. So we don't have individuals we've identified in those areas for them to look up to. I was going to be snarky and say, most white hackers won't even use their real name, but, um, there's a, there's an aura around their anonymity here. >>So, so again, the real question is, is how do we get them engaged and keep them engaged? And that's what Amy was pointing out too. Exactly the engagement and sticking with it. So one of the things that we're trying to do through our competition on the state level and other elements is providing connections. We call them ambassadors. These are people in the business who can contact the students that are in the game or in that, uh, challenge environment and let them interact and let them talk about what they do and what they're doing in life would give them a challenging game format. Um, a lot of computer based training, um, capture the flag stuff is great, but if you can make it hands on, if you can make it a learn by doing experiment, if you can make it am personally involved and see the benefit as a result of doing that challenge and then talk to the people who do that on a daily basis, that's how you get them involved. >>The second part is as part of what we're doing is, is we're involving partnership companies in the development of the teams. So this year's competition that we're running has 82 teams from across the state of California, uh, of those 82 teams at six students team, middle school, high school, and many of those have company partners. And these are practitioners in cybersecurity who are working with those students to participate. It's it's that adult connectivity, it's that visualization. Um, so at the competition this year, um, we have the founder of Def con red flag is a participant to talk to the students. We have Vince surf as who is of course, very well known for something called the internet to participate. It's really getting the students to understand who's in this. Who can I look up to and how do I stay engaged with them? >>There's definitely a celebrity aspect of it. I will agree. I mean, the influencer aspect here with knowledge is key. Can you talk about, um, these ambassadors and, and, and how far along are you on that program? First of all, the challenge stuff is anything gamification wise. We've seen that with hackathons is just really works well. Grades, bonding, people who create together kinda get sticky and get very high community aspect to it. Talking about this ambassador thing. What does that industry is that academic >>Absolutely partners that we've identified? Um, some of which, and I won't hit all of them. So I'm sure I'll short changes, but, uh, Palo Alto, Cisco, um, Splunk, um, many of the companies in California and what we've done is identified, uh, schools, uh, to participate in the challenge that may not have a strong STEM program or have any cyber program. And the idea of the company is they look for their employees who are in those school districts to partner with the schools to help provide outreach. It could be as simple as a couple hours a week, or it's a team support captain or it's providing computers and other devices to use. Uh, and so again, it's really about a constant connectivity and, uh, trying to help where some schools may not have the staff or support units in an area to really provide them what they need for connectivity. What that does gives us an opportunity to not just focus on it once a year, but throughout the year. So for the competition, all the teams that are participating have been receiving, um, training and educational opportunities in the game of education side, since they signed up to participate. So there's a website, there's learning materials, there's materials provided by certain vendor companies like Wireshark and others. So it's a continuum of opportunity for the, >>You know, I've seen just the re randomly, just going to random thought, you know, robotics clubs are moving den closer into that middle school area, in fact Fleischer. And certainly in high schools, it's almost like a varsity sport. E-sports is another one. My son just combined made the JV at the college Dean, you know, it's big and it's up and serious. Right. And, um, it's fun. This is the aspect of fun. It's hands on. This is part of the culture down there you learn by doing, is there like a group? Is it like, um, is it like a club? I mean, how do you guys organize these bottoms up organically interest topics? >>So, so here in the college of engineering, uh, when we talk about learning by doing, we have learned by doing both in the classroom and out of the classroom. And if we look at the, these types of, out of the classroom activities, we have over 80 clubs working on all different aspects of many of these are bottom up. The students have decided what they want to work on and have organized themselves around that. And then they get the leadership opportunities. The more experienced students train in the less experienced students. And it continues to build from year after year after year with them even doing aspects of strategic planning from year to year for some of these competitions. So, yeah, it's an absolutely great experience. And we don't define for them how their learned by doing experiences should be, we want them to define it. And I think the really cool thing about that is they have the ownership and they have the interest and they can come up with new clubs year after year to see which direction they want to take it. And, you know, we will help support those clubs as old clubs fade out and new clubs come in >>Trunk real quick. Before we go on the next, uh, talk track, what, what do you recommend for, um, middle school, high school or even elementary? Um, a little bit of coding Minecraft. I mean, what, how do you get them hooked on the fun and the dopamine of, uh, technology and cybersecurity? What's your, what's your take on that? >>On, on this aspect, I like to share with you my experience as a junior high and high school student in Texas, the university of Texas in Austin organized a competition for every high school in Texas. If we phew from poetry to mathematics, to science, computer engineering, but it's not about with university of Texas. The university of Texas is on the serving SSN for the final competition that we divide the competition to be strict and then regional, and then spit at each level, we have local university and colleges volunteering to host it competition and make it fun. >>Also students with private enterprises to raise funding for scholarship. So students who see the competition they get exposed to so they can see different option. They also get a scholarship when they attend university in college. So I've seen the combination in competition aspect would be a good thing to be >>Got the engagement, the aspiration scholarship, you know, and you mentioned a volunteer. I think one of the things I'll observe is you guys are kind of hitting this as community. I mean, the story of Steve jobs and was, was building the Mac, they call it bill Hewlett up in Palo Alto. It was in the phone book and they scoured some parts from them. That's community. This is kind of what you're getting at. So this is kind of the formula we're seeing. So the next question I really want to get into is the women in technology, STEM, underrepresented minorities, how do we get them on cybersecurity career path? Is there a best practices there, bill, we'll start with you? >>Well, I think it's really interesting. First thing I want to add is if I could have just a clarification, what's really cool that the competition that we have and we're running, it's run by student from Cal poly. Uh, so, you know, Amy referenced the clubs and other activities. So many of the, uh, organizers and developers of the competition that we're running are the students, but not just from engineering. So we actually have theater and liberal arts majors and technology for liberal arts majors who are part of the competition. And we use their areas of expertise, set design, and other things, uh, visualization of virtualization. Those are all part of how we then teach and educate cyber in our game effication and other areas. So they're all involved in their learning as well. So we have our students teaching other students. So we're really excited about that. And I think that's part of what leads to a mentoring aspect of what we're providing, where our students are mentoring the other students. And I think it's also something that's really important in the game. Um, the first year we held the game, we had several all girl teams and it was really interesting because a, they, they didn't really know if they could compete. I mean, this is their, their reference point. We don't know if they did better than anybody. I mean, they, they knocked the ball out >>Of the park. The second part then is building that confidence level that they can going back and telling their cohorts that, Hey, it's not this thing you can't do. It's something real that you can compete and win. And so again, it's building that comradery, that spirit, that knowledge that they can succeed. And I think that goes a long way and an Amy's programs and the reach out and the reach out that Cal poly does to schools to develop. Uh, I think that's what it really is going to take. It. It is going to take that village approach to really increase diversity and inclusivity for the community. >>That's the flusher. I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned, um, your, your outreach program and the dropoff, some of those data, uh, you're deeply involved in this. You're passionate about it. What's your thoughts on this career path opportunity for STEM? >>Yeah, I think STEM is an incredible career path opportunity for so many people. There's so many interesting problems that we can solve, particularly in cyber and in space systems. And I think we have to meet the kids where they are and kind of show them, you know, what the exciting part is about it, right. But, you know, bill was, was alluding to this. And when he was talking about, you know, trying to name somebody that you can can point to. And I think having those visible people where you can see yourself in that is, is absolutely critical and those mentors and that mentorship program. So we use a lot of our students going out into California, middle schools and elementary schools. And you want to see somebody that's like you, somebody that came from your background and was able to do this. So a lot of times we have students from our national society of black engineers or a society of Hispanic professional engineers or our society of women engineers. >>We have over a thousand members, a thousand student members in our society of women engineers who were doing these outreach programs. But like I also said, it's hitting them at the lower levels too. And girl Scouts is actually distinguishing themselves as one of the leading STEM advocates in the country. And like I said, they developed all these cybersecurity badges, starting in kindergarten. There's a cybersecurity badge for kindergarten and first graders. And it goes all the way up through late high school, the same thing with space systems. And they did the space systems in partnership with NASA. They did the cybersecurity and partnership with Palo Alto networks. And what you do is you want to build these, these skills that the girls are developing. And like bill said, work in and girl led teams where they can do it. And if they're doing it from kindergarten on, it just becomes normal. And they never think, well, this is not for me. And they see the older girls who are doing it and they see a very clear path leading them into these careers. >>Yeah. It's interesting. You used the word normalization earlier. That's exactly what it is. It's life, you get life skills and a new kind of badge. Why wouldn't learn how to be a white, white hat hacker, or have fun or learn new skills just in, in the, in the grind of your fun day. Super exciting. Okay. Trung your thoughts on this. I mean, you have a diverse diversity. It brings perspective to the table in cybersecurity because you have to think like the other, the adversary, you got to be the white headed hippie, a white hat, unless you know how black hat thinks. So there's a lot of needs here for more, more, more points of view. How are we going to get people trained on this from under represented minorities and women? What's your thoughts? >>Well, as a member of, I took a professional society of directed pool in the electronic engineer. You have the, uh, we participate in the engineering week. We'll be ploy our members to local junior high school and high school to talk about our project, to promote the discovery of engineering. But at the same time, we also participate in the science fair that we scaled up flex. As the squad organizing our engineer will be mentoring students, number one, to help them with the part check, but number two, to help us identify talents so that we can recruit them further into the field of STEM. One of the participation that week was the competition of the, what they call future CV. We're still going, we'll be doing a CT on a computer simulation. And in recent year we promote ops smart CV where CT will be connected the individual houses to be added in through the internet. >>And we want to bring awareness of cybersecurity into competition. So we deploy engineer to supervise the people, the students who participate in the competition, we bring awareness, not in the technical be challenged level, but in what we've called the compound level. So speargun will be able to know what is, why to provide cyber security for the smart city that they are building. And at the same time, we were able to identify talent, especially talent in the minority and in the room. And so that we can recruit them more actively. And we also raise money for scholarship. We believe that scholarship is the best way to get students to continue education in Epic college level. So with scholarship, it's very easy to recruit them, to give you and then push them to go further into the cyber security Eylea. >>Yeah. I mean, you know, I see a lot of the parents like, Oh, my kid's going to go join the soccer team, >>Private lessons, and maybe look at a scholarship >>Someday. Well, they only do have scholarships anyway. I mean, this is if they spent that time doing other things, it's just, again, this is a new lifestyle, like the girl Scouts. And this is where I want to get into this whole silo breaking down because Amy, you brought this up and bill, you were talking about as well, you've got multiple stakeholders here with this event. You got, you know, public, you got private and you've got educators. It's the intersection of all of them. It's again, that those, if those silos break down the confluence of those three stakeholders have to work together. So let's, let's talk about that. Educators. You guys are educating young minds, you're interfacing with private institutions and now the public. What about educators? What can they do to make cyber better? Cause there's no real manual. I mean, it's not like this court is a body of work of how to educate cybersecurity is maybe it's more recent, it's cutting edge, best practices, but still it's an, it's an evolving playbook. What's your thoughts for educators, bill? We'll start with you. >>Well, I don't really, I'm going to turn it off. >>I would say, I would say as, as educators, it's really important for us to stay on top of how the field is evolving, right? So what we want to do is we want to promote these tight connections between educators and our faculty and, um, applied research in industry and with industry partnerships. And I think that's how we're going to make sure that we're educating students in the best way. And you're talking about that inner, that confluence of the three different areas. And I think you have to keep those communication lines open to make sure that the information on where the field is going and what we need to concentrate on is flowing down into our educational process. And that, that works in both ways that, you know, we can talk as educators and we can be telling industry what we're working on and what are types of skills our students have and working with them to get the opportunities for our students to work in industry and develop those skills along the way as well. >>And I think it's just all part of this is really looking at, at what's going to be happening and how do we get people talking to each other and the same thing with looking at public policy and bringing that into our education and into these real hands on experiences. And that's how you really cement this type of knowledge with students, not by not by talking to them and not by showing them, but letting them do it. It's this learn by doing and building the resiliency that it takes when you learn by doing. And sometimes you learn by failing, but you just up and you keep going. >>And these are important skills that you develop along the way >>You mentioned, um, um, sharing too. That's the key collaborating and sharing knowledge. It's an open, open world and everyone's collaborating feel private public partnerships. I mean, there's a real private companies. You mentioned Palo Alto networks and others. There's a real intersection there there's, they're motivated. They could, the scholarship opportunities, trunk points to that. What is the public private educator view there? How do companies get involved? What's the benefit for them? >>Well, that's what a lot of the universities are doing is to bring in as part of either their cyber centers or institutes, people who are really focused on developing and furthering those public private partnerships. That's really what my role is in all these things is to take us to a different level in those areas, uh, not to take away from the academic side, but to add additional opportunities for both sides. Remember in a public private partnership, all entities have to have some gain in the process. Now, what I think is really interesting is the timing on particularly this subject space and cyber security. This has been an absolute banner year for space. The Stanhope of space force, the launch of commercial partnership, leaving commercial platforms, delivering astronauts to the space station, recovering them and bringing back the ability of a commercial satellite platform to be launched a commercial platforms that not only launch, but return back to where they're launched from. >>These are things that are stirring the hearts of the American citizens, the kids, again, they're getting interested, they're seeing this and getting enthused. So we have to seize upon that and we have to find a way to connect that public private partnerships is the answer for that. It's not one segment that can handle it all. It's all of them combined together. If you look at space, space is going to be about commercial. It's going to be about civil moving from one side of the earth, to the other via space. And it's about government. And what's really cool for us. All those things are in our backyard. Yeah. That's where that public private comes together. The government's involved, the private sector is involved. The educators are involved and we're all looking at the same things and trying to figure out like this forum, what works best to go to the future. >>You know, if people are bored and they want to look for an exciting challenge, he couldn't have laid it out any clearer. It's the most exciting discipline. It hits everything. I mean, we just talk about space. GPS is everything we do is well tested. Do with satellites. >>I have to tell you a story on that, right? We have a very unique GPS story right in our backyard. So our sheriff is the son of the father of GPS for the air force. So you can't get better than that when it comes to being connected to all those platforms. So we, we really want to say, you know, this is so exciting for all of us because >>It gives everybody a job for a long time. >>You know, the kids that don't think tick toxic, exciting, wait til they see what's going on here with you guys, this program, trunk final word on this from the public side, you're at the air force. You're doing research. Are you guys opening it up? Are you integrating into the private and educational sectors? How do you see that formula playing out? And what's the best practice for students and preparing them? >>I think it's the same in athlete university CP in the engineering program will require our students to be final project before graduation. And in this kind of project, we send them out to work in the private industry. The private company got sponsor. Then they get the benefit of having an intern working for them and they get the benefit of reviewing the students as the prospective employee in the future. So it's good for the student to gain practical experience working in this program. Some, some kind of, we call that a core program, some kind, we call that a capstone program and the company will accept the students on a trial PRCS, giving them some assignment and then pay them a little bit of money. So it's good for the student to earn some extra money, to have some experience that they can put on their resume when they apply for the final of the job. >>So the collaboration between university and private sector is really important. We, when I joined a faculty, normally they already exist that connection. It came from. Normally it came from the Dean of engineering who would whine and dine with companies. We work relationship and sign up women, but it's approach to do a good performance so that we can be credibility to continue the relationship with those company and the students that we selected to send to those company. We have to make sure that they will represent the university. Well, they will go a good job and they will make a good impression. >>Thank you very much for great insight, trunk, bill, Amy, amazing topic. I'd like to end this session with each of you to make a statement on the importance of cybersecurity to space. We'll go Trung bill and Amy Truong, the importance of cybersecurity space statement. >>We know that it's affecting components that we are using and we are connecting to. And normally we use them for personal purpose. But when we connect to the important system that the government public company put into space, so it's really important to practice cyber security and a lot of time, it's very easy to know concept. We have to be careful, but in reality, we tend to forget to partnership the way we forget how to ride safely. And with driving a car, we have a program called defensive driving that requires every two or three years to get. We can get discount. >>We are providing the cyber security practice, not to tell people about the technology, but to remind them not practicing cybersecurity. And it's a requirement for every one of us, bill, the importance of cyber security to space. It's not just about young people. It's about all of us as we grow and we change as I referenced it, you know, we're changing from an analog world to a digital world. Those of us who have been in the business and have hair that looks like mine. We need to be just as cognizant about cybersecurity practice as the young people, we need to understand how it affects our lives and particularly in space, because we're going to be talking about people, moving people to space, moving payloads, data, transfer all of those things. And so there's a whole workforce that needs to be retrained or upskilled in cyber that's out there. So the opportunity is ever expensive for all of us, Amy, the importance of cybersecurity space, >>Uh, and the, the emphasis of cybersecurity is space. Just simply, can't be over emphasized. There are so many aspects that are going to have to be considered as systems get ever more complex. And as we pointed out, we're putting people's lives at stake here. This is incredibly, incredibly complicated and incredibly impactful, and actually really exciting the opportunities that are here for students and the workforce of the future to really make an enormous impact on the world around us. And I hope we're able to get that message out to students, to children >>Today. But these are my really interesting fields that you need to consider. >>Thank you very much. I'm John foray with the cube and the importance of cybersecurity and space is the future of the world's all going to happen in and around space with technology, people and society. Thank you to Cal poly. And thank you for watching the Cypress of computer security and space symposium 2020.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Joe Donahue, managing director at Accenture. Hal Stern, AVP, IT Engineering Merck Research Labs. And Derek Seymour, Global Partner Leader Industry Verticals at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you! >> So, we're talking today about a new informatics research platform in the pharmaceutical/medical research industry. Will you paint a picture for us right now, Joe, of what it's like today. Sort of what medical research the time frame we're thinking about, the clunkiness of it all. >> Yeah, so it's a great question Rebecca. Drug discovery today generally takes more than a decade, it costs billions of dollars and has a lot of failures in excess of 90%. So it's not an exact science, we're generating more and more data. And at the same time, just our understanding of human disease biology continues to increase. These metrics haven't really changed. If you look back at the last coupe of decades, it's a 10 year plus process and that much money. So we're looking for ways that we can apply technology to really improve the odds of discovering a new drug that could help patients sooner and faster. >> And that will ultimately save lives. So it's a real social problem, a real problem. Why a platform for this? >> I think if you look at basic research, and you talk about basic blood sciences research, the lingua franca there is chemistry and biology. And we still don't really understand all the aspects, all the mechanisms of action that lead to chronic disease or lead to specific disease that we're interested in. So very, very much research is driven by the scientific method. You formulate a hypothesis based on some data, you run an experiment, you collect the data, you analyze it, and you start over again. So your ability to essentially cycle your data through that discovery process is absolutely critical. The problem is that we buy a lot of applications. And the applications were not designed to be able to interchange data freely. There is no platform to the sense of you have one on your phone, or you have one on your server operating system, where things were designed with a fairly small set of standards that say this is how you share data, this is how you represent it, this is how you access it. Instead we have these very top to bottom integrated applications that, quite honestly, they work together through a variety of copy and paste. Sometimes quite literal copy and paste mechanisms. And our goal in producing a platform is we would like to be able to first separate data from the applications to allow it to flow more freely around the cycle, that basic scientific method. Number two, to now start to allow component substitution. So we'll actually start to encourage more innovation in the space, bring in some of the new players. Make it easier to bring in new ideas is there better ways of analyzing the data or better ways of helping shape and formulate and curate those hypothesis. And finally, there's just a lot of parts of this that are fairly common. They're what we call pre competitive. Everybody has to do them. Everybody has to store data, everybody has to get lab instrument information. Everybody has to be able to go capture assay information. It's very hard to do it better than one of your competitors. So we should just all do it the same way. You see this happen in the cable industry, you see this happen at a variety of other industries where there are industry standards for how you accomplish basic commoditized things, and we haven't really had that. So one of the goals is, let's just sit down and find the first things to commoditize and go drive that economic advantage of being able to buy them as opposed to having to go build them bespoke each time. >> So this pre competitive element is really important. Derek, can you talk a little bit about how this platform in particular operates? >> Certainly. Our goal collectively as partners is to help pharma companies and researchers improve their efficiency and effectiveness in the drug discovery process. So the platform that we built brings together content and service and data from the pharma companies in a way that allows them, the researchers, a greater access to share that information. To do analysis, and to spend their time on researching the data and using their science and less on the work of managing an IT environment. So in that way we can both elevate their work and also take away, what we at AWS, call the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing an IT environment. >> So you're doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes so that the researchers themselves can do what they do, which is focus on the science. So what have we seen so far? What kind of outcomes are we seeing? Particularly because it is in this pre competitive time. >> Well we've just really started, but we're getting a lot of excitement. Merck obviously is our first client, but our intent is that we'll have other pharmaceutical and biotech companies coming on board. And right now we've effectively started to create this two sided marketplace of pharma and biotech companies on one side and the key technology providers and content providers on the other side. We've effectively created that environment where the technology companies can plug in their secret sauce, you know via standardized APIs and micro services, and then the pharmaceutical and biotech companies can leverage those capabilities as part of this industry standard open platform that we're co creating. And so far we've started that process. The results are really encouraging. And the key thing is, you know really two fold. Get the word out there, we're doing that today here. Talking to other pharmaceutical and biotech companies. As well as not only the established technology providers in this space, but also the new comers. 'Cause this type of infrastructure, this type of platform, will enable the new innovative companies, the startup companies, to enter a market that traditionally has been very challenging to get into. Because there's so much data, there's so much legacy infrastructure. We're creating a mechanism that pharmaceutical researchers can take advantage of new technologies faster. For example, the latest algorithms on artificial intelligence and machine learning analyze all of this diverse data that's being generated. >> So that's for the startups, and that's sort of the promise of this kind of platform approach. But what about for a Merck, a established player in this. What kinds of things are you feeling and seeing inside the company? >> You think about this efficient frontier of what does is cost us to run the underlying technology systems that are foundational to our science? And you think about it, there are some things we do which are highly commoditized, we want them to be very efficient. And some things we do, which are very highly specialized, they're highly competitive, and it's okay if they're less efficient. You want to invest your money there. And you really want to invest more in things that are going to drive you a unique competitive advantage. And less in the things that are highly commoditized. The example I use frequently is you could go out and buy a barrel of oil, bring it home, refine it in your backyard, make your own gasoline. It's not recommended. It's messy, it really annoys the neighbors. Especially when it goes wrong. And it's not nearly as cost effective or as convenient as driving over to Exxon Mobil and filling up at the pump. If you're in New Jersey, having someone else even pump it for you. That's kind of the environment we're in right now today where we're refining that barrel of oil for every single application we have. So in doing this, we start to establish the base line of really thinking about refactoring our core applications into those things which can be driven by the economics of the commodity platform and those things which are going to give us unique advantage. We will see things I think, like improved adoption of data standards. We're going to see a lower barrier to entry for new applications, for new ideas. We're also going to see a lower barrier to exit. It'll be easier for us to adopt new ideas. Or to change or to substitute components because they really are built as part of a platform. And you see this, you look at, I would say over time things that have sedimented into AWS. It's been a remarkable story of starting with things that were basically resting our faces on a pausics file system and turned all the sudden into a seamless data base. By sedimenting well defined open source projects, we would like to see some of the same thing happen, where some of the core things we have to go do, entity registration, assay data captured, data management. They should be part of the platform. It's really hard to register an entity better than your competitor. What you do with it, how you describe what you're registering, how you capture intellectual property, how it drives your next invention. Completely bespoke, completely highly competitive. I'm going to keep that. But the underlying mechanics of it, to me it's file system stuff, it's data base stuff. We should leverage the economics of our industry. And again, leverage it as technologist ingredient. It's not the top level brand, chemistry and biology are the top level brand, technology's an ingredient brand we should really use the best ingredients we can. >> When you're hearing this conversation so related to life sciences, medical, bio/pharma research, what are sort of the best practices that have emerged, in terms of the way life sciences approaches its platform, and how it can be applied to other industries? >> What we've seen through the early collaboration with Merck and with Accenture is that bringing together these items in a secure environment, multi talent environment, managed by Accenture, run by AWS. We can put those tools in the hands of the researchers. We can provide them with work flow data analytics capabilities, reporting capabilities, to cover the areas that Hal is talking about so that they can elevate the work that they are doing. Over time, we expect to bring in more components. The application, the platform, will become more feature rich as we add additional third parties. And that's a key element in life science is that the science itself, while it may take place in (mumbles), it's a considerable collaboration across a number of research institutes. Both within the pharma and biotech community. Having this infrastructure in place where those companies and the researchers can come together in a secure manner, we're very proud to be supporting of that. >> So Joe, we started this conversation with you describing the state of medical research today, can you describe what you think it will be in 10 years from now as more pharmaceutical companies adopt this platform approach. And we're talking about the Mercks of the world, but then also those hungry start ups that are also. >> Sure, I think we're starting to see that transition actually happen now. And I think it's the recognition and you start to hear it as you hear some of the pharmaceutical CEO's talking about their business and the transformation. They've always talked about the science. They've always talked about the research. Now they're talking about data and informatics and they're realizing being a pharmaceutical company is not just about the science, it's about the data and you have to be as good and as efficient on the informatics and the IT side as you are on the science side. And that's the transition that we're going through right now. In 10 years, where we all hope we should be, is leveraging modern computing architectures. Existing platform technology to let the organizations focus on what's really important. And that's the science and the data that they generate for the benefit potentially of saving patient's lives in the future. >> So not only focusing on their core competencies, but then also that means that drug discovery will be quicker, that failure rates will go down. >> Even a 10 or 20% improvement in failure rates would be incredibly dramatic to the industry. >> And could save millions of lives. And improve lives and outcomes. Great, well thank you all so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a really fun and interesting conversation. >> Same here, thank you Rebecca. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of the AWS Executive Summit and theCUBE's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. (echoing percussive music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment, we have Brian Bohan, the AABG global business lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, welcome back to theCUBE, managing director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah. >> So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship, bring us up to speed on what's happened in those three years. >> Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services, we've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads at AWS, to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization, all the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. We started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations, and cloud management, and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation, and helping our customers drive the innovation on top of that platform. >> I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian-- >> Mhmm. >> And so what does this mean? >> Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus, and we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, even if we looked at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve, where they're there in the cloud, and now they're asking what can I do? Right, so I have SAP, I have my core systems in the cloud, and so we're investing heavily, as Chris mentioned, in some of the modern technologies, so application modernization, cloud native development. Andy in his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom, so now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolios, start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So, these are way that we can innovate with our customers that you maybe typically don't think about, but are critically important, and I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning, and in AI, and in analytics, and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right. And what we find, with these kinds of projects, is you need to move very, very quickly, and you also need to prove out the concepts. So these are two important things, and so what we're doing is a big investment in the partnership, is investing something we call Launchpad. So this a mechanism in Amazon parlance, we can think about it as two pizza teams, so several nodes of two pizza teams around the world, and these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, and driving POCs, and pilots, and prototyping, and asset development, in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect, so new modern customers care capabilities. So that's really important, and then, kind of related to that, very closely, is our innovation studios. So these team will be located across the world, some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together, and we can execute on working backward, and ideation, and design thinking sections, so we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete, implementable set of requirements, and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. >> So interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now, why is that so important, to get everyone in the room together? >> Now I think what we've seen is it gets them out of their day-to-day environment, right? And in an innovative environment, where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas, and then very quickly see them in reality, versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that, we find works very well, in a very innovative studio type format. >> So how does it work, I mean a client comes-- >> Yep. >> You're together, Accenture, AWS, together, with the clients-- >> Yep. >> saying what are your problems, and so how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? >> So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right, we get the technology, but what they're trying to do, how they want to think about the problem differently, and we do the working backwards. So, idea is, where do you want to end up, either press release, or something like that, that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards, at leverage the design thinking, and then going to the idea-zation phase, look at what will work, what might not work, and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there, they say, "Oh if we can go use these three services "off the platform, we can actually deliver this," and take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help to answer that problem. >> And the technologists are also saying, "If we can leverage these three existing technologies, "we can also build some more stuff." >> Yeah, and I think Andy was again hitting home, the right tool for the right job, and as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's gotten very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice, around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing sessions, is around Amazon culture, and how does Amazon innovate. So we programatize that, as well, into our working backward methodology, that we work with clients, and what we've done is we've married these two things together. So, we're able now to bring the best of both worlds, and help our customers through that journey, getting from idea to actual realization. And then, as you saw, we now have I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. >> How do we innovate, that's sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big, but still is famous for it's start up mentality, and it's ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need, until they until they (Rebecca laughs) have them in their little hands, how do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? >> So, I mean, there's a few things, and I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit, is hugely important, and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian's CIO talk today how important it was. They didn't start with technology to cloud, they started with actually redesigning their work spaces and how their teams work together, that's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly autonomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams, but they can make decisions autonomously, and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast, is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes, you're going to take risks, you're going to experiment, and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos always likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. Right, so we want to controlled failures, and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door, meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door, and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path that we can't retreat. So, you know, again, small teams, our culture, a culture that also rewards risk-taking, controlled risk-taking and failure, and that's also I think why getting us in the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down, and that's it, you start over. So, it's a great platform for that as well. >> Chris, what have been some of the most exciting new business ideas, models, approaches, that you've come up with; we're having a number of really fascinating guests theCUBE, what personally excites you most? >> Yeah, I think one of the things is the research life science cloud and then some of the work we've done with AWS and marketed around that. To bring the research all together to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process, and I thought that's a lot of waste of time by very, very smart people, just coding data, and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about saying how can we help lives to be better, and that's something that's really doing it. Other thing is just, customer interaction. So, one of the things I've talked about and have been very excited over the last couple of years, was you know Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities, again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up it up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBXs and install them and go through that whole, and the the 360 relationship that you can build with those services, that customers are demanding and asking for, right? You can go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care, and now within a few days, and do 360 type customer and omni-channel, and pass off chats, and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves, as dot com business, are famous for, right? And they can, they can get there. So you know, those things just excite me, and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. >> And how are they measuring the ROI because I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers, and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? >> So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right, which Amazon can help you do too, right? You know, so really understanding how satisfied the customers are, they can tell by the way they're talking to the reps, and listening to the recordings, and stuff like that. And see how angry they get, and how much that reduces over time, and really get there, right. They're looking at customer satisfaction, of course. >> Yeah. >> Right, and almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chatbot, or via text, and things like that, and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. When you're on the phone, usually you can only talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time, via chat, and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, and the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. >> Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about at AWS 2019. >> So I think if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right, and Chris already mentioned one with life sciences and the research life science cloud because it's sort of a migration across industries, with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we're going to see next year, is a lot more things like the research life science cloud across industries, right, so we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets, and banking around things like money-laundering, and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into PNC, and insurance, on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their PNC insurance companies. So, as we dive deeper into this, and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems, and I'm just super excited about that. >> Great, well we're looking forward to seeing you >> Yeah, yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> here again. >> I'm sure we will. >> I'm looking forward to it. (Chris laughs) >> We'll be here. >> Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage at the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (bouncy percussive music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome to the Music City. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This is Commvault GO. 20-year-old company, Commvault, the third year of their show, and the first time we have theCUBE here, and the first time we've been in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Stu Miniman, your host for one day of coverage and joining me to help unlock the Commvault is the CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Keith, so you've actually been to this show before. It's my first time. I've known Commvault for a long time, but, you know, we talk about companies, they're all going through some kind of digital transformation and Commvault is no exception. I love the energy that I'm seeing at this show. They've got great puns around data. Data is at the center of everything, and really comes to what we see. You know, we know that data is so important. All the tropes out there. It's the new oil, it's the new currency, it is one of the most important things, not only in IT, but in business. So what's your experience been, so far? >> So far great. You know, they did a great job, second go for me. Last year, they had Captain Sully, great inspirational talk. This year they had a comedian, Connell on it, did a fabulous job of fast-paced multimedia sessions, talking about the connection of data, our everyday lives, lives as a technologist. Really high-powered show, a lot of great conversation around data and its applicability. >> Yeah, I did love that. Steve Connell, he is a poet, and some humor, and a lot of geeky things in there, talking about, right, how data fits into all of our lives, and what we do. And then that's one of the reason's why we're here, why the customers are here, and that's what it's about. You look at a company like Commvault. They've got 10s of thousands of customers, and as the big wave's coming in, what is Cloud Mead? I like some of the messages. I know we're going to dig in, both in our analysis, as well as with the guests, how cloud is impacting this, as well as things like the wave of AI. How is that changing the product? How can I access the information? I hear things like ransomware and GDPR, and hacking. It's a dangerous time in technology, whether you're talking social media, or talking in business. So give us a little bit of background, what you're hearing. Keith, you're talking to customers in your day job all the time. How important is data? And things like backup and data recovery, where do they fit in their world? >> Well, you know what? Customers are still learning this journey. I've talked to plenty of customers that have used Commvault, competing products, and a lot of, at the low level, a lot of these guys are still thinking about it as backup, but great, great testimony from one of the larger customers, out there, Merck, who talked about using backup or data protection, as part of their data management strategy, moving workloads from worker mobility, moving workloads from cloud to cloud, location to location. Every customer is dealing with multi-cloud challenges. Stu, we've talked about multi-cloud and the keys to multi-cloud data is absolutely the most important part of getting your multi-cloud strategy, or even cloud strategy, straight. So, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation I've had out in the field, which is customers challenged with how do I simply identify a data management strategy? To hearing Commvault's message today and throughout the guests that we'll have on, customers, partners, the entire ecosystem, about how Commvault enables multi-cloud through data management. >> Yeah, I was curious what I would see coming in. Would this be, kind of, a hard core, let's get in to the product and understand things like backup and recovery. As you know, backup's important, but recovery is everything. We heard some of the customer stories about how fast they can recover. Those are great stories. How does cloud fit into it? You had the CEO and the COO on stage talking about do you go, when you go to the cloud, do you go simple or do you go smart? And there's some nuance there that you'll want to unpack as to understanding. You know, as we look at cloud, it's not just take the way we were doing things and throw them up there. I mean Keith, they talked about tape and virtual tape. You know, I remember back when, like, the VTLs were first being a thing, I was working at a storage company back then. You know, it was a huge move. Backup, those processes, are really hardened into an environment. What do the admins have to do? What do they have to change in the way they're doing things? Let's look at the news a little bit. So, you know, there was the, Commvault did a good job, I think, of checking all the check boxes. While there was nothing that jumped out at me as, like, wow this is the first time I've heard it, it's what I'm hearing from customers. So, moving to, and as a service portfolio, they've got a full line of appliances, but it's not only hardware. If you'd like to buy the software from them, of course you could do that. Got a number of big partners. We're going to HPE on the program. We're going to have Cisco on the program. NetUP is another big, big partner here. As well as, I think that the product that they're most excited to talk about is Commvault Activate, which is really looking a lot of the governance, which, when you talk in a cloud world, is one of the biggest challenges. By the way, if people in the background hear these cheering, the Commvault employees are really excited, everybody's starting to walk on the show floor. We're in the center of it all, Keith. So, we got a preview yesterday, they actually announced it to the tech field day crew, which you and I sat in with. So, give me your thoughts as to what you saw in the product line. How does that line up with what you're hearing from customers in a competitive nature? >> So, I think I tweeted out yesterday, doing the tech field day session, Commvault does not sleep at the wheel. As you said, Stu, there's nothing amazingly new about what they announced, but a 20-year-old technology company is definitely keeping pace with the innovation that we've seen in the field. Customers want options when it comes to consuming backup and recovery. From a storage layer, they want the storage bricks, they want a hardware solution, they want to consume it via subscription, or perpetual license. They want this cloud-type capability. More importantly, they want, and they talked about it on stage today, this analytics capability. The ability to extract intelligence out of your data. Commvault calls is 4-D indexing. Other vendors just call it, simply, meta-data. But taking advantage of 15, 20 year-old data, to drive innovation in today's society, while keeping compliant with GDPR and other regulations that are coming up, sprouting up as it seems, every other week. >> I did like that terminology that you used. The 4-D innovation, because of course the fourth dimension is time and we're using intelligence. The challenge we have, as we know, is we have so much data and what do we the analytics for? They said we can use the analytics, first of all, compliance. I need to understand that I take care of that. Secondly, what if I want to cull data? What data don't I need anymore? What can I get rid of? There's huge cost savings that I can have there. And lastly, what can I get from analytics? How can I get value out of that information? And more. So, the use of analytics is something I was looking for, obviously want to talk to some of the product people, some of the customers, about what I've heard so far and talking to people. People were excited. I was actually talking to one of the partners of Commvault, they said one of the reasons they partnered deeper and are looking to work with Commvault, is they've got good tech. There's a reason they've been around for 20 years. They're a publicly traded stock. They've been doing well. They have been growing. Revenue wise, I looked, the last three years, I think they're at 700 million, they've been growing in the kind of eight to 9% year over year for the last couple years. Which, as a software company, it's not taking the world by storm, but for, in the infrastructure space, that is good growth. I do have to mention, there was some activist investor activity that came on. We actually we're going to have the CMO, we're going to have the COO on the program. We won't have the CEO, they are in the midst of going through a change there. And, you know, look, say what you will about activist investors. The reason they're getting involved is because they believe that there is more value that can be unlocked in Commvault with some changes and with product line and the things happening that's what we're starting to see here. That's why were excited to dig in and kind of understand. >> Yeah, we can see that even in some of the tech customer's testimonials. The state of Colorado net new customer. This is amazing in an area that we've seen 90 million, 250 million, easily a half a million dollars of investment in the data protection space. Commvault, 20-year-old company, still gaining traction with net new use cases and if I was an activist investor, I'd look at that. I'd look at the overall industry and thinking what can we do to unlock some of the potential of a fairly large customer base? Pretty stable company, but a very, very exciting part of the industry. >> Yeah, and Keith, you brought up meta-data. Meta-data's something that, you know, in the industry we've been talking about for a long time. It's really that intelligence that's going to allow the systems to gather everything. I know, when I get my brand new phone now, I can search my 4,000 photos by location, by date, everything like that. It's auto-recognizing information. The same thing we're getting on the business side. It used be oh okay, let's make sure when you put your photo, your file, in there that you tag it. Come on. Nobody can do this. Nobody's thinking when I'm doing my job, well I really need to think about the meta data 'cause five years from now, I might want to do it. Oh, I can search by person or project or things like that. But it's the intelligence in the system to be able to learn and grow and the more data we have, actually the more that the intelligence can get there. >> And that's critically important for even compliance. Again, culling data. You know, Bill Nye got up on stage and talked about being able to use data, or I'm sorry, AstraZeneca got up on stage and talked about using data that was 15-years-old to rerun through today's algorithms and trials. If you were to cull the wrong data, then they could not have the innovation that they've created by having 15-year-old data. So, the meta data, the ability to go back again, search your repository for key words, content, surface up that data and leverage that data. This is why we say data is the new currency, it's the new oil, it's the most critical. I even heard on stage today, data's the new water. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, you know I like my old-fashioned glass of water, but this is why we hear these terms because companies are reinventing themselves with the data. >> Alright, so Keith, what Dave Allante would point out is water is a limited resource. Data, we can reuse it. We can take a drink of data, we can share it. Data helps complete us. It's the shirts that they have at the show. We've got AstraZeneca, we've got the state of Colorado, we've got other users. The key partners, key executives. We're going to bring you the key data to help you extract the signal from the noise here at Commvault GO. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for joining theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Hello and welcome back to Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover 2017 or HPE Discover 2017. This is theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconeANGLE media. We go out to the events, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconeANGLE. with my co-founder, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest, Jason Newton, Vice President of HP Marketing Pan-HPE Market cross HP, and Jim Jackson, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Group Marketing. The big dogs here at HP laying out the show here for 2017. Guys, great show again, our seventh year, appreciate it. But this year, more than ever, is a seminal moment, obviously everyone knows what's going on in the news, is a huge shift in the market place, what's happening at the show, set the scene for us, what's the backdrop? You guys lined up all the messaging, you have the whole set up to the show, tell us: what is this show about this year? >> First, welcome to Discover, guys! We're really excited to have you guys here. And you know, we got a lot going on at this show, so for example, yesterday, we had our Global Partners Summit so we brought out top 1300 partners, and we had an amazing session with them. This week starts Discover, so it's going to run for the next three days. We've exceeded our tenants targets, so we're feeling really good about it. I think what that shows is there's a lot of interest, a lot of energy, a lot of passion, for what Hewlett-Packard Enterprise can bring. You know, I'm not going to go through all the mechanics of the separation and the spin merger, but I would say that that was all designed to make us a faster, more nimbler company, and one that is really aligned to where we want to take our partners on their digital transformation journey. You know, what we're seeing today, is digital transformation is impacting every single customer and every single industry, and digital business is technology, and really, that's where we play and that's why we're so excited to get our story out. And when you look at over the last year, there's a lot that's happened at this company around really innovation, acquisitions, and ecosystem. Just look at some of the innovation that we've brought to the market, Synergy. Amazing innovation, it created a new category, it really enables our customers to now get a public cloud experience, but on PRIM. And we're hearing from a lot of customers, I want to leave my applications on PRIM, but I need that capability. So we're delivering that with that kind of innovation. Another one is HPC. High growing market, we're leading in that space. What we're doing in the storage flash space, we rebooted, and rebranded our services organization, it's not called Pointnext. We want to help our customers point next to whats' next for their business. When you look at the Edge, just amazing innovation happening there, whether it's Aruba technology, whether it's what we're doing with all of our Edge compute solutions, so just a tons of things happening and then when you layer on top of that all the acquisitions. SGI, we're already the leader in HPC, we have 140 of the top 500 systems, SGI makes our position that much stronger. That's a hot market, it's growing at six to eight percent. SimpliVity, when we brought our capabilities, our UI from our technology, combined it with the data services from SimpliVity, we now have the leading HC solution in the industry. When you look at Niara, that gives up additional capabilities at the Edge to help secure that. When we look at Cloud Cruiser, we can help customers understand and balance what's happening across their workloads. And then Nimble gives us just an amazing portfolio across storage. We're really the leader now in the storage space when you look at the ability to dress almost any use case, from MSA to SimpliVity, for customers looking for more of that hyperconverge play, to Nimble, to 3PAR. Our strategy, super simple. Make hybrid IT simple, power the Intelligent Edge, and it's not just the compute, it's to bring the analytics so that we can translate insight into action, and really to bring the services to help our customers on their journey. And those services are our Pointnext services complimented by our partner services. So, you know what, we're fired up, we're excited, there's a lot happening. >> You guys got so much going on and we've documented the whole spin merge thing 'till the cows come home, we've already done that. You guys got a lot going on, a lot of customers are talking a lot of people are talking about you in the industry, at an industry level, certainly at a partnership level, you guys have always been customer focused. We heard that, you mentioned that, they kind of want to know: what is HP going to do now? You're going to put the stake in the ground, they want to know what's happening, where is the phoenix coming from out from all this decoupling, and more agile messaging, it's a lot of corporate governance, corporate development, I get that, what's next? When are you guys going to put the stake in the ground, you going to be aggressive, when are we expecting to hear from Meg Whitman? >> This week, right, you're going to see it this week. I think that's why we're so excited, this is our opportunity to bring our story together and talk about the innovation and the outcomes that we're delivering for our customers. We are playing offense, and you're going to see that this week. You know, I think one of the themes about this whole week is really about outcomes. I just hosted a panel, with four amazing customers, we had Dreamworks on there, we had CenterPoint Energy, we had CallidusCloud, and I had one more, can't think of it, Merck. And just amazing stories in terms of their digital transformation journey and how HPE is helping to enable that. You're going to hear that on main stage, we're going to have additional customers, Symmetry, others, talking about their digital transformation journey. So, we're really fired up about the main stage, and the story that we're going to get out today. Backstage talking with the executives, they're ready to rock and roll. You know, we know we have a great story and we need to package it, we need to send it out there to the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen later today. In addition to the outcomes, and I think that's what's different about us maybe from some of our other competitors who come to these similar events and just have a bunch of products, we're really talking about how our technology is enabling outcomes but you're going to see a lot of innovation today as well really themed along our strategy. We're going to highlight and roll out the next generation of our compute experience. We're going to talk about how we're delivering the industry's most secure industry standard servers. That's complimented by a whole set of announcements we did last week on our storage portfolio, and the software defined space updates to our synergy solution to HP OneView, and then we're going to be previewing our multi cloud hybrid stack, which will be available later in the year. When you look at the edge, new campus solution, core solution, so what we're really doing is if you think of a data center course which we're bringing that to the campus, so we can essentially now manage from the ceiling, to the side, to the floor. So we're bringing all the capabilities. Asset tracking capabilities coming in as well. Pointnext, we're bringing in new innovations to the marketplace around Consume. Jason, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the IOT Edge stuff that's coming out as well. >> Yeah, I mean we think, a core part of our strategy is to power the Intelligent Edge. We think that's where all the innovation is going and increasingly, you know, we think about data and getting insights from data, right? Going forward, we're going to start thinking about how do I take data and put it into action, right? The Edge is a place, and there's lot of different places that we can bring technology to bear to put into action and create value and so, tons of examples of what we'll be talking about with customers and really interwoven within that are the need for analytics, you know, big data, high performance computing, having a renaissance because of that, and the need for hybrid computing right because the stuff needs to be secure and it needs to be driven by applications, and so it really is a great way to try to exemplify why our strategy is the right strategy and why it's a winning one, because those are the unique elements that are going to power this world going forward, and we've got 'em. >> 43% of data will be analyzed at the Edge by 2020, so think about that, right. >> Yeah and we actually think that it'll be much higher over time, that moving around all this data is going to be challenging, I know you're working on the speed of light problem in the labs, and that number I think will increase. So, I wanted to ask you about messaging because messaging in very important. It clarifies your vision and it underscores your relevance to customers and previously a lot of the HP and now it's HPE, messaging was very product centric, and one tended to get lost in that. How have you sort of transformed your messaging architecture to address things like outcomes and business impacts. >> Yeah, you know customers today, it's really about outcomes, right, so technology matters but if you just look at making hybrid IT simple, as an example, that's a easy statement to say, hybrid IT is not simple. So when you, think of the messaging though, of how we're talking to our customers about that it's really at multiple different levels and let me give you a couple of examples. It's, first of all, the services from Pointnext, how do we come and engage them, and help them characterize their applications, understand their environment, and ultimately give them a roadmap with the right mix of technology, not only for today, but for the future. So, that's an example of leading much more with services in terms of our Pointnext services, in terms of how we're engaging our customers. Getting very disciplined in terms of when you think about okay how do I want to run my hybrid IT environment? We believe it runs best on a software defined infrastructure solution, Synergy gives us that. So, customers are telling us, hey I want to have more on PRIM, or I want to be able to run my applications on PRIM but I need the same experience that I can get from a public cloud, we can now do that with Synergy. Fully programmable, we're seeing amazing interaction with it we have almost 400 customers engaging, and that pipeline is continuing to grow. And then I think the third part of it, when you talk about solutions, again it's not just about technology, it's how do I want to consume this, right? So, we're hearing from our customers, you know, I need, not all of them want to just buy it from us and install it. So, we do amazing things here that we probably haven't gotten out to the market, and you're going to see us get a lot louder this week about that. For example, through our flexible financial services organization, we have amazing capabilities to really engage with other parts of the line of business, the CFO, and talk to them about how do you really want to finance this, what kind of business relationship are you looking for? With Flexible Capacity services, we bring amazing capabilities to help our customers get a public cloud experience on PRIM, so it's sitting on their environment, we're managing it, they only pay for what they use. The other part of it is, it is customers are telling us increasingly, hey you know what I want to actually have a network of service providers that I can get services from. We have done that through our Cloud28+ and our service provider partner ready program, we have a whole set of service providers optimized for infrastructure, for applications, many of them are located close to our customers, so just a few examples, I think of how we're trying to bring this all together, and a solution message is really elevating it and saying: what is the outcome you're trying to drive, starting there, and then looking at engaging them holistically across all of that. So you're seeing more and more of that. Our demos highlight that, that's the stuff we're trying to highlight at the show. >> Dave, can I pile on to the message piece, too, as well? His messaging guy here, for Jim. You know, there's a lot of noise also out on the marketplace, and I think one of the keys is the advantage of being a more focused company now, we can be much more simple, and forthright and direct in our messaging, right, in terms of who we are, what we're about, what's our strategy, what are the elements that we're putting in place to execute that strategy and it's I think it's really important because you don't get but 60 seconds, right, in front of a customer, or to grab their attention off a Twitter feed, or whatever and so, simplicity is really really important, and I think the advantage of an event like this is it brings our strategy and that message to life, I mean it's three dimensional out there right. It's living and breathing, we bring the customers forward first, that's the lead of every message because that's what other customers want to hear about, what are you going to do for me, right? >> Well, lets talk about the messaging and how it translate, from as I always say, if you got the sizzle you better have the steak, to use that old expression. Just as a random example, the user experience is changing significantly in IT, I mean yesterday I was delayed coming in Southwest coming from Silicone Valley and, you know they sold my seat, they didn't have to drag me off the plane, but you know I'm getting some help in the analog face to face but I got on Twitter, had to DM Southwest, instant channel to Southwest. That proves that the interface to technology in a digital business is changing. Now IT is transforming in a similar way, how are you guys taking the messaging of simplicity at the same time as the product evolution is shifting and architectures are changing. The people who have to consume and manage this stuff, their work is changing, so how do you guys talk about that because that's really where the meat on the bone is sitting that's where the rubber is hitting the road, your thoughts? >> I'll start, and maybe Jason you can pile on, you know I think Jason poked at it, we are a much simpler company today, so our strategy is very clean. It's to make hybrid IT simple, it's to power the Intelligent Edge, and it's to bring the services to help our customer go along that journey. So just starting with that simple message means that we can get out whole organization, our partner organization, on message in terms of what we bring and how we can help them to do that. I think the other part this that's really important is we view innovation today as really a team sport, and as we become more focused, we're actually leaning in a lot harder to our partner ecosystem. Whether it's our traditional partners, like Microsoft and SAP, whether it's new partners like Docker, Mesosphere, you know bringing the containerized environments, or actually curating a new set of partners for the future with Partner Next. Because it is about getting it down the simple thing of what's the outcome you're trying to drive, what's the technology, and the ecosystem and how can we be the company to help bring that forward? And I think that's a lot of the simplicity that you're going to see. You know on stage later today, I think why we're so excited about this is, you know you're going to hear Meg talk a little bit about the journey we've been on but more importantly the outcomes that we're delivering for customers and then what we're going to do is we're going to feature three customer scenarios, talking about what they have done, what their journey has been, their outcomes, their experiences and what they can do today, and then of course, how HP technology is enabling that. >> We had in our opening, Dave and I always talk about this, because we love the shiny new toy. Certainly I'm from Silicone Valley, he's from the east coast but the reality is that all this stuff about declining markets here and there is always a shift to another growth market, even on PRIM, you know, people might buy and consume and interface differently with technology but it doesn't mean that the data is slowing down, it doesn't mean that the value creation is changing, it's shifting. So I think that has really been something that I think you guys have had online, maybe lost in some of the tactical things but, you know, from new style of IT, to this, it's been kind of a cadence that you've been on it's not like you guys are groping for messaging. >> What goes down, yeah, and you can't just snap your fingers and be the transformed company that you want, right, but we're moving at break-neck speed on that and it does all go back to the advantage of that strategy, and the world you just described, right, you want to be nimble. You know, there may be something next month we've never heard of that disrupts the entire container market, right, containers become oh that's so yesterday, we want to be the company that's ready to pounce on the next thing, right, and we're geared to do that. You know, competitors - >> John: (mumbles) containers in microseconds is kind of a big deal, and it's coming out of the labs. >> Well you know, the other thing, I want to just add, so you talk about customers, you start with the customer the technology business is always moved faster pretty much than any business, but now, every customer is technology company, and so they're accelerating the pace, so you've got to accelerate that pace with them and be that provider. Digital transformation is all about data, it's all about becoming a technology company. So what's the message to your customers in terms of your role in helping them accelerate their transformation? >> Well, I think you pretty much hit it, right, in the statement that I use is digital business is technology. You are not going to seed with your digital transformation unless you have the right technology foundation and that's what we heard from those customers on the panel. It's about speed, it's about flexibility, it's about having the right technology that enables me to deliver services back to my internal clients at the speed I need to do it. And you know, that's where our innovation is really focused today, and that's why we're seeing a lot of customers coming to us and saying I want to understand how you did it for CenterPoint, or for Dreamworks and how we can take advantage of that. The other part of it is, technology is a big part of it but it's also the learning and the expertise that we can bring to actually make that technology work in that customer environment - we know how to do that. We're proven in doing that, and I think that's something because we're close to the technology, we not only have the right innovation, we have the right expertise to make it work for our customers, and that's important. >> I don't even think it's early innings either, Dave, I think it's not the game hasn't even started and I think you know one of the things that we believe and we're doing some research on is, we think asset evaluations is going to be completely data driven. Data will be an asset and that will impact the evaluation mechanism to >> Dave: Data is the new currency! >> John: To companies' value, so I think the shift is so early. So, riding the wave, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE we really appreciate it. Looking forward to the keynote from Meg Whitman to hear the messaging. Congratulations as you guys continue to - >> Dave: We're fired up! >> Jason: He's fired up. >> Dave: There's a lot of energy, Meg's fired up >> Jason: She's going to bring it today - >> Dave: Antonio is fired up, there's a lot of energy at the company, and you know, we're just excited to get our story out and engage customers. Thanks guys for the opportunity. >> Live here from HPE Discover, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, we'll be back with more live action. Three days of wall to wall coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Please welcome Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Ariel Kelman. (applause) (techno music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I hope you guys are having a great day here. It is my pleasure to introduce to come up on stage here, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy. (applause) (techno music) >> Okay. Let's get started. I have a bunch of questions here for you, Andy. >> Just like one of our meetings, Ariel. >> Just like one of our meetings. So, I thought I'd start with a little bit of a state of the state on AWS. Can you give us your quick take? >> Yeah, well, first of all, thank you, everyone, for being here. We really appreciate it. We know how busy you guys are. So, hope you're having a good day. You know, the business is growing really quickly. In the last financials, we released, in Q four of '16, AWS is a 14 billion dollar revenue run rate business, growing 47% year over year. We have millions of active customers, and we consider an active customer as a non-Amazon entity that's used the platform in the last 30 days. And it's really a very broad, diverse customer set, in every imaginable size of customer and every imaginable vertical business segment. And I won't repeat all the customers that I know Werner went through earlier in the keynote, but here are just some of the more recent ones that you've seen, you know NELL is moving their their digital and their connected devices, meters, real estate to AWS. McDonalds is re-inventing their digital platform on top of AWS. FINRA is moving all in to AWS, yeah. You see at Reinvent, Workday announced AWS was its preferred cloud provider, and to start building on top of AWS further. Today, in press releases, you saw both Dunkin Donuts and Here, the geo-spatial map company announced they'd chosen AWS as their provider. You know and then I think if you look at our business, we have a really large non-US or global customer base and business that continues to expand very dramatically. And we're also aggressively increasing the number of geographic regions in which we have infrastructure. So last year in 2016, on top of the broad footprint we had, we added Korea, India, and Canada, and the UK. We've announced that we have regions coming, another one in China, in Ningxia, as well as in France, as well as in Sweden. So we're not close to being done expanding geographically. And then of course, we continue to iterate and innovate really quickly on behalf of all of you, of our customers. I mean, just last year alone, we launched what we considered over 1,000 significant services and features. So on average, our customers wake up every day and have three new capabilities they can choose to use or not use, but at their disposal. You've seen it already this year, if you look at Chime, which is our new unified communication service. It makes meetings much easier to conduct, be productive with. You saw Connect, which is our new global call center routing service. If you look even today, you look at Redshift Spectrum, which makes it easy to query all your data, not just locally on disk in your data warehouse but across all of S3, or DAX, which puts a cash in front of DynamoDB, we use the same interface, or all the new features in our machine learning services. We're not close to being done delivering and iterating on your behalf. And I think if you look at that collection of things, it's part of why, as Gartner looks out at the infrastructure space, they estimate the AWS is several times the size business of the next 14 providers combined. It's a pretty significant market segment leadership position. >> You talked a lot about adopts in there, a lot of customers moving to AWS, migrating large numbers of workloads, some going all in on AWS. And with that as kind of backdrop, do you still see a role for hybrid as being something that's important for customers? >> Yeah, it's funny. The quick answer is yes. I think the, you know, if you think about a few years ago, a lot of the rage was this debate about private cloud versus what people call public cloud. And we don't really see that debate very often anymore. I think relatively few companies have had success with private clouds, and most are pretty substantially moving in the direction of building on top of clouds like AWS. But, while you increasingly see more and more companies every month announcing that they're going all in to the cloud, we will see most enterprises operate in some form of hybrid mode for the next number of years. And I think in the early days of AWS and the cloud, I think people got confused about this, where they thought that they had to make this binary decision to either be all in on the public cloud and AWS or not at all. And of course that's not the case. It's not a binary decision. And what we know many of our enterprise customers want is they want to be able to run the data centers that they're not ready to retire yet as seamlessly as they can alongside of AWS. And it's why we've built a lot of the capabilities we've built the last several years. These are things like PPC, which is our virtual private cloud, which allows you to cordon off a portion of our network, deploy resources into it and connect to it through VPN or Direct Connect, which is a private connection between your data centers and our regions or our storage gateway, which is a virtual storage appliance, or Identity Federation, or a whole bunch of capabilities like that. But what we've seen, even though the vast majority of the big hybrid implementations today are built on top of AWS, as more and more of the mainstream enterprises are now at the point where they're really building substantial cloud adoption plans, they've come back to us and they've said, well, you know, actually you guys have made us make kind of a binary decision. And that's because the vast majority of the world is virtualized on top of VMWare. And because VMWare and AWS, prior to a few months ago, had really done nothing to try and make it easy to use the VMWare tools that people have been using for many years seamlessly with AWS, customers were having to make a binary choice. Either they stick with the VMWare tools they've used for a while but have a really tough time integrating with AWS, or they move to AWS and they have to leave behind the VMWare tools they've been using. And it really was the impetus for VMWare and AWS to have a number of deep conversations about it, which led to the announcement we made late last fall of VMWare and AWS, which is going to allow customers who have been using the VMWare tools to manage their infrastructure for a long time to seamlessly be able to run those on top of AWS. And they get to do so as they move workloads back and forth and they evolve their hybrid implementation without having to buy any new hardware, which is a big deal for companies. Very few companies are looking to find ways to buy more hardware these days. And customers have been very excited about this prospect. We've announced that it's going to be ready in the middle of this year. You see companies like Amadeus and Merck and Western Digital and the state of Louisiana, a number of others, we've a very large, private beta and preview happening right now. And people are pretty excited about that prospect. So we will allow customers to run in the mode that they want to run, and I think you'll see a huge transition over the next five to 10 years. >> So in addition to hybrid, another question we get a lot from enterprises around the concept of lock-in and how they should think about their relationship with the vendor and how they should think about whether to spread the workloads across multiple infrastructure providers. How do you think about that? >> Well, it's a question we get a lot. And Oracle has sure made people care about that issue. You know, I think people are very sensitive about being locked in, given the experience that they've had over the last 10 to 15 years. And I think the reality is when you look at the cloud, it really is nothing like being locked into something like Oracle. The APIs look pretty similar between the various providers. We build an open standard, it's like Linux and MySQL and Postgres. All the migration tools that we build allow you to migrate in or out of AWS. It's up to customers based on how they want to run their workload. So it is much easier to move away from something like the cloud than it is from some of the old software services that has created some of this phobia. But I think when you look at most CIOs, enterprise CIOs particularly, as they think about moving to the cloud, many of them started off thinking that they, you know, very well might split their workloads across multiple cloud providers. And I think when push comes to shove, very few decide to do so. Most predominately pick an infrastructure provider to run their workloads. And the reason that they don't split it across, you know, pretty evenly across clouds is a few reasons. Number one, if you do so, you have to standardize in the lowest common denominator. And these platforms are in radically different stages at this point. And if you look at something like AWS, it has a lot more functionality than anybody else by a large margin. And we're also iterating more quickly than you'll find from the other providers. And most folks don't want to tie the hands of their developers behind their backs in the name of having the ability of splitting it across multiple clouds, cause they actually are, in most of their spaces, competitive, and they have a lot of ideas that they want to actually build and invent on behalf of their customers. So, you know, they don't want to actually limit their functionality. It turns out the second reason is that they don't want to force their development teams to have to learn multiple platforms. And most development teams, if any of you have managed multiple stacks across different technologies, and many of us have had that experience, it's a pain in the butt. And trying to make a shift from what you've been doing for the last 30 years on premises to the cloud is hard enough. But then forcing teams to have to get good at running across two or three platforms is something most teams don't relish, and it's wasteful of people's time, it's wasteful of natural resources. That's the second thing. And then the third reason is that you effectively diminish your buying power because all of these cloud providers have volume discounts, and then you're splitting what you buy across multiple providers, which gives you a lower amount you buy from everybody at a worse price. So when most CIOs and enterprises look at this carefully, they don't actually end up splitting it relatively evenly. They predominately pick a cloud provider. Some will just pick one. Others will pick one and then do a little bit with a second, just so they know they can run with a second provider, in case that relationship with the one they choose to predominately run with goes sideways in some fashion. But when you really look at it, CIOs are not making that decision to split it up relatively evenly because it makes their development teams much less capable and much less agile. >> Okay, let's shift gears a little bit, talk about a subject that's on the minds of not just enterprises but startups and government organizations and pretty much every organization we talk to. And that's AI and machine learning. Reinvent, we introduced our Amazon AI services and just this morning Werner announced the general availability of Amazon Lex. So where are we overall on machine learning? >> Well it's a hugely exciting opportunity for customers, and I think, we believe it's exciting for us as well. And it's still in the relatively early stages, if you look at how people are using it, but it's something that we passionately believe is going to make a huge difference in the world and a huge difference with customers, and that we're investing a pretty gigantic amount of resource and capability for our customers. And I think the way that we think about, at a high level, the machine learning and deep learning spaces are, you know, there's kind of three macro layers of the stack. I think at that bottom layer, it's generally for the expert machine learning practitioners, of which there are relatively few in the world. It's a scarce resource relative to what I think will be the case in five, 10 years from now. And these are folks who are comfortable working with deep learning engines, know how to build models, know how to tune those models, know how to do inference, know how to get that data from the models into production apps. And for that group of people, if you look at the vast majority of machine learning and deep learning that's being done in the cloud today, it's being done on top of AWS, are P2 instances, which are optimized for deep learning and our deep learning AMIs, that package, effectively the deep learning engines and libraries inside those AMIs. And you see companies like Netflix, Nvidia, and Pinterest and Stanford and a whole bunch of others that are doing significant amounts of machine learning on top of those optimized instances for machine learning and the deep learning AMIs. And I think that you can expect, over time, that we'll continue to build additional capabilities and tools for those expert practitioners. I think we will support and do support every single one of the deep learning engines on top of AWS, and we have a significant amount of those workloads with all those engines running on top of AWS today. We also are making, I would say, a disproportionate investment of our own resources and the MXNet community just because if you look at running deep learning models once you get beyond a few GPUs, it's pretty difficult to have those scale as you get into the hundreds of GPUs. And most of the deep learning engines don't scale very well horizontally. And so what we've found through a lot of extensive testing, cause remember, Amazon has thousands of deep learning experts inside the company that have built very sophisticated deep learning capabilities, like the ones you see in Alexa, we have found that MXNet scales the best and almost linearly, as we continue to add nodes, as we continue to horizontally scale. So we have a lot of investment at that bottom layer of the stack. Now, if you think about most companies with developers, it's still largely inaccessible to them to do the type of machine learning and deep learning that they'd really like to do. And that's because the tools, I think, are still too primitive. And there's a number of services out there, we built one ourselves in Amazon Machine Learning that we have a lot of customers use, and yet I would argue that all of those services, including our own, are still more difficult than they should be for everyday developers to be able to build machine learning and access machine learning and deep learning. And if you look at the history of what AWS has done, in every part of our business, and a lot of what's driven us, is trying to democratize technologies that were really only available and accessible before to a select, small number of companies. And so we're doing a lot of work at what I would call that middle layer of the stack to get rid of a lot of the muck associated with having to do, you know, building the models, tuning the models, doing the inference, figuring how to get the data into production apps, a lot of those capabilities at that middle layer that we think are really essential to allow deep learning and machine learning to reach its full potential. And then at the top layer of the stack, we think of those as solutions. And those are things like, pass me an image and I'll tell you what that image is, or show me this face, does it match faces in this group of faces, or pass me a string of text and I'll give you an mpg file, or give me some words and what your intent is and then I'll be able to return answers that allow people to build conversational apps like the Lex technology. And we have a whole bunch of other services coming in that area, atop of Lex and Polly and Recognition, and you can imagine some of those that we've had to use in Amazon over the years that we'll continue to make available for you, our customers. So very significant level of investment at all three layers of that stack. We think it's relatively early days in the space but have a lot of passion and excitement for that. >> Okay, now for ML and AI, we're seeing customers wanting to load in tons of data, both to train the models and to actually process data once they've built their models. And then outside of ML and AI, we're seeing just as much demand to move in data for analytics and traditional workloads. So as people are looking to move more and more data to the cloud, how are we thinking about making it easier to get data in? >> It's a great question. And I think it's actually an often overlooked question because a lot of what gets attention with customers is all the really interesting services that allow you to do everything from compute and storage and database and messaging and analytics and machine learning and AI. But at the end of the day, if you have a significant amount of data already somewhere else, you have to get it into the cloud to be able to take advantage of all these capabilities that you don't have on premises. And so we have spent a disproportionate amount of focus over the last few years trying to build capabilities for our customers to make this easier. And we have a set of capabilities that really is not close to matched anywhere else, in part because we have so many customers who are asking for help in this area that it's, you know, that's really what drives what we build. So of course, you could use the good old-fashioned wire to send data over the internet. Increasingly, we find customers that are trying to move large amounts of data into S3, is using our S3 transfer acceleration service, which basically uses our points of presence, or POPs, all over the world to expedite delivery into S3. You know, a few years ago, we were talking to a number of companies that were looking to make big shifts to the cloud, and they said, well, I need to move lots of data that just isn't viable for me to move it over the wire, given the connection we can assign to it. It's why we built Snowball. And so we launched Snowball a couple years ago, which is really, it's a 50 terabyte appliance that is encrypted, the data's encrypted three different ways, and you ingest the data from your data center into Snowball, it has a Kindle connected to it, it allows you to, you know, that makes sure that you send it to the right place, and you can also track the progress of your high-speed ingestion into our data centers. And when we first launched Snowball, we launched it at Reinvent a couple years ago, I could not believe that we were going to order as many Snowballs to start with as the team wanted to order. And in fact, I reproached the team and I said, this is way too much, why don't we first see if people actually use any of these Snowballs. And so the team thankfully didn't listen very carefully to that, and they really only pared back a little bit. And then it turned out that we, almost from the get-go, had ordered 10X too few. And so this has been something that people have used in a very broad, pervasive way all over the world. And last year, at the beginning of the year, as we were asking people what else they would like us to build in Snowball, customers told us a few things that were pretty interesting to us. First, one that wasn't that surprising was they said, well, it would be great if they were bigger, you know, if instead of 50 terabytes it was more data I could store on each device. Then they said, you know, one of the problems is when I load the data onto a Snowball and send it to you, I have to still keep my local copy on premises until it's ingested, cause I can't risk losing that data. So they said it would be great if you could find a way to provide clustering, so that I don't have to keep that copy on premises. That was pretty interesting. And then they said, you know, there's some of that data that I'd actually like to be loading synchronously to S3, and then, or some things back from S3 to that data that I may want to compare against. That was interesting, having that endpoint. And then they said, well, we'd really love it if there was some compute on those Snowballs so I can do analytics on some relatively short-term signals that I want to take action on right away. Those were really the pieces of feedback that informed Snowball Edge, which is the next version of Snowball that we launched, announced at Reinvent this past November. So it has, it's a hundred-terabyte appliance, still the same level of encryption, and it has clustering so that you don't have to keep that copy of the data local. It allows you to have an endpoint to S3 to synchronously load data back and forth, and then it has a compute inside of it. And so it allows customers to use these on premises. I'll give you a good example. GE is using these for their wind turbines. And they collect all kinds of data from those turbines, but there's certain short-term signals they want to do analytics on in as close to real time as they can, and take action on those. And so they use that compute to do the analytics and then when they fill up that Snowball Edge, they detach it and send it back to AWS to do broad-scale analytics in the cloud and then just start using an additional Snowball Edge to capture that short-term data and be able to do those analytics. So Snowball Edge is, you know, we just launched it a couple months ago, again, amazed at the type of response, how many customers are starting to deploy those all over the place. I think if you have exabytes of data that you need to move, it's not so easy. An exabyte of data, if you wanted to move from on premises to AWS, would require 10,000 Snowball Edges. Those customers don't want to really manage a fleet of 10,000 Snowball Edges if they don't have to. And so, we tried to figure out how to solve that problem, and it's why we launched Snowmobile back at Reinvent in November, which effectively, it's a hundred-petabyte container on a 45-foot trailer that we will take a truck and bring out to your facility. It comes with its own power and its own network fiber that we plug in to your data center. And if you want to move an exabyte of data over a 10 gigabit per second connection, it would take you 26 years. But using 10 Snowmobiles, it would take you six months. So really different level of scale. And you'd be surprised how many companies have exabytes of data at this point that they want to move to the cloud to get all those analytics and machine learning capabilities running on top of them. Then for streaming data, as we have more and more companies that are doing real-time analytics of streaming data, we have Kinesis, where we built something called the Kinesis Firehose that makes it really simple to stream all your real-time data. We have a storage gateway for companies that want to keep certain data hot, locally, and then asynchronously be loading the rest of their data to AWS to be able to use in different formats, should they need it as backup or should they choose to make a transition. So it's a very broad set of storage capabilities. And then of course, if you've moved a lot of data into the cloud or into anything, you realize that one of the hardest parts that people often leave to the end is ETL. And so we have announced an ETL service called Glue, which we announced at Reinvent, which is going to make it much easier to move your data, be able to find your data and map your data to different locations and do ETL, which of course is hugely important as you're moving large amounts. >> So we've talked a lot about moving things to the cloud, moving applications, moving data. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something not on the cloud, connected devices. >> Yeah. >> Where do they fit in and how do you think about edge? >> Well, you know, I've been working on AWS since the start of AWS, and we've been in the market for a little over 11 years at this point. And we have encountered, as I'm sure all of you have, many buzzwords. And of all the buzzwords that everybody has talked about, I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the one that has delivered fastest on its promise has been IOT and connected devices. Just amazing to me how much is happening at the edge today and how fast that's changing with device manufacturers. And I think that if you look out 10 years from now, when you talk about hybrid, I think most companies, majority on premise piece of hybrid will not be servers, it will be connected devices. There are going to be billions of devices all over the place, in your home, in your office, in factories, in oil fields, in agricultural fields, on ships, in cars, in planes, everywhere. You're going to have these assets that sit at the edge that companies are going to want to be able to collect data on, do analytics on, and then take action. And if you think about it, most of these devices, by their very nature, have relatively little CPU and have relatively little disk, which makes the cloud disproportionately important for them to supplement them. It's why you see most of the big, successful IOT applications today are using AWS to supplement them. Illumina has hooked up their genome sequencing to AWS to do analytics, or you can look at Major League Baseball Statcast is an IOT application built on top of AWS, or John Deer has over 200,000 telematically enabled tractors that are collecting real-time planting conditions and information that they're doing analytics on and sending it back to farmers so they can figure out where and how to optimally plant. Tata Motors manages their truck fleet this way. Phillips has their smart lighting project. I mean, there're innumerable amounts of these IOT applications built on top of AWS where the cloud is supplementing the device's capability. But when you think about these becoming more mission-critical applications for companies, there are going to be certain functions and certain conditions by which they're not going to want to connect back to the cloud. They're not going to want to take the time for that round trip. They're not going to have connectivity in some cases to be able to make a round trip to the cloud. And what they really want is customers really want the same capabilities they have on AWS, with AWS IOT, but on the devices themselves. And if you've ever tried to develop on these embedded devices, it's not for mere mortals. It's pretty delicate and it's pretty scary and there's a lot of archaic protocols associated with it, pretty tough to do it all and to do it without taking down your application. And so what we did was we built something called Greengrass, and we announced it at Reinvent. And Greengrass is really like a software module that you can effectively have inside your device. And it allows developers to write lambda functions, it's got lambda inside of it, and it allows customers to write lambda functions, some of which they want to run in the cloud, some of which they want to run on the device itself through Greengrass. So they have a common programming model to build those functions, to take the signals they see and take the actions they want to take against that, which is really going to help, I think, across all these IOT devices to be able to be much more flexible and allow the devices and the analytics and the actions you take to be much smarter, more intelligent. It's also why we built Snowball Edge. Snowball Edge, if you think about it, is really a purpose-built Greengrass device. We have Greengrass, it's inside of the Snowball Edge, and you know, the GE wind turbine example is a good example of that. And so it's to us, I think it's the future of what the on-premises piece of hybrid's going to be. I think there're going to be billions of devices all over the place and people are going to want to interact with them with a common programming model like they use in AWS and the cloud, and we're continuing to invest very significantly to make that easier and easier for companies. >> We've talked about several feature directions. We talked about AI, machine learning, the edge. What are some of the other areas of investment that this group should care about? >> Well there's a lot. (laughs) That's not a suit question, Ariel. But there's a lot. I think, I'll name a few. I think first of all, as I alluded to earlier, we are not close to being done expanding geographically. I think virtually every tier-one country will have an AWS region over time. I think many of the emerging countries will as well. I think the database space is an area that is radically changing. It's happening at a faster pace than I think people sometimes realize. And I think it's good news for all of you. I think the database space over the last few decades has been a lonely place for customers. I think that they have felt particularly locked into companies that are expensive and proprietary and have high degrees of lock-in and aren't so customer-friendly. And I think customers are sick of it. And we have a relational database service that we launched many years ago and has many flavors that you can run. You can run MySQL, you can run Postgres, you can run MariaDB, you can run SQLServer, you can run Oracle. And what a lot of our customers kept saying to us was, could you please figure out a way to have a database capability that has the performance characteristics of the commercial-grade databases but the customer-friendly and pricing model of the more open engines like the MySQL and Postgres and MariaDB. What you do on your own, we do a lot of it at Amazon, but it's hard, I mean, it takes a lot of work and a lot of tuning. And our customers really wanted us to solve that problem for them. And it's why we spent several years building Aurora, which is our own database engine that we built, but that's fully compatible with MySQL and with Postgres. It's at least as fault tolerant and durable and performant as the commercial-grade databases, but it's a tenth of the cost of those. And it's also nice because if it turns out that you use Aurora and you decide for whatever reason you don't want to use Aurora anymore, because it's fully compatible with MySQL and Postgres, you just dump it to the community versions of those, and off you are. So there's really hardly any transition there. So that is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS. I'm amazed at how quickly it's grown. I think you may have heard earlier, we've had 23,000 database migrations just in the last year or so. There's a lot of pent-up demand to have database freedom. And we're here to help you have it. You know, I think on the analytic side, it's just never been easier and less expensive to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today. Part of that has to do with the economics of the cloud. But a lot of it has to do with the really broad analytics capability that we provide you. And it's a much broader capability than you'll find elsewhere. And you know, you can manage Hadoop and Spark and Presto and Hive and Pig and Yarn on top of AWS, or we have a managed elastic search service, and you know, of course we have a very high scale, very high performing data warehouse in Redshift, that just got even more performant with Spectrum, which now can query across all of your S3 data, and of course you have Athena, where you can query S3 directly. We have a service that allows you to do real-time analytics of streaming data in Kinesis. We have a business intelligence service in QuickSight. We have a number of machine learning capabilities I talked about earlier. It's a very broad array. And what we find is that it's a new day in analytics for companies. A lot of the data that companies felt like they had to throw away before, either because it was too expensive to hold or they didn't really have the tools accessible to them to get the learning from that data, it's a totally different day today. And so we have a pretty big investment in that space, I mentioned Glue earlier to do ETL on all that data. We have a lot more coming in that space. I think compute, super interesting, you know, I think you will find, I think we will find that companies will use full instances for many, many years and we have, you know, more than double the number of instances than you'll find elsewhere in every imaginable shape and size. But I would also say that the trend we see is that more and more companies are using smaller units of compute, and it's why you see containers becoming so popular. We have a really big business in ECS. And we will continue to build out the capability there. We have companies really running virtually every type of container and orchestration and management service on top of AWS at this point. And then of course, a couple years ago, we pioneered the event-driven serverless capability in compute that we call Lambda, which I'm just again, blown away by how many customers are using that for everything, in every way. So I think the basic unit of compute is continuing to get smaller. I think that's really good for customers. I think the ability to be serverless is a very exciting proposition that we're continuing to to fulfill that vision that we laid out a couple years ago. And then, probably, the last thing I'd point out right now is, I think it's really interesting to see how the basic procurement of software is changing. In significant part driven by what we've been doing with our Marketplace. If you think about it, in the old world, if you were a company that was buying software, you'd have to go find bunch of the companies that you should consider, you'd have to have a lot of conversations, you'd have to talk to a lot of salespeople. Those companies, by the way, have to have a big sales team, an expensive marketing budget to go find those companies and then go sell those companies and then both companies engage in this long tap-dance around doing an agreement and the legal terms and the legal teams and it's just, the process is very arduous. Then after you buy it, you have to figure out how you're going to actually package it, how you're deploy to infrastructure and get it done, and it's just, I think in general, both consumers of software and sellers of software really don't like the process that's existed over the last few decades. And then you look at AWS Marketplace, and we have 35 hundred product listings in there from 12 hundred technology providers. If you look at the number of hours, that software that's been running EC2 just in the last month alone, it's several hundred million hours, EC2 hours, of that software being run on top of our Marketplace. And it's just completely changing how software is bought and procured. I think that if you talk to a lot of the big sellers of software, like Splunk or Trend Micro, there's a whole number of them, they'll tell you it totally changes their ability to be able to sell. You know, one of the things that really helped AWS in the early days and still continues to help us, is that we have a self-service model where we don't actually have to have a lot of people talk to every customer to get started. I think if you're a seller of software, that's very appealing, to allow people to find your software and be able to buy it. And if you're a consumer, to be able to buy it quickly, again, without the hassle of all those conversations and the overhead associated with that, very appealing. And I think it's why the marketplace has just exploded and taken off like it has. It's also really good, by the way, for systems integrators, who are often packaging things on top of that software to their clients. This makes it much easier to build kind of smaller catalogs of software products for their customers. I think when you layer on top of that the capabilities that we've announced to make it easier for SASS providers to meter and to do billing and to do identity is just, it's a very different world. And so I think that also is very exciting, both for companies and customers as well as software providers. >> We certainly touched on a lot here. And we have a lot going on, and you know, while we have customers asking us a lot about how they can use all these new services and new features, we also tend to get a lot of questions from customers on how we innovate so quickly, and they can think about applying some of those lessons learned to their own businesses. >> So you're asking how we're able to innovate quickly? >> Mmm hmm. >> I think there's a few things that have helped us, and it's different for every company. But some of these might be helpful. I'll point to a few. I think the first thing is, I think we disproportionately index on hiring builders. And we think of builders as people who are inventors, people who look at different customer experiences really critically, are honest about what's flawed about them, and then seek to reinvent them. And then people who understand that launch is the starting line and not the finish line. There's very little that any of us ever built that's a home run right out of the gate. And so most things that succeed take a lot of listening to customers and a lot of experimentation and a lot of iterating before you get to an equation that really works. So the first thing is who we hire. I think the second thing is how we organize. And we have, at Amazon, long tried to organize into as small and separable and autonomous teams as we can, that have all the resources in those teams to own their own destiny. And so for instance, the technologists and the product managers are part of the same team. And a lot of that is because we don't want the finger pointing that goes back and forth between the teams, and if they're on the same team, they focus all their energy on owning it together and understanding what customers need from them, spending a disproportionate amount of time with customers, and then they get to own their own roadmaps. One of the reasons we don't publish a 12 to 18 month roadmap is we want those teams to have the freedom, in talking to customers and listening to what you tell us matters, to re-prioritize if there are certain things that we assumed mattered more than it turns out it does. So, you know I think that the way that we organize is the second piece. I think a third piece is all of our teams get to use the same AWS building blocks that all of you get to use, which allow you to move much more quickly. And I think one of the least told stories about Amazon over the last five years, in part because people have gotten interested in AWS, is people have missed how fast our consumer business at Amazon has iterated. Look at the amount of invention in Amazon's consumer business. And they'll tell you that a big piece of that is their ability to use the AWS building blocks like they do. I think a fourth thing is many big companies, as they get larger, what starts to happen is what people call the institutional no, which is that leaders walk into meetings on new ideas looking to find ways to say no, and not because they're ill intended but just because they get more conservative or they have a lot on their plate or things are really managed very centrally, so it's hard to imagine adding more to what you're already doing. At Amazon, it's really the opposite, and in part because of the way we're organized in such a decoupled, decentralized fashion, and in part because it's just part of our DNA. When the leaders walk into a meeting, they are looking for ways to say yes. And we don't say yes to everything, we have a lot of proposals. But we say yes to a lot more than I think virtually any other company on the planet. And when we're having conversations with builders who are proposing new ideas, we're in a mode where we're trying to problem-solve with them to get to yes, which I think is really different. And then I think the last thing is that we have mechanisms inside the company that allow us to make fast decisions. And if you want a little bit more detail, you should read our founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter, which just was released. He talks about the fast decision-making that happens inside the company. It's really true. We make fast decisions and we're willing to fail. And you know, we sometimes talk about how we're working on several of our next biggest failures, and we hope that most of the things we're doing aren't going to fail, but we know, if you're going to push the envelope and if you're going to experiment at the rate that we're trying to experiment, to find more pillars that allow us to do more for customers and allow us to be more relevant, you are going to fail sometimes. And you have to accept that, and you have to have a way of evaluating people that recognizes the inputs, meaning the things that they actually delivered as opposed to the outputs, cause on new ventures, you don't know what the outputs are going to be, you don't know consumers or customers are going to respond to the new thing you're trying to build. So you have to be able to reward employees on the inputs, you have to have a way for them to continue to progress and grow in their career even if they work on something didn't work. And you have to have a way of thinking about, when things don't work, how do I take the technology that I built as part of that, that really actually does work, but I didn't get it right in the form factor, and use it for other things. And I think that when you think about a culture like Amazon, that disproportionately hires builders, organizes into these separable, autonomous teams, and allows them to use building blocks to move fast, and has a leadership team that's looking to say yes to ideas and is willing to fail, you end up finding not only do you do more inventing but you get the people at every level of the organization spending their free cycles thinking about new ideas because it actually pays to think of new ideas cause you get a shot to try it. And so that has really helped us and I think most of our customers who have made significant shifts to AWS and the cloud would argue that that's one of the big transformational things they've seen in their companies as well. >> Okay. I want to go a little bit deeper on the subject of culture. What are some of the things that are most unique about the AWS culture that companies should know about when they're looking to partner with us? >> Well, I think if you're making a decision on a predominant infrastructure provider, it's really important that you decide that the culture of the company you're going to partner with is a fit for yours. And you know, it's a super important decision that you don't want to have to redo multiple times cause it's wasted effort. And I think that, look, I've been at Amazon for almost 20 years at this point, so I have obviously drank the Kool Aid. But there are a few things that I think are truly unique about Amazon's culture. I'll talk about three of them. The first is I think that we are unusually customer-oriented. And I think a lot of companies talk about being customer-oriented, but few actually are. I think most of the big technology companies truthfully are competitor-focused. They kind of look at what competitors are doing and then they try to one-up one another. You have one or two of them that I would say are product-focused, where they say, hey, it's great, you Mr. and Mrs. Customer have ideas on a product, but leave that to the experts, and you know, you'll like the products we're going to build. And those strategies can be good ones and successful ones, they're just not ours. We are driven by what customers tell us matters to them. We don't build technology for technology's sake, we don't become, you know, smitten by any one technology. We're trying to solve real problems for our customers. 90% of what we build is driven by what you tell us matters. And the other 10% is listening to you, and even if you can't articulate exactly what you want, trying to read between the lines and invent on your behalf. So that's the first thing. Second thing is that we are pioneers. We really like to invent, as I was talking about earlier. And I think most big technology companies at this point have either lost their will or their DNA to invent. Most of them acquire it or fast follow. And again, that can be a successful strategy. It's just not ours. I think in this day and age, where we're going through as big a shift as we are in the cloud, which is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime, as dynamic as it is, being able to partner with a company that has the most functionality, it's iterating the fastest, has the most customers, has the largest ecosystem of partners, has SIs and ISPs, that has had a vision for how all these pieces fit together from the start, instead of trying to patch them together in a following act, you have a big advantage. I think that the third thing is that we're unusually long-term oriented. And I think that you won't ever see us show up at your door the last day of a quarter, the last day of a year, trying to harass you into doing some kind of deal with us, not to be heard from again for a couple years when we either audit you or try to re-up you for a deal. That's just not the way that we will ever operate. We are trying to build a business, a set of relationships, that will outlast all of us here. And I think something that always ties it together well is this trusted advisor capability that we have inside our support function, which is, you know, we look at dozens of programmatic ways that our customers are using the platform and reach out to you if you're doing something we think's suboptimal. And one of the things we do is if you're not fully utilizing resources, or hardly, or not using them at all, we'll reach out and say, hey, you should stop paying for this. And over the last couple of years, we've sent out a couple million of these notifications that have led to actual annualized savings for customers of 350 million dollars. So I ask you, how many of your technology partners reach out to you and say stop spending money with us? To the tune of 350 million dollars lost revenue per year. Not too many. And I think when we first started doing it, people though it was gimmicky, but if you understand what I just talked about with regard to our culture, it makes perfect sense. We don't want to make money from customers unless you're getting value. We want to reinvent an experience that we think has been broken for the prior few decades. And then we're trying to build a relationship with you that outlasts all of us, and we think the best way to do that is to provide value and do right by customers over a long period of time. >> Okay, keeping going on the culture subject, what about some of the quirky things about Amazon's culture that people might find interesting or useful? >> Well there are a lot of quirky parts to our culture. And I think any, you know lots of companies who have strong culture will argue they have quirky pieces but I think there's a few I might point to. You know, I think the first would be the first several years I was with the company, I guess the first six years or so I was at the company, like most companies, all the information that was presented was via PowerPoint. And we would find that it was a very inefficient way to consume information. You know, you were often shaded by the charisma of the presenter, sometimes you would overweight what the presenters said based on whether they were a good presenter. And vice versa. You would very rarely have a deep conversation, cause you have no room on PowerPoint slides to have any depth. You would interrupt the presenter constantly with questions that they hadn't really thought through cause they didn't think they were going to have to present that level of depth. You constantly have the, you know, you'd ask the question, oh, I'm going to get to that in five slides, you want to do that now or you want to do that in five slides, you know, it was just maddening. And we would often find that most of the meetings required multiple meetings. And so we made a decision as a company to effectively ban PowerPoints as a communication vehicle inside the company. Really the only time I do PowerPoints is at Reinvent. And maybe that shows. And what we found is that it's a much more substantive and effective and time-efficient way to have conversations because there is no way to fake depth in a six-page narrative. So what we went to from PowerPoint was six-page narrative. You can write, have as much as you want in the appendix, but you have to assume nobody will read the appendices. Everything you have to communicate has to be done in six pages. You can't fake depth in a six-page narrative. And so what we do is we all get to the room, we spend 20 minutes or so reading the document so it's fresh in everybody's head. And then where we start the conversation is a radically different spot than when you're hearing a presentation one kind of shallow slide at a time. We all start the conversation with a fair bit of depth on the topic, and we can really hone in on the three or four issues that typically matter in each of these conversations. So we get to the heart of the matter and we can have one meeting on the topic instead of three or four. So that has been really, I mean it's unusual and it takes some time getting used to but it is a much more effective way to pay attention to the detail and have a substantive conversation. You know, I think a second thing, if you look at our working backwards process, we don't write a lot of code for any of our services until we write and refine and decide we have crisp press release and frequently asked question, or FAQ, for that product. And in the press release, what we're trying to do is make sure that we're building a product that has benefits that will really matter. How many times have we all gotten to the end of products and by the time we get there, we kind of think about what we're launching and think, this is not that interesting. Like, people are not going to find this that compelling. And it's because you just haven't thought through and argued and debated and made sure that you drew the line in the right spot on a set of benefits that will really matter to customers. So that's why we use the press release. The FAQ is to really have the arguments up front about how you're building the product. So what technology are you using? What's the architecture? What's the customer experience? What's the UI look like? What's the pricing dimensions? Are you going to charge for it or not? All of those decisions, what are people going to be most excited about, what are people going to be most disappointed by. All those conversations, if you have them up front, even if it takes you a few times to go through it, you can just let the teams build, and you don't have to check in with them except on the dates. And so we find that if we take the time up front we not only get the products right more often but the teams also deliver much more quickly and with much less churn. And then the third thing I'd say that's kind of quirky is it is an unusually truth-seeking culture at Amazon. I think we have a leadership principle that we say have backbone, disagree, and commit. And what it means is that we really expect people to speak up if they believe that we're headed down a path that's wrong for customers, no matter who is advancing it, what level in the company, everybody is empowered and expected to speak up. And then once we have the debate, then we all have to pull the same way, even if it's a different way than you were advocating. And I think, you always hear the old adage of where, two people look at a ceiling and one person says it's 14 feet and the other person says, it's 10 feet, and they say, okay let's compromise, it's 12 feet. And of course, it's not 12 feet, there is an answer. And not all things that we all consider has that black and white answer, but most things have an answer that really is more right if you actually assess it and debate it. And so we have an environment that really empowers people to challenge one another and I think it's part of why we end up getting to better answers, cause we have that level of openness and rigor. >> Okay, well Andy, we have time for one more question. >> Okay. >> So other than some of the things you've talked about, like customer focus, innovation, and long-term orientation, what is the single most important lesson that you've learned that is really relevant to this audience and this time we're living in? >> There's a lot. But I'll pick one. I would say I'll tell a short story that I think captures it. In the early days at Amazon, our sole business was what we called an owned inventory retail business, which meant we bought the inventory from distributors or publishers or manufacturers, stored it in our own fulfillment centers and shipped it to customers. And around the year 1999 or 2000, this third party seller model started becoming very popular. You know, these were companies like Half.com and eBay and folks like that. And we had a really animated debate inside the company about whether we should allow third party sellers to sell on the Amazon site. And the concerns internally were, first of all, we just had this fundamental belief that other sellers weren't going to care as much about the customer experience as we did cause it was such a central part of everything we did DNA-wise. And then also we had this entire business and all this machinery that was built around owned inventory business, with all these relationships with publishers and distributors and manufacturers, who we didn't think would necessarily like third party sellers selling right alongside us having bought their products. And so we really debated this, and we ultimately decided that we were going to allow third party sellers to sell in our marketplace. And we made that decision in part because it was better for customers, it allowed them to have lower prices, so more price variety and better selection. But also in significant part because we realized you can't fight gravity. If something is going to happen, whether you want it to happen or not, it is going to happen. And you are much better off cannibalizing yourself or being ahead of whatever direction the world is headed than you are at howling at the wind or wishing it away or trying to put up blockers and find a way to delay moving to the model that is really most successful and has the most amount of benefits for the customers in question. And that turned out to be a really important lesson for Amazon as a company and for me, personally, as well. You know, in the early days of doing Marketplace, we had all kinds of folks, even after we made the decision, that despite the have backbone, disagree and commit weren't really sure that they believed that it was going to be a successful decision. And it took several months, but thankfully we really were vigilant about it, and today in roughly half of the units we sell in our retail business are third party seller units. Been really good for our customers. And really good for our business as well. And I think the same thing is really applicable to the space we're talking about today, to the cloud, as you think about this gigantic shift that's going on right now, moving to the cloud, which is, you know, I think in the early days of the cloud, the first, I'll call it six, seven, eight years, I think collectively we consumed so much energy with all these arguments about are people going to move to the cloud, what are they going to move to the cloud, will they move mission-critical applications to the cloud, will the enterprise adopt it, will public sector adopt it, what about private cloud, you know, we just consumed a huge amount of energy and it was, you can see both in the results in what's happening in businesses like ours, it was a form of fighting gravity. And today we don't really have if conversations anymore with our customers. They're all when and how and what order conversations. And I would say that this going to be a much better world for all of us, because we will be able to build in a much more cost effective fashion, we will be able to build much more quickly, we'll be able to take our scarce resource of engineers and not spend their resource on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure and instead on what truly differentiates your business. And you'll have a global presence, so that you have lower latency and a better end user customer experience being deployed with your applications and infrastructure all over the world. And you'll be able to meet the data sovereignty requirements of various locales. So I think it's a great world that we're entering right now, I think we're at a time where there's a lot less confusion about where the world is headed, and I think it's an unprecedented opportunity for you to reinvent your businesses, reinvent your applications, and build capabilities for your customers and for your business that weren't easily possible before. And I hope you take advantage of it, and we'll be right here every step of the way to help you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (applause) >> Thank you, Andy. And thank you, everyone. I appreciate your time today. >> Thank you. (applause) (upbeat music)

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girl's in Tech Catalyst Conference on the fourth year of the conference, about 400 people here, wanted to come down, get a feel for what's going on. Seems to be something about Phoenix and women in tech, because we were here two years ago at the Grace Hopper Conference, the first time we ever covered that event with Telle Whitney and Marie Klawe, et cetera. So, we're excited to be back, and with our next guest, Scarlett Spring, president and chief commercial officer of VisionGate. Welcome, Scarlett. >> Thank you, and welcome back to Phoenix. >> Absolutely, thank you. So for those that aren't familiar with VisionGate, give us a little 411 on the company. >> Absolutely, so VisionGate is a medical device company, launching an in-vitro diagnostic tool for noninvasive, early detection of lung cancer, and, as of this year, January, we now have licensed in a drug which could treat even the pre-cancerous condition before you would get lung cancer, called dysplasia of the lung. >> Okay, so you said a whole lot there. >> Exactly. >> A lot of words. So let's go through that sentence one more time, a little bit slower, so it's-- >> It's a medical-- >> It's noninvasive. >> Yeah, so we're a medical device company, so there's a hardware component to the company. There's a software component to the company, because we're in-vitro diagnostic, meaning we have an assay, and that's a noninvasive test for lung cancer, so it's a sputum test. >> What does that mean, a sputum test? >> If you give us a deep cough, from the cells of your lungs, not saliva which would come from your oral cavity but a deep cough from your lung, our device can look at those cells and make a determination whether there are abnormal cells, thus leading to think that there would be cancer cells. >> And how would that process of trying to determine whether you have cancer or not happen without your technology? >> There isn't a test, today. >> There's no test? >> Right. Sputum has been looked at manually by putting your deep cough on a glass slide since the 1930s, and there's so much variation in data, because it's like finding a needle in the haystack, because when you give a cough, you cough up about four million cells, give or take a million. So for a human to do that, exactly that's it. It's extremely laborious, it's not cost effective, and, once again, you're looking for a handful of cells which would be diagnostic, because most of what's coming out of your lungs is saliva and white cells, because obviously it's trying to kill anything that's in there. >> Right, so in terms of the way the technology works, so is it kind of advanced, kind of pattern recognition? What is trying to do-- >> Perfect. That is a perfect question. It is exactly. Our innovation is we use machine recognition technology, and we look at the morphology of a cell. What does that mean? That means the cellular features, because cell features of a cancer cell look very different from a normal cell, and you can train a computer through a series of algorithms to recognize those differences, very similar to what a human being does. So in essence, we put a pathologist in a box, and we have trained thousands and thousands, like 250,000 cells has gone into training this classifier, and some of the world's best pathologists and cytopathologists have actually trained our machine. >> And the fact that you chose to go after lung cancer, it sounds like this would work, because you're basically looking for anomalies. >> That's exactly right. >> It sounds like that would work for lots-- >> It does. >> Of different things. >> You're exactly right. Once we can train this algorithm to actually look at other cancer types, so we're still in our kind of late stage startup phase, but we already have proof of concept work that is looking in urine for bladder cancer, looking at blood for circulating tumor cells, adenocarcinoma of the esophagus by being able to get some of the cells extracted. What we're trying to do is look at noninvasive ways, because today you want to make sure that you're being cost-effective, so that's the easiest way that you could get a cell, but you could use more invasive techniques to get a cell. For instance, like a pancreatic cancer. That would kind of be a real opportunity. Some conversations that we're having with clinical collaborators, that would inquire at least an upper GI where you would go into the stomach, poke the wall to try to get a specimen. What I tell individuals is if you get us a cell, we can create the classifier to ascertain whether it's normal or abnormal. >> And, the end goal is to just come up with more kind of regular routine with your checkup process that you're testing for these cancers to get out ahead of the curve. >> Jeff, it is all about early detection. Unfortunately, most of our cost today happen toward the end of the disease cycle. If we could invert that and actually have better early detection tools, not only would we save lives, but downstream it would be a tremendous cost saving just to the healthcare system. >> Right, very interesting work. >> Thank you. >> And have you always been involved in-- >> Well, it's interesting, I have 19 years of big pharma experience, so I actually started with Merck which became AstraMerck, AstraZeneca. So I had 19 years of continuous service, and I launched Prilosec in 1989 and then had the pleasure of continuing my pharma career with some terrific products, you know, Nexium, the oncology division there at AstraZeneca. So, oncology did grab me, and I've been very passionate about that since the late 1990s, early 2000s. >> Does it ever just crush you though that it's oncology, that it's cancer? I always think of the saints that are in these wards that are dealing with this everyday. >> You're right, particularly at AstraZeneca, we had breast cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer products, and one of the things that every October during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I would get out in the field and go and be with our sales representatives, and it never got far from me that at the end there was a patient that was receiving therapy and the tremendous impact that your body goes through. So, we can never forget that at the end of all that we're doing is. there's a patient. We're trying to save a life, and the work matters. >> Yeah, and it's a person, right not only-- >> That's a person. >> A patient, but it's a person. >> It's a person. >> A mom, a sister. >> I don't think any of probably even watching this today has not been somehow impacted by cancer. >> Yeah, crazy, so let's shift gears. Get off the cancer for a minute. You had a presentation here at the-- >> I did. >> Conference. How to fly in the face of adversity. So for the folks unfortunately that couldn't make it to Phoenix today, what's it all about? >> Well, flying in the face of adversity, my workshop is going to talk about three layers. Raising money for a startup that has a big idea, and I think just by the brief introduction I gave you to VisionGate, it's a game changing kind of idea. Secondly, how do you go from startup to scale up? And lastly, how are you as a leader, thinking about your brand and how it aligns with the mission of your company? And there isn't any given week and maybe even any give day that I don't balance those three things, whether I'm trying to raise money, because we're still not revenue generating yet, whether I'm scaling the company, because we've grown just 40% since, call it Thanksgiving of last year, to thinking about what's my responsibility being here today, because the girls that are here are just starting their careers in technology, and by them, they will be the leaders of tomorrow. So, I think it's going to be a great topic. I'm actually going to allow the audience to do some prioritization, which one of these do you want to talk about, and we're going to walk through some exercises of doing that. >> It's interesting, many moons ago, I was involved in a speaker series at Wharton, and we had David Pottruck on. He's the former CEO of Schwab, Schwab's right hand guy, really articulate speaker, phenomenal speaker, and we had dinner with him afterwards. I asked him, I said why are you such a good speaker, and he goes, you know, I practice a lot. As a senior executive of a company, all you do is communicate. You communicate to your investors. You communicate to your employees. You communicate to your customers. That's pretty much what your job is, and so I took it as a serious thing, and I hired coaches, and I practiced. And now I'm pretty good at it, so it's interesting that you tie that back that building your own personal brand and getting that out there and how important that is to really helping the development, and the movement and the success of your company. >> It's true, and if you think about your brand, if you do it from being a self-centered or trying to have it being inward focused, you're going to probably end up in the wrong place, but if you do it thinking about how you would market a brand, what are the traits, the attributes that I have, that I want to be known for, and then that I want to try to nurture. And what it really comes down to is helping someone tap into their authenticity and their reputational power. What do you want to be known for? >> That's interesting I was just thinking as you were talking to get someone the nuggets, but that is a great nugget. What do you want to be known for? And to put the consciously out front. And I do think too that the world has shifted, in kind of the sharing world that we live in. It used to be power was in retention, holding. You had your stack of business cards. You'd never let those things out of your sight. You change companies, you take your Rolodex with you. Now, it's very different. The power comes, actually, from sharing. The more you share, the more you help others, actually the more influence and power that you get. >> And that's actually some of the very things that we'll be talking about is whether you are just starting your career, whether you are looking to get a promotion and move up within your own company, whether you are toward the end of your career and looking to transition to boards or advisory boards or be more connected to something that you're passionate about. In that, what are the things that you're known for that make you valuable? Is it that you're going to take on extra projects at work and kind of get known for someone who brings solutions to the table or is the person who's going to have the uncomfortable conversation, you know, the conversation that needs to be had in the room, but you're able to do it in a way that isn't polarizing, but brings everybody in to go, oh my gosh, you just articulated what needed to be said, and that created some sort of positive change. I want to get at those things today in our workshop, and it should be fun. >> That's just phenomenal, the way you summed that up so succinctly. You know, there's a lot of places that you can add value in the way that you work and the tasks that you chose to add on and to be known for doing some of the dirty work, doing some of the ugly stuff and helping the whole organization get over that hurdle. Scarlett, sounds like it's going to be a great session. Unfortunately, we'll be here doing more interviews, which is not unfortunately. We love being here to do interviews, but sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun. Good luck with it. >> I appreciate it. Thank you so much for the time. >> Absolutely and-- >> Come back to Phoenix again! >> Good luck with VisionGate. >> Absolutely. >> So when is your next hurdle with VisionGate? When's your next kind of trial? I know these medical ones take a while. >> It is true, so we've got a couple things that are going on right now. Hopefully, there'll be a screening opportunity coming to you soon, and we're getting our drug into phase three trials. >> All right, Scarlett, again thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Absolutely, I'm Jeff Frick. It's Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. You're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)