>>Everyone welcome back from the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Aus re Mars. It's one of the re shows, as we know, reinvent is the big show. Now they have focus, shows reinforces coming up that security Remar is here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, director of machine learning thought leadership with AWS. Great to see you again. Yeah. Give alumni welcome back here. Back every time we got deep racer, always to talk >>About, Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >>So I want to get into the deep racer in context here, but first re Mars is a show. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press. Um, not a lot of news, cuz it's not a newsy show. It's more of a builder kind of a convergence show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a, a moment in time that I think's gonna be one of those timeless moments where we're gonna look back and saying that year at re Mars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping machine learning, scaling robotics is hot. It's now transforming fast. Just like the back office data center did years ago. Yeah. And so like a surge is coming. >>Yeah. >>What, what's your take of this show? >>Yeah. And all of these three or four components are all coming together. Right. And they're intersecting rather than just being in silos. Right. So we're seeing machine learning, enabled perception sort of on robots, um, applied to space and sort of these, uh, extra sort of application initiatives. Um, and that's, what's really exciting about this show is seeing all these things come together and all the industry-wide examples, um, of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So, >>So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them? This show? What, what, what they're gonna be what's in it for me, what's all this show. What does it mean? >>Yeah. It's just a glimpse into where things are headed. Right. And it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. It's sort of the beginning of the wave of, um, you know, these sort of advanced capabilities that we're gonna see imbued in applications, um, across all different industries. >>Awesome. Well, great to have you in the cube. Every time we have an event we wanna bring you on because deep racers become a, the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following. It's become massive following. Um, and which started out as an IOT, I think raspberry pie first time was like a, like >>A, we did a little camera initially camera >>And it was just a kind of a fun, little clever, I won't say hack, but just having a project that just took on a life OFS own, where are we? What's the update with racer you're here with the track. Yeah, >>Possibly >>You got the track and competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there. Boston dynamics. >>Well we'll, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah. So deep razor, you know, is the fastest way to get hands on with machine learning. You know, we designed it as, uh, a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using, uh, a simulation, uh, to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So deep racer includes a 3d racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car. So you can take, uh, the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this one 18th scale, um, kind of RC car. That's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra, uh, Intel, X, 86 processor inside here. Um, and this thing will drive itself, autonomously around the track. And of course what's a track and uh, some cars driving around it without a little competition. So we've got the deep racer league that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's >>It's, it's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models cuz they go off the track and I see people and it's oh my, then they gotta reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch and every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list that reinvent, it's almost like a, a super score gets you up. Yeah. Take, take us through the reinvents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our, our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at re Mars and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical, uh, races. Um, and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. Yeah. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. Um, so we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical and they, the top ones of them come together at reinvent every year in November, December. Um, and we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where these guys get the field gets narrowed to 10 racers and then those 10 racers, uh, race to hold up the championship cup and, um, earn, earn, uh, you know, a whole set of prizes, either cash or, or, you know, scholarships or, you know, tuition funds, whatever the, uh, the developer is most interested >>In. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on the cube because I I'm smiling. That's, it's so much fun. I mean, if I had not been with the cube anyway, I'd love to do this. Um, would you ever imagine when you first started this, that it would be such so popular and at the rise of eSports? So, you know, discord is booming. Yeah. The QB has a discord channel now. Sure, sure. Not that good on it yet, but we'll get there, but just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who wanna compete. You never thought that would be this big. We, >>We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched deep racer, you know, we envisioned this as a way for, you know, developers who had already graduated from school. They were in a company they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies. And they're saying, this is really fun. Like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and national Australia bank all adopting deep racer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. Um, the second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use deep racer because you needed an AWS account. You had to have a credit card. You might, you might get billed. There was a free tier involved. Um, so what we did this past year was we launched the deep racer student league, um, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college, uh, deep Razer student includes 10 hours a month of free training, um, so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win, win prizes. >>So they don't have to go onto the dark web hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a deep Razer that's right. They can now come in on their own. >>That's right. That's right. They can log into that virtual the virtual environment, um, and get access. And, and one of the other things that we realized, um, and, and that's a common kind of, uh, realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning. But also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners? Um, and this applies to the, the, the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, Hey, you know, um, the world's gonna see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with, um, you know, underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of deep Bracer student. So now students, um, can register and opt into the scholarship program and we're gonna give out, uh, Udacity scholarships to 2000 students, um, at the end of this year who compete in AWS deep racer student racers, and also go through all of the learning modules online. >>Okay. Hold on, lets back up. Cuz it sounds, this sounds pretty cool. All right. So we kind went fast on that a little bit slow today at the end of the day. So if they sign up for the student account, which is lowered the batteries for, and they Intel and a desk, this is a courseware for the machine learning that's right. So in order to participate, you gotta take some courseware, check the boxes and, and, and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with the scholarship after the fact. >>So Intel's a partner of ours in, in putting this on. So it's both, um, helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who, um, get qualified for the scholarship and, and win one of those 2000 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships, uh, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel, um, professionals will help mentor these students, uh, give them career advice, give them technical advice. C >>They'll they're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just gonna get to data here. So is it money or credits for the, for the training? >>That's the scholarship or both? Yes. So, so the, the student training is free for students. Yep. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just, you log in and you get your account. Um, then the 2000, uh, Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to, to the winners of the student, um, scholarship program. It's a four month long, uh, class on Python programming for >>AI so's real education. Yeah. It's like real, real, so ones here's 10 hours. Here's check the box. Here's here's the manual. Yep. >>Everybody gets access to that. That's >>Free. >>Yep. >>To the student over 16. Yes. Free. So that probably gonna increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now? Yeah. In terms of scope to scale here for me. Yeah. Scope it >>Out. What's the numbers we've, we've been, uh, pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the deep racer student program and of those over 30,000 have opted into that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest, um, from across the globe in, in this virtual students, um, opportunity, you know, and students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun, deep racer kind of hands on racing. Um, and obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity >>Or how many people are in the AWS deep racer, um, group. Now, because now someone's gotta work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, >>You know, we're pretty efficient with what we, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of, um, what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience in viewing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements. You know, one of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a discord channel, so not only can the students get hands on, but they also have this built in community of other students now to help support them bounce ideas off of and, you know, improve their learning. >>Awesome. So what's next, take us through after this event and what's going on for you more competitions. >>Yeah. So we're gonna be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico city, you know, uh, this week we were in Milan, um, you know, we've got some AWS public sector, um, activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in, um, Ottawa in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in, um, Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events, both for students as well as for the professionals who wanna compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at reinvent. So we'll be back here in Vegas, um, at the beginning of December where our champions will, uh, compete to ho to come. >>So you guys are going to all the summits, absolutely. Most of the summits or >>All of them, anytime there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to >>The track is always open. >>Absolutely. All >>Right. Well, thanks for coming on the cube with the update. Appreciate it, >>Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be >>Here. Pleasure to know you appreciate it. Love that program. All right. Cube coverage here. Deep race are always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events, more exciting than the cube. Some say, but uh, almost great to have you on Mike. Uh, great success. Check it out free to students. The barrier's been lower to get in every robotics club. Every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. Uh, it's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. There's one to learn that. All right. Cube coverage. Coming back after this short break.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto offices for a CUBE Conversation today. We're going to talk about an interesting topic. You know as all these applications get more complex and they're all Internet based. I'm sure you know that feeling when you're at home and you lose your Internet power you pretty much can't do much of anything. So what can we do about that? Who are some of the companies that are working on this problem? We're real excited to have an innovator in this space from ThousandEyes. She's Archana Kesavan, Director of Product Marketing for ThousandEyes, welcome. >> Archana: Thank you Jeff, it's good to be here. >> Absolutely, so this is crazy. Give us kind of the run-down on ThousandEyes and what you do and then we'll jump into it. >> Sure, so ThousandEyes is a company that provides and enables enterprises. Gives them visibility into how the Internet is impacting end-user experience, right? When you think of it, of what users are, what this user experience is, it could be twofold. One is if you're an enterprise providing a digital service then they're your customers, right? So that customer experience we provide visibility into that. Then also if you're an enterprise moving towards using cloud applications or SaaS applications, employees using those applications, we provide visibility into that space as well. Really the thought and the idea behind ThousandEyes and the reason we are here is as enterprises are moving to the cloud and relying on this Internet-based delivery infrastructure, they're are starting to lose visibility into their critical customer-facing and employee-facing applications. What ThousandEyes does is it gives them back that control by giving them that visibility into that environment. >> Okay so then just to be clear because there's a ton of kind of monitoring applications, we use the Sumo Logic, we do Splunk. So there's a lot of things around operations where they're monitoring these apps, and they're super complex apps. But your guys main focus if I understand, is the network. The network piece and the transportation of that app across the wire. >> Right, let me unpack that and explain with an example, right. Let's think you're an enterprise that's moving towards Office 365 and you have a global workforce, right? Your users are connecting report and your VP of sales happens to connect from a Starbucks or a Philz because we're in Palo Alto. Can't download emails, can't get to emails. What's the first step this person or this employee's going to take is call corporate IT and say hey, I can't get to my emails. Now it's up the the corporate IT team to go and troubleshoot that scenario, right? Because if you can't get to your emails or you can't get to these collaboration apps today it's productivity down the hill. The IT team now starts troubleshooting it and where do they start? Is it the WiFi at the Philz that's a problem? Is it Microsoft that's a problem because which I can't get to my email. Or is it that access in between which is the Internet, right? How do you get from a Philz all the way to Office 365 is through that Internet transport. So where we come in is irrespective of the application or even the network, right, we've very agnostic to it. And we combine application performance all the way to the network performance. We take it one step further and we see how the Internet is impacting the services throughout. Because what we see is our customers be that in enterprises consuming SaaS, or enterprises delivering these SaaS services, the production teams and the corporate IT teams they feel the brunt of this every day. They have people calling and say hey, I can't get to this, I can't get to that application. They have their own customers complaining that something's wrong. Unfortunately in this world of the Internet and the cloud, while it's enabled convenience and flexibility they've traded in that for control and visibility. So if you again go back to this Office 365 example that I was just talking about, the enterprise does not own the WiFi in force. It does not own the Internet. Not one entity owns the Internet. It doesn't own Office 365. So monitoring tools that have existed and that have been in place to understand issues within the four walls of an enterprise flatline when it comes to Internet-based delivery and connectivity, which is where we come in. >> What about VPNs, because isn't kind of the purpose of a VPN on one hand is to be secure 'cause Lord knows who's sniffing on the Philz WiFi. But does that not put you into kind of a higher grade Internet line back to the server to get to my email? >> Archana: Is anybody using VPN these days? >> I hear the ads all the time on the radio. (laughing) I don't know, that's a good question. You guys are sitting on there, are people not using VPN? Does VPN solve their problem? Or is it something that's in the backside that regardless of whether you're using VPN or not these are kind of back hall issues that have to get worked out? >> So VPN, if you think about it, it's kind of an encapsulation over the underlying network. You still have to move packets through this network. So you might be connecting through a VPN, but it's the underlying, if you're going through the Internet than that can result in performance degradation, too. So irrespective of these techniques that enable, or so-called enable, performance and make performance better, you still need to know how the transport's behaving and how it's influencing performance just because you don't control it. >> And as I understand, the way you guys are doing this is you have a lot, a lot, a lot of monitoring points all over the place, hence ThousandEyes. Tell us a little bit about kind of how that works, what's the network? How has that been growing over time? >> We've been growing our infrastructure, monitoring infrastructure, over the last few years. The way ThousandEyes gathers its data which you know all the way from the application layer to the network, kind of then looking at Internet performance is our fleet of agents are distributed, are pre-deployed in about 185 cities around the world. We call them Cloud Agents. Now these agents are actively monitoring the services that might be of interest to an enterprise. You can also take a form of these agents and enterprises can deploy them within their own branch offices and their data centers. You can also use them in cloud providers. We actually have agents pre-deployed in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba too, which we recently announced. You can use these agents to monitor applications. You can use these agents to monitor your API endpoints which is another growing area that we see. So, fleet of our agents distributed. You can use that, a combination of agents that we own and pre-deployed along with agents that enterprises would like to put in their own infrastructure. >> Right, so you've got the ones already out there, you've got the ones in the clouds and then I can put some additional ones into my remote offices or places that are of interest to me. So if there's an issue because you said for tech support when the person can't get into email there's a whole host of potential things it could be, right? Office 365 could be down, there's all kinds of things. How does your application communicate to this poor person on the end of this service call that hey, it's a network issue between these two points? Or maybe it's a big exchange that's getting attacked like happened on the East Coast a couple of years ago. How did they work that into their triage so they know hey, we've been able to kind of identify that this is the issue not one of the other 47 things that's impacting that application? >> Right so we are a SaaS-based product. Our uniqueness and our secret sauce is how we look at all of these different layers that affect performance and we correlate them, visually correlate them in a time sequence. We present it to the corporate IT person or a production IT person who is actually triaging this issue. We help them very quickly pinpoint. It's very visual there. You can see how application performance ebbs and flows. You can look at what does a network pack look like? If I'm seeing an outage of the Internet service provider we're going to call that out. Obviously all of this is tied in with an alerting system which the platform enables as well. I think one of the most interesting changes that's happening in the industry is in the past when you found an issue, you could fix an issue because the chances are you owned that entire environment, right? It was a router that failed or a switch was dropping packets. You owned that switch, you owned that router. You could go and make changes to it. But in today's Internet-dependent and cloud-heavy environment, it's more about having the right evidence so you can escalate it to the right person. So knowing which neck to choke is absolutely critical in this distributed environment that enterprises are losing control over slowly. >> So the people start to make active changes in the way they route their traffic based on what they find? Is there either consistent good or consistent bad behavior in certain networks or certain public clouds that you can get a better latency performance by switching that? >> Sure, we've seen cases where usually enterprises have, let's take an example of an Internet service provider having an outage. Usually enterprises for redundancy they have two upstream providers, for instance, and they're probably load balancing traffic equally across these providers. Once ThousandEyes detects that one provider is completely down, could be a routing issue, could be a router failed within their environment. Once we alert them it's up to the enterprise to make that decision saying hey, we want to bypass this route, right? And we've seen that happen in a lot of cases. They do bypass routes if it's possible. It also depends on the severity of the issue, how long the issue lasts and things like that. But that definitely happens. >> You guys talk about a concept called Internet-aware Synthetic. What does that mean? >> Synthetics, it's interesting as a term. What it really means is trying to mimic something that's natural. Just the term synthetics in layman's language, right? Synthetic monitoring is really just that. While you're trying to understand application performance or how a website performs, synthetic monitoring replicates how a user would interact with that application. You replicate those steps and you periodically repeat them over time. Let's take an example. You're shopping online, you're going to Amazon.com. You're searching for whatever it is you're searching for. You get a list of results. You are interested in one item, you look at a review, you seem happy, you move it to your checkout, pay and move on, right? Those sequence of steps is what synthetic monitoring can actually craft. We keep executing those steps periodically so you can understand if there's any degradation of performance, has it slipped from baseline? So IT operations team can use that to understand if there's any change that's happening or if there is a particular area in the world where users are starting to see degradation and so on. The nice thing about synthetics is it's proactive. There's a lot of monitoring techniques out there that looks at real user interaction with the website. And to typically do that you need to insert a piece of code within the application itself that tracks that user's activity. That's great information. You want to see what your users are really doing and engaging with your website. That's very useful but it fundamentally doesn't tell you if performance is completely degraded or the checkout button's not working, for instance. That's where synthetic comes in. >> So is that the primary way that you maintain kind of this testing of the health of the network? Or are you using more of a passive, waiting for something to be slow and then running something like the synthetics to try to figure out where it is? >> The recommendation is to keep synthetics running constantly because you don't want something to slow down and then react. That's a very reactive approach. Really in today's digital economy you don't want an outage to last too long because customer loyalty is fleeting. You don't want even 10 seconds of wait time, right? The way I see it is every time I try to find a cab through Uber, if Uber makes me wait 30 seconds I'm moving on to Lyft. I don't have the patience to wait that long. You don't want outages to prolong so you definitely don't want to understand performance after they have degraded, right? So synthetics recommendation is to continuously monitor so you can find out what's happening and if there's any drift from required baselines. >> Okay and then are you running that concurrently across a number of geographies for the same customer? Because if this same shopper's sitting in Seattle versus if that same shopper is sitting in Mexico City or they're sitting in London are you running that concurrently to make sure that you're checking all the different potential hiccups? >> Our agents, because they are so pervasive across the globe you can pick an agent in one of those 185 cities and you can execute those same sequence of steps over time to actually run that. Now synthetics as a technology is not new. It really predates the cloud. The action of mimicking a user journey through a website, that really predates the cloud which is why it's fundamentally broken when it comes to these cloud and Internet-heavy environments. What we introduce, ThousandEyes Internet-aware Synthetics tries to take this age-old technique and tie that together with how the network and how the underlying Internet performs. So when you're looking at performance you're not looking at it in a silo. Because that's the other thing we hear all the time from our customers. Like the application team has blinders on. They're wanting to see if anything's gone wrong at the application. The network team has its own blinders on wanting to see if anything's gone wrong with the network, right? And usually what's happening is if they figure out it's not an application issue then they punt it over to the network team. The network team says ah, not my problem, you take care of it. So there's this constant finger-pointing that happens in today's environment. This pain has really gotten worse in the era of the cloud and Internet-based deliveries because guess what? Your application is first of all split into these microservices. The number of API calls that you are making has gone up, right? And all of these components don't sit in the same place. You're probably running into a hybrid infrastructure environment where some pieces of your code resides in your data center, the other may be in the cloud. Or you're making API calls which is resulting in a multi-cloud scenario. And what is it that's connecting all of these different environments is the actual network and the Internet. So understanding just hey, my app is down, is not good enough any more. You need to know my app is down, it's down because the Internet is causing problems for instance, right? So what ThousandEyes Internet-aware or network-aware Synthetics does is we look at performance right from the application stage, look at all those transactions see if they are run correctly or not. We tie them into how the underlying network is performing. And hey, if the Internet is causing issues we tie that into in a single correlated pin. So you're looking at one single platform and you're able to pinpoint quickly. You gather the evidence to escalate it to the right person. And at the same time you are bringing the application and the network teams together so it's more collaboration. It's not finger-pointing. Then that's what we really want to enable and what most of our customers actually do with ThousandEyes. >> Before I let you know I want to dig into the Alibaba announcement a little bit more. China is a special challenge on the Internet space. We've done some work over there and none of the Google services work and we use a lot of Google services. How did that come about? Is this a new growing area for you? I would presume there's all kinds of demand from the customers to try to get a little bit deeper penetration into that marketplace. >> China definitely is an interesting space. I mean because of the great firewall and all of the techniques China implements, performance is known to be relatively suboptimal in that region. Fortunately or unfortunately it's the fastest growing market, too. So enterprises want to invest in China. We're seeing a trend where they are moving their services to Ali Cloud. What does that mean for enterprises? You need to monitor that environment, too. Which means you want to understand how performances from Ali Cloud to Ali Cloud and so on. What we did recently is we increase our vantage points within Ali Cloud. Now you can look at user experience for users connecting from all around the world into Ali Cloud. You can look at API performance going from Ali Cloud to GCP or AWS, right? I think the key point to remember is that not just in China, but across the world not all cloud providers are created equal. We found some very interesting data for traffic between Beijing and Singapore, Ali Cloud performed relatively better, no surprises there. But AWS has relatively high performance. Same user from Beijing to AWS's data center in Singapore, they had a very circuitous route to get to Singapore. They were going from China to Tokyo to Singapore. During peak times, eight a.m. to eight p.m. Beijing time there was a lot of fluctuation showing some kind of congestion in the network, right? Ali Cloud we didn't see that. Understanding cloud provider performance is absolutely critical. What we do is our vantage points enable enterprises to do that. One of the initiatives that ThousandEyes we've been doing for a couple of years now is do a comparison of all these providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and Ali Cloud now. Last year we had our first report, it's called a Public Cloud Performance Benchmark report that compared AWS, GCP, and Azure. This year we're expanding it to Ali Cloud as well. So that's launching in November so it's going to be interesting to see. >> Jeff: A lot of people will want to see that one. >> Yes, it's going to be interesting to see who performed better and where. It's always good information. >> Jeff: I was going to ask you if you could share, but I didn't want you to give away any secrets. But I guess we'll have to wait 'til the report comes out. >> Yes, mid-November it's going to be there. >> All right Archana, we'll look forward to that. I'm sure it will be more variable than what most people expect. >> Archana: We'll see. Thanks for having me, Jeff. >> Thanks you very much. All right, she's Archana, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018. Brought to you by RedHat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and Cloud Native Con. I'm John Furrier your host, Stu Miniman from Wikibon here. Next guests Anthony Lye, whose the senior vice president general manager of Cloud Data Services at NetApp, and Jonsi Stergesson, CTO and VP of Cloud Services. Great to have you guys on, great to see you again Anthony. >> As always thank you. >> So first I want to get out there we talked lots in the Kube lounge just to reset. The value parsons of NetApp have significantly been enhanced with the cloud. What is that value proposition? What have you guys seen the explosive headroom for value creation that you guys are enabling with NetApp and the cloud? >> You know what I think NetApp has done over now, probably five years, is really pushed itself to embrace the cloud. To recognize that the cloud is a very important part of everybody's IT infrastructure whether it's an extension of the existing IT infrastructure for things like DR or backup or whether it's the primary platform for legacy workloads or, as we're all here to do, to discuss the refactoring and rebuilding of applications around microservices. I think NetApp chose, unlike all of the traditional storage vendors, to see the cloud as an opportunity and I think it's helped the company and it's helped our customers to operate in what is, I think, is by default now, the end state for many companies is hybrid cloud. >> You guys also made some good moves early on with the cloud. We've documented certainly on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE early on. And then as flash comes in for performance, now you've got compute, storage and networking all being optimized in the cloud, creates app developers an environment where it's programmable infrastructure finally. I mean dev ops is happening, this is where services and notion of compute has gone from standing something up in seconds on the cloud to with functions milliseconds. This is changing the dynamic of applications but you've still got to store the data. Talk about, Jonsi, the impact of the services in piece to the developer, storage, services, provisioning, all that and it covers. >> We are taking, I mean all of our services that are running in all the hyperskills in Google and Azure and AWS and more and even on premise. Our view is our role is always to find the best home for any workload at any given time. Even though it's in public cloud or on premise. However storage has always been sort of left aside, it's always been living in this propietary chunk that is hard to move and the weight of the data is actually quite heavy. So we actually want to use Kubernetes and microservices and resistant volume claims by taking that data and making that very easily migratable replicated between locations, between hyperscalers and sort of adopt a true multi cloud strategy. With data with it not only moving those workloads or applications but the data is key, data is key. >> Sometimes, you know, you want to move the data to a compute and sometimes you want to move compute to the data. >> And that's been validated by Amazon's RDS announcement on VMware, Amazon announced outposting on premises, and the number one thing was latency, work was not yet moving. This is exactly to what you guys have been doing and implementing, today, this is like real product. >> I think the reality of the world is, you know, while there is a ton of innovation that exists in public cloud there are well documented use cases that struggle with a cloud only environment. I think NetApp has chosen to make each one of those three potential persistent stores equal to one another. So whether that's in a traditional on premise and upgrading on premise environments to get better price performance characteristics, embracing the public cloud or combining public and private cloud. >> While it's not trivial NetApp, at it's core, always was software so moving it from a hardware appliance, I mean, back in the day Network Appliance was the original name of the company to a software defined solution to being multi-cloud, you can kind of see that genesis where it can go. A lot of times the tougher part is from the customer standpoint. You know, the traditional person that bought and managed this was a storage administrator and getting them to understand cloud native applications and dev ops and all those things, those are pretty challenging moves so how much of it is education? How much of it is new buying centers inside the company or new clients, help us walk through that. >> Yeah I would make two points in maybe answering to you. So I think NetApp's history, actually 25 years ago, NetApp started off as selling into the developers who were running SUN workstations, who wanted shared everything and NetApp actually you know went around IT and put those appliances into the developers. We built a SaaN business, a very successful SaaN business, with the IT people. Now you're absolutely right, the people around here fall into the, sort of, the modern day dev ops characters. What Google calls the SREs the Site Reliability Engineers. And they're a new breed, they're young, they're doing more and more CICD. Storage is an integral part of what they do but maybe not a primary part. They expect storage to work. We are really lucky you know, a little company called Microsoft and another little company called Google sell our stuff so we get introduced into all of those cloud first, cloud only sort of use cases. Not just of refactoring of primary but building. So we're actually, in many cases now, very relevant to those people but we've been fortunate enough to leverage the big public clouds together. >> So you have a relationship with AWS, Google and Microsoft, Microsoft and Google, which you've just mentioned. You mentioned SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, this is a new persona that's clearly emerging and it has a focus around operations, now IT operations has been around for a long time, dev is changing too but this is, if they sell your stuff, their customers need to operate at scale. This is a big point, can you elaborate on the importance of this and what you guys are doing specifically to help that. >> So the Site Reliability Engineer, he is not doing operations. He is actually in charge of running the workload or the development or the application or the product that comes from development. They have to abide by specific rules that are actually set by the SRE. And to your point, because you were talking about different selling motions and not selling into the storage admin or not selling to traditional IT. This is actually what has actually been really surprising and showcases the power of Kubernetes and how widely adopted it has been, both on premise and in the public cloud because customers are actually coming to us and saying, "Hey we had no idea NetApp was actually "doing all of this in the public cloud. "We had no idea that you had your own Kubernetes services "that actually help solve one of the biggest problems "which is persistent volume claims and application of data." So it's actually coming, and you sort of see how important CNCF is, because they're actually educating the market and educating the enterprise space just as well as the new up and coming development team like I've traditionally come from. So I'm actually seeing that it's easier than I would have sort of thought in the beginning. So they're actually becoming more educated about microservices, more educated about how to run their, actually everybody almost in any company that I go into now, they have the SRE playbook somewhere in their meeting room somewhere and everybody sort of getting educated on how they need to, sort of, elevate themselves from being traditional system administrators into that SRE or dev op role. >> And it's also a cultural thing too, they have to develop, not just the playbook, but have some experience in economies of scale, managing it, and certainly it's a tail wind for you guys, storage because, again, it's also a lot of coating involved they need a pool of resources, storage being one of them. But the other thing that's interesting, those are single clouds, Amazon, Google, multi cloud is really where the action is, right? So multi cloud to me is just, to me, a modern version of multi vendor, which basically is about choice. Choice is critical, but having choice around the app, it becomes the value creator. So if you guys can scale with the app development environments that seems to be a sweet spot. How are you guys talking about that particular point because this becomes an under the covers, a new kind of operations, a new kind of scale, pushing code, not just you know stacking interacting boxes but, like, really making things, patching security things or could have been head of security things so doing things in a really really automated way. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing I'm most proud of at my time at NetApp and what the team does and what the team continues to do is we took a very, very, I think, deliberate perspective that we would deliver storage, but we would do it in a very unique way. That my background was from Saas, I spent my entire career building applications, and when you build an application, you run the application, there is nothing you give the customer and say, "Here, administer it." When you look at a lot of the infrastructure services, they make the customer do a lot of work. So what we did at NetApp was we decided that we ourselves would almost create like an always available protocol that people could just ask for it and it would be there. There was no concept of setting it up or patching it or upgrading it. And that's really I think we have set a bar now on the public clouds that, I think, even the public clouds themselves have not done, and giving those developers that I asked for a storage through an API and all I need to do is ask for capacity and throughput. Nothing else, that's something to a developer they're like, "So now I don't even have to ask "anybody with storage skills. "I can tell my application to ask for it's own storage." >> It's interesting you're living in a new world where you need the scale of a system but the functionality of like an app server. I feel like we're living in that app server days where that middle ground and app development was the key focus, you've got to have both now. You need scalable systems but really application performance. >> And then you add an additional layer because now everybody wants to be able to use the same deployment script, the same configuration management system, Terraform, whatever they're actually using to deploy it on premise or in a public cloud but it needs to be done in a unified manner. This is why it's so important to be upstream compatible and there's a lot of companies out there that are actually destroying that model and not following the true cloud concept. >> Yes give them a slap on the wrist, get in line, fix it! >> If you are going to play in this space with the CNCF and with Kubenetes, you better play by the rules and do the open standards. And so you're actually compatible no matter where your workload resides. >> We've been monitoring how storage is maturing in this whole cloud native Kubenetes ecosystem here. A year ago there were a lot of backroom arguments over what were the right architectures, a few sub projects working through here, it actually blew me away in the keynote this morning to hear that 40% of all applications that are deployed in Kubernetes are stateful. So where are we? What's working? What's good for customers? And what do we still need to work on to kind of solidify the storage data piece of this? >> I think it's interesting, 'cause I think we, sort of, ourselves now consider NetApp to be a data company. Storage is an enabler but what's interesting, everyone talks about their Saas strategy, their PaaS strategy their IaaS strategies. I always ask people, "What's your data strategy?" and that's something I think the CNCF Kubernetes, themselves, recognize that they've done a lot of really great things for compute around the microservices themselves but the storage piece has always been something of a challenge. And we said, about solving that problem, we have an open source project called Trident, that essentially enables people to make persistent volume claims and if the container dies, they can essentially start a new container and pick up the storage exactly where they left off. So we really believe that stateful is an ever increasing percentage of the overall application model. Databases are important things, people need them. >> I would agree with that and that's developing too, it's early on. All right so I want to ask you guys a question, kind of outside the box. Multi cloud certainly is part of a hybrid, what they call a hybrid today, it's really a choice, multi cloud will be a future reality, no matter what anyone says, I believe that. How is multi cloud changing IT investments? Business investments, technical investments or both, what's your guys thoughts on how multi cloud is driving and changing IT investments? >> Well I actually think it offers you the opportunity to have like placement policy algorithms that fit your workload at any given time. For example, if this particular application is latency sensitive, and I created an application that all of a sudden became really popular in Mexico, then I should be able to see which one of the hyperscalers actually has a presence in Mexico City, deploy it there. If I'm under utilizing my private cloud and I have a lot of space on it and there is no specific requirements, it gives you that flexibility to, like I said, always find the best home for your workload at any given time. >> Dynamic policy based stuff? >> Yeah, precisely. And it allows you also, I mean, you can choose to do it whether its based on workload requirements or you can start doing it in a least cost effective route, I mean least cost routing. So it actually impacts both from a technical and a business sense in my opinion. >> I think you know you cannot help but get excited every day with what one cloud delivers over another cloud, and we're seeing something not unlike the arms race, you know, Google does this, then Amazon does this, then Microsoft does this. As developers we're very keen to take advantage of all these capabilities and we want to, in many cases, let the application itself make the decision. >> So yeah Amazons got there, everyone's catching up. Competitions good. All right, final question. Predictions for multi cloud in 2019. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a loud bang? Is there going to be a crash? Is it going to be fruit on the trees? What's the state of the multi cloud predictions for 2019? >> Well I actually believe it's going to become a standard. Nobody should be locked into any region or any one provider, I don't even care if it's on premise or NetOps specific, you should be able to... I mean, I think it's just going to become standard. Everybody has to have a multi cloud strategy and you can see that, like the IDC report that 86% of Fortune 500 companies are adopting multi cloud. And I think I'm actually quite fed up of this hyper cloud stuff because, in my opinion, on premise is just the fourth or the fifth hyperscaler and should be treated as such. So if you actually have that true cloud concept, you should be able to deploy that using the same script, the same APIs to deploy it everywhere. >> As I said in theCube the data center and non print, they're just an edge, a big edge. If it's an operating mall? >> My prediction? Your prediction. >> 2019 is the year of Istio. I think we've become enamored with Kubernetes, I think what Istio brings significantly advances Kubernetes, and we barely scratched the surface, I think, with the service mesh and all of the enhancements and all the contributions that will go into that. I think, you know, that 2019 will probably see as many vendors here next year with Istio credentials and STO capabilities as we see today with Kubernetes. >> Anthony, Jonsi, thanks for coming on, great insights, smart commentary, appreciate it. We should get in the studio and dig into this a little bit deeper. Really a great example of an incumbent, large company, NetApp, really getting a tailwind from the cloud, good smart bets you guys made, programmable infrastructure, dynamic policy routing, all kinds of under the covers goodness from smart cloud deployments. This is where software drives the data. >> Yep data is the new oil, that's what they say right? If you don't have a data set you're not very competitive. >> Thanks for coming on I appreciate it. More Kube coverage here, getting all the breakdown here, the impact of cloud computing at scale, the role of data software, all happening here at the CNCF. This is the KubeCon, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break.

>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering AT&T Spark. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Maribel Lopez, the founder of Lopez Research, and I am guest hosting theCUBE at the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco. And I have the great pleasure of being with Vishy Gopalakrishnan. He is the VP of ecosystems and innovation at AT&T. And Vishy, I've known you for a long time now. I've known you through companies that are as diverse as SAP to AT&T. Could you tell us a little bit about what VP of ecosystem and innovation does and this concept of the foundry that AT&T is having? >> Sure. First of all nice to see you again, Maribel. >> Paths cross. No new people, just different business cards. >> Exactly. So ecosystem and innovation. So this organization has been around at AT&T for about seven years or so. And it was set up to fundamentally answer this question: How can AT&T systematically tap into innovation that happens outside the company and then bring it inside, and then over a period of time become as good at adopting some of those principles of innovative thinking, innovative principles of problem-solving into the company itself? So if you think about ecosystem and innovation, there are three key pillars to ecosystem and innovation. One of them is called ecosystem outreach. So this is a part of the organization that acts as the interface to the broader startup NVC community. >> Right. >> Right. So this allows us to keep on top of innovation happening across a wide variety of technology waterfronts. Networking, security, virtualization, all the way up to AR, VR, AI machine-learning, et cetera. >> It wouldn't be innovation if they weren't together, right? People try to really parse them, but true innovation comes of looking at some of the intersections of technology. >> Absolutely. And we're also agnostic in some sense about where the innovation comes from. 'Cause all we're trying to do is apply innovation to a particular business problem. And the foundry is the second component of the ecosystem and innovation organization. Think of the foundry as centers of innovation. There are six of them around the globe. Four in the US, one in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the newest one in Mexico City that we opened in March. And these foundries represent fundamentally an environment within AT&T where we can rapidly prototype new technologies, de-risk new technologies before we introduce them into the rest of the organization and actually also provide a way for us to bring proactively new, promising areas of technology to the rest of the business. So the foundries, if you will, serve as the leading edge of technology innovation within a company like AT&T. >> Well I've been in The Valley for more than 10 years now, and I came from the East Coast, and the concept of an innovation lab and innovation foundry isn't new. We've seen it come and go with established companies and with new companies. So I remember the launch of the foundry. You said it's about seven years ago, now. I can't believe it's even been that long. What have you learned in that time, and how are you making it work? Because I think everybody wants to be innovative, and they want to take, particularly established companies, these innovations and bring them back into the corporation. Can you give us a little more color and context on what you think you've done well and what surprised you? >> That's a great point to make about the relative longevity of the organization within a company like AT&T. >> And it's grown, apparently, with all the new innovation centers. >> Yes. And we've expanded to other locations outside. I think some of the lessons we've learned are that no organization stands still. >> True. >> AT&T as we know it today is different from what AT&T was seven years ago. The kinds of businesses we're in, the kinds of capabilities that we have to bring to bear, markedly different from what it was seven years ago. And the nature of the competitive waterfront is also dramatically different. So, which means that as an innovation organization, we've had to evolve almost lockstep and sometimes ahead of the organization itself. So that's been one thing that we've done, is that we've made sure that we always are aware of where the company's going, so that as we look at what kinds of innovation might apply, might be relevant, might be material for the corporation, we know that it's always grounded in what the company wants to do now, in about two years from now. >> So forget the science projects and try to get something that's practical to the business, but also a bit edgy, right? >> Yes. >> You want to be edgy. >> Yes, and it's an art and a science. We like to focus on innovation that's in context. So pure innovation is kind of interesting, but we always like to bring it back to either an internal stakeholder or an external customer as a stakeholder to sign off and be almost the kind of the voice of reason to say yes, this is interesting technology, but this is how it might or might not apply to my business problem. >> Do they ask you for things? Does the organization come to you and say, "Hey, we're looking for blah and..."? >> Absolutely. In fact, a big part of what we do as an organization is actually keep the dialogue with the internal stakeholders kind of ongoing and active, so that we always need to be aware of, from a business standpoint, what are the imperatives that a business leader is facing. 'Cause let's face it, a lot of these business leaders within a corporation as large as AT&T are running P&Ls that are pretty large. So for us to bring relevant and material innovation to them, we have to be aware of what are the two or three top, key problem areas that they're looking at. Is it cost reduction? Is it operational simplification? If it's a big part for network organization, what parts of network optimization are they most interested in? So being aware of that informs us better and in some sense helps us curate what kinds of innovative solutions we bring to them. >> Now you are talking about how you put these innovation engines around the globe, and I imagine that you are learning and gaining different things and insights from these different groups because there are phenomenally different ways people use technology depending where they are in the world. So can you share a little bit with us about what's exciting, what you're seeing in the labs today, are there geographic differences that we should be aware of as business leaders when we think of trying to roll out technologies? >> Sure. I'll give a two-part answer. One of it from areas of kind of focus for us. >> Okay. >> One as we just finished the panel on edge compute, so that's a big focus for the foundry organization, is trying to understand the use cases in which edge computing might actually give a pretty dramatic improvement in user experience, what is the role of the network edge in doing that, so working with a broad ecosystem of partners, both established and start-ups to actually make that happen. So that's one big area of focus. The other thing we're doing is... A big part of AT&T's business is actually focused on the enterprise side to AT&T business. So we have two foundry locations, one in Plano and one in Houston, that are focused exclusively on customer co-creation with our enterprise customers. For the past five years, we focused exclusively on IOT and used the Plano foundry to co-create around IOT for customers. In terms of differences across geographies, I think the most salient one is the one in Mexico City. We actually started that with the very explicit intent of innovating for emerging markets. Emerging markets have the need for high-performing, high-quality solutions. >> At a low cost. >> Exactly. So you need to deliver them at a much, much lower cost than the emerging markets actually will bear. So which means that you have to frame the problem differently, you have to go about innovation very differently, and oftentimes, you'll have to tap into the local innovation ecosystem as well. So that's a big, big part of what we're doing in Mexico as well. Trying to tap into the global network that we have as a company through all of the six foundry locations but making sure that we're tailoring it to what the local Mexican market needs. >> I'm actually very excited to see how innovation has been rolling out around the world. One of the things that comes up in every dialogue I have around innovation right now and frankly in most products is AI. Do you see a role of AI happening in the foundry today? >> Yeah we've been doing work on AI for quite some time. In fact, we've been doing a series of projects for our internal organization around applying machine-learning techniques to some very complex network optimization problems. And we're doing that for about 18 months or so. And we've been looking at even ways to apply reinforcement learning to some very classic network problems as well. As part of some of the work that we're doing around edge, we're looking at ways to do influencing at the edge. For a variety of use cases, including, for example, a public safety or a first-responder kind of a use case. So absolutely, AI and machine-learning continue to be one of the areas that we spend a lot of time on. >> Well Vishy, it's been great talking to you today here at AT&T's shape, and look forward to seeing you again soon. >> Thank you, Maribel. Likewise. >> Maribel Lopez, speaking with theCUBE. Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello everybody, welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube here in New York City for Blockchain Week, New York, also part of the consensus 2018 event, wrapping up day three. We've been rocking and rolling. All the action, cryptos here from business models, financing, technology change and a lot of demos. It's been great. My next guest is Alex Scarsini who's the president of Edgewater Markets. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you very much. We're excited. >> So we were chatting about a lot of the capital markets and then the go-to markets for these companies, and I got to say the feedback here at the show is the demos are kind of suck-y 'cause everyone's working on the backend technologies. So it's the evolution, but you're starting to see the technology having a real impact. >> Of course. >> What are you working on? Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, and then we can chat about the general market. >> Sure, sure. So Edgewater Markets, we are developing what we think will be the preeminent platform for the institutional market purely institutional market that'll enable sophisticated investors to be able to buy and sell all the digital currencies or at least in the first stage of our rollout, the 10 or 15 most selected currencies in the same manner that they transact their currency business today, which is efficiently, at low cost, in a low latency environment, and with a A-Z turn around of trade processes from the initial buy or sell to the confirmation process. We've done this before at Edgewater Markets. We do it in the currency business. We have a one-stop shop platform where our clients come to us and efficiently access global equity for the currencies they want. In the market that we have today, it's virtually impossible for the institutional segment to get in and get involved in a scalable manner. There's just too much dislocation globally in terms of exchanges, in terms of collateral that needs to be posted or not, in terms of accessing rates in a low latency environment. None of this exists. >> So is it their problem in that there's too much time to do work? Is it mechanisms that aren't in place? What's the real frustration that you guys are solving? I mean, mention dislocation, be specific. Is it the time it takes? No systems in place? >> Well, imagine that, imagine that you are a large institutional trader and you wanted to buy 1000 units of bitcoin. It's a million dollar log or eight million five hundred dollar log. You'd have to go and check prices on 20 different exchanges where you can buy three cheaply, where you can buy the next four cheaply. By the time you've looked and figured all this out, the price has moved. >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's impossible. Moreover, our clients want to buy 1000 logs and they may very well want to sell them out in 30 seconds. They don't want delivery of the coin, they don't want to deal with cold storage, warm storage. They want to speculate on the movement of these digital currencies the same way they do in Eurodollar, et cetera, so they need to be able to buy their interest in one place efficiently and at the best price. >> It's a great model, so much value there. How's it work and how's it coming together? So, you got to go set up, what, all the market-making deals? So you have to set up the connections? What are you guys bringing to the table? How does the platform work behind the scenes? >> Well the good part about all this is we've done it before. We've been in business for ten years. We've set up offices globally in London, Singapore, New York, Chicago. We're in Mexico City, as well. We have servers in each one of these locations, so we're already a very low latency provider of liquidity, and we already have a like-product for the FX side. We have, obviously, a smart order routing system. We have a central limit order book. We have a pricing engine. We have algos. We've already developed a lot of the processes that we will need for this new product. The most important part of the equation, for us, is we have 300 active institutional clients that are waiting for this product. >> Yeah, they're dying. >> That's why we have a tremendous advantage. >> So what changes are you making for cryptos? So you've got the great leverage from your previous experience, check, awesome. What's the cryptos tweak to your model? What's the key? >> So the market is yet to solve for the custodian part of the equation. In today's world, institutions, and I'm talking about the household names in the macrospace or the high frequency space, I would say 99% of the institutional space deals in the name of their PB, prime broker. Goldman, Morgan Stanley, et cetera, as do we. Now these exchanges are what we call the liquidity providers. You would have to go up and literally set up an account with each one of these exchanges so you can access that liquidity. It's completely inefficient. So what we aim to do, in the absence of a solution in the next year, what we plan to do for our rollout is to open those accounts ourselves and have that collateral with each one of these exchanges, obviously we'll get leverage, there's going to be some cross pollination of products between exchanges at some point. The way you have it today between a London exchange in the equities world and a New York stock exchange where they cross pollinate some of their liquidity pools, you will see that in exchanges throughout the world, and you'll also see some consolidation in that space. So we're going to put up the collateral, we're going to deal with the exchanges, we're going to make sure that we do the post-trade processes on behalf of our client. Our client comes to us, buys 100 units and sells them 30 seconds later, and he's either made money or he's lost money, and that just gets netted out at the end of the day or at the end of the week depending on the agreements that we have with our institutional clients. >> I look at all this, some of the transactions it takes, such a long time to get stuff done because it's just kludgy, it's really a mess. It's exciting that you guys are doing this. >> Well, but there's a need for it. The market is growing tremendously fast. I mean, it's evolved just in the last year, we've evolved from some concepts that were in the preliminary stage to a real demand for a product for an institutional client base that is dying for new product in this environment, meaning the currency markets are very quiet. The bond markets, although they're picking up or percolating right now, are very quiet. This is an area that gives the institutional traders and speculators a chance to arbitrage, to produce alpha, and to do it efficiently. They need a product, and we're there for it. >> Alex, how do people get involved? Obviously they're lining up, waiting for the mousetrap to be built 'cause it's a better mousetrap, obviously, than what's out there. What's next for you guys? How do people get involved? They just call you up at Edgewater Markets? Is there a front end website? How do they contact you guys? >> Well, yeah, certainly we have a website. We're in the process of putting together a product we think will be ready in the next three months for a beta roll out. We've got all hands on deck building it out. We have a handful of clients that have agreed to beta test it for us, so we do think we're ahead of the curve. I've seen a lot of other companies that are trying to do what we do, and we always believe that in the absence of a real clientele that demands the product, it's tough to build what you don't know you'll be asked to build eventually. Our clients are looking at our products, giving us live feedback today as we speak, and these aren't small institutional clients. These are your household names in the macrospace. >> Yeah, they need it. >> The big boys. And so we think we'll have something great in the next few months. >> Great Alex, thanks for coming onto The Cube, really appreciate it. Good luck tonight and continue the events here, and great job. We need that. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Liquidity's critical marketplaces are being developed. You've got two-sided marketplaces, you got cryptocurrency. This is a new, exciting product at many levels. Financial obviously here with Alex, technology, business model, all covered on The Cube here. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More coverage here in New York City after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: From the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference Spring, San Francisco It's theCUBE. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Spring Event about a hundred CAO's as opposed to CDO's talking about big data, transformation and analytics and the role of analytics and a lot of practitioners are really excited to have our next guest. He's up from Mexico City, it's Jose Murillo. He's the chief analytics officer from Banorte. Jose, great to see you. >> Thank you for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so for people that aren't familiar with Banorte give us a quick overview. >> Banorte's the second largest financial group in Mexico. We, for the last, during the last three years were able to leapfrog city bank. >> Congratulations, and as we were talking before we turned the cameras on, you and your project had a big part of that. So before we get in it, you are a chief analytics officer. How did you come in, what's the reporting structure, how do you work within the broader spectrum of the bank? >> Well I moved to Banorte like about five years ago from, I was working at the central bank where I spent about 10 years in the MPC, the Monitor Policy Committee, and I was invited by initially by the president of the board and when the new chief operating officer was named he invited me to, to lead a new analytics business unit that he wanted to create. And that's the way that I arrived there. >> Okay so you report in to the COO. >> He's the COO/CFO, so he's not only a very smart guy but a very powerful guy running the organization. >> And does the CIO also report to him? >> The CIO, the CDO, the CMO report to him. >> Okay so you have a CDO as well Chief Data Officer. >> We have a CDO who I work very close with him. >> We could go for a long time I might not let you leave for lunch. So I'm just curious on the relationship between the CDO and the CAO, the data officer and the analytics officer. We often hear one or the other, it's very seldom that I've heard both. So how do you guys divide and conquer your responsibilities? How do you parse that out? >> I guess he provides the foundation that we need to find analytics projects that are going to transform the financial group and he has been a very good partner in providing the data that we need and basically what we do as the CAO we find those opportunities to improve the efficiency, to bring the customer to the center, and be able to deliver value to our stakeholders. >> Right, so he's really kind of giving you the infrastructure if you will, of making that data available, getting it to you from all various sources, et cetera, that then you can use for your analytics magic on top. >> Exactly >> Okay, so that's very good, so when we sat down you said an exciting report has come out from, I believe it was HBR, about the tremendous ROI that you guys have realized. So you tell the story better than I, what did they find in your recent article? >> Well in the recent article from the Harvard Business Review is how Banorte has made its analytics business unit pay off. And what we have found in the past two and a half years is we've been able to deliver massive value and by now we have surpassed a billion dollars in net income creation. From analytics projects made on cost saving strategies and revenue generating projects. >> So you paid for yourself just barely >> Yeah. >> No I mean that's such a great story, just barely 'cause it's so it's so important. So as you said, that billion dollars have been realized both in cost savings but more importantly on incremental revenue and that's really the most important thing. >> Exactly >> So how are you measuring that ROI? >> So basically the way we measure it is on cost saving strategies that are related to a risk operational and financial cost. It's the contemporary news effect. And that can be audited. And on the other side, on revenue generating projects, the way we do it is we estimate the customer lifetime value, which is nothing else than the net present value of the relationship with our customers, so we need to estimate survival rates plus the depth of the relationship with our customers. >> So I just love, so you're doing all kinds of projects, you're measuring the value of the projects. What are some of the projects that had a high ROI that you would've never guessed that you guys applied some analytics to and said wow, terrific value relative to what we expected. >> Let me tell you about two types of projects. The first project that we started on was on cost of risk cutting strategies. And we delivered massive value and very quickly. So that helped us gain credibility. And the way we do it, we did it, is like to analyze a dicing of the data where we had excessive cost of risk. And in the first year, actually, that was the first quarter of Operations, we yielded about a 25% incremental value to the credit card business. And after that, we start to work with them and started the discovery data process. And from there, we were able to optimize analytically the cross cell process. And that's a project that has already a three year maturity. And by this time, we are able to sell, without having any bricks or mortars, about 25% of the credit cards sold by the financial group. If we were a territory within the financial group, we would be the largest one with 400 basis points lower on cost of risk, 30% more on activation rates. And it's no surprise that the acquisition cost is 30% less, vis-a-vis our most efficient channel. >> Right, I just want to keep digging down into this, Jose, there's a lot of this stuff to go. I mean, you've been issuing cards forever. So was it just a better way to score customers, was it a better way to avoid the big fraud customers, was it a better way to steal customers maybe from a competitor with a competitive rate that you can afford, I mean, what are some of the factors that allowed you to grow this business in such a big way? >> I guess it's something that has been improving during the first three years. The first thing is that we made like, a very simple cascade on seeing why we were not that efficient cross cell process. And we kind of fixed every part of it. Like on the income estimation models that we had, and we partner with the risk department to improve them. Up to the information that we had on our customers to contact them, and we partner with data governance to improve those. And finally, on the delivery process and all the engaging process with the customers. And it seemed that we were going to find something that was going to be more costly, but it was something that we had at the center of the customers so that it was more likely for them to go and pick up the card and we deliver it to their homes. And finally, that process was much more efficient and the gains that we had, we shared them with our customers. And after three years, we've done things with artificial intelligence to have much better scripts so that we are better able to serve our customers. We do a lot of experimentation, experimentation that we didn't do before. And we use some concepts from behavioral economics to try to explain much better the value proposition to our customers. >> So I just, I love this point, is that it was a bunch of small, it was optimizing lots of little steps and little pieces of the pie that added up to such a significant thing, it wasn't like this magic AI pixie dust. >> Initially, it as a big bang, and then it has been something incremental that has since, it's a project that at the end of the day, we own, and it's something that we are tracking. We are willing to put all the effort to have all the incremental efficiency within the process. >> So people, process, and technology, we talk about, those are the three pieces always to drive organizational change. And usually, the technology is the easy part, the hard part is the people and the process. So as you and your team have started to work with the various lines of businesses for all these different pieces. Promotional piece, customary attention piece, risk and governance piece, cross sale pice, how has their attitude towards your group changed over time as you've started to deliver insight and all this incremental deltas into their business. >> I guess you are hitting just on the spot. Building the models is the easy part. The hard part is to build the consensus around, to change a process that has run for 20 years, there's a lot of inertia. >> Right, right. >> And there are a lot of silos within organizations. So initially, I guess, the credibility that we gained initially helped us move faster. And at the end of the day, I think what happens is the way that we are set up is that the incentives are very well aligned within the different units that need to interact in the sense that we are a unit that is sponsored by the, corporately sponsored, and we make it easier for our partners to attain their goals. So that's, and they don't share the cost of us, so that helps. >> And those are the goals they already had. So you're basically helping them achieve their objectives that they already had better and more efficiently. >> Yeah, and you are pointing out correctly, it's the people, and besides the math, it's a highly, you could say diplomatic or political position in the sense that you need to have all the different partners and stakeholders aligned to change something that has been running for 20 years. >> Right, right. And i just love it, it's a ton of little marginal improvements across a wide variety of tough points, it's so impactful. So as you look forward now, is there another big bang out there, or do you just see kind of this constant march of incremental improvement, and, or are you just going to start getting into more different businesses or kind of different areas in the bank to apply the same process, where do you go next? >> Well, we started with the credit card business, but we moved toward the verticals within the financial group. From mortgages, auto loans, payroll loans, to we are working with the insurance company, the long term savings company. So we've increased the scope of the group. And we moved not only from cost to revenue generating projects. And so far, it has been, we have been on an exponential increase of our impact, I guess that's the big question. The first, we were able to do 46 times our cost. The second year, we made 106 times our cost, the third year, we are close to 200 times our cost with an incremental base. And so far, we've been on this increasing slide. At some point, it's, I guess, we are going to decelerate, but so far, we haven't hit the point. >> Right, the law of big numbers, eventually, you got to, eventually, you'll slow down a little bit. All right, well Jose, I'll give you the last word before we sign off here. Kind of tips and tricks that you would share with a peer if we're sitting around on a Friday afternoon on a back porch. You know, as you've gone through this journey, three and a half years and really sold you and your vision into the company, what would you share with a peer that's kind of starting this journey or starting to run into some of the early hurdles to get past. >> I guess there are two things that I could share. And once you have built a group like this and you have already, the incentives aligned and you have support from the top in the sense that they know that there's no other way they want really to compete and be successful, and suppose that you have all these preconditions set up and suddenly, you have a bunch of really smart people that are coming to a company, so you need to focus on ROI, high ROI projects. I;s very easy to get distracted on non-impactful projects. And I guess, the most important thing is that you have to learn to say no to a lot of things. >> Speaking my language, I love it. Learn to say no, it's the most important thing you'll ever, all right, well Jose, thanks for spending a few minutes and congratulations on all your success, what a great story. >> Thank you for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, he's Jose, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Summit in downtown San Francisco. (electronic music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that will be successful in the 21st century [Music] being open is really important because it comes with a lot of trust the open-source community now has matured so much and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation [Music] but what's really exciting is the change that we've seen in our teams not only the way they collaborate but the way they operate in the way they work [Music] I think idea is everything ideas can change the way you see things open-source is more than a license it's actually a way of operating [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome Red Hat president and chief executive officer Jim Whitehurst [Music] all right well welcome to day two at the Red Hat summit I'm amazed to see this many people here at 8:30 in the morning given the number of people I saw pretty late last night out and about so thank you for being here and have to give a shout out speaking of power participation that DJ is was Mike Walker who is our global director of open innovation labs so really enjoyed that this morning was great to have him doing that so hey so day one yesterday we had some phenomenal announcements both around Red Hat products and things that we're doing as well as some great partner announcements which we found exciting I hope they were interesting to you and I hope you had a chance to learn a little more about that and enjoy the breakout sessions that we had yesterday so yesterday was a lot about the what with these announcements and partnerships today I wanted to spin this morning talking a little bit more about the how right how do we actually survive and thrive in this digitally transformed world and to some extent the easy parts identifying the problem we all know that we have to be able to move more quickly we all know that we have to be able to react to change faster and we all know that we need to innovate more effectively all right so the problem is easy but how do you actually go about solving that right the problem is that's not a product that you can buy off the shelf right it is a capability that you have to build and certainly it's technology enabled but it's also depends on process culture a whole bunch of things to figure out how we actually do that and the answer is likely to be different in different organizations with different objective functions and different starting points right so this is a challenge that we all need to feel our way to an answer on and so I want to spend some time today talking about what we've seen in the market and how people are working to address that and it's one of the reasons that the summit this year the theme is ideas worth it lorring to take us back on a little history lesson so two years ago here at Moscone the theme of the summit was the power of participation and then I talked a lot about the power of groups of people working together and participating are able to solve problems much more quickly and much more effectively than individuals or even individual organizations working by themselves and some of the largest problems that we face in technology but more broadly in the world will ultimately only be solved if we effectively participate and work together then last year the theme of the summit was the impact of the individual and we took this concept of participation a bit further and we talked about how participation has to be active right it's a this isn't something where you can be passive that you can sit back you have to be involved because the problem in a more participative type community is that there is no road map right you can't sit back and wait for an edict on high or some central planning or some central authority to tell you what to do you have to take initiative you have to get involved right this is a active participation sport now one of the things that I talked about as part of that was that planning was dead and it was kind of a key my I think my keynote was actually titled planning is dead and the concept was that in a world that's less knowable when we're solving problems in a more organic bottom-up way our ability to effectively plan into the future it's much less than it was in the past and this idea that you're gonna be able to plan for success and then build to it it really is being replaced by a more bottom-up participative approach now aside from my whole strategic planning team kind of being up in arms saying what are you saying planning is dead I have multiple times had people say to me well I get that point but I still need to prepare for the future how do I prepare my organization for the future isn't that planning and so I wanted to spend a couple minutes talk a little more detail about what I meant by that but importantly taking our own advice we spent a lot of time this past year looking around at what our customers are doing because what a better place to learn then from large companies and small companies around the world information technology organizations having to work to solve these problems for their organizations and so our ability to learn from each other take the power of participation an individual initiative that people and organizations have taken there are just so many great learnings this year that I want to get a chance to share I also thought rather than listening to me do that that we could actually highlight some of the people who are doing this and so I do want to spend about five minutes kind of contextualizing what we're going to go through over the next hour or so and some of the lessons learned but then we want to share some real-world stories of how organizations are attacking some of these problems under this how do we be successful in a world of constant change in uncertainty so just going back a little bit more to last year talking about planning was dead when I said planning it's kind of a planning writ large and so that's if you think about the way traditional organizations work to solve problems and ultimately execute you start off planning so what's a position you want to get to in X years and whether that's a competitive strategy in a position of competitive advantage or a certain position you want an organizational function to reach you kind of lay out a plan to get there you then typically a senior leaders or a planning team prescribes the sets of activities and the organization structure and the other components required to get there and then ultimately execution is about driving compliance against that plan and you look at you say well that's all logical right we plan for something we then figure out how we're gonna get there we go execute to get there and you know in a traditional world that was easy and still some of this makes sense I don't say throw out all of this but you have to recognize in a more uncertain volatile world where you can be blindsided by orthogonal competitors coming in and you the term uber eyes you have to recognize that you can't always plan or know what the future is and so if you don't well then what replaces the traditional model or certainly how do you augment the traditional model to be successful in a world that you knows ambiguous well what we've heard from customers and what you'll see examples of this through the course of this morning planning is can be replaced by configuring so you can configure for a constant rate of change without necessarily having to know what that change is this idea of prescription of here's the activities people need to perform and let's lay these out very very crisply job descriptions what organizations are going to do can be replaced by a greater degree of enablement right so this idea of how do you enable people with the knowledge and things that they need to be able to make the right decisions and then ultimately this idea of execution as compliance can be replaced by a greater level of engagement of people across the organization to ultimately be able to react at a faster speed to the changes that happen so just double clicking in each of those for a couple minutes so what I mean by configure for constant change so again we don't know exactly what the change is going to be but we know it's going to happen and last year I talked a little bit about a process solution to that problem I called it that you have to try learn modify and what that model try learn modify was for anybody in the app dev space it was basically taking the principles of agile and DevOps and applying those more broadly to business processes in technology organizations and ultimately organizations broadly this idea of you don't have to know what your ultimate destination is but you can try and experiment you can learn from those things and you can move forward and so that I do think in technology organizations we've seen tremendous progress even over the last year as organizations are adopting agile endeavor and so that still continues to be I think a great way for people to to configure their processes for change but this year we've seen some great examples of organizations taking a different tack to that problem and that's literally building modularity into their structures themselves right actually building the idea that change is going to happen into how you're laying out your technology architectures right we've all seen the reverse of that when you build these optimized systems for you know kind of one environment you kind of flip over two years later what was the optimized system it's now called a legacy system that needs to be migrated that's an optimized system that now has to be moved to a new environment because the world has changed so again you'll see a great example of that in a few minutes here on stage next this concept of enabled double-clicking on that a little bit so much of what we've done in technology over the past few years has been around automation how do we actually replace things that people were doing with technology or augmenting what people are doing with technology and that's incredibly important and that's work that can continue to go forward it needs to happen it's not really what I'm talking about here though enablement in this case it's much more around how do you make sure individuals are getting the context they need how are you making sure that they're getting the information they need how are you making sure they're getting the tools they need to make decisions on the spot so it's less about automating what people are doing and more about how can you better enable people with tools and technology now from a leadership perspective that's around making sure people understand the strategy of the company the context in which they're working in making sure you've set the appropriate values etc etc from a technology perspective that's ensuring that you're building the right systems that allow the right information the right tools at the right time to the right people now to some extent even that might not be hard but when the world is constantly changing that gets to be even harder and I think that's one of the reasons we see a lot of traction and open source to solve these problems to use flexible systems to help enterprises be able to enable their people not just in it today but to be flexible going forward and again we'll see some great examples of that and finally engagement so again if execution can't be around driving compliance to a plan because you no longer have this kind of Cris plan well what do leaders do how do organizations operate and so you know I'll broadly use the term engagement several of our customers have used this term and this is really saying well how do you engage your people in real-time to make the right decisions how do you accelerate a pace of cadence how do you operate at a different speed so you can react to change and take advantage of opportunities as they arise and everywhere we look IT is a key enabler of this right in the past IT was often seen as an inhibitor to this because the IT systems move slower than the business might want to move but we are seeing with some of these new technologies that literally IT is becoming the enabler and driving the pace of change back on to the business and you'll again see some great examples of that as well so again rather than listen to me sit here and theoretically talk about these things or refer to what we've seen others doing I thought it'd be much more interesting to bring some of our partners and our customers up here to specifically talk about what they're doing so I'm really excited to have a great group of customers who have agreed to stand in front of 7,500 people or however many here this morning and talk a little bit more about what they're doing so really excited to have them here and really appreciate all them agreeing to be a part of this and so to start I want to start with tee systems we have the CEO of tee systems here and I think this is a great story because they're really two parts to it right because he has two perspectives one is as the CEO of a global company itself having to navigate its way through digital disruption and as a global cloud service provider obviously helping its customers through this same type of change so I'm really thrilled to have a del hasta li join me on stage to talk a little bit about T systems and what they're doing and what we're doing jointly together so Adelle [Music] Jim took to see you Adele thank you for being here you for having me please join me I love to DJ when that fantastic we may have to hire him no more events for events where's well employed he's well employed though here that team do not give him mics activation it's great to have you here really do appreciate it well you're the CEO of a large organization that's going through this disruption in the same way we are I'd love to hear a little bit how for your company you're thinking about you know navigating this change that we're going through great well you know key systems as an ICT service provider we've been around for decades I'm not different to many of our clients we had to change the whole disruption of the cloud and digitization and new skills and new capability and agility it's something we had to face as well so over the last five years and especially in the last three years we invested heavily invested over a billion euros in building new capabilities building new offerings new infrastructures to support our clients so to be very disruptive for us as well and so and then with your customers themselves they're going through this set of change and you're working to help them how are you working to help enable your your customers as they're going through this change well you know all of them you know in this journey of changing the way they run their business leveraging IT much more to drive business results digitization and they're all looking for new skills new ideas they're looking for platforms that take them away from traditional waterfall development that takes a year or a year and a half before they see any results to processes and ways of bringing applications in a week in a month etcetera so it's it's we are part of that journey with them helping them for that and speaking of that I know we're working together and to help our joint customers with that can you talk a little bit more about what we're doing together sure well you know our relationship goes back years and years with with the Enterprise Linux but over the last few years we've invested heavily in OpenShift and OpenStack to build peope as layers to build you know flexible infrastructure for our clients and we've been working with you we tested many different technology in the marketplace and been more successful with Red Hat and the stack there and I'll give you an applique an example several large European car manufacturers who have connected cars now as a given have been accelerating the applications that needed to be in the car and in the past it took them years if not you know scores to get an application into the car and today we're using open shift as the past layer to develop to enable these DevOps for these companies and they bring applications in less than a month and it's a huge change in the dynamics of the competitiveness in the marketplace and we rely on your team and in helping us drive that capability to our clients yeah do you find it fascinating so many of the stories that you hear and that we've talked about with with our customers is this need for speed and this ability to accelerate and enable a greater degree of innovation by simply accelerating what what we're seeing with our customers absolutely with that plus you know the speed is important agility is really critical but doing it securely doing it doing it in a way that is not gonna destabilize the you know the broader ecosystem is really critical and things like GDP are which is a new security standard in Europe is something that a lot of our customers worry about they need help with and we're one of the partners that know what that really is all about and how to navigate within that and use not prevent them from using the new technologies yeah I will say it isn't just the speed of the external but the security and the regulation especially GDR we have spent an hour on that with our board this week there you go he said well thank you so much for being here really to appreciate the work that we're doing together and look forward to continued same here thank you thank you [Applause] we've had a great partnership with tea systems over the years and we've really taken it to the next level and what's really exciting about that is you know we've moved beyond just helping kind of host systems for our customers we really are jointly enabling their success and it's really exciting and we're really excited about what we're able to to jointly accomplish so next i'm really excited that we have our innovation award winners here and we'll have on stage with us our innovation award winners this year our BBVA dnm IAG lasat Lufthansa Technik and UPS and yet they're all working in one for specific technology initiatives that they're doing that really really stand out and are really really exciting you'll have a chance to learn a lot more about those through the course of the event over the next couple of days but in this context what I found fascinating is they were each addressing a different point of this configure enable engage and I thought it would be really great for you all to hear about how they're experimenting and working to solve these problems you know real-time large organizations you know happening now let's start with the video to see what they think about when they think about innovation I define innovation is something that's changing the model changing the way of thinking not just a step change improvement not just making something better but actually taking a look at what already exists and then putting them together in new and exciting lives innovation is about to build something nobody has done before historically we had a statement that business drives technology we flip that equation around an IT is now demonstrating to the business at power of technology innovation desde el punto de vista de la tecnología supone salir de plataform as proprietary as ADA Madero cloud basado an open source it's a possibility the open source que no parameter no sir Kamala and I think way that for me open-source stands for flexibility speed security the community and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation innovation at a pace that I don't think our one individual organization could actually do ourselves right so first I'd like to talk with BBVA I love this story because as you know Financial Services is going through a massive set of transformations and BBVA really is at the leading edge of thinking about how to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy and kind of modular layered architecture to be successful regardless of what happens in the future so with that I'd like to welcome on stage Jose Maria Rosetta from BBVA [Music] thank you for being here and congratulations on your innovation award it's been a pleasure to be here with you it's great to have you hi everybody so Josemaria for those who might not be familiar with BBVA can you give us a little bit of background on your company yeah a brief description BBVA is is a bank as a financial institution with diversified business model and that provides well financial services to more than 73 million of customers in more than 20 countries great and I know we've worked with you for a long time so we appreciate that the partnership with you so I thought I'd start with a really easy question for you how will blockchain you know impact financial services in the next five years I've gotten no idea but if someone knows the answer I've got a job for him for him up a pretty good job indeed you know oh all right well let me go a little easier then so how will the global payments industry change in the next you know four or five years five years well I think you need a a Weezer well I tried to make my best prediction means that in five years just probably will be five years older good answer I like that I always abstract up I hope so I hope so yah-yah-yah hope so good point so you know immediately that's the obvious question you have a massive technology infrastructure is a global bank how do you prepare yourself to enable the organization to be successful when you really don't know what the future is gonna be well global banks and wealth BBBS a global gam Bank a certain component foundations you know today I would like to talk about risk and efficiency so World Bank's deal with risk with the market great the operational reputational risk and so on so risk control is part of all or DNA you know and when you've got millions of customers you know efficiency efficiency is a must so I think there's no problem with all these foundations they problem the problem analyze the problems appears when when banks translate these foundations is valued into technology so risk control or risk management avoid risk usually means by the most expensive proprietary technology in the market you know from one of the biggest software companies in the world you know so probably all of you there are so those people in the room were glad to hear you say that yeah probably my guess the name of those companies around San Francisco most of them and efficiency usually means a savory business unit as every department or country has his own specific needs by a specific solution for them so imagine yourself working in a data center full of silos with many different Hardware operating systems different languages and complex interfaces to communicate among them you know not always documented what really never documented so your life your life in is not easy you know in this scenario are well there's no room for innovation so what's been or or strategy be BES ready to move forward in this new digital world well we've chosen a different approach which is quite simple is to replace all local proprietary system by a global platform based on on open source with three main goals you know the first one is reduce the average transaction cost to one-third the second one is increase or developers productivity five times you know and the third is enable or delete the business be able to deliver solutions of three times faster so you're not quite easy Wow and everything with the same reliability as on security standards as we've got today Wow that is an extraordinary set of objectives and I will say their world on the path of making that successful which is just amazing yeah okay this is a long journey sometimes a tough journey you know to be honest so we decided to partnership with the with the best companies in there in the world and world record we think rate cut is one of these companies so we think or your values and your knowledge is critical for BBVA and well as I mentioned before our collaboration started some time ago you know and just an example in today in BBVA a Spain being one of the biggest banks in in the country you know and using red hat technology of course our firm and fronting architecture you know for mobile and internet channels runs the ninety five percent of our customers request this is approximately 3,000 requests per second and our back in architecture execute 70 millions of business transactions a day this is almost a 50% of total online transactions executed in the country so it's all running yes running I hope so you check for you came on stage it's I'll be flying you know okay good there's no wood up here to knock on it's been a really great partnership it's been a pleasure yeah thank you so much for being here thank you thank you [Applause] I do love that story because again so much of what we talk about when we when we talk about preparing for digital is a processed solution and again things like agile and DevOps and modular izing components of work but this idea of thinking about platforms broadly and how they can run anywhere and actually delivering it delivering at a scale it's just a phenomenal project and experience and in the progress they've made it's a great team so next up we have two organizations that have done an exceptional job of enabling their people with the right information and the tools they need to be successful you know in both of these cases these are organizations who are under constant change and so leveraging the power of open-source to help them build these tools to enable and you'll see it the size and the scale of these in two very very different contexts it's great to see and so I'd like to welcome on stage Oh smart alza' with dnm and David Abraham's with IAG [Music] Oh smart welcome thank you so much for being here Dave great to see you thank you appreciate you being here and congratulations to you both on winning the Innovation Awards thank you so Omar I really found your story fascinating and how you're able to enable your people with data which is just significantly accelerated the pace with which they can make decisions and accelerate your ability to to act could you tell us a little more about the project and then what you're doing Jim and Tina when the muchisimas gracias por ever say interesado pono true projecto [Music] encargado registry controller las entradas a leda's persona por la Frontera argentina yo sé de dos siento treinta siete puestos de contrôle tienen lo largo de la Frontera tanto area the restreamer it EEMA e if looool in dilute ammonia shame or cinta me Jonas the tránsito sacra he trod on in another Fronteras dingus idea idea de la Magneto la cual estamos hablando la Frontera cantina tienen extension the kin same in kilo metros esto es el gada mint a maje or allege Estancia kaeun a poor carretera a la co de mexico con el akka a direction emulation s 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calidad de vida de atras de mettre personas SI y meet our que el delito perform a trois Natura from Dana's Argentine sigue siendo en favor de esto SI temes uno de los países mess Alberto's Allah immigration en Latin America yah hora con una plataforma mas segunda first of all I want to thank you for the interest is played for our project the National migration administration or diem records the entry and exit of people on the Argentine territory it grants residents permits to foreigners who wish to live in our country through 237 entry points land air border sea and river ways Jim dnm registered over 80 million transits throughout last year Argentine borders cover about 15,000 kilometers just our just to give you an idea of the magnitude of our borders this is greater than the distance on a highway between Mexico City and Alaska our department applies the mechanisms that prevent the entry and residents of people involved in crimes like terrorism trafficking of persons weapons drugs and others in 2016 we shifted to a more preventive and predictive paradigm that is how Sam's the system for migration analysis was created with red hats great assistance and support this allowed us to tackle the challenge of integrating multiple and varied issues legal issues police databases national and international security organizations like Interpol API advanced passenger information and PNR passenger name record this involved starting private cloud with OpenShift Rev data virtualization cloud forms and fuse that were the basis to develop Sam and implementing machine learning models and artificial intelligence our analysts consulted a number of systems and other manual files before 2016 4 days for each person entering or leaving the country so this has allowed us to optimize our decisions making them in real time each time Sam is consulted it processes patterns of over two billion data entries Sam's aim is to improve the quality of life of our citizens and visitors making sure that crime doesn't pierce our borders in an environment of analytic evolution and constant improvement in essence Sam contributes toward Argentina being one of the leaders in Latin America in terms of immigration with our new system great thank you and and so Dave tell us a little more about the insurance industry and the challenges in the EU face yeah sure so you know in the insurance industry it's a it's been a bit sort of insulated from a lot of major change in disruption just purely from the fact that it's highly regulated and the cost of so that the barrier to entry is quite high in fact if you think about insurance you know you have to have capital reserves to protect against those major events like floods bush fires and so on but the whole thing is a lot of change there's come in a really rapid pace I'm also in the areas of customer expectations you know customers and now looking and expecting for the same levels of flexibility and convenience that they would experience with more modern and new startups they're expecting out of the older institutions like banks and insurance companies like us so definitely expecting the industry to to be a lot more adaptable and to better meet their needs I think the other aspect of it really is in the data the data area where I think that the donor is now creating a much more significant connection between organizations in a car summers especially when you think about the level of devices that are now enabled and the sheer growth of data that's that that's growing at exponential rates so so that the impact then is that the systems that we used to rely on are the technology we used to rely on to be able to handle that kind of growth no longer keeps up and is able to to you know build for the future so we need to sort of change that so what I G's really doing is transform transforming the organization to become a lot more efficient focus more on customers and and really set ourselves up to be agile and adaptive and so ya know as part of your Innovation Award that the specific set of projects you tied a huge amount of different disparate systems together and with M&A and other you have a lot to do there to you tell us a little more about kind of how you're able to better respond to customer needs by being able to do that yeah no you're right so we've we've we're nearly a hundred year old company that's grown from lots of merger and acquisition and just as a result of that that means that data's been sort of spread out and fragmented across multiple brands and multiple products and so the number one sort of issue and problem that we were hearing was that it was too hard to get access to data and it's highly complicated which is not great from a company from our perspective really because because we are a data company right that's what we do we we collect data about people what they what's important to them what they value and the environment in which they live so that we can understand that risk and better manage and protect those people so what we're doing is we're trying to make and what we have been doing is making data more open and accessible and and by that I mean making data more of easily available for people to use it to make decisions in their day-to-day activity and to do that what we've done is built a single data platform across the group that unifies the data into a single source of truth that we can then build on top of that single views of customers for example that puts the right information into the into the hands of the people that need it the most and so now why does open source play such a big part in doing that I know there are a lot of different solutions that could get you there sure well firstly I think I've been sauce has been k2 these and really it's been key because we've basically started started from scratch to build this this new next-generation data platform based on entirely open-source you know using great components like Kafka and Postgres and airflow and and and and and then fundamentally building on top of red Red Hat OpenStack right to power all that and they give us the flexibility that we need to be able to make things happen much faster for example we were just talking to the pivotal guys earlier this week here and some of the stuff that we're doing they're they're things quite interesting innovative writes even sort of maybe first in the world where we've taken the older sort of appliance and dedicated sort of massive parallel processing unit and ported that over onto red Red Hat OpenStack right which is now giving us a lot more flexibility for scale in a much more efficient way but you're right though that we've come from in the past a more traditional approach to to using vendor based technology right which was good back then when you know technology solutions could last for around 10 years or so on and and that was fine but now that we need to move much faster we've had to rethink that and and so our focus has been on using you know more commoditized open source technology built by communities to give us that adaptability and sort of remove the locking in there any entrenchment of technology so that's really helped us but but I think that the last point that's been really critical to us is is answering that that concern and question about ongoing support and maintenance right so you know in a regular environment the regulator is really concerned about anything that could fundamentally impact business operation and and so the question is always about what happens when something goes wrong who's going to be there to support you which is where the value of the the partnership we have with Red Hat has really come into its own right and what what it's done is is it's actually giving us the best of both worlds a means that we can we can leverage and use and and and you know take some of the technology that's being developed by great communities in the open source way but also partner with a trusted partner in red had to say you know they're going to stand behind that community and provide that support when we needed the most so that's been the kind of the real value out of that partnership okay well I appreciate I love the story it's how do you move quickly leverage the power community but do it in a safe secure way and I love the idea of your literally empowering people with machine learning and AI at the moment when they need it it's just an incredible story so thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] you know again you see in these the the importance of enabling people with data and in an old-world was so much data was created with a system in mind versus data is a separate asset that needs to be available real time to anyone is a theme we hear over and over and over again and so you know really looking at open source solutions that allow that flexibility and keep data from getting locked into proprietary silos you know is a theme that we've I've heard over and over over the past year with many of our customers so I love logistics I'm a geek that way I come from that background in the past and I know that running large complex operations requires flawless execution and that requires great data and we have two great examples today around how to engage own organizations in new and more effective ways in the case of lufthansa technik literally IT became the business so it wasn't enabling the business it became the business offering and importantly went from idea to delivery to customers in a hundred days and so this theme of speed and the importance of speed it's a it's a great story you'll hear more about and then also at UPS UPS again I talked a little earlier about IT used to be kind of the long pole in the tent the thing that was slow moving because of the technology but UPS is showing that IT can actually drive the business and the cadence of business even faster by demonstrating the power and potential of technology to engage in this case hundreds of thousands of people to make decisions real-time in the face of obviously constant change around weather mechanicals and all the different things that can happen in a large logistics operation like that so I'd like to welcome on stage to be us more from Lufthansa Technik and Nick Castillo from ups to be us welcome thank you for being here Nick thank you thank you Jim and congratulations on your Innovation Awards oh thank you it's a great honor so to be us let's start with you can you tell us a little bit more about what a viet are is yeah avatars are a digital platform offering features like aircraft condition analytics reliability management and predictive maintenance and it helps airlines worldwide to digitize and improve their operations so all of the features work and can be used separately or generate even more where you burn combined and finally we decided to set up a viet as an open platform that means that we avoid the whole aviation industry to join the community and develop ideas on our platform and to be as one of things i found really fascinating about this is that you had a mandate to do this at a hundred days and you ultimately delivered on it you tell us a little bit about that i mean nothing in aviation moves that fast yeah that's been a big challenge so in the beginning of our story the Lufthansa bot asked us to develop somehow digital to win of an aircraft within just hundred days and to deliver something of value within 100 days means you cannot spend much time and producing specifications in terms of paper etc so for us it was pretty clear that we should go for an angel approach and immediately start and developing ideas so we put the best experts we know just in one room and let them start to work and on day 2 I think we already had the first scribbles for the UI on day 5 we wrote the first lines of code and we were able to do that because it has been a major advantage for us to already have four technologies taken place it's based on open source and especially rated solutions because we did not have to waste any time setting up the infrastructure and since we wanted to get feedback very fast we were certainly visited an airline from the Lufthansa group already on day 30 and showed them the first results and got a lot of feedback and because from the very beginning customer centricity has been an important aspect for us and changing the direction based on customer feedback has become quite normal for us over time yeah it's an interesting story not only engaging the people internally but be able to engage with a with that with a launch customer like that and get feedback along the way as it's great thing how is it going overall since launch yeah since the launch last year in April we generated much interest in the industry as well from Airlines as from competitors and in the following month we focused on a few Airlines which had been open minded and already advanced in digital activities and we've got a lot of feedback by working with them and we're able to improve our products by developing new features for example we learned that data integration can become quite complex in the industry and therefore we developed a new feature called quick boarding allowing Airlines to integrate into the via table platform within one day using a self-service so and currently we're heading for the next steps beyond predictive maintenance working on process automation and prescriptive prescriptive maintenance because we believe prediction without fulfillment still isn't enough it really is a great example of even once you're out there quickly continuing to innovate change react it's great to see so Nick I mean we all know ups I'm still always blown away by the size and scale of the company and the logistics operations that you run you tell us a little more about the project and what we're doing together yeah sure Jim and you know first of all I think I didn't get the sportcoat memo I think I'm the first one up here today with a sport coat but you know first on you know on behalf of the 430,000 ups was around the world and our just world-class talented team of 5,000 IT professionals I have to tell you we're humbled to be one of this year's red hat Innovation Award recipients so we really appreciate that you know as a global logistics provider we deliver about 20 million packages each day and we've got a portfolio of technologies both operational and customer tech and another customer facing side the power what we call the UPS smart logistics network and I gotta tell you innovations in our DNA technology is at the core of everything we do you know from the ever familiar first and industry mobile platform that a lot of you see when you get delivered a package which we call the diad which believe it or not we delivered in 1992 my choice a data-driven solution that drives over 40 million of our my choice customers I'm whatever you know what this is great he loves logistics he's a my choice customer you could be one too by the way there's a free app in the App Store but it provides unmatched visibility and really controls that last mile delivery experience so now today we're gonna talk about the solution that we're recognized for which is called site which is part of a much greater platform that we call edge which is transforming how our package delivery teams operate providing them real-time insights into our operations you know this allows them to make decisions based on data from 32 disparate data sources and these insights help us to optimize our operations but more importantly they help us improve the delivery experience for our customers just like you Jim you know on the on the back end is Big Data and it's on a large scale our systems are crunching billions of events to render those insights on an easy-to-use mobile platform in real time I got to tell you placing that information in our operators hands makes ups agile and being agile being able to react to changing conditions as you know is the name of the game in logistics now we built edge in our private cloud where Red Hat technologies play a very important role as part of our overage overarching cloud strategy and our migration to agile and DevOps so it's it's amazing it's amazing the size and scale so so you have this technology vision around engaging people in a more effect way those are my word not yours but but I'd be at that's how it certainly feels and so tell us a little more about how that enables the hundreds of thousands people to make better decisions every day yep so you know we're a people company and the edge platform is really the latest in a series of solutions to really empower our people and really power that smart logistics network you know we've been deploying technology believe it or not since we founded the company in 1907 we'll be a hundred and eleven years old this August it's just a phenomenal story now prior to edge and specifically the syphon ishutin firm ation from a number of disparate systems and reports they then need to manually look across these various data sources and and frankly it was inefficient and prone to inaccuracy and it wasn't really real-time at all now edge consumes data as I mentioned earlier from 32 disparate systems it allows our operators to make decisions on staffing equipment the flow of packages through the buildings in real time the ability to give our people on the ground the most up-to-date data allows them to make informed decisions now that's incredibly empowering because not only are they influencing their local operations but frankly they're influencing the entire global network it's truly extraordinary and so why open source and open shift in particular as part of that solution yeah you know so as I mentioned Red Hat and Red Hat technology you know specifically open shift there's really core to our cloud strategy and to our DevOps strategy the tools and environments that we've partnered with Red Hat to put in place truly are foundational and they've fundamentally changed the way we develop and deploy our systems you know I heard Jose talk earlier you know we had complex solutions that used to take 12 to 18 months to develop and deliver to market today we deliver those same solutions same level of complexity in months and even weeks now openshift enables us to container raise our workloads that run in our private cloud during normal operating periods but as we scale our business during our holiday peak season which is a very sure window about five weeks during the year last year as a matter of fact we delivered seven hundred and sixty-two million packages in that small window and our transactions our systems they just spiked dramatically during that period we think that having open shift will allow us in those peak periods to seamlessly move workloads to the public cloud so we can take advantage of burst capacity economically when needed and I have to tell you having this flexibility I think is key because you know ultimately it's going to allow us to react quickly to customer demands when needed dial back capacity when we don't need that capacity and I have to say it's a really great story of UPS and red hat working you together it really is a great story is just amazing again the size and scope but both stories here a lot speed speed speed getting to market quickly being able to try things it's great lessons learned for all of us the importance of being able to operate at a fundamentally different clock speed so thank you all for being here very much appreciated congratulate thank you [Applause] [Music] alright so while it's great to hear from our Innovation Award winners and it should be no surprise that they're leading and experimenting in some really interesting areas its scale so I hope that you got a chance to learn something from these interviews you'll have an opportunity to learn more about them you'll also have an opportunity to vote on the innovator of the year you can do that on the Red Hat summit mobile app or on the Red Hat Innovation Awards homepage you can learn even more about their stories and you'll have a chance to vote and I'll be back tomorrow to announce the the summit winner so next I like to spend a few minutes on talking about how Red Hat is working to catalyze our customers efforts Marko bill Peter our senior vice president of customer experience and engagement and John Alessio our vice president of global services will both describe areas in how we are working to configure our own organization to effectively engage with our customers to use open source to help drive their success so with that I'd like to welcome marquel on stage [Music] good morning good morning thank you Jim so I want to spend a few minutes to talk about how we are configured how we are configured towards your success how we enable internally as well to work towards your success and actually engage as well you know Paul yesterday talked about the open source culture and our open source development net model you know there's a lot of attributes that we have like transparency meritocracy collaboration those are the key of our culture they made RedHat what it is today and what it will be in the future but we also added our passion for customer success to that let me tell you this is kind of the configuration from a cultural perspective let me tell you a little bit on what that means so if you heard the name my organization is customer experience and engagement right in the past we talked a lot about support it's an important part of the Red Hat right and how we are configured we are configured probably very uniquely in the industry we put support together we have product security in there we add a documentation we add a quality engineering into an organization you think there's like wow why are they doing it we're also running actually the IT team for actually the product teams why are we doing that now you can imagine right we want to go through what you see as well right and I'll give you a few examples on how what's coming out of this configuration we invest more and more in testing integration and use cases which you are applying so you can see it between the support team experiencing a lot what you do and actually changing our test structure that makes a lot of sense we are investing more and more testing outside the boundaries so not exactly how things must fall by product management or engineering but also how does it really run in an environment that you operate we run complex setups internally right taking openshift putting in OpenStack using software-defined storage underneath managing it with cloud forms managing it if inside we do that we want to see how that works right we are reshaping documentation console to kind of help you better instead of just documenting features and knobs as in how can how do you want to achieve things now part of this is the configuration that are the big part of the configuration is the voice of the customer to listen to what you say I've been here at Red Hat a few years and one of my passion has always been really hearing from customers how they do it I travel constantly in the world and meet with customers because I want to know what is really going on we use channels like support we use channels like getting from salespeople the interaction from customers we do surveys we do you know we interact with our people to really hear what you do what we also do what maybe not many know and it's also very unique in the industry we have a webpage called you asked reacted we show very transparently you told us this is an area for improvement and it's not just in support it's across the company right build us a better web store build us this we're very transparent about Hades improvements we want to do with you now if you want to be part of the process today go to the feedback zone on the next floor down and talk to my team I might be there as well hit me up we want to hear the feedback this is how we talk about configuration of the organization how we are configured let me go to let me go to another part which is innovation innovation every day and that in my opinion the enable section right we gotta constantly innovate ourselves how do we work with you how do we actually provide better value how do we provide faster responses in support this is what we would I say is is our you know commitment to innovation which is the enabling that Jim talked about and I give you a few examples which I'm really happy and it kind of shows the open source culture at Red Hat our commitment is for innovation I'll give you good example right if you have a few thousand engineers and you empower them you kind of set the business framework as hey this is an area we got to do something you get a lot of good IDs you get a lot of IDs and you got a shape an inter an area that hey this is really something that brings now a few years ago we kind of said or I say is like based on a lot of feedback is we got to get more and more proactive if you customers and so I shaped my team and and I shaped it around how can we be more proactive it started very simple as in like from kbase articles or knowledgebase articles in getting started guys then we started a a tool that we put out called labs you've probably seen them if you're on the technical side really taking small applications out for you to kind of validate is this configured correctly stat configure there was the start then out of that the ideas came and they took different turns and one of the turns that we came out was right at insights that we launched a few years ago and did you see the demo yesterday that in Paul's keynote that they showed how something was broken with one the data centers how it was applied to fix and how has changed this is how innovation really came from the ground up from the support side and turned into something really a being a cornerstone of our strategy and we're keeping it married from the day to day work right you don't want to separate this you want to actually keep that the data that's coming from the support goes in that because that's the power that we saw yesterday in the demo now innovation doesn't stop when you set the challenge so we did the labs we did the insights we just launched a solution engine called solution engine another thing that came out of that challenge is in how do we break complex issues down that it's easier for you to find a solution quicker it's one example but we're also experimenting with AI so insights uses AI as you probably heard yesterday we also use it internally to actually drive faster resolution we did in one case with a a our I bought basically that we get to 25% faster resolution on challenges that you have the beauty for you obviously it's well this is much faster 10% of all our support cases today are supported and assisted by an AI now I'll give you another example of just trying to tell you the innovation that comes out if you configure and enable the team correctly kbase articles are knowledgebase articles we q8 thousands and thousands every year and then I get feedback as and while they're good but they're in English as you can tell my English is perfect so it's not no issue for that but for many of you is maybe like even here even I read it in Japanese so we actually did machine translation because it's too many that we can do manually the using machine translation I can tell it's a funny example two weeks ago I tried it I tried something from English to German I looked at it the German looked really bad I went back but the English was bad so it really translates one to one actually what it does but it's really cool this is innovation that you can apply and the team actually worked on this and really proud on that now the real innovation there is not these tools the real innovation is that you can actually shape it in a way that the innovation comes that you empower the people that's the configure and enable and what I think is all it's important this don't reinvent the plumbing don't start from scratch use systems like containers on open shift to actually build the innovation in a smaller way without reinventing the plumbing you save a lot of issues on security a lot of issues on reinventing the wheel focus on that that's what we do as well if you want to hear more details again go in the second floor now let's talk about the engage that Jim mentioned before what I translate that engage is actually engaging you as a customer towards your success now what does commitment to success really mean and I want to reflect on that on a traditional IT company shows up with you talk the salesperson solution architect works with you consulting implements solution it comes over to support and trust me in a very traditional way the support guy has no clue what actually was sold early on it's what happens right and this is actually I think that red had better that we're not so silent we don't show our internal silos or internal organization that much today we engage in a way it doesn't matter from which team it comes we have a better flow than that you deserve how the sausage is made but we can never forget what was your business objective early on now how is Red Hat different in this and we are very strong in my opinion you might disagree but we are very strong in a virtual accounting right really putting you in the middle and actually having a solution architect work directly with support or consulting involved and driving that together you can also help us in actually really embracing that model if that's also other partners or system integrators integrate put yourself in the middle be around that's how we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the original business problem trust me reducing the hierarchy or getting rid of hierarchy and bureaucracy goes a long way now this is how we configured this is how we engage and this is how we are committed to your success with that I'm going to introduce you to John Alessio that talks more about some of the innovation done with customers thank you [Music] good morning I'm John Alessio I'm the vice president of Global Services and I'm delighted to be with you here today I'd like to talk to you about a couple of things as it relates to what we've been doing since the last summit in the services organization at the core of everything we did it's very similar to what Marco talked to you about our number one priority is driving our customer success with red hat technology and as you see here on the screen we have a number of different offerings and capabilities all the way from training certification open innovation labs consulting really pairing those capabilities together with what you just heard from Marco in the support or cee organization really that's the journey you all go through from the beginning of discovering what your business challenge is all the way through designing those solutions and deploying them with red hat now the highlight like to highlight a few things of what we've been up to over the last year so if I start with the training and certification team they've been very busy over the last year really updating enhancing our curriculum if you haven't stopped by the booth there's a preview for new capability around our learning community which is a new way of learning and really driving that enable meant in the community because 70% of what you need to know you learned from your peers and so it's a very key part of our learning strategy and in fact we take customer satisfaction with our training and certification business very seriously we survey all of our students coming out of training 93% of our students tell us they're better prepared because of red hat training and certification after Weeds they've completed the course we've updated the courses and we've trained well over a hundred and fifty thousand people over the last two years so it's a very very key part of our strategy and that combined with innovation labs and the consulting operation really drive that overall journey now we've been equally busy in enhancing the system of enablement and support for our business partners another very very key initiative is building out the ecosystem we've enhanced our open platform which is online partner enablement network we've added new capability and in fact much of the training and enablement that we do for our internal consultants our deal is delivered through the open platform now what I'm really impressed with and thankful for our partners is how they are consuming and leveraging this material we train and enable for sales for pre-sales and for delivery and we're up over 70% year in year in our partners that are enabled on RedHat technology let's give our business partners a round of applause now one of our offerings Red Hat open innovation labs I'd like to talk a bit more about and take you through a case study open innovation labs was created two years ago it's really there to help you on your journey in adopting open source technology it's an immersive experience where your team will work side-by-side with Red Hatters to really propel your journey forward in adopting open source technology and in fact we've been very busy since the summit in Boston as you'll see coming up on the screen we've completed dozens of engagements leveraging our methods tools and processes for open innovation labs as you can see we've worked with large and small accounts in fact if you remember summit last year we had a European customer easier AG on stage which was a startup and we worked with them at the very beginning of their business to create capabilities in a very short four-week engagement but over the last year we've also worked with very large customers such as Optim and Delta Airlines here in North America as well as Motability operations in the European arena one of the accounts I want to spend a little bit more time on is Heritage Bank heritage Bank is a community owned bank in Toowoomba Australia their challenge was not just on creating new innovative technology but their challenge was also around cultural transformation how to get people to work together across the silos within their organization we worked with them at all levels of the organization to create a new capability the first engagement went so well that they asked us to come in into a second engagement so I'd like to do now is run a video with Peter lock the chief executive officer of Heritage Bank so he can take you through their experience Heritage Bank is one of the country's oldest financial institutions we have to be smarter we have to be more innovative we have to be more agile we had to change we had to find people to help us make that change the Red Hat lab is the only one that truly helps drive that change with a business problem the change within the team is very visible from the start to now we've gone from being separated to very single goal minded seeing people that I only ever seen before in their cubicles in the room made me smile programmers in their thinking I'm now understanding how the whole process fits together the productivity of IT will change and that is good for our business that's really the value that were looking for the Red Hat innovation labs for us were a really great experience I'm not interested in running an organization I'm interested in making a great organization to say I was pleasantly surprised by it is an understatement I was delighted I love the quote I was delighted makes my heart warm every time I see that video you know since we were at summit for those of you who are with us in Boston some of you went on our hardhat tours we've opened three physical facilities here at Red Hat where we can conduct red head open Innovation Lab engagements Singapore London and Boston were all opened within the last physical year and in fact our site in Boston is paired with our world-class executive briefing center as well so if you haven't been there please do check it out I'd like to now talk to you a bit about a very special engagement that we just recently completed we just recently completed an engagement with UNICEF the United Nations Children's Fund and the the purpose behind this engagement was really to help UNICEF create an open-source platform that marries big data with social good the idea is UNICEF needs to be better prepared to respond to emergency situations and as you can imagine emergency situations are by nature unpredictable you can't really plan for them they can happen anytime anywhere and so we worked with them on a project that we called school mapping and the idea was to provide more insights so that when emergency situations arise UNICEF could do a much better job in helping the children in the region and so we leveraged our Red Hat open innovation lab methods tools processes that you've heard about just like we did at Heritage Bank and the other accounts I mentioned but then we also leveraged Red Hat software technologies so we leveraged OpenShift container platform we leveraged ansible automation we helped the client with a more agile development approach so they could have releases much more frequently and continue to update this over time we created a continuous integration continuous deployment pipeline we worked on containers and container in the application etc with that we've been able to provide a platform that is going to allow for their growth to better respond to these emergency situations let's watch a short video on UNICEF mission of UNICEF innovation is to apply technology to the world's most pressing problems facing children data is changing the landscape of what we do at UNICEF this means that we can figure out what's happening now on the ground who it's happening to and actually respond to it in much more of a real-time manner than we used to be able to do we love working with open source communities because of their commitment that we should be doing good for the world we're actually with red hat building a sandbox where universities or other researchers or data scientists can connect and help us with our work if you want to use data for social good there's so many groups out there that really need your help and there's so many ways to get involved [Music] so let's give a very very warm red hat summit welcome to Erica kochi co-founder of unicef innovation well Erica first of all welcome to Red Hat summit thanks for having me here it's our pleasure and thank you for joining us so Erica I've just talked a bit about kind of what we've been up to and Red Hat services over the last year we talked a bit about our open innovation labs and we did this project the school mapping project together our two teams and I thought the audience might find it interesting from your point of view on why the approach we use in innovation labs was such a good fit for the school mapping project yeah it was a great fit for for two reasons the first is values everything that we do at UNICEF innovation we use open source technology and that's for a couple of reasons because we can take it from one place and very easily move it to other countries around the world we work in 190 countries so that's really important for us not to be able to scale things also because it makes sense we can get we can get more communities involved in this and look not just try to do everything by ourselves but look much open much more openly towards the open source communities out there to help us with our work we can't do it alone yeah and then the second thing is methodology you know the labs are really looking at taking this agile approach to prototyping things trying things failing trying again and that's really necessary when you're developing something new and trying to do something new like mapping every school in the world yeah very challenging work think about it 190 countries Wow and so the open source platform really works well and then the the rapid prototyping was really a good fit so I think the audience might find it interesting on how this application and this platform will help children in Latin America so in a lot of countries in Latin America and many countries throughout the world that UNICEF works in are coming out of either decades of conflict or are are subject to natural disasters and not great infrastructure so it's really important to a for us to know where schools are where communities are well where help is needed what's connected what's not and using a overlay of various sources of data from poverty mapping to satellite imagery to other sources we can really figure out what's happening where resources are where they aren't and so we can plan better to respond to emergencies and to and to really invest in areas that are needed that need that investment excellent excellent it's quite powerful what we were able to do in a relatively short eight or nine week engagement that our two teams did together now many of your colleagues in the audience are using open source today looking to expand their use of open source and I thought you might have some recommendations for them on how they kind of go through that journey and expanding their use of open source since your experience at that yeah for us it was it was very much based on what's this gonna cost we have limited resources and what's how is this gonna spread as quickly as possible mm-hmm and so we really asked ourselves those two questions you know about 10 years ago and what we realized is if we are going to be recommending technologies that governments are going to be using it really needs to be open source they need to have control over it yeah and they need to be working with communities not developing it themselves yeah excellent excellent so I got really inspired with what we were doing here in this project it's one of those you know every customer project is really interesting to me this one kind of pulls a little bit at your heartstrings on what the real impact could be here and so I know some of our colleagues here in the audience may want to get involved how can they get involved well there's many ways to get involved with the other UNICEF or other groups out there you can search for our work on github and there are tasks that you can do right now if and if you're looking for to do she's got work for you and if you want sort of a more a longer engagement or a bigger engagement you can check out our website UNICEF stories org and you can look at the areas you might be interested in and contact us we're always open to collaboration excellent well Erica thank you for being with us here today thank you for the great project we worked on together and have a great summer thank you for being give her a round of applause all right well I hope that's been helpful to you to give you a bit of an update on what we've been focused on in global services the message I'll leave with you is our top priority is customer success as you heard through the story from UNICEF from Heritage Bank and others we can help you innovate where you are today I hope you have a great summit and I'll call out Jim Whitehurst thank you John and thank you Erica that's really an inspiring story we have so many great examples of how individuals and organizations are stepping up to transform in the face of digital disruption I'd like to spend my last few minutes with one real-world example that brings a lot of this together and truly with life-saving impact how many times do you think you can solve a problem which is going to allow a clinician to now save the life I think the challenge all of his physicians are dealing with is data overload I probably look at over 100,000 images in a day and that's just gonna get worse what if it was possible for some computer program to look at these images with them and automatically flag images that might deserve better attention Chris on the surface seems pretty simple but underneath Chris has a lot going on in the past year I've seen Chris Foreman community and a space usually dominated by proprietary software I think Chris can change medicine as we know it today [Music] all right with that I'd like to invite on stage dr. Ellen grant from Boston Children's Hospital dr. grant welcome thank you for being here so dr. grant tell me who is Chris Chris does a lot of work for us and I think Chris is making me or has definitely the potential to make me a better doctor Chris helps us take data from our archives in the hospital and port it to wrap the fastback ends like the mass up and cloud to do rapid data processing and provide it back to me in any format on a desktop an iPad or an iPhone so it it basically brings high-end data analysis right to me at the bedside and that's been a barrier that I struggled with years ago to try to break down so that's where we started with Chris is to to break that barrier between research that occurred on a timeline of days to weeks to months to clinical practice which occurs in the timeline of seconds to minutes well one of things I found really fascinating about this story RedHat in case you can't tell we're really passionate about user driven innovation is this is an example of user driven innovation not directly at a technology company but in medicine excuse me can you tell us just a little bit about the genesis of Chris and how I got started yeah Chris got started when I was running a clinical division and I was very frustrated with not having the latest image analysis tools at my fingertips while I was on clinical practice and I would have to on the research so I could go over and you know do line code and do the data analysis but if I'm always over in clinical I kept forgetting how to do those things and I wanted to have all those innovations that my fingertips and not have to remember all the computer science because I'm a physician not like a better scientist so I wanted to build a platform that gave me easy access to that back-end without having to remember all the details and so that's what Chris does for us is brings allowed me to go into the PAC's grab a dataset send it to a computer and back in to do the analysis and bring it back to me without having to worry about where it was or how it got there that's all involved in the in the platform Chris and why not just go to a vendor and ask them to write a piece of software for you to do that yeah we thought about that and we do a lot of technical innovations and we always work with the experts so we wanted to work with if I'm going to be able to say an optical device I'm going to work with the optical engineers or an EM our system I'm going to work with em our engineers so we wanted to work with people who really knew or the plumbers so to speak of the software in industry so we ended up working with the massive point cloud for the platform and the distributed systems in Red Hat as the infrastructure that's starting to support Chris and that's been actually a really incredible journey for us because medical ready medical softwares not typically been a community process and that's something that working with dan from Red Hat we learned a lot about how to participate in an open community and I think our team has grown a lot as a result of that collaboration and I know you we've talked about in the past that getting this data locked into a proprietary system you may not be able to get out there's a real issue can you talk about the importance of open and how that's worked in the process yeah and I think for the medical community and I find this resonates with other physicians as well too is that it's medical data we want to continue to own and we feel very awkward about giving it to industry so we would rather have our data sitting in an open cloud like the mass open cloud where we can have a data consortium that oversees the data governance so that we're not giving our data way to somebody else but have a platform that we can still keep a control of our own data and I think it's going to be the future because we're running of a space in the hospital we generate so much data and it's just going to get worse as I was mentioning and all the systems run faster we get new devices so the amount of data that we have to filter through is just astronomically increasing so we need to have resources to store and compute on such large databases and so thinking about where this could go I mean this is a classic feels like an open-source project it started really really small with a originally modest set of goals and it's just kind of continue to grow and grow and grow it's a lot like if yes leanest torval Linux would be in 1995 you probably wouldn't think it would be where it is now so if you dream with me a little bit where do you think this could possibly go in the next five years ten years what I hope it'll do is allow us to break down the silos within the hospital because to do the best job at what we physicians do not only do we have to talk and collaborate together as individuals we have to take the data each each community develops and be able to bring it together so in other words I need to be able to bring in information from vital monitors from mr scans from optical devices from genetic tests electronic health record and be able to analyze on all that data combined so ideally this would be a platform that breaks down those information barriers in a hospital and also allows us to collaborate across multiple institutions because many disorders you only see a few in each hospital so we really have to work as teams in the medical community to combine our data together and also I'm hoping that and we even have discussions with people in the developing world because they have systems to generate or to got to create data or say for example an M R system they can't create data but they don't have the resources to analyze on it so this would be a portable for them to participate in this growing data analysis world without having to have the infrastructure there and be a portal into our back-end and we could provide the infrastructure to do the data analysis it really is truly amazing to see how it's just continued to grow and grow and expand it really is it's a phenomenal story thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] I really do love that story it's a great example of user driven innovation you know in a different industry than in technology and you know recognizing that a clinicians need for real-time information is very different than a researchers need you know in projects that can last weeks and months and so rather than trying to get an industry to pivot and change it's a great opportunity to use a user driven approach to directly meet those needs so we still have a long way to go we have two more days of the summit and as I said yesterday you know we're not here to give you all the answers we're here to convene the conversation so I hope you will have an opportunity today and tomorrow to meet some new people to share some ideas we're really really excited about what we can all do when we work together so I hope you found today valuable we still have a lot more happening on the main stage as well this afternoon please join us back for the general session it's a really amazing lineup you'll hear from the women and opensource Award winners you'll also hear more about our collab program which is really cool it's getting middle school girls interested in open sourcing coding and so you'll have an opportunity to see some people involved in that you'll also hear from the open source Story speakers and you'll including in that you will see a demo done by a technologist who happens to be 11 years old so really cool you don't want to miss that so I look forward to seeing you then this afternoon thank you [Applause]

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you buy SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Dr. Deborah Berebichez. She is the chief data scientist at Metis, which is owned by Kaplan. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks for inviting me, too. >> You have had such an interesting and varied professional career. You were even a host of a lot of different science-oriented television programs. You work on initiatives to get young women into technology. But one of the things that is most impressive is that you were the first Mexican woman to ever earn her PhD in physics-- >> Deborah: In physics, at Stanford. >> From Stanford University. What an accomplishment. But talk a little bit about your path to Stanford. Tell our viewers a little bit more about your trajectory. >> It's definitely a convoluted, and not a typical path. I grew up in Mexico City in a conservative community that discouraged girls and young women from pursuing a career in the hard sciences. I was told from a very young age that physics was for geniuses, and that I had better pick a more feminine path, like communications or something else, which were great careers, but they were not the right ones for a very inquisitive mind like mine. When I confessed to my mom in high school that I loved physics and math, she said, "Don't tell the boys, "because you'll intimidate them, "and you may not be able to get married." >> Rebecca: Nonsense! >> Actually, it's funny, because that kind of overt bias is sometimes easier to combat than the one that more women experience, which is a more subtle bias. You know, that the media tells us that some things are for boys and for women. So, in my case, it was very open, and so it almost gave me more courage to try to fight against it. Anyways, so, it came time to pick what career, what BA to do in college, and I was told by the advisors in school that philosophy was a more feminine and acceptable path, but it also asked a lot of questions about the universe. So, I enrolled in a local college in Mexico City to study philosophy, but the more I tried to stifle my love for physics and math, the more that inner voice was screaming, "This is your path. "You have to do it, you have to study physics." Just like a lot of kids do their rebellious things behind their parents' back, I would go and rent from the library books about obscure physicists like Tycho Brahe, this Danish astronomer who was locked up in a tower, and I was thinking, I'll be just like him, kind of antisocial, nobody will like me, but at least I'll have my data, my numbers, to keep me company. >> Rebecca: This was your teenage rebellion, is reading about brooding philosophers? >> Well, there other-- >> Okay. >> In the middle of my BA in philosophy in Mexico, I decided to apply to universities in the US to give it a chance, and give myself the opportunity to pursue both BAs, physics and philosophy. I was very fortunate to get a full scholarship to attend Brandeis University, and I say that because, in Mexico, universities are about eight times less expensive than in the US, so I could have not afford to go anywhere else. While at Brandeis, I took the courage to take a very general course in astronomy. Very little math, introductory course, and there I met the teaching assistant, who was a graduate student by the name of Roopesh. He was from India. Roopesh and I became good friends, and he told me that I wasn't the typical student that just wanted to get an A in the class and do the homework well, that my curiosity had no end. That I would ask questions about quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, and I wanted to know everything about the universe and nature. So, one time, we were walking in Harvard Square, and I realized that I was the only one who could make my dream of becoming a physicist happen. With teary eyes, I told Roopesh, "I don't want to die without trying. "I just don't want to die without trying to do physics." He called his advisor on a payphone. He was the head of the graduate student committee, so he called me to Brandeis. He handed me a book called Div, Grad and Curl, Vector Calculus in Three Dimensions. For me, it was an alien language. He said to me, "There's a problem, "because the BA in physics takes four years, "and your scholarship is only for two years. "But guess what, someone else has done this at Brandeis. "His name is Ed Witten. "Do you know who he is? "He switched from history to physics." I said, "You're kidding. "Ed Witten is a very famous physicist, "the father of string theory. "Clearly, there's no way I could pull this off." He says to me, "I give you two months this summer. "If, by the end of the summer, "you pass a test on this one book, "I'll let you skip through "the first two years of the physics major "so you can complete the BA in only two years." Roopesh decided to mentor me and tutor me 10 hours a day for eight weeks. I tell the story of Roopesh because I always wanted to pay him back. He said to me, when he was growing up in India, in Darjeeling, there was an old man who would teach him and his sisters the tabla, the musical instrument, English, and math. And when they wanted to pay him back, the old man said, "No, the only way you could ever pay me back "is if you do this with someone else in the world." That's how my mission in life started, to inspire, encourage, and help other, especially women, but minorities who, like myself, want a career in STEM, but for some reason, whether it be financial or social, feel that they cannot achieve their dreams. >> Great story. >> Yeah, wow! Incredible! >> And then, you asked about Stanford. So, then I went back to Mexico, and I was doing a Master's in theoretical physics, and I was again told by my community, "Okay, you've got it over with. "Stay here, get married and stay as part of the community." But I was still more hungry for knowledge, and to do more physics. I was very late in the application cycle, and I decided to apply to schools. I went to my Mexican advisor's office, and I said, "You know, I'm going to leave again. "I'd like to go to the US where I can pursue experiments. "I wrote to a couple of professors." He says, "Who did you write to?" I say, "Well, there's one particularly interesting one, "Steve Chu at Stanford." His jaw dropped. He said, "Steve Chu?" I said, "Yes, why?" He said, "Do you realize he just won the Nobel Prize "a couple of months ago?" And Steve Chu later became Secretary of Energy in the US. I was so fortunate that he received my email with interest, invited me to work directly with him at Stanford. That's how my career started. >> It's such a good mix of fortuitousness, serendipity, but also doggedness on your part, so, really, there's a lot going on. >> Don't be shy, is my-- >> This gets to our final question, really, which is, what's your advice for the younger versions of you? >> The first thing is that it was not all easy for me. There was a lot of failure along the way. My first advice is, the people who get to the end of the line and succeed in life are not the ones that simply persevere and get everything right. They're the ones that keep getting up and succeeding step after step. It's the courage to get to the end and persevere even when failure exists. The second piece of advice, especially for parents out there, is when your kids ask questions about the world and nature, don't just give them the answer. Go through the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman would say. Especially with computing. Computers are a tool, a magnificent tool. But they're just a tool to another goal, which is to gain insights about the world. It's more important to be a critical thinker and a thought leader, rather than just focus on being proficient at coding. >> You had the element of humor, you had the element of storytelling, you had the element of everyday things in the way, 'cause you're obviously a super smart lady to accomplish these things. Not everybody's so super smart, so you've created a style in which you can help those that aren't maybe necessarily PhDs from Stanford to gain interest, to become interested, to kind of hook 'em into this interesting world that you're so passionate about. >> Yeah, thank you. I try to do it through my TV show that I cohost with The Science Channel called Outrageous Acts of Science, which serves exactly that purpose, to get people interested in the fact that science and STEM is behind everyday life. It's not just some complicated equation in a board. It's what we go through every day, and if you just gain the joy of discovering those concepts, you're set. >> Great. Well, Deborah, thank you so much for joining us. It's been so much fun talking to you. >> Thank you. I loved being here. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (fast techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back here, we're live here in San Francisco for SiliconANGLE's the Cube's exclusive 2 days of coverage for Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create, building on their 3 year old successful DevNet program which is Cisco core developer program now foraying out into the world of cloud native developers, open source, great move for Cisco. Our next guest, Wissam Ali-Ahmad, lead solutions architect with Splunk. Good to see you. >> Good to see you too, John. >> Here with Peter Burris of course, my co-host. >> Wissam: Hi, Peter. >> So Splunk being here is an important thing because you guys have been riding the wave for cloud, certainly your relationship with Amazon web service is well known, very successful. Splunk as a company went public, well known. You guys really, really hit a niche around big data and how cloud has helped you guys accelerate your business. So you've been transformed, but continuing to grow, so you're riding that wave, but now Cisco's on the wave, and Cisco's been involved in the wave. But from a relationship standpoint, oh yeah, we're the networking guys, we're going to come in and help Docker with this, we're going to come in and help Splunk with this, so they've been kind of a helper, not the main player. This is a new way to get back in and be really enabled for the cloud world. What's your reaction to this move by Cisco? >> I mean, we have a great partnership with Cisco for many years. And I think, you know, Splunk plays a good, as you said, we're a good player there. We integrate well. I mean, all the initiatives Cisco's involved with, we have integrations with Cisco on many levels with different technology. And also Splunk, the deal is with Splunk is that you need to bring invisibly to everything, and Splunk is that platform where you have access to all that data throughout all, all is like all that machine data so you have access to all that data, not only application data, not only network data. You need to look at everything these days. Especially when there's attacks. You know we heard recently, of course everybody heard about WannaCry, and to the tech, that attack, you need to look at everything, because you could someone bring in a laptop behind the firewall even, and they can be affected already, and if you don't have access to see what they're doing, not just from a network perspective, like what apps in the cloud they're accessing, you know, what other files on the locally, so, because you have access to all that data in Splunk, you should be able to get better visibility. >> And you guys have a unique position in the sense that you're close, again, to the machine. You know, logs and data We had Amanda on from Cisco, who was, in her tribe as a developer, she's not necessarily a network engineer, but she's brought on that mojo in from the developer community. When she was first day on the job, you know, they were doing some Python, some rest API stuff, you know, basic 101 stuff, but she didn't want to do an app that was showing hey, how many Twitter followers do I have? She had to go in and look at the devices. So now the opportunity with IOT is that for Cisco to make and expose the network for programmability >> Wissam: Right. >> And extend it. How are they going to do that? I mean you're closer to those guys in your relationship, but that's what everyone wants. They want the infrastructure to just go, that's DevOps >> Right. Yeah, they want the edge to come to them. They want data to be more accessible to all the users. And then so Cisco's on that path, definitely on that path, to get more infrastructure visibility in the data center and the networks, so they're definitely on that path of doing that. >> And let me build on this, so if we think about the various components associated with some of the things that Splunk does. A leader in the application of machine and AI and big data related technologies, to solving business problems. The algorithms for doing this have been around for a long time. The hardware couldn't do it, so you had to write really tight software to do it, and you were one of the first companies out there to really do that. And then it was, we'll point all that at sources of data, that you can apply these technologies, to create better business value. And there were two places where people did it. Web logs, for online marketing, and IT, since IT technology throws off an enormous amount of data. So as I think about it, the relationship with Cisco is especially interesting, because Cisco is going to be one of those companies that encourages people to create new sources of data and a lot of it, IOT and other places, and bring it back to companies and technologies that have a proven track record for generating value out of that data. So talk a bit about how Splunk intends to, going back to what John said, riding that wave. The algorithms are here, the hardware can do it, now we've got to get access to more of the data, and here comes Cisco being really serious about moving a lot of data around. What do you think? >> I mean, we like when people bring in a lot of data into Splunk. We also have been focusing a lot on the personas. On the, we call the Sherlock, the data Sherlock. Right, so that unique persona is where they need to look at, how do I make sense of my data? Not only just about bringing data, but how do I make sense of that data. What are solutions? What are use case I need to have better impact on the business? So we're actually helping solve real kind of business use cases. This morning, Yelp had a webinar about how they use Splunk driving all the web infrastructure for Yelp, the Yelp back end for all their-- >> Peter: This is still in the IT? >> Yeah. >> Peter: It's not Yelps marketing group, this is still in the IT? >> But they are correlating that with other business use cases, yes. >> Of course, it will start coming together. So where do you see some of these use cases popping up, now that Cisco is helping to create those new sources, and get people to, you know, acculturating people to the idea that these are sources of value, business value. Where do you see some of the new use cases? >> There's a lot of use cases now coming up around business analytics, around IOT as you mentioned. And an added element of machine learning across different data sources. So if I want to look at not just performance of one service, let's say my elevator, I want to see how that's going to affect other areas of my business, too. So you're able to see not only the power of correlating that data, but also be able to apply machine learning on that data. So there's a lot of use cases around business analytics. Security's always there, because security, as you know, attack vectors are getting complex every few months or so, so you need to also chase that, and you need to look at all the data, the behaviors in that data, to get better predictability, to get better prevention detection. >> So Splunk is emerging as a great software company for a lot of IT pros, but it still is more in the op side. How is this conference and the likelihood or the notion that developers are increasingly going to be part of that use case, it's utilizing data and data-related services to better understand operations, but find new ways of creating value out of the capabilities provided by that. What's the developer angle here for Splunk? >> Great question. We actually are focusing a lot on developer tools. So Splunk, being a platform. I always say Splunk is a full-feature platform for machine data and big data. So it's open in the sense that developers can develop their own content on Splunk. They can extend what we have. So an example of that is, the recent project called Mexico Contaro. So that's a project full that's looking at internet usage and coverage on Mexico, in Mexico City and across all the cities. And this was using Splunk to end Meraki API's, and bring all that data together, and network data to try to give exposure to kind of like government analytics. And that's a neat case because not necessarily only IT, but also helping all the goods out there. >> So Cisco, Meraki and other sources, plus Splunk to be able to get deep visibility into a number of ways, you know, a very complex system like Mexico City, which is about as complex as you get, actually operates. >> Wissam: Yes. That's one, yeah. >> Tell about the Splunk direction now, because everyone's been questioning about the public offering, because you're not putting numbers out there, active community, it's not that you guys aren't being transparent, but you've got to go to the next level of growth. Obviously Cisco's coming at the cloud native world. We see the cloud native compute foundation, really with great support of the Linux foundation. New open source stuff's going on all the time. How is Splunk looking at the future right now? What's next? I mean obviously security, we heard that at Dot Conf last year, but you guys have really a good position with the data. You have good account names. You've got great blue chip customers. What's next? What's the product solution look like for you guys? What's the new architecture? What's the new plan? >> I think more listening, looking at all the scale, and cloud and listen to the customers, making the data onboarding easier, making it more scalable, covering more use cases that we talked about. Innovate a lot of areas around machine learning, all that to cover more of the use cases, so we're definitely moving forward to go the next step beyond just-- >> So let's take another example. So DevOps, right, everyone loves the DevOps. It's not like a solution, you can't buy DevOps, you just got to do it, right? So that's pretty clear. You can't just write an Agile manifesto and say, "We're DevOps." You got to have a vision, maybe write a manifesto just to get the people motivated, but put the right people in place, let the things organically develop. So the question is, what is an ideal architecture, and what is a best practice, from your standpoint, where you've seen examples of people who've transformed into this DevOps world, where they really got the ball rolling, got some change happening, and then scaled it. Can you give us a kind of a pattern that you've seen the customers? >> I have not seen personally a lot of that, but definitely there's transformation happening. It's not easy to move into that DevOps switch. You cannot do it overnight. So you need as much as possible tools that would actually give exposure, how am I doing, right? Am I pushing my code at the speed it's expected to be? Do I have bugs addressed early on? So that kind of exposure you need a system that will give you basically to analyze all that data too, and then at Splunk we have a story on DevOps. DevOps and application exposure monitoring and that. And the unique thing about Splunk is that you don't only look at what's inside the application, which was AMP's that do application management, but you should look at everything, so we look outside the black box. Not inside the app, but look at outside too, so we're going to give you exposure of your whole DevOp process You know, from the beginning, the whole condis integration, so I see Splunk helping organizations moving into that kind of new process. >> But there's an interesting relationship between tools and process, or tools and skills, so John, you'll probably laugh at this. Many years ago I found myself sitting in a room with the CEO of a very, very large pharmaceutical, me and a group of other other consultants, and he said, the discussion was, are we going to buy SAP or not? And after two hours of people arguing about it, he finally said, "Screw it, we're doing it, "I'm sick and tired of these process arguments. "We're just going to do what SAP says in the process." There's a relationship between the practices suggested by Splunk and the types of things that a business actually does in a DevOps sense. What is this, how is Splunk changing the notion of DevOps, and how is now as Splunk extends itself, how is DevOps and new practices and new ways of thinking, altering the way that Splunk delivers capability? >> I mean, we always listen to our customers. And then we've actually been looking at addressing use cases, like on DevOps, from a persona aspect. Like as a DevOp engineer, I won't be able to address this kind of issues, and we listen to that, and we try to address those, not only just by a tool, but also by looking at best practices around that. And sometimes we manifest those through apps. So Splunk can actually, you can publish an app as a developer if you're not happy as a customer, you can modify, take one of our existing free apps, and then modify them cue on process, so we're not kind of specific rigid to certain way, and I know DevOps, and Agile Ward, is not even like a religion, you know, you're not supposed to follow, you're supposed to be flexible in certain areas, and even implementing DevOps comes in Agile way too. >> But it's still pedagogical, and John in many respects, there's your manifesto for DevOps, right? Is your choice of tools and how they come together, and degree to which they're integrated kind of take priority. >> Well, you got eight minutes until you have to go up on stage and do your talk. Here we're live in San Francisco. What are you going to be speaking about when you hit the stage in eight minutes? You have seven minutes to explain (laughs). >> (Laughs) Deliver pitch. So I'll be focusing a lot on the integrations that we have with various Cisco products, so we have, with Splunk you're able to bring in a lot of the API, data through API integrations, so I'm going to show how easy that process is to bring that data if you have an API like Meraki or ACI or Ice. And I'll also be focusing more on how the data you can do it from the cloud, easy, without having an agent involved, without having any software you need to install to collect the data, and we'll be talking more about the Mexico Contaro case, and then do some fun live demos also. >> But Cisco's got good API's, people might not know that, but they are API'd up pretty well on the equipment and the gear and the platform. >> Yes, of course. >> Just commentary on that, your reaction to share for people who are not fluent in Cisco, in terms of their enablement of getting data out? >> Yes, Cisco has a lot of good API's, capabilities around sharing that data, the openness of it has been great, and made easy for us, even for our customers to bring that data, the API, that data into Splunk, so it's a matter of a few minutes now to point to that API and bring that data into Splunk, and yeah, that's good. >> Wissam Ali-Ahmad, going on stage in seven minutes, you got it all done, congratulations. Thanks for coming on The Cube. I know you've got your big speech here to the packed house. Inaugural event here, Cisco's DevNet Create. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> More live coverage here in San Fransciso. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Peter Burris. Stay with us as we get down to wrapping up day two. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior directory of strategy and plan

>> We just started reselling Veeam We now have a combination of a very strong technology portfolio, deep integration, and a commitment to good market partnership. The combination, we think, will be very exciting for HP, Nimble, and Veeam customers in the years to come. (relaxed electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans it's theCUBE covering Veeam On 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Dave Russell is here. He's a vice-president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, good to see you guys. Nice to see you again. >> So, we were talking off camera. I mean, you are probably the number one known backup, data protection analyst in the business and have been for quite some time. You've seen it all. Give us the state of backup, recovery, data protection, availability, whatever you want to call it. But where are we today? >> You know, in some regards, I don't know if we're any different than we were 28 years ago when I got into the business. The interesting thing is, my wife actually got into this before I did. We were both mainframe developers of backup at IBM and I didn't really want to get a real job. Maybe you could argue I still don't have a real job but what I wanted to do is to stay in grad school forever and I started doing backup there in grad school for undergraduate computing lab. And about six years ago, I showed my wife some of the polls that we do at Gartner events. We can do realtime feedback, what's your greatest challenge, what are your issues with backup? And then she said that was kind of interesting. Two years ago, she came to an event we did in Las Vegas and afterwards she came up and I was hoping she was going to say, "Hey, you did a good job." She said, "What in the heck have you been doing? "These are the same problems when I left the industry 20 years ago to be a mom." Everybody still has too much data, too little backup window, the cost is too high, the complexity is too great. So a lot of infrastructure changes but not a lot of the same pain points have shifted dramatically. What has shifted, though, is cost is even more important than it ever was. Obviously, we could talk about volume of data but now we maybe want to have multiple copies of even our backup data. We want faster access to that backup data. 'Cause we want, now, backup to be a high-availability replication solution not just the tape in the vault somewhere. So there's now speed requirements on our backup. So, I could keep going forever but I'll just let it out to say that as an industry, we still have many of the same challenges that we've always had, arguably for decades and decades. Now, the challenge is the cat's out of the bag, meaning the rest of the business sometimes is aware of just how costly this is. Just how difficult this is from an op-ecs perspective. We can't go hire five, 10 smart people to do this. >> And the backup window, is it correct to say it's essentially disappeared? >> Yeah, there's some organizations that really feel like we don't have a backup window 'cause if we just take a step back, what is really backup, nevermind how you could use it for other use cases like DevOps. Backup, if you state it in the most unappealing terms, it's how much data are you willing to lose, how much time are you willing to take to go get that aged copy of data. And, of course, the rhetorical answer would be well, I don't want any of those bad things to happen, right. But at the end of the day, that's really our frustration. >> David: And I want it back instantly. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so that's obviously putting great pressure on the businesses. So when you look at Veeam's ascendancy, I've been saying it all day and I'd like to test this with you, it sort of coincided, obviously, with VMware and when people had to sort of rethink their VMware backups. You just did a webinar entitled "Backup: Fix it or Ditch it." I feel like a lot of people went through that, answering that question in early VMware days. So, give us, what was the conclusion of that webinar? >> Yeah, well, the number one thing is frustration. And we've done a lot of drill down on what are you frustrated on. Number one is cost, number two is complexity and we could even break this up by large enterprise, mid-size, and smaller enterprise but there's a lot of similarities. So now, where do you come out on fix it or ditch it? The answer for many organizations, is a little bit of both. And what I mean by that, this is kind of mind-boggling, I think, is that backup space used to be sweep the floor. If you were in an incumbent vendor, you wanted to kick out any other solution, if you were an organization, you wanted to collapse from three, five backup products to one backup product, and if you were an emerging vendor, what do you want to do? Go kick out the incumbent vendor. But now, an organization says, "You know, maybe we'd like "to completely change, but we can't. "So we're going to try and fix what we've got." And that's usually what I recommend, at least try and get the value out of what you've already bought and deployed But we're going to implement something else, too. So, there's probably 15 years or more of trying to collapse the number of solutions. Now an organization says, not 'cause I want five solutions but because through pain, basically, not getting my needs met, I'm going to continue running two solutions or expand to two solutions. And you could argue Veeam invented that. They came in on the virtual end, exactly to your point, and then it was a land and expand. We see this happening, though, in the industry overall. >> Dave, I have to think that just the current state of cloud is compounding what you're talking about. Customers have their own data centers, they have virtualized environments. I think Veeam said this morning the average customer they have is only 75% virtualized so they've got 25 physical. Everybody's got SASS, everybody's using some public cloud, at least for some test data. Veeam says that they can now go everywhere but most customers are probably doing piecemeal deployments. Everything in IT is additive. What do you see, how does cloud impact that space in general? >> Well, my biggest fear on the cloud aspect, whether it's software as a service or public cloud, someone's going to rent you infrastructure, is that we're going to learn some lessons the hard way. Again, meaning that most organizations typically think well, if we went to software as a service, they'll take care of it. We have no responsibility anymore or didn't we "get rid of that problem" meaning backup or DR. And the answer is no. You're still the owner of the data. And where it gets shades of gray is that SASS provider's going to give you some level of protection, some level of backup. Chances are they're not going to give you everything you had when you had that email system on premise. So my fear is that organizations are going to suffer an outage and realize there is still a need for additional protection. Right now, many organizations, they're running a bit exposed or don't even realize that they're running a bit exposed. >> Yeah, what is the state of those SASS providers and public cloud providers? Is Veeam still best of breed to go in those environments or are we starting to see them all offer their own native pieces? >> Well, I think we're in a transition period because there's a number of third party solutions that can be good at handling this and you'd have to believe that ... So, take Microsoft for example. They're in the unique position of having had on premise applications and now having public cloud and so eventually, someone's going to say well, here's all the things we did for exchange on premise. Why can't we get all that availability beyond 60, 90 day retention if we go to SharePoint Online or exchange in Azure. There's a tension that's taking place right now. Right now, at this point in time, though, I think if an organization really wants to protect their data like they have and they're used to having been doing on prem, they're going to need a third party solution, whether it's Veeam or someone else. >> David, I want to ask you about your magic corner on data center backup and recovery software. It struck me that ... I don't want to overdo it. I know you guys are very sensitive about each quadrant and how customers should interpret that but we all do the same thing. We go right to the leader. People fight to be in the upper right. And it struck me that Veeam was the only relatively smaller company that sort of knows their way in there. And they're known for SMB but in the magic quadrant you were saying this is really the upper end of M and larger organizations. So what is it that sort of sets leadership apart and how is it that Veeam was able to get in there with those established, much larger players? >> Yeah, that's a great question because exactly what you said, the competitive response would have been isn't Veeam just deployed in small environments? And collectively, we take about two and a half thousand end user inquiry calls a year in backup. So we started seeing a number of trends a couple of years earlier that hey, Fortune 500 companies are deploying Veeam and it's not in the plant in Mexico City or in a small, little area. It's in the Detroit Motor City in the data center and we're seeing a bid for six figures or higher, in some cases. So that's when we started realizing, hey wait a minute. The point of being cast an enterprise supplier is to actually be in the enterprise. They're already in the enterprise. So that's what we started to notice and finally we said another issue we have with putting some of the leaders in quadrants, are they really leading the market or pushing the market? And we really felt that Veeam had kind of crossed over the point last year when we issued the quadrant in June that they were causing the market to shift, whether it was having better virtualization capability, changing to socket-level pricing, addressing ease of use. They were doing things and give sort of "extra credit" for a provider that can not only sense what the market is looking for but kind of push the market. >> Can you explain the socket-based pricing a little bit and how that affected the market? 'Cause I know a number of vendors have made some pricing changes. IBM in particular sort of said everybody can buy anything and use credits there and that was, I felt, a move to keep the install base where it is. Veeama interpreting was different with the socket-based pricing. What was that, did it have an effect on the market in any other way? >> Yeah, the short answer is it absolutely effected the market because you look at the number of heterogeneous backup vendors that have come out and now offer socket-based pricing. So they're doing this in response to Veeam. And what we see now is the organization, depending on who the buyer is, they have no idea what terabytes are. I know what server deployment we have, meaning how much socket we've got so it was just speaking to that constituency in a buying motion that they understood. >> Stu: Something they could quantify. >> Exactly. >> Veeam made a number of announcements this morning and some prior to the show. Anything jump out at you? CDP's one of the ones we've been talking the most. Maybe you could give us your quick competitive analysis of how that looks. >> Well, CDP was near and dear to my heart. In 2005, it was September 2005, almost the same day Microsoft came out with their data protection manager for CDP, Backup Exec came out with CDP. >> Stu: I was trying to remember when Kosha came out because I was at the company that acquired Kosha. >> Yeah, sure. So Kosha, Topio, you know, it can go on. And CDP, around 2005 and 6 was really a lot of buzz, going to change everything. The problem was it was difficult to do because thee infrastructure didn't facilitate it. So, back then you had to split the volume manager and have multiple rights. Now, today's announcement on CDP where you don't have to have a lot of extra infrastructure but it's the hypervisor that's splintering this off for you. IL filtering that's making this easier, making this actually achievable. I think that's going to be really compelling. Most people here I've been talking to say this is going to be great for critical applications. There were some shops I spoke with in the mid-2000s, you know, five, six, seven years, that said we use CDP even on general file systems and why? It's because if I keep making a delete and I call up the help desk and it's like, oh, Dave hit confirm to delete again. He called up to say can you get me my file back and it's the fifth time I've called this week. Well, data protection would allow us to go let him self-service perhaps, but definitely use less data. >> So, for Veeam to get that CDP granularity, if I could talk about that for a second. It's got to obviously rely on VMware APIs. Are you, I'm sure you're tracking this, but are you concerned about Dell EMC gaming the system? Historically, what have you seen there? Difficulty getting hands on SDKs? Trying to put the incumbent in an advantage. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, you're right. Historically, especially at the storage rate perspective, proprietary APIs or sort of supporting SMIS but having quote "extensions" which are basically proprietary off to the side, were an issue. Here is a case where I think it's in the hypervisor's best interest, and soon it'll be in Microsoft's best interest with Hyper-V and you could go on and on about the other platforms to offer the capability as well. So there is a danger but I don't see how the sort of storage oligarchs are going to be able to fence that off in this case. >> Yeah, I call them the cartel. Is Veeam now, because of its ascendancy, part of that oligarchy? >> Well, I think you have to say approaching half a billion dollars in revenue, it's sort of like the enterprise question. How many enterprises do you have to get in before you enterprise? Well, how many hundreds of millions of dollars do you have to make before you're one of the big ones? >> What do you make of this messaging of Veeam, companies like Veeam, don't want to talk about backup anymore. Backups kind of past ... You see some start-ups like Datos the other day said no, no, we're not a backup company. Okay, and then there's shifting to this notion of availability. Does that resonate with customers? Is that the way customers are thinking about this or is it just sort of good marketing? >> It resonates with some customers. Now, personally, I like it 'cause to me availability is an umbrella. We can put backup and we can put disaster recovery and high availability under there. And maybe you can sort of find a way that DevOps and copy data kind of plays under availability. It doesn't actually work in all geographies. So, I was in Tokyo at a Gartner data center conference three weeks ago, I guess, almost. And they don't really, availability doesn't sound good and disaster recovery sounds worse because that meant you had disaster. So how much disaster recovery do you want to buy? Well, none because I don't want any disasters. So availability is a little regionalized. There are definitely some shops that just say look, I have a backup budget and that's what I need to go and do better. I have a backup pain point, etc. I think, though, whether it's replication and instant VM mounting and the notion of DevOps, we're seeing more and more organizations get their head around ... Whether they want to call it availability or something else but it's beyond backup. >> Well, what's come through loud and clear, however, is your point about cost. I mean, it seems like customers are still insanely focused on cost and that's because backup generally is insurance. So cost and complexity have to be minimized and a lot of the backup platforms that are out there are expensive and they're anything but simple. >> Yeah, and you look at the economics. We've seen negative pricing pressure on dollars per terabyte of backup software now for three years running. Now, list price and obviously, no one really pays list, but list price starting with just a small number of terabytes, some vendors were 10,000 dollars, some vendors were 14 and a half thousand dollars a terabyte and you and I go down to whatever shop and we go buy a terabyte drive, if you can find a one terabyte drive, for a couple hundred dollars. >> David: Four terabytes now. >> And obviously, the data written on it is where the real value is but you see the mismatch of I'm spending list price 14,000 dollars terabytes to protect 140 dollars worth of equipment. There's a problem here. So, whether you're the VP of infrastructure, the purchasing department, or just the backup admin that says I have a problem because I can't go buy now the agent for the database that I'm trying to buy 'cause we've already spent all this money on just the base backup platform. >> Yeah, there's really this 10 year pressure on all infrastructure pricing. Cloud, open source, is really putting pressure on that. So, David, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your insights and keep up the great work. >> It was great to see you guys. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. It's theCUBE, we're live from New Orleans, Veeam On 2017. (relaxed electronic music)

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It looks like they're letting the general session out. We're here at the Professional Business Women of California Conference; 6,000 women, about 5% men really talking about, it's amazing, the 28th year. I've never been to this show about how women can get more inclusive and diversity and taking, executing on steps to actually make it happen as somebody said in the key note. It's not a strategy problem, it's an execution problem. So, we've got a great story here and we're really excited to have CUBE alumni, Andrea Ward. She's now the CMO of Magento Commerce. Welcome back, Andrea. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here and great to be at this conference. The buzz is amazing and I was here two years ago and it's grown so much, just in the two years. >> How many people were there, they say it's 6,000, now. >> I mean, it looks like it's about doubled. I don't know what the numbers were two years ago but the participation is amazing and it's such a great opportunity for local businesses to bring employees from their companies, have them have a chance just to talk and learn from such powerful women. So, it's been a really great conference. >> And, it's also a cross of so many kind of verticals if you will, because you know we go to a lot of tech conferences. This is more kind of a cross industry with banking and insurance and, you know, United Airlines we talked to earlier. And so, it's a much more diverse kind of set. >> Absolutely, I mean the women on the panels this morning spanned legal professions, government, entertainment, business, really diverse issue and it's fantastic that women are coming together to support each other to help make a difference. >> So last we saw you, I think we were on the street on Howard Street a couple years back which was pretty exciting as well, but now your new company, Magento Commerce. So, for people who aren't familiar with the company, give them kind of the four-one-one. >> Yeah great, well Magento Commerce is a leading commerce technology platform for mid-size businesses. We have recently separated from Ebay about 15 months ago and are now a privately held company and we power about a third of the world's commerce, believe it or not. >> That is amazing. Yeah. >> A third of the world's eCommerce. >> That's right. So, it's a fantastic company. We're growing and a part of that growth is absolutely growing a more diverse workforce and we've been putting into place some initiatives since last year. >> Yeah, part of the key note conversations were, obviously, that you need to put goals down on paper and you need to measure them and I think it was Bev Crair from Intel talked about, you know, doing it across all the pay grades. It's not just in engineering or just on the board or just the executive ranks, but really all the way across and it sounds like you guys are executing that to really help you just grow the company generically. >> Well, we're in a very lucky position in that we're experiencing growth and so that gives us room to really go out and look for amazing talent across the board. And so, we put a focus on diversity and inclusion and by doing that, we've increased the percentage of women in all roles across the company by 50% and that's since last June. So I think, you know, really just what you said earlier about execution and putting some numbers and goals against that can really make a difference. >> Right, and if you hadn't had those, that execution detail you probably couldn't have grown that fast because let's face it, it's hard to get good talent. If you're not including a broader base of talent, you're not going to be able to achieve your goals. >> Well, that's right and I think that some of that is, I don't know if you want to call it unconscious bias or unintentional, we're used to hiring people that look like us, have experience like us. And so, by encouraging that diversity, it really has made us expand the pool of applicants, make sure that we're not going for the easiest choice or the simplest choice but really considering a wide range of candidates to fill those positions. >> You know, I don't the birds of a feather conversation comes up enough, it's just easy to go with what you're familiar with. So whether it's unconscious or not, it's just easy, people are busy, you want to check the box and get off to your next task. So, you have to take a step back and consciously do the extra work, take the extra effort. >> Well, in the industry we support, the industries we support are going through digital transformation, I mean, commerce is key and central to digital transformation. And, transformation and change means that you have to consider other perspectives. You need to learn from new ideas and I think, you know, diversity plays a big part in that as well. So, I think bringing that into our own company because we're supporting that broader industry has been very important. >> Right. So, I want to take that opportunity to pivot on what you just said about in terms of the changing role of commerce. You know, I often think of like banks because in a bank, you know, your relationship was with your local branch; maybe you knew the banker, maybe you knew a couple of the tellers whatever, but you had a personal connection. Now, most people's engagement with the brands they interact with is electronic and via their phone and it's interesting that you say that. And, it's the commerce around those engagements, that the commerce is becoming the central point of gravity if you will and the relationship is spawning all from that. >> Well, I mean, personal connections are still very important and commerce I feel is like the moment where a conversation really turns into a relationship. So, it's important that those digital experiences, the customer experiences really make up the right connection with the brand. And so, that seamless interaction between what happens at the branch, for example in the financial example, on what you can do at home, that needs to be very cohesive. It needs to be trustworthy, it needs to be authentic and that means businesses need to create individual experiences that really reflect their brand. And, our company specifically has really helped businesses create those experiences, seamless experiences and translated them from digital to in-store or in the branch. I think the biggest change now is how that's starting to impact business-to-business relationships, I think. >> In what way? In the consumer world, we're used to that now right? We're all doing that in our everyday experiences. Now, we're starting to see that also come into a business-to-business relationship. So, just like the seamless conveniences that you have online in your day to day life, people want to see that in the workplace, too. And so, we're seeing the biggest change now in those types of business models. >> They're rocking in the background, if you can't hear them. >> Yeah! We are here. >> Yeah! You know, it's funny, I just saw, something come across the feed talking about that annoying business-to-business add in Instagram, but then aren't you glad you saw it? >> Yeah. >> So, it's interesting how, you know, the B to C norms, you know, continue to help define what's going on in the B to B space and we've seen it in Enterprise Software Applications and Cloud and the flexibility and speed of innovation. It just continues to really drive the business-to-business relationship. >> Yeah, and I think just like in the business-to-consumer world, it has started with content in business-to-business. But, now people want to move from just learning and knowledge to actually transacting which means that companies need to enable specialized price list, account management, things like that and that's starting to surface in the commerce world as well. So, we're really excited about that and we're going to be sharing some of that at our conference next week; Imagine, in Las Vegas. >> Okay yeah, it's amazing how fast. It was not that long ago, we were just trying to get the 360 view. Right? We were just trying to pull from all the various desperate systems to know who that customer was for a given system. Now, it's a segmentation to want, a very different challenge. >> Right, I mean it's that change from thinking about trying to attract your customer to come to your business to really bringing the business to the customer. I mean, I think that's what some of this digital technology is allowing us to do. We're going to them rather than trying to draw them in to come to us, if that makes sense. This idea of commerce coming to you, right? >> And, it's got to come to you with something that's relevant, that's topical, that's timely. >> That's easy to execute, that can mirror a real experience. I mean, you hear a lot of things about, things like virtual reality, artificial intelligence. I mean, all of that's just gimmicks unless you can actually think about how you make that real for your brand. So, for example, we have a customer in Mexico City who is selling eyewear, right. And so, everybody when they buy glasses, they want to try them on, so we need to help them give their customers that virtual experience. If they can't come into the store and try them on, we want to be able to let them try them on at home. So, that's a natural extension of the brand and a way to use virtual reality and I think businesses are still trying to figure that out. But, if those customers didn't have that experience, it'd be less likely that they actually would buy or, you know, make a commerce transaction. >> But, if I'm hearing you, instead of it really kind of being in a marketing effort that then it's completed with a transaction, you're kind of coming at that which you just described from the transaction first and this is really a supporting or an enabling activity. >> That's right, it all starts with the customer understanding what is going to help them make their decisions. Giving them experiences that feel seamless, giving them options. So, if they want to come in-store but see what's maybe available at another store for pick-up or if they want to come in-store and order online or if they want to order from home and then go into the store and pick it up. It's really about giving the customer the right options for them. >> Right. >> Another great story we had is, I mean, how many of us travel, I know you travel a lot. >> Right. >> I travel a ton. >> Especially, to Vegas. (chuckling) >> Especially, to Vegas! And, you know, my kids are always expecting something when I come home but who has time? So, you know, one of our partners worked with the Frankfurt Airport and created an application where on the way to the airport, you can go shopping at all of their stores in the airport and have your package waiting for you at the gate on the way to the plane. So now, you know, they've figured out what their customers want to do first by creating this great shopping experience at the airport. Now, they know people are running through the airport, how can we extend that shopping experience for them while they're sitting in the taxi (chuckling) on the way, have it waiting for them at the gate? And so, for me personally, working for a company that's helping customers to do those kinds of things has really been fun. >> Right, because they always have the liquor for ya ready to go at the gate but never the kids', you know, t-shirts or a little tchotchke or, I can remember running through Heathrow time and time again trying to find something quickly. >> Yeah, and now with two kids and a husband that all want something different, (laughing) you know, it makes it much easier for me. >> Alright, Andrea, well you've been doing this marketing thing for a long time. I'll give you the last word both on the conference and kind of, you know, as a marketer to see where we're going with A.I. and really the ability to actually segment to one. You know, how exciting is that for you? >> Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. I think, you know, marketers want to create relationships with their brand and all of these tools are giving us better access, better chance to create that fantastic experience. So, it's a great time to be a marketer. (chuckling) And, it's a great time to be at this conference, too so. >> Alright. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for stopping by, Andrea Ward. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the Professional Business Women's Conference in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)