>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's TheCUBE, covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to sunny Orlando everybody. This is TheCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and this is PentahoWorld, #PWorld17. Don DeLoach here, he's the co-chair of the midwest IoT council. Thanks so much for coming on TheCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> So you've just written a new book. I got it right in my hot off the presses in my hands. The Future of IoT, leveraging the shift to a data-centric world. Can you see that okay? Alright, great, how's that, you got that? Well congratulations on getting the book done. >> Thanks. >> It's like, the closest a male can come to having a baby, I guess. But, so, it's fantastic. Let's start with sort of the premise of the book. What, why'd you write it? >> Sure, I'll give you the short version, 'cause that in and of itself could go on forever. I'm a data guy by background. And for the last five or six years, I've really been passionate about IoT. And the two converged with a focus on data, but it was kind of ahead of where most people in IoT were, because they were mostly focused on sensor technology and communications, and to a limited extent, the workflow. So I kind of developed this thesis around where I thought the market was going to go. And I would have this conversation over and over and over, but it wasn't really sticking and so I decided maybe I should write a book to talk about it and it took me forever to write the book 'cause fundamentally I didn't know what I was doing. Fortunately, I was able to eventually bring on a couple of co-authors and collectively we were able to get the book written and we published it in May of this year. >> And give us the premise, how would you summarize? >> So the central thesis of the book is that the market is going to shift from a focus on IoT enabled products like a smart refrigerator or a low-fat fryer or a turbine in a factory or a power plant or whatever. It's going to shift from the IoT enabled products to the IoT enabled enterprise. If you look at the Harvard Business Review article that Jim Heppelmann and Michael Porter did in 2014, they talked about the progression from products to smart products to smart, connected products, to product systems, to system of systems. We've largely been focused on smart, connected products, or as I would call IoT enabled products. And most of the technology vendors have focused their efforts on helping the lighting vendor or the refrigerator vendor or whatever IoT enable their product. But when that moves to mass adoption of IoT, if you're the CIO or the CEO of SeaLand or Disney or Walmart or whatever, you're not going to want to be a company that has 100,000 IoT enabled products. You're going to want to be an IoT enabled company. And the difference is really all around data primacy and how that data is treated. So, right now, most of the data goes from the IoT enabled product to the product provider. And they tell you what data you can get. But that, if you look at the progression, it's almost mathematically impossible that that is sustainable because company, organizations are going to want to take my, like let's just say we're talking about a fast food restaurant. They're going to want to take the data from the low-fat fryer and the data from the refrigerator or the shake machine or the lighting system or whatever, and they're going to want to look at it in the context of the other data. And they're going to also want to combine it with their point-of-sale or crew scheduling, or inventory and then if they're smart, they'll start to even pull in external data, like pedestrian traffic or street traffic or microweather or whatever, and they'll create a much richer signature. And then, it comes down to governance, where I want to create this enriched data set, and then propagate it to the right constituent in the right time in the right way. So you still give the product provider back the data that they want, and there's nothing that precludes you from doing that. And you give the low-fat fryer provider the data that they want, but you give your regional and corporate offices a different view of the same data, and you give the FDA or your supply chain partner, it's still the same atomic data, but what you're doing is you're separating the creation of the data from the consumption of the data, and that's where you gain maximum leverage, and that's really the thesis of the book. >> It's data, great summary by the way, so it's data in context, and the context of the low-fat fryer is going to be different than the workflow within that retail operation. >> Yeah, that's right and again, this is where, the product providers have initially kind of pushed back because they feel like they have stickiness and loyalty that's bred out of that link. But, first of all, that's going to change. So if you're Walmart or a major concern and you say, "I'm going to do a lighting RFP," and there's 10 vendors that say, "Hey, we want to compete for this," and six of 'em will allow Walmart to control the data, and four say, "No, we have to control the data," their list just went to six. They're just not going to put up with that. >> Dave: Period, the end, absolutely. >> That's right. So if the product providers are smart, they're going to get ahead of this and say, "Look, I get where the market's going. "We're going to need to give you control of the data, "but I'm going to ask for a contract that says "I'm going to get the data I'm already getting, "'cause I need to get that, and you want me to get that. "But number two, I'm going to recognize that "they can give, Walmart can give me my data back, "but enrich it and contextualize it "so I get better data back." So everybody can win, but it's all about the right architecture. >> Well and the product guys going to have the Trojan horse strategy of getting in when nobody was really looking. >> Don: That's right. >> And okay, so they've got there. Do you envision, Don, a point at which the Walmart might say, "No, that's our data "and you don't get it." >> Um, not really- >> or is there going to be a quid pro quo? >> and here's why. The argument that the product providers have made all along is, almost in a condescending way sometimes, although not intentionally condescending, it's been, look, we're selling you this low-fat fryer for your fast food restaurant. And you say you want the data, but you know, we had a team of people who are experts in this. Leave that to us, we'll analyze the data and we'll give you back what you need. Now, there's some truth to the fact that they should know their products better than anybody, and if I'm the fast food chain, I want them to get that data so that they can continually analyze and help me do my job better. They just don't have to get that data at my expense. There are ways to cooperatively work this, but again, it comes back to just the right architecture. So what we call the first receiver is in essence, setting up an abstraction close to the point of the ingestion of all this data. Upon which it's cleansed, enriched, and then propagated again to the right constituent in the right time in the right way. And by the way, I would add, with the right security considerations, and with the right data privacy considerations, 'cause like, if you look around the market now, things like GEP are in Europe and what we've seen in the US just in the wake of the elections and everything around how data is treated, privacy concerns are going to be huge. So if you don't know how to treat the data in the context of how it needs to be leveraged, you're going to lose that leverage of the data. >> Well, plus the widget guys are going to say "Look, we have to do predictive maintenance "on those devices and you want us to do that." You know, they say follow the money. Let's follow the data. So, what's the data flow look like in your mind? You got these edge devices. >> Yep, physical or virtual. Doesn't have to be a physical edge. Although, in a lot of cases, there are good reasons why you'd want a physical edge, but there's nothing technologically that says you have to have a physical edge. >> Elaborate on that, would you? What do you mean by virtual? >> Sure, so let's say I have a server inside a retail outfit. And it's collecting all of my IoT data and consolidating it and persisting it into a data store and then propagating it to a variety of constituents. That would be creating the first receiver in the physical edge. There's nothing that says that that edge device can't grab that data, but then persist it in a distributed Amazon cloud instance, or a Rackspace instance or whatever. It doesn't actually need to be persisted physically on the edge, but there's no reason it can't either. >> Okay, now I understand that now. So the guys at Wikibon, which is a sort of sister company to TheCUBE, have envisioned this three tiered data model where you've got the devices at the edge where real-time activity's going on, real-time analytics, and then you've got this sort of aggregation point, I guess call it a gateway. And then you've got, and that's as I say, aggregation of all these edge devices. And then you've got the cloud where the heavy modeling is done. It could be your private cloud or your public cloud. So does that three tier model make sense to you? >> Yeah, so what you're describing as the first tier is actually the sensor layer. The gateway layer that you're describing, in the book would be characterized as the first receiver. It's basically an edge tier that is augmented to persist and enrich the data and then apply the proper governance to it. But what I would argue is, in reality, I mean, your reference architecture is spot-on. But if you actually take that one step further, it's actually an n-tier architecture. Because there's no reason why the data doesn't go from the ten franchise stores, to the regional headquarters, to the country headquarters, to the corporate headquarters, and every step along the way, including the edge, you're going to see certain types of analytics and computational work done. I'll put a plug for my friends at Hitachi Lumada in on this, you know, there's like 700 horizontal IoT platforms out there. There aren't going to be 700 winners. There's going to be probably eight to 10, and that's only because the different specific verticals will provide for more winners than it would be if it was just one like a search engine. But, the winners are going to have to have an extensible architecture that is, will ultimately allow enterprises to do the very things I'm talking about doing. And so there are a number out there, but one of the things, and Rob Tiffany, who's the CTO of Lumada, I think has a really good handle on his team on an architecture that is really plausible for accomplishing this as the market migrates into the future. >> And that architecture's got to be very flexible, not just elastic, but sometimes we use the word plastic, plasticity, being able to go in any direction. >> Well, sure, up to and including the use of digital twins and avatars and the logic that goes along with that and the ability to spin something up and spin something down gives you that flexibility that you as an enterprise, especially the larger the enterprise, the more important that becomes, need. >> How much of the data, Don, at that edge do you think will be persisted, two part question? It's not all going to be persisted, is it? Isn't that too expensive? Is it necessary to persist all of that data? >> Well, no. So this is where, you'll hear the notion of data exhaust. What that really means is, let's just say I'm instrumenting every room in this hotel and each room has six different sensors in it and I'm taking a reading once a second. The ratio of inconsequential to consequential data is probably going to be over 99 to one. So it doesn't really make sense to persist that data and it sure as hell doesn't make sense to take that data and push it into a cloud where I spend more to reduce the value of the payload. That's just dumb. But what will happen is that, there are two things, one, I think people will see the value in locally persisting the data that has value, the consequential data, and doing that in a way that's stored at least for some period of time so you can run the type of edge analytics that might benefit from having that persisted store. The other thing that I think will happen, and this is, I don't talk much, I talk a little bit about it in the book, but there's this whole notion where when we get to the volumes of data that we really talk about where IoT will go by like 2025, it's going to push the physical limitations of how we can accommodate that. So people will begin to use techniques like developing statistical metadata models that are a highly accurate metadata representation of the entirety of the data set, but probably in about one percent of the space that's queryable and suitable for machine learning where it's going to enable you to do what you just physically couldn't do before. So that's a little bit into the future, but there are people doing some fabulous work on that right now and that'll creep into the overall lexicon over time. >> Is that a lightweight digital twin that gives you substantially the same insight? >> It could augment the digital twin in ways that allow you to stand up digital twins where you might not be able to before. The thing that, the example that most people would know about are, like in the Apache ecosystem, there are toolsets like SnappyData that are basically doing approximation, but they're doing it via sampling. And that is a step in that direction, but what you're looking for is very high value approximation that doesn't lose the outlier. So like in IoT, one of the things you normally are looking for is where am I going to pick up on anomalous behavior? Well if I'm using a sample set, and I'm only taking 15%, I by definition am going to lose a lot of that anomalous behavior. So it has to be a holistic representation of the data, but what happens is that that data is transformed into statistics that can be queryable as if it was the atomic data set, but what you're getting is a very high value approximation in a fraction of the space and time and resources. >> Ok, but that's not sampling. >> No, it's statistical metadata. There are, there's a, my last company had developed a thing that we called approximate query, and it was based on that exact set of patents around the formation of a statistical metadata model. It just so happens it's absolutely suited for where IoT is going. It's kind of, IoT isn't really there yet. People are still trying to figure out the edge in its most basic forms, but the sheer weight of the data and the progression of the market is going to force people to be innovative in how they look at some of these things. Just like, if you look at things like privacy, right now, people think in terms of anonymization. And that's, basically, I'm going to de-link data contextually where I'm going to effectively lose the linkages to the context in order to conform with data privacy. But there are techniques, like if you look at GDCAR, their techniques, within certain safe harbors, that allow you to pseudonymize the data where you can actually relink it under certain conditions. And there are some smart people out there solving these problems. That's where the market's going to go, it's just going to get there over time. And what I would also add to this equation is, at the end of the day, right now, the concepts that are in the book about the first receiver and the create, the abstraction of the creation of the data from the consumption of the data, look, it's a pretty basic thing, but it's the type of shift that is going to be required for enterprises to truly leverage the data. The things about statistical metadata and pseudonymization, pseudonymization will come before the statistical metadata. But the market forces are going to drive more and more into those areas, but you got to walk before you run. Right now, most people still have silos, which is interesting, because when you think about the whole notion of the internet of things, it infers that it's this exploitation of understanding the state of physical assets in a very broad based environment. And yet, the funny thing is, most IoT devices are silos that emulate M2M, sort of peer to peer networks just using the internet as a communication vehicle. But that'll change. >> Right, and that's really again, back to the premise of the book. We're going from these individual products, where all the data is locked into the product silo, to this digital fabric, that is an enterprise context, not a product context. >> That's right and if you go to the toolsets that Pentaho offers, the analytic toolsets. Let's just say, now that I've got this rich data set, assuming I'm following basic architectural principles so that I can leverage the maximum amount of data, that now gives me the ability to use these type of toolsets to do far better operational analytics to know what's going on, far better forensic analysis and investigative analytics to mine through the date and do root cause analysis, far better predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics to figure out what will go on, and ultimately feed the machine learning algorithms ultimately to get to in essence, the living organism, the adaptive systems that are continuously changing and adapting to circumstances. That's kind of the Holy Grail. >> You mentioned Hitachi Vantara before. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the Hitachi, you know, two years ago, we saw the acquisition, said, okay, now what? And you know, on paper it sounded good, and now it starts to come together, it starts to make more sense. You know, storage is going to the cloud. HDS says, alright, well we got this Hitachi relationship. But what do you make of that? How do you assess it, and where do you see it going? >> First of all, I actually think the moves that they've done are good. And I would not say that if I didn't think it. I'd just find a politically correct way not to say that. But I do think it's good. So they created the Hitachi Insight Group about a year and a half ago, and now that's been folded into Hitachin Vantara, alongside HDS and Pentaho and I think that it's a fairly logical set of elements coming together. I think they're going down the right path. In full disclosure, I worked for Hitachi Data Systems from '91 til '94, so it's not like I'm a recent employee of them, it's 25 years ago, but my experience with Hitachi corporate and the way they approach things has been unlike a lot of really super large companies, who may be super large, but may not be the best engineers, or may not always get everything done so well, Hitachi's a really formidable organization. And I think what they're doing with Pentaho and HDS and the Insight Group and specifically Lumada, is well thought out and I'm optimistic about where they're going. And by the way, they won't be the only winner in the equation. There's going to be eight or nine different key players, but they'll, I would not short them whatsoever. I have high hopes for them. >> The TAM is enormous. Normally, Hitachi eventually gets to where it wants to go. It's a very thoughtful company. I've been watching them for 30 years. But to a lot of people, the Pentaho and the Insight's play make a lot of sense, and then HDS, you used to work for HDS, lot of infrastructure still, lot of hardware, but a relationship with Hitachi Limited, that is quite strong, where do you see that fit, that third piece of the stool? >> So, this is where there's a few companies that have unique advantages, with Hitachi being one of them. Because if you think about IoT, IoT is the intersection of information technology and operational technology. So it's one thing to say, "I know how to build a database." or "I can build machine learning algorithms," or whatever. It's another thing to say, "I know how to build trains "or CAT scans or smart city lighting systems." And the domain expertise married with the technology delivers a set of capabilities that you can't match without that domain expertise. And, I mean, if you even just reduce it down to artificial intelligence and machine learning, you get an expert ML or AI guy, and they're only as good as the limits of their domain expertise. So that's why, and again, that's why I go back to the comparison to search engines, where there's going to be like, there's Google and maybe Yahoo. There's probably going to be more platform winners because the vertical expertise is going to be very, very important, but there's not going to be 700 of 'em. But Hitachi has an advantage that they bring to the table, 'cause they have very deep roots in energy, in medical equipment, in transportation. All of that will manifest itself in what they're doing in a big way, I think. >> Okay, so, but a lot of the things that you described, and help me understand this, are Hitachi Limited. Now of course, Hitachi Data Systems started as, National Advance Systems was a distribution arm for Hitachi IT products. >> Don: Right, good for you, not many people remember. >> I'm old. So, like I said, I had a 30 year history with this company. Do you foresee that that, and by the way, interestingly, was often criticized back when you were working for HDS, it was like, it's still a distribution hub, but in the last decade, HDS has become much more of a contributor to the innovation and the product strategy and so forth. Having said that, it seems to me advantageous if some of those things you discussed, the trains, the medical equipment, can start flowing back through HDS. I'm not sure if that's explicitly the plan. I didn't necessarily hear that, but it sort of has to, right? >> Well, I'm not privy to those discussions, so it would be conjecture on my part. >> Let's opine, but right, doesn't that make sense? >> Don: It makes perfect sense. >> Because, I mean HDS for years was just this storage silo. And then storage became a very uninteresting business, and credit to Hitachi for pivoting. But it seems to me that they could really, and they probably have a, I had Brian Householder on earlier I wish I had explored this more with him. But it just seems, the question for them is, okay, how are you going to tap those really diverse businesses. I mean, it's a business like a GE or a Siemens. I mean, it's very broad based. >> Well, again, conjecture on my part, but one way I would do it would be to start using Lumada in the various operations, the domain-specific operations right now with Hitachi. Whether they plan to do that or not, I'm not sure of. I've heard that they probably will. >> That's a data play, obviously, right? >> Well it's a platform play. And it's enabling technology that should augment what's already going on in the various elements of Hitachi. Again, I'm, this is conjecture on my part. But you asked, let's just go with this. I would say that makes a lot of sense. I'd be surprised if they don't do that. And I think in the process of doing that, you start to crosspollinate that expertise that gives you a unique advantage. It goes back to if you have unique advantages, you can choose to exploit them or not. Very few companies have the set of unique advantages that somebody like Hitachi has in terms of their engineering and massive reach into so many, you know, Hitachi, GE, Siemens, these are companies that have big reach to the extent that they exploit them or not. One of the things about Hitachi that's different than almost anybody though is they have all this domain expertise, but they've been in the technology-specific business for a long time as well, making computers. And so, they actually already have the internal expertise to crosspollinate, but you know, whether they do it or not, time will tell. >> Well, but it's interesting to watch the big whales, the horses in the track, if you will. Certainly GE has made a lot of noise, like, okay, we're a software company. And now you're seeing, wow, that's not so easy, and then again, I'm sanguine about GE. I think eventually they'll get there. And then you see IBM's got their sort of IoT division. They're bringing in people. Another company with a lot of IT expertise. Not a lot of OT expertise. And then you see Hitachi, who's actually got both. Siemens I don't know as well, but presumably, they're more OT than IT and so you would think that if you had to evaluate the companies' positions, that Hitachi's in a unique position. Certainly have a lot of software. We'll see if they can leverage that in the data play, obviously Pentaho is a key piece of that. >> One would assume, yeah for sure. No, I mean, I again, I think, I'm very optimistic about their future. I think very highly of the people I know inside that I think are playing a role here. You know, it's not like there aren't people at GE that I think highly of, but listen, you know, San Ramon was something that was spun up recently. Hitachi's been doing this for years and years and years. You know, so different players have different capabilities, but Hitachi seems to have sort of a holistic set of capabilities that they can bring together and to date, I've been very impressed with how they've been going about it. And especially with the architecture that they're bringing to bear with Lumada. >> Okay, the book is The Future of IoT, leveraging the shift to a data-centric world. Don DeLoach, and you had a co-author here as well. >> I had two co-authors. One is Wael Elrifai from Pentaho, Hitachi Vantara and the other is Emil Berthelsen, a Gartner analyst who was with Machina Research and then Gartner acquired them and Emil has stayed on with them. Both of them great guys and we wouldn't have this book if it weren't for the three of us together. I never would have pulled this off on my own, so it's a collective work. >> Don DeLoach, great having you on TheCUBE. Thanks very much for coming on. Alright, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back. This is PentahoWorld 2017, and this is TheCUBE. Be right back.

(lively music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Supercloud presentation here. I'm theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. What a great segment here. We're going to unpack the networking aspect of the cloud, how that translates into what Supercloud architecture and platform deployment scenarios look like. And demystify multi-cloud, hybridcloud. We've got two great experts. Amir Khan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Alkira, Atif Khan, Co-Founder and CTO of Alkira. These guys been around since 2018 with the startup, but before that story, history in the tech industry. I mean, routing early days, multiple waves, multiple cycles. >> Welcome three decades. >> Welcome to Supercloud. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> So, let's get your take on Supercloud because it's been one of those conversations that really galvanized the industry because it kind of highlights almost this next wave, this next side of the street that everyone's going to be on that's going to be successful. The laggards on the legacy seem to be stuck on the old model. SaaS is growing up, it's ISVs, it's ecosystems, hyperscale, full hybrid. And then multi-cloud around the corners cause all this confusion, everyone's hand waving. You know, this is a solution, that solution, where are we? What do you guys see as this supercloud dynamic? >> So where we start from is always focusing on the customer problem. And in 2018 when we identified the problem, we saw that there were multiple clouds with many diverse ways of doing things from the network perspective, and customers were struggling with that. So we delved deeper into that and looked at each one of the cloud architectures completely independent. And there was no common solution and customers were struggling with that from the perspective. They wanted to be in multiple clouds, either through mergers and acquisitions or running an application which may be more cost effective to run in something or maybe optimized for certain reasons to run in a different cloud. But from the networking perspective, everything needed to come together. So that's, we are starting to define it as a supercloud now, but basically, it's a common infrastructure across all clouds. And then integration of high lift services like, you know, security or IPAM services or many other types of services like inter-partner routing and stuff like that. So, Amir, you agree then that multi-cloud is simply a default result of having whatever outcomes, either M&A, some productivity software, maybe Azure. >> Yes. >> Amazon has this and then I've got on-premise application, so it's kinds mishmash. >> So, I would qualify it with hybrid multi-cloud because everything is going to be interconnected. >> John: Got it. >> Whether it's on-premise, remote users or clouds. >> But have CTO perspective, obviously, you got developers, multiple stacks, got AWS, Azure and GCP, other. Not everyone wants to kind of like go all in, but yet they don't want to hedge too much because it's a resource issue. And I got to learn this stack, I got to learn that stack. So then now, you have this default multi-cloud, hybrid multi-cloud, then it's like, okay, what do I do? How do you spread that around? Is it dangerous? What's the the approach technically? What's some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, certainly. John, first, thanks for having us here. So, before I get to that, I'll just add a little bit to what Amir was saying, like how we started, what we were seeing and how it, you know, correlates with the supercloud. So, as you know, before this company, Alkira, we were doing, we did the SD-WAN company, which was Viptela. So there, we started seeing when people started deploying SD-WAN at like a larger scale. We started like, you know, customers coming to us and saying they needed connectivity into the cloud from the SD-WAN. They wanted to extend the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud. So we came up with an architecture, which was like later we started calling them Cloud onRamps, where we built, you know, a transit VPC and put like the virtual instances of SD-WAN appliances extended from there to the cloud. But before we knew, like it started becoming very complicated for the customers because it wasn't just connectivity, it also required, you know, other use cases. You had to instantiate or bring in security appliances in there. You had to secure all of that stuff. There were requirements for, you know, different regions. So you had to bring up the same thing in different regions. Then multiple clouds, what did you do? You had to replicate the same thing in multiple clouds. And now if there was was requirement between clouds, how were you going to do it? You had to route traffic from somewhere, and come up with all those routing controls and stuff. So, it was very complicated. >> Like spaghetti code, but on network. >> The games begin, in fact, one of our customers called it spaghetti mess. And so, that's where like we thought about where was the industry going and which direction the industry was going into? And we came up with the Alkira where what we are doing is building a common infrastructure across multiple clouds, across in, you know, on-prem locations, be it data centers or physical sites, branches sites, et cetera, with integrated security and network networking services inside. And, you know, nowadays, networking is not only about connectivity, you have to secure everything. So, security has to be built in. Redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery. So all of that needs to be built in. So that's like, you know, kind of a definition of like what we thought at that time, what is turning into supercloud now. >> Yeah. It's interesting too, you mentioned, you know, VPCs is not, configuration of loans a hassle. Nevermind the manual mistakes could be made, but as you decide to do something you got to, "Oh, we got to get these other things." A lot of the hyper scales and a lot of the alpha cloud players now, and cloud native folks, they're kind of in that mode of, "Wow, look at what we've built." Now, they're got to maintain, how do I refresh it? Like, how do I keep the talent? So they got this similar chaotic environment where it's like, okay, now they're already already through, so I think they're going to be okay. But then some people want to bypass it completely. So there's a lot of customers that we see out there that fit the makeup of, I'm cloud first, I've lifted and shifted, I move some stuff to the cloud. But I want to bypass all that learnings from all the people that are gone through the past three years. Can I just skip that and go to a multi-cloud or coherent infrastructure? What do you think about that? What's your view? >> So yeah, so if you look at these enterprises, you know, many of them just to find like the talent, which for one cloud as far as the IT staff is concerned, it's hard enough. And now, when you have multiple clouds, it's hard to find people the talent which is, you know, which has expertise across different clouds. So that's where we come into the picture. So our vision was always to simplify all of this stuff. And simplification, it cannot be just simplification because you cannot just automate the workflows of the cloud providers underneath. So you have to, you know, provide your full data plane on top of it, fed full control plane, management plane, policy and management on top of it. And coming back to like your question, so these nowadays, those people who are working on networking, you know, before it used to be like CLI. You used to learn about Cisco CLI or Juniper CLI, and you used to work on it. Nowadays, it's very different. So automation, programmability, all of that stuff is the key. So now, you know, Ops guys, the DevOps guys, so these are the people who are in high demand. >> So what do you think about the folks out there that are saying, okay, you got a lot of fragmentation. I got the stacks, I got a lot of stove pipes, if you will, out there on the stack. I got to learn this from Azure. Can you guys have with your product abstract the way that's so developers don't need to know the ins and outs of stack's, almost like a gateway, if you will, the old days. But like I'm a developer or team develop, why should I have to learn the management layer of Azure? >> That's exactly what we started, you know, out with to solve. So it's, what we have built is a platform and the platform sits inside the cloud. And customers are able to build their own network or a virtual network on top using that platform. So the platform has its own data plane, own control plane and management plane with a policy layer on top of it. So now, it's the platform which is sitting in different clouds, but from a customer's point of view, it's one way of doing networking. One way of instantiating or bringing in services or security services in the middle. Whether those are our security services or whether those are like services from our partners, like Palo Alto or Checkpoint or Cisco. >> So you guys brought the SD-WAN mojo and refactored it for the cloud it sounds like. >> No. >> No? (chuckles) >> We cannot said. >> All right, explain. >> It's way more than that. >> I mean, SD-WAN was wan. I mean, you're talking about wide area networks, talking about connected, so explain the difference. >> SD-WAN was primarily done for one major reason. MPLS was expensive, very strong SLAs, but very low speed. Internet, on the other hand, you sat at home and you could access your applications much faster. No SLA, very low cost, right? So we wanted to marry the two together so you could have a purely private infrastructure and a public infrastructure and secure both of them by creating a common secure fabric across all those environments. And then seamlessly tying it into your internal branch and data center and cloud network. So, it merely brought you to the edge of the cloud. It didn't do anything inside the cloud. Now, the major problem resides inside the clouds where you have to optimize the clouds themselves. Take a step back. How were the clouds built? Basically, the cloud providers went to the Ciscos and Junipers and the rest of the world, built the network in the data centers or across wide area infrastructure, and brought it all together and tried to create a virtualized layer on top of that. But there were many limitations of this underlying infrastructure that they had built. So number of routes per region, how inter region connectivity worked, or how many routes you could carry to the VPCs of V nets? That all those were becoming no common policy across, you know, these environments, no segmentation across these environments, right? So the networking constructs that the enterprise customers were used to as enterprise class carry class capabilities, they did not exist in the cloud. So what did the customer do? They ended up stitching it together all manually. And that's why Atif was alluding to earlier that it became a spaghetti mess for the customers. And then what happens is, as a result, day two operations, you know, troubleshooting, everything becomes a nightmare. So what do you do? You have to build an infrastructure inside the cloud. Cloud has enough raw capabilities to build the solutions inside there. Netflix's of the world. And many different companies have been born in the cloud and evolved from there. So why could we not take the raw capabilities of the clouds and build a network cloud or a supercloud on top of these clouds to optimize the whole infrastructure and seamlessly connecting it into the on-premise and remote user locations, right? So that's your, you know, hybrid multi-cloud solution. >> Well, great call out on the SD-WAN in common versus cloud. 'Cause I think this is important because you're building a network layer in the cloud that spans out so the customers don't have to get into the, there's a gap in the system that I'm used to, my operating environment, of having lockdown security and network. >> So yeah. So what you do is you use the raw capabilities like bandwidth or virtual machines, or you know, containers, or, you know, different types of serverless capabilities. And you bring it all together in a way to solve the networking problems, thereby creating a supercloud, which is an abstraction layer which hides all the complexity of the underlying clouds from the customer, right? And it provides a common infrastructure across all environments to that customer, right? That's the beauty of it. And it does it in a way that it looks like, if they have the networking knowledge, they can apply it to this new environment and carry it forward. One way of doing security across all clouds and hybrid environments. One way of doing routing. One way of doing large-scale network address translation. One way of doing IPAM services. So people are tired of doing individual things and individual clouds and on-premise locations, right? So now they're getting something common. >> You guys brought that, you brought all that to bear and flexible for the customer to essentially self-serve their network cloud. >> Yes, yeah. Is that the wave? >> And nowadays, from business perspective, agility is the key, right? You have to move at the pace of the business. If you don't, you are losing. >> So, would it be safe to say that you guys have a network supercloud? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> We, pretty much, yeah. Absolutely. >> What does that mean to our customer? What's in it for them? What's the benefit to the customer? I got a network supercloud, it connects, provides SLA, all the capabilities I need. What do they get? What's the end point for them? What's the end? >> Atif, maybe you can talk some examples. >> The IT infrastructure is all like distributed now, right? So you have applications running in data centers. You have applications running in one cloud. Other cloud, public clouds, enterprises are depending on so many SaaS applications. So now, these are, you can call these endpoints. So a supercloud or a network cloud, from our perspective, it's a cloud in the middle or a network in the middle, which provides connectivity from any endpoint to any endpoint. So, you are able to connect to the supercloud or network cloud in one way no matter where you are. So now, whichever cloud you are in, whichever cloud you need to connect to. And also, it's not just connecting to the cloud. So you need to do a lot of stuff, a lot of networking inside the cloud also. So now, as Amir was saying, every cloud has its own from a networking, you know, the concept perspective or the construct, they are different. There are limitations in there also. So this supercloud, which is sitting on top, basically, your platform is sitting into the cloud, but the supercloud is built on top of using your platform. So that abstracts all those complexities, all those limitations. So now your limitations are whatever the limitations of that platform are. So now your platform, that platform is in our control. So we can keep building it, we can keep scaling it horizontally. Because one of the things is that, you know, in this cloud era, one of the things is autoscaling these services. So why can't the network now autoscale also, just like your other services. >> Network autoscaling is a genius idea, and I think that's a killer. I want to ask the the follow on question because I think, first of all, I love what you guys are doing. So, I think it's a great example of this new innovation. It's not obvious until you see it, right? Geographical is huge. So, you know, single instance, global instances, multiple instances, you're seeing global. How do you guys look at that global equation? Because as companies expand their clouds into geos, and then ultimately, you know, it's obviously continent, region and locales. You're going to have geographic issues. So, this is an extension of your network cloud? >> Amir: It is the extension of the network cloud because if you look at this hyperscalers, they're sitting pretty much everywhere in the globe. So, wherever their regions are, the beauty of building a supercloud is that you can by definition, be available in those regions. It literally takes a day or two of testing for our stack to run in those regions, to make sure there are no nuances that we run into, you know, for that region. The moment we bring it up in that region, all customers can onboard into that solution. So literally, what used to take months or years to build a global infrastructure, now, you can configure it in 10 minutes basically, and bring it up in less than one hour. Since when did we see any solution- >> And by the way, >> that can come up with. >> when the edge comes out too, you're going to start to see more clouds get bolted on. >> Exactly. And you can expand to the edge of the network. That's why we call cloud the new edge, right? >> John: Yeah, it is. Now, I think you guys got a good solutions, network clouds, superclouds, good. So the question on the premise side, so I get the cloud play. It's very cool. You can expand out. It's a nice layer. I'm sure you manage the SLAs between latency and all kinds of things. Knowing when not to do things. Physics or physics. Okay. Now, you've got the on-premise. What's the on-premise equation look like? >> So on-premise, the kind of customers, we are working with large enterprises, mid-size enterprises. So they have on-prem networks, they have deployed, in many cases, they have deployed SD-WAN. In many cases, they have MPLS. They have data centers also. And a lot of these companies are, you know, moving the applications from the data center into the cloud. But we still have large enterprise- >> But for you guys, you can sit there too with non server or is it a box or what is it? >> It's a software stack, right? So, we are a software company. >> Okay, so no box. >> No box. >> Okay, got it. >> No box. >> It's even better. So, we can connect any, as I mentioned, any endpoint, whether it's data centers. So, what happens is usually these enterprises from the data centers- >> John: It's a cloud endpoint for you. >> Cloud endpoint for us. And they need highspeed connectivity into the cloud. And our network cloud is sitting inside the or supercloud is sitting inside the cloud. So we need highspeed connectivity from the data centers. This is like multi-gig type of connectivity. So we enable that connectivity as a service. And as Amir was saying, you are able to bring it up in minutes, pretty much. >> John: Well, you guys have a great handle on supercloud. I really appreciate you guys coming on. I have to ask you guys, since you have so much experience in the industry, multiple inflection points you've guys lived through and we're all old, and we can remember those glory days. What's the big deal going on right now? Because you can connect the dots and you can imagine, okay, like a Lambda function spinning up some connectivity. I need instant access to a new route, throw some, I need to send compute to an edge point for process data. A lot of these kind of ad hoc services are going to start flying around, which used to be manually configured as you guys remember. >> Amir: And that's been the problem, right? The shadow IT, that was the biggest problem in the enterprise environment. So that's what we are trying to get the customers away from. Cloud teams came in, individuals or small groups of people spun up instances in the cloud. It was completely disconnected from the on-premise environment or the existing IT environment that the customer had. So, how do you bring it together? And that's what we are trying to solve for, right? At a large scale, in a carrier cloud center (indistinct). >> What do you call that? Shift right or shift left? Shift left is in the cloud native world security. >> Amir: Yes. >> Networking and security, the two hottest areas. What are you shifting? Up or down? I mean, the network's moving up the stack. I mean, you're seeing the run times at Kubernetes later' >> Amir: Right, right. It's true we're end-to-end virtualization. So you have plumbing, which is the physical infrastructure. Then on top of that, now for the first time, you have true end-to-end virtualization, which the cloud-like constructs are providing to us. We tried to virtualize the routers, we try to virtualize instances at the server level. Now, we are bringing it all together in a truly end-to-end virtualized manner to connect any endpoint anywhere across the globe. Whether it's on-premise, home, multiple clouds, or SaaS type environments. >> Yeah. If you talk about the technical benefits beyond virtualizations, you kind of see in virtualization be abstracted away. So you got end-to-end virtualization, but you don't need to know virtualization to take advantage of it. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> What are some of the tech involved where, what's the trend around on top of virtual? What's the easy button for that? >> So there are many, many use cases from the customers and they're, you know, some of those use cases, they used to deliver out of their data centers before. So now, because you, know, it takes a long time to spend something up in the data center and stuff. So the trend is and what enterprises are looking for is agility. And to achieve that agility, they are moving those services or those use cases into the cloud. So another technical benefit of like something like a supercloud and what we are doing is we allow customers to, you know, move their services from existing data centers into the cloud as well. And I'll give you some examples. You know, these enterprises have, you know, tons of partners. They provide connectivity to their partners, to select resources. It used to happen inside the data center. You would bring in connectivity into the data center and apply like tons of ACLs and whatnot to make sure that you are able to only connect. And now those use cases are, they need to be enabled inside the cloud. And the customer's customers are also, it's not just coming from the on-prem, they're coming from the cloud as well. So, if they're coming from the cloud as well as from on-prem, so you need like an infrastructure like supercloud, which is sitting inside the cloud and is able to handle all these use cases. So all of these use cases have to be, so that requires like moving those services from the data center into the cloud or into the supercloud. So, they're, oh, as we started building this service over the last four years, we have come across so many use cases. And to deliver those use cases, you have to have a platform. So you have to have your own platform because otherwise you are depending on somebody else's, you know, capabilities. And every time their capabilities change, you have to change. >> John: I'm glad you brought up the platform 'cause I want to get your both reaction to this. So Bob Muglia just said on theCUBE here at Supercloud, that supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question is, is supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> That's an interesting view on things, you know? I mean, if you think of it, you have to design or architect a solution before we turn it into a platform. >> John: It's a trick question actually. >> So it's a, you know, so we look at it as that you have to have an architectural approach end to end, right? And then you build a solution based on that approach. So, I don't think that they are mutually exclusive. I think they go hand in hand. It's an architecture that you turn into a solution and provide that agility and high availability and disaster recovery capability that it built into that. >> It's interesting that these definitions might be actually redefined with this new configuration. >> Amir: Yes. >> Because architecture and platform used to mean something, like, aight here's a platform, you buy this platform. >> And then you architecture solution. >> Architect it via vendor. >> Right, right, right. >> Okay. And they have to deal with that architecture in the place of multiple superclouds. If you have too many stove pipes, then what's the purpose of supercloud? >> Right, right, right. And because, you know, historically, you built a router and you sold it to the customer. And the poor customer was supposed to install it all, you know, and interconnect all those things. And if you have 40, 50,000 router network, which we saw in our lifetime, 'cause there used to be many more branches when we were growing up in the networking industry, right? You had to create hierarchy and all kinds of things to figure out how to solve that problem. We are no longer living in that world anymore. You cannot deploy individual virtual instances. And that's what approach a lot of people are taking, which is a pure overly network. You cannot take that approach anymore. You have to evolve the architecture and then build the solution based on that architecture so that it becomes a platform which is readily available, highly scalable, and available. And at the same time, it's very, very easy to deploy. It's a SaaS type solution, right? >> So you're saying, do the architecture to get the solution for the platform that the customer has. >> Amir: Yes. >> They're not buying a platform, they end up with a platform- >> With the platform. >> as a result of Supercloud path. All right. So that's what's, so you mentioned, that's a great point. I want to double click on what you just said. 'Cause I like that what you said. What's the deployment strategy in your mind for supercloud? I'm an architect. I'm at an enterprise in the Midwest. I'm an insurance company, got some cloud action going on. I'm mostly on-premise. I've got the mandate to transform the company. We have apps. We'll be fully transformed in five years. What's my strategy? What do I do? >> Amir: The resources. >> What's the deployment strategy? Single global instance, code in every region, on every cloud? >> It needs to be a solution which is available as a SaaS service, right? So from the customer's perspective, they are onboarding into the supercloud. And then the supercloud is allowing them to do whatever they used to do, you know, historically and in the new world, right? That needs to come together. And that's what we have built is that, we have brought everything together in a way that what used to take months or years, and now taking an hour or two hours, and then people test it for a week or so and deploy it in production. >> I want to bring up something we were talking about before we were on camera about the TCP/IP, the OSI model. That was a concept that destroyed the proprietary narcissist. Work operating systems of the mini computers, which brought in an era of tech prosperity for generations. TCP/IP was kind of the magical moment that allowed for that kind of super networking connection. Inter networking is what's called as a category. It feels like something's going on here with supercloud. The way you describe it, it feels like there's this unification idea. Like the reality is we've got multiple stuff sitting around by default, you either clean it up or get rid of it, right? Or it's almost a, it's either a nuance, a new nuisance or chaos. >> Yeah. And we live in the new world now. We don't have the luxury of time. So we need to move as fast as possible to solve the business problems. And that's what we are running into. If we don't have automated solutions which scale, which solve our problems, then it's going to be a problem. And that's why SaaS is so important in today's world. Why should we have to deploy the network piecemeal? Why can't we have a solution? We solve our problem as we move forward and we accomplish what we need to accomplish and move forward. >> And we don't really need standards here, dude. It's not that we need a standards body if you have unification. >> So because things move so fast, there's no time to create a standards body. And that's why you see companies like ours popping up, which are trying to create a common infrastructure across all clouds. Otherwise if we vent the standardization path may take long. Eventually, we should be going in that direction. But we don't have the luxury of time. That's what I was trying to get to. >> Well, what's interesting is, is that to your point about standards and ratification, what ratifies a defacto anything? In the old days there was some technical bodies involved, but here, I think developers drive everything. So if you look at the developers and how they're voting with their code. They're instantly, organically defining everything as a collective intelligence. >> And just like you're putting out the paper and making it available, everybody's contributing to that. That's why you need to have APIs and terra form type constructs, which are available so that the customers can continue to improve upon that. And that's the Net DevOps, right? So that you need to have. >> What was once sacrilege, just sayin', in business school, back in the days when I got my business degree after my CS degree was, you know, no one wants to have a better mousetrap, a bad business model to have a better mouse trap. In this case, the better mouse trap, the better solution actually could be that thing. >> It is that thing. >> I mean, that can trigger, tips over the industry. >> And that that's where we are seeing our customers. You know, I mean, we have some publicly referenceable customers like Coke or Warner Music Group or, you know, multiple others and chart industries. The way we are solving the problem. They have some of the largest environments in the industry from the cloud perspective. And their whole network infrastructure is running on the Alkira infrastructure. And they're able to adopt new clouds within days rather than waiting for months to architect and then deploy and then figure out how to manage it and operate it. It's available as a service. >> John: And we've heard from your customer, Warner, they were just on the program. >> Amir: Yes. Okay, okay. >> So they're building a supercloud. So superclouds aren't just for tech companies. >> Amir: No. >> You guys build a supercloud for networking. >> Amir: It is. >> But people are building their own superclouds on top of all this new stuff. Talk about that dynamic. >> Healthcare providers, financials, high-tech companies, even startups. One of our startup customers, Tekion, right? They have these dealerships that they provide sales and support services to across the globe. And for them to be able to onboard those dealerships, it is 80% less time to production. That is real money, right? So, maybe Atif can give you a lot more examples of customers who are deploying. >> Talk about some of the customer activity. What are they like? Are they laggards, they innovators? Are they trying to hit the easy button? Are they coming in late or are you got some high customers? >> Actually most of our customers, all of our customers or customers in general. I don't think they have a choice but to move in this direction because, you know, the cloud has, like everything is quick now. So the cloud teams are moving faster in these enterprises. So now that they cannot afford the network nor to keep up pace with the cloud teams. So, they don't have a choice but to go with something similar where you can, you know, build your network on demand and bring up your network as quickly as possible to meet all those use cases. So, I'll give you an example. >> John: So the demand's high for what you guys do. >> Demand is very high because the cloud teams have- >> John: Yeah. They're going fast. >> They're going fast and there's no stopping. And then network teams, they have to keep up with them. And you cannot keep deploying, you know, networks the way you used to deploy back in the day. And as far as the use cases are concerned, there are so many use cases which our customers are using our platform for. One of the use cases, I'll give you an example of these financial customers. Some of the financial customers, they have their customers who they provide data, like stock exchanges, that provide like market data information to their customers out of data centers part. But now, their customers are moving into the cloud as well. So they need to come in from the cloud. So when they're coming in from the cloud, you cannot be giving them data from your data center because that takes time, and your hair pinning everything back. >> Moving data is like moving, moving money, someone said. >> Exactly. >> Exactly. And the other thing is like you have to optimize your traffic flows in the cloud as well because every time you leave the cloud, you get charged a lot. So, you don't want to leave the cloud unless you have to leave the cloud, your traffic. So, you have to come up or use a service which allows you to optimize all those traffic flows as well, you know? >> My final question to you guys, first of all, thanks for coming on Supercloud Program. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success. And you guys have a great positioning and I'm a big fan. And I have to ask, you guys are agile, nimble startup, smart on the cutting edge. Supercloud concept seems to resonate with people who are kind of on the front range of this major wave. While all the incumbents like Cisco, Microsoft, even AWS, they're like, I think they're looking at it, like what is that? I think it's coming up really fast, this trend. Because I know people talk about multi-cloud, I get that. But like, this whole supercloud is not just SaaS, it's more going on there. What do you think is going on between the folks who get it, supercloud, get the concept, and some are who are scratching their heads, whether it's the Ciscos or someone, like I don't get it. Why is supercloud important for the folks that aren't really seeing it? >> So first of all, I mean, the customers, what we saw about six months, 12 months ago, were a little slower to adopt the supercloud kind of concept. And there were leading edge customers who were coming and adopting it. Now, all of a sudden, over the last six to nine months, we've seen a flurry of customers coming in and they are from all disciplines or all very diverse set of customers. And they're starting to see the value of that because of the practical implications of what they're doing. You know, these shadow IT type environments are no longer working and there's a lot of pressure from the management to move faster. And then that's where they're coming in. And perhaps, Atif, if you can give a few examples of. >> Yeah. And I'll also just add to your point earlier about the network needing to be there 'cause the cloud teams are like, let's go faster. And the network's always been slow because, but now, it's been almost turbocharged. >> Atif: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as I said, like there was no choice here. You had to move in this industry. And the other thing I would add a little bit is now if you look at all these enterprises, most of their traffic is from, even from which is coming from the on-prem, it's going to the cloud SaaS applications or public clouds. And it's more than 50% of traffic, which is leaving your, you know, what you used to call, your network or the private network. So now it's like, you know, before it used to just connect sites to data centers and sites together. Now, it's a cloud as well as the SaaS application. So it's either internet bound or the public cloud bound. So now you have to build a network quickly, which caters to all these use cases. And that's where like something- >> And you guys, your solution to me is you eliminate all that work for the customer. Now, they can treat the cloud like a bag of Legos. And do their thing. Well, I oversimplify. Well, you know I'm talking about. >> Atif: Right, exactly. >> And to answer your question earlier about what about the big companies coming in and, you know, now they slow to adopt? And, you know, what normally happens is when Cisco came up, right? There used to be 16 different protocols suites. And then we finally settled on TCP/IP and DECnet or AppleTalk or X&S or, you know, you name it, right? Those companies did not adapt to the networking the way it was supposed to be done. And guess what happened, right? So if the companies in the networking space do not adopt this new concept or new way of doing things, I think some of them will become extinct over time. >> Well, I think the force and function too is the cloud teams as well. So you got two evolutions. You got architectural relevance. That's real as impact. >> It's very important. >> Cost, speed. >> And I look at it as a very similar disruption to what Cisco's the world, very early days did to, you know, bring the networking out, right? And it became the internet. But now we are going through the cloud. It's the cloud era, right? How does the cloud evolve over the next 10, 15, 20 years? Everything's is going to be offered as a service, right? So slowly data centers go away, the network becomes a plumbing thing. Very, you know, simple to deploy. And everything on top of that is virtualized in the cloud-like manners. >> And that makes the networks hardened and more secure. >> More secure. >> It's a great way to be secure. You remember the glory days, we'll go back 15 years. The Cisco conversation was, we got to move up to stack. All the manager would fight each other. Now, what does that actually mean? Stay where we are. Stay in your lane. This is kind of like the network's version of moving up the stack because not so much up the stack, but the cloud is everywhere. It's almost horizontally scaled. >> It's extending into the on-premise. It is already moving towards the edge, right? So, you will see a lot- >> So, programmability is a big program. So you guys are hitting programmability, compatibility, getting people into an environment they're comfortable operating. So the Ops people love it. >> Exactly. >> Spans the clouds to a level of SLA management. It might not be perfectly spanning applications, but you can actually know latencies between clouds, measure that. And then so you're basically managing your network now as the overall infrastructure. >> Right. And it needs to be a very intelligent infrastructure going forward, right? Because customers do not want to wait to be able to troubleshoot. They don't want to be able to wait to deploy something, right? So, it needs to be a level of automation. >> Okay. So the question for you guys both on we'll end on is what is the enablement that, because you guys are a disruptive enabler, right? You create this fabric. You're going to enable companies to do stuff. What are some of the things that you see and your customers might be seeing as things that they're going to do as a result of having this enablement? So what are some of those things? >> Amir: Atif, perhaps you can talk through the some of the customer experience on that. >> It's agility. And we are allowing these customers to move very, very quickly and build these networks which meet all these requirements inside the cloud. Because as Amir was saying, in the cloud era, networking is changing. And if you look at, you know, going back to your comment about the existing networking vendors. Some of them still think that, you know, just connecting to the cloud using some concepts like Cloud OnRamp is cloud networking, but it's changing now. >> John: 'Cause there's apps that are depending upon. >> Exactly. And it's all distributed. Like IT infrastructure, as I said earlier, is all distributed. And at the end of the day, you have to make sure that wherever your user is, wherever your app is, you are able to connect them securely. >> Historically, it used to be about building a router bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, and then interconnecting those routers. Now, it's all about horizontal scale. You don't need to build big, you need to scale it, right? And that's what cloud brings to the customer. >> It's a cultural change for Cisco and Juniper because they have to understand that they're still could be in the game and still win. >> Exactly. >> The question I have for you, what are your customers telling you that, what's some of the anecdotal, like, 'cause you guys have a good solution, is it, "Oh my god, you guys saved my butt." Or what are some of the commentary that you hear from the customers in terms of praise and and glory from your solution? >> Oh, some even say, when we do our demo and stuff, they say it's too hard to believe. >> Believe. >> Like, too hard. It's hard, you know, it's >> I dont believe you. They're skeptics. >> I don't believe you that because now you're able to bring up a global network within minutes. With networking services, like let's say you have APAC, you know, on-prem users, cloud also there, cloud here, users here, you can bring up a global network with full routed connectivity between all these endpoints with security services. You can bring up like a firewall from a third party or our services in the middle. This is a matter of minutes now. And this is all high speed connectivity with SLAs. Imagine like before connecting, you know, Singapore to U.S. East or Hong Kong to Frankfurt, you know, if you were putting your infrastructure in columns like E-connects, you would have to go, you know, figure out like, how am I going to- >> Seal line In, connect to it? Yeah. A lot of hassles, >> If you had to put like firewalls in the middle, segmentation, you had to, you know, isolate different entities. >> That's called heavy lifting. >> So what you're seeing is, you know, it's like customer comes in, there's a disbelief, can you really do that? And then they try it out, they go, "Wow, this works." Right? It's deployed in a small environment. And then all of a sudden they start taking off, right? And literally we have seen customers go from few thousand dollars a month or year type deployments to multi-million dollars a year type deployments in very, very short amount of time, in a few months. >> And you guys are pay as you go? >> Pay as you go. >> Pay as go usage cloud-based compatibility. >> Exactly. And it's amazing once they get to deploy the solution. >> What's the variable on the cost? >> On the cost? >> Is it traffic or is it. >> It's multiple different things. It's packaged into the overall solution. And as a matter of fact, we end up saving a lot of money to the customers. And not only in one way, in multiple different ways. And we do a complete TOI analysis for the customers. So it's bandwidth, it's number of connections, it's the amount of compute power that we are using. >> John: Similar things that they're used to. >> Just like the cloud constructs. Yeah. >> All right. Networking supercloud. Great. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for coming on Supercloud. >> Atif: Thank you. >> And looking forward to seeing more of the demand. Translate, instant networking. I'm sure it's going to be huge with the edge exploding. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. So this is Supercloud 2 event here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. The network Supercloud is here. Checkout Alkira. I'm John Furry, the host. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, we are in the meat of the conference. >> It's really in crunch time, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage and this next guest is running the show at CNCF, the OG and been in the community doing a great job. I'm looking forward to this segment. >> Me too. I'm even wearing... You may notice, I am in my CNCF tee, and I actually brought my tee from last year for those of you. And the reason I brought it, actually, I want to use this to help introduce our next guest is the theme last year was resistance realized, and I think that KubeCon this year is an illustration of that resistance realized. Please welcome Priyanka Sharma to the show. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> This is your show. How are you feeling right now? What does it feel like to be here? >> It's all of our show. I am just another participant, but I am so happy to be here. I think this is our third hybrid in person back event. And the whole ecosystem, we seem to have gotten into the groove now. You know, the first one we did, was in LA >> Savannah: Yes. >> Where you have that shirt from. Then we went to Valencia, and now here in Detroit I could sense the ease in the attendees. I can sense that it just feels great for everyone to be here. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you guys, who were face to face in LA, but this is really kind of back face to face, somewhat normalized, right? >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> And so that's a lot of feedback there. What's your reaction? Because the community's changed so much in three years, >> Savannah: Yes. >> Even two years, even last year. Where do you see it now? Because there's so much more work to do, but it feels like it's just getting started, but also at the same time it feels like people are celebrating at the same time. >> Yeah. >> Kubernetes is mainstream, CloudNative at scale. >> Savannah: That feels like a celebration. >> People are talking about developer... more developers coming on board, more traction, more scale, more interoperability, just a lot of action. What's your thoughts? >> I think you're absolutely right that we are just getting started. I've been part of many open source movements and communities. This is... I think this is something special where we have our flagship project considered mainstream, but yet so much to be done right over there. I mean, you've seen announcements around more and more vendors coming to support the project in, you know, the boring but essential ways that happened I think this week, just today, I think. And so Kubernetes continues to garner support and energy, which is unique in the ecosystem, right? Because once something becomes mainstream, normally, it's like, "Okay, boring." (John laughs) But that's happening. And I think the reason for that is CloudNative. It's built upon Kubernetes and so much more than Kubernetes. >> We have 140 plus projects >> Absolutely. >> and folks have a choice to contribute to something totally cutting edge or something that's, you know, used by everyone. So, the diversity of options and room for innovation at the same time means this is just the beginning. >> And also projects are coming together too. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see formation, you're starting to see some defacto alignment. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> You're starting to see the- >> Priyanka: Clustering. >> Some visibility into how the big moves are being playing out, almost the harvesting of that hard work. >> Priyanka: Yes, I do think there is consolidation, but I would definitely say that there's consolidation and innovation. >> John: Yeah. >> And that is something... I genuinely have not seen this before. I think there are definitely areas we're all really focusing on. I talked a lot about security in my keynote because it continues to gain importance in CloudNative, whether that is through projects or through practices. The same, I did not mention this in my keynote, but around like, you know, continuous delivery generally the software delivery cycle, there's a lot coming together happening there. And, you know, >> John: Yeah. >> many other spaces. So, absolutely right. >> Let's dig in a little bit actually, because I'm curious. You get to see these 140 plus projects. >> Yes. >> What are some of the other trends that you're seeing, especially now, as we're feeling this momentum around Kubernetes? The excitement is back in the ecosystem. >> Yes. So, so much happening. But I would definitely say that like the underlying basis of all these projects, right? I brought that up in my keynote, is the maintainers. And I think the maintainer group, is the talent keeps thriving and growing, the load on them is very heavy though. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And I do think there's a lot more we all company, the companies around us need to do to support these people, because the innovation they're bringing is unprecedented. Besides Kubernetes, which has its own cool stuff all the time. I think I'm particularly excited about the Argo projects. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So, they're the quadruplets as I like to call them. Right? Because there's four of them within the Argo banner. I had Yuan from Argo on my keynote actually. >> Savannah: Oh, nice. >> Alongside Hiba from Kubernetes. And we talked about their maintainer journey. And it's interesting. Totally different projects. Same asks, you know, which is more support and time from employers, more ways to build up contributors and ultimately they love the CNCF marketing supports. >> That Argo project's really in a great umbrella. There are a lot of action going on. Arlon, I saw that. Got some traction. A lot of great stuff. The question I want to ask you, and I want to get your reaction to this, you know, we always go to a lot of events with theCUBE and you can always tell the vibrant of the ecosystem when you see developers doing stuff, projects going on. But when you start seeing the commercialization >> Priyanka: Yes. >> The news briefings coming out of this show feels a lot like reinvent, like it's like a tsunami. I've never seen this much news. Everyone's got a story, they got announcing products. >> Savannah: That was a lot of news. That's a great point, John. >> There was a lot of flow even from the CNCF. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? I mean like to me it's a tell sign of activity, certainly, >> Right. >> And engagement. >> Right. >> But there's real proof coming out, real visibility into the value propositions, >> Priyanka: Yes. >> rendering itself with real products. What's your reaction to the news flow? >> Absolutely. I think it's market proof, like you said, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> That we have awesome technologies that are useful to lots of people around the world. And I think that, I hope this continues to increase. And with the bite basket of project portfolios that's what I hope to see. CNCF itself will continue supporting the maintainers with things like conformance programs which are really essential when you are... when you have people building products on top of your projects and other initiatives so that the technological integrity remains solid while innovation keeps happening. >> I know from a little birdie, Brendan, good friend of mine that you had a board meeting today. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I am curious because I hope I'm not going out about an assumption I imagine that room is full of passionate people. >> Priyanka: Absolutely. >> CNCF board would be a wild one. (Priyanka laughs) What are the priorities for the board between now and KubeCon next year? >> Sure. So the CNCF governing board is an over... It's like an oversight body. And their focus is on working with us on the executive team to make sure that we have the right game plan for the foundation. They tend to focus on the business decisions, things such as how do we manage our budget, how do we deploy it, and what are the initiatives? And that's always their priority. But because this is CloudNative and we are all technologists who love our projects, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> we also engage closely with the technical oversight committee who was in the said meeting that we just talked about. And so lots of discussions are around project health, sustainability. How do we keep moving? Because as you said, Kubernetes is going mainstream but it's still cool. There are all these other cool things. It's a lot going on, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. You got a lot of balls in the air. It's complex decision making and balancing of priorities. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> John: And demands, stakeholders. You have how many stakeholders? Every project, every person, every company. >> Everyone's a stakeholder. You're a stakeholder, too. >> And a hundred... I mean, I love how community focused you are. Obviously we're here to talk about the community. You have contributors from 187 different countries. >> Priyanka: It's one of the things I'm the most proud of. >> Savannah: It's... Yeah. It gives me all the feels as a community builder as well. >> Priyanka: Yeah. >> What an accomplishment and supporting community members in those different environments must be so dynamic for you and the team. >> Absolutely, and it behooves us to think globally in how we solve problems. Even when we introduce programs. My first question is, are we by accident being, let's say, default U.S. or are we being default Europe, whatever it may be because we really got to think about the whole world. >> John: It's global culture, it's a global village. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> And I think global now more than ever is so important. And, the Ukraine >> Priyanka: Yes. >> discussion on the main stage was awesome. I love how you guys did that because this is impacting the technology. We need the diverse input. Now I made a comment yesterday that it's going to make... it might slow things down. I meant as is more diversity, there's more conversations. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> But once people get aligned and committed, that's where the magic happens. Share your thoughts on the global diversity, why it's important, how things are made, how decisions are made. What's the philosophy? Because there's more to get your arms around. >> Yes, absolutely. It may seem harder or slower or whatever but once it gets done, aligned and committed, the product's better, everything's better. >> Priyanka: Yes, absolutely. I think the more people involved, the better it is for sure. Especially from a robustness resilience perspective. Because you know, as they say, sunlight makes bugs shallow. That's because the more eyes on something the faster people will solve problems, fix bugs and make, you know, look for security, vulnerability, solve all that. So especially in those areas, I think, where you want to be more resilient, the more the people, the better it is. A hundred percent. And then when it comes to direct technical direction and choosing a path, I think that's where, you know it's the role of the maintainers. And as I was saying there's only a thousand audit maintainers for 140 plus projects, right? So they are catering- >> Wow, they have a lot of responsibility. >> Right. >> Serious amount of responsibility. >> It's crazy. I know. And we have to do everything we can for those people because they are the ones who set the vision, set the direction, and then 176,000 plus contributors follow their lead. So we have... I think, the bright mechanisms of contribution and collaboration in a global way are in place. And we keep chugging along and doing better and better each year. >> What's next for you guys? You got the EU of show coming out, >> Priyanka: Correct, Amsterdam. the economy looking, I don't see your recession for technology, but that's me. I'm Polish on tech. Yeah, there's some layoffs going on, some cleaning up, overinflated expectations on valuations of startups, but I don't see this stopping or slowing down. But what's your take? >> Priyanka: Yeah, I mean, as I said in my keynote, right? Open source usage soars in times of turmoil and financial turmoil is one example of that. So we are expecting growth and heavy growth this year, next year and onwards. And in fact, going back to the whole maintainer journey, now is a time there's even more pressure on them and companies as they manage their, you know, workforces and prioritization, they really need to remember they're building products off of open source. They are... This is open sources on which what their business realize, whether they're a vendor or end user and give maintainers a space time to work on what they need to work on. >> Yeah. They need a little work-life balance. I mean the self-care there, I can't even imagine the complexity of the decision matrix in their mind. Speaking of that, and obviously you... Culture must be a huge part of how you lead these teams. How do you approach that as leader? >> I think the number one... So the foundation is a very small set of staff, just so you know. >> Savannah: I was actually... Let's tell the audience, how many people are on the team? >> Priyanka: You know, it's actually a difficult question because we have folks who like spin up and down and we have matrix support from the Linux Foundation, but about 30 people in total are dedicated to CNCF at any given time. >> Savannah: Wow. >> But compared... >> Savannah: You all do hard work. >> Yes. >> Savannah: You're doing great. I am impressed. >> It's a flat organization. >> It's pretty flat. >> Seriously, it's beautiful. >> It's actually in some ways very similar to the projects and there the, you know, contribution communities there where it's like everyone kind of like steps up and does what needs to be done, which is wonderful and beautiful, but with the responsibility on our shoulders, it's definitely a balancing act. So first off, it is, I ask everyone to have some grace for the staff. They are in a startup land with no IPO on the other side of the rainbow. They're doing it because they love love, love this community and technology so much. >> John: Yeah. Yeah, and then also they're acknowledging that nobody in open source wants to see a bureaucracy. >> Priyanka: Right. >> I mean, everyone see lean, efficient. >> Savannah: Yeah, absolutely John. It's great. It's a great point. And and I think that it's just... It's amazing what passionate people can do if given the opportunity. Let's talk a little bit about the literal event that we're at right now. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> Theme today, building for the road ahead. >> Priyanka: Yes. >> What was the inspiration for that? >> Detroit. (group laughs) We're in Detroit, people drive here. >> Savannah: In case you didn't know, cars have been made in this city. >> Motor city. >> It's everywhere being here in this city, which is awesome. >> But you know, it did... There was of course a geographical element but it also aligns with where we're at, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're building for the road ahead, which frankly given the changes going on in the world is a bumpy road. So it's important to talk about it. And that's what the theme was. >> And how many folks have shown up... This is a totally different energy from Los Angeles last year. I'm sure we can both agree. Everyone was excited last year, but this is an order of magnitude. >> Yes. >> How many folks do you think are milling around? >> Yeah, it's much more than double of Los Angeles. We are close to 8,000. >> Savannah: That's amazing. And it's so... You're absolutely right. The energy is just... >> Savannah: Way up. >> It's so good. People are enjoying themselves. It's been lovely. >> That's great. So you're feeling good? You're riding the high? >> Congratulations. >> Awesome. >> Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm a little bit of a zombie right now. (group laughs) >> You don't look it, we wouldn't know. Nobody knows. They don't know. >> If you want to take a break, We got 12 interviews tomorrow. (Savannah and Priyanka laughing) You can co-host with us. We'd love to have you. >> Exactly. You're welcome anytime. Welcome anytime, Priyanka. >> Well thank you. But no, it's been such a wonderful show and you folks are part of the reason you say everybody here is contributing to the awesomeness. >> John: Yep. >> You're part of it. Look at your smiley faces. >> John: And Lisa Marty is over there. Lisa's over there. >> Yes! >> Say hi to Lisa and team. >> Yes, the team is awesome. >> Guys, thank you for your support for theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We enjoy it a lot. And we love the community. Thank you. >> Yes. Thank you for your support for CloudNative. >> Thank you. >> One last thing I just want to point out, because it's not always it happens in this industry. The women outnumber the men on this stage right now. >> John: Proud of that? >> And I know the diversity and inclusion is a priority for CNCF. >> Priyanka: Top priority. >> Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> Yes. It is something at the forefront of my mind, no matter what we do. And it's because I have such great role models. You know, when I was just a participant in the ecosystem, Dan Conn was leading the foundation and he took it so seriously to always try to uplift people from a diverse backgrounds and bring those faces into CloudNative. >> Savannah: Yes. >> And he made a serious lasting impact. >> John: Yes. >> And I am not going to let that go to waste. It's not going to be me who drops the ball. (group laughs) >> We're behind you all the way. >> Right? >> We see improvement over here. >> We got your back. >> I mean, even from an attendance perspective on stage I feel like you've done just an outstanding job with the curation and representation. I don't say that lightly. It really matters to me. But even in the audience looking around, it's so refreshing. Even it sounds silly. The shirts are more fitted. >> It's not silly. >> There's different types of shirts, and I mean, you know how it is. We've been in this industry long enough. >> It's a shirt you want to wear. >> Savannah: Exactly. And that's the whole point. I absolutely love it. Have we announced a location for KubeCon North America 2023, yet? >> It's Chicago. >> Savannah: Exciting! >> Yes. >> Savannah: All right. So we'll be seeing you >> Midwest. >> not that far away. >> This is the first time I've said this publicly, I just realized, It's Chicago, people. >> The scoop, yay! >> Oh, I feel so lucky we got to break the scoop. I was learning from John's lead there and I'm very excited. Amsterdam, Chicago. It's going to be absolutely >> I'll get my hotel now. >> Fantastic. >> Yes. >> Smart move. Everybody listen to him. >> Yeah, right? Especially after Detroit. It's actually not a... It's not a bad move. Priyanka, is there anything else you'd like to say to folks? Maybe they're thinking about coming or contributing to the ecosystem? >> Priyanka: Yes. Anyone and everyone can and should contribute and join us. The maintainers are holding us all up. Let's rally to support them. We have more and more programs to do that. As you know, we did ContribFest here this week which was the first time. So we will help you get involved so you're not on your own. So that's my number one message, which is anyone and everyone, you're welcome here. We'll make sure you have a good time. So just come. >> Okay. Please do it. >> I can tell you that Priyanka is not blowing smoke. I feel very welcome here. This community has welcomed me as a non-technical, so I think you're absolutely preaching the truth. Priyanka, thank you so much for being here with us today on the show, for helping herd the cats and wrangle the brilliant minds that make CNCF possible. And honestly for just bringing your energy and joy to the entire experience. John, thank you for hanging out with me. >> I'm glad I can contribute in a small way. >> I was going to say... I was going to say thank you for founding theCUBE so that we could be here in this little marriage and collaboration can be possible. And thank all of you for tuning in to theCUBE here, live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. I am thrilled to be sharing this content with you today and I hope to see you for the rest of our interviews this afternoon. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, at The Cosmopolitan, here on day two of theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022. I'm excited to be joined by one of Coupa's many successful customers, Jaime Robles joins me, the chief procurement officer at Casey's General Stores. You're going to be talking about building a technology hub with source-to-pay and interconnecting ecosystem platforms. Welcome, Jaime. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today in this week, hearing about Coupa and all the fabulous things that we can do around technology. >> Coupa is amazing, and in terms of their innovation, I don't know if you had a chance to see the Keynote this morning, but the slides that Raja showed with just the arrow going up and to the right. Talk to us a little bit about Casey's General Stores. This is the U.S's fourth largest convenience store retailer. But just for the audience who may not know, give us a background. >> So, just a little bit about Casey's. So, Casey's is, as you said, one of the largest convenience store chains out there. We got more than 2,500 locations in 16 states in the Midwest in the U.S. And just out of curiosity, we are the fifth largest pizza company as well. >> Lisa: Is that right? >> We make a great pizza and our guests love it. So, we are in three businesses. We are in convenience store, we are in fuel, and also we are in the food business, because we got a kitchen inside every single store that we got out there. So, for us it's been a fabulous journey with procurement, because we came to the company, joined the company two years ago in the middle of pandemic, and the whole idea was to build the procurement function from the ground up. Casey's didn't have a formal procurement function. So, pretty much, all the spend was done by the functions, by themselves, but no formal process, no technology, no platforms, nothing; very old school. And we came here to build a foundation and build, as I call it, a procurement tech house. >> A procurement tech house. So, talk to me, so I know that Casey's dates back to 1959, and what you described sounds like a lot of paper-based, manual processes; technology really wasn't in the mix. Is that what attracted you to take the role going, "I want to bring technology and build this powerhouse"? >> Yes, that was amazing. So, over my career, I've been doing this for several companies, such as in the past, in Phillips, G, and recently, with Walmart. And then, what attracted me for this opportunity was, well, everything is paper. Everything is manual. There's nothing digital in this company. There's no team, there's no sourcing, no process, no policies. It's like building everything from the ground up. So, it was very attractive. It's huge opportunities for the company, and we were going through this massive transformation to digitize the company all across the operations. So, procurement wasn't the core of those strategies for the CEO of the company, and that's what the opportunity lies. He was like, "How do we move from manual transactions to all this digital world?" and where, now everything is frictionless, that we move from 80%, 85%, that it was all manual. Now we are plus 65%, everything is digital now in the company, and just within one year of moving all over. So, the savings, the cost, the, the leakage, all the waste on the processes that we have, is just amazing, after one year. >> Sounds like the company had a cloud, a digitization strategy, brought you on board to help make that a reality for procurement. So, the appetite was there at Casey's from a cultural perspective, it wasn't battling uphill to get folks to go, "Let go of the paper. Let's go to Coupa." >> Yeah, that's the truth. So, it was the whole digital transformation for the company, not only on the procurement, spend side, but all the process in the company. So, as COVID hit our stores and the whole world, right? So, we had to move into more digital ordering, into more digital transaction, into more how my guests can interact with my stores without going to the stores, how they can order from the app, how they can get their food directly to their house, and all this stuff. And procurement was right there, hand to hand, as part of those strategies from the very beginning. And we were, I will say, very lucky to be on time to make all those digital transformations for the company, so when the COVID really hit, we were ready and prepared to take over. >> That's good, being ready and prepared. Oh my gosh. But some of the few people I've talked to. Talk to me about the core technology requirements that you had for the right BSM solution, and why Coupa ticked all those boxes. >> Yeah. So for us, it was one of the most important ones is as I said, bring the digital across the whole source to pay. Another big element for us, it was, how do we bring transparency into the process? How do we bring transparency on how much we pay, how do we spend our money, Which areas, which categories? We built a model in cases that are called, it's a self-service model. And this self service model is, I put the technology in its core, which is Coupa, and I give my users and my internal stakeholders all the power to take those decisions. So, now they can see how much they spend in different categories, with different suppliers, for the preferred vendors, what type of contracts do we have? And how do we manage that spend, versus the budget, as well? They have all that ability to take those decisions, and they don't need a procurement team. As I like to call, in my couple of speaker notes during this week, we like to make procurement invisible. We are in the back, they don't see us. And they got all the power to use the technology out there to do the job for us. >> Transparent, but empowered at the same time. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what we want, moving forward for this company. And I believe that is the vision that we got in the procurement 2.0. >> Procurement 2.0. Talk to me about some of the solutions that you implemented. You talked about source-to-pay, but give us kind of an idea if you double click on that, and then we'll kind of unpack ` what you talked about on your sessions. >> Yeah, pretty much, for Coupa, we implemented the whole source to pay. So, from sourcing, procurement, invoicing and payment. So, we implement all that at the core of the Coupa. I believe in an ecosystem of procurement technologies that are interconnected with Coupa, to interact for other needs, like contract lifecycle management, tail spend management, TNE, and some others that we're going after. Like, now for us, is going after supplier data hub, which for us is very important also to get it right. And that procurement ecosystem of different technologies connected is going to give us the ability to move faster, to be more lean and to have better data and technology accessible for the team that is in charge of procurement, to operate under that environment. >> You mentioned a few minutes ago that, when the pandemic hit, Casey's was ready, from a digital perspective. I imagine that was a huge advantage, going into such unknown times that we're still kind of in. >> Well, when I say ready, it's like, we were ready to go, and we were on the fly, implementing everything, and what the pandemic did is to accelerate all this. So, as many companies did, we were already in the process of going this direction, and when the pandemic start hitting, we accelerate everything, and we made it happen. So, we went live in three, four months, and a year later, we were completely live since we joined the company, and we were start seeing all this paying coming to ours. So, 18 months later, we are pretty much hitting best in class levels in terms of transactional, operational, tactical, savings, visibility, spend, transparency, risk management. Now we're going to take it to the next level of the maturity. It's like, how do we go for ESG? How do we go for supplier diversity? How do we manage risk management? Right? And all those things. >> You had a couple of presentations here at Inspire, talk to me about those, and some of the top takeaways that the audience gleaned from you. >> Yeah, one of the most important ones yesterday was about how to build a procurement organization from the ground up, or how to go through a digital transformation in procurement. That is something that has been on the topic on the procurement community for years now. Everybody talks about procurement transformation, et cetera. And I just showed to them, my journey in the companies that I've been doing this for the last two decades, across the world, in many different countries, and the things that work and the and the things that doesn't work, really. And how they need to build, for the future of procurement, a technology procurement house on the core. And that's how you operate day to day. And for us, organization was Coupa. And then on top of that, you need to build a procurement ops model, right? How you want to operate your procurement operating model. So, it's centralized, decentralized, a hybrid model. And it all depends about the type of company, the type of industry you are, how material is your organization, et cetera. And another big, big element in all your strategy is, how you're going to serve your customers, right? What type of service model do you have in place? If you're going to be like a full service mode, or you going to be in a strategic direction, or you going to be a self-service mode. And pretty much, what we have chosen as the best way to move forward in the future is, let's put the technology in the middle. Let's give the support our users need, but let them be self-service, and let's make our job invisible in the back, where we have all these sourcing events, all these beautiful negotiations, all these great deals, contracts, et cetera. So, by the time they use the technology, they know where to buy, how to buy, what's the right level, how to make it happen, and they don't need us. They can do it by their own. >> And they've got that visibility, that before, it sounds like they didn't have it at all. >> Exactly, so now we know how much we spend, where do we spend, and where are the opportunities? Where are some gaps that we can go after, as well? And I think one of the most important aspects in these transformations that many of my colleagues are going through is, then you have a model that you can repeat year over year and evolve with the company, so it's agile and it's flexible. Because companies keep evolving. You buy business, you sell business, you acquire, you expand, you grow, and how that model is going to shape around. So, by the time you're done, it's not obsolete again. So, technology is going to keep evolving with your model, and that for me, is the key part in all this. >> Do you feel like, this is a marketing term; future-proof, and it always is one of those things that, well what does that actually really mean? Do you feel though that, what you've put in place is future-proof? That it's going to be able to grow and scale as the company changes? >> Jaime: Totally, totally. Because as I said before, we put the technology on the core. And for us, having that technology on the core, and plugging different technologies around that and sourcing around that with our amazing sourcing team, is going to evolve whatever the company needs. If we expand into different regions, we're ready. If we expand into different business types, we're ready. I believe what we need to keep evolving, as well, is, there will be new emerging technologies. There's going to be way more AI. There's going to be way more machine learning. There's going to be more predictive analytic sourcing stuff. How do we keep pulling those technologies into our platforms to keep giving us that advantage and that edge to the market? I think we have the model, and I think it's one of the most advanced procurement functions that I've seen in the industries around. >> And it sounds like you designed and deployed it really quickly, >> We did. >> especially during a global crisis. >> Yeah, we are disruptors by nature. We love change. We love speed. And that is, I will say my procurement brand. We make it happen and we make it fast. That's how we do it. We keep momentum. >> That's incredibly important. I mean, one of the things that we've learned, many things the last two years, a couple things. Access to realtime data is no longer a "nice to have." It's absolutely business critical. The patience of many people, including myself, was quite thin, the last two years. But also, every company has to be a data company. Casey's has to be a data company. If I have the ability to order from my app, or order things, I want them to know when I'm here for, what I ordered before; make my visit personalized, efficient, easy. So, that data strategy, having that data at the core, is nowadays, you have to have it. >> It is essential. We're building a data hub for the company, completely showing us all that information. As you can imagine, being in those three business, on the food industry, on the retail convenience store, and in the fuel, so data for us is our living breath every single day. And not only having the data now, it's like, what type of decisions we're taking with all this data? And how fast we are adapting to all that, in pricing, in cost, in margin and availability and inventory and logistics and transportation, and in your whole supply chain. So, that is extremely important for us. Not only having the data, but what kind of decisions we're taking with the data, and everything starts with the transparency right? Whenever you see it, you act. >> You should be able to act, but to your point, you have to have that visibility. You have to be able to see it and act on it. Talk to me about what it's like being a Coupa customer. I know how I've been to many Inspires, and I always love seeing all the customer success stories everywhere across industries. What's it like being a Coupa customer, in terms of having the ability to influence, say, the roadmap? Is that something that you're able to work on in partnership with Raj's team? >> Yeah, that's great. So, Coupa has been a great company to work with, and I know them for some years now, and not only they been able to support our vision of what we're trying to build, but at the same time they're taking many of our feedback to make Coupa better, in many of the different models. Listen, Coupa's not perfect, right? And I don't think any tool out there is going to be perfect. But being in so many different industries and with so many opportunities in different areas, they've been able to take our feedback and make those improvements for ourselves. We have so many conversations with the Coupa product development team when we were going through a transformation, asking them for things that we thought it was very valuable to have on the tool, that was in our, in our eyes, no brainer, and they were very, very fast to react and make the change. And we are, I think, one of the most lousy customers, guilty as charged about that, but we just wanted to make it better because it's a benefit of the whole community. Everything that we've been talking this week about community AI, it's amazing. All the things that we're sharing during this week, all the ideas that we are getting about things that we can do. That's amazing. That's the value. >> It's huge value. And that's that sort of flywheel of the community and the power and the insights. Last question for you. If you talk to peers, or when you talk to peers who are maybe starting their procurement digitization journey, what advice do you give them? >> Don't take a no as an answer. Make it happen. Own it. Own it. I think you need to have a vision. You need to put in strategy in place. You need to build a business case. You need to earn your seat at the table at the C-suite. But you need to own it. You cannot let the IT, function, finance community too long, and decide how you want to operate and how you want to move your function as procurement, or build how you operate. You need to own it, and you need to build a business case and you need to make it happen. You need to, yeah. To struggle with that. But if you are a hustler, as we are in cases, we are disruptors. And if you don't disrupt, it's not going to happen. >> I completely agree. Own it, make it happen. Jaime, great to have you on the program. >> Jaime: Thanks so much. >> Thanks for hearing what Casey's is doing, how you're really leading the charge, and how you owned it and made it happen. That's awesome. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for being here. >> Thanks. For Jaime Robles, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage day two, Coupa Inspire 22, from Las Vegas. Join me with my next guest, coming up shortly. (lighthearted upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the metaverse and what it all means, what it brings to the table. We've got two pioneers here in the metaverse breaking it down, doing great stuff. Both co-founders of companies, Noah Gainer, co-founder and CEO Parcel. And CJ Hetherington Co-Founder of Atlantis World, digging deep and doing all the great stuff in the Midwest. Chill and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, first of all, I want to say congratulations for the work you guys are doing. This is one of the biggest waves we've seen coming on. It's a changing user expectations, it's a changing architecture, it's real technology involved, there's a lot of action. 30% of people at University of California, Berkeley are dropping out of the Computer Science program to get into Web3. This is the biggest technological change, business model change, user experience change. And we've been seeing going back multiple inflection points. This is a big deal. So the metaverse is real. Some people say, "Well, you know, it's not com..." It's coming it's just a matter of time. So let's get into it. What are you guys doing? Tell us about your company's Parcel and Atlantis World. Noah, start with you. >> Sure, so Parcel is a marketplace for virtual real estate. So you can think of something like OpenSea, which everyone is familiar with, but we solely focus on virtual land and virtual real estate in a number of virtual world, maybe part of decent land or the sandbox. So we feature those on our platform and, you know, we take it the next level with the user experience. So we have fully interactive maps. We have price estimates. You can think of it like a estimate on Zillow and in general, we're building the fully verticalized solution for virtual real estate users. And that will extend into rentals, like Airbnbing out your virtual condo or getting a mortgage on your virtual home, as well as, you know, cultivating the community around it. And especially helping empower creators and architects and builders and getting them work and getting their work on display. >> I'm looking forward to digging into that, that sounds very cool. CJ what's Atlantis world doing? What do you got going on? >> Yeah, exactly. So at Atlantis world, we're building the Web3, social metaverse by connecting Web3 with social, gaming, and education in one light web virtual world, that's accessible to everybody. So by going with actually a light web first and a pixel approach so that you can play on mobile or a really old device, because the problem with existing metaverses is that they set an incredibly high cost barrier to entry and also tech isn't necessarily readily available globally in terms of things like VR headsets and gaming PCs. Like for example, when I was in Africa, I travel a lot. If my book would break, it's not even that I couldn't necessarily afford to buy anyone, it's actually not available there. So we're ruling out a lot of the global kind of population from a metaverse experience. And we're building something which is like 3D pixel and super light weight, to kind of bridge that gap and build something which is ready to be massive up till now and onboard billions of users into Web3. So they'll all basically be using Web3 applications in a gamified way and going really hard on connecting that with social features, like voice chat and talking, getting, and virtual events and vaulting and all of that stuff. >> You know, I love what you guys are doing, you're pioneering a whole another area, but what's great about the whole crypto area, is that, since you know, 2017 onwards you saw Ethereum set the developer market started coming in strong. So you start to see that development. And now we got the metaverse. So I got to ask you guys what's the current definition of the metaverse. I mean everyone's... I mean, since Facebook changed their name to Meta, it's been a hype cycle and everyone's like, "Woh..." First of all, you know why they did that. But they're actually putting a lot of DAO in this. This is a wave, we talked about that. But what is the metaverse? How do you describe it? Why is it relevant? Virtual real estate, that sounds cool. What does this all come together? Explain it for the people out there that might not be getting it right. >> Yeah, I feel like for me, the critical difference between an ordinary gamer, what one might think of as game and a metaverse is actually Web3. For me, Web3 is metaverse. And for me it's really because Web3 enables real world utility, but inside of a virtual environment. So for example, inside of Atlantis, you might run into a DeFi bank and understand by interacting with other game characters, which are programmed to teach you about DeFi and like, what is Avel, how to deposit. And so you're actually getting a real world utility out of doing something in a virtual environment. And for me, that's what really bridges the gap into metaverse. Yeah, I'm really kind of bullish on that. (chuckles) >> Noah, what's your take? Define the current state of the definition of the metaverse? What is the metaverse? >> Yeah, to me, it's the 3D internet. And I do agree with what CJ's saying, how, you know, what makes it the most compelling and will ultimately the most successful is that addition of a blockchain and essentialized, you know, tributed ledger technology. Because you can have the closed metaverse, which nobody wants that future. And I don't believe that will be the future. you know, versus the open metaverse, which is blockchain-based, the users are the owners of the assets and the land and everything around it. And it's really foreign by the people. But I see the metaverse as just an extension of the internet we're already using today but we're going to have hardware that makes it 3D and more immersive like AR and VR. >> Yeah, I think- >> Yeah, definitely- >> Go on CJ. >> Around kind of like eight or nine months ago when we started to build Atlantis, we decided that the metaverse was a virtual world where you could live, work, play, and earn, and that's what we've been building. It started off as like building the metaverse that has DeFi and over the kind of time it's gone on our community has grown, we've started to understand the future of our product and our mission and values. It started to become the Web3 metaverse, right? And then on top of that, the Web3 social metaverse, so it's a combination of what all these things. >> You know, it's interesting. And I'm a little bit older than you guys, I wish I was your age, but when the web came along, people were saying the same thing. That the web's terrible. It's a stupid thing. It's never going to be real. And yeah, there was problems. It was slow to dial up back in the day. But yeah, now with gaming, I got to say, I had to look at the gaming evolution being a gamer myself, old school, I guess, but the gaming culture is proxy to what I see kind of happening in the metaverse. And let me get your reaction to that. I'm not saying directly, but you saw what gaming did, right? In game currency, some, you know, pockets of the same kind of dynamic where a lot of value is happening, the expectations were different for users. So how does the metaverse... How does gaming cross over? What's the ecosystem of metaverse? Obviously it's a cultural shift, one. Infrastructure, two. But I can just see this new generation of thinking. It's a whole nother level. Can you guys share your thoughts on that riff? >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's like for us, we really believe that we can enable a social revolution, where workers from impoverished and remote regions can actually be onboarded into these digital player to earn economies and also learn to earn economies. So it's about leveraging Web3 and blockchain gaming, whatever actually you want to call it, to enable this revolution and actually onboard new people into a completely new working and dynamic. One of the other things we envision for Atlantis, imagine like you run around this game world and you complete quests inside of the game. And these quests basically involve talking to the non-player characters, the NPCs, which are basically pre-programmed. I don't know if anyone's ever played an MMORPG before, but it can be super fun. And they'll actually teach you how to use different crypto applications. Whether that's a DeFi bank, NFT marketplace, kind of digital asset exchange. And once you all do that, the kind of end goal in vision is that you'll be rewarded with tokens. So users will earn crypto for learning about crypto. And if anybody wants to do that right now, they can actually go to rabbithole.gg. It's a different project to Atlantis, but they building learn to earn, and you go on you complete quests and interact with different crypto applications. And it's so crucial for onboarding. And yeah, it's going to be really powerful, the kind of revolution that play to earn and learn to earn will enable. >> I'll check out the rabbihole.gg sounds awesome. What's your take on the reaction to that riff on this convergence of culture tech, gaming, vibe that's kind of divine the metaverse what's your take on that, Noah? >> Yeah, I mean... I think gaming will be the on ramp for maybe the first billion people, you know, into blockchain. It's something people already do and are already paying for, and they now have the opportunity to get paid to play. So the incentives are extremely strong and I think that will be a great way to usher people in, teach 'em about blockchain without realizing that they're using blockchain. And then once they're already in it and have already used it, then it becomes much more natural to user than other applications. >> It's funny, people always talk about, "Oh, user experience!" You know, expectations drive experience, right? If you expect something and if they're used to gaming, I see the great, great call out there, good point. Well, let me ask you guys a question, 'cause I think this is comes out a lot in terms of like the market shifts and metaverse, as an old expression, "Great markets pull the products out of companies or out of the industry." What organic growth have you guys seen in the metaverse that's been either a surprise or a natural evolution of just success and just growth, because the market's hungry for this and it is relevant. It's new, what's pulling out? What's coming out of the organic aspect of the metaverse? >> I think a lot of art and architecture and design. And, you know, it's empowering a lot of independent creators and allowing 'em to stretch their skills in a way that they maybe couldn't do before, but now can do and get compensated for. Like, we see really see the rise of the creator coming in the next couple of years in the open metaverse and finally they will be the ruling class. They won't get the short end of the stick, which artists have for... I mean all the time. >> Yeah, some of the wall street bet skies in the same way, feel the same way. CJ, What's your take on... What's getting pulled out on the organic execution growth of the interactions and metaverse evolution? >> Of course, yeah. I would, first of all love to go back to the previous point on gaming and just kind of like, definitely agree with what Noah said. And the thing is that gaming is 3.4 billion user market, and they're typically an experimental by nature people and group of users, right? So it's definitely a huge onboarding opportunity for teaching users about Web3 and using Web3 in a gamified way and making that kind of inherently fun and engaging. And again, in terms of organic growth, Web3 is incredible for that. We place a huge emphasis on, I think, collaborate versus compete and try to enable network effects for everybody who is involved in Atlantis and becoming part of our fast growing ecosystem. Like we have eight blockchain, more than 10 DeFi apps, like Aave, Yearn, Balanced, 1inch, Perpetual. All of the DAOs like The Exile, MetaCartel, lobsterdao, PizzaDAO, all of the NFT communities. Like we're actually building a yacht for bought yacht club on the beach in Atlantis. So that's fun. But yeah, we grew our community. We're very early stage still. We've been building only for eight or nine months, but we grew our community to like 20 to 30,000 community members across social channels. And we recently raised over a million dollars from our community and we're fully bootstrapped and taken no private money. So the ability to actually do that and to coordinate both kind of community efforts and fundraising and resources is really testament to Web3 and what it's becoming in the community aspect of that. And also its future and the kind of dawn and domination of the Metaverse. >> Well, I got to say, I just got to give you props for that. I think that fundraising dynamic is a real entrepreneurial new thing, that's awesome. You've got active community vote with their contribution and whether it's money and or other value, right? You got social value. This is the whole thing about the metaverse, there's a new community culture going next level here. >> We believe in community and we believe in Web3. And we know we don't understand why most leading metaverses are focusing fully on huge IP and actually ignoring Web3. So we're actually trying to build the infrastructure layer for Web3 applications and for Web3 driven utility inside of the metaverse. And what we mean by that imagine that any developer or any project or any team or any company could occupy a plot for free inside of the metaverse, customize it by branding and then effectively set up shop, whether that's a Web3 integration, so it's a DeFi Bank, or it's an exchange. Or whether that's an NFT marketplace or a music venue or a coworking space. We're really excited about that. And we really believe we've designed the value capture mechanism for virtual land in the metaverse and we're approaching it in a different way to land in the real world. >> That's awesome. Well, let's get that infrastructure conversation, unstoppable domains obviously there having the partner showcase here. You guys are partners. This NFT kind of like access method is a huge... I love it by the way. I think it's phenomenal. I love the value there, but it's also digital identity and it's distributed naming. So you kind of got this enablement vibe, you got solve a problem. How is it working with you guys? Take us through what does unstoppable metaverse... Why does unstoppable matter to the metaverse? >> Yeah, unstoppable is very great mostly for identity and having a kind of crush chain identity inside of the metaverse and just kind of in Web3 in general. And unstoppable, we enable log in with unstoppable. So if you have, for example, an unstoppable domain which is like a human readable kind of crypto wallet address, but you can also do some incredible, stuff with it, and there is a lot of fun and exciting utility, effectively, like if you would have, I don't know, like unstoppable.dao you would be able to use that to log in to the Atlantis metaverse and it would represent some of your identity and social graph in game with your peers. >> Awesome, Noah, what's your take on the unstoppable angle on this? >> Yeah, I mean, it makes it social. So, instead of you can have a feed, you know, something we're thinking about at Parcel is like a feed of all the real estate transactions, and you could follow certain people, you can follow your friends and see a feed of everything that your friends are doing in English or human readable terms that are not just like a wallet address. So, that's obviously a big one and they're also giving people more options in terms of, naming and top level domains if you want to be something.wallet or .nft, or hopefully eventually .metaverse- >> John: Yes. >> Will help expand that ecosystem much more. In addition to like on our... Like backend being able to capture email when they login and to provide better marketing for our users. >> What would you guys say to other metaverse partners looking for work with unstoppable domains for their login and digital identity, what would you recommend? >> It doesn't make sense to- >> I believe- >> Connect with the best DAO and integrate that if you want to keep shipping stuff for your community and keeping it exciting and engaging and enabling user choice in how they choose to display their identity in virtual environments. >> Yeah, there's practically no downside and plenty of upside, again, having those users who are already using unstoppable domains quickly, you know, log into your site and plug in. >> All right. That's awesome. Good stuff with unstoppable. I got to ask you guys give an example of on your products, I love the metaverse progression. I love the pioneering work you guys are doing. And again, the funding things are different. The user expectations are different. The technology experience are different. Billions of people going to be in enabled for it. What are the cool things you guys got going on? CJ, we were talking before we came on camera about the tree thing you got going on. Take us through some of the things that are exciting that people may not know about or may know about. What should they pay attention to share, share some insight? >> Yeah, of course. So one of the fun things, actually that we're building on that on these sites together with our full team and also some outside contributors from the community and two kin protocol, which is a regenerative finance protocol. And I'll get into that a little bit in a minute. Effectively what we're actually doing is planting a carbon capturing virtual forest inside of the metaverse that will in future also be bio diverse. So how we're approaching that is imagine that you can plant NFT trees inside of the metaverse, providing that your will deposit X amount of kind of USD stablecoin or Ether or some digital asset. You can actually use that to deposit inside of the tree. And we will use some, probably something like super fluid, which is like a kind of smart projecting infrastructure platform. And we all essentially enable every single second funds being sent from the contract and actually purchasing real world carbon credits. So legitimate, you know, government bags to carbon credits from the voluntary kind of public market that have actually been bridged on chain, transformed into a crypto asset, and they will be locked away inside of these trees inside of game forever. And in future, we also hope to have like user on animals, roaming the great forest of Atlantis, which will have biodiversity and endangered species credit, locked inside. And we hope to support a variety of different kind of sustainable assets and things like that to really populate this ecosystem. >> So it's you're doing climate change good for real, as well as rendering it as an asset for everyone to see and enjoy. >> Absolutely. And for me, that's what makes the metaverse the metaverse, that's what I talked about. It's how Web3 enables the metaverse to cross over into our real world, ordinary life from URL to IRL and actually provide some incredible positive impact for all of humanity on the planet. >> And Noah, you have some action going on there. I mean, I would be like, "oh, virtual real estate, isn't it unlimited real estate?" But when you have users come together, this value, we've seen this in gaming, what are some of the cool things you got going on over there at Parcel? >> Yeah, I think one thing that stands out, which maybe not enough people are thinking about are AR virtual world. So, right now a lot of people are focused on the VR types, central and sandbox and, and Atlantis, but there very well may be a billion people using augmented reality before there are a billion using virtual reality just because of the nature of the hardware development and apple may come out with their AR headset by the end of the year. So there are a few projects there they've taken the real world to map and Parcel it out into hexagons, and you can actually buy that, and you own that, that piece and you can put your own custom content there. And on that social impact point, we have heard about a few projects that are trying to use it for good. And like one project is bought up some land in the Amazon rain forest and some of the proceeds go to conservation of the rain forest. So, you know, we're all about using blockchain for good and right, coming together as a globe. >> I can't wait to see the commercial real estate division of your group with all the work from, a remote coming on. Guys, great stuff you got going on, again, you guys are pioneering an area that is coming big. It's coming strong, its got a lot of... A momentum, vitality, and energy to it. Put a plug in for your companies. Noah, we'll start with you. What's going on with Parcel, share a plug for the company. What you're looking for, do some key highlights, news, take a minute to, to give a plug. >> Sure. Yeah, great. We are the destination for virtual real estate and that extends well beyond just the buyers and sellers. That's everyone across the whole chain with property managers and property developers, but then also the builders and creators and artists, and we are working right now on aggregating the best creator directory in the metaverse. So you can think of it as a place where artists can come showcase their work and get hired. As well as just generally like bridging this knowledge gap that is much wider than we even expected. So we have our Parcel learn product coming soon, which is a fully fledged, knowledge base with education, informational content and lots of rich data. >> Where can people get involved? What's the channels? Are all channels open? Where can we find you? >> Yeah, our websites Parcel.so on Twitter, you can find us at ParcelNFT and you can link to our discord from either one of those. It's the best way to get involved. >> All right, CJ, put a plug in for the last world, I know you got a lot of action to share. >> Yeah, of course. I would love to see everybody there. Thanks so much for having us. And thanks for listening. Like I said, at the start of the call, we're building the Web3 social metaverse and we're connecting Web3 with social gaming and education, in one light web virtual world that's accessible to everybody. We're also doing some crazy stuff like planting their cabin, capturing virtual forest and all of that, and trying to be the infrastructure layer for Web3 driven real world utility inside of the metaverse. And we believe that we have designed the critical value capture mechanism for virtual learn. I we'll be sharing more all of that very soon and continuing to integrate the best apps from across the Web3 ecosystem and showcasing them at the center of Atlantis. You can go to discord.gg/atlantisworld. If you would love to learn more about us, you can go to wiki.atlantis.world. And there is some documentation now, which includes back story and team and some of our milestones and achievements so far from winning hackathons to raising grants and launching our Alpha belt, soft launching it. And we all have the public free to play coming in March. And where most active, I would say on discord and Twitter. On Twitter you can find us atlantisOx, or just search Atlantis world. And it's the first one that come up. >> All right. CJ, thank you. Noah, thanks for coming out. I really appreciate you spending the time here, and unstoppable showcase and being a partner. Again they got the great digital identity, great plug there for them here. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for sharing the time. Appreciate you guys are pioneer of some good stuff. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much man. >> I so appreciate that. >> All right, theCUBE's unstoppable domains partner showcase. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(soft instrumental music) >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in person at a live physical event with real people. Of course, it's a hybrid event. Great stuff online. Check it out on the Amazon site, as well as theCUBE zone. We've got great guests, talking about the cloud vision for getting talent in to the marketplace, in being productive and for society Accenture always great content. Denise Reese, Managing Director of the South Market Unit Lead at Accenture, AABG, which stands for "Accenture Area Business Group" and Gina Gina Fratarcangeli who is also the managing director of Midwest sales leader. Ladies, thanks for coming, I appreciate you coming on and talking about the vision of talent. >> I guess >> Thanks for having us. >> Yes, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, Amazon's got this dangerous goal, to train 29 million people. Maureen Lonergan came on yesterday, who I've known for a long time, doing a great job. It's hard to get the talent in. First of all, it sounds harder than it really is, that's my opinion. You know, you get some training certifications and you're up and running. So, talent's a big thing. What do you guys do? Give us the overview. >> Sure. Well, we're having a lot of activity at Accenture trying to get talent in. Across the entire country we're spending a tremendous amount of effort to do that. A couple of critical things we're doing in the Midwest is bringing in and searching for different talent streams that we haven't typically done in the past. For instance, one thing that we're doing is, we set up an apprentice program where we're reaching out into the market to find diverse talent, who aren't coming through the critical normal college path and bringing folks in like that. And we've got 1200 people that we've brought in that way, just in the Midwest. Which has been a phenomenal new talent stream for us. And supporting our inclusion and diversity. One of the other exciting things is what we call "The Mom Project", where we're intentionally working with an organization called the Mom Project, to bring women back into the workplace who may have left while they were taking care of their families and helping them get certified in all the new cloud technology and getting back to work. >> I love how you guys are going after this whole places that not everyone's looking at, because what I love about Cloud is that, it's a level up kind of opportunity where you don't really have to have that pedigree, or that big-big school. Of course, I went to a different school. So, I have a little chip on my shoulder. I didn't go to MIT, wasn't North-east but still good school. But, I mean, you could really level up from anywhere. >> Gina: That's right. >> And the opportunities with Cloud are so great. This is like a huge thing. No I'm surprised no one knows about it. >> Absolutely. I would add to that. So, we've in the South, in Georgia in particular. We've just launched an initiative with the technical college system of Georgia and AWS. So, it's a public-private partnership, where we're actually helping to set the curriculum for those students that are going through programs, through the technical colleges. It's one of the largest parts of the university system of Georgia. And, we're actually helping to frame the curriculum. And, giving folks what they need, to your point. It is an opportunity to level up. It's a great way to get talent in non-traditional spaces. It helps us to achieve our inclusion and diversity roles or goals, rather. But, then it also allows us to really continue to fill that pipeline with folks that we may not have had access to otherwise. >> Is there a best practice that you see developing in the acquisition of talent? Or enticing people to come in? Because that's just economics you know, Maureen was telling me that it was this person she was unemployed, and she got certified and she's making six figures. >> Both: Yeah. >> She's like oh my God, this is great. So, that's the Cloud growth. Is there a way to entice people? Is there a pattern? Is it more economic? Is it more, hey, be part of something. What's the data showing? >> There's definitely a war for talent out there. And so in this space we continuously hear from our clients that they can't hire enough people. So in the past, in the technology space, a lot of clients were hiring their own teams and here they just can't get the skills fast enough. So we're spending a tremendous amount of time being proactive. We started a women in Cloud organization where we're proactively reaching out to the community to bring women in, let them know that we will help them get those certifications and partnering with organizations like Women in Cloud, which is a global organization to create new funnels of talent. >> I think the women angle is great. The mom network coming out of the work for back into the workforce, because things change. Like we were talking about how Amazon just changed over the past five years now that this architectural approach is changing. So that's cool. Also we were involved in the women in data science, out of Stanford University, they have that great symposium. This is power technical women. >> Yes >> And it's got a global following. So the women networks that are developing are phenomenal. So that's not just an Accenture thing, right? That's outside of Accenture. >> I think it's a combination because I think we do a really good job inside of Accenture to create opportunities for women of various ethnicities lived experiences to be able to come together to network internally, but then also to pour some of that talent that they have into the communities where we live and we all do business as well. So I think I'm seeing definitely a two-pronged approach there. >> Let me ask you a question, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I kind of will, Accenture's known as a pretty great firm. So working at Accenture is kind of a big deal. Does that scare people? Because if you could work at a Accenture I mean, that's good pedigree right there. So like, when you're trying to get people coming into the cloud, do they get the Accenture mojo or does it work for them? And can you share your experiences on that? >> I've been here five years and it's been a phenomenal ride for me. I've really enjoyed the fact having a female CEO, I think, and having a CEO who is so committed to diversity on all aspects, right? Her commitment is 50% diversity parody by 2025 at every level of our organization. And that doesn't happen without really intentional efforts at the entry-level and everywhere through the process to ensure that women are not only promoted, but really given the support network among all of our leaders and mentorship to be successful. And it's not just words, it's something that we're really spending a lot of time doing with intention. And that word is out in the space now, as women come in, they're loving it and they're recruiting their other women into the organization and diverse groups as well as what I'm seeing. >> And so I actually just started at Accenture in March. So I've been around eight months. I actually joined from AWS, interestingly enough. And I can tell you from my own experience, the intentionality that Gina spoke to you is it's evident at all levels. I feel like the way that I was courted to the firm was nothing short of amazing. That's another story for another day, but I feel like my being where I am, being hired in as a managing director, as an experienced hire, I think my presence is a testament to the focus that Accenture has on inclusion diversity and the equity component as well. And then also in Atlanta, we are exceptionally fortunate. We have close to 30 black and Latin X managing directors and senior managing directors out of the Atlanta office. So what we're doing there is pretty magical and it's something that I've never experienced in my 25 years. >> It's contagious I hope, the magic is contagious. >> Yeah. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And it's exciting because we're known as a management consulting business, right? So our product is the people >> That's right. >> And so there is intention from day one as to what you want from your career and setting your career plan. So everyone is given those career counselors and the expectation that someone is thinking about your business and your personal business, and what is your role today and what should your role be in two years, and what skills do you need to get there? Which is awesome, it's a lot of fun. >> It's also walking the talk too, right? I mean, Amazon here, they had a 50% women on stage. I don't know if you noticed on the keynote, they was two men and two women, 50%. Of course the United Airlines, it's got to be three. We got to get a 51%,, 'cause technically 51% So it should be three to one, but yeah, like, okay, that was cute notice but that's good. But this is real, I've been a big proponent of software development. Customers are women too that's 51%. So I think this whole representation thing has to be more real and more intentional. And so I want to ask you, how would you share the best practice of making that real from the essential playbook? What could people learn and what mistakes should they avoid? I think people who do want to try with it, but they don't know what to do. >> You know, I think get started, right. Do the work. I feel like since I started in technology, we've been having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and bringing more people into the space. And now it's time for us to just do that. And I feel like Accenture is doing that in spades. I think also again, I've been using this word. I was on a breakout panel yesterday talking about our partnership with AWS and intentionality keeps coming up. But I think also it helps to have a CEO who's creating diversity as an imperative at the most senior levels of the firm and folks are being incentivized as a result. So you've got to put the mechanisms in place to ensure that folks understand that this is not just lip service. >> That's a great point. It's not only just the people, but the mechanisms. And one of the things that I've been saying early on in the top of the interview was Cloud is an instant leveler there, because if you can be so capable so fast. So like when you start thinking about getting people in the market, producing talent, this notion of meritocracy isn't lip service, because if you have the capabilities and the people side lineup, then it truly can be like that. 'Cause your game does the talking, right. >> And we're doing it with intention at every level in the organization so much though, that every people leader, one of their metrics is the diversity. And as we look at the promotions, making sure that that parody is there, but every person who's managing people has diversity as a metric that they're being measured on. And so I think that's really critical as well as having the people who are being the advocates and being the allies and really asking the questions as the teams are getting put together. You know, my job is to review all the deals in the Midwest. And when the teams come forward, I say, "Great where are the women on the team? Who are we putting it?" We're all talking about the diversity. So when we're going to a client meeting, where are the women who are you're taking to that meeting? And if the answer is well, there's not one who's technical yet, the most senior, the most technical, well, great bring her on and use this as a training opportunity. We need to walk the walk and talk the talk and show that to our clients. >> I think that's really good. You guys are senior leaders, one can do that, demonstrate that, but also you're in the field for Accenture. You're in front of your customers. What are you seeing out there and what excites you about being in these industry? >> Yeah, I love the fact that there are so many more women in this space. I love that we're having so many women out there with intention. We've had six female CEOs do women in Cloud panel discussions with us and with our team. So you made the comment early about cloud moving so fast. That's the most exciting thing for me and the fact that it is moving at such a pace that no one client is going to be able to get the skills fast enough. They need companies like Accenture. They need companies like AWS to help them where we're leveraging all the knowledge from our own other clients and bringing that together so we can help them accelerate their development. What about you? >> Absolutely. Now I would echo that as we used to say at AWS plus one to that. But I'm really hopeful because what I'm seeing is the number of folks with my lived experience better at senior executive levels, not only within Accenture and AWS, but in our customers. And I think going back to the point that you were making earlier regarding Cloud being a level up and giving folks opportunity, folks have to be able to see a path, right? It's one thing to just get a certification and tick a box, that's great. But if you don't see a pathway to being able to utilize that in a way that allows you to move up and seeing where we are now, just as a firm, just really, really excites me that every time I get onto a call and I see another strong, amazing woman, I'm like, man, this is amazing. And it's something that... I think it's a phenomenon that I've started to see maybe within the last like five years or so. And probably even within the last two to three years, I've started to see that even more so, so that really excites me. >> Well, first of all, you guys are great. You're contagious, okay? Which is good, a good thing. I love how you brought the whole path thing because path finders was a big part of Adam's Leslie's keynote, and it must be really fun to see people taking the path that you guys are pioneering- >> We're ploughing, we're ploughing >> Yes we are. We're ploughing and you know what else we're doing? We're lifting, as we climb. That is important. I would say that, we don't have all of these amazing opportunities and blessings just to talk about what we have, but if you're not actually bringing somebody else along and giving those opportunities to folks, then it's all for not. >> You got people and the Cloud, to get them people, which is, we're humans and the mechanisms software to bring it together, magic. >> Absolutely >> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thanks for having us. >> Okay this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage from re:Invent 2021 AWS web services. Thanks for watching (soft instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to the CUBE's continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin here with David Nicholson. We have two live sets going on, we've got two remote sets, over 100 guests working with AWS and it's a massive ecosystem of partners, really digging into the next decade of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Edith Harbaugh, CEO, and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. We're going to be talking about a blueprint for continuous modernization, Edith, it's great to have you, thanks for coming. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I was doing some research, you guys raised 200 million in series D in August, just a few months ago, that new funding tripled your valuation to 3 billion up more than 3x from the previous funding rounds, so rocket ship. >> Edith: Yeah. >> I also noticed you guys are on the Forbes Cloud 100 2nd year on the list, you jumped dramatically from 100 in 2020 to 47 this year, talk to us about all the innovation and acceleration that's going on at LaunchDarkly. >> Yeah, well, it's, it's great to be here, you know, I'm the CEO and co-founder and we started seven years ago in 2014 and what we were doing back then was a really new field, like I actually came up with the name feature management, just to describe what we were doing and it was this idea that you could release features to different people at different times, which sounds really simple, but it really allows you to have valves to different populations that you can then turn something on, turn something off, run a beta, do personalization and then if something's going wrong out on the field quickly and easily, turn it off. >> So as an engineer, as a long standing engineer, what were the things that really frustrated you, that you thought this, this is missing, we've got to focus on this. >> Oh my gosh, so, I was an engineering manager, I actually do a podcast too called To Be Continuous just about all the bad things I saw happen, the worst thing you could do is, is build something that nobody wants, which is really frustrating, so I think a lot of continuous delivery came out of the urge to just get stuff out quicker. The flip side of that is that if you moved too fast, a release can be catastrophic. We used to call them the push and pray release because you push stuff out and then you're just crossing your fingers that nothing breaks because if something breaks it's extremely stressful. Your mind starts flooding with endorphins and hormones, your heart rate increases and you sometimes make even worse decisions, so what LaunchDarkly and feature management allow you to do is push it out to who you want and if something is going wrong, you could turn it off without a redeploy, if things are going right, you can continue to push it out. >> And when you say feature management, you're talking about, you're talking about a level of granularity that is finer than a release version. that is finer than a release version. >> Edith: Yeah. How do you do that? >> Our customers do it, so we provide a platform where our customers and we have 2,500 worldwide, everything from IBM and Atlassian, down to like three person startups, they decide how to encapsulate a feature >> David: Okay. >> So they could push it to who they want, so, so there's a lot of really neat use cases. >> So knowing that you're providing them with the valves. >> Edith: Yes. Then they can- think differently about how they're actually developing in anticipation of delivering encapsulated features, as opposed to, here's your new release. >> Edith: Exactly. >> Okay. >> Exactly, so we have some customers who've used LaunchDarkly to actually move to the cloud. So like TrueCar was running their own data centers and they wanted a way to start moving all of that data center traffic into AWS, so they could use LaunchDarkly to manage that traffic flow and do it in a controlled way instead of just one quick switch. >> I was looking at that case study of TrueCar, they migrated 500 websites to AWS without downtime and deploying 20x per day, which is up from 1x a week, that's a massive change. >> Yeah, I think really what we give our customers is confidence that if you know that you can always have control over stuff with feature management, you actually move much quicker. You can, you can move 20 times a day if you know that if something goes wrong, you can always turn it off, you have much more confidence. >> Where are your, you having customer conversations? I know you, you coined to the term feature management, I'd love to know a bit more contextually about the evolution from feature flags to feature management and where are those customer conversations happening? are they kind of down in the technical ways? are they more higher level? given the fact that we're in such a, still a, such a state of flux with COVID? >> Yeah, so we, we didn't invent feature flagging like the smart companies like Amazon, Facebook, Netflix have been doing feature flagging for decades now, it was always a secret sauce of this is how they could manage their own functionality. What LaunchDarkly did was kind of changed it to feature management about doing it where any other customer also had the same set of tools and platforms and also on top of that things like a workflow, scheduling, integrations. So that for example, a developer could develop something and then give the keys to the product manager, say product manager, you get to, you get to run the beta now. >> So putting, putting more control back in the hands of the folks that are, that really are touching and feeling and smelling the product. >> Yeah or customer support, you know, >> Yeah or customer support, you know, if something is going wrong in the field, instead of having to wait for an engineer to fix a bug customer support could just turn it off. >> So I'm curious about, you know, when we talk about it's a, this, this sort of dovetails with something that was discussed in the keynote today, out of the gate, Adam comes out and he's talking about microprocessor technology. Now in the era of cloud, generally people would say, that stuff doesn't matter, right? It's all about the feeling of being in the cloud and the flame, you know, the, the, the field of wheat blowing in the wind and it's a feeling that you get, it's really interesting what you're doing under the covers, but who is the, who is the audience? Who, who buys this? Because I can imagine some in the engineering, on the engineering side of things, feeling like maybe they're giving up some control, but really you're giving them more tools, but is it business people who are demanding this? how, how do you go to market? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting because our core audience is developers and VP of engineering, like they love the platform. Like our Net Promoter Score is extremely high, engineers say like, this gave me my weekends back because if a bug happens I don't have to come in. >> David: Okay so they get it. >> They get it. This isn't being pushed down- from executives that don't understand the technology. >> No, I mean, a typical thing is a developer's, like, I need this to do my job and then the business people say, well, if the developers are happy, we're happy, you know, it's, it's a developers world now, you know, they're hard to hire, you have to have them and if you have anything that will make their job easier and them happier, why wouldn't you buy it? >> That's a big facilitator, so you mentioned a high, high NPS, high Net Promoter Score, we, we talk with Amazon folks about their their focus on the customer and their customer obsession if you will, that everything starts backwards, we start from the customer, 2,500 customers in such a short time period, we talked about the funding, I imagine culturally there's similarities there, if one of the things that you're able to confidently give your customers is that confidence in LaunchDarkly. >> Yeah, you know, one of the happiest parts of my job is visiting customers, you know, I, my co-founder and I personally visited, I think the first 10 or 20 customers and if they had a bug, if they wanted something, and if they had a bug, if they wanted something, we built it. And I love going on customer sites, cause it's. And I love going on customer sites, cause it's. >> When they're telling you that you gave them their weekend back. >> Edith: Yeah. >> Huge. >> That's, yeah, that.- that's not an insignificant thing when you think about what people do with their weekends, you know, so? >> Yeah, you know, it, it feels really good to have customers say, like this literally has changed the way they built software for the better. >> I can't imagine this, you know, with everything that's happened in the last 22 months with the acceleration to cloud, but all these massive pivots by businesses, in every industry just to survive in the beginning, were an advantage, something like LaunchDarkly is for those organizations, so you have to move really, really quickly and keep changing direction to kind of figure out how do we stay afloat and now how do we thrive in that, that this has probably been a real lifesaver for a lot of organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen like a ten year roadmap at our customers compressed into a month, like we had a, a retail chain in the Midwest that was thinking about doing in-store pickup and then when COVID hit, they're like, okay, this changed from a, maybe to a, we need to have this to stay afloat and now, now they can help people pick up, same with, same with restaurants having a mobile app to do delivery or pickup, it used to be when we'll get to that next year, now it's something that you have to have. >> Oh yeah. >> Because if, if you're going to go get coffee and one place has a mile long line and their place has an app, which one are you going to pick? >> So, what do people do that don't have this capability? This, I mean, this might sound like a completely naive question, I know a lot about a lot of things, so I'm okay looking dumb sometimes, it's how I learn, so I'm okay looking dumb sometimes, it's how I learn, but seriously, if you don't have these valves, then aren't you doomed then aren't you doomed to releases that are going to be panic inducing. >> It's really, it's really painful, like, I mean, that's, that's the way I used to, to release, you know, I remember it, like you're released and you would have tried to have caught all the bugs, but it would go out and if something happened, you had to fix it on the fly and even if you have a really good deployment process, that's 20 minutes, maybe two hours. >> David: Sure, and, and. >> Which, which if you're a mobile app, it could be a business killer. >> Yeah, well we're here at AWS reinvent, I mean, how does, how does this dovetail with this, the AWS mission to migrate and modernize into the cloud native world? we're talking about cloud native, you know, development and operations that you're involved with, so there's obviously a synergy there, but why specifically AWS? >> Oh, I mean, I think one of the biggest tailwinds we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, you don't really need a tool like this, or a platform like this, your business process is completely different, but you're going to die as a company cause you can't survive on two releases a year. If you're moving to the cloud, we help you get there and once you're in the cloud, if you want to move at the speed of business, but safely, we give you that platform. Like, so, I think continuous delivery got this bad wrap because people thought that meant that you push out stuff every second and break everything. >> David: Right. >> What we do is we allow you to innovate as fast as you want, but release in a controlled way. >> I got to ask you a question, you, you talked about the customers and your love of being with customers, one of the things I can't help thinking is that what you're helping facilitate is brand reputation. If, you know, if we have an expectation and we want to go on a, on an app and order coffee, and it's down, we're going to go to the next competitor, so from a brand reputation perspective, I'm just wondering if, if any of your customer conversations kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering and it focused on the folks that are leading these companies going, our reputation is on the line, people are, let's face it during COVID far less patience than we've, we've seen a lot of really impatient people, but is, is that something that you also facilitate, is the brand reputation? >> Oh, not just a brand reputation that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars, like. that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars, like. >> Lisa: $5,600 a minute, I think is what Gartner estimates. >> Yeah, but depending on what business you're in, like if you're in a bank, you absolutely need to be reliable. If you're a streaming service like streaming, one of the biggest horse races in Australia, you need to have uptime. >> Everybody needs uptime, let's, let's just be clear if I can't get door dash or whatever, it's a disaster from my perspective as a consumer and yes, we have, we have far less patience than we've ever had. >> Yeah, I mean, we have a really interesting, we have both B2C, like streaming ash, streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B and they both have problems that we solve but honestly, the, the, the business problems with a B2B are much more challenging sometimes. >> Well Edith, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program, talking about LaunchDarkly, what you're enabling organizations to achieve in every industry, it sounds like you're riding a rocket ship. >> It's been really fun, you know, I, I love seeing a customer that's been using us for three, five years. >> David: Wow. >> And how much their life has gotten better. >> And as you said, that's, that's no small statement. Thank you so much for joining us on the program, we appreciate your insights and look forward to hearing more news from LaunchDarkly coming out. >> Thanks. >> All right, for David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS:reinvent 2021, theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Viewers of our breaking analysis series know that we've been following the developments in cybersecurity for a number of years and of course, throughout the pandemic. Focusing on the permanent shifts that we see in cyber from remote work, distributed computing and technology advancements. We've reported how the adversaries are highly capable they're well-funded and they're motivated. And how they're constantly upping their game on defenders, island hopping, stealthily living off the land, planting self forming malware at various points in the digital supply chain, offering advanced ransomware as a service of the dark web to any disreputable individual with or without a high school diploma that may have access to a server and is brazen enough to steal from their company. We've also shared this chart from Optiv many, many times, it's a taxonomy of the cybersecurity landscape, and it is meant to make your eyes bleed, ask any CSO and they'll tell you they're drowning in fragmented tooling, technical debt, and their number one challenge is lack of talent. Not that their people aren't capable, they are, but CSOs just don't have enough of them. They can't hire fast enough or they can't retain qualified people with the talent war that's going on. Or they can't train people fast enough, or they just don't have the budget. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this video exclusive with Nick Schneider, president and CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, Nick, so good to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> That's our pleasure. So Arctic Wolf networks, let's talk about the company, the problem, you heard my little narrative upfront. What are you guys all about? >> Yeah, so at its core, we're a cybersecurity technology company. You know, it's our belief that we've really pioneered the first full scale cloud native security operations platform and at its core, what we're trying to do as a business is make security operations something that's fast, easy and economical for really a company of any size and scale to implement with really two key components, one we're agnostic to the technology and the landscape of the technology that they have already implemented within their environment, and two, we can feather into really any organization, regardless of the skill set they have from a cybersecurity standpoint in house. And really the problem that we're setting out to solve, I think you illustrated well at the beginning of the show here is that it's our belief that the cybersecurity industry in a sense has failed the end user or failed the customer by throwing, you know, a myriad of different tools at them. And it's really, you know, our mission here as a company to end cyber risk. And it's our belief that through the cloud native platform that we've bought in the cybersecurity security operations cloud that we've built, that we can deliver the outcomes that have been promised over time to these customers, which at the end of the day, is really just to be safe and have their customer and have their business protected. >> So you guys are the experts. You can kind of provide a white glove service that essentially plugs in to my business. Is that right? And how easy is that to do, what do I have to do to, to set it up? How complicated is that for me, the customer? >> Yeah, so it's, it's very straightforward. We can implement our security operations platform, you know, in as short as a week and generally speaking, you know, about a month and we plug in really to the infrastructure that the customer has in place. And for some of our customers, that's very little and for some of our customers, most of our customers, that's quite a bit of technology. And the beauty of the way that we've built the platform is that we're really agnostic to that tech. So, we can take feeds from kind of any technology that are in place, that helps to augment the platform that we've built. And then we feather in kind of the technologies that we've built within the platform, into their existing infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is give the customer visibility, you know, into the tools that they have, the gaps that they might have as a result of the tools, you know, in some cases, the duplication of efforts that they have, you know, between these tools and then deliver a security outcome or a protection that maybe they haven't otherwise felt as a business. And then outside of kind of the technology platform, we add what we call our concierge security team as a layer to the deliverable that we give to the customer. And why that's important is that not all customers are created equal and with regard to the skillset that they have in house, in that that concierge security platform allows us to kind of work with a customer at any kind of, you know, point along their security journey, regardless of the in-house technology talent that they have. >> Now, so I got to ask you, our largest footprint for the cube is in the heart of Silicon Valley. We love the valley, but I also love stories of high growth companies that are outside of Silicon Valley. You guys are in the Midwest in Minnesota, it's got some Compellent DNA in there. And I remember my, so my business friends, Phil Soren, and Larry Yasmin, you know them, Phil used to tell me, Dave, this is actually an advantage for us to be in the middle of the part of the country. There's a talent war going on, which back then was a lot less than it is today, even. So how do you see that? Are there advantages to you and being in that part of the country, or does it not matter because you're so distributed around the world? >> Yeah, I mean, I would follow a similar tune to Phil, right. I, you know, obviously worked at Compellent early and, you know, historically I've worked at other Minneapolis based technology companies and the reality is there's a really strong technology ecosystem in Minneapolis. And a lot of the, of the talent, you know, is not just in sales and marketing or just on the technical side, but it's in building high growth technology companies kind of from the ground up into, you know, large scale. And now we've seen not only the fortune 500 kind of base that we have here in Minneapolis, but also a growing contingency of larger technology companies using Minneapolis as at least, you know, one of the spokes against their hub, if not the hub themselves. And clearly my pedigree in history was out of Minneapolis based tech, you know, and I've moved to other locations throughout the country, but as we started to build out, you know, Arctic Wolf and what we wanted Artic Wolf's culture to look like, and as we started to lay out the foundation for what we wanted our growth to look like, it became very clear to myself, you know, our chairman and co-founder Brian Nesmith, that Minneapolis would be a great home for us as Arctic Wolf. And then we would continue to invest in some of the locations that we have, you know, both across the country and now across the globe. >> So there are a lot of companies that are doing managed security services, but if I got it right, you guys specifically target smaller and midsize companies, is that correct? And why is that? >> Yeah, so I would say that that would be correct as of a few years ago, the dynamic has changed quite a bit. And I think it's a result of the dynamic of the market. First and foremost, we are a technology company. We have this concierge layer on top, which is really what the customers are looking for, but it's all powered by the platform. So the platform kind of allows us to do what we've done as a business, into both small organizations, which is, you know, where we probably got our start, but over the last few years, we've seen tremendous growth up market, you know, so for example, we as a business have grown, you know, over a hundred percent now for eight years in a row and now on a much larger denominator, but our upmarket business is growing at four to 500%. And I think that's a result of really two things. I think, A, customers of that size and scale have realized that cyber security and cybersecurity operations as a problem is something that's really hard to accomplish in-house regardless of your size and complexity. And then two, I think what happened over the past year, year and a half is that we saw a lot of organizations move from a centralized I.T or a centralized, you know, security function where they could all operate within an office and all operate in a centralized environment, all of a sudden becoming very disparate in their geography. And that led to a lot more interest in what we did with larger customers, because we could deploy a security operation effectively, remotely in a really short amount of time. And we could do it more effectively and economically than, than they could do on their own. And then we also solve for a component of the human aspect of what a security operation means, right. And what I mean by that is these larger organizations can take their highly skilled cybersecurity talent and focus them on the strategic initiatives within the company. Whereas a lot of the security work or risk is in kind of the day to day, right? The dieting that takes place within an organization. And that's where a lot of the breaches take place is in making sure that you're actually paying attention to, you know, the alerts that you're getting and paying attention to the telemetry and the tools that you've made investments in. And we augment that portion of a cybersecurity operation really, really well for larger organizations and for smaller organizations, we are that security operation. So it's kind of dependent on the way in which they're set up. >> Okay. So it's a mix of both well augmenting, and basically you take the whole thing and so, so your ideal customer profile, your ICP is anybody with a security problem. I mean, that's everybody, well, maybe you could describe paint a picture of your perfect customer, if you would. >> Yeah, so, and you, I know you said that somewhat jokingly, but it, but it is true. We have customers of all sizes, you know, so I, I bet our smallest customer is under 10 employees. Our largest customer is over 50,000 employees. We have customers in every vertical of the market, you know, mostly centralized in healthcare, financial organizations, manufacturing, but, you know, the largest swath of customers by industry would probably not top 10%. So, we service really any account that's looking to develop and invest in a security operation and has the support of their organization and the support of their board and their leadership teams to make that investment. And then where we, where we fall within the account is really dependent on the way in which their current operation is set up. And certainly, you know, the massive organizations that have, you know, 50 people within their cybersecurity team, and they have a hundred different tools. They're probably not the best target for us, but if they have security awareness, if they have a security as a top need or a top priority within their business, and they're looking for a way to build out a true security operation within their account, whether that be wholesale through a third-party or in part through a third-party, we're a perfect fit for all those accounts, which makes our addressable market massive. >> Yeah, so what's unique about you guys, I mean, this may be not the right analogy, but you're kind of like the easy button for cyber. I mean, there's nothing easy about cyber., I get that, but you, you do make it easy, especially for companies that don't have any cyber expertise to engage and get up to speed fast, and certainly be more protected. That's one aspect of your uniqueness. The other is, I think, is your tech stack. I'm hearing, you've got a platform. I know you're focused on network detection and fast response. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's unique about Arctic Wolf. >> Yeah, so the platform itself is really what we founded the company on. So we spent the first few years of our organization in really building out this cloud scale, multitenant cloud, native platform, understanding that the volume of data and the amount of sophistication that we would need to deliver the security operation in the long run was going to be massive. So the platforms really kind of, you know, set on a few different founding principles. One, the platform needs to work for any organization regardless of their size, regardless of their underlying tech and regardless of the skill set within their account. And that's really important. A lot of the tools in the market today require certain things of the, of the customer. And it's our premise, regardless of the customer that we won't require anything from the customers themselves. It's up to them to tell us which portions of the experience they want to own, verse Artic Wolf owning. The second would be that we need to be able to ingest a vast amount of data, and we need to be able to make intelligent decisions with that data, in a short amount of time. And as we've built out our machine learning and our AR algorithms, what we've been able to do is leverage a tool set that allows us to ingest. I think we're up to now 1.5 approaching 2 trillion observations a week, right. Which might equate to a few hundred alerts within our SOC on a per customer basis. But we're only bringing one or two things to a customer on a weekly basis that really need attention. And that's all about the platform kind of curating, cultivating the vast amount of data that we've brought into it. And then, how do we explain and how do we sell that platform with this concierge later into the customer base is also important. And we've done that through what we call modules. So we kind of founded the company on MDR managed detection and response, but we are not a managed detection and response company. It's one of our modules. We've then added manage risk, which competes kind of in the vulnerability management space. We've added a SAS and IAS monitoring, which is really cloud security. We've added what we call log search, which is really our first foray into collaboration. And then we just recently launched a quarter ago, what we call managed security awareness training, which is, you know, training the human aspect of the company on the threats of cybersecurity. And we actually just announced another acquisition in the managed security space today with habituate, which is going to give us, you know, kind of a Hollywood style approach to content within managed awareness training. But tying all those together is very unique in the market. So generally speaking, you'll see a company focused on a specific attack surface, or a specific threat. And what we're trying to say is, look, you're not a hundred percent protected as a business, or you don't have a robust security operation unless you're bringing together all aspects of cybersecurity under one umbrella. And that's really our goal as a company. >> Okay. So you got all these different modules and you may not want to go here cause you're in the cyber business and you're, you're prudently secretive, but, but I'm interested in kind of what's underneath. I presume you're using best of breed tooling underneath, but unlike, you know, the hosting company of the past or those, you know, a big, you know, integrator who could do this, but they've got one of everything and it's sort of, kind of a mess. You're building a scalable business, but you're not, you're not developing, you know, best of breed, identity access products for the marketplace. You're I presume you're buying those in integrating them and working through whatever APIs and making it all work across your stack. Can you talk a little bit about your tech stack? >> Yeah, so the technology stack has been built from the ground up by Arctic Wolf. So certainly we're using, you know, various technologies or open source technologies from within the ecosystem, but the technology and the platform itself is Arctic Wolf. So we're not beholden to any third parties for what we deliver to the customer. And that makes us very nimble in a few areas. One, it makes us very nimble in the way that we price the solution to the customer, which for us is a very predictable model. And then two, it allows us to be nimble with customer needs as to what they want from us, both of the existing modules that we have, but also additional modules or, you know, additional solutions that we might bring to the market. So a lot of vendors that have historically kind of lived within the MDR space and certainly vendors that have lived in the managed, you know, the MSSP or MSP space, which we are certainly not, they're generally leveraging third-party technologies. They're generally buying and implementing or white labeling third-party technologies. And then they're layering kind of a services component on top. And we are not doing that. We've built the technology ourselves and don't get me wrong. That was a massive investment in both time and resources. But I think in the end, what it'll allow us to do is be very nimble with the market and most importantly, be very nimble with the customer's requirements and requests. >> Right. Okay. So let's talk about your market opportunity. I mean, the cyberspace, I mean, I got it well over a hundred billion, I don't know, maybe it's 110, 120 billion. That's kind of your tan, you may be not serving that entire market today. Although you said you started in small and mid-size, you're targeting now your enterprise, your higher end businesses growing, you talked about, I think you said a hundred percent growth, like eight quarters in a row. And so there's no shortage of opportunity for you. How do you think about your total available market? Maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's been eight years of a hundred percent growth. >> Eight years, not eight quarter, I apologize. >> It's been going really well for us. And it's a reflection on the market itself and the approach we're taking. So in our view, security operations is really the opportunity to unify all these disparate markets in cybersecurity. And, when I walk into a customer account, if I had to use two words to describe how they're feeling, one would be confused, the other would be frustrated. Sometimes they're both. Sometimes they're only one, but generally speaking, one of those two words comes out of their mouth. And the reason for it is at the end of the day, they just want to be protected. They want the outcome. And all of these disparate markets are promising the same outcome, but they're just promising it on the endpoint or just on the network or just in cloud or just an IOT or just an OT, or just in fill in the blank. And it's our view that it's our opportunity as a company to really fill that void for the customer, which is to unify all of these different technologies and spaces into one security operation. And sometimes that means that we're delivering our own end point. And sometimes that means that we're leveraging an end point or an end point solution that the customer has in house. And we're ingesting that data into our platform and we're making sense of it to the end user. But when you put that market together, you know, it's a hundred, I think Gartner's recent numbers there are 150 plus billion dollar market. And in 2021, I think it's growing at, you know, 12 to 15%. And it's our view that we can service the majority of that market, you know, I think on a conservative measure, you know, 90 to a hundred billion is the, is the Tam that we're addressing. And we're now starting to go, not only scaling out from the number of products for the markets that we service, and you can see that through managed security awareness training, but also the geographies we service, the segments of the market we service, specialization within verticals. And, for us, that is the opportunity at the end here. >> I wonder if you could help us squint through some of the data you hear in the industry, some of the trends you see in the press, certainly this came up in the, in the solar winds hack. We were seeing, I mentioned upfront, the adversaries are very capable. They're able to get in, live off the land, live stealthily, they're island hopping into the supply chain. You know, oftentimes you don't know, more than often, you don't know they're there, I've heard stats like, and we look at the solar winds hack, we saw that it was, you know, 300 days or over a year that they were inside the company. And you've heard, you know, average statistics from, you know, whatever that it's hundreds of days are those, are you able to compress those? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of where you see your customers and how you're helping them, you know, respond? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day, you know, cybersecurity, the industry is really about limiting the volume of incidents within a customer account and then limiting the impact. And what you're talking about is the impact. And the impact as these threat actors have become, you know, more sophisticated is larger as they're in the environment for a longer period of time. So the faster you can get to an attack or the faster you can detect an attack, the better off you'll be as a business. And that is the core of what we do as a company. And, and certainly, you know, managed detection response or MDR, our first offering was all about that. It's all about detecting early and responding early to a threat so that you can get anything that has gotten through your perimeter defenses out of your systems, as fast as humanly possible. And then we feathered in, you know, manage risk, which is more about the front end. So how do we make sure that we have everything configured properly? How do we make sure that we, you know, fill any holes that are in the current environment so that we don't even get to a point where we have to manage the time with which an attack has had to live within your environment? So, it's all about kind of those two things, reduce the frequency and reduce the impact. And we're, we're focused on both, both the, kind of the proactive measures, which would be more on the front end and then the reactive measures, which is what do you do and how can you act as quickly as possible within your environment to ensure that, you know, they're not getting into the crown jewels of the business. >> We've seen lately where the, the attackers have. I mean, it's really insidious, right Nick, they, they will exfiltrate, they'll get in they'll exfiltrate stealthily and they'll be ready to attack from a ransomware standpoint. And then they, you know, maybe they're hitting the bank and they're scouring to see what the Chief Information Officer is going to invest in. And they're actually making trades ahead of that. They're making more money, you know, snooping than from the ransomware. And then when the company realizes and they respond, then they get them in a headlock and say, okay, now, now that you're going to stop us from making all this money through exfiltration, we're going to hit you with ransomware. So it's just, it's a really awful situation. So my point being that, or we've said, organizations have to be stealthy in their response. Have you seen that as a trend? Am I overstating that? >> No, no. I mean, customers are, you know, good news, bad news customers are very aware of the threats in particular ransomware, data exfiltration and all the other trends in the market. And I think they become more sophisticated in the way in which they respond. And I think as a result, we've seen both changes in the way customers kind of set up their environment technologically, but we've also seen a pretty dramatic shift recently with the way in which they view insurance and the way in which, you know, carriers, view insurance, and how that plays a role in, you know, cybersecurity in their cybersecurity operation. And for a lot of customers, I think recent trends are that the carriers are struggling to, you know, make money on their cyber books. And the reason for that is because they need to make sure that the customer's environment is truly secure, or they're kind of flying blind on what their book looks like. And we've started to see that both on the end-user side, we've seen that through the carriers themselves, and that also has played an integral role in the way in which the customer views risk. And I think that dynamics changing. And I think what the result of that will be is that customers are going to be looking more and more towards how they solve this problem by alleviating risk in-house, as opposed to transferring some of that risk to an insurance carrier or a third party. And what I hope that means for customers is that they'll have the proper investment. They'll have the proper tooling, they'll have the proper operations around how to react and how to respond in the quickest possible manner, which at the end of the day, the faster you can react to an incident, the smaller the impact will be and the smaller of a financial burden it will be. And they'll do that through vendors like Arctic Wolf, you know, tools that are best of breed within their infrastructure. And then a really well thought out plan about how to respond to anything that, that you know, happens within their environment. >> Yeah. I mean, if I'm an insurance company, I give a discount to somebody who's got an alarm in their house and they use it. Maybe I'll give a discount if they're working with a company like Arctic Wolf. >> Exactly. >> What percent, do you have a census to what percent of enterprises actually have a SOC? >> Yeah, we actually did a, some homework here and there's kind of two stats that jump out. And these are through a few different surveys through very well-known organizations in the cybersecurity market. But one is that last year, which would have been, you know, 2020, about 60% of organizations said that they suffered some semblance of a breach, 60%, you know, think about how many tools and how much money these organizations are investing in protecting their businesses. And over half are suffering some semblance of a breach. When those same customers are asked whether or not they felt like they have a security operation, over 99% answered no. >> Wow. >> Right. So they have a bunch of tools they're investing a ton of money, but at the end of the day, when asked, hey, do you feel like you have an operation that can protect your business? Their answer is no. And that's really the void we're trying to. >> And you and I both know that 60%, okay. But then the other 40%, they've been hacked. They just don't know it. So, all right. Let's wrap with the sub stats on the company. I think you've raised nearly half a million, half a billion dollars to date $500 million to date. So that's, I can infer from that some pretty lofty numbers, but where are you in funding with that kind of growth? I got to believe IPO is and you and your future. What can you tell, what metrics can you share? What can you tell us about where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a few metrics on the platform and a few metrics on the company. So the platform itself, you know, we're observing over 1.5 trillion observations a week, we have 10,000 plus sensors in the field. You know, we're ingesting coming from a, you know, Compellent infrastructure guy. You know, we're in ingesting over a petabyte and a half a data week. I would have loved to have been that sales guy in the glory days, you know, but the platforms, you know, operating at massive scale, we've grown the business eight years in a row, over a hundred percent. We've talked about that. Our subscription gross margins are very software-like. We have over 2000 customers. You know, our customers are really happy with an NPS score, you know, approaching 70, you know, over a million licensed users. So we're, we're doing very, very well as a business. And as a result, we've raised money to invest in that growth, which is to the tune of about a half a billion dollars and our path here, and we've stated this publicly now is that, you know, next summer give or take a quarter is really the timeframe that we're marching towards for an IPO. If I'm being honest, given the metrics that we have as a business, we could be a publicly traded company today, especially with the way the market's operating in the valuations of some of the businesses that have gone out. There might be some, even some pressure to do so, but we want to make sure that we are ready to go from a systems and an operation standpoint to not just be, you know, a flashing the pan awesome IPO, but a company that's really kind of the backbone of cybersecurity for years to come. >> Well, obviously a hot space. What we've been covering for a couple of years now, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, we've seen what's happened in the action in the market there. I mean, what are your comps? I mean, I know, I think dark trace is getting ready to go. I don't think they've gone yet. I know Sentinel One went out. How should we think about you? You're not an Okta or I don't think well, CrowdStrike, but you know, those are pure play product companies. How should we think about you guys? >> Yeah, I mean, companies that were on a similar trajectory as us at our size, Sentinel One's a very good example. And you can kind of look across all the core business metrics on that. And clearly those will all be public here in under a year. CrowdStrike's a great example. If you go, you know, reel back the tape to when they were, you know, our size we're right in line with them Zscaler, Okta, you know, I joke with our board and investors and our CFO, that the number of companies that we benchmark ourselves against is starting to become a very small number, given you know, our growth at the scale that we're at. >> Well, that's an awesome story, Nick. We're really excited that you could make some time to come on the Cube and we want to follow your progress. Welcome you back anytime. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me, Dave, and looking forward to continuing the conversation at some point. >> Excellent and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube and we'll see you next time.

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short attention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short retention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello, everyone, and welcome to track three off beyond. My name is being in Yemen and I am an account executive here at Thought spot based out of our London office. If the accents throwing you off I don't quite sound is British is you're expecting it because the backgrounds Australian so you can look forward to seeing my face. As we go through these next few sessions, I'm gonna be introducing the guests as well as facilitating some of the Q and A. So make sure you come and say hi in the chat with any comments, questions, thoughts that you have eso with that I mean, this whole track, as the title somewhat gives away, is really about everything that you need to know and all the tips and tricks when it comes to adoption and making sure that your thoughts what deployment is really, really successful. We're gonna be taking off everything from user training on boarding new use cases and picking the right use cases, as well as hearing from our customers who have been really successful in during this before. So with that, though, I'm really excited to introduce our first guest, Kathleen Maley. She is a senior analytics executive with over 15 years of experience in the space. And she's going to be talking to us about all her tips and tricks when it comes to making the most out of your center of excellence from obviously an analytics perspective. So with that, I'm going to pass the mic to her. But look forward to continuing the chat with you all in the chat. Come say hi. >>Thank you so much, Bina. And it is really exciting to be here today, thanks to everyone for joining. Um, I'll jump right into it. The topic of evolving your analytics center of excellence is a particular passion of mine on I'm looking forward to sharing some of my best practices with you. I started my career, is a member of an analytic sioe at Bank of America was actually ah, model developer. Um, in my most recent role at a regional bank in the Midwest, I ran an entire analytics center of excellence. Um, but I've also been on the business side running my own P and l. So I think through this combination of experiences, I really developed a unique perspective on how to most effectively establish and work with an analytic CEO. Um, this thing opportunity is really a two sided opportunity creating value from analytics. Uh, and it really requires the analytics group and the line of business Thio come together. Each has a very specific role to play in making that happen. So that's a lot of what I'll talk about today. Um, I started out just like most analysts do formally trained in statistics eso whether your data analyst or a business leader who taps into analytical talent. I want you to leave this talk today, knowing the modern definition of analytics, the purpose of a modern sioe, some best practices for a modern sioe and and then the role that each of you plays in bringing this Kuito life. So with that said, let me start by level, setting on the definition of analytics that aligns with where the discipline is headed. Um, versus where it's been historically, analytics is the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns in data, the connective tissue between data and effective decision making within an organization. And this is a definition that I've been working under for the last, you know, 7 to 10 years of my career notice there is nothing in there about getting the data. We're at this amazing intersection of statistics and technology that effectively eliminates getting the data as a competitive advantage on this is just It's true for analysts who are thinking in terms of career progression as it is for business leaders who have to deliver results for clients and shareholders. So the definition is action oriented. It's purposeful. It's not about getting the data. It's about influencing and enabling effective decision making. Now, if you're an analyst, this can be scary because it's likely what you spend a huge amount of your time doing, so much so that it probably feels like getting the data is your job. If that's the case, then the emergence of these new automated tools might feel like your job is at risk of becoming obsolete. If you're a business leader, this should be scary because it means that other companies air shooting out in front of you not because they have better ideas, necessarily, but because they can move so much faster. According to new research from Harvard Business Review, nearly 90% of businesses say the more successful when they equipped those at the front lines with the ability to make decisions in the moment and organizations who are leading their industries and embracing these decision makers are delivering substantial business value nearly 50% reporting increased customer satisfaction, employee engagement, improve product and service quality. So, you know, there there is no doubt that speed matters on it matters more and more. Um, but if you're feeling a little bit nervous, I want you to think of it. I want you think of it a little differently. Um, you think about the movie Hidden figures. The job of the women in hidden figures was to calculate orbital trajectories, uh, to get men into space and then get them home again. And at the start of the movie, they did all the required mathematical calculations by hand. At the end of the movie, when technology eliminated the need to do those calculations by hand, the hidden figures faced essentially the same decision many of you are facing now. Do I become obsolete, or do I develop a new set of, in their case, computer science skills required to keep doing the job of getting them into space and getting them home again. The hidden figures embraced the latter. They stayed relevant on They increase their value because they were able to doom or of what really mattered. So what we're talking about here is how do we embrace the new technology that UN burdens us? And how do we up skill and change our ways of working to create a step function increase in data enabled value and the first step, really In evolving your analytics? Dewey is redefining the role of analytics from getting the data to influencing and enabling effective decision making. So if this is the role of the modern analyst, a strategic thought partner who harnesses the power of data and directs it toward achieving specific business outcomes, then let's talk about how the series in which they operate needs change to support this new purpose. Um, first, historical CEOs have primarily been about fulfilling data requests. In this scenario, C always were often formed primarily as an efficiency measure. This efficiency might have come in the form of consistency funds, ability of resource is breaking down silos, creating and building multipurpose data assets. Um, and under the getting the data scenario that's actually made a lot of sense for modern Sealy's, however, the objective is to create an organization that supports strategic business decision ing for individuals and for the enterprises the whole. So let's talk about how we do that while maintaining the progress made by historical seaweeds. It's about really extending its extending what, what we've already done the progress we've already made. So here I'll cover six primary best practices. None is a silver bullet. Each needs to fit within your own company culture. But these air major areas to consider as you evolve your analytics capabilities first and foremost always agree on the purpose and approach of your Coe. Successfully evolving yourself starts with developing strategic partnerships with the business leaders that your organization will support that the analytics see we will support. Both parties need to explicitly blocked by in to the objective and agree on a set of operating principles on bond. I think the only way to do that is just bringing people to the table, having an open and honest conversation about where you are today, where you wanna be and then agree on how you will move forward together. It's not about your organization or my organization. How do we help the business solve problems that, you know, go beyond what what we've been able to do today? So moving on While there's no single organizational model that works for everyone, I generally favor a hybrid model that includes some level of fully dedicated support. This is where I distinguish between to whom the analyst reports and for whom the analyst works. It's another concept that is important to embrace in spirit because all of the work the analyst does actually comes from the business partner. Not from at least it shouldn't come from the head of the analytic Center of excellence. Andan analysts who are fully dedicated to a line of business, have the time in the practice to develop stronger partnerships to develop domain knowledge and history on those air key ingredients to effectively solving business problems. You, you know, how can you solve a problem when you don't really understand what it is? So is the head of an analytic sioe. I'm responsible for making sure that I hire the right mix of skills that I can effectively manage the quality of my team's work product. I've got a specialized skill set that allows me to do that, Um, that there's career path that matters to analysts on all of the other things that go along with Tele management. But when it comes to doing the work, three analysts who report to me actually work for the business and creating some consistency and stability there will make them much more productive. Um, okay, so getting a bit more, more tactical, um, engagement model answers the question. Who do I go to When? And this is often a question that business partners ask of a centralized analytics function or even the hybrid model. Who do I go to win? Um, my recommendation. Make it easy for them. Create a single primary point of contact whose job is to build relationships with a specific partner set of partners to become deeply embedded in their business and strategies. So they know why the businesses solving the problems they need to solve manage the portfolio of analytical work that's being done on behalf of the partner, Onda Geun. Make it make it easy for the partner to access the entire analytics ecosystem. Think about the growing complexity of of the current analytics ecosystem. We've got automated insights Business Analytics, Predictive modeling machine learning. Um, you Sometimes the AI is emerging. Um, you also then have the functional business questions to contend with. Eso This was a big one for me and my experience in retail banking. Uh, you know, if if I'm if I'm a deposits pricing executive, which was the line of business role that I ran on, I had a question about acquisitions through the digital channel. Do I talk Thio the checking analyst, Or do I talk to the digital analyst? Um, who owns that question? Who do I go to? Eso having dedicated POC s on the flip side also helps the head of the center of excellence actually manage. The team holistically reduces the number of entry points in the complexity coming in so that there is some efficiency. So it really is a It's a win win. It helps on both sides. Significantly. Um, there are several specific operating rhythms. I recommend each acting as a as a different gear in an integrated system, and this is important. It's an integrated decision system. All of these for operating rhythms, serves a specific purpose and work together. So I recommend a business strategy session. First, UM, a portfolio management routine, an internal portfolio review and periodic leadership updates, and I'll say a little bit more about each of those. So the business strategy session is used to set top level priorities on an annual or semiannual basis. I've typically done this by running half day sessions that would include a business led deep dive on their strategy and current priorities. Again, always remembering that if I'm going to try and solve all the business problem, I need to know what the business is trying to achieve. Sometimes new requester added through this process often time, uh, previous requests or de prioritized or dropped from the list entirely. Um, one thing I wanna point out, however, is that it's the partner who decides priorities. The analyst or I can guide and make recommendations, but at the end of the day, it's up to the business leader to decide what his or her short term and long term needs and priorities are. The portfolio management routine Eyes is run by the POC, generally on a biweekly or possibly monthly basis. This is where new requests or prioritize, So it's great if we come together. It's critical if we come together once or twice a year to really think about the big rocks. But then we all go back to work, and every day a new requests are coming up. That pipeline has to be managed in an intelligent way. So this is where the key people, both the analyst and the business partners come together. Thio sort of manage what's coming in, decking it against top priorities, our priorities changing. Um, it's important, uh, Thio recognize that this routine is not a report out. This routine is really for the POC who uses it to clarify questions. Raised risks facilitate decisions, um, from his partners with his or her partner so that the work continues. So, um, it should be exactly as long as it needs to be on. Do you know it's as soon as the POC has the information he or she needs to get back to work? That's what happens. An internal portfolio review Eyes is a little bit different. This this review is internal to the analytics team and has two main functions. First, it's where the analytics team can continue to break down silos for themselves and for their partners by talking to each other about the questions they're getting in the work that they're doing. But it's also the form in which I start to challenge my team to develop a new approach of asking why the request was made. So we're evolving. We're evolving from getting the data thio enabling effective business decision ing. Um, and that's new. That's new for a lot of analysts. So, um, the internal portfolio review is a safe space toe asks toe. Ask the people who work for May who report to May why the partner made this request. What is the partner trying to solve? Okay, senior leadership updates the last of these four routines, um, less important for the day to day, but significantly important for maintaining the overall health of the SIOE. I've usually done this through some combination of email summaries, but also standing agenda items on a leadership routine. Um, for for me, it is always a shared update that my partner and I present together. We both have our names on it. I typically talk about what we learned in the data. Briefly, my partner will talk about what she is going to do with it, and very, very importantly, what it is worth. Okay, a couple more here. Prioritization happens at several levels on Dive. Alluded to this. It happens within a business unit in the Internal Portfolio review. It has to happen at times across business units. It also can and should happen enterprise wide on some frequency. So within business units, that is the easiest. Happens most frequently across business units usually comes up as a need when one leader business leader has a significant opportunity but no available baseline analytical support. For whatever reason. In that case, we might jointly approach another business leader, Havenaar Oi, based discussion about maybe borrowing a resource for some period of time. Again, It's not my decision. I don't in isolation say, Oh, good project is worth more than project. Be so owner of Project Be sorry you lose. I'm taking those. Resource is that's It's not good practice. It's not a good way of building partnerships. Um, you know that that collaboration, what is really best for the business? What is best for the enterprise, um, is an enterprise decision. It's not a me decision. Lastly, enterprise level part ization is the probably the least frequent is aided significantly by the semi annual business strategy sessions. Uh, this is the time to look enterprise wide. It all of the business opportunities that play potential R a y of each and jointly decide where to align. Resource is on a more, uh, permanent basis, if you will, to make sure that the most important, um, initiatives are properly staffed with analytical support. Oxygen funding briefly, Um, I favor a hybrid model, which I don't hear talked about in a lot of other places. So first, I think it's really critical to provide each business unit with some baseline level of analytical support that is centrally funded as part of a shared service center of excellence. And if a business leader needs additional support that can't otherwise be provided, that leader can absolutely choose to fund an incremental resource from her own budget that is fully dedicated to the initiative that is important to her business. Um, there are times when that privatization happens at an enterprise level, and the collective decision is we are not going to staff this potentially worthwhile initiative. Um, even though we know it's worthwhile and a business leader might say, You know what? I get it. I want to do it anyway. And I'm gonna find budget to make that happen, and we create that position, uh, still reporting to the center of excellence for all of the other reasons. The right higher managing the work product. But that resource is, as all resource is, works for the business leader. Um, so, uh, it is very common thinking about again. What's the value of having these resource is reports centrally but work for the business leader. It's very common Thio here. I can't get from a business leader. I can't get what I need from the analytics team. They're too busy. My work falls by the wayside. So I have to hire my own people on. My first response is have we tried putting some of these routines into place on my second is you might be right. So fund a resource that's 100% dedicated to you. But let me use my expertise to help you find the right person and manage that person successfully. Um, so at this point, I I hope you see or starting to see how these routines really work together and how these principles work together to create a higher level of operational partnership. We collectively know the purpose of a centralized Chloe. Everyone knows his or her role in doing the work, managing the work, prioritizing the use of this very valuable analytical talent. And we know where higher ordered trade offs need to be made across the enterprise, and we make sure that those decisions have and those decision makers have the information and connectivity to the work and to each other to make those trade offs. All right, now that we've established the purpose of the modern analyst and the functional framework in which they operate, I want to talk a little bit about the hard part of getting from where many individual analysts and business leaders are today, uh, to where we have the opportunity to grow in order to maintain pain and or regain that competitive advantage. There's no judgment here. It's simply an artifact. How we operate today is simply an artifact of our historical training, the technology constraints we've been under and the overall newness of Applied analytics as a distinct discipline. But now is the time to start breaking away from some of that and and really upping our game. It is hard not because any of these new skills is particularly difficult in and of themselves. But because any time you do something, um, for the first time, it's uncomfortable, and you're probably not gonna be great at it the first time or the second time you try. Keep practicing on again. This is for the analyst and for the business leader to think differently. Um, it gets easier, you know. So as a business leader when you're tempted to say, Hey, so and so I just need this data real quick and you shoot off that email pause. You know it's going to help them, and I'll get the answer quicker if I give him a little context and we have a 10 minute conversation. So if you start practicing these things, I promise you will not look back. It makes a huge difference. Um, for the analyst, become a consultant. This is the new set of skills. Uh, it isn't as simple as using layman's terms. You have to have a different conversation. You have to be willing to meet your business partner as an equal at the table. So when they say, Hey, so and so can you get me this data You're not allowed to say yes. You're definitely not is not to say no. Your reply has to be helped me understand what you're trying to achieve, so I can better meet your needs. Andi, if you don't know what the business is trying to achieve, you will never be able to help them get there. This is a must have developed project management skills. All of a sudden, you're a POC. You're in charge of keeping track of everything that's coming in. You're in charge of understanding why it's happening. You're responsible for making sure that your partner is connected across the rest of the analytics. Um, team and ecosystem that takes some project management skills. Um, be business focused, not data focused. Nobody cares what your algorithm is. I hate to break it to you. We love that stuff on. We love talking about Oh, my gosh. Look, I did this analysis, and I didn't think this is the way I was gonna approach it, and I did. I found this thing. Isn't it amazing? Those are the things you talk about internally with your team because when you're doing that, what you're doing is justifying and sort of proving the the rightness of your answer. It's not valuable to your business partner. They're not going to know what you're talking about anyway. Your job is to tell them what you found. Drawing conclusions. Historically, Analyst spent so much of their time just getting data into a power 0.50 pages of summarized data. Now the job is to study that summarized data and draw a conclusion. Summarized data doesn't explain what's happening. They're just clues to what's happening. And it's your job as the analyst to puzzle out that mystery. If a partner asked you a question stated in words, your answer should be stated in words, not summarized data. That is a new skill for some again takes practice, but it changes your ability to create value. So think about that. Your job is to put the answer on page with supporting evidence. Everything else falls in the cutting room floor, everything. Everything. Everything has to be tied to our oi. Um, you're a cost center and you know, once you become integrated with your business partner, once you're working on business initiatives, all of a sudden, this actually becomes very easy to do because you will know, uh, the business case that was put forth for that business initiative. You're part of that business case. So it becomes actually again with these routines in place with this new way of working with this new way of thinking, it's actually pretty easy to justify and to demonstrate the value that analytic springs to an organization. Andi, I think that's important. Whether or not the organization is is asking for it through formalized reporting routine Now for the business partner, understand that this is a transformation and be prepared to support it. It's ultimately about providing a higher level of support to you, but the analysts can't do it unless you agree to this new way of working. So include your partner as a member of your team. Talk to them about the problems you're trying to sell to solve. Go beyond asking for the data. Be willing and able to tie every request to an overarching business initiative on be poised for action before solution is commissioned. This is about preserving. The precious resource is you have at your disposal and you know often an extra exploratory and let it rip. Often, an exploratory analysis is required to determine the value of a solution, but the solution itself should only be built if there's a plan, staffing and funding in place to implement it. So in closing, transformation is hard. It requires learning new things. It also requires overriding deeply embedded muscle memory. The more you can approach these changes is a team knowing you won't always get it right and that you'll have to hold each other accountable for growth, the better off you'll be and the faster you will make progress together. Thanks. >>Thank you so much, Kathleen, for that great content and thank you all for joining us. Let's take a quick stretch on. Get ready for the next session. Starting in a few minutes, you'll be hearing from thought spots. David Coby, director of Business Value Consulting, and Blake Daniel, customer success manager. As they discuss putting use cases toe work for your business

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Hello and welcome back. You're just in time for our third session spot. I Q amplify your insights with AI in this session will explore how AI gets you to the why of your data capturing changes and trends in the moment they happen. >>You'll >>start to understand how you can transform your data culture by making it easier for analysts to enable business users to consume insights in real time. >>You >>might think this all sounds too good to be true. Well, since seeing is believing, we're joined by thought spots. Vika Scrotum, senior product manager. Anak Shaped Mirror, principal product manager to walk you through all of this on MAWR. Over to you actually, >>Thank you. Wanna Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. I am Action Hera, together with my colleague because today we will talk to you about how spot I Q uses a. I to generate meaningful insights for the users Before we dwell into that. Let's see why this is becoming so important. Your business and your data is growing and moving faster than ever. Data is considered the new oil Howard. Only those will benefit who can extract value of it. The data used in most of your organization's is just the tip of the iceberg beneath the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see or what you don't know to ask. That makes the difference in this data driven world. Let's learn how one can extract maximum value of the data to make smarter business decisions. We believe that analytics should require less input while producing more output with higher quality in a traditional approach. To be honest, users generally depend on somebody else to create data models, complex data queries to get answers to their pre anticipated questions. But solution like hot spot business users already have a Google like experience where they can just go and get answers to their questions. Now, if you look at other consumer applications, there are multiple of recommendation engines which are out there, which keep recommending. Which article should I read next? Which product should I buy? Which movie should I watch in a way, helping me optimized? Where should I focus my time on in a Similarly in analytics, as your data is growing, solutions must help users uncovered insights to questions which they may not ask, we believe, and a I automated insights will help users unleash the full potential off their data Across the spectrum, we see a potential in a smart, AI driven solution toe autonomously. Monitor your data and feed in relevant insights when you need them, much like a self driving car navigates our users safely to their desired destination. With this, yeah, I'm happy to introduce you to spot like you are a driven insights engine at scale, which will help you get full potential off your data like you automatically discovers, personalize and drive insights hidden in your data. So whenever you search to create answers, spot that you continues to ask a lot more questions on your behalf as it keeps drilling and related date dimensions and measures employed insights which may be of interest to you. Now you as a user can continue to ask your questions or can dig deeper into the inside, provided by spotted you Spartak. You also provides a comprehensive set of insights, which helps user get answers to their advance business questions. In a few clicks, so spotted it. You can help you detect any outlier, for example, spot that you can not only tell you which seller has the highest returns than others, but also which product that sellers selling has higher returns than other products. Or, like you can quickly detect any trends in your data and help us answer questions like how my account sign ups are trending after my targeted campaign is over. I can quickly use for, like, toe get unanswered how my open pipeline is related to my bookings amount and what's the like there. What it means is that how much time a lead will take to convert into a deal I can use partake. You, too, create multiple clusters off my all my customer base and then get answers to questions that which customer segment is buying which particular brand and what are the attributes last and the most used feature Key drivers of change spotted you helps you get answer to a question. What factors lead to the change in sales off a store in 2020 as compared to 2019? We can do all this and simple fix. That's barbecue. What is so unique about Spartak? You how it works hand in hand with our search experience, the more you search, the smarter. The spot that you get as it keeps learning from your usage behavior on generates relevant insights for you for your users. Spartak. You ensures that users can trust every insights. A generator. It broadly does this and broadly, two ways. It keeps their insights relevant by learning the underlying data model on. By incorporating the users feedback that is, users can provide feedback to the spot I Q similar to any social media back from, they can like watching sites they find useful on dislike. What insights Do not find it useful based on users. Feedback Spot like you can downgrade any insight if the users have not find it useful. In addition to that, users can dig deep into any Spartak you insight on all calculations behind it are available for a user to look and understand. The transparency in these calculations not only increases the analytical trust among the users, but also help them learn how they can use the search bar to do much more. I'm super excited to announce Partake you is now available on embrace so our automated A insights engine can run queries life and in database on these datasets so you do not need to bring your data to thoughts about as you connect your data sources. Touch Part performs full indexing value to the data you have selected, not just the headers in the material and as you run sport in Q, it optimizes and run efficient queries on your data warehouse on. I am super pleased to introduce you. This new spot like you monitor the spot that you monitor will enable all your users to keep track of their key metrics. Spartak, you monitor will not only provide them regular updates off their key metrics, but we also analyze all the underlying data on related dimensions to help them explain. What is leading to the change of a particular metric monitor will also be available on your mobile app so that you can keep track of your metrics whenever and wherever you go, because will talk for further detail about this during the demo. So now let's see Spartak in action. But before we go there, let's meet any. Amy is an analyst at a global retail about form. Amy is preparing for her quarterly sales review meeting with the management, so Amy has to report how the sales has meat performing how, what, what factors lead to the change in the sales? And if there are any other impressing insights, which everyone should off tell to the management? So but this Let's see how immigrant use part like you to prepare for the meeting. So Amy goes to that spot, chooses the sales data set for her company. But before we see how many users what I Q to prepare for the meeting. I just wanted to highlight that all this data which we're going to talk about is residing in Snowflake. >>So >>Touch Part is going to do a life query on the snowflake database on even spot. A Q analysis will run on the Snowflake databases, so we'll go back and see how you can use it. So Amy is preparing for the sales meeting for 2019. We just ended. So images right Sales 2019 on here. She has the graph of the Continent tickets, >>so >>what she does is immediately pence it >>for >>the report. She's creating Andi now. This graph is available >>there now. >>Any Monnet observed >>that >>the Q four sales is significantly higher than Q >>three, so >>you she wants to deep dive into this. So she just select these two data points and does the right click and runs particularities. So now, as we talked earlier, Spartak, you recommends which columns Spartak Things Will best explains this change >>on. >>Not only that, you can look that Spartacus automatically understood that Amy is trying toe identify what led to this change. So the change analysis we selected So now with this, >>Amy >>has a bit more business context when he realizes that she doesn't want to add these columns. So she's been using because she thinks this is too granular for the management right now. >>If >>she wants, she can add even more columns. All columns are available for her, and she can reduce columns. So now she runs 42 analysis. So while this product Unisys is running, what the system will do with the background, this part I Q will drill across all the dimensions, which any is selected and try to explain the difference, which is approximately $10 million in sales. So let's see if Amy's report is ready. Yeah, so with this, what's product you has done is protect you has drilled across all dimensions. Amy has selected and presented how the different values in these dimensions have changed. So it's product. You will not only tell you which values in these dimensions have changed the most, but also does an attribution that how much of this change has led to the overall change scenes. So here in the first inside sport accuse telling that 10 products have the largest change out of the 3 45 values and the account for 39% increase. Overall, there has been look by the prototype category. It's saying that five product types of the largest change out of the 15 values, and they account for 98.6% of total increase. And they're not saying the sailors increased their also demonstrating that in some categories the sales has actually decreased to ensure the sales has decreased. Amy finds this inside should be super useful so immediately pins this on the same pain, but she was preparing for and she's getting ready with that. Amy also wants to dig deeper into this inside. My name goes here. She sees that spot. I Q has not only calculated the change across these product types, but has also calculated person did change. So Amy immediately sorts this by wasn't did change. And then she notices that even though Sweater as a category as a prototype, was not appearing in the change analysis but has the most significant change in terms of percentage in comparison to Q two vs Q four. So she also wants to do this so she can just quickly change the title. And she can pin this insight as well under spin board for the management to look at with this done. Now, Amy, just want to go back to this sales and see if she can find anything else interesting. So now Amy has already figured out the possible causes. What led to the increase in sales? So now, for the whole of 2019, as this is also your closing, Amy looks, uh, the monthly figures for 2019, and she gets this craft now. If Amy has to understand, if there is an interesting insight, she can dig into different dimensions and figure out on her own or immigrant, just click on this product analysis. That's product immediately suggest all the dimensions and measures immigrant analyze sales by Andi many. We will run this What will happen is this barbecue system will try to identify outliers. The different trend analysis Onda cross correlation across different measures. So Amy again realizes that this is a bit too much for her. So she reduces some of these insights, which she thinks are not required for the management right now from the business context and the business meeting. And then she just immediately runs this analysis. So now, with this, Amy is hoping to get some interesting insights from Spartak, which immigrant present to her management meeting. Let's see what sport gets for her. So now the Alice is run within 10 seconds, so spot taken started analyzing. So these are the six anomaly sport like you found across different products, where their total sales are higher than the rest. He also founded Spot. I just found eight insights off different product types which has tired total sales and look across these enemy sees that oh jackets have against the highest sales across all the categories in December as well. Amy wants toe been this to the PIN board on M. It moves further now. Amy's is that it has also shown Total Country purchased their product a me thinks this is not a useful insights. Amy can get this feedback. The system and system asked, Why are you saying you don't find this useful so the system can remember? So you can also say that anomalies are obvious right now and give this feedback and the system will remember. In addition, Amy finds that the system has automatically correlated the total sales in total contrary purchase. Amy Pence this as well to the pin board. Andi. She loves this inside where she she is that not only the total sales have increased, but total quantity purchases have increased a lot more on their training, opposed as well. So she also opens this now anything. She is ready for her meeting with the management. So she just goes and shares the PIN board, which she just created with the management. And you know what happens immediately? The jacket sales category Manager Mr Tom replies back to Amy and says in the request, Any d really like this? So now we will see how Spartak you can help any educators as request doesn't mean really need to create these kind of reports every month to cater toe Tom's request. So with this, I will handle it because to take us walk us through How spot that you can cater this request. Hi, >>everyone. So analysts like Amy are always flooded with such requests from the business users and with Spot and you monitor. Amy can set up everyone who needs updates on a on a metric in just a few simple steps and enable them to drag these metrics whenever and wherever they want. And north of the metrics, they also get the corresponding change analysis on the device off their choice with hot Spot. What I give money being available on both Web and the mobile labs. So let's get started with the demo will be set up a meet and go to the search tab and creator times we start for the metrics you want to monitor, right? And please know if the charges already created is already created. All is available is, um, usually a section in a PIN board. Also dancer. Then there's no need to create a new child. She can simply then uh, right click on the chart and select moisture from the menu, which then shows, which then shows the breakdown off the metric he's going to monitor, including the measure. What it's been grouped by on what it is filtered on. Okay, and also as this is a weekly metric, all the subscribers are going to get a weekly notification for this metric had been a monthly metric. Then the notifications would have been delivered on a monthly cadence. Next she can click on, continue and go to the configure dimensions called on Page. Here A is recommending what all dimensions could best being the change in this metric, she can go ahead with default recommendation, or she can change the columns as she seems very she can click, she conflict, continue and go to the next page, which is the subscriber stage. It is added by default to the subscriber, but she can search everyone who needs update on this metric and add them on this metric by clicking confirmed, she'll see a toast message on the bottom of the page, taking on which will take a me to this page, which is a metric detail page On the top of this page, we can see the movement of the metric and how it is changing over time, 92 you can see that the Mets jacket, since number has increased by 2.5% in the week off 23rd of December has compared toa the week off 16th of December and just below e a has invaded the man is generated in sites which are readily available for consumption. Okay to discharge. Right here says that pain products have the largest change out of all the 28 values and contributes to the 88% of the total increase in the same. And this one right here is that Midwest is the larger Midwest has the largest change and accounts for 55.66% off the total increase. Now, all this goodness is also available on the mobile lab. Right? So let me just show you how business users are going to get notified on the based. On this metric, all the business users who are subscribed to this metric are going to get a regular email as well as push notifications on the mobile lab. And when the click on this, they line on a metric detail page which has all the starts, which I just showed you on the on the bed version, okay. And one cyclic on back burden. They land on this page, which is a monitor tab, and it summarizes all the metrics Which opportunity monitoring and gives them a whole gave you to stay all I want to stay on top of their businesses. Okay. Eso that folks was monitor. Now I'll search back to slaves and cover. Summarize the key takeaways. From what? That she and I just don't know. So it's part of you wanted, uh, Summit Spartak you. It automatically discovers insights and helps you unless the full potential of your data and that's what I do is comprehensive set off analysis. You can answer your advanced business question in just a few simple steps and the end speed of your time. Bring state. And with a new support for embrace, you can run sport like you on your data in your data warehouse and with spotted you monitor, you can monitor all the business metrics and not just died. We can also understand that teaching teaching drivers on those metrics on the platform of your choice. So with that, I'll hand over toe, you know. >>Thank you so much. Both of you That was fantastic. Um, I just love spot like, because it makes me look like much more of a rock star with data than I really am. So thank you guys for that fantastic presentation. Um, so we've got a couple of minutes for a couple of questions for you. The first one is for action. Um, once spot I Q generates a number of insights. Can you run spot I Q again on one of those insights? >>Yeah, As a philosophy off Spiric, you sport like you never takes the user to the dead end Spartak. You also transparently shares the calculation. So user can not only the keeper that on edit Understand how this product you inside has been calculated, but user can also run us for like you analysts is honest for data analysis as well. Which music? And continue to do not on the first level. Second level in the third level as well. >>That's cool. Thank you. Actually on then The next one is for because for spot ik monitor is it possible to edit the dimensions used for explaining the factors to change that was detected? >>Yes. It's an owner of the metric you can change the dimensions whenever you want and save them for everyone else. >>Okay, well, I think that's about all we've got time for in this session. So all that remains is for me to say a huge thank you to Because an Akshay Andi, we've got the last session of this track coming up in a few minutes. So grab a snack. Come right back and listen to an amazing customer story with Snowflake on Western Union, they're up next.

>>Yeah, >>yeah. Hello and welcome to this track to creating engaging analytics experiences for all. I'm Hannah Sinden Thought spots Omiya director of marketing on. I'm delighted to have you here today. A boy Have we got to show for you now? I might be a little bit biased as the host of this track, but in my humble opinion, you've come to a great place to start because this track is all about everything. Thought spot. We'll be talking about embedded search in a I thought spot one spot I. Q. We've got great speakers from both thoughts about andare customers as well as some cool product demos. But it's not all product talk. We'll be looking at how to leverage the tech to give your users a great experience. So first up is our thoughts about one deep dive. This session will be showing you how we've built on our already superb search experience to make it even easier for users across your company to get insight. We've got some great speakers who are going to be telling you about the cool stuff they've been working on to make it really fantastic and easy for non technical people to get the answers they need. So I'm really delighted to introduce Bob Baxley s VP of design and experience That thought spot on Vishal Kyocera Thought spots director of product management. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to Bob. Thanks, >>Hannah. It's great to be here with everybody today and really excited to be able to present to you thought spot one. We've been working on this for months and months and are super excited to share it before we get to the demo with Shawl, though, I just want to set things up a little bit to help people understand how we think about design here. A thought spot. The first thing is that we really try to think in terms of thought. Spot is a consumer grade product, terms what we wanted. Consumer grade you x for an analytics. And that means that for reference points rather than looking at other enterprise software companies, we tend to look at well known consumer brands like Google, YouTube and WhatsApp. We firmly believe that people are people, and it doesn't matter if they're using software for their own usage or thought are they're using software at work We wanted to have a great experience. The second piece that we were considering with thoughts about one is really what we call the desegregation of bundles. So instead of having all of your insights wraps strictly into dashboards, we want to allow users to get directly to individual answers. This is similar to what we saw in music. Were instead of you having to buy the entire album, of course, you could just buy individual songs. You see this in iTunes, Spotify and others course. Another key idea was really getting rid of gate keepers and curators and kind of changing people from owning the information, helping enable users to gather together the most important and interesting insights So you can follow curator rather than feeling like you're limited in the types of information you can get. And finally, we wanted to make search the primary way, for people are thinking about thought spot. As you'll see, we've extended search from beyond simply searching for your data toe, also searching to be able to find pin boards and answers that have been created by other people. So with that, I'll turn it over to my good friend Rachel Thio introduce more of thought, spot one and to show you a demo of the product. >>Thank you, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here to Hello, everyone. My name is Michelle and Andy, product management for Search. And I'm really, really excited to be here talking about thoughts about one our Consumer analytics experience in the Cloud. Now, for my part of the talk, we're gonna first to a high level overview of thoughts about one. Then we're going to dive into a demo, and then we're gonna close with just a few thoughts about what's coming next. So, without any today, let's get started now at thought spot. Our mission is to empower every user regardless of their expertise, to easily engage with data on make better data driven decisions. We want every user, the nurse, the neighborhood barista, the teacher, the sales person, everyone to be able to do their jobs better by using data now with thoughts about one. We've made it even more intuitive for all these business users to easily connect with the insights that are most relevant for them, and we've made it even easier for analysts to do their jobs more effectively and more efficiently. So what does thoughts about one have? There's a lot off cool new features, but they all fall into three main categories. The first main category is enhanced search capabilities. The second is a brand new homepage that's built entirely for you, and the third is powerful tools for the analysts that make them completely self service and boost their productivity. So let's see how these work Thought Spot is the pioneer for search driven analytics. We invented search so that business users can ask questions of data and create new insights. But over the years we realized that there was one key piece off functionality that was missing from our search, and that was the ability to discover insights and content that had already been created. So to clarify, our search did allow users to create new content, but we until now did not have the ability to search existing content. Now, why does that matter? Let's take an example. I am a product manager and I am always in thought spot, asking questions to better understand how are users are using the product so we can improve it now. Like me, A lot of my colleagues are doing the same thing. Ah, lot of questions that I asked have already been answered either completely are almost completely by many of my colleagues, but until now there's been no easy way for me to benefit from their work. And so I end up recreating insights that already exists, leading to redundant work that is not good for the productivity off the organization. In addition, even though our search technology is really intuitive, it does require a little bit of familiarity with the underlying data. You do need to know what metric you care about and what grouping you care about so that you can articulate your questions and create new insights. Now, if I consider in New employees product manager who joins Hotspot today and wants to ask questions, then the first time they use thought spot, they may not have that data familiarity. So we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves, Well, how can we augment our search so that we get rid off or reduced the redundant work that I described? And in addition, empower users, even new users with very little expertise, maybe with no data familiarity, to succeed in getting answers to their questions the first time they used Hot Spot, and we're really proud and excited to announce search answers. Search answers allows users to search across existing content to get answers to their questions, and its a great compliment to search data, which allows them to search the underlying data directly to create new content. Now, with search answers were shipping in number of cool features like Answer Explainer, Personalized search Results, Answer Explorer, etcetera that make it really intuitive and powerful. And we'll see how all of these work in action in the demo. Our brand new homepage makes it easier than ever for all these business users to connect with the insights that are most relevant to them. These insights could be insights that these users already know about and want to track regularly. For example, as you can see, the monitor section at the top center of the screen thes air, the KP eyes that I may care most about, and I may want to look at them every day, and I can see them every day right here on my home page. By the way, there's a monitoring these metrics in the bankrupt these insights that I want to connect with could also be insights that I want to know more about the search experience that I just spoke about ISS seamlessly integrated into the home page. So right here from the home page, I can fire my searchers and ask whatever questions I want. Finally, and most interestingly, the homepage also allows me to connect with insights that I should know about, even if I didn't explicitly ask for them. So what's an example? If you look at the panel on the right, I can discover insights that are trending in my organization. If I look at the panel on the left, I can discover insights based on my social graph based on the people that I'm following. Now you might wonder, How do we create this personalized home page? Well, our brand new, personalized on boarding experience makes it a piece of cake as a new business user. The very first time I log into thought spot, I pay three people I want to follow and three metrics that I want to follow, and I picked these from a pool of suggestions that Ai has generated. And just like that, the new home page gets created. And let's not forget about analysts. We have a personalized on boarding experience specifically for analysts that's optimized for their needs. Now, speaking of analysts, I do want to talk about the tools that I spoke off earlier that made the analysts completely self service and greatly boost their productivity's. We want analysts to go from zero to search in less than 30 minutes, and with our with our new augmented data modeling features and thoughts about one, they can do just that. They get a guided experience where they can connect, model and visualize their data. With just a few clicks, our AI engine takes care off a number of tasks, including figuring out joints and, you know, cleaning up column names. In fact, our AI engine also helps them create a number of answers to get started quickly so that these analysts can spend their time and energy on what matters most answering the most complicated and challenging and impactful questions for the business. So I spoke about a number of different capabilities off thoughts about one, but let's not forget that they are all packaged in a delightful user experience designed by Bob and his team, and it powers really, really intuitive and powerful user flows, from personalized on boarding to searching to discover insights that already exist on that are ranked based on personalized algorithms to making refinements to these insights with a assistance to searching, to create brand new insights from scratch. And finally sharing all the insights that you find interesting with your colleagues so that it drives conversations, decisions and, most importantly, actions so that your business can improve. With that said, let's drive right into the demo for this demo. We're going to use sales data set for a company that runs a chain off retail stores selling apparel. Our user is a business user. Her name is Charlotte. She's a merchandiser, She's new to this company, and she is going to be leading the genes broader category. She's really excited about job. She wants to use data to make better decisions, so she comes to thought spot, and this is what she sees. There are three main sections on the home page that she comes to. The central section allows you to browse through items that she has access to and filter them in various ways. Based for example, on author or on tags or based on what she has favorited. The second section is this panel on the right hand side, which allows her to discover insights that are trending within her company. This is based on what other people within her company are viewing and also personalized to her. Finally, there's this search box that seamlessly integrated into the home page. Now Charlotte is really curious to learn how the business is doing. She wants to learn more about sales for the business, so she goes to the search box and searches for sales, and you can see that she's taken to a page with search results. Charlotte start scanning the search results, and she sees the first result is very relevant. It shows her what the quarterly results were for the last year, but the result that really catches her attention is regional sales. She'd love to better understand how sales are broken down by regions. Now she's interested in the search result, but she doesn't yet want to commit to clicking on it and going to that result. She wants to learn more about this result before she does that, and she could do that very easily simply by clicking anywhere on the search result card. Doing that reveals our answer. Explain our technology and you can see this information panel on the right side. It shows more details about the search results that she selected, and it also gives her an easy to understand explanation off the data that it contains. You can see that it tells her that the metrics sales it's grouped by region and splitter on last year. She can also click on this preview button to see a preview off the chart that she would see if she went to that result. It shows her that region is going to be on the X axis and sales on the Y axis. All of this seems interesting to her, and she wants to learn more. So she clicks on this result, and she's brought to this chart now. This contains the most up to date data, and she can interact with this data. Now, as she's looking at this data, she learns that Midwest is the region with the highest sales, and it has a little over $23 million in sales, and South is the region with the lowest sales, and it has about $4.24 million in sales. Now, as Charlotte is looking at this chart, she's reminded off a conversation she had with Suresh, another new hire at the company who she met at orientation just that morning. Suresh is responsible for leading a few different product categories for the Western region off the business, and she thinks that he would find this chart really useful Now she can share this chart with Suresh really easily from right here by clicking the share button. As Charlotte continues to look at this chart and understand the data, she thinks, uh, that would be great for her to understand. How do these sales numbers across regions look for just the genes product category, since that's the product category that she is going to be leading? And she can easily narrow this data to just the genes category by using her answer Explorer technology. This panel on the right hand side allows her to make the necessary refinements. Now she can do that simply by typing in the search box, or she can pick from one off the AI generated suggestions that are personalized for her now. In this case, the AI has already suggested genes as a prototype for her. So with just a single click, she can narrow the data to show sales data for just jeans broken down by region. And she can see that Midwest is still the region with the highest sales for jeans, with $1.35 million in sales. Now let's spend a minute thinking about what we just saw. This is the first time that Charlotte is using Thought spot. She does not know anything about the data sources. She doesn't know anything about measures or attributes. She doesn't know the names of the columns. And yet she could get to insights that are relevant for her really easily using a search interface that's very much like Google. And as she started interacting with search results, she started building a slightly better understanding off the underlying data. When she found an insight that she thought would be useful to a colleague offers, it was really seamless for her to share it with that colleague from where she Waas. Also, even though she's searching over content that has already been created by her colleagues in search answers. She was in no way restricted to exactly that data as we just saw. She could refine the data in an insight that she found by narrowing it. And there's other things you can do so she could interact with the data for the inside that she finds using search answers. Let's take a slightly more complex question that Charlotte may have. Let's assume she wanted to learn about sales broken down by, um, by category so that she can compare her vertical, which is jeans toe other verticals within the company. Again, she can see that the very first result that she gets is very relevant. It shows her search Sorry, sales by category for last year. But what really catches her attention about this result is the name of the author. She's thrilled to note that John, who is the author of this result, was also an instructor for one off for orientation sessions and clearly someone who has a lot of insight into the sales data at this company. Now she would love to see mawr results by John, and to do that, all she has to do is to click on his name now all of the search results are only those that have been authored by John. In fact, this whole panel at the top of the results allow her to filter her search results or sort them in different ways. By clicking on these authors filter, she can discover other authors who are reputed for the topic that she's searching for. She can also filter by tags, and she can sort these results in different ways. This whole experience off doing a search and then filtering search results easily is similar to how we use e commerce search engines in the consumer world. For example, Amazon, where you may search for a product and then filter by price range or filter by brand. For example, Let's also spend a minute talking about how do we determine relevance for these results and how they're ranked. Um, when considering relevance for these results, we consider three main categories of things. We want to first make sure that the result is in fact relevant to the question that the user is asking, and for that we look at various fields within the result. We look at the title, the author, the description, but also the technical query underpinning that result. We also want to make sure that the results are trustworthy, because we want users to be able to make business decisions based on the results that they find. And for that we look at a number of signals as well. For example, how popular that result is is one of those signals. And finally, we want to make sure the results are relevant to the users themselves. So we look at signals to personalize the result for that user. So those are all the different categories of signals that we used to determine overall ranking for a search result. You may be wondering what happens if if Charlotte asks a question for which nobody has created any answer, so no answers exist. Let's say she wants to know what the total sales of genes for last year and no one's created that well. It's really easy for her to switch from searching for answers, which is searching for content that has already been created to searching the data directly so she can create a new insight from scratch. Let's see how that works. She could just click here, and now she's in the search data in her face and for the question that I just talked about. She can just type genes sales last year. And just like that, she could get an answer to her question. The total sales for jeans last year were almost $4.6 million. As you can see, the two modes off search searching for answers and searching, the data are complementary, and it's really easy to switch from one to the other. Now we understand that some business users may not be motivated to create their own insights from scratch. Or sometimes some of these business users may have questions that are too complicated, and so they may struggle to create their own inside from scratch. Now what happens usually in these circumstances is that these users will open a ticket, which would go to the analyst team. The analyst team is usually overrun with these tickets and have trouble prioritizing them. And so we started thinking, How can we make that entire feedback loop really efficient so that analysts can have a massive impact with as little work as possible? Let me show you what we came up with. Search answers comes with this system generated dashboard that analysts can see to see analytics on the queries that business users are asking in search answers so it contains high level K P. I is like, You know how many searches there are and how many users there are. It also contains one of the most popular queries that users are asking. But most importantly, it contains information about what are popular queries where users are failing. So the number on the top right tells you that about 10% off queries in this case ended with no results. So the user clearly failed because there were no results on the table. Right below it shows you here are the top search queries for original results exist. So, for example, the highlighted row there says jean sales with the number three, which tells the analysts that last week there were three searches for the query jean sales and the resulted in no results on search answers. Now, when an analyst sees a report like this, they can use it to prioritize what kind of content they could be creating or optimizing. Now, in addition to giving them inside into queries which led to no results or zero results. This dashboard also contains reports on creatives that lead to poor results because the user did get some results but didn't click on anything, meaning that they didn't get the answer that they were looking for. Taking all these insights, analysts can better prioritize and either create or optimize their content to have maximum impact for their business users with the least amount of for. So that was the demo. As you can see with search answers, we've created a very consumer search interface that any business user can use to get the answers to their questions by leveraging data or answers that have already been created in the system by other users in their organization. In addition, we're creating tools that allow analysts toe create or optimized content that can have the highest impact for these business users. All right, so that was the demo or thoughts about one and hope you guys liked it. We're really excited about it. Now Let me just spend a minute talking about what's coming next. As I've mentioned before, we want to connect every business user with the insights that are most relevant for them, and for that we will continue to invest in Advanced AI and personalization, and some of the ways you will see it is improved relevance in ranking in recommendations in how we understand your questions across the product within search within the home page everywhere. The second team that will continue to invest in is powerful analyst tools. We talked about tools and, I assure you, tools that make the analysts more self service. We are committed to improving the analyst experience so that they can make the most off their time. An example of a tool that we're really excited about is one that allows them to bridge the vocabulary difference that this even business user asks questions. A user asked a question like revenue, but the column name for the metric in the data set its sales. Now analysts can get insights into what are the words that users air using in their questions that aren't matching anything in the data set and easily create synonyms so that that vocabulary difference gets breached. But that's just one example of how we're thinking about empowering the analysts so that with minimal work, they can amplify their impact and help their business users succeed. So there's a lot coming, and we're really excited about how we're planning to evolve thoughts about one. With all that said, Um, there's just, well, one more thing that my friend Bob wants to talk to you guys about. So back to you, Bob. >>Thanks, Michelle. It's such a great demo and so fun to see all the new work that's going on with thought. Spot one. All the happenings for the new features coming out that will be under the hood. But of course, on the design side, we're going to continue to evolve the front end as well, and this is what we're hoping to move towards. So here you'll see a new log in screen and then the new homepage. So compared to the material that you saw just a few minutes ago, you'll notice this look is much lighter. A little bit nicer use of color up in the top bar with search the features over here to allow you to switch between searching against answers at versus creating new answers, the settings and user profile controls down here and then on the search results page itself also lighter look and feel again. Mork color up in the search bar up the top. A little bit nicer treatments here. We'll continue to evolve the look and feel the product in coming months and quarters and look forward to continue to constantly improving thoughts about one Hannah back to you. >>Thanks, Bob, and thank you both for showing us the next generation of thought spot. I'd love to go a bit deeper on some of the points you touched on there. I've got a couple of questions here. Bob, how do you think about designing for consumer experience versus designing for enterprise solutions? >>Yes, I mentioned Hannah. We don't >>really try to distinguish so much between enterprise users and consumer users. It's really kind of two different context of use. But we still always think that users want some product and feature and experience that's easy to use and makes sense to them. So instead of trying to think about those is two completely different design processes I think about it may be the way Frank Lloyd Wright would approached architecture. >>Er I >>mean, in his career, he fluidly moved between residential architecture like falling water and the Robie House. But he also designed marquis buildings like the Johnson wax building. In each case, he simply looked at the requirements, thought about what was necessary for those users and designed accordingly. And that's really what we do. A thought spot. We spend time talking to customers. We spend time talking to users, and we spent a lot of time thinking through the problem and trying to solve it holistically. And it's simply a possible >>thanks, Bob. That's a beautiful analogy on one last question for you. Bischel. How frequently will you be adding features to this new experience, >>But I'm glad you asked that, Hannah, because this is something that we are really really excited about with thoughts about one being in the cloud. We want to go really, really fast. So we expect to eventually get to releasing new innovations every day. We expect that in the near future, we'll get to, you know, every month and every week, and we hope to get to everyday eventually fingers crossed on housing. That can happen. Great. Thanks, >>Michelle. And thank you, Bob. I'm so glad you could all join us this morning to hear more about thoughts about one. Stay close and get ready for the next session. which will be beginning in a few minutes. In it will be introduced to thoughts for >>everywhere are >>embedded analytics product on. We'll be hearing directly from our customers at Hayes about how they're using embedded analytics to help healthcare providers across billing compliance on revenue integrity functions. To make more informed decisions on make effective actions to avoid risk and maximize revenue. See you there.

>>Yeah, >>yeah. Hello and welcome to Day two at Beyond. I am so excited that you've chosen to join the building a vibrant data ecosystem track. I might be just a little bit biased, but I think it's going to be the best track of the day. My name is Mallory Lassen and I run partner Marketing here, a thought spot, and that might give you a little bit of a clue as to why I'm so excited about the four sessions we're about to hear from. We'll start off hearing from two thought spotters on how the power of embrace can allow you to directly query on the cloud data warehouse of your choice Next up. And I shouldn't choose favorites, but I'm very excited to watch Cindy housing moderate a panel off true industry experts. We'll hear from Deloitte Snowflake and Eagle Alfa as they describe how you can enrich your organization's data and better understand and benchmark by using third party data. They may even close off with a prediction or two about the future that could prove to be pretty thought provoking. So I'd stick around for that. Next we'll hear from the cloud juggernaut themselves AWS. We'll even get to see a live demo using TV show data, which I'm pretty sure is near and dear to our hearts. At this point in time and then last, I'm very excited to welcome our customer from T Mobile. They're going to describe how they partnered with whip pro and developed a full solution, really modernizing their analytics and giving self service to so many employees. We'll see what that's done for them. But first, let's go over to James Bell Z and Ana Son on the zero to search session. James, take us away. >>Thanks, Mallory. I'm James Bell C and I look after the solutions engineering and customer success teams have thought spot here in Asia Pacific and Japan today I'm joined by my colleague Anderson to give you a look at just how simple and quick it is to connect thought spot to your cloud data warehouse and extract value from the data within in the demonstration, and I will show you just how we can connect to data, make it simple for the business to search and then search the data itself or within this short session. And I want to point out that everything you're going to see in the demo is Run Live against the Cloud Data Warehouse. In this case, we're using snowflake, and there's no cashing of data or summary tables in terms of what you're going to see. But >>before we >>jump into the demo itself, I just like to provide a very brief overview of the value proposition for thought spot. If you're already familiar with thought spot, this will come as no surprise. But for those new to the platform, it's all about empowering the business to answer their own questions about data in the most simple way possible Through search, the personalized user experience provides a familiar search based way for anyone to get answers to their questions about data, not just the analysts. The search, indexing and ranking makes it easy to find the data you're looking for using business terms that you understand. While the smart ranking constantly adjust the index to ensure the most relevant information is provided to you. The query engine removes the complexity of SQL and complex joint paths while ensuring that users will always get thio the correct answers their questions. This is all backed up by an architecture that's designed to be consumed entirely through a browser with flexibility on deployment methods. You can run thought spot through our thoughts about cloud offering in your own cloud or on premise. The choice is yours, so I'm sure you're thinking that all sounds great. But how difficult is it to get this working? Well, I'm happy to tell you it's super easy. There's just forced steps to unlock the value of your data stored in snowflake, Red Shift, Google, Big Query or any of the other cloud data warehouses that we support. It's a simple is connecting to the Cloud Data Warehouse, choosing what data you want to make available in thought spot, making it user friendly. That column that's called cussed underscore name in the database is great for data management, but when users they're searching for it, they'll probably want to use customer or customer name or account or even client. Also, the business shouldn't need to know that they need to get data from multiple tables or the joint parts needed to get the correct results in thought spot. The worksheet allows you to make all of this simple for the users so they can simply concentrate on getting answers to their questions on Once the worksheet is ready, you can start asking those questions by now. I'm sure you're itching to see this in action. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Anna to show you exactly how this works over to you. Anna, >>In this demo, I'm going to go to cover three areas. First, we'll start with how simple it is to get answers to your questions in class spot. Then we'll have a look at how to create a new connection to Cloud Data Warehouse. And lastly, how to create a use of friendly data layer. Let's get started to get started. I'm going to show you the ease off search with thoughts Spot. As you can see thought spot is or were based. I'm simply lobbying. Divide a browser. This means you don't need to install an application. Additionally, possible does not require you to move any data. So all your data stays in your cloud data warehouse and doesn't need to be moved around. Those sports called differentiator is used experience, and that is primarily search. As soon as we come into the search bar here, that's what suggestion is guiding uses through to the answers? Let's let's say that I would wanna have a look at spending across the different product categories, and we want Thio. Look at that for the last 12 months, and we also want to focus on a trending on monthly. And just like that, we get our answer straightaway without alive from Snowflake. Now let's say we want to focus on 11 product category here. We want to have a look at the performance for finished goods. As I started partially typing my search them here, Thoughts was already suggesting the data value that's available for me to use as a filter. The indexing behind the scene actually index everything about the data which allowed me to get to my data easily and quickly as an end user. Now I've got my next to my data answer here. I can also go to the next level of detail in here. In third spot to navigate on the next level of detail is simply one click away. There's no concept off drill path, pre defined drill path in here. That means we've ordered data that's available to me from Snowflake. I'm able to navigate to the level of detail. Allow me to answer those questions. As you can see as a business user, I don't need to do any coding. There's no dragon drop to get to the answer that I need right here. And she can see other calculations are done on the fly. There is no summary tables, no cubes building are simply able to ask the questions. Follow my train or thoughts, and this provides a better use experience for users as anybody can search in here, the more we interact with the spot, the more it learns about my search patterns and make those suggestions based on the ranking in here and that a returns on the fly from Snowflake. Now you've seen example of a search. Let's go ahead and have a look at How do we create a connection? Brand new one toe a cloud at a warehouse. Here we are here, let me add a new connection to the data were healthy by just clicking at new connection. Today we're going to connect Thio retail apparel data step. So let's start with the name. As you can see, we can easily connect to all the popular data warehouse easily. By just one single click here today, we're going to click to Snowflake. I'm gonna ask some detail he'd let me connect to my account here. Then we quickly enter those details here, and this would determine what data is available to me. I can go ahead and specify database to connect to as well, but I want to connect to all the tables and view. So let's go ahead and create a connection. Now the two systems are talking to each other. I can see all the data that's available available for me to connect to. Let's go ahead and connect to the starter apparel data source here and expanding that I can see all the data tables as available to me. I could go ahead and click on any table here, so there's affect herbal containing all the cells information. I also have the store and product information here I can make. I can choose any Data column that I want to include in my search. Available in soft spot, what can go ahead and select entire table, including all the data columns. I will. I would like to point out that this is important because if any given table that you have contains hundreds of columns it it may not be necessary for you to bring across all of those data columns, so thoughts would allow you to select what's relevant for your analysis. Now that's selected all the tables. Let's go ahead and create a connection. Now force what confirms the data columns that we have selected and start to read the medic metadata from Snowflake and automatically building that search index behind the scene. Now, if your daughter does contain information such as personal, identifiable information, then you can choose to turn those investing off. So none of that would be, um, on a hot spots platform. Now that my tables are ready here, I can actually go ahead and search straight away. Let's go ahead and have a look at the table here. I'm going to click on the fact table heat on the left hand side. It shows all the data column that we've brought across from Snowflake as well as the metadata that also brought over here as well. A preview off the data shows me off the data that's available on my snowflake platform. Let's take a look at the joints tap here. The joint step shows may relationship that has already been defined the foreign and primary care redefining snowflake, and we simply inherited he in fourth spot. However, you don't have toe define all of this relationship in snowflake to add a joint. He is also simple and easy. If I click on at a joint here, I simply select the table that I wanted to create a connection for. So select the fact table on the left, then select the product table onto the right here and then simply selected Data column would wish to join those two tables on Let's select Product ID and clicking next, and that's always required to create a joint between those two tables. But since we already have those strong relationship brought over from Snow Flag, I won't go ahead and do that Now. Now you have seen how the tables have brought over Let's go and have a look at how easy is to search coming to search here. Let's start with selecting the data table would brought over expanding the tables. You can see all the data column that we have previously seen from snowflake that. Let's say I wanna have a look at sales in last year. Let's start to type. And even before I start to type anything in the search bar passport already showing me all those suggestions, guiding me to the answers that's relevant to my need. Let's start with having a look at sales for 2019. And I want to see this across monthly for my trend and out off all of these product line he. I also want to focus on a product line called Jackets as I started partially typing the product line jacket for sport, already proactively recommending me all the matches that it has. So all the data values available for me to search as a filter here, let's go ahead and select jacket. And just like that, I get my answer straight away from Snowflake. Now that's relatively simple. Let's try something a little bit more complex. Let's say I wanna have a look at sales comparing across different regions, um, in us. So I want compare West compared to Southwest, and then I want to combat it against Midwest as well as against based on still and also want to see these trending monthly as well. Let's have look at monthly. If you can see that I can use terms such as monthly Key would like that to look at different times. Buckets. Now all of these is out of the box. As she can see, I didn't have to do any indexing. I didn't have to do any formulas in here. As long as there is a date column in the data set, crossbows able to dynamically calculate those time bucket so she can see. Just by doing that search, I was able to create dynamic groupings segment of different sales across the United States on the sales data here. Now that we've done doing search, you can see that across different tables here might not be the most user friendly layer we don't want uses having to individually select tables. And then, um, you know, selecting different columns with cryptic names in here. We want to make this easy for users, and that's when a work ship comes in. But those were were sheet encapsulate all of the data you want to make available for search as well as formulas, as well as business terminologies that the users are familiar with for a specific business area. Let's start with adding the daughter columns we need for this work shape. Want to slack all of the tables that we just brought across from Snowflake? Expanding each of those tables from the facts type of want sales from the fax table. We want sales as well as the date. Then on the store's table. We want store name as well as the stay eating, then expanding to the product we want name and finally product type. Now that we've got our work shit ready, let's go ahead and save it Now, in order to provide best experience for users to search, would want to optimize the work sheet here. So coming to the worksheet here, you can see the data column that we have selected. Let's start with changing this name to be more user friendly, so let's call it fails record. They will want to call it just simply date, store name, call it store, and then we also want state to be in lower case product name. Simply call it product and finally, product type can also further optimize this worksheet by adding, uh, other areas such as synonyms, so allow users to use terms of familiar with to do that search. So in sales, let's call this revenue and we all cannot also further configure the geo configuration. So want to identify state in here as state for us. And finally, we want Thio. Also add more friendly on a display on a currency. So let's change the currency type. I want to show it in U. S. Dollars. That's all we need. So let's try to change and let's get started on our search now coming back to the search here, Let's go ahead. Now select out worksheet that we have just created. If I don't select any specific tables or worksheets, force what Simply a search across everything that's available to you. Expanding the worksheet. We can see all of the data columns in heat that's we've made available and clicking on search bar for spot already. Reckon, making those recommendations in here to start off? Let's have a look at I wanna have a look at the revenue across different states for here today, so let's use the synonym that we have defined across the different states and we want to see this for here today. Um yesterday as well. I know that I also want to focus on the product line jacket that we have seen before, so let's go ahead and select jacket. Yeah, and just like that, I was able to get the answer straight away in third spot. Let's also share some data label here so we can see exactly the Mount as well to state that police performance across us in here. Now I've got information about the sales of jackets on the state. I want to ask next level question. I want to draw down to the store that has been selling these jackets right Click e. I want to drill down. As you can see out of the box. I didn't have to pre define any drill paths on a target. Reports simply allow me to navigate to the next level of detail to answer my own questions. One Click away. Now I see the same those for the jackets by store from year to date, and this is directly from snowflake data life Not gonna start relatively simple question. Let's go ahead and ask a question that's a little bit more complex. Imagine one. Have a look at Silas this year, and I want to see that by month, month over month or so. I want to see a month. Yeah, and I also want to see that our focus on a sale on the last week off the month. So that's where we see most. Sales comes in the last week off the month, so I want to focus on that as well. Let's focus on last week off each month. And on top of that, I also want to only focus on the top performing stores from last year. So I want to focus on the top five stores from last year, so only store in top five in sales store and for last year. And with that, we also want to focus just on the populist product types as well. So product type. Now, this could be very reasonable question that a business user would like to ask. But behind the scenes, this could be quite complex. But First part takes cares, or the complexity off the data allow the user to focus on the answer they want to get to. If we quickly have a look at the query here, this shows how forceful translate the search that were put in there into queries into that, we can pass on the snowflake. As you can see, the search uses all three tables as well shooting, utilizing the joints and the metadata layer that we have created. Switching over to the sequel here, this sequel actually generate on the fly pass on the snowflake in order for the snowflake to bring back to result and presented in the first spot. I also want to mention that in the latest release Off Hot Spot, we also bringing Embraced um, in the latest version, Off tosspot 6.3 story Q is also coming to embrace. That means one click or two analysis. Those who are in power users to monitor key metrics on kind of anomalies, identify leading indicators and isolate trends, as you can see in a matter of minutes. Using thought spot, we were able to connect to most popular on premise or on cloud data warehouses. We were able to get blazing fast answers to our searches, allow us to transform raw data to incite in the speed off thoughts. Ah, pass it back to you, James. >>Thanks, Anna. Wow, that was awesome. It's incredible to see how much committee achieved in such a short amount of time. I want to close this session by referring to a customer example of who, For those of you in the US, I'm sure you're familiar with who, Lou. But for our international audience, who Lou our immediate streaming service similar to a Netflix or Disney Plus, As you can imagine, the amount of data created by a service like this is massive, with over 32 million subscribers and who were asking questions of over 16 terabytes of data in snow folk. Using regular B I tools on top of this size of data would usually mean using summary or aggregate level data, but with thoughts. What? Who are able to get granular insights into the data, allowing them to understand what they're subscribes of, watching how their campaigns of performing and how their programming is being received, and take advantage of that data to reduce churn and increase revenue. So thank you for your time today. Through the session, you've seen just how simple it is to get thought spot up and running on your cloud data warehouse toe. Unlock the value of your data and minutes. If you're interested in trying this on your own data, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial of thoughts. What cloud? Right now? Thanks again, toe Anna for such awards and demo. And if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know. >>Awesome. Thank you, James and Anna. That was incredible. To see it in action and how it all came together on James. We do actually have a couple of questions in our last few minutes here, Anna. >>The first one will be >>for you. Please. This will be a two part question. One. What Cloud Data Warehouses does embrace support today. And to can we use embrace to connect to multiple data warehouses. Thank you, Mallory. Today embrace supports. Snowflake Google, Big query. Um, Red shift as you assign that Teradata advantage and essay Bahana with more sources to come in the future. And, yes, you can connect on live query from notable data warehouses. Most of our enterprise customers have gotta spread across several data warehouses like just transactional data and red Shift and South will start. It's not like, excellent on James will have the final question go to you, You please. Are there any size restrictions for how much data thought spot can handle? And does one need to optimize their database for performance, for example? Aggregations. >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, as we've just heard from our customer, who there's, there's really no limits in terms of the amount of data that you can bring into thoughts Ponant connect to. We have many customers that have, in excess of 10 terabytes of data that they're connecting to in those cloud data warehouses. And, yeah, there's there's no need to pre aggregate or anything. Thought Spot works best with that transactional level data being able to get right down into the details behind it and surface those answers to the business uses. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both so much. And for everyone at home watching thank you for joining us for that session. You have a few minutes toe. Get up, get some water, get a bite of food. What? You won't want to miss this next panel in it. We have our chief data strategy off Officer Cindy, Housing speaking toe experts in the field from Deloitte Snowflake and Eagle Alfa. All on best practices for leveraging external data sources. See you there