(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the evolving capabilities of VCF on VxRail. VCF being VMware Cloud Foundation. as VxRail from Dell Technologies. Samuel Niemi is their Product Manager of VCF on VxRail. He's got the keys to the kingdom. He is going to give us the update on what's going on, obviously with all the major IT operational conversations going on with cloud native, how to get the best excellence out of the organization as we come through the pandemic, big stuff happening. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> In June, you guys announced some major updates that's coming on to VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail that would allow customers to extend their capabilities and their ability to innovate in the landscape and with external storage. Can you take us through what's new what's the situation and tell us what's happening? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off if you're, for those who might be watching who are not familiar with VCF on VxRail, VxRail is our hyperconverged infrastructure system that allows for massive data centers scaling at, from node to node to node. VCF on VxRail specifically is the VMware SDDC software suite that allows us to create a private cloud with VxRail deployments. So instead of saying, I want to manage this cluster and this cluster, and this cluster VCF allows us to manage VxRail clusters and deployments at a big scale. So VCF on VxRail, we've gone from in the last two and a half years or so that we have been available as a product we've gone from nothing to tens of thousands of nodes deployed across the world. And it has been a rollercoaster of a ride. And we're just thrilled with the success that we've had so far. >> And what's been new since the release in June but what's new? >> Absolutely. So, one thing that we've realized from a VxRail perspective is that, as we grow and as our data center and enterprise scale customers continue to grow their VCF on the VxRail environments VCF on VxRail has to evolve as well. And in June we announced an ability for VCF on VxRail to consume external storage. Now, hyper-converged means no storage, networking, network virtualization I should say and your server all in one box. External storage gives us the ability to utilize your existing Dell EMC storage arrays and use that data centric kind of storage deployment with your existing or net new VCF on VxRail deployments. It's really exciting stuff. And we're really looking forward to be able to even better provide solutions for our customers at that big enterprise scale. >> So a lot of change happening scale is a big word here, right? We're seeing scale, modern applications looking for environment. You talk about hybrid private cloud. I mean, essentially cloud operations is private cloud if you will. I got to ask you on this big product that you have VCF on VxRail, what are the drivers behind making this option viable for customers, what are they looking for? Why are they consuming it this way? What are the key aspects of drive in this force? >> Absolutely. So, what we found is that with vSAN which has been wildly successful on the VxRail, it's fantastic for general purpose workloads. And we don't see that changing. What we see is an ability for our customers to leverage the extreme speed of our PowerStore T, our PowerMax and our Unity XT storage arrays so that you can get that sub millisecond latency that you're used to out of those storage arrays and have the same benefits in say another workload domain of your existing vSAN deployment. Now, my favorite example of a use case for that is when you have sub millisecond latency, that's something like a PowerMax can provide. Let's say you're standing at the gas pump. It's cold, I'm here in Minnesota it was three degrees here yesterday. When I'm standing at the gas pump, swipe my card. I don't want to wait and wait and wait for that database kit. Put my card to go through I want it now. PowerMax and our PowerStore T, unity XT with those crazy low latencies, they allow our VCF on VxRail customers to not have to wait at the pump. So when our enterprise customers have those things deployed with that crazy low latency for database hits, you're not standing at the pump. You're not waiting awkwardly at the grocery store for your card to go through. You really get that extreme speed that those big storage arrays can provide. >> Yeah, so the weather in Minnesota, and so my brother lives in that area too. He was complaining about it on the family text, but this is an edge case, whether you're swiping your credit card on the pump, this latency discussion, the edge is really a key conversation because that's what you're, you're going to get cold waiting, but still you could be, key data store for say some equipment in a manufacturing operation, or on a farm or somewhere. So again, this brings up the whole edge. >> True. >> That an area is that the driver, one of the drivers, or is it also just in general the performance? >> You know I would say it depends on what you need out of your storage array. If you need that performance at the edge, VCF can deploy remote clusters in a metro distance within 50 milliseconds. So you can have your center and you can have your edges, you can put storage arrays behind those edges. You can have that kind of, speed from place to place, to place to place, or you can use traditional vSAN storage. So it really comes down to what your storage use case is. Maybe you have a need of the data replication that PowerMax can provide from one site to the other, and that's your backup for your edges. Those kinds of things can all be utilized with VCF on VxRail and remote clusters at the edge. >> What a similar customer use case? Can you just walk me through some examples of customers that you have and what they're interested in, what kind of advantages they're seeing with the capability? >> Certainly. So we have a number of customers who have high level of data resiliency requirements that we have that 99 point lots of nines resiliency that the PowerMax, and it's forebears, VMX have provided for 20 something years now, those customers say at our financial institutions where they have to have massive levels of resiliency. We have customers who frankly have separate buying cycles, where they buy their compute one year, and then maybe two years later, that's when their storage comes up for renewal. So those customers are able to leverage both VCF on VxRail and their external storage. I'm not going to drop customer names. I've got a couple that come to mind, but I'll say in the financial institution and in healthcare especially is where we see. >> What problem are they solving? You don't have to name names because I know it's probably the company, everything, but you know what all the reference stuff, but what's the anecdotal, what's the main problem, let's say kind of the use cases that jump out and people, if people are watching might think that they should be using this. What signals and signs should they be looking for? >> Absolutely. I would say first off data resiliency, and I'm just in love with PowerMax. So that's the first thing that jumps to mind. I'm extreme performance, whether it's databases or having a need to get data out to their customers as quickly as possible. Replication comes to mind. Those are the big three. And then of course, where you maybe need a little bit of compute and a lot of storage are dynamic nodes and VCF on VxRail means that we can sell our nodes without any storage. And that really gives us an ability to just say, I need a lot of compute, I need a little compute, whatever it might be, I'm going to scale my nodes and my storage independently of one another. >> Where can people get more information to find out? >> Sure, absolutely. So for more information, you can always go to dell.com. You can reach out to your sales team and talk to your VMware sales team as well, who are well-versed in VCF on VxRail deployments, but we're always here dell.com and we're always just an email away. >> So while I've got your here, say, I want to ask you about this notion of simplifying the IT operational experience. >> Sure. >> In your view, as you look out on the horizon from your perspective, being the product leader on this area, what's on the mind of the customer. What's the psychology out there? What's some of the environmental conditions that they're facing (indistinct) their landscape. Is it do more with less, the classic cliche? Is it actually a replatformin, is it refactoring? Is it application developers? what's some of the big drivers there in terms of the customers that you're seeing? >> So as a customer today, I have so many options for where to put my data and where to put my VMs and my development. I want to look at what is the best route for my business? Is it a hybrid cloud offering? And if yes, what's the easiest way to manage that because at the end of the day, if I'm spending money on maintenance spending money on staff who are not accelerating the business, but just keeping the thing going, what's the best way to do that? And VCF on VxRail today really allows our customers to deploy a private or a hybrid cloud rather, and maintain the entire thing through one interface. That interface being SDDC Manager. When we look at the benefits of it, VCF for on VxRail today provides Tanzu. So for customers who need to have a development platform in their hybrid cloud Tanzu is that the easy option or the easy answer for that. So, it is a big answer. What's driving this, lots of things, but really it's data center modernization. It's moving from a traditional servers with virtual machines on them into the hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, you were missing resilience here on the data. I think that's awesome because I mean, at the end of the day it's data driven. Everyone wants more data. Database has been around for a while. So making that go faster is really critical. Awesome, awesome conversation. And now on the VCF on VxRail, what's the bottom line, if you had to summarize the evolution capabilities that are coming on, they're evolving, you're the Product Manager, you got the keys to the kingdom, what's next, what's happening? >> If I'm looking at VCF and what's next and what's on the way, really lifecycle management. So, when our customers talk about what it looks like to lifecycle their systems without VCF on VxRail and the complexity of doing that without VCF it's lifecycle management is the reason for being. We look at the, from everything we lifecycle from the hardware of the VxRail nodes, including disc firmware, HPAs, NIC drivers, etc to the VCF SDDC software suite, all of those components they're in vSphere, VCenter ESXi. I'm going through the checklist in my head here. The V realized components, getting all of that lifecycle to a good continuous revalidated state is really, really tough. And then your add storage, that's one more thing. So I want to be able to just have a single click that will go through LCM my entire hybrid cloud environment from hardware to software stack, so that I can manage that external storage that I just added to my system without adding more pain. So really with VCF on VxRail, it's the only jointly engineered solution from an HCI vendor like VxRail and VMware to deliver that single click soup to nuts hardware to software suite LCM. LCM is the name of the game. And we're going to continue to make that innovate on that and new ways that I can't even say yet. >> I can't wait to hear the innovation is a great model. Putting that out there, getting the environmental all scaled up. Sam Niemi, Product Manager, VCF VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail with Dell Technologies. Thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Absolutely thanks, John. >> Okay, it's theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John for your host, thanks for watching. (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.

(digital music) >> My, what a difference 10 years makes in the tech industry. At the beginning of the last decade, the cloud generally in AWS specifically ushered in the era where leading developers they tapped into a powerful collection of remote services through programmable interfaces you know, out there in the cloud. By the end of the decade this experience would shape the way virtually every IT professional thinks about acquiring, deploying, consuming and managing technology. Today that remote cloud is becoming ubiquitous, expanding to the "edge" with connections to on-premises, data centers and other local points throughout the globe. One of the most talked about examples of this movement is AWS Outposts, which brings the Amazon experience to the edge wherever that may be. Welcome everyone to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to explore the ever expanding cloud and how two companies are delivering on customer needs to connect their data center operations to the cloud and the cloud to their on-prem infrastructure and applications. And with me are Joshua Burgin who's the General Manager of AWS Outposts and Michael Sotnick who's the VP at Global Alliances at Pure Storage. Gents, welcome come inside theCUBE. >> Right on. Well, thrilled to be here Dave. >> Great. >> Pleasure is mine, thank you. >> Awesome to have this conversation with you it's really our pleasure. So Joshua, let's start with Outpost. Maybe you could for the audience describe what it is maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing you're heard by narrative upfront maybe you can course correct anything I missed. >> Oh sure. I mean, I think you got it right on. AWS Outpost is a fully managed service that allows you to use AWS, API systems, tools, technology, hardware software innovation in your own data center or a colocation facility. And coming later this year as you put the edge in quotes at almost any edge site, as we announced the small form factor one you and two you Outposts at this last year's re-invent. >> I was excited when I saw Outpost a couple of years ago we were doing theCUBE at reinvent and I said, wow, this is truly going to be interesting. And I'm wondering like, how's Amazon, how are they going to partner? Where do some of the ecosystem get folks fit in? So Michael, you're an AWS Outpost ready partner. You know, what is that program all about? What does that mean for customers? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, like you, Dave, I think we're as a vendor in technology we're inspired by what AWS has done. And when we look at Pure and see the opportunity we have you know, shared customer obsession, focused on outcomes, focused on NPS, great customer experience seeing AWS deliver the cloud to the edge, deliver the cloud to the data center that's just a great fit for us. So we rallied internally across our flash array of block storage solution a unified fast file and object flash plate solution and our container solution Portworx and, you know, across the entire portfolio we're the first to be in our segment the first to be service ready with AWS Outposts. And to us, it's an opportunity to link arms with AWS and cover some ground that's very familiar to us in the data center and clearly cover some ground that's very familiar to AWS in terms of great customer relationships across the board. >> Right, and, you know, I got to say, I've been a student of of Andy Jassy I always have listened to all his talks and go back and read the transcripts and Joshua I've learned that I never say never when it comes to AWS. And you see you guys moving into that, whatever you call it, the hybrid cloud, the on-premises really leaning in in a big way with Outposts and I wonder if you could talk about what's behind that expansion strategy? >> Sure, I mean, the way we looked at it obviously is always kind of working backwards from our customers. We have people tell us that they had some applications with low latency needs or where data resonancy or sovereignty was driven by regulations or in some cases where they needed to do local data processing something like an autonomous vehicle workload or in a factory or a healthcare facility. And they really wanted to say like, look, we're going to move all of our applications, you know the bulk of them to one of your regions in the fullness of time, but what's holding us back is that we want a consistent environment on-prem and in what you call the cloud. So we wanted a continuum of offerings from AWS to be able to serve all those needs. And that's really where Outpost came from. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of traction across financial services with companies like Morningstar and First Abu Dhabi bank, the iGaming space as you can imagine highly regulated industry, every city and, you know, municipality around the world wants to get in on that but they have their own regulations and they really require the infrastructure to be in a specific location and run a certain way. A company like TYPICA, which is based out of Europe they don't want to deliver different solutions depending on whether something's deployed in Minnesota or Germany or, you know, Vancouver. So that's where AWS Outpost comes in and it kind of fits that it works the same way as the things do in the region they can use the same tooling. >> Yeah, so Michael I'm going to ask you this question and maybe Joshua, you can chime in as well. I mean, you've got this, it's sort of a, win-win-win you know, Pure, AWS, you bringing that experience to on-premises, the customer gets that experience that Joshua just explained. I wonder if you could, I mean, you've been out now for a little bit testing the market learning here and there. What are the big takeaways in the learnings you're getting from customers? >> Yeah, I'll start and I'm sure Joshua can compliment quite a bit. And like Joshua hit on, right. You know, I think we take our cues from our customers, Dave, and you know what the customers are looking for, you know is a commercial relationship and so in addition to the technological inspiration we've got from AWS we offer the solution for Outposts and a Pure as a service model. So it's 100% subscription-based for the customer and they're able to consume it, you know the same way that they would all of their services from AWS including Outposts and it's also available on the AWS marketplace. So you've got to meet the customer where they want to be met first and foremost and so they appreciate that. And they see that as a great value in the relationship. You know, the growth of object, you know, I think is another one of those macro trends that's happening in our space. And as customers are deploying locations that are putting out petabytes of object storage requirements there's an increasing need for high-performance object. And that's where we can really compliment an Outpost implementation and deliver high performance and that kind of ubiquitous experience, that hybrid experience to allow the customer on a policy based way to maximize that on-prem performance with Outpost and Pure around that object data set. And then also manage the life cycle of that data and the economics of that data in the cloud. >> So, but Joshua, so you guys obviously you invented that, you know, the modern subscription model for infrastructure but it's different, you're actually installing hardware. So you had to sort of rethink how you did that. What have you learned and how has that model... How do you get it substantially similar as possible to the public cloud? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you called it a win-win-win earlier. And as much as we like to innovate we also like to make things feel kind of comfortable and familiar to people 'cause you think about there's both the developer who's using the APIs and the tools and also the CFO and the people in finance or procurement who are looking at the spending. So with Outposts, it actually feels very similar to the region. If you're used to purchasing our compute savings plans or what people used to call reserved instances or RIs the underlying infrastructure on the Outpost works in a very similar way. You're not going to be deploying a multi-rack Outpost and then ripping it out three weeks later so on demand doesn't really make sense there. But for all the services that are deployed on top of Outposts whether it's application load balancer or elastic cash or Elastic MapReduce, those have the same kind of on demand service model, the pricing model that they do in the region. And so very similarly, the Outpost ready program which lets you use trusted and certified third-party solutions, such as ones from Pure those are also going to feel familiar, whether you're coming from the on-prem world and you're already that technology for your storage, your network monitoring, your security or if you're using that solution from the marketplace in the AWS region, it's going to be a totally seamless deploy on the Outpost. So you're going to get something that's kind of the best of both worlds, familiar to you economically and from an installation perspective but also removing all that undifferentiated heavy lifting of having to patch and manage firmware upgrades and you asked this earlier, what customers really want is that there's this whole world of innovation, things that haven't even been invented yet. A few years ago, we hadn't invented Outposts. People want to know that as those innovations get released to the market they can take advantage of them without having to redeploy and so that's what having an AWS Outpost means. That as third parties or Amazon innovates new services can be made available without shipping a DVD or kind of spinning up an entire staff to manage that. >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting watching this equilibrium you know, take place. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. Obviously AWS has a huge impact on how people think about price, as I said upfront. And it seems like, you know, culturally, Michael, there's a fit. I mean, you guys have always sort of been into that you know, your evergreen model, for the first one that subscription sort of mindset. So it's sort of natural for you whereas, you know, maybe a a legacy company might not (chuckles) be able to lean in as hard as you guys are. Maybe some quick thoughts on that. >> Yeah, look, I love the way you framed that up and couldn't agree more. I think AWS is famous for a lot of things some of the values that they embrace and putting the customer at the center of everything they do couldn't be more shared, you know, with Pure. I think, you know, we talk about our company as one that runs two fires right, to give the customer a great experience. And so we know our way around the data center and I think the opportunity to give that customer, you know a consistent experience with AWS as they deliver Outpost to the data center is a really powerful combination. You know, I think one thing, just look at the backdrop of the pandemic, Dave, you know, every part of a company's organization is going through significant change. And I think the data center is absolutely at the center of some of those changes. And I think every one now as they look at the next generation data center they're asking themselves what are containers what does Kubernetes mean to my business? And I think the opportunity that, you know we see jointly with EKS as a partner is really to help customers achieve that goal of, you know the application deployments anywhere and the ability to drive that application, you know modernize that next generation application cycle. So I love the way you framed it up, giving us credit for being highly differentiated from our legacy competitors and we take great pride in that and really want to give a cloud-like experience to our customers. And I think what we're able to do with AWS Outpost is kind of bring that cloud-like experience that they have come to love from AWS into the data center and at the same time shine a light on what we've always done in terms of a cloud-like experience for the Pure customer. >> There's a lot of ways to skin a cat but when you've invented the cloud and you don't have a lot of legacy baggage you can kind of move faster. And I think that, you know, we're really excited about what's occurring here because take the term digital transformation I mean, before the pandemic (groaning) it's like, yeah okay, it had some meaning but you really had to squint through it and a lot of people were complacent about it. Well, we know what digital means now if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. And so it was kind of this forced march to digital I call it and as a result it really increases the need for things like automation and that cloud experience on-prem because I don't have time to be provisioning LUNs anymore. It's just what you guys call it undifferentiated heavy lifting that is really a no-no these days I just absolutely can't afford it. Let's close on what's next. I mean, we've got new form factors coming we're like super excited about when we see things like what Amazon is doing with custom Silicon we see these innovations coming out with processing power going through the roof. Everybody says Moore's law is dead but processing power is increasing faster than it ever has when you combine all these innovations of GPU's and NPUs and accelerators, it's just, it's amazing. And the costs are coming down so you're going to be able to take advantage of that. Outpost will take advantage of that, Pure will, New Designs but specifically as it relates to Outpost, you got one you, you got two you, you coming optimizing for the edge what do customers need to know about these solutions? Why should they consider this combination of Pure and AWS? Maybe Joshua you can start and Michael you can bring us home. >> Yeah, I mean, you hit a lot of the reasons that people should consider it, right. The pace of innovation is not going to slow down here at AWS or of course, with Pure. Whether you have the need for a single server, or you're somebody like dish rolling out a new cloud enabled, you know cloud native 5G network you want to work with somebody who can deploy all the way at the Telco edge right, with hardware innovation up to a local zone all the way up to a region. You don't want to be working with different providers for that and you don't know what you're going to need in three or five years and frankly, I'm not sure that we know everything yet either but we're going to continue to listen to our customers and as you mentioned, deliver things like graviton and inferential and trainium which are our innovations in custom Silicon. Those are delivering 40% price performance improvements for people who are migrating, that's really an enormous benefit. And we're bringing all of those to the Outpost as well so you don't have to choose between moving to the cloud and that being your only modernization option, you can move to the cloud and at the same time still operate on-prem, you know, at a colo facility or all the way at the edge using all of the same tooling. And you can work with best-in-breed third-party technologies like what's offered by Pure. >> Well, and Michael, I'm going to cut you off before you get a chance to close, but I'll let you close. The Portworx acquisition was really interesting to us because it brings that kind of portability, new programming model and something that Joshua said struck in my mind is when I think about the edge word to me what's going to win the edge you know, obviously the flexibility, the agility but the programmability and the customization. So many different use cases. We're not just going to take general purpose boxes and throw them over the fence and say, here you go. You know, the general purpose, that's not what's going to win the edge it's really going to take a lot more thought than that. But, so I just wanted to put that in there. Michael, bring us home, please. (laughing) >> Right on. Well, look you two, and no surprise here right, you two covered so much great ground there. From first principles you know, what does Pure look at? Like what we did being first in terms of service ready across Portworx, for EKS, for flash plate across unified fast file on object and flash ray, you know for block storage, being first with Outposts we want to be first for the one you and to you solutions. So I think customers can expect, you know that our partnership is going to continue to deliver that cloud-like experience, that cloud experience in the AWS context, that cloud-like experience in the Pure context, you know for their on-prem and hybrid workloads. And I think you hit it up so well like if you're not digital business, you're not in business. And so I think one thing that everyone learned over the last year is exactly that. The other thing they learned is they don't know what they don't know. And so they need to make bets on partners that are modern that are delivering simple solutions that solve complex problems that are automated and that are being delivered with the customer first mindset. And I think in the combination of AWS, Outposts and Pure, we're doing exactly that. >> Great point, so a lot of unknowns out there. Hey guys, congratulations on the progress you've made. It's a great partnership, two super innovative companies and really pleasure to have you in theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're still on our Palo Alto studios, we're still getting through COVID and we're still doing all of our remotes, all of our interviews via remote and I'm really excited to have a guest we had around a long time ago. I looked it up is 2016, April 2016. She's Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance. Coco, it's great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well. We actually formally started in April of 2016. >> I know, I saw, I noticed that on LinkedIn. So we were at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, I remembers was a really cool conference, met a ton of people, a lot of them have turned out that are on your board. So yeah, and you formally on LinkedIn, it says you started in May. So that was right at the very, very beginning. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So for people that aren't familiar with the at the Athena Alliance give them the quick overview. >> Okay. Well, it's a little different that it was four years ago. So Athena first and foremost is a digital platform. So you literally log in to Athena. And we're a combination of community access to opportunity and learning. And so you can kind of envision it a little bit like a walled garden around the LinkedIn, meets Khan Academy for senior executives, meets Hollywood agency for women trying to get into the boardroom and senior level roles in the c-suite as advisors, et cetera. And then the way that we operate is you can have a self-service experience of Athena, you can have a concierge experience with Athena with real humans in the loop making key connections for you and you can add accelerators where we build brand packages and BIOS and give you executive coaching. So... >> Wow. >> Kind of a... >> You've built out your services portfolio over the last several years. But still the focus >> yes, we have. is boards, right? Still the focus is getting women on public boards, or is that no longer still the focus? >> No, that's a big piece of it for sure. I mean, one of the things that we discovered, that was the very first mission of Athena, was to bring more women into the boardroom. And as we were doing that we discovered that once you get into a senior realm of leadership in general, there's more things that you want to do than just get into the boardroom. Some of it may be wanting to be an investor or an LP in a fund or become a CEO, or certainly join outside boards but also be relevant to your own inside board. And so we started to look at Athena as a more holistic experience for senior leaders who are attempting to make sure that they are the best they can be in this very senior realm of overarching stewardship of business. >> Awesome. and have you seen, so obviously your your focus shifted 'cause you needed to add more services based on the demand from the customers. But have you seen the receptiveness to women board members change over the last four years? How have you seen kind of the marketplace change? >> Yeah, it's changed a lot, I would say. First of all I think laws like the California law and Goldman Sachs coming out saying they won't take companies public unless they have diverse board data. The statements by big entities that people are paying attention to made the boardroom dynamics a conversation around the dinner table in general. So it became more of a common conversation and common interest as opposed to just the interest of a few people who are trying to get in there. And so that's created a lot of momentum as well as sort of thoughtfulness from leaders and from employees and from larger stakeholders to say the diversity at the top business has to mimic the demographics of society as a whole. And that's become a little bit more accepted as opposed to grudgingly sort of taken in. >> Right. So one of the big problems always it's like the VC problem, right? Is the whole matchmaking problem. How do you, how do qualified people find qualified opportunities? And I wonder if you can speak a little bit as to how that process has evolved, how are you really helping because there's always people that are looking for quality candidates, and there's great quality candidates out there that just don't know where to go. How are you helping bridge kind of that kind of basic matchmaking function? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. One is certainly to understand and have real connections into the parts of the leadership ecosystem that influences or makes the decision as to who sits around that table. So that would be communities of CEOs, it's communities of existing board directors, it's venture capital firms, its private equity firms, and as you get really entrenched in those organizations and those ecosystems, you become part of that ecosystem and you become what they turn to to say, "Hey, do you know somebody?" Because it still is a "who do yo know" approach at the senior most levels. So that's one way. The other mechanism is really for individuals who are looking for board seats who want to be on boards to actually be thinking about how they proactively navigate their way to the kinds of boards that they would fit to. I like in a very much to the way our children go after the schools that they might want to when it's time for university. You'll figure out who your safeties, your matches, your reaches are, and figure out how you're going to take six degrees of separation and turn them into one through connections. So those are that's another way to go about it. >> You know, it's interesting, I talked to Beth Stewart from True Star, they also help place women on boards. And one of the issues is just the turnover. And I asked that just straight up, are there formal mechanisms to make sure that people who've been doing business from way before there were things like email and the internet eventually get swapped out. And she said, that's actually a big part of the problem is there isn't really a formal way to keep things fresh and to kind of rotate the incumbents out to enable somebody who's new and maybe has a different point of view to come in. So I'm curious when someone is targeting their A-list and B-list and C-lists, how do they factor in kind of the age of the board composition of the existing board, to really look for where there's these opportunities where a spot opens up, 'cause if there's not a spot open up clearly, there's really not much opportunity there. >> Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the whole ecosystem, right? I mean, there's anything from let's say series A, venture backed private companies all the way up to the mega cap companies, right? And there's this continuum. And it's not, there's not one universal answer to what you're talking about. So for example, if you're talking about smaller private companies, you're competing against, not somebody giving up their seat, but whether or not the company feels real motivation to fill that particular independent director seat. So the biggest competition is often that that seat goes unfilled. When you're talking about public companies, the biggest competition is really the fact that as my friend Adam Epstein of the small cap Institute will tell you, that 80% of public companies are actually small cap companies. And they don't have the same kinds of pressures that large caps do to have turnover. But yeah, it takes a big piece of the challenge is really boards having the disposition collectively to see the board as a competitive advantage for the business as a very necessary and productive piece of the business and when they see that then they take more proactive measures to make sure they have a evolving and strong board that does turnover as it needs to. >> Right. So I'm curious when you're talking to the high power women, right, who are in operational roles probably most of the time, how do you help coach them, how should they be thinking, what do they have to do different when they want to kind of add board seats to their portfolio? Very different kind of a role than an operational role, very different kind of concerns and day to day tasks. So, and clearly, you've added a whole bunch of extra things to your portfolio. So how do you help people, what do you tell women who say, "Okay, I've been successful, "I'm like successful executive, "but now I want to do this other thing, "I want to take this next step in my career"? What usually the gaps and what are the things that they need to do to prepare for that? >> Well, I'm going to circle in then land a little bit. Autodesk was actually a really great partner to us back when you and I first met. They had a couple of women at the top of the organization that were part of Athena, specifically because they wanted to join boards. They are on boards now, Lisa Campbell, Amy Bunszel, Debbie Clifford. And what they told us is they were experiencing everything that we were offering in terms of developing them, helping them to position themselves, understand themselves, navigate their way, was that they simply became better leaders as a result of focusing on themselves as that next level up, irrespective of the fact that it took them two to three years to land that seat. They became stronger in their executive role in general and better able to communicate and engage with their own boards. So I think, now I'm landing, the thing that I would say about that is don't wait until you're thinking oh, I want to join a board, to do the work to get yourself into that ecosystem, into that atmosphere and into that mindset, because the sooner you do that as an executive, the better you will be in that atmosphere, the more prepared you will be. And you also have to recognize that it will take time. >> Right. And the how has COVID impacted it, I mean, on one hand, meeting somebody for coffee and having a face to face is a really important part of getting to know someone and a big part of I'm sure, what was the recruitment process, and do you know someone, yeah, let's go meet for a cup of coffee or dinner or whatever. Can't do that anymore, but we can all meet this way, we can all get on virtually and so in some ways, it's probably an enabler, which before you could grab an hour or you didn't have to fly cross-country or somebody didn't have to fly cross-country. So I'm kind of curious in this new reality, which is going to continue for some time. How has that impacted kind of people's ability to discover and get to know and build trust for these very very senior positions. >> HBR just came out with a really great article about the virtual board meeting. I don't know if you saw it but I can send you a link. I think that what I'm learning from board directors in general and leaders in general is that yes, there's things that make it difficult to engage remotely, but there's also a lot of benefit to being able to get comfortable with the virtual world. So it's certainly, particularly with COVID, with racial equity issues, with the uncertain economy, boards are having to meet more often and they're having, some are having weekly stand ups and those are facilitated by getting more and more comfortable with being virtual. And I think they're realizing that you don't have to press flesh, as they say, to actually build intimacy and real connection. And that's been a hold up, but I think as the top leadership gets to understand that and feel that for themselves, it becomes easier for them to adopt it throughout the organization that the virtual world is one we can really embrace, not just for a period of time. >> It's funny we had John Chambers on early on in this whole process, really talking about leadership and leading through transition. And he used the example, I think had been that day or maybe a couple days off from our interview where they had a board meeting, I think they were talking about some hamburger restaurant, and so they just delivered hamburgers to everybody's office and they had the board meeting. But that's really progressive for a board to actually be doing weekly stand ups. That really shows a pretty transformative way to manage the business and kind of what we think is the stodgy old traditional get together now and then, fly and then get some minutes and fly out, that's super progressive. >> Yeah. I mean, I was on three different board meetings this week with a company I'm on the board of in Minnesota. And we haven't seen each other in person in, I guess since January. (woman laughs) >> So final tips for women that want to make this this move, who, they've got some breathing space, they're not homeschooling the kids all day while they're trying to get their job done and trying to save their own business, but have some cycles and the capabilities. What do you tell them, where should they begin, how should they start thinking about, kind of taking on this additional responsibility and really professional growth in their life? >> Well, I mean, I think something very important for all of us to think about with regard to board service and in general as we get into a very senior level point in our careers at a managing and impact portfolio. People get into a senior point and they don't just want to be an executive for one company, they want to have a variety of ways that they're delivering impact, whether it's as an investor or as a board member or as other things as well as being an operator. And I think the misnomer is that people believe that you have to add them up and they, one plus one plus one equals three, and it's just not true. The truth is that when you add a board seat, when you add that other thing that you're doing it makes you better as a leader in general. Every board meeting I have with [Indistinct] gives me more than I bring back to Athena as an example. And so I think we tend to think of not being able to take on one more thing and I say that we all have a little more space than we think we have to take on the things we want to do. >> Right? That's a good message to me. It is often said if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. It's more likely to get it done 'cause you got to be efficient and you just have that kind of get it done attitude. >> That's right. >> All right, Coco. Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts. >> Congratulations, so I guess it's your four year anniversary, five year anniversary [Indistinct] about right? >> Yes, four. >> That's terrific. And we look forward to continuing to watch the growth and hopefully checking in face to face at some point in the not too distant future. >> I would like that. >> All right. Thanks a lot Coco. >> Great talking to you. >> Already. >> She's Coco, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Reporter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios, talking about a really important topic. And that's data. And as we hear over and over and over, right data is the oil. Data is the new currency. Data is driving business decisions. Data drives AI. Data drives machine learning. Data is increasingly important. And we're still kind of waiting for it, to show up on balance sheets. Which is kind of implied in a lot of the big iterations, that we see in companies that are built on data. But one of the important things about data, is taking care of it. And we're excited to have our next guest here to talk about, some of the things you need to think about, and best practices in securing your data. Backing up your data, protecting your data. We're joined today by Tim Burlowski. He is the senior director, Product Management from Veritas. Joining us from remote. I believe you're in Minnesota. Tim, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so let's just jump into it. So all we hear about is data these days. It's such an important topic, that is growing exponentially. And it's structured and it's unstructured. And it's so core to the business. And are you making database decisions? And are you getting enough data to drive your AI? And your machine learning algorithms? I mean, data is only exploding. You've been in this business for a long, a long, long time. I wonder if you can share your perspective, when you hear these things. more data is going to be created in the next 15 minutes. And wasn't the entire history of men before us? I'm making that up, but it's been quite an explosion. >> I know yeah, I know where you're coming from. And frankly, I don't even put that, in my presentation anymore. Because it's a lot like saying gravity exists, And things that you drop out, of a window will fall to the ground. Everyone's heard it. Everyone's aware of it. The numbers are just so staggering. You don't even know what to do with it. Like how many iPhones could you stack to the moon and back and then to Saturn? Doesn't make sense. But the truth is, we are seeing an explosion. Everyone knows it. We have to manage it better. Now for us, a lot of what we do, is in this data protection space. Where we want to make sure, that data is protected and always available. All of the data that's been created, and the growth in mission-critical applications. It's no longer seven to 20 mission-critical applications. It's hundreds and hundreds of mission-critical applications. Means you have to be ready, with a recent recovery if necessary. And you need to provide that data back to the consumer, as quickly as you possibly can. Because you've got people waiting on it. We've all got our apps on our phone, where we're looking at our bank account 24 seven. We don't wait until a teller appears at nine a.m anymore. It's not the world we live in. >> Right, I'm just curious if you've got some tailwinds, in terms of you're kind of, you've been in this market for a very long time. In terms of people finally realizing that their data, is really more of an asset and a liability. In the investments, to gather it, protect it, analyze it, have it ready for refresh it, If there's some problem. It's a positive investment towards, kind of revenue and strategic importance to the company, as opposed to kind of a back-office IT function, that we're kind of taking care of business because we have to. >> Boy that one really varies a lot by company. I see companies taking shortcuts and outsourcing, and then suddenly you'll see them in the news. And they discover that they had a major outage for a couple of days. And suddenly practices change very, very quickly. The relative comprehensive, sturdy and reliable infrastructure that people run today, sometimes lulls people into false security. And then you see a major airlines with a multi-day outage. And you go hmm, I think we missed a few steps in the process. So it sometimes takes those rude awakenings. But the companies who are really taking it seriously, and starting to practice pruning their data, examining their data for PII. So they meet various compliance regimes, and other in various states and countries. And starting to think about their backup stream, really being, how do we get a fast recovery? Instead of how do I make a copy, which I will never use again? Are really starting to drive a more efficient IT operation, when it comes to data protection. >> No, it's an interesting take, in reference to having some issue. Because we do a lot of stuff around security. Which is related to but not equal to this conversation. And one of the topics in security is that, most people have already been breached. It's just a function of how fast can you find out, and how fast can you minimize the damage? And how fast can you move on? Why are they breaching? They're breaching to get the data. So I would imagine, with this constant reading in the newspaper, of who was breached here there and everywhere, pretty much every day. That's got to be a huge driver, in terms of people kind of upping their game, and the sophistication, of the way they really think about data protection. >> It is and I'll tell you, I've had the misfortune, I would say. Of talking to customers who are in the middle of recovering, from a major ransomware malware attack. And it's a very difficult proposition. And what customers often discover is, they haven't practiced enough, they don't have enough of a DR plan present. We are certainly rising the occasion. Our products are sort of the last thing, that often stands between the customer, losing their data completely. And so we're looking at a number of technology innovations, that will enable them to store their data on immutable devices. And for the backup infrastructure, to be completely aware of that. Which we'll be announcing later this summer. Which we're very excited about. Of course, from our perspective of our appliance portfolio, we've always provided a couple of extra layers of security against intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention right out of the box. Because we know the backup infrastructure becomes this collection of the very most important data in your infrastructure. Because that's the thing you back up. And you want to restore. If there's ever any sort of manmade disaster or otherwise. >> Right. So I want to shift gears a little bit, and talk about kind of the evolution of the infrastructure kind of scene. If you will. With the rise of public clouds, with Amazon and Google and Microsoft, is sure. And then obviously, you tried into a data center. Lot of talk about HP discover, this week kind of going from edge to cloud and data center in the middle. So the environment in which these applications live, and these applications run, and where the data is, relative to those applications. Is evolved dramatically over the last, you probably have a much better time perspective than I do. Five years, 10 years. But it continues to accelerate, in this kind of Application-Centric World versus, kind of an Infrastructure Centric World. Just curious to get your take on, The kind of the challenges that presents to your company, and what you guys are trying to do to accomplish. And how do you see that continuing to evolve and get, not simpler but more complex over time? >> That is a very astute acknowledgement of what's going on in the industry. And I often call it the industry's getting weirder. I would have thought at some point, we'd sort of have Linux and Windows, and a couple of database vendors. And the truth is that database vendors exploded. And it's not just Linux anymore. It's containers. And it might be a container based on CentOS. And it might be container running in the cloud. Or it might be a simple function, like a lambda function running on nothing in AWS. And so this whole world has gotten a lot stranger. From my perspective, I think the biggest change for Veritas, has been a renewed focus on API's that we make public to customers, in ways that we can glue and stitch these systems together. Now, of course, it doesn't replace the deep integration, we do with companies like VMware, with Docker, as well as the the container ecosystem around. OpenShift and some of those technologies. But from our perspective, we've had to be a little bit more prolific, in what we support. And the truth is, it's all files, it's all objects, it's all things we've done before. But they just keep bubbling up in new and different ways. >> Right, but what's interesting though, is you touch on all kinds of stuff there with Kubernetes and clouds and in containers. Is a lot of it's kind of ethereal, right? The whole idea of of a cloud-based infrastructure, is that you can bring it up and bring it down as you need it. You can adjust it as you go. And literally turn it off when you don't need it. And bring it back up. And then you add to that serverless. And this kind of increasing atomization, of all the different parts of compute. Kind of an interesting thing for you guys, to try to back up as these things are created and destructed. We hear these crazy stories of, automating Kubernetes to spin up tons of these things at a time and then bring them back back down. And then I'm curious too. Within that is also the open source. kind of challenge in continuing to have evolution in open source technologies, API's, et cetera. So it is getting weirder and weirder, on a number of fronts as you guys continue to evolve with the market. >> Absolutely, and all I'll tell you, you have to think about all technologies as being on a bridge. As I remind people, we have washing machines. They work really well but washboards still exist, even though it's a technology from 18th century, or beforehand. Now, they may be used as still do exist. Now, my point in this is, people need a bridge. Most enterprises run on an amazing amount of technology, they've developed as a stack over the last 10 to 15 years. And they can't immediately rewrite that, and put it all in a cloud container. So we're actually seeing a lot of use of containers, and Kubernetes with fairly heavy application stacks. When you think about something as heavy as, all have Oracle inside of a container. You can understand that, that's a big lift for container. And it's not ephemeral at all. Then it reaches out to storage, that has that persistence value. And that's where we come in. 'Cause we want to make sure that persistent storage, is always protected. And easily available to the customer for any recovery needs. >> Is great, so I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, to talk about regulations and compliance. 'Cause, regulatory requirements drive a lot of behavior and activity, and really oftentimes, are ahead of maybe the business prerogative to do things like provide backups, provide quick and dirty, quick and easy access. Because you needed it for, a public Freedom of Information Act request. Or you need it for some type of court type of activity. So I wonder if you can kind of talk about, how the regulatory environment, continues to evolve over time. And how does that impact, what you guys are doing in the marketplace? >> Great question. The biggest place is It's affected us, is customers are starting to think about privacy. And where do I have data which relates to, personally identifying information. And that's really driven a lot, by the European regulations around GDPR. Then we're seeing the California Privacy Act come in. And a number of other states are considering legislation in this area. In some ways, it's actually been a good news story for data protection and data management. Because people are starting to say, I should identify where the data is, I should figure out where the PII is. And I should make sure, I'm actually using my backups for the right purposes. Which is something we've always believed in. We've always thought, Hey, Mr. Customer, I see you're backing up an Oracle database for 10 years. What are you going to do with it in 10 years? Are you going to install Oracle seven and reboot it? It doesn't really add up to me. So, how can you get to a true archive, for that data you really need archive? And then for your backup set, how can you keep it lean and mean. And just keep it for the length of time you actually need it? Which for many customers, could be as little as 14, 15 days, maybe six months, maybe a year. But it's often not those extreme retentions people were thinking of, when they were building their tape based infrastructure 10 years ago. >> Right, that's funny. 'Cause as you mentioned, also I'm thinking of, is big data. Right in this constant kind of conversation. In the Big Data world is they keep everything forever, with the hopes that at some point in time, there may be a different algorithm or a different kind of process, you might run on that, but you didn't think about. Right kind of scheme on read versus scheme on right. But to your point, is that necessarily something that has to be backed up, but it sounds like a lot of, kind of policy driven activity. Than to drive the software to define what to back up, what you don't back up, how you back it up, how long you back it up? And a lot of kind of business decisions as opposed to technology decisions. >> Absolutely, that's been on the back of, the price of storing a bit of data, has declined over the last 10 years. An average 15 percent year over year. For a very long time. So people have ignored the problem. But the truth is, when you're really working at scale, there's a tremendous amount of waste. And we've identified for customers, using our data analytics technology. Millions of dollars of cost savings, where they were, both had storing files on, expensive primary tier one storage. And they were backing up those same, that same bit of information every single week. Even though it hadn't changed, or hadn't been read in seven plus years, and they couldn't find an owner for the information in the company. They literally didn't know why they had it. And I think people are starting to consider that. Especially in budget constraint times. >> Right, it's so funny, right? Sometimes it's such a simple answer, a friend one time had a startup, and he was doing contract management. This is 20 years ago. And I was like, how do you manage the complexity of contracts inside software. Again 20 years ago. And he said, Jeff, that's not it at all. We just need to know like, where is the contract? who signed it and when does it expire? And they built the business, on answering simple questions like that. It's sometimes the simple stuff that's the hard stuff. I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, on what bear toss dude in the market in terms of still having appliances? I'm sure a lot of people like weight appliances. Why are we still using appliances? This is a software defined world. And everything just runs on x86 architecture. You guys still have appliances, tell us a little bit about the why. And some of the benefits of having, kind of a dedicated hardware, software piece of equipment, versus just a pure software solution that sits on anybody's box. >> That's a great question. Thanks for asking. When I think about that world, you have to understand Veritas at its core is absolutely a software company. We build software and we preserve the choice and how the customer implements. When I say we preserve choice. We obviously still support old school Unix. We certainly have enormous investment in the x86 world, both on Windows and various Linux flavors. And of course, you can run those same That same software in the cloud. And of course, you can run it inside of a virtualized infrastructure. So we always like to preserve choice. Now why did we create the appliance business, it's frankly because customers asked us to. The thing that made storing backups on disk affordable, was this technology known as deduplication. Which at its heart is just a fancy kind of compression, That's very, very good at copies of data, where there's a lot of blocks that are have been seen before. And so we don't store them if we've seen them before. We simply store the ones that are new and fresh. So from our perspective, customers said, "we want this technology." And the market really moved away, from general purpose solutions on servers to do that. Because it was very hard to build something, that could have a very high throughput, very high memory, and at the same time, could give excellent support for random access reads, when the customer actually needed to read that data. And so we created a purpose built appliances as a result. And what we discovered in the the process was, there were a lot of pieces that were actually fairly hard in the enterprise. So when a customer would describe, the purchasing process of their typical solution before appliances, they would talk about, filing tickets with the server team. Filing tickets with the storage team. Filing tickets with security team. And sometimes taking six or nine months, to get a piece of equipment ready to install the backup software on the floor. Whereas with ours, they placed an order, it showed up on the dock, as soon as it when it was in the rack, they were ready to go and working independently. Now while we have a great and thriving appliance business, we're very, very proud of, we always preserve choice at Veritas. And even though that's the business I represent, I would make sure our customers always understand, that we're interested in the best platform for the customer. So that's our basic perspective. If you want to go deeper, let me know where you have questions. (chuckles) >> Well, I'm curious on the process, when there's a fail, when there's attack, when there's ransomware, whatever. When you need to go back to your backup. What are some of the things that your approach enables, or what are kind of the typical stumbling blocks that are the hardest things to overcome. That people miss when they're planning for that. Or thinking about it. That kind of rear their ugly heads, when the time comes that, oh, I guess we need to go back to a backup version. >> Yeah, and I'll break that input into this disaster recovery or restore process. And then also the process of backup. So when you think about that disaster recovery, and I'll use ransomware as that piece of it. Because that's the real kind of disaster, when you're looking at equipment in the infrastructure, which has been wiped clean. That's a worst case scenario for most IT managers. When you think about that situation, we've built into our appliances first of all, a hardened Linux OS. Meaning we've shrank down that OS as much as we possibly could. Second, we've added role-based access protection. To make sure that you simply can't log in and perform activities which you're not privileged to perform. And then we have intrusion protection software, intrusion detection software. To ensure that even for those zero day attacks, that we may not even be aware of when we release our software, that the system is hardened. Of course, you have firewalls and STIG rules, STIG or rules are DoD standard, for hardening Linux based devices. So we've got a hardened device. And I was talking to a customer, in a different part of the world this week. Where they described having a data center, where everything had been wiped. And there's one thing left there, their NetBackup appliances. And they were then able to then take that, and use that for the restore. Because that was a real vault for their data. Now, the flipside is, that's a rare day. So that is truly a black swan event. When you think about day to day, and we're running a data protection operation, really think about speed of backup. And for us being able to take something that's neatly tuned for the hardware, the operating system, the tuning, the net backup software is all configured out of the box and ready to go. And the data protection folks, can be independently able to drive that is a great value. Because essentially, you have Lego style building blocks. Where you can order device, it always performs the same. And three years from now, you don't have to redesign it. And take your expensive IT staff and ask them to figure out what's the best solution. We've just got another one off the shelf for you, another series in the model. >> Right >> Now, as you said earlier, the world's getting weirder. It definitely is. So we'll be branching off into what kind of appliances we offer. And you'll see some announcements later, in the year where we'll be offering some reference architecture approaches, which will be a little different than what we offer today. Just to meet the customer demand that's out there. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, 'cause as you said, it's all about customer choice. And meeting the customer where they want to meet. But before I let you go, this is pretty interesting conversation. I want to get your perspective, as someone who's been in the business, for a really long time. And as you look at opportunities around, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and you look at kind of the I'm going to steal your line about things getting weirder. And use over and over. But as they continue to get weirder and weirder, where do you see kind of the evolution is, you kind of sit back, not necessarily in the next six months or so. But where do you see growth opportunities and places you want to go? That better still out in front of you, even though you've been doing this for many, many years? >> Well, that's a great question. So this is yet another wave. And that's often how I look at it. Meaning, there's a wave of Unix. There's a wave of windows. There's wave of virtualization. And each of these technologies, brought some real shifts to our environment. I think, from my perspective, the next big wave is dealing with ransomware. And some of these compliance requirements we talked about earlier. And then I can't get away from this big data, AI piece and my son's studying computer science in college. And that's a weekly conversation for us. What's new in that front? Because I think we're going to see, a lot more technology developed there. We are just truly on the beginning of that curve. And frankly, when I think about the companies I work with, they have a tremendous amount of data. But that's really only going to increase, as they realize they can actually develop value from it. And as you mentioned, first thing once it shows up on the balance sheet, suddenly everyone's going to get very excited about that. >> Yeah, it's so funny, right? 'Cause it basically does show up on the balance sheet of Facebook, and it shows up on the balance sheet of Google. But it's just not a line item. And I keep waiting for the tipping point, to happen where that becomes, a line item on the balance sheet. Because increasingly, that is arguably, the most important asset. 0r certainly the information and learning that goes around that data. >> You're right. And frankly, it's an insurable asset at this point. You can go to a company in a number of commercial settings and get ransomware insurance, for instance. So people are definitely recognizing the value of it if they're willing to insure it. >> Right, right. All right, Tim. Well, thank you very much for stopping by. And giving us an update really interesting times in, kind of taking care of business and really the core of the business, which is the data inside the business. So, important work. And thanks for taking a few minutes. >> All right, thanks. I'll be glad to be back anytime you want me. >> Alright, He's Tim. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Reporter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios, talking about a really important topic. And that's data. And as we hear over and over and over, right data is the oil. Data is the new currency. Data is driving business decisions. Data drives AI. Data drives machine learning. Data is increasingly important. And we're still kind of waiting for it, to show up on balance sheets. Which is kind of implied in a lot of the big iterations, that we see in companies that are built on data. But one of the important things about data, is taking care of it. And we're excited to have our next guest here to talk about, some of the things you need to think about, and best practices in securing your data. Backing up your data, protecting your data. We're joined today by Tim Burlowski. He is the senior director, Product Management from Veritas. Joining us from remote. I believe you're in Minnesota. Tim, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so let's just jump into it. So all we hear about is data these days. It's such an important topic, that is growing exponentially. And it's structured and it's unstructured. And it's so core to the business. And are you making database decisions? And are you getting enough data to drive your AI? And your machine learning algorithms? I mean, data is only exploding. You've been in this business for a long, a long, long time. I wonder if you can share your perspective, when you hear these things. more data is going to be created in the next 15 minutes. And wasn't the entire history of men before us? I'm making that up, but it's been quite an explosion. >> I know yeah, I know where you're coming from. And frankly, I don't even put that, in my presentation anymore. Because it's a lot like saying gravity exists, And things that you drop out, of a window will fall to the ground. Everyone's heard it. Everyone's aware of it. The numbers are just so staggering. You don't even know what to do with it. Like how many iPhones could you stack to the moon and back and then to Saturn? Doesn't make sense. But the truth is, we are seeing an explosion. Everyone knows it. We have to manage it better. Now for us, a lot of what we do, is in this data protection space. Where we want to make sure, that data is protected and always available. All of the data that's been created, and the growth in mission-critical applications. It's no longer seven to 20 mission-critical applications. It's hundreds and hundreds of mission-critical applications. Means you have to be ready, with a recent recovery if necessary. And you need to provide that data back to the consumer, as quickly as you possibly can. Because you've got people waiting on it. We've all got our apps on our phone, where we're looking at our bank account 24 seven. We don't wait until a teller appears at nine a.m anymore. It's not the world we live in. >> Right, I'm just curious if you've got some tailwinds, in terms of you're kind of, you've been in this market for a very long time. In terms of people finally realizing that their data, is really more of an asset and a liability. In the investments, to gather it, protect it, analyze it, have it ready for refresh it, If there's some problem. It's a positive investment towards, kind of revenue and strategic importance to the company, as opposed to kind of a back-office IT function, that we're kind of taking care of business because we have to. >> But that one really varies a lot by company. I see companies taking shortcuts and outsourcing, and then suddenly you'll see them in the news. And they discover that they had a major outage for a couple of days. And suddenly practices change very, very quickly. The relative comprehensive, sturdy and reliable infrastructure that people run today, sometimes lulls people into false security. And then you see a major airlines with a multi-day outage. And you go hmm, I think we missed a few steps in the process. So it sometimes takes those rude awakenings. But the companies who are really taking it seriously, and starting to practice pruning their data, examining their data for PII. So they meet various compliance regimes, and other in various states and countries. And starting to think about their backup stream, really being, how do we get a fast recovery? Instead of how do I make a copy, which I will never use again? Are really starting to drive a more efficient IT operation, when it comes to data protection. >> No, it's an interesting take, in reference to having some issue. Because we do a lot of stuff around security. Which is related to but not equal to this conversation. And one of the topics in security is that, most people have already been breached. It's just a function of how fast can you find out, and how fast can you minimize the damage? And how fast can you move on? Why are they breaching? They're breaching to get the data. So I would imagine, with this constant reading in the newspaper, of who was breached here there and everywhere, pretty much every day. That's got to be a huge driver, in terms of people kind of upping their game, and the sophistication, of the way they really think about data protection. >> It is and I'll tell you, I've had the misfortune, I would say. Of talking to customers who are in the middle of recovering, from a major ransomware malware attack. And it's a very difficult proposition. And what customers often discover is, they haven't practiced enough, they don't have enough of a DR plan present. We are certainly rising the occasion. Our products are sort of the last thing, that often stands between the customer, losing their data completely. And so we're looking at a number of technology innovations, that will enable them to store their data on immutable devices. And for the backup infrastructure, to be completely aware of that. Which we'll be announcing later this summer. Which we're very excited about. Of course, from our perspective of our appliance portfolio, we've always provided a couple of extra layers of security against intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention right out of the box. Because we know the backup infrastructure becomes this collection of the very most important data in your infrastructure. Because that's the thing you back up. And you want to restore. If there's ever any sort of manmade disaster or otherwise. >> Right. So I want to shift gears a little bit, and talk about kind of the evolution of the infrastructure kind of scene. If you will. With the rise of public clouds, with Amazon and Google and Microsoft, is sure. And then obviously, you tried into a data center. Lot of talk about HP discover, this week kind of going from edge to cloud and data center in the middle. So the environment in which these applications live, and these applications run, and where the data is, relative to those applications. Is evolved dramatically over the last, you probably have a much better time perspective than I do. Five years, 10 years. But it continues to accelerate, in this kind of Application-Centric World versus, kind of an Infrastructure Centric World. Just curious to get your take on, The kind of the challenges that presents to your company, and what you guys are trying to do to accomplish. And how do you see that continuing to evolve and get, not simpler but more complex over time? >> That is a very astute acknowledgement of what's going on in the industry. And I often call it the industry's getting weirder. I would have thought at some point, we'd sort of have Linux and Windows, and a couple of database vendors. And the truth is that database vendors exploded. And it's not just Linux anymore. It's containers. And it might be a container based on CentOS. And it might be container running in the cloud. Or it might be a simple function, like a lambda function running on nothing in AWS. And so this whole world has gotten a lot stranger. From my perspective, I think the biggest change for Veritas, has been a renewed focus on API's that we make public to customers, in ways that we can glue and stitch these systems together. Now, of course, it doesn't replace the deep integration, we do with companies like VMware, with Docker, as well as the the container ecosystem around. Open shift and some of those technologies. But from our perspective, we've had to be a little bit more prolific, in what we support. And the truth is, it's all files, it's all objects, it's all things we've done before. But they just keep bubbling up in new and different ways. >> Right, but what's interesting though, is you touch on all kinds of stuff there with Kubernetes and clouds and in containers. Is a lot of it's kind of ethereal, right? The whole idea of of a cloud-based infrastructure, is that you can bring it up and bring it down as you need it. You can adjust it as you go. And literally turn it off when you don't need it. And bring it back up. And then you add to that serverless. And this kind of increasing atomization, of all the different parts of compute. Kind of an interesting thing for you guys, to try to back up as these things are created and destructed. We hear these crazy stories of, automating Kubernetes to spin up tons of these things at a time and then bring them back back down. And then I'm curious too. Within that is also the open source. kind of challenge in continuing to have evolution in open source technologies, API's, et cetera. So it is getting weirder and weirder, on a number of fronts as you guys continue to evolve with the market. >> Absolutely, and all I'll tell you, you have to think about all technologies as being on a bridge. As I remind people, we have washing machines. They work really well but washboards still exist, even though it's a technology from 18th century, or beforehand. Now, they may be used as still do exist. Now, my point in this is, people need a bridge. Most enterprises run on an amazing amount of technology, they've developed as a stack over the last 10 to 15 years. And they can't immediately rewrite that, and put it all in a cloud container. So we're actually seeing a lot of use of containers, and Kubernetes with fairly heavy application stacks. When you think about something as heavy as, all have Oracle inside of a container. You can understand that, that's a big lift for container. And it's not ephemeral at all. Then it reaches out to storage, that has that persistence value. And that's where we come in. 'Cause we want to make sure that persistent storage, is always protected. And easily available to the customer for any recovery needs. >> Is great, so I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, to talk about regulations and compliance. 'Cause, regulatory requirements drive a lot of behavior and activity, and really oftentimes, are ahead of maybe the business prerogative to do things like provide backups, provide quick and dirty, quick and easy access. Because you needed it for, a public Freedom of Information Act request. Or you need it for some type of court type of activity. So I wonder if you can kind of talk about, how the regulatory environment, continues to evolve over time. And how does that impact, what you guys are doing in the marketplace? >> Great question. The biggest place is It's affected us, is customers are starting to think about privacy. And where do I have data which relates to, personally identifying information. And that's really driven a lot, by the European regulations around GDPR. Then we're seeing the California Privacy Act come in. And a number of other states are considering legislation in this area. In some ways, it's actually been a good news story for data protection and data management. Because people are starting to say, I should identify where the data is, I should figure out where the PII is. And I should make sure, I'm actually using my backups for the right purposes. Which is something we've always believed in. We've always thought, Hey, Mr. Customer, I see you're backing up an Oracle database for 10 years. What are you going to do with it in 10 years? Are you going to install Oracle seven and reboot it? It doesn't really add up to me. So, how can you get to a true archive, for that data you really need archive? And then for your backup set, how can you keep it lean and mean. And just keep it for the length of time you actually need it? Which for many customers, could be as little as 14, 15 days, maybe six months, maybe a year. But it's often not those extreme retentions people were thinking of, when they were building their tape based infrastructure 10 years ago. >> Right, that's funny. 'Cause as you mentioned, also I'm thinking of, is big data. Right in this constant kind of conversation. In the Big Data world is they keep everything forever, with the hopes that at some point in time, there may be a different algorithm or a different kind of process, you might run on that, but you didn't think about. Right kind of scheme on read versus scheme on right. But to your point, is that necessarily something that has to be backed up, but it sounds like a lot of, kind of policy driven activity. Than to drive the software to define what to back up, what you don't back up, how you back it up, how long you back it up? And a lot of kind of business decisions as opposed to technology decisions. >> Absolutely, that's been on the back of, the price of storing a bit of data, has declined over the last 10 years. An average 15 percent year over year. For a very long time. So people have ignored the problem. But the truth is, when you're really working at scale, there's a tremendous amount of waste. And we've identified for customers, using our data analytics technology. Millions of dollars of cost savings, where they were, both had storing files on, expensive primary tier one storage. And they were backing up those same, that same bit of information every single week. Even though it hadn't changed, or hadn't been read in seven plus years, and they couldn't find an owner for the information in the company. They literally didn't know why they had it. And I think people are starting to consider that. Especially in budget constraint times. >> Right, it's so funny, right? Sometimes it's such a simple answer, a friend one time had a startup, and he was doing contract management. This is 20 years ago. And I was like, how do you manage the complexity of contracts inside software. Again 20 years ago. And he said, Jeff, that's not it at all. We just need to know like, where is the contract? who signed it and when does it expire? And they built the business, on answering simple questions like that. It's sometimes the simple stuff that's the hard stuff. I want to shift gears a little bit Tim, on what bear toss dude in the market in terms of still having appliances? I'm sure a lot of people like weight appliances. Why are we still using appliances? This is a software defined world. And everything just runs on x86 architecture. You guys still have appliances, tell us a little bit about the why. And some of the benefits of having, kind of a dedicated hardware, software piece of equipment, versus just a pure software solution that sits on anybody's box. >> That's a great question. Thanks for asking. When I think about that world, you have to understand Veritas at its core is absolutely a software company. We build software and we preserve the choice and how the customer implements. When I say we preserve choice. We obviously still support old school Unix. We certainly have enormous investment in the x86 world, both on Windows and various Linux flavors. And of course, you can run those same That same software in the cloud. And of course, you can run it inside of a virtualized infrastructure. So we always like to preserve choice. Now why did we create the appliance business, it's frankly because customers asked us to. The thing that made storing backups on disk affordable, was this technology known as deduplication. Which at its heart is just a fancy kind of compression, That's very, very good at copies of data, where there's a lot of blocks that are have been seen before. And so we don't store them if we've seen them before. We simply store the ones that are new and fresh. So from our perspective, customers said, "we want this technology." And the market really moved away, from general purpose solutions on servers to do that. Because it was very hard to build something, that could have a very high throughput, very high memory, and at the same time, could give excellent support for random access reads, when the customer actually needed to read that data. And so we created a purpose built appliances as a result. And what we discovered in the the process was, there were a lot of pieces that were actually fairly hard in the enterprise. So when a customer would describe, the purchasing process of their typical solution before appliances, they would talk about, filing tickets with the server team. Filing tickets with the storage team. Filing tickets with security team. And sometimes taking six or nine months, to get a piece of equipment ready to install the backup software on the floor. Whereas with ours, they placed an order, it showed up on the dock, as soon as it when it was in the rack, they were ready to go and working independently. Now while we have a great and thriving appliance business, we're very, very proud of, we always preserve choice at Veritas. And even though that's the business I represent, I would make sure our customers always understand, that we're interested in the best platform for the customer. So that's our basic perspective. If you want to go deeper, let me know where you have questions. (chuckles) >> Well, I'm curious on the process, when there's a fail, when there's attack, when there's ransomware, whatever. When you need to go back to your backup. What are some of the things that your approach enables, or what are kind of the typical stumbling blocks that are the hardest things to overcome. That people miss when they're planning for that. Or thinking about it. That kind of rear their ugly heads, when the time comes that, oh, I guess we need to go back to a backup version. >> Yeah, and I'll break that input into this disaster recovery or restore process. And then also the process of backup. So when you think about that disaster recovery, and I'll use ransomware as that piece of it. Because that's the real kind of disaster, when you're looking at equipment in the infrastructure, which has been wiped clean. That's a worst case scenario for most IT managers. When you think about that situation, we've built into our appliances first of all, a hardened Linux OS. Meaning we've shrank down that OS as much as we possibly could. Second, we've added role-based access protection. To make sure that you simply can't log in and perform activities which you're not privileged to perform. And then we have intrusion protection software, intrusion detection software. To ensure that even for those zero day attacks, that we may not even be aware of when we release our software, that the system is hardened. Of course, you have firewalls and STIG rules, STIG or rules are DoD standard, for hardening Linux based devices. So we've got a hardened device. And I was talking to a customer, in a different part of the world this week. Where they described having a data center, where everything had been wiped. And there's one thing left there, their NetBackup appliances. And they were then able to then take that, and use that for the restore. Because that was a real vault for their data. Now, the flipside is, that's a rare day. So that is truly a black swan event. When you think about day to day, and we're running a data protection operation, really think about speed of backup. And for us being able to take something that's neatly tuned for the hardware, the operating system, the tuning, the net backup software is all configured out of the box and ready to go. And the data protection folks, can be independently able to drive that is a great value. Because essentially, you have Lego style building blocks. Where you can order device, it always performs the same. And three years from now, you don't have to redesign it. And take your expensive IT staff and ask them to figure out what's the best solution. We've just got another one off the shelf for you, another series in the model. >> Right >> Now, as you said earlier, the world's getting weirder. It definitely is. So we'll be branching off into what kind of appliances we offer. And you'll see some announcements later, in the year where we'll be offering some reference architecture approaches, which will be a little different than what we offer today. Just to meet the customer demand that's out there. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, 'cause as you said, it's all about customer choice. And meeting the customer where they want to meet. But before I let you go, this is pretty interesting conversation. I want to get your perspective, as someone who's been in the business, for a really long time. And as you look at opportunities around, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and you look at kind of the I'm going to steal your line about things getting weirder. And use over and over. But as they continue to get weirder and weirder, where do you see kind of the evolution is, you kind of sit back, not necessarily in the next six months or so. But where do you see growth opportunities and places you want to go? That better still out in front of you, even though you've been doing this for many, many years? >> Well, that's a great question. So this is yet another wave. And that's often how I look at it. Meaning, there's a wave of Unix. There's a wave of windows. There's wave of virtualization. And each of these technologies, brought some real shifts to our environment. I think, from my perspective, the next big wave is dealing with ransomware. And some of these compliance requirements we talked about earlier. And then I can't get away from this big data, AI piece and my son's studying computer science in college. And that's a weekly conversation for us. What's new in that front? Because I think we're going to see, a lot more technology developed there. We are just truly on the beginning of that curve. And frankly, when I think about the companies I work with, they have a tremendous amount of data. But that's really only going to increase, as they realize they can actually develop value from it. And as you mentioned, first thing once it shows up on the balance sheet, suddenly everyone's going to get very excited about that. >> Yeah, it's so funny, right? 'Cause it basically does show up on the balance sheet of Facebook, and it shows up on the balance sheet of Google. But it's just not a line item. And I keep waiting for the tipping point, to happen where that becomes, a line item on the balance sheet. Because increasingly, that is arguably, the most important asset. 0r certainly the information and learning that goes around that data. >> You're right. And frankly, it's an insurable asset at this point. You can go to a company in a number of commercial settings and get ransomware insurance, for instance. So people are definitely recognizing the value of it if they're willing to insure it. >> Right, right. All right, Tim. Well, thank you very much for stopping by. And giving us an update really interesting times in, kind of taking care of business and really the core of the business, which is the data inside the business. So, important work. And thanks for taking a few minutes. >> All right, thanks. I'll be glad to be back anytime you want me. >> Alright, He's Tim. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi Bri welcome back this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special presentation made possible by IBM we're talking about data op data ops in Acton Steve Lucas here he's the senior vice president and director of data management at Associated Bank be great to see how are things going and in Wisconsin all safe we're doing well we're staying safe staying healthy thanks for having me Dave yeah you're very welcome so Associated Bank and regional bank Midwest to cover a lot of the territories not just Wisconsin but another number of other states around there retail commercial lending real estate offices stuff I think the largest bank in in Wisconsin but tell us a little bit about your business in your specific role sure yeah no it's a good intro we're definitely largest bank at Corvis concen and then we have branches in the in the Upper Midwest area so Minnesota Illinois Wisconsin our primary locations my role at associated I'm director data management so been with the bank a couple of years now and really just focused on defining our data strategy as an overall everything from data ingestion through consumption of data and analytics all the way through and then I'm also the data governance components and keeping the controls and the rails in place around all of our data in its usage so financial services obviously one of the more cutting-edge industries in terms of their use of technology not only are you good negotiators but you you often are early adopters you guys were on the Big Data bandwagon early a lot of financial services firms we're kind of early on in Hadoop but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about sort of the business drivers and and where's the poor the pressure point that are informing your digital strategy your your data and data op strategy sure yeah I think that one of the key areas for us is that we're trying to shift from more of a reactive mode into more of a predictive prescriptive mode from a data and analytics perspective and using our data to infuse and drive more business decisions but also to infuse it in actual applications and customer experience etc so we have a wealth of data at our fingertips we're really focused on starting to build out that data link style strategy make sure that we're kind of ahead of the curve as far as trying to predict what our end users are going to need and some of the advanced use cases we're going to have before we even know that they actually exist right so it's really trying to prepare us for the future and what's next and and then abling and empowering the business to be able to pivot when we need to without having everything perfect that they prescribed and and ready for what if we could talk about a little bit about the data journey I know it's kind of a buzzword but in my career as a independent observer and analyst I've kind of watched the promise of whether it was decision support systems or enterprise data warehouse you know give that 360 degree view of the business the the real-time nature the the customer intimacy all that in and up until sort of the recent digital you know meme I feel as though the industry hasn't lived up to that promise so I wonder if you could take us through the journey and tell us sort of where you came from and where you are today and I really want to sort of understand some of the successes they've had sure no that's a that's a great point nice I feel like as an industry I think we're at a point now where the the people process technology have sort of all caught up to each other right I feel that that real-time streaming analytics the data service mentality just leveraging web services and API is more throughout our organization in our industry as a whole I feel like that's really starting to take shape right now and and all the pieces of that puzzle have come together so kind of where we started from a journey perspective it was it was very much if your your legacy reporting data warehouse mindset of tell me tell me the data elements that you think you're going to need we'll figure out how do we map those in and form them we'll figure out how to get those prepared for you and that whole lifecycle that waterfall mentality of how do we get this through the funnel and get it to users quality was usually there the the enablement was still there but it was missing that that rapid turnaround it was also missing the the what's next right than what you haven't thought of and almost to a point of just discouraging people from asking for too many things because it got too expensive it got too hard to maintain there was some difficulty in that space so some of the things that we're trying to do now is build that that enablement mentality of encouraging people to ask for everything so when we bring out new systems - the bank is no longer an option as far as how much data they're going to send to us right we're getting all of the data we're going to we're going to bring that all together for people and then really starting to figure out how can this data now be used and and we almost have to push that out and infuse it within our organization as opposed to waiting for it to be asked for so I think that all of the the concepts so that bringing that people process and then now the tools and capabilities together has really started to make a move for us and in the industry I mean it's really not an uncommon story right you had a traditional data warehouse system you had you know some experts that you had to go through to get the data the business kind of felt like it didn't own the data you know it felt like it was imposing every time it made a request or maybe it was frustrated because it took so long and then by the time they got the data perhaps you know the market had shifted so it create a lot of frustration and then to your point but but it became very useful as a reporting tool and that was kind of this the sweet spot so so how did you overcome that and you know get to where you are today and you know kind of where are you today I was gonna say I think we're still overcoming that we'll see it'll see how this all goes right I think there's there's a couple of things that you know we've started to enable first off is just having that a concept of scale and enablement mentality and everything that we do so when we bring systems on we bring on everything we're starting to have those those components and pieces in place and we're starting to build more framework base reusable processes and procedures so that every ask is not brand new it's not this reinvent the wheel and resolve for for all that work so I think that's helped if expedite our time to market and really get some of the buy-in and support from around the organization and it's really just finding the right use cases and finding the different business partners to work with and partner with so that you help them through their journey as well is there I'm there on a similar roadmap and journey for for their own life cycles as well in their product element or whatever business line there so from a process standpoint that you kind of have to jettison the you mentioned waterfall before and move to a more being an agile approach did it require different different skill sets talk about the process and the people side of yeah it's been a it's been a shift we've tried to shift more towards I wouldn't call us more formal agile I would say we're a little bit more lean from a an iterative backlog type of approach right so what are you putting that work together in queues and having the queue of B reprioritized working with the business owners to help through those things has been a key success criteria for us and how we start to manage that work as opposed to opening formal project requests and and having all that work have to funnel through some of the old channels that like you mentioned earlier kind of distracted a little bit from from the way things had been done in the past and added some layers that people felt potentially wouldn't be necessary if they thought it was a small ask in their eyes you know I think it also led to a lot of some of the data silos and and components that we have in place today in the industry and I don't think our company is alone and having data silos and components of data in different locations but those are there for a reason though those were there because they're they're filling a need that has been missing or a gap in the solution so what we're trying to do is really take that to heart and evaluate what can we do to enable those mindsets and those mentalities and find out what was the gap and why did they have to go get a siloed solution or work around operations and technology and the channels that had been in place what would you say well your biggest challenges in getting from point A to point B point B being where you are today there were challenges on each of the components of the pillar right so people process technology people are hard to change right men behavioral type changes has been difficult that there's components of that that definitely has been in place same with the process side right so so changing it into that backlog style mentality and working with the users and having more that be sort of that maintenance type support work is is a different call culture for our organization and traditional project management and then the tool sets right the the tools and capabilities we had to look in and evaluate what tools do we need to Mabel this behavior in this mentality how do we enable more self-service the exploration how do we get people the data that they need when they need it and empower them to use so maybe you could share with us some of the outcomes and I know it's yeah we're never done in this business but but thinking about you know the investments that you've made in intact people in reprocessing you know the time it takes to get leadership involved what has been so far anyway the business outcome and you share any any metrics or it is sort of subjective a guidance I yeah I think from a subjective perspective the some of the biggest things for us has just been our ability to to truly start to have that very 60 degree view of the customer which we're probably never going to get they're officially right there's there everyone's striving for that but the ability to have you know all of that data available kind of at our fingertips and have that all consolidated now into one one location one platform and start to be that hub that starts to redistribute that data to our applications and infusing that out has been a key component for us I think some of the other big kind of components are differentiators for us and value that we can show from an organizational perspective we're in an M&A mode right so we're always looking from a merger and acquisition perspective our the model that we've built out from a data strategy perspective has proven itself useful over and over now in that M&A mentality of how do you rapidly ingest new data sets it had understood get it distributed to the right consumers it's fit our model exactly and and it hasn't been an exception it's been just part of our overall framework for how we get that data and it wasn't anything new that we had to do different because it was M&A just timelines were probably a little bit more expedited the other thing that's been interesting in some of the world that were in now right from a a Kovach perspective and having a pivot and start to change some of the way we do business and some of the PPP loans and and our business models sort of had to change overnight and our ability to work with our different lines of business and get them the data they need to help drive those decisions was another scenario where had we not had the foundational components there in the platform there to do some of this if we would have spun a little bit longer so your data ops approach I'm gonna use that term helped you in this in this kovat situation I mean you had the PPE you had you know of slew of businesses looking to get access to that money you had uncertainty with regard to kind of what the rules of the game were what you was the bank you had a Judah cape but you it was really kind of opaque in terms of what you had to do the volume of loans had to go through the roof in the time frame it was like within days or weeks that you had to provide these so I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit and how you're sort of approach the data helped you be prepared for that yeah no it was a race I mean the bottom line was it felt like a race right from from industry perspective as far as how how could we get this out there soon enough fast enough provide the most value to our customers our applications teams did a phenomenal job on enabling the applications to help streamline some of the application process for the loans themselves but from a data and reporting perspective behind the scenes we were there and we had some tools and capabilities and readiness to say we have the data now in our in our lake we can start to do some business driven decisions around all all of the different components of what's being processed on a daily basis from an application perspective versus what's been funded and how do those start to funnel all the way through doing some data quality checks and operational reporting checks to make sure that that data move properly and got booked in in the proper ways because of the rapid nature of how that was was all being done other covent type use cases as well we had some some different scenarios around different feed reporting and and other capabilities that the business wasn't necessarily prepared for we wouldn't have planned to have some of these types of things and reporting in place that we were able to give it because we had access to all the data because of these frameworks that we had put into place that we could pretty rapidly start to turn around some of those data some of those data points and analytics for us to make some some better decisions so given the propensity in the pace of M&A there has to be a challenge fundamentally in just in terms of data quality consistency governance give us the before and after you know before kind of before being the before the data ops mindset and after being kind of where you are today I think that's still a journey we're always trying to get better on that as well but the data ops mindset for us really has has shifted us to start to think about automation right pipelines that enablement a constant improvement and and how do we deploy faster deploy more consistently and and have the right capabilities in place when we need it so you know where some of that has come into place from an M&A perspective is it's really been around the building scale into everything that we do dezq real-time nature this scalability the rapid deployment models that we have in place is really where that starts to join forces and really become become powerful having having the ability to rapidly ingesting new data sources whether we know about it or not and then exposing that and having the tools and platforms be able to expose that to our users and enable our business lines whether it's covent whether it's M&A the use cases keep coming up right they we keep running into the same same concept which is how rapidly get people the data they need when they need it but still provide the rails and controls and make sure that it's governed and controllable on the way as well [Music] about the tech though wonder if we could spend some time on that I mean can you paint a picture of us so I thought what what what we're looking at here you've got you know some traditional IDI w's involved I'm sure you've got lots of data sources you you may be one of the zookeepers from the the Hadoop days with a lot of you know experimentation there may be some machine intelligence and they are painting a pic before us but sure no so we're kind of evolving some of the tool sets and capabilities as well we have some some generic kind of custom in-house build ingestion frameworks that we've started to build out for how to rapidly ingest and kind of script out the nature of of how we bring those data sources into play what we're what we've now started as well as is a journey down IBM compact product which is really gonna it's providing us that ability to govern and control all of our data sources and then start to enable some of that real-time ad hoc analytics and data preparation data shaping so some of the components that we're doing in there is just around that data discovery pointing that data sources rapidly running data profiles exposing that data to our users obviously very handy in the emanating space and and anytime you get new data sources in but then the concept of publishing that and leveraging some of the AI capabilities of assigning business terms in the data glossary and those components is another key component for us on the on the consumption side of the house for for data we have a couple of tools in place where Cognos shop we do a tableau from a data visualization perspective as well that what that were we're leveraging but that's where cloud pack is now starting to come into play as well from a data refinement perspective and giving the ability for users to actually go start to shape and prep their data sets all within that governed concept and then we've actually now started down the enablement path from an AI perspective with Python and R and we're using compact to be our orchestration tool to keep all that governed and controlled as well enable some some new AI models and some new technologies in that space we're actually starting to convert all of our custom-built frameworks into python now as well so we start to have some of that embedded within cloud pack and we can start to use some of the rails of those frameworks with it within them okay so you've got the ingest and ingestion side you've done a lot of automation it sounds like called the data profiling that's maybe what classification and automating that piece and then you've got the data quality piece the governance you got visualization with with tableau and and this kind of all fits together in a in an open quote unquote open framework is that right yeah I exactly I mean the the framework itself from our perspective where we're trying to keep the tools as as consistent as we can we really want to enable our users to have the tools that they need in the toolbox and and keep all that open what we're trying to focus on is making sure that they get the same data the same experience through whatever tool and mechanism that they're consuming from so that's where that platform mentality comes into place having compact in the middle to help govern all that and and reprovision some of those data sources out for us has it has been a key component for us well see if it sounds like you're you know making a lot of progress or you know so the days of the data temple or the high priest of data or the sort of keepers of that data really to more of a data culture where the businesses kind of feel ownership for their own data you believe self-service I think you've got confidence much more confident than the in the compliance and governance piece but bring us home just in terms of that notion of data culture and where you are and where you're headed no definitely I think that's that's been a key for us too as as part of our strategy is really helping we put in a strategy that helps define and dictate some of those structures and ownership and make that more clear some of the of the failures of the past if you will from an overall my monster data warehouse was around nobody ever owned it there was there wasn't you always ran that that risk of either the loudest consumer actually owned it or no one actually owned it what we've started to do with this is that Lake mentality and and having all that data ingested into our our frameworks the data owners are clear-cut it's who sends that data in what is the book record system for that source data we don't want a ability we don't touch it we don't transform it as we load it it sits there and available you own it we're doing the same mentality on the consumer side so we have we have a series of structures from a consumption perspective that all of our users are consuming our data if it's represented exactly how they want to consume it so again that ownership we're trying to take out a lot of that gray area and I'm enabling them to say yeah I own this I understand what I'm what I'm going after and and I can put the the ownership and the rule and rules and the stewardship around that as opposed to having that gray model in the middle that that that we never we never get but I guess to kind of close it out really the the concept for us is enabling people and end-users right giving them the data that they need when they need it and it's it's really about providing the framework and then the rails around around doing that and it's not about building out a formal bill warehouse model or a formal lessor like you mentioned before some of the you know the ivory tower type concepts right it's really about purpose-built data sets getting the giving our users empowered with the data they need when they need it all the way through and fusing that into our applications so that the applications and provide the best user experiences and and use the data to our advantage all about enabling the business I got a shove all I have you how's that IBM doing you know as a as a partner what do you like what could they be doing better to make your life easier sure I think I think they've been a great partner for us as far as that that enablement mentality the cloud pack platform has been a key for us we wouldn't be where we are without that tool said I our journey originally when we started looking at tools and modernization of our staff was around data quality data governance type components and tools we now because of the platform have released our first Python I models into the environment we have our studio capabilities natively because of the way that that's all container is now within cloud back so we've been able to enable new use cases and really advance us where we would have a time or a lot a lot more technologies and capabilities and then integrate those ourselves so the ability to have that all done has or and be able to leverage that platform has been a key to helping us get some of these roles out of this as quickly as we have as far as a partnership perspective they've been great as far as listening to what what the next steps are for us where we're headed what can we what do we need more of what can they do to help us get there so it's it's really been an encouraging encouraging environment I think they as far as what can they do better I think it's just keep keep delivering write it delivery is ping so keep keep releasing the new functionality and features and keeping the quality of the product intact well see it was great having you on the cube we always love to get the practitioner angle sounds like you've made a lot of progress and as I said when we're never finished in this industry so best of luck to you stay safe then and thanks so much for for sharing appreciate it thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube data ops in action we got the crowd chat a little bit later get right there but right back right of this short break [Music] [Music]

>> I am stupid men. And this is a special on the ground here the be Tugg SummerSlam 2019 the 16th and final year of the event. We've got people coming in from all over the environment and so many changes. Really, really. Change is one of the central themes, and joining me on >> the program is >> Matt Robber, who when I first met, I had a very different job, had a different name, but it was one of the keynote speakers this morning at Thank you so much for joining us representing the cube shirt. Yeah, >> thank you. I had aware my limited edition cute shirt I've gotta represent for everybody. Yeah, I've moved on in a slightly different direction from the V community, but what I love about the virtual ization community is it's really about the relationships that we have. So being here is just reconnecting with people I really care about, and making sure that they have hats for with their career is well, not that virtual ization is disappearing overnight. But there's a lot of interesting ways to grow these days, and I like to advocate >> one of things that I loved. When this change from being the the mug, the New England being logged to the beat hug. It actually was helping along that transition. It's more than just virtualization. What's going on in Cloud Computing? Obviously, is having a huge impact. And you know what's happening? Careers and developers. And that was some of the conversation that you have this morning. And if people can't read on the lower third you currently with Red Hat, your technical advocated an editor with open source dot com. That's of course, Red hat. We now call that IBM, right? >> Yes, well, I mean, IBM is the overall Read had a Silla independent part of ah, the organization, and I work for open source dot com. It's a special small group that we get to focus just on telling open source stories inside the ecosystem of open source. So everything from lawyers talking about licenses to people learning python to system administrators telling about their Lennox expertise. And it's all it's all very interesting and very, very exciting because so many of the people here are fantastic sys admin is that yes, they know virtualization. Yes, they know the the proprietary side of it, but the open source side is just as much part of their day, and I want to give them a way of sharing that. >> Yeah. Eso careers, of course, is something that, you know. Well, I was not only a longtime listener, but happened Pleasure to be on the geek twisters broadcast once, and you yourself have gone through a number of career changes. When I first met you very technical working in, you know, some of the products there. You did some very community focused events, but kept your technical bent on your back, working a lot with this, you know, technical community. You know, this key these geek is, you know, at the show there. And they're your people. One >> 100% my people. Yeah, I I I found it early on. I was given the advice that if you ever go anywhere outside of an engineering organization, you're gonna lose your edge. And what I found in practices that there's actually a wide breath of technology and wide breath of jobs necessary to support the technology out there these days. So when you pick your head up when you look into and organizations you might not normally think you could work in, like marketing or in sales. You can find some of the most technical people in ah company. They're attracted to jobs where they can communicate in the way they like to communicate. And they have the day to day life >> that matters. Saddam. >> I found that I love telling stories. I love supporting people, trying to tell stories that makes me gravitate to a very different part of the organization than engineering where it started on. I still get to learn quite a bit. I'm actually coding more than I did when I was an engineer. Technically, and I look forward to doing that more. >> Yeah, well, it really is being able to connect between communities. How do we get, you know, share those stories and make sure we can speak the language of our audience? You know, this is so often it's, you know, if I'm if I'm in the I T organization, I don't necessarily understand the business. We're just talking to Josh out. Well, is if you don't understand the key objectives of the business, how do you know that you're supporting it? How do you make sure you are valuable to the organization right on a similar themes were in your one >> 100% true, and there's a lot of nuance to it because the waves of Cloud and Dev ops and coding infrastructure is code have all see kind of shaking the foundation of this administration. In a way, that's just it seems to be telling a story if you're not good enough in what you're doing, and I really don't like that narrative, I think we can reframe it in a very positive way that we decided to all work in technology because it is inclusive of change and because we >> need to >> continue to evolve. >> If we wanted to be certain about what we're doing every day, you need to study something like geology, so that rocks kind of keep the same or be a chiropractor, and you cracked the back the same way every time In technology you're constantly evolving. You're constantly looking at the next step on. I love Josh is working new ops. I love seeing people adopt Dev ops ideas and open source is such a gateway into all of that work, so open source as the core of it. Once you realize you don't have to file a ticket. When something breaks and you can go fix it or you can talk to a developer that's fixing it. You feel a brand new form of community that you just don't feel in this part of the industry, and I have just become obsessed with it. I want other people to know that there's an option there that it's really exciting. >> Yeah, trust me. I remember the first time I went to a red hat show. I worked with Lennox for many years. I worked with Red Hat for a long time, but it was definitely a different feel at a Red Hat summit. Then it was going to, you know, virtual station, user group or am world. Yes, that inclusiveness. And they want to help. But you know, an open source. A lot of times, it's like, How are you? Contributed doesn't mean you necessarily have to be, you know, fixing bugs and filing code. Maybe you're helping in the documentation, but it is. That contribution is so central onto what happens open source. I know you've got one >> 100% yet the contribution is such a huge element, and like the shirt that you made the shirt is for go for con effectively. It's with gophers fromthe go programming language community and what's cool about Go and I recently went up icon for the python developer community. And at each of those events, what I love is that every one of the booths, every one of the people speaking they have a project that you can participate in. And what's great about that is I think it is the fear of it being like, Oh, I have to learn to code to participate here goes away when you look and they're they're looking for user's. They're looking for subject matter experts on I t infrastructure to use the software tested at scale, make sure it's supported. Make sure it's secure in all the ways that sys admin are the subject matter experts on. So it's not that cyst administrations going away. It's that it's evolving in a way that is Maur inclusive of other technologies and honestly, more freeing once you get into it. All right. So, >> Matt, you currently live in Minnesota. You lived here in the North east For a while. You've been toe many environment. Give us a little bit of you know what? What? The V tug community and the people at this >> thing this event >> have meant to you personally, >> I can't quite some of how important it's been. I started volunteering is part of the pizza community from a social media angle, which showed me that actually, marketing could be interesting because it helps other people connect. And then I spoke here on multiple times early on in my career. It gave me the confidence it gave me the community that help support me. And I think we all can do. Ah, good job of remembering why we're here and remembering how to bring that forward in our local communities. Well, >> not always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you for the keynote this morning. And I look forward to seeing your continue working other events. Thanks. All right, I'm still Minutemen. Way back with more coverage here, as always. Thanks for watching the cue

>> Voice Over: Live from Washington, D.C. It's the Cube! Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Kim Majerus. She is the leader, state and local government at AWS. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me, I'm excited my first time so. >> John: Welcome to the Cube. >> Welcome! >> I'm excited! >> Rebecca: Your first rodeo. I'm sure you'll be a natural. >> Thank you. >> Let's start by telling our viewers a little bit about what you do, and how heading up the state and local is different from the folks who work more with the federal government. >> Sure. So I've been with Amazon a little over a couple of years and having responsibility for state and local government has really opened up my eyes to the transformation that that space is moving to. So when I think about our opportunity, it's not just state and local government, but it's actually the gov tax that are supporting that transformation in traditional environments. Everyone asks that questions, what's the difference between a federal versus a state and local? And I attribute it to this way, programs are very important in a federal space but what I'm focused on is every single city, county, state has aspirations to do things the way they want to do things, of how they need to address their specialized market. What people need in New York City might feel and look a little bit different in a small town in my home state. So when you look at the differences it's exciting to have the opportunity to impact there. >> And one of the things that you inherited in the job is state and local governments also, and we've heard this on the Cube from many guests that have been on, they didn't have the big IT budgets. >> No. >> And so, things to move the needle on R&D and experiment, you know Andy Jassy talks about experimentation and learning through failure, a lot of them don't have the luxury. And this changing landscapes, different diversity environments. >> Yeah absolutely. It's doing more with less, and each state struggles with that. And when you take a look at the budget and where state budget goes, it's predominantly in the health provider instances. So they have the responsibility to serve their constituents and their health, so what's left? You're competing with budgets for teachers, firefighters, first responders of all sorts, so they have to be very frugal with what they do and they have to learn from one another. I think that is one of the nicest things that we see across the states and the cities. >> Tell me about the community aspect of it because one of the things we're seeing on the trend side is the wave that's coming, besides all the normal investments they've got to make, is internet of things and digitization. Whether it's cameras on utility poles, to how to deal with policies just like self-driving cars and Uber. All these things are going on, right? >> Yep. >> Massive change going on, and it's first generation problems. >> Absolutely. >> Net New right? So where's the money going to come from? Where's the solutions going to come from? >> Save to invest right? So they're taking a look at Net New technologies that allows them to actually re-invest those savings into what the community's asking for. People don't want to stand in lines to get their driver's license or a permit. We just had a customer meeting, they were talking about how the challenge between the connected community. If you're in a city, in a county, who do you go and talk to? I need a building permit, do I go to the city, do I go to the county? But I don't want to go. I want to be able to do it in a different way. That's the generational change and we're seeing that, even local to the D.C. area, when you take a look at Arlington county, they have the highest population of millennials. How they want to interact with government is so different than what they've seen in times past. >> So talk to me about what, so what what are the kinds of innovations that Arlington needs to be thinking about according to you, in terms of how to meet these citizens where they are and what they're accustomed to? >> Expectations, I mean take a look at, we walk outside the street you see birds sitting around there and you've got to be able to give them transportation that is accustomed to what they do every single day. They want to buy, they want to communicate and more importantly they want to their services when they look for it. They don't want to have to go to the buildings, they want to have to, they want to be able to actually access the information, find exactly where they need to go to grab that specific service. I mean long is the day that you would stand there are say, well I don't know which office to go to, send me. People want to look and everything's got to be available and accessible. >> I mean this is classic definition of what Andy Jassy and Theresa talk about. Removing all that undifferentiated heavy-lifting. >> Yep, barriers. >> All this red tape, and the lack of budget. All these things kind of create this environment. What are you guys doing to address that? How do you get people over the hump to saying, okay, it's okay to start this journey, here's some successes, is it get a couple wins under your belt first? What's the process? Take us through it and use (mumbles). >> I think this has been probably one of the most refreshing parts for me to be a part of AWS. It's really starting with, what problem are you trying to solve for? What is the biggest issue that you have? And we work backwards from their needs. And it's a very different approach than how others have worked with our customers, our state and local customers, because we're used to selling them this thing for this opportunity, whereas we take three steps backwards and say let's start from the beginning. What issues are you having? What're your constituents having? Was with a group of CIOs on Monday and we went through this whole process of, who are your customers? And they would've thought, well it's an agency here and it's an agency there, and what they soon realized is, those are my stakeholders, those are not my customers. So if we really look at it more of a product versus a project with the state and local executives, it's really changing their perspective on how they could actually have a full cycle of opportunity, not a project-based solution. So when you think about how a constituent wants to work through the government, or access it's services, it will look and feel differently if you're thinking about the full life-cycle of it, not the activity. >> You know one thing I want to ask you that came up in a couple conversations earlier, and then what the key note was. The old days was if you worked for the government, it was slow, why keep the effort if you can't achieve the objective? I'm going to give up, people get indifferent, they abandon their initiatives. Now Andy and you guys are talking about the idea that you can get to the value proposition earlier. >> Yes. >> So, even though you can work backwards, which I appreciate, love the working backwards concept, but even more reality for the customer in public and local and state is like, they now see visibility into light at the end of the tunnel. So there's changing the game on what's gettable, what's attainable, which is aspirational. >> It might feel aspirational for those who have not embraced the art of what's possible, and I think one of the things that we've seen recently in another state. They had a workforce that liked to do what they did, as Andy said, "Touch the tin." And when you think about that whole concept, you never touch the tin. So now let's take a look at your workforce, how do we make being in government the way to, as Andy close it, to make the biggest impact for your local community. So some states are saying, what we've done is we still need the resources we have, but the resources that are moving up the stack and providing more of an engagement of difference, those are the ones that are taking those two pizza team type of opportunities and saying what are we going to do to change the way they interact? >> With real impact. >> With real impact. >> Andy also talked about real problems that could be solved, and he didn't really kind of say federal or any kind of category, he just kind of laid it out there generally. And this is what people care about, that work for state, local and federal. They actually want to solve problems so there are a lot of problems out there. What are you seeing at the state and local level that are on the top problem statements that you're seeing where Cloud is going to help them? >> A great example would be, when you think about all the siloed organizations within our community care. You're unable to track any one record, and a record could be an individual or an organization. So what they're doing is they're moving all those disparate data silos into an opportunity say let's dedupe-- how many constituents do we have? What type of services do they need? How do we become proactive? So when you take a look at someone who's moved into the community and their health record comes in, what're the services that they need? Because right now they have to go find those services and if they county were to do things more proactively, say hey, these are the services that you need, here is where you can actually go and get them. And it's those individual personalized engagements that, once you pull all that data together through all the different organizations, from the beginning of a 911 call for whatever reason, through their health record to say, this is the care that they, these are the cares that they have, and these are the services that they need, and oh by the way they might be allergic to something or they might have missed a doctor's appointment, let's go ensure that they are getting the healthcare. There's one state that's actually even thinking about their senior care. Why don't we go put an Alexa in their house to remind them that these are the medications that you need? You have a doctor's appointment at 2 o'clock, do you want me to order a ride for you to get to your doctor's appointment on time? That is proactive. >> And also the isolation for a lot of old people living by themselves, having another voice who can answer their question is actually incredibly meaningful. >> It is, and whether it's individual care to even some are up and rising drivers. A great application in Utah is they've actually used Alexa and wrote skills around Alexa so that they could pre-test at home before they go take their test are the driver's license facility. So when you think about these young kids coming into the government, how interactive and how exciting for them to say, hey, I'm going to take the time, I have my Alexa, she's going to ask me all the questions that I need to literally the other end of the spectrum to say, hey, I can order you an Uber, I could provide you with a reminder of your doctor's appointments or any health checks requirements that you might need along the way. >> So you're talking about the young people today engaging with government in this way, but what about actually entering the government as a career? Because right now we know that there's just such a poisonous atmosphere in Washington, extreme partisanship and it doesn't seem like a very, the government doesn't seem appealing to a lot of people. And when they are thinking about, even the people who are in Cloud, not necessarily in the public policy, what're you hearing, what're you thinking? What's AWS's position on this? >> This is where I love my brother and in the education space. So in two different areas we have California, Cal State Poly, and then we also have Arizona State University who have put in kicks. They're innovation centers are the university that they're enlisting these college students or maybe project based that are coming in and helping solve for some of the state and local government challenges. I think the important part is, if you could grab those individuals in early through that journey in maybe through their later years of education say, hey, you could write apps, you could help them innovate differently because it's through their lens. That gets them excited and I think it's important for everyone to understand the opportunity and whether it's two years, four years or a lifetime career, you've got to see it from the other side and I think, what we hear from the CIOs today across the states is they want to pull that talent in and they want to show them the opportunity, but more importantly they want to see the impact and hear from them what they need differently. So it's fun. >> There's a whole community vibe going on. >> Yeah. >> And we were riffing on day one on our intro about a new generation of skill, not just private and public sector, both. We have a collective intelligence and this is where open-data, openness, comes in, and that's resource. And I think a lot of people are looking at it differently and I think this is what gets my attention here at this event this year, besides the growth and size, is that Cloud is attracting smart people, it's attracting people who look at solutions that are possibly attainable, and for the first time you're seeing kind of progress. >> It's a blank sheet of paper. >> There's been progress before I don't mean to say there's no progress, there's new kinds of progress. >> I think the best part, and I say this to people who are working with Amazon, when you think about a blank sheet of paper, that's where we're at. And I think that's the legacy that we need to get through, it's like this is the way we've done it, this is the way we've always done it. In state and local government we're dealing with procurement challenges, they know how to do CATPACs, they don't know how to OPECs, so how can you help us change the way they look at assets, and more importantly, break through those barriers so that we could start with a blank sheet of paper and build from the ground-up what's needed, versus just keep on building on what was out there. >> So that mean education's paramount for you. So what're you guys doing with education? Share some notable things that are important that are going on that are on education initiatives that you can help people. >> It's starting at the 101. Again I think it's the partnership with the education, what we have in the community college, and even starting in high school, is get people interested in Cloud. But for state and local customers today, it is about workforce redevelopment and giving them the basic tools so that they could rebuild. And there are going to be people that are going to opt-in, and there's going to be people that say, I'm fine where I'm at thank you very much, and there's a place and, more importantly, there's plenty of opportunity for them there. So we're providing them with AWS Educate, we're providing them with our support locally through my team, but the important part is you get in, show them, put their hands on the keyboards and let them go 'cause once they start they're like, I didn't realize I could do that, I didn't understand the value and the opportunity and the cost savings that I could move through with these applications. >> And there's so many jobs out there, I mean Amazon is just one company that's in Cloud. There's Machine Learning, there's AI, there's all kinds of analytics. All kinds of new job opportunities that there's openings for, it's not like. No one's skilled enough! We need more people. >> I'll give you another. There was a great case study in there, they actually did a session here this week, LA County. They get 800-900 calls a day just within an IT, one of the IT organizations and Benny would say, my customer is those who are working in the county. So they've been able to move to CANACT, and now they have a sentiment scale, they are able to not only intake, transcribe, comprehend, but they're able to see the trends that they're saying. What that's been able to save by ways of time and assets and resources it's really allowing them to focus on what's the next generation service that they could deliver differently, and more importantly, cost-effectively. >> Where in the US, 'cause Andy talked about the middle class shrinking with the whole reference to the mills going out of the business, inferring that digital's coming. Where do you see the trends in the US, outside of the major metros like Silicon Valley, New York, et cetera, Austin, where there's growth in digital mind IQ? Are you seeing, obviously we joke with the Minnesota guys, it's O'Shannon on and we had Troy on earlier, both from Minnesota. But is there areas that you're seeing that's kind of flowering up in terms of, ripe for investment for in-migration, or people staying within their states. Because out-migration has been a big problem with these states in the middle of the country. They want to keep people in the state, have in-migration. What're you areas of success been for digital? >> You know what, look at Kansas City. Great use case, smart connected city, IOT. If you take a look at what their aspirations were, it was to rejuvenate that downtown area. It's all started with a street car and the question was, when people got off that street car did they go right or did they go left? And they weren't going left and the question was why? Well when they looked and they surveyed, well there's nothing there, the coffee shops there. So what they did proactively, because this is about providing affordable opportunity for businesses, but more importantly, students and younger that are moving out of home, they put a coffee shop there. Then they put a convenience store, then they put a sandwich shop down there and they started to build this environment that allowed more people to move in and be in that community. It's not about running to the big city, it's about staying maybe where you're at but in a new way. So Kansas City I think has done a fantastic job. >> And then having jobs to work remotely 'cause you're seeing now remote, virtual-first companies are being born and this is kind of a new generational thing where it's not Cloud first. >> Work is where you're at, it's not where you go. >> And yet we do need >> That's an opportunity. >> Clusters of smart people and these sort of centers of innovation beyond just the coasts. >> I'm out of Chicago. I obviously have headquarters in D.C. for public sector and corporate out of Seattle. I think there is a time and place that is required to be there when we're working on those projects or we require that deep time. But I want to be available to my team, and more importantly to my customers, and when I see my customers, my customers are not all in city buildings or county buildings or state buildings. They're all over. So it's actually refreshing to see the state government and local governments actually promote some of that. It's like well hey I'm not going to the office today, let's go meet in this location so that we could figure out how to get through these challenges. It has to be that way because people want to be a part of their community in a different way, and it doesn't necessarily mean being in an office. >> Exactly. >> Okay Kim, well to check in with you and to find out your progress on the state and local, certainly it's real opportunity for jobs and revitalization crossed with digital. >> Yep, as Andy would put it, when we look at this space, it's a labor of love and it's the biggest impact that I could make in my career. >> And tech for good. >> And tech for good. >> Excellent, well thank you so much Kim. >> Thank you. Goodbye. >> Stay tuned for my of the Cube's live coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. (outro music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. it's The Cube covering AWS Public Sector Summit, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector summit here in our nation's capitol, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting alongside analyst John Furrier. We are welcoming today Troy Bertram. He is the GM Public Business Development Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube, Troy >> Thanks for having me Rebecca >> Rebecca: A first timer. >> It is the first time. >> Rebecca: Welcome. >> Yes, thank you John, thank you Rebecca. >> Let's talk about your partner organization. Why don't you let our viewers know how it's structured, what its mission is, how it works. >> Yes, certainly. Our public sector partner teams work with our partners around the world that really support the mission requirements of government, education, and non-profits. Our partners are part of the large Amazon partner network, so 35,000 plus partners, but really our customers choose, Whether it's technology partners that have really focused their SaaS, PaaS, ISV solutions on government customers and worked through accreditations and certifications, or it's the consulting partners that go to market and own the prime contract vehicles. Contracts are how our customers buy in public sector. What we've done is really focused our teams from start-ups, and venture capitalists, and incubators, through technology, ISVs, PaaS and SaaS partners to our large consulting partners; global consulting partners, but also really helping curate those consulting partners that meet socioeconomic requirements. Often times governments have laws, regulations to buy small woman owned 8(a), service disabled veteran, as veteran, one of my near and dear partner subset to me, and we work with them to help navigate through and develop programs to work through the APN, and often times it's a partner to partner activity of a consulting partner working with a specialized ISV technology solution that can meet a customer's mission requirements. >> What's interesting about the cloud, we've been talking about our intro this morning is the agility and government's now seeing it benefits, and it's not just and aha moment anymore cloud is really, it's driving a lot of change. That's been lifting up a lot of your partner profiles. You have start-ups to large entities all playing together because the requirements my change based upon either the agency or the public sector entity. >> Yes. >> Have unique needs, so you have a broad range of partners. How do you guys nurture that? That's good diversity. You have nice solution set from tech to business. How do you guys nurture that? What's some of the challenges and opportunities you guys are seeing with the growth. >> Cloud is really allowed a reset for many of our partners. Whether you are born in the cloud company, that doesn't necessarily have a long legacy, and haven't built an entire infrastructure, and you don't have an infrastructure of people, but also don't have technology debt that you've been burdened with because of your prior operating models. It's nurturing that born in the cloud company that maybe a services oriented migration partner that's focused on moving our customers applications and workloads, or it's nurturing the technology and helping them build, or it's a refactor and a legacy on premise solution or those solution providers that have traditionally operated in an on-prem environment. Helping them train, certify, and really build a new practice. >> And it's exciting too. You got the ecosystem kind of approach where, you know a thousand flowers can bloom. I've got to ask you, what do you see sprouting up? What's growing most? What is some of the trends that you see in the partner ecosystem? What's growing fast? What's the demand? What's the hot area? >> The real demand is for people with skill sets. In our business, skill sets also often include security clearances, and a knowledge of the working environment that they're migrating from. We're spending an inordinate amount training and educating. Also, our partner selling community of understanding the dynamics of how to go to market, and the contract vehicles, and how to navigate. The opportunities are really immense. It's nurturing those thousand flowers, and it is a challenge for many of us. How do we nurture those thousand flowers simultaneously? >> Are you finding the right people? A big theme on The Cube here is the skills gap. I just saw a Deloitte survey. 60% of executives, and these are executives, they're not in the public sector, said a skills gap hindered their AI initiatives and hindering their cloud computing initiatives. What are you seeing? What are you hearing from the people you're talking to? >> There's a thirst for both knowledge and training, but there's also, from the executive side, we have a need to fill. There's an abundance of roles, and all of us working together. One of our initiatives is even the job boards that we're working with our educate team and Ken Eisner a peer that leads that is, we're helping our partners promote their open roles. Allowing our partners to look for and curate the same talent that Amazon is helping train and develop because when our partners can find amazing talent, our customers win. It benefits AWS and the partner ecosystem. >> Education's huge. You got to have the ongoing digital course ware. Is that a top priority for you? What are some of your top goals for this year in your plan? >> When it comes to education, top goal is training many of our new partners through our emerging partner team. Many of the new partners have a commercial practice. We're also looking at those partners and actively recruiting those partners that have built a commercial practice that are looking to enter government. Whether it's our distributors or our resellers that own the prime contract vehicles, we're doing partner to partner activities. We call it partner speed dating. It's contract vehicles that exist across state and local government, US federal, or in the international community for those ISVs that want to enter new market regions is pairing with those existing local companies that have contract vehicles and then helping train and educate on the nuances of public sector. >> We were talking with General Keith Alexander and retired General Yesthidae came on and I asked them directly, if you could a magic wand, I think I said, something along the lines of if you had a magic wand, what would you do to change the government? It could go faster. He said the technology check we're doing very well, it's moving along great, it's the procurement process. It's just too long. He mentioned contracts. This is really the key point we keep hearing. The red tape. What's the update there? I'm sure partners aren't wanting more red tape. They want to cut through it, to your point. >> No. It's really an education process. When I started at Amazon over six and a half years ago, my first role was to stand up, and it still is the core of my role, I have individuals in 22 different countries around the world, and we're helping governments and VR partners through the procurement process. We did this past week in my home state of Minnesota, our 10,000th RFX, so we consider an FRP, FRI, an RFQ a tender, I need to buy, I want to buy something. We responded to 10,000 of those in six years and two months. That's an abundance of contract that ultimately, many of them are task orders and IDIQs and GWAX. There's an abundance of pathways as General Alexander stated for customers to buy the technology. Now it's educating the contracting officers, the COs, the KOs, around the world on the existing pathways and how to leverage them. We still see old procurement methodologies being applied to the cloud, and it does slow down the end customer's mission requirements. >> And the path to value. >> Yes, the path to value. Exactly. They want to move and move fast and contracts is how we buy, but it's also what slows us down. >> You know, you're with Amazon six years plus, so you know this, so the speeds of value's been the key thing for the cloud. As you look at success now with Amazon public sector, not only in the US, but abroad and internationally, you got massive tailwinds on the success. The growth is phenomenal. How does that feel? What's some observations? What's some learnings that you can take away from the past few years and where's it going? >> It feels like it's day one. It does feel like it's day one. There are tailwinds, but there's still an abundance of customer requirements, and they're evolving, and they're more complex. I personally really like my career's been public sector. Solving the mission requirements, whether it's helping a forward deployed airman, soldier, really keeping them at the cutting edge of technology, and out of harms way, or our first responders; some of the new product demonstrations that we've seen of evolving technology that's helping a firefighter see from an aerial drone vehicle. What does it look like on the other side of this building, and how can I now communicate across different agencies? Is phenomenal. In my home state, where Army Futures Command, I live in Austin, Texas. Army Futures Command is working with the state of Texas as well as the University of Texas to really collaborate as we've never seen before. The barriers of emerging technology to legacy government, to ministries, and health defenses around the world, ministries of defense, and health agencies around the world. >> The data, the scale of Amazon cloud is going to to make that possible. Ground Station's a great example of how that's growing like a weed. The DOD has got a great charter around using agility and AI. >> Collaboration, which is so critical too, as you said. >> It is, and our VM Ware partnership with VM Ware on AWS can really help, and that's a partner play. That's partners helping migrate using the co-developed technology to really move and move faster. Use those existing apps and vacate those data centers. >> Well, thanks for coming on The Cube. Got to be a quick plug, plug the organization, share with the audience, what you're looking for, and update on the partner network. Give a quick plug for your group. >> What we're really looking for is, we've got 105 different competency partners that have really invested in their government, their education, their non-profit competency, and we want to help. I personally want to help them promote their business, and what the opportunity is to connect to either other partners or to government mission requirements. Really welcome the opportunity, John, to come on and look forward to seeing my partners on The Cube in the future. Thank you. >> Well, Troy Bertram, you are now a Cube alum, >> A Cube alum >> Thank you. (panel laughing) >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, you are watching The Cube, stay tuned for more AWS Public Sector Summit.

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red hat. Some twenty nineteen. You buy bread. >> Oh, good afternoon. And welcome back as the Cube continues our live coverage. Exclusive coverage of Redhead Summit twenty nineteen here in Boston. Some nine thousand strong attendees here. Key notes have been jam packed, but we just finished our afternoon session not too long ago again. Very well attended. Dynamic speakers stew Minimum. John Walls. We're joined now by Lee Dae. Who's the Vice president of Marketing Communications? That Red Hatley. Good to see you. I see you and Michael brats, who was a teacher of English as a second language of Franklin Middle School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr B. Good to see you, sir. And that's what your your students call you, Mr B. Is that right? What they do, we saw that way. Might just follow through on that tradition right now. All right, let's talk about why the two of you are here together. And I know you're Michael School has an interesting history that they've been kind of following somewhat independently, you know, in terms of open source and work. And only you found them through your marketing work some really very interesting. Two avenues that you have on your platform. So tell me a little bit about how how you got here. And then we'LL get into it after that. >> Okay, Great. So Red Hat has a program called co lab and this sir program where we go into schools and we teach kids how to code. So we do things like circuit boards and programming on raspberry pies. Kids have program raspberry pies into cameras to go around cities and take pictures. And we have had collapse in many cities, and we hadn't hit the Midwest. And we chose Minneapolis. And we found, fortunately, Franklin Middle School in that great group of girls and two awesome teachers that are very inspirational on, So the relationship didn't stop it. That week of coal lab, we have stayed in touch, and here at the summit, we've showcased the work in the police ship that we have together. Yeah, >> and I know a lot of the focus that the program is toward, uh, appealing to younger ladies. You know, young girls trying to get them or involved in stem education. We just had the two award winners for the women and open source with us just a few moments ago. So this is Ahh, a company wide. Durant wants a directive initiative that you said, Okay, we we have a responsibility, and we think we have a role here to play >> absolutely well. It's important to us to see the next generation of technologists. And when you feel like women, especially young women sometimes feel like technology is inaccessible to them, and they're not often in technology programs and university. So it's our initiative. Teo help young people feel comfortable and good about technology and that they can actually code. And they can actually do things that they didn't think were possible to them previously. >> So, Mr B. Help us understand how this fixing curriculum and give us a little bit of the story of how it went down. >> Well, it's funny asset. I mean, this opportunity for us is a home run out the part because we're a steam school science, technology, engineering, arts in math. So today, not only did our students perform on the main stage a song that we were able to collaborate right and go through a >> whole production process >> with music were also able to on there right now as we speak down running a booth, building circuits, presenting those circuits, presenting those circuit boards, and collaborating altogether down there with attendees of this conference right now. So, I mean, we're covering every one of those steam components, basically, in one project, one large scale technology project. So this opportunity homeland out the >> part. >> I love that because that was the first thing I went to mind. I heard photography involved. You say steam and so much, you know, we can't just have tech for Tex take. You know, I worried I studied engineering and, like, things like design and those kind of things right weren't in the curriculum. But you know what? I went to school. Creative side. Yeah. How important is that? You kind of get especially think young people get the enthusiasm going. That creative side would, you know, get them deeper into it. >> Well, you know, I always look att, individual students. Everybody has their individual gifts and talents, and it's about, you know, finding those leadership skills within each one of those gifts. And so within this, you're able to find someone that might be more creative in one area, maybe more technical and more, you know, logic orientated in other areas. So with that, you're able to just have Mohr a broader spectrum to be ableto find people's individual gives in towns and for them to in the collaboration also contribute their gifts and talents in different avenues instead of it just being one lane like just this part of technology or just this part of production and just this part of design were able to kind of integrate all of that into one thing and to take it one step further. After we did the, um So Cola came out with their mobile container to US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it was right downtown, right outside of where our football team players brand new stadium Super Bowl is is there two years ago now And, um, so with our students being there after we got done with that, that cold lamb, when they were asking us, you know, to take it a step further in the classroom are students actually designed with our future boys Lo Bill Future Girls logo a card and then presented it to Red hat and they ended up printing off the cars and they were able to use it to build the circuit. So we weren't just using the coal lab cars. But we also got to design our own, too. >> So, you know, you said future boy's feet. So that's that's a new organization, the club that you formed the school Future Boys and Girls Club for the express purpose of what? >> Well, so we actually tie in all different content areas into assault. Obviously, this is just the future girls that are here in Boston and did the technology side with us and that parts of Spain the cold because it's an initiative for girls in technology but of the future boys and girls, uh, overall program. We encompass a lot of different continent as we integrate performing arts with academics and all the components of esteem school, um, into learning. And we do interest based learning. We do project based learning, and basically, you know, kids are learning a lot without realizing how much they're really learning, you know, and we make it fun and relevant. But we also teach the leadership skills in the hard work that goes in with it. And I mean, even just coming out here to Boston for this, uh, for this opportunity here in this summit, I mean, the amount of work that it took for the students to get here and the process, the ups and downs, especially with middle school students. You know, the marathon, not a sprint mentality, you know, has been absolutely amazing. >> Good luck with that eye. Well, >> I always say I >> haven't had a bad day yet. Just an overstimulating one. >> So lately, you know, we love having stories on the Cube and especially tech for good is something that we always get a good dose here at Red had some it. You know what else can share some of the open tour stories that were going on around the event? >> We're really thrilled. Today. We're launching our newest open source story, which is about agriculture and which we choose topics with open source stories that are important every everyone so medicine, helping to find cures for cancer, even our government and artificial intelligence. And today it's about open hardware and open agriculture. And we're launching a new film this afternoon. >> It's all future farming, right? Right. That that's the viewing today. >> Yes, and we had someone showing their their farming computer on our stage, and it's actually done in Summit >> Show for today. So you've got the open studio, you know, working and you have a number of projects. I assume this fell into one of those slots right where you were Using one of those platforms to feature great work of future farming is another example of this, But But you have some, I think, pretty neat things that you've created some slots that give you a chance to promote open source in a very practical and very relatable way. >> Yes, exactly. So our Opens our open studio is our internal creative community agency. But we do get ideas from everyone around, you know, around the world. So wait, get ideas about open agriculture, eh? I, uh, what we can do with kids and programming with kids. And then we take those ideas into the open studio and it is a meritocracy. So the best ideas when and that's what we choose to bring to life. And we have designers and writers and filmmakers and strategist and a whole group of people that make up the open studio inside a red hat >> And you've done a new feature, Frank. >> Yes. So, yeah. We work together to create the container that doctor be mentioned and to create the container. And then we work. When >> you have you >> have. You know, one of the girls Taylor actually taught me just now I am not technical. I will just give that caveat. But they they make, they made circuit boards, and they're making circuit boards here. Some issue and mine doesn't work. So don't That's okay. Just, basically were you can see here we have different designs that are attendees can choose from, and then we have electrical tape that you are sorry, competent and an led light. And so the idea is to toe form a circuit and to have led light item the card. That's great. So one of the one of the girls actually taught me how to make it, but I think I didn't follow >> her. Instructed you to go back to school. Wouldn't be the first time that I would have fallen apart either on that. So where Michael, Where would you be now without red hat? Or, you know, you were doing your own thing right independently. But now you've received some unexpected support. Where would you be? You think was out that help. And how much of a difference have they made >> you? Well, let me tell you. I mean, you know, when we look at it being an after school program, the amount of enrichment and opportunities that redhead has created for us has been, honestly, just unbelievable. It's been first class, and we're so appreciative. I mean, even even in our meeting with the future girls last night, we just talked about gratitude and how grateful we are for it. I mean, when you look at this circuit, this is an abbreviated version of what the students actually participate in. This is, you know, just a one one, uh, one led light and a small formation our students were doing. I think there were seven or eight on ours. And so the amount of learning in the modern opportunity that this presented to him not only have they learned how to do the technical piece of it, they've learned howto present. They've learned howto speak and present. They've learned howto call lab, collaborate, work together on huge levels, and I mean, they learned what they can take on an airplane, you know, coming out here. So I mean, the amount of things that through the learning process of, like, eye color, large scale technology project that we've been participating since October since they brought the mobile lab out to Minneapolis. I called a large scale tech, you know, technology project, and going through that whole process has been huge. And let me tell you this as a teacher and those that are parents you're competing was so much in this day and age to keep kids attention, right? I mean, everything is swiped the phone every which way and everything. So instant gratification. So for students to actually engage in this cola program for to be set up so well from Red Hat and to actually stick with it and stay engaged with it really speaks volumes denying the program. But also, you know, our students staying engaged with it, but they've they've stuck with it, they've been engaged, and it's very interest based, the project I've seen it through. But then also the renewed opportunities and being ableto one of the things on our rubric as the teacher is toe expand and extend the learning I don't mean to be long winded, but we wanted, you know, expand on the learning that's already taken place and being out here, it's just it's just a continuous continuation of the learning, you know, not just one level going to next level going on next long light, next level. And that's that, honestly, is where the real learning really takes place. >> So, Michael, you know, from its very nature being an open source company, you know, Red Hat talks a lot about it. Ecosystem in community. If I five red right in the notes, they're you know, your student really getting the value and understanding of community. There's something about they wrote a song. Talk >> about that. We become stronger. Yeah, that's the name of the song is we become stronger And you know what the idea was. We were looking at the power point for this summer and for this summit, and in that there was, uh there was a phrase that said ideas become stronger and that's the collaboration. And so we started tossed around ideas and things like that were like, Well, we liked the idea of stronger, and then we're like, Well, this is more of the coal lab experience, not just the ideas of the technical side. And that's why we become stronger. And yet we developed a song specifically for this summit. I think you go top for, you know. >> Yeah, the performance was amazing. >> Yeah, you don't want >> one top forty, to be honest with you, but no. I mean, uh, you know, and that was another whole another phase, you know, like, I talked about the steam side of the school. Um uh, integrating the arts in and the whole production side of that, you know, it was a lot of work and another project, but it was another area of content that we're able to integrate into this project, and, uh, and we're able to perform it on stage. So, like I said, they literally just got off stage performing. We become stronger singing the whole production of song a dance routine choreography and then went straight to the boot to now present circuits and teach attendees here at the summit howto build a circuit. I don't know how much better can get in that. >> That is so cool. That's great. Now is this the song that you recorded in the same studio. Lenny Kravitz. Atlantis More. Tell me you didn't like that, huh? >> I mean, you know, it's all right. >> That's good. That's great. Congratulations, Roy. On this collaboration, it's really it is exciting to see what they're doing to inspire young people on Michael. I can tell you like your job. Don't you love it? I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, keep up the great work. And we appreciate the time here. And I look forward to hearing that song. Maybe if it hits, you know, the ice store. You know, Apple Store, maybe, You know, maybe good things will happen, right? Hey, you never know. She's Vice president marketing. We're gonna figure this. I'm checking out. I tio go by weight, become stronger. Thanks, Michael. We appreciate Lee. Thank you for having me back with more. Here on the Cube. You're watching our coverage, right? Had some twenty nineteen, but

>> Live from Washington DC. It's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon and welcome back to Inform18, we are live in Washington DC, the nation's capital for this year's show. Joining Dave Vellante and me is Corey Tollefson, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for retail at Infor. Corey good to see you today sir. >> Good to see you, good to be seen. >> Yeah, right (laughs) it is, under any circumstance right. >> Absolutely. >> So retail, you talk about a world that's kind of upside down now. The brick and mortar guys are, they aren't brick and mortar anymore. So talk about the state of the industry if you would a little bit since it's moved to the digital platform and how that's changing your work with it. >> It certainly was simple 20 years ago. Manufacturers manufactured things, wholesale distributors distributed things, and then retailers sold things. Right, and so the whole business model has been disrupted. Mainly because of the advent of the mobile phone, a mobile device. I said it last year it feels like everyday you wake up and it's very chaotic and there is a lot of disorder. And I think it's an amazing opportunity for retailers to reinvent themselves into a modern 21st century retailer. Everyday is a challenge but we're working on it. >> So what's it like, I mean, every retailer I talk to has this sort of Amazon war room. They're trying to use their physical presence to drive online. They're really getting creative. Amazon continues to do super well. There are those who are predicting the end of of retail stores because of AI etcetera. What's your take? You're knee deep in this business. >> Well I feel, I mean Amazon certainly is bringing a lot of downward pressure. It's the first digital, retail is the first industry to be digitally disrupted. It is happening in healthcare, its happening in manufacturing, but retail brought on the initial wave so to speak. And what I'm seeing is a lot of the middle of the road retailers that don't have too much of an online presence, their legacy brands that maybe had their following 20 years ago. They're going to get squeezed out because the middle in this group is going to get squeezed out. The high end brands that control their own brand image, they brand manufacture their own products, they also have their own retail stores. Those are the companies that are uniquely qualified to compete and thrive against Amazon because the last I looked having stores and having an outlet for immediate gratification of getting products and services is a good thing. The retailers that we are working with are combating that against pure plays like Amazon. >> But there's some consumer friction there right, and it's generational, so how we shop is different then how our kids shop. They look at retail in a very different, through a very different prism then we do. So how do you address that in terms of, how do you help your clients address that through different segmentation of their audiences and addressing those unique problems? >> Well even as a kid I remember that the retail shopping was a destination shopping experience, so we'd load up the family truck, and we'd go to a mall, and spend the whole day. There would be entertainment there, there would be restaurants to eat at. We'd shop and then we'd come home, it was a destination. Try doing that when it is 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year on your phone, suddenly the social engagement, with social media, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook is a little old for a lot of the younglings now, but the moral of the story is social media takes on everything and that's where the influence is. And that whole shopping experience it used to be, well I'm just going to get some product information and then I'm going to go into the store. That's been completely disrupted as well. One other aspect of this is the whole concept of consumerism is disrupted. There is a lot of, you know you look at a lot of the cool brands that are in other adjacent industries whether its Uber or Airbnb, they don't own any of their assets. Same thing is happening in retail, a lot of the new emerging brands are going to have disruptive business models. Like you go into a store and they don't even have any inventory. It's all made to order right. So there's a lot of disruption that's happening and we're working with a lot of brands to help. >> So talk about the next big thing NBT, next big thing in retail is that one of them? I go into a store and say that's what I want send it to my house, what else? >> Well I think one of the next big things that we're working on is the whole concept of machine learning. I think you guys have heard about this before, but the whole technology singularity where its the point in which there is no differentiation between engaging with a customer. Oh sorry engaging with a human versus engaging with a computer. We're not that far away and its a little bit scary. I think we talked about it a couple years ago but the whole concept is why do I need to interact with a human being for my shopping experience? I can just interact with a chat bot, for example. As long as I the customer gets the information I need to make an informed decision, I don't really feel weird talking to a computer anymore. >> Yeah so that's the idea of systems of agency, right, where the machine is taking action on behalf of the brand, and the consumer either doesn't know or doesn't care. >> Right that's right. >> So do you have customers that are on the precipice of doing that? >> Yeah we do. In one of the areas I have talked about this before, machine learning-based demand forecasting. So getting better at forecasting the right product, the right skew on a store-by-location basis. And what we do is we leverage a lot of the inherent capabilities of the internet. A lot of companies talk about cloud as simply a cost reduction. We view cloud as taking advantage of the world's greatest super computer which is the internet. And so, that's one of the areas in which we've been using machine learning. >> So what's the, you say the company, that mid-lane, or middle range, what are they to do now? Because they are kind of stuck, they have their challenges, they have this legacy approach that they are kind of in a tough spot. >> The die has been cast, if I was in their shoes, a lot of these middle of the road retailers. I would look at finding ways to optimize what I have. So whether that's optimizing your inventory, optimizing your labor. That's another thing we talked about, Charles this morning mentioned the whole concept of unleashing maximizing human behavior and unleashing human capital. For years we've been on shows like this talking about products, instead it's about engaging your customer. Everybody's a customer, if you're in healthcare you're a customer. In manufacturing distribution, you have customers. To look at it more from a human element around store associates, I think there's are a lot of middle of the road retailers that have an old iconic brand that could reinvent themselves with time and enough patience. >> How do you deal with the inevitable, well first of all how do your customers deploy your software? It's in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> It's in the Amazon cloud right? >> Well three years ago we made a fundamental decision that we were not going to be an on premise company. So we are a cloud-only applications provider. The second decision point we made was, do we want to be suite or best-to-breed. And when we say suite that was our decision. The third point was, how do you want it to be able to be deployed? So when I started off in this industry which felt like yesterday. I feel like I'm super old now, I started off as a software developer for a company called Retech out of Minneapolis. You know I was doing batch forms, and Oracle PL/SQL and everything was tied to the database, and the user experience was basically a graphical depiction of a database. (Dave laughs) But back in those days-- >> And it still is in a lot of apps. >> Yeah. In those days it was pretty much all about developing that individual code. I kind of lost my train of thought on that. The way you can deploy our assets is on an individualized basis. You can deploy our demand forecasting engine for example. You can deploy our allocation and replenishment engine. And when you tie it all together, you can have a suite that doesn't need to be deployed like it used to be in the old days is where I was going. Which is you have to deploy the whole data model to get all the information that you're looking for. >> Okay so in retail you've got the inevitable, oh well, I'm going to run this in Amazon, they're my big competitor, they're disrupting me. What's the conversation like with customers? How do you guarantee we're protecting their data, you point to Netflix and say hey it's working for them? What do you say? >> Well I think, I mean we're Infor, we're a big company. It's on a case-by-case basis. Yes we have a relationship with AWS and yes they are a strategic partner for us. That doesn't preclude the fact that we work with Google we work with Azure. We are cloud agnostic in retail so, it hasn't been as big of an issue as a lot of industry critics and analysts have made it out to be. >> So if there were an issue, you'd could run it anywhere you want. >> Yeah you just swap it out yeah. >> Alright I want to change gears here. Announcement on the stage today, keynote Van Jones from CNN was talking about #YesWeCode, an organization he has an affiliation with. You've created this, well launched an initiative NextGen. First off explain what that is but fill us back up to the genesis of that because as we found out just a few moments before it's a pretty interesting journey. >> Yeah. >> That you personally were involved in. >> Yeah, I know I am sure a lot of friends and family that know me well are going to be tired of hearing this story. I will give you the condensed version, which is-- >> Take your time. >> Growing up in Minneapolis, I was a huge Prince fan like most Minneapolis people are. And through serendipity I met Prince's brother, and Prince's brother pre-social, pre-internet, pre-mobile, put me on Prince's private guest list for parties at Paisley Park. And so here I am I had a loving family, and I can't believe my mom and dad would let me do this, but I am 16, 17 years old going to parties with Prince. And when I say parties I mean these were intimate parties, maybe the most was 50 people in his house. Sometimes there's like five of us, and what happened at these parties were he would play new music. If we danced and got up there and jammed with him, then he'd put it on an album. If it wasn't very good, or he felt like there wasn't a good strong reaction he put it in his vault. So we were a test case, a Petri dish so to speak, for his music. And I got to build a relationship with him as much as anyone that could. He was a very stand-offish person, but a brilliant artist, and a brilliant human being for that matter. I got to build that relationship and through that relationship I met Van Jones. We hooked up again at one of Prince's memorials a couple of years ago after his death, and we looked at each other and we connected and I said I'm in the technology industry. And he goes we got to talk because there's some things related to Prince's legacy we should really talk about. Which ties us back to #YesWeCode and the announcement we made today about GenOne. >> For GenOne excuse me I said NextGen. >> Yeah GenOne. >> My fault. >> Yeah no, no worries. And the genesis of this was Prince, Rogers Nelson, and Van Jones had a conversation right after Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. And a lot of people suspect the main reason was he looked suspect because he had a hoodie on. And here is an African American kid wearing a hoodie, they follow him and bad things happen right. Van Jones asked Prince directly he goes, you know clearly that guy was racist. And Prince said, think again, maybe if that was a white kid in Silicon Valley wearing a hoodie he'd be a dot.com billionaire, but because we haven't produced enough people of color in CEO level positions in our tech industry, that's on us. Meaning we need to develop more of our own. And so this project means a lot to us, because of the fact that we don't think diversity is just a check box that you have on your corporate mission statement. We think diversity can change the DNA of your company and it can influence better products, solutions, and services to our customers. So it's really important for us and this is just the first step of a multi-echelon, multi-year, multi-faceted program. That we want to take this and roll it out to the entire industry. I'd love for Salesforce and Oracle and SAP and Workday. I'd love for all of them to adapt a program similar to this. This isn't pride of ownership, it's the right thing to do and putting brilliant kids and brilliant minds that maybe came from a bad circumstance, they all deserve a chance too. And it only makes all of us better, and I feel like a lot of great things have happened to me in my career and I feel like I have to give back. And if I can be a small part of this with Van, so be it. >> So that's a very thoughtful response by Prince, and you were saying earlier Corey it was sort of hard to get to know him. Was that typical of Prince, was he sort of introspective and maybe pensive and prescient in that way? >> Well the piece the people that don't understand about Prince is that the whole story of his life is written in his music. And he's released over two thousand songs, you know I'm sure the family and the estate might see this but I've heard another couple thousand songs that have been unreleased and it's beautiful brilliant music and his whole life story is there. You just need to listen to the lyrics, or read the lyrics and listen to the music. >> So was... You mentioned this story, and I just thought 17-year-old kid, I mean with all do respect you don't look like one of Prince's friends right. You're a Minnesota guy, he was too, but just different and I think, did you ever just think that what in the world am I doing here? >> I had that moment, I will never forget that one moment. So it was probably the summer of 1995, Prince was standing five feet from me. He had his right hand strumming his electric guitar, his left hand was playing lead keyboard lines on the keyboard, his right foot was controlling the pitch of the guitar, the left foot was controlling the pitch on the keys, and he was singing vocals and dancing. And I said to myself, I pinched myself, and I said this moment in time, if Amadeus Mozart was standing here he would be blown away. Because there is nobody in the history of music that can write, produce all this great music, but also maintain that look, that image. And then the musicianship, he's a musician's musician. You know we talk about Lenny Kravitz, I ran into Lenny Kravitz about 20 years ago sitting on Prince's couch. He probably doesn't remember me, I am pretty sure he doesn't. >> We'll find out tomorrow night. >> We'll find out tomorrow, but I mean the moral of the story is he was a musician's musician. I'll never forget sitting on the couch and this really soft spoken gal said to me she was really nervous to perform tonight. And I am like don't worry you go this, and it was an 18 year old Alicia Keys. And Prince behind the scenes had been cultivating and developing talent whether its Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Nora Jones, you know. These people he helped develop behind the scenes, and no one really knew it. >> Well his band members were always incredibly talented. I don't know if you ever saw Prince live. >> Nope, did not. >> You've saw him many times. Man as he would say, that band was tight. (laughing) >> That's right. >> Well the program's a great legacy. >> It is. >> And one that is certainly not apparent, but it is great to know that back story to know the generation of that. What got going and certainly I think there's a lot seems like of emotional equity that you and the company have invested, to make sure it's successful as well. >> We think that it was Prince's legacy, but we feel like he has passed the torch between Van, myself and Charles. This really means a lot to us. So we want to take it to the next level so, we are pretty excited. >> Fantastic. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for sharing the story too. I'm glad and it's just wonderful and look forward to talking to Charles about it, when we have him on tomorrow. Alright back with more we are live here, theCUBE is covering Inforum18 in Washington D.C. 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(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

>> Hi, Lisa Martin, on the ground, with the Cube at Google for the sixth annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud awards. And we are very excited to be joined by our next guest, Bridgit Kromhout, the principal Cloud developer advocate from Microsoft. Welcome to the Cube! >> Welcome, to me, wait. You know what? I feel like, it's so funny. I spend so much time hosting podcasts that I'm primed to start welcoming guests. (laughter) So. >> Well, thank you. I feel very welcomed. >> Hi. Thank you so much for having me. >> And we love your Microsoft-reflected hair extensions. That's so fantastic (laughter) So, Bridgit, you are a computer scientist by training, what was your education like? Were you a STEM kid from grade school all the way through graduating college? >> Yeah, it's kind of funny. I actually wasn't and I think that there's maybe a take away there for people who think, oh, it would be too hard to switch into computers. There's too much to learn. I mean, yes, there is a lot to learn, but I didn't have a computer until I was 16, so, and, I didn't know I was going to major in Computer Science until I took a programming class and realized I loved it and dropped all my other classes and completely switched my major. And I think that there's probably a lot of opportunities today that there weren't back when I did this in the 90's. You know, all sorts of boot camps and that sort of thing, but I think probably just that you can choose to go into tech from any starting point. ' Cause, like, not having a computer as a kid, I would go over to friend's houses and play Oregon Trail and, you know, Dive Dysentery, but I wouldn't have that at home and I turned out fine. >> Well, I love that you took a class and you tried it and that was transformative. I think that's one of the great lessons that even your experience can share is, try it. >> Absolutely. >> And it probably opened up your world too. Did it, well yeah, let's talk about that. >> Yeah. >> Did it open up your world to expose more of what computer science is than what you may have thought? >> You know, I had gone to some summer math camps as a teenager and you know, played around with fractals and you know, programs to generate fractals, like on the, I think it was probably SJI workstations, that the college we were at had and it was interesting to me but maybe not necessarily something I could take action on until I got to college and got access to unit systems and it's like the little kid in Jurassic Park, this is a unit system. I know this. (laughter) You know, I think that getting the opportunity to try things, whether it's in an academic setting or just with all of the free resources that are available today, it's super important. >> So, you went to the University of Minnesota, what surprised your or delighted you through your curriculum in computer science, when you were there? >> You know, it's kind of funny. I feel like there was a lot of emphasis on algorithms and data structures and probably, because I was working for the CS department as a Student Systems Administrator at the same time, I kept thinking like, well bigger notation, this is great, but let's talk about troubleshooting things on this, you know, Solaris system, because that's what I would actually do and I think that there is, I've come to realize over time that there's a lot of benefit to both. Like, you could spend a lot of time going down a rabbit hole if you don't have a firm theoretical background of what's actually possible, and how you can speed up a system. So, it's good to have that theoretical background, but I think it's also really important to focus on the like, the observability and the usability of systems and your detailed troubleshooting steps. I think of it like, you spent a lot of time in college taking classes where they emphasize the Scientific Method and you learning to prove that gravity works was never the point. >> Right. >> Because, obviously, we all know that but you learning how to isolate variables and observe accurately, helps a lot in terms of solving problems in production systems later. >> Good insight. So, you're very involved in the community. You are, you mentioned, podcasts. You go to conferences. You blog. What inspires you to share your knowledge, your experiences, and be involved in the community? >> I mean, I think that I had a manager some years ago who encouraged me to speak at a local UN conference and I brought a co-worker and spoke with him and it was a very new experience for me and I was nervous and what I realized is, that the room was full of people who, they weren't there to stare at me or judge me, they were there because they really hoped to get some insights for things they were trying to do and I think realizing that, whatever it is that you're putting out there in the world, people aren't looking at it to judge you, they're looking at it 'cause they need something and realizing that makes it so much more interesting and also, less scary to share. >> I imagine rewarding, as well. >> I think so. Like, especially because people are often looking for ways that they can drive change inside their organization, how they can convince somebody to use the exciting new framework or the exciting new, you know, container orchestration or whatever, that they're trying to use. Like, a lot of times, people who are paying attention to the wider world of tech really want to use exciting new things, but, hey, spoiler alert, if you work in a company with more than two people, there will probably be at least two opinions. >> Yeah. (laughter) >> So, you have to. >> You can basically go and do that, right? >> Yeah. Right? >> Yeah. >> So, you have to have not just all the technical background. I like to joke that, you know, I majored in Computer Science 'cause I didn't want to talk to people and, oops, turns out, tech is full of humans. Software is made of people. >> Yep, right. >> Like sort of an ingredient, right? >> Yeah. >> And, it's like, you can't, you can't avoid that and I say, just embrace it. >> I love that. Do you have any themes to your podcasts or to your blogs? >> Yeah, I think there's a talk I gave a number of times in the last year called, Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken Culture And Other Hard Truths. >> Interesting. >> And, then I gave, I decided a few months after I gave that one enough times that I was bored of hearing myself talk, I started giving one called Computers Are Easy, People Are Hard, because I think that the tech stuff that we're all excited about has a lot of socio-technical components, in terms of the interactions. >> Yeah. >> Like, every single technical choice you want to make has a certain weight and gravity to it of the way the other people feel about how you maybe made their job harder or easier or maybe that they now feel displaced. Maybe they're not sure what their place is in the exciting new world where you changed everything out from under them and they were just hoping to hold on a couple years more, until they retired and I think, as a mid-career professional, shall we put it that way? I, of course, I see all the kids these days TM, but I also see and sympathize with all the people who, who really prefer the industry not have another giant C change right this second. >> Right. >> 'Cause they kind of just want to vest and get out and it's like, I think we have to be empathetic and understanding of everyone's perspective along that entire spectrum, 'cause there's a lot of benefit to exciting change and there's also a lot of benefit to contextual knowledge of your local environment. >> Right. >> And, it's like, people at different ends of, you know, their career trajectory have you know, a varying degree of either of those, and I think it's really important and positive to listen to everyone. >> I love that because culture is something that we talk about a lot with technology executives that we're talking to in the Cube, whether it's a C level or a line of business manager or a product person and cultural change is hard. >> Really hard. >> To impact but, you bring up a great point about where you are on the career trajectory. You're opinions or experience is going to influence that. >> It totally will. I mean, especially because, so, I just started a couple months ago, working at Microsoft. I spent the two years before that working at Pivotal, talking to a lot of our customers in large enterprises and governments and you know, banks and that sort of thing and you have a lot of resistance to and fear of change when it feels like the stakes are really high and there's a lot of uncertainty and so, anywhere that, from a technical point of view, you can help with that uncertainty. Whether it's by, instead of the artisanally, hand-whittled servers in your data center, maybe looking at public Cloud, anything that can make steps more reproducible, so that you don't have to cling so much to what you were doing before and can, hopefully, extend past that. Like, there's a lot of places where that the exciting wave of IT improvement that a lot of orgs are doing intersects with people's desire to maybe have challenges but also, still feel valued. Like, there's a lot of places where, considering those human factors, when making exciting organizational change happen, which everybody needs to for their profit motives or you know, their organizational mission, in general. I think it's really beneficial. >> Speaking of feeling valued, who do you value? Who are some of your mentors that inspire you today? >> You know, it's funny you should ask that because I feel like mentorship is one of those things where I have a giant question mark. I'm not sure if I've had it done right or have ever done it right or whatever. I would say I'm definitely inspired by a lot of the women I know in technology. In particular, like, for example, Jessie Frazelle. I happen to work on the same team with her now at Microsoft, which we did not, either of us, know that the other one was going there when I had her keynote, Dev Up Stays Minneapolis, last summer and then, in just a couple months later, it was like, oh, you're going to Microsoft? What team? We're going to the same team. This is fantastic! >> Wow, that's great. >> But, I bring her up as an example because I think that if you, no matter how long you've been in tech and she's younger than I am and has been in tech a shorter amount of time, and yet, like, she both contributes, you know, solid technical content. She has commits in the Linux kernel, but she also makes sure to put information out there to help other people. I think that, that's a really, it's what I look up to and what I try to emulate is it's great to be technical, but we also have to be human. >> I love that. Well, Bridget, thank you so much for stopping by the Cube and sharing your story and congrats on the award. >> Thank you so much. >> We thank you for watching again. Lisa Martin, on the ground, with the Cube at Google for the CloudNow Top Women in Cloud Awards. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in Denver, Colorado at the DJI Airworks Show. It's about 600 people, talking about commercial drones. Nothing for fun, no film, no movies. This is all commercial, agriculture, construction, public safety and really excited to have someone on the agricultural side, it's Greg Emerick. He's the co-founder, EVP of Bus Dev for Sentera. Greg, great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for letting me be part of this. >> Absolutely, so it's pretty interesting. I think a brilliant move by DJI to break the drone up into the platform, the payload, and the software which we kept hearing about over and over in the keynote and even the software, they break into the mobile software to control the thing, and then the actual software on the drone itself to collect the data. And you guys have a really interesting product. You have a different payload option, then what comes out of the box and what most people think of. So tell us a little bit about what Sentera's all about and how you use this capability to build your business. >> Sure, we're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We have a team of engineers, a long history in remote sensing. And so what we've done is, we've taken these sensors that we build, there are a multitude of different types of the ones that we build, and we integrate them onto different DJI platforms. We've engaged their software developer's kit and so we fly the aircraft with the mobile app. When the airplane lands, we pull the data out, pull it into our software, do the analytics on it and then push it into other analytics tools that are used for agricultural purposes. >> So what kind of sensors do you use? What are the sensors? >> Some of them are as simple as a red, green, blue camera, just a simple image. >> Alright. >> Other times, it's multi-spectral imagery. It could be near infrared or red edge that would be used for crop stress or maybe the opportunity to apply nitrogen in some instances We also do machine learning, and so we'll do things where we're counting plants, identifying the location of weeds in the field, and then pushing that into other tools or other implements that then could go do something and apply maybe something to the field, or do something to help improve the crop production. >> So how was that done before there were these efficient, small, and easy to operate drones? >> Manually, and then, there was a lot of interpolation, where someone would go out instead of we can count every plant in the crop and in some instances, that can be done if you have a really small crop. Otherwise, they're just sampling and it's not very accurate and there's a lot of interpolation between maybe six different locations in the field on 160 acres versus counting all of them. >> Right, it's pretty interesting because we've seen that time and time again in technology space. Now with big data, we have the capability to not sample anymore, but to actually take all the raw input and take action on the raw input. >> That's right. >> It's got to be way more productive than a sample. >> Right, and what we're doing is actually facilitating a lot of tools that are out there today. They already know how much fertilizer they've applied. They know what the soils are like. They know how much precipitation they've had. But they don't know the status of the crop. And so what they need is sort of this real-time opportunity to look at it, understand what might be a problem or maybe there's no problem at all, but in the end, they identify what they might want to do and then, from there, create an application or a prescription to go out and do something. >> Okay, and then, from your business model, do they buy a drone outfitted with your sensors, do they buy the sensors, do you provide this as a service, how does the business model work? >> Yeah, so for us, it's all about the sensor and the software and so a customer will come to us, and they'll typically buy a solution. We've taken the time and invested the energy to make sure that they function and operate on all of the DJI equipment. And then, from there, they'll purchase a solution and that solution will then be used for their own business applications. It might be at the enterprise level, or it might just be a big grower. And from there, they'll take the data and then push it into their analytics tools. >> And push it into whatever analytics tools they have. >> That's right. >> That's awesome. So as you turn the calendar to 2018, hard to believe we're through 2017, I'm still, kind of can't believe that. What are some of your priorities for 2018? Where are you guys going next? How do you see this evolving, as both the market matures for acceptance as well as the technology and some of the cool things they announced here at DJI today? >> Sure, well you know, of course DJI does great things and we continue to work with them. You'll see new sensors come from Sentera. You'll see tighter integration into the platforms themselves and you'll also see a lot more data that comes from them, and how they'll be able to be used in other analytics tools. >> Excellent, alright Greg, well, congrats to you and your business, it's fun. We hear about the ag application all the time. I stumbled upon on YouTube, a dedicated channel just for drones for rice farming, which I thought was fascinating. (laughter) Like, wow, I didn't know that was a thing. >> Sure. >> But clearly huge impact in agriculture. Huge, huge benefit to food production, farmers and ultimately more food for all of us. >> That's the motivator for us. I mean, that's what get us up everyday, so it's great to have someone understand what we're trying to do, so thank you. >> Oh, a pleasure, alright, he's Greg, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube, from DJI Airworks, 2017. Thanks for watching.