>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special CUBE Conversation coming to us from our Boston area studio. We know that so much has changed in 2020 with the global pandemic on, with people working from home, staying safe is super important, and that especially is true when it comes to the threats that are facing us. So really happy to welcome to the program Hardik Modi, we're going to be talking about the NETSCOUT threat intelligence report for the first half of 2020. Hardik's the AVP of engineering for threat and mitigation products. Hardik, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks Stu, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so first set this up. This is NETSCOUT does these threat reports and on a pretty regular cadence, I have to think that the first half of 2020, we'll dig into this a little bit, is a little different because I know everybody when they had their plans at the beginning of 2020, by the time we got to March, we kind of shredded them and started over or made some serious adjustments. So why don't you introduce us to this? And then we'll talk specifically about the first half 2020 results. >> Right, thanks, Stu. So I'm here to speak about the fifth NETSCOUT threat intelligence report. So this is something that we do every six months in my team, in particular, the NETSCOUT threat intelligence organization, we maintain visibility across the internet and in particular threat activity across the internet, and very specifically with a strengthened DDoS activity. And so, you know, there's a lot of data that we have collected. There's a lot of analysis that we conduct on a regular basis. And then every six months, we try to roll this up into a report that gives you a view into everything that's happened across the landscape. So this is our report for the first half of the year. So through June 2020, and yes, you know, as we came into March 2020, everything changed. And in particular, when, you know, the pandemic kind of set upon us, you know, countries, entire continents went into lockdown and we intuited that this would have an impact on the threat landscape. And you know, this is even as we've been reporting through it, this is our first drill of roll up and look at really everything that happened and everything that changed in the first half of 2020. >> Yeah. It absolutely had such a huge impact. You know, my background, Hardik, is in networking. You think about how much over the last decade we've built out, you know, those corporate networks, all the Wi-Fi environments, all the security put there, and all of a sudden, well, we had some people remote, now everybody is remote. And you know, that has a ripple on corporate IT as well as, you know, those of us at home that have to do the home IT piece there. So why don't you give us a look inside the report? What are some of the main takeaways that the report had this time? >> No, so you're right, the network became everything for us and the network became how we, how our students attended school, right? And how we did our shopping, you know, how we did certainly finance and most definitely how for a lot of us how we did work, and suddenly the network, which, you know, certainly was a driver for productivity, and just business worldwide suddenly became that much more central. And so, we tend to look at the network, both sort of at the enterprise level, but then also a lot of what we get to see is at the service provider level. So what's happening on the big networks worldwide, and that's what we've rolled up into this report. So a few things that I want to kind of highlight from the report, the first thing is there were a lot of DDoS attacks. So we recorded through our visibility, 4.83 million DDoS attacks in the first six months of the year. That's almost 30,000 attacks a day. And you know, it's not like we hear about 30,000 outages every day. Certainly aren't 30,000 outages every day, but you know, this is an ongoing onslaught, for anybody who exists on the internet, and this didn't update at all through the first half of the year. If you kind of go like, just look at the numbers, it went up 15% for the same period year on year. But then as you enter into March, and in particular, the date when the WHO sort of announced the global pandemic, that's essentially the start that we marked. From that day onwards, the rise in attacks year on year for the same period, you know, a year ago was 25%. So that really, just in sheer numbers a lot changed. And then, you know, as we go a level deeper, and we look at like the nature of these attacks. You know, a lot of that actually has evolved considerably, over the past few years. And then in particular, like we're able to highlight a few stats in the first half of the year, and certainly like a lot of the drivers for this, the technical drivers are understood. And then there's just the human drivers for this, right? And we understand that a lot more people are at home. A lot more people are reliant on the internet and, you know, just sad to say, but you know, certainly also a lot more people aren't as engaged with school, with work, with society at large. And these tend to have knock on effects across large, a lot of things that we do in life, but also in like cyber crime and in particular, like in the DDoS space. >> Maybe if you could for our audience, I think they're in general familiar with DDoS, it's typically when, you know, sites get overwhelmed with traffic, different from say, everybody working at home is it'd be a little bit more cautious about phishing attacks. You're getting, you know, links and tax links in email, "Super important thing, please check this," please don't click those links. Does this impact, you know, those workers at home or is it, you know, all the corporate IT and all the traffic going through those that there's ways that they can stop, halt that, or, you know, interfere, get sensitive data? >> That's a really good point. And in large parts, I mean, and like with a lot of other kind of cyber crime activity, this is primarily felt inside the enterprise. And so the, as far as like, you know, companies are concerned and people who are using VPN and other kinds of remote access to get to critical resources, the key challenge here is the denial of availability. And so, okay. So you're right. Let's take a step back. DDoS, distributed denial of service. This is typically when like a large polarity of devices are used to direct traffic towards a device on the internet. And we typically think of this as a site. And so maybe, your favorite newspaper went down because of a DDoS attack, or you couldn't get to your bank or your retail, you know, e-commerce as a result of the DDoS attack, but this plays out in many different ways, including the inability for people to access work, just because their VPN concentrators have been DDOSed. I think, you know, just coming back to the split between people who work for a company and the company themselves, ultimately it's a shared responsibility, there's some amount of best practices that employees can follow. I mean, a lot of this enforcement and, you know, primarily ensuring that your services are running to expectation, as always, there's going to be the responsibility of the enterprise and something that enterprise security typically will want to cater for. >> All right. And how are these attacks characterized? You said it was up significantly 15% for the half year, overall, 25% overall, anything that differentiates big attacks, small attacks? Do we know how many of them actually freeze a site or pause how much activity is going on? >> Right, so what I will say is that within just those numbers, and we're simply just counting attacks, right? Even within those numbers, a key aspect that has changed is the rise in what we call multi-vector attacks. And so these are attacks in which they're, you go back maybe five years, certainly like going back further, typically a DDoS attack would involve a single technique that was being used to cause damage. And then over time, as many techniques were developed and new vulnerable services are discovered on the internet, what we find is that there's, you know, occasionally there would be a combination of these vectors, as we call them, being used against the target. And so a big thing that has changed within the last two years is what we think of as the rise in multi-vector attacks. And what we are seeing is that attacks that involve even 15 separate vectors are up considerably, over 1000% compared to the same time last year, and correspondingly attacks that involve a single vector are down in a really big way. And so we're just seeing a shift in the general, the techniques that are used within these attacks, and, you know, that has been considerable over certainly, you know, the same time 2019. But if you go back two years, even, it would seem like a complete sea change. >> What other key things, key learnings did you have from the survey this year that you can share? >> Yeah, so one thing I want to highlight that, you know, we kind of, and I think it's been implicit in some of your questions, certainly in many conversations that I have, like, what is the cost of these attacks? You know, what is ultimately the impact of these attacks on society? And one of the ways in which we tend to think of the impact is in simply like outages, like an e-commerce site that does a certain amount of business every day, you know, they can easily recognize that "All right, if I'm off for a day, for two days, for seven days, here's the impact to my business." So that tends to be understood at the individual enterprise level. Another cost that that often is well recognized as like the cost of mitigating attacks. And so now there's, whether it's the service provider, the enterprise themselves, other forms of business or other entities who will invest in mitigation techniques and capacity, those costs tend to kind of rack up. What we have done, and thanks to our kind of really unique visibility into service provider networks worldwide. What we've been able to do is extract essentially the, what we call the DDoS attack coefficient. And this is, think of it as like, here's how much DDoS attack traffic is going on worldwide or across any set of networks at any given time. So if you had zero DDoS in the world, that number will be zero, but it most definitely is not. You know, there's, we have represented numbers for different parts of the world. This can be many, many, many gigabits per second, many terabits per second. And essentially there's a, even just a transit cost for carrying this traffic from one point to another. And that is actually like the, you know, what we call the DDoS attack coefficient. And that cost is something that I want to highlight is being borne by everyone. So this ultimately is what shows up in your internet bills, whether you're a residential subscriber, whether you're using your phone and paying for internet through your phone, or you're an enterprise, and now you have network connections for your service providers, because ultimately this is a cost that we're bearing as a society. This is the first time that we've actually conducted research into this phenomenon. And I'm proud to say that we've captured this split across multiple geographies of the world. >> Yeah. It's been a big challenge these days. The internet is a big place, there's worry about fragmentation of the internet. There's worry about some of the countries out there, as well as some of the large, multinational global companies out there, really are walling our piece of the internet. Hardik, one thing I'm curious about, we talked about the impact of work from home and have a more distributed workforce. One of the other big mega trends we've been seeing even before 2020 is the growth of edge computing. You talk about the trillions of IOT devices that will be out there. Does DDoS play into this? You know, I just, the scenario runs through my mind. "Okay, great. We've got all these vehicles running that has some telemetry," all of a sudden, if they can't get their telemetry, that's a big problem. >> Yeah. So this is both the, this is the devices themselves and the, basically the impact that you could see from an attack on them. But more often what we see on the internet in the here and now is actually the use of these devices to attack other more established entities on the internet. So then, so for us now, for many years, we've been talking about the use of IOT devices in attacks, and simply the fact that so many devices are being deployed that are physically, they're vulnerable from the get-go, insecure at birth, essentially, and then deployed across the internet. You know, even if they were secure to start, they often don't have update mechanisms. And now, they, over a period of time, new vulnerabilities are discovered in those devices and they're used to attack other devices. So in this report, we have talked about a particular family of malware called Mirai, and Mirai has been around since 2016, been used in many high profile attacks. And over time there have been a number of variations to Mirai. And, you know, we absolutely keep track of the growth in these variations and the kinds of devices where they attack. Sorry, that they compromise, and then use to attack other targets. We've also kind of gone into another malware family that has been talked about a bit called Lucifer, and Lucifer was another, I think originally more Microsoft Windows, so you're going to see it more on your classic kind of client and server kind of computing device. But over time, we've seen, we have reported on Linux variants of Lucifer that not only can be installed on Linux devices, but also have DDoS capabilities. So we're tracking like the emergence of new botnets. Still, Stu, going straight back to your question. They are, this is where IOT, you know, even for all the promise that it holds for us as society, you know, if we don't get this right, there's a lot of pain in our future just coming from the use of these devices in attacks. >> Well, I thought it was bad enough that we had an order of magnitude more surface area to defend against on, I hadn't really thought about the fact that all of these devices might be turned into an attack vector back on what we're doing. Alright, Hardik. So you need to give us some, the ray of hope here. We've got all of these threats out here. How's the industry doing overall defending against this, what more can be done to stop these threats? What are some of the actions people, and especially enterprise techs should be doing? >> Yeah, so I absolutely start with just awareness. This is why we publish the report. This is why we have resources like NETSCOUT Cyber Threat Horizon that provides continuous visibility into attack activity worldwide. So it absolutely just starts with that. We're actually, this is not necessarily a subject of the report because it's happened in the second half of the year, but there have been a wave of high profile attacks associated with extortion attempts, over the past month. And, these attacks aren't necessarily complex, like the techniques being used aren't novel. I think in many ways, these are the things that we would have considered maybe run of the mill, at least for us on the research side and the people who live this kind of stuff, but, they have been successful, and a number of companies right now, a number of entities worldwide right now are kind of rethinking what they're doing in particular DDoS protection. And for us, you know, our observation is that this happens every few years, where every few years, there's essentially a reminder that DDoS is a threat domain. DDoS typically will involve an intelligent adversary on the other side, somebody who wants to cause you harm. To defend against it, there are plenty of well known kind of techniques and methodology, but that is something that enterprises, all of us, governments, service providers, those of us on the research side have to kind of stay on top of, keep reminding ourselves of those best practices and use them. And, you know, I'll say that again, for me, the ray of hope is that we haven't seen a new vector in the first six months of the year, even as we've seen a combination of other known vectors. And so for these, just from that perspective, there's these attacks we should be able to defend against. So that's essentially where I leave this, in terms of the hope for the future. >> Alright, Hardik, what final tips do you have? How do people get the report itself and how do they keep up? Where do you point everyone to? >> Yes, so the report itself is going to be, is live on the 29th of September 2020. It will be available at NETSCOUT.com/threatreport. I'll also point you to another resource, Cyber Threat Horizon, that gives you more continuous visibility into a tech activity, and that's NETSCOUT.com/horizon. And so these are the key resources that I leave you with, again, this is, there's plenty to be hopeful about. As I said, there hasn't been a new vector that we've uncovered in the first six months of the year, as opposed to seven vectors in the year 2019. So, that is something that certainly gives me hope. And, for the things that we've talked about in the report, we know how to defend against them. So, this is something that I think with action, we'll be able to live through just fine. >> Well, Hardik, thanks so much for sharing the data, sharing the insight, pleasure catching up with you. >> Okay. Likewise, Stu, thank you. >> All right, and be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos we have, including many of the upcoming events. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special CUBE Conversation coming to us from our Boston area studio. We know that so much has changed in 2020 with the global pandemic on, with people working from home, staying safe is super important, and that especially is true when it comes to the threats that are facing us. So really happy to welcome to the program Hardik Modi, we're going to be talking about the NETSCOUT threat intelligence report for the first half of 2020. Hardik's the AVP of engineering for threat and mitigation products. Hardik, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks Stu, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so first set this up. This is NETSCOUT does these threat reports and on a pretty regular cadence, I have to think that the first half of 2020, we'll dig into this a little bit, is a little different because I know everybody when they had their plans at the beginning of 2020, by the time we got to March, we kind of shredded them and started over or made some serious adjustments. So why don't you introduce us to this? And then we'll talk specifically about the first half 2020 results. >> Right, thanks, Stu. So I'm here to speak about the fifth NETSCOUT threat intelligence report. So this is something that we do every six months in my team, in particular, the NETSCOUT threat intelligence organization, we maintain visibility across the internet and in particular threat activity across the internet, and very specifically with a strengthened DDoS activity. And so, you know, there's a lot of data that we have collected. There's a lot of analysis that we conduct on a regular basis. And then every six months, we try to roll this up into a report that gives you a view into everything that's happened across the landscape. So this is our report for the first half of the year. So through June 2020, and yes, you know, as we came into March 2020, everything changed. And in particular, when, you know, the pandemic kind of set upon us, you know, countries, entire continents went into lockdown and we intuited that this would have an impact on the threat landscape. And you know, this is even as we've been reporting through it, this is our first drill of roll up and look at really everything that happened and everything that changed in the first half of 2020. >> Yeah. It absolutely had such a huge impact. You know, my background, Hardik, is in networking. You think about how much over the last decade we've built out, you know, those corporate networks, all the Wi-Fi environments, all the security put there, and all of a sudden, well, we had some people remote, now everybody is remote. And you know, that has a ripple on corporate IT as well as, you know, those of us at home that have to do the home IT piece there. So why don't you give us a look inside the report? What are some of the main takeaways that the report had this time? >> No, so you're right, the network became everything for us and the network became how we, how our students attended school, right? And how we did our shopping, you know, how we did certainly finance and most definitely how for a lot of us how we did work, and suddenly the network, which, you know, certainly was a driver for productivity, and just business worldwide suddenly became that much more central. And so, we tend to look at the network, both sort of at the enterprise level, but then also a lot of what we get to see is at the service provider level. So what's happening on the big networks worldwide, and that's what we've rolled up into this report. So a few things that I want to kind of highlight from the report, the first thing is there were a lot of DDoS attacks. So we recorded through our visibility, 4.83 million DDoS attacks in the first six months of the year. That's almost 30,000 attacks a day. And you know, it's not like we hear about 30,000 outages every day. Certainly aren't 30,000 outages every day, but you know, this is an ongoing onslaught, for anybody who exists on the internet, and this didn't update at all through the first half of the year. If you kind of go like, just look at the numbers, it went up 15% for the same period year on year. But then as you enter into March, and in particular, the date when the WHO sort of announced the global pandemic, that's essentially the start that we marked. From that day onwards, the rise in attacks year on year for the same period, you know, a year ago was 25%. So that really, just in sheer numbers a lot changed. And then, you know, as we go a level deeper, and we look at like the nature of these attacks. You know, a lot of that actually has evolved considerably, over the past few years. And then in particular, like we're able to highlight a few stats in the first half of the year, and certainly like a lot of the drivers for this, the technical drivers are understood. And then there's just the human drivers for this, right? And we understand that a lot more people are at home. A lot more people are reliant on the internet and, you know, just sad to say, but you know, certainly also a lot more people aren't as engaged with school, with work, with society at large. And these tend to have knock on effects across large, a lot of things that we do in life, but also in like cyber crime and in particular, like in the DDoS space. >> Maybe if you could for our audience, I think they're in general familiar with DDoS, it's typically when, you know, sites get overwhelmed with traffic, different from say, everybody working at home is it'd be a little bit more cautious about phishing attacks. You're getting, you know, links and tax links in email, "Super important thing, please check this," please don't click those links. Does this impact, you know, those workers at home or is it, you know, all the corporate IT and all the traffic going through those that there's ways that they can stop, halt that, or, you know, interfere, get sensitive data? >> That's a really good point. And in large parts, I mean, and like with a lot of other kind of cyber crime activity, this is primarily felt inside the enterprise. And so the, as far as like, you know, companies are concerned and people who are using VPN and other kinds of remote access to get to critical resources, the key challenge here is the denial of availability. And so, okay. So you're right. Let's take a step back. DDoS, distributed denial of service. This is typically when like a large polarity of devices are used to direct traffic towards a device on the internet. And we typically think of this as a site. And so maybe, your favorite newspaper went down because of a DDoS attack, or you couldn't get to your bank or your retail, you know, e-commerce as a result of the DDoS attack, but this plays out in many different ways, including the inability for people to access work, just because their VPN concentrators have been DDOSed. I think, you know, just coming back to the split between people who work for a company and the company themselves, ultimately it's a shared responsibility, there's some amount of best practices that employees can follow. I mean, a lot of this enforcement and, you know, primarily ensuring that your services are running to expectation, as always, there's going to be the responsibility of the enterprise and something that enterprise security typically will want to cater for. >> All right. And how are these attacks characterized? You said it was up significantly 15% for the half year, overall, 25% overall, anything that differentiates big attacks, small attacks? Do we know how many of them actually freeze a site or pause how much activity is going on? >> Right, so what I will say is that within just those numbers, and we're simply just counting attacks, right? Even within those numbers, a key aspect that has changed is the rise in what we call multi-vector attacks. And so these are attacks in which they're, you go back maybe five years, certainly like going back further, typically a DDoS attack would involve a single technique that was being used to cause damage. And then over time, as many techniques were developed and new vulnerable services are discovered on the internet, what we find is that there's, you know, occasionally there would be a combination of these vectors, as we call them, being used against the target. And so a big thing that has changed within the last two years is what we think of as the rise in multi-vector attacks. And what we are seeing is that attacks that involve even 15 separate vectors are up considerably, over 1000% compared to the same time last year, and correspondingly attacks that involve a single vector are down in a really big way. And so we're just seeing a shift in the general, the techniques that are used within these attacks, and, you know, that has been considerable over certainly, you know, the same time 2019. But if you go back two years, even, it would seem like a complete sea change. >> What other key things, key learnings did you have from the survey this year that you can share? >> Yeah, so one thing I want to highlight that, you know, we kind of, and I think it's been implicit in some of your questions, certainly in many conversations that I have, like, what is the cost of these attacks? You know, what is ultimately the impact of these attacks on society? And one of the ways in which we tend to think of the impact is in simply like outages, like an e-commerce site that does a certain amount of business every day, you know, they can easily recognize that "All right, if I'm off for a day, for two days, for seven days, here's the impact to my business." So that tends to be understood at the individual enterprise level. Another cost that that often is well recognized as like the cost of mitigating attacks. And so now there's, whether it's the service provider, the enterprise themselves, other forms of business or other entities who will invest in mitigation techniques and capacity, those costs tend to kind of rack up. What we have done, and thanks to our kind of really unique visibility into service provider networks worldwide. What we've been able to do is extract essentially the, what we call the DDoS attack coefficient. And this is, think of it as like, here's how much DDoS attack traffic is going on worldwide or across any set of networks at any given time. So if you had zero DDoS in the world, that number will be zero, but it most definitely is not. You know, there's, we have represented numbers for different parts of the world. This can be many, many, many gigabits per second, many terabits per second. And essentially there's a, even just a transit cost for carrying this traffic from one point to another. And that is actually like the, you know, what we call the DDoS attack coefficient. And that cost is something that I want to highlight is being borne by everyone. So this ultimately is what shows up in your internet bills, whether you're a residential subscriber, whether you're using your phone and paying for internet through your phone, or you're an enterprise, and now you have network connections for your service providers, because ultimately this is a cost that we're bearing as a society. This is the first time that we've actually conducted research into this phenomenon. And I'm proud to say that we've captured this split across multiple geographies of the world. >> Yeah. It's been a big challenge these days. The internet is a big place, there's worry about fragmentation of the internet. There's worry about some of the countries out there, as well as some of the large, multinational global companies out there, really are walling our piece of the internet. Hardik, one thing I'm curious about, we talked about the impact of work from home and have a more distributed workforce. One of the other big mega trends we've been seeing even before 2020 is the growth of edge computing. You talk about the trillions of IOT devices that will be out there. Does DDoS play into this? You know, I just, the scenario runs through my mind. "Okay, great. We've got all these vehicles running that has some telemetry," all of a sudden, if they can't get their telemetry, that's a big problem. >> Yeah. So this is both the, this is the devices themselves and the, basically the impact that you could see from an attack on them. But more often what we see on the internet in the here and now is actually the use of these devices to attack other more established entities on the internet. So then, so for us now, for many years, we've been talking about the use of IOT devices in attacks, and simply the fact that so many devices are being deployed that are physically, they're vulnerable from the get-go, insecure at birth, essentially, and then deployed across the internet. You know, even if they were secure to start, they often don't have update mechanisms. And now, they, over a period of time, new vulnerabilities are discovered in those devices and they're used to attack other devices. So in this report, we have talked about a particular family of malware called Mirai, and Mirai has been around since 2016, been used in many high profile attacks. And over time there have been a number of variations to Mirai. And, you know, we absolutely keep track of the growth in these variations and the kinds of devices where they attack. Sorry, that they compromise, and then use to attack other targets. We've also kind of gone into another malware family that has been talked about a bit called Lucifer, and Lucifer was another, I think originally more Microsoft Windows, so you're going to see it more on your classic kind of client and server kind of computing device. But over time, we've seen, we have reported on Linux variants of Lucifer that not only can be installed on Linux devices, but also have DDoS capabilities. So we're tracking like the emergence of new botnets. Still, Stu, going straight back to your question. They are, this is where IOT, you know, even for all the promise that it holds for us as society, you know, if we don't get this right, there's a lot of pain in our future just coming from the use of these devices in attacks. >> Well, I thought it was bad enough that we had an order of magnitude more surface area to defend against on, I hadn't really thought about the fact that all of these devices might be turned into an attack vector back on what we're doing. Alright, Hardik. So you need to give us some, the ray of hope here. We've got all of these threats out here. How's the industry doing overall defending against this, what more can be done to stop these threats? What are some of the actions people, and especially enterprise techs should be doing? >> Yeah, so I absolutely start with just awareness. This is why we publish the report. This is why we have resources like NETSCOUT Cyber Threat Horizon that provides continuous visibility into attack activity worldwide. So it absolutely just starts with that. We're actually, this is not necessarily a subject of the report because it's happened in the second half of the year, but there have been a wave of high profile attacks associated with extortion attempts, over the past month. And, these attacks aren't necessarily complex, like the techniques being used aren't novel. I think in many ways, these are the things that we would have considered maybe run of the mill, at least for us on the research side and the people who live this kind of stuff, but, they have been successful, and a number of companies right now, a number of entities worldwide right now are kind of rethinking what they're doing in particular DDoS protection. And for us, you know, our observation is that this happens every few years, where every few years, there's essentially a reminder that DDoS is a threat domain. DDoS typically will involve an intelligent adversary on the other side, somebody who wants to cause you harm. To defend against it, there are plenty of well known kind of techniques and methodology, but that is something that enterprises, all of us, governments, service providers, those of us on the research side have to kind of stay on top of, keep reminding ourselves of those best practices and use them. And, you know, I'll say that again, for me, the ray of hope is that we haven't seen a new vector in the first six months of the year, even as we've seen a combination of other known vectors. And so for these, just from that perspective, there's these attacks we should be able to defend against. So that's essentially where I leave this, in terms of the hope for the future. >> Alright, Hardik, what final tips do you have? How do people get the report itself and how do they keep up? Where do you point everyone to? >> Yes, so the report itself is going to be, is live on the 29th of September 2020. It will be available at NETSCOUT.com/threatreport. I'll also point you to another resource, Cyber Threat Horizon, that gives you more continuous visibility into a tech activity, and that's NETSCOUT.com/horizon. And so these are the key resources that I leave you with, again, this is, there's plenty to be hopeful about. As I said, there hasn't been a new vector that we've uncovered in the first six months of the year, as opposed to seven vectors in the year 2019. So, that is something that certainly gives me hope. And, for the things that we've talked about in the report, we know how to defend against them. So, this is something that I think with action, we'll be able to live through just fine. >> Well, Hardik, thanks so much for sharing the data, sharing the insight, pleasure catching up with you. >> Okay. Likewise, Stu, thank you. >> All right, and be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos we have, including many of the upcoming events. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>>buy from San Francisco. It's the queue covering our essay conference 2020. San Francisco Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>Hey, welcome back here. Ready? Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in downtown San Francisco. It is absolutely spectacular. Day outside. I'm not sure why were incited. Mosconi. That's where we are. It's the RCC conference, I think 50,000 people the biggest security conference in the world here in Mosconi this week. We've been here, wall to wall coverage. We'll be here all the way till Thursday. So thanks for joining us. We're excited to have our next guest. He's got a lot of great data to share, so let's jump into it. It's hard mode. He's a VP engineering threat and mitigation products for nets. Cowhearted. Great to meet you. >>Thank you. Good to be here, >>too. So for people who aren't familiar with Net Scout, give em kind of the basic overview. What do you guys all about? Yes, and that's what we consider >>ourselves their guardians of the connected world. And so our job is to protect, like, you know, companies, enterprises, service providers, anybody who has on the Internet and help keep their services running your applications and things returned deliver to your customers would make sure that it's up there performing to, like, you know the way you want them to, but also kind of give you visibility and protect you against DDOS attacks on other kind of security threats. That's basically in a nutshell. What we do as a company and, yeah, wear the garden of connected world. >>So So I just from a vendor point of the I always I feel so sorry for >>buyers in this environment because you walk around. I don't know how many vendors are in here. A lot of >>big boost, little boost. So how do you kind of help separate? >>You know, Netsch out from the noise? How what's your guys? Secret sauce? What's your kind of special things? >>Really, it's like 30 years >>off investment in like, network based visibility, and >>we truly >>believe in the network. Our CEO, he says, like you know the network like, you know, actually, when you monitor the network, it's like taking a blood test. It tells you the truth, right? And it's really like how you find out, like, you know, some things right or wrong. I mean, I actually, for my background to like network monitoring. There's a lot of our what we think of as like the endpoint is actually contested territory. That's where the adversary is. When you're on the network and your monitoring all activity, it really gives you a vantage point. You know, that's >>really special. So we really focus on the network. Our heritage and the network is is one of our key strengths and then, you know, as part of >>us as a company like Arbor Arbor. Networks with coming in that's got acquired some years ago were very much part of Net Scout with our brand of products. Part of that, you know, the Arbor legacy includes huge visibility into what's happening across the Internet and visibility like nobody else like in terms of the number of service providers and large enterprises who work with us, help us understand what's happening across the landscape. That's like nobody else out here. And that is what we consider a key differentiator. >>Okay, great. So one of the things you guys do >>a couple times years, I understand his publisher reporting solution, gift people. Some information as to what's going on. So we've got the We've >>got the version over four here. Right Net scout threat, intelligence report. So you said this comes out twice a year, twice a year. So what is the latest giving some scoop >>here, Hot off the presses we published last week. Okay, so it's really just a few days old and, you know, our focus here is what happened in the last six months of last year. So that and then what we do is we compare it against data that we've collected a year prior. >>So really a few things >>that we want you to remember if you're on the right, you know, the first number is 8.4 million. That's the number of D DOS attacks that >>we saw. This doesn't mean that >>we've seen every attack, you know, in the world, but that's like, you know just how many DDOS attacks we saw through the eyes of our customers. That's >>in this in six months. 8.4 number is >>actually for the entire year here in an entire year of 2019. There's a little bit of seasonality to it. So if you think of it like a 4.4, maybe something that that was the second half of the year. But that's where I want to start. That's just how many DDOS attacks we observed. And so, in the >>course of the report, what we can do a >>slice and dice that number talk about, like, different sizes, like, what are we seeing? Between zero and 100 gigabits per 2nd 102 104 100 above and >>kind of give you a sense of just what kind of this separation there is who is being targeted >>like we had a very broad level, like in some of the verticals and geographies. We kind of lay out this number and give you like, a lot of contact. So if you're if you're in finance and you're in the UK, you want to know like, Hey, what happened? What happened in Europe, for example, In the past 66 months, we have that data right, and we've got to give you that awareness of what's happening now. The second number I want you to remember is seven seven or the number of new attack vectors reflection application attack vectors that we observed being used widely in in in the second half. >>Seven new 17 new ones. So that now kind of brings our tally >>up to 31 like that. We have those listed out in here. We talk about >>just how much? Uh huh. Really? Just how many of these vectors, how they're used. Also, these each of these vectors >>leverage vulnerabilities in devices that are deployed across the Internet. So we kind of laid out like, you know, just how many of them are out there. But that's like, You know that to us seven is reflecting how the adversary is innovating. They're looking for new ways to attack us. They've found 71 last year. They're going to war, right? Right. And that's that's kind of what we focus on. >>Let's go back to the 8.4. So of those 8.4 million, how many would you declare >>successful from the attacker point of view? >>Yeah, You know something that this is always >>like, you know, you know, it's difficult to go estimate precisely or kind of get within some level of >>precision. I think that you know, the the adversaries, always trying to >>of course, they love to deliver a knockout blow and like all your services down but even like every attack inflicts a cost right and the cost is whether it's, you know, it's made its way all the way through to the end target. And now you know, they're using more network and computing resource is just to kind of keep their services going while they're under attack. The attack is low, You're still kind of you. You're still paying that cost or, you know, the cost of paid upstream by maybe the service provider. Somebody was defending your network for you. So that way, like, you know, there's like there's a cost to every one of these, right? In >>terms of like outages. I should also point out that the attacks that you might think >>that this attack is like, you know, hey, you know, there was a specific victim and that victim suffered as a result of but >>in many cases, the adversaries going after people who are providing services to others. So I mean, if a Turkish bank >>goes down right, like, you know, our cannot like services, customers for a month are maybe even a few hours, right, And you know, the number of victims in this case is fairly broad. Might be one attacks that might be one target, however, like the impact is fairly, >>is very large. What's interesting is, have begs a question. Kind of. How do you >>define success or failure from both the attacker's point of view as well as the defender? >>Yeah, I mean, I mean and again, like there's a lot of conversation in the industry about for every attack, right? Any kind of attack. What? When do I say that? You know what? I was ready for it. And, you know, I was I was fine. I mean, I don't care about, you know, ultimately, there's a cost to each of these things. I'd say that everybody kind of comes at it with their You know, if you're a bank, that you might go. Okay. You know what? If my if I'm paying a little bit extra to keep the service up and running while the Attackers coming at me, No problem. If I if my customers air aren't able to log in, some subset of my customers aren't able to log in. Maybe I can live through that. A large number of my customers can't log in. That's actually a really big problem. And if it's sustained, then you make your way into the media or you're forced to report to the government by like, outages are like, You know, maybe, you know, you have to go to your board and go like a sorry, right? Something just happened. >>But are the escalation procedures >>in the definition of consistency? Right? Getting banged all the time right? And there's something like you said, there's some disruption at some level before it fires off triggers and remediation. So so is there some level of okay, that's kind of a cost of doing business versus, you know, we caught it at this. They're kind of like escalation points that define kind of very short of a full line. >>I think when we talk to our service provider customers, we talked to the very large kind of critical enterprises. They tend to be more methodical about how they think of like, Okay, you know, degradation of the service right now, relative to the attack. I think I think for a lot of people, it's like in the eyes of the beholder. Here's Here's something. Here's an S L. A. That I missed the result of the attack at that point. Like you know, I have, I certainly have a failure, but, you know, it's it's up until there is kind of like, Okay, you're right >>in the eyes the attacker to delay service >>at the at the Turkish bank because now their teams operate twice, twice the duration per transaction. Is it? Just holding for ransom is what benefit it raises. A range >>of motivations is basically the full range of human nature. There's They're certainly like we still see attacks that are straight journalism. I just I just cause I could just I wanted I wanted to write. I wanted to show my friend like, you know, that I could do this. There's there's definitely a lot of attacks that have that are like, you know, Hey, I'm a gamer and I'm like, you know, there's I know that person I'm competing with is coming from this I p address. Let me let me bombard them with >>an attack. And you know, there's a huge kind of it could be >>a lot of collateral damage along the way because, you know, you think you're going after this one person in their house. But actually, if you're taking out the network upstream and there's a lot of other people that are on that network, like you know, there's certain competitive element to it. They're definitely from time to time. There are extortion campaigns pay up or we'll do this again right in some parts of the world, like in the way we think of it. It's like cost of doing business. You are almost like a business dispute resolution. You better be. You know, you better settle my invoice or like I'm about, Maybe maybe I'll try and uses take you out crazy. Yeah, >>it, Jeff. I mean things >>like, you know the way talked about this in previous reports, and it's still true. There's especially with d dos. There's what we think of it, like a democratization off the off the attack tools where you don't have to be technical right. You don't have to have a lot of knowledge, you know, their services available. You know, like here's who I'm going to the market by the booth, so I'd like to go after and, you know, here's my $50 or like a big point equivalent. All right, >>let's jump to >>the seven. We talked about 8.4 and the seven new attack vectors and you outline, You know, I think, uh, the top level themes I took from the summary, right? Weaponizing new attack vectors, leveraging mobile hot spots targeting compromised in point >>about the end points. I o t is >>like all the rage people have mess and five G's just rolling out, which is going to see this huge i o t expansion, especially in industrial and all these connected devices and factories in from that power people. How are people protecting those differently now, as we're getting to this kind of exponential curve of the deployment of all these devices, >>I mean, there are a lot of serious people thinking about how to protect individual devices, but infrastructure and large. So I'm not gonna go like, Hey, it's all bad, right? Is plenty back on it all to be the next number, like 17 and 17 as the number of architectures for which Amir, I mean, I was really popular, like in a bar right from a few years ago. That still exists. But over time, what's happened is people have reported Mirai to different architectures so that, you know, think of it like, you know, if you have your your refrigerator connected to the Internet, it comes. It's coming with a little board, has CPU on it like >>running a little OS >>runs and runs in the West on it. Well, there's a Mirai variant ready for that. Essentially, as new devices are getting deployed like, you know, there's, you know, that's kind of our observation that there's even as new CPUs are introduced, a new chips or even the West they're introduced. There's somebody out there. We're ready to port it to that very now, Like, you know, the next level challenges that these devices, you know, they don't often get upgraded. There's no real. In many cases, they're not like, you know, there's very little thought given to really kind of security around it. Right? There are back doors and, like default passwords used on a lot of them. And so you take this combination. I have a whole you know, we talk about, you know, large deployments of devices every year. So you have these large deployments and now, you know, bought is just waiting for ready for it Now again, I will say that it's not. It's not all bad, but there are serious people who were thinking about this and their devices that are deployed on private networks. From the get go, there was a VPN tunnel back to a particular control point that the the commercial vendor operates. I mean, there are things like that, like, hardening that people have done right, So not every device is gonna find its way into a botnet. However, like, you know, you feel like you're getting a toy like Christmas and against $20 you know, and it can connect to the Internet. The odds are nobody's >>thinking not well. The thing we've heard, too, about kind of down the i t and kind of bringing of operations technology and I t is. A lot of those devices weren't developed for upgrades and patches, and Lord knows what Os is running underneath the covers was a single kind of use device. It wasn't really ever going to be connected to the outside world. But now you're connecting with the I t. Suddenly exposing a whole host of issues that were never kind of part of the plan when whoever designed that thing in the first place for sure for sure is crazy. Alright, so that's that. Carpet bombing tactics, increased sector attack, availability. What is there's carpet bomb and carpet bombing generally? What's going on in this space? >>Well, so carpet bombing is a term that we applied a few years ago to a kind of a variation of attack which, like >>traditionally, you know, we see an attack >>against a specific I P address or a specific domain, right? That's that's where that's what I'm targeting. Carpet bombing is taking a range of API's and go like, you know, hey, almost like cycling through every single one of them. So you're so if your filters, if your defense is based on Hey, if my one server sees a spike, let me let me block traffic while now you're actually not seeing enough of a spike on an individual I p. But across a range there's a huge you know, there's a lot of traffic that you're gonna be. >>So this is kind of like trips people >>up from time to time, like are we certainly have defensive built for it. But >>now what? We're you know, it's it's really like what we're seeing is the use >>off Muehr, our other known vectors. We're not like, Okay, C l dap is a protocol feel that we see we see attacks, sealed up attacks all the time. Now what we're >>seeing is like C l >>dap with carpet bombing. Now we're seeing, like, even other other reflection application protocols, which the attack isn't like an individual system, but instead the range. And so that's that's what has changed. Way saw a lot of like, you know, TCP kind of reflection attacks, TCP reflection attacks last year. And then and then the novelty was that Now, like okay, alongside that is the technique, right? Carpet bombing technique. That's that's a pipe >>amounts never stops right? Right hard. We're out of time. I give you the final word. One. Where can people go get the information in this report? And more importantly, for people that aren't part of our is a matter that you know kind of observers or they want to be more spark. How should they be thinking about security when this thing is such a rapidly evolving space? >>So let me give you two resource is really quickly. There's this this >>report available Dub dub dub dub dot com slash threat report. That's that's that's what That's where this report is available on Google Next Threat report and you'll find your way there. We've also, you know, we made another platform available that gives you more continuous visibility into the landscape. So if you read this and like Okay, what's happening now? Then you would go to what we call Met Scout Cyber Threat Horizon. So that's >>kind of tell you >>what's happening over the horizon. It's not just like, you know, Hey, what's what am I seeing? What are people like me seeing maybe other people other elsewhere in the world scene. So that's like the next dot com slash horizon. Okay, to find >>that. And I think like between those two, resource is you get >>access to all of our visibility and then, you know, really, in terms of like, our focus is not just to drive awareness, but all of this knowledge is being built into our products. So the Net's got like arbor line of products. We're continually innovating and evolving and driving like more intelligence into them, right? That's that's really? How We help protect our customers. Right >>hearted. Thanks for taking a few minutes >>and sharing the story. Thank you. 18 Scary. But I'm glad you said it's not all bad. So that's good. >>Alright, he started. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We're at the RSA conference 2020 >>Mosconi. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here with Sanjay Poonen who's the COO of VMware and a good friend of theCUBE. Sanjay great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave it's a pleasure. In these new circumstances, shelter at home and remote working. I hope you and your family are doing well. >> Yeah, and back at you Sanjay. Of course I saw you on Kramer Mad Money the other night. I was jealous. I said, "I need Sanjay on to get an optimism injection." You're a great leader And I think, a role model for all of us. And of course the "Go Niners" in the background really incented me to get-- I got my Red Sox cap and we have a lack of sports, but, and we miss it, But hey, we're making the best. >> Okay Red Sox is better than the Patriots. Although I love the Patriots. If i was in the east coast, especially now that Brady's gone. I guess you guys are probably ruing a little bit that Jimmy G came to us. >> I am a huge Tampa Bay fan all of a sudden. I be honest with you. Tom Brady can become a Yankee and I would root for them. I tell you that's how much I love the guy. But anyway, I'm really excited to have you on. It's obviously as you mentioned, these times are tough, but we're making the best do and it's great to see you. You are a huge optimist, but I want to ask you, I want to start with Narendra Modi just announced, basically a lockdown for 21 days. 1.3 billion people in your native country. I wonder if you could give us some, some thoughts on that. >> I'm, my parents live half their time in Bangalore and half here. They happen to be right now in the US, and they're doing well. My dad's 80 and my mom's 77. I go to India a lot. I spent about 18 years of my life there, and the last 32 odd years here and I still go there a lot. Have a lots friends and my family there. And , it's I'm glad that the situation is kind of , as best as they can serve it. It's weird, I was watching some of the social media photos of Bangalore. I tweeted this out last night. The roads look so clean and beautiful. I mean, it looks like 40 years ago when I was growing up. When I would take a bicycle to school. I mean Bangalore's one of the most beautiful cities in India, very green and you can kind of see it all again. And I think, as I've been watching some of the satellite photos of the various big cities to just watch sort of Mother Nature. Obviously, we're in a tough time and, I open my empathy and thoughts and prayers go to every family that's affected by this. And certainly ones who have lost loved ones, but it's sort of, I think it's neat, that we're starting to see some of the beautiful aspects of nature. Even as we deal with the tough aspects of sheltered home. And the incredible tough impacts of this pandemic across the world. >> Yeah, I think you're right. There is a silver lining as much as, our hearts go out to those that are that are suffering. You're seeing the canals in Venice run clear. As you mentioned, the nitrous oxide levels over China. what's going on in Bangalore. So, there is a little bit of light in the end of the tunnel for the environment, I hope. and at least there's an indication that we maybe, need to be more sensitized to this. Okay, let's get into it. I want to ask you, so last week in our breaking analysis. We worked with a data company called ETR down in New York City. They do constant surveys of CIO's. I want to read you something that they came out with just on Monday and get your reaction. Basically, their annual growth and IT spend they're saying, is showing a slight decline for 2020. As a significant number of organizations plan to cut and/or delay IT expenditures due to the coronavirus. Though the current climate may suggest worse many organizations are accelerating spending for 2020 as they ramp up their work-from-home infrastructure. These organizations are offsetting what would otherwise be a notable decline in global IT spend versus last year. Now we've gone from the 4% consensus at the beginning of the year. ETR brought it down to zero percent and then just on Monday, they went to slight negative. But, what's not been reported widely is the somewhat offsetting factor of work-from-home infrastructure. VMware obviously plays there. So I wonder if you could comment on what you're seeing. >> Yeah, Dave, I think , we'll have to see . I'm not an economic pundit. So we're going to have to see what the, IT landscape looks like in the overall sense and we'll probably play off GDP. Certain industries: travel, hospitality, I mean, it's brutal for them. I mean, and I hope that, what I really hope, that's going to happen to that industry, especially there's an infusion through recovery type of bill. Is that no real big company goes under, and goes bankrupt. I mean kind of the situation in 2008. I mean, people wondering what will happen to the Airlines. Boeing, hospital-- these are ic-- some of them like Boeing are iconic brands of the United States and of the world. There's only two real companies that make planes. So we've got to make sure that those industries stay afloat and stay good for the health of the world. Health of the US economy, jobs, and so on. That's always one end. Listen, health and safety of our employees always comes first. Before we even think about that. I always tell people the profits of VMware will wait if you are not well, if your loved ones not well, if your going to take care of people, take care of that first. We will be fine. This too shall pass. But if you're healthy, let's turn our attention because we're not going to just sit at home and play games. We're going to serve our customers. How do we do that? A lot of our customers are adjusting to this new normal. As a result, they have to either order devices with a laptop, screens, things of those kinds, to allow a work-from-home environment to be as close to productive as they work environment. So I expect that there will be a surge in the, sort of, end points that people need. I will have to see how Dell and HP and Lenovo, but I expect that they will probably see some surge in their laptops. As people, kind of, want those in the home and hopefully their supply chains are able to respond. But then with every one of those endpoints and screens that we need now for these types of organizations. You need to manage them, end point management. Often, you need virtual desktops on them. You need to end point security and then in some cases you will probably need, if it's a remote office, branch office, and into the home office, network security and app acceleration. So those Solutions, end point management, Workspace ONE, inclusive of a full-fledged virtual desktop capability That's our product Workspace ONE. Endpoint Securities, Carbon Black and the Network Platform NSX being software-defined was relegated for things like, load balancers and SDWAN capabilities and it's kind of almost feels like good, that we got those solutions, the last three, four years through acquisitions, in many cases. I mean, of course, Airwatch and Nicira were six, seven, eight years ago. But even SD-WAN, we acquired Velocloud three and a half years ago, Carbon Black just four months ago, and Avi in the last year. Those are all parts of that kind of portfolio now, and I feel we were able to, as customers come to us we're not going in ambulance-chasing. But as customers come to us and say, "What do you have as a work-at-home "for business continuity?" We're able to offer them a solution. So we did a webcast earlier this week. Where we talked about, we're calling it work in home with business continuity. It's led with our EUC offerings Workspace ONE. Accompanied by Carbon Black to secure that, and then underneath it, will obviously be the cloud foundation and our Network capabilities of NSX. >> Yeah, so I want to double down on that because it was not, the survey results, showed it was not just collaboration tools. Like Zoom and WebEx and gotomeeting Etc. It was, as you're pointing out, it was other infrastructure that was of VPN's. It was Network bandwidth. It was virtualization, security because they need to secure that work-from-home infrastructure. So a lot of sort of, ancillary activity. It was surprising to me, when I saw the data, that 21% of the CIO's that we surveyed, said that they actually plan on spending more in 2020 because of these factors. And so now we're tracking that daily. And the sentiment changes daily. I showed some other data that showed the CIO sentiment through March. Every day of the survey it dropped. Okay, so it's prudent to be cautious. But nonetheless, people to your point aren't just sitting on their hands. They're not standing still. They're moving to support this new work-from-home normal. >> Yeah, I mean listen, I forgot to say that, Yeah, we are using the video collaboration tools. Zoom a lot. We use Slack. We'll use Teams. So we are, those are accompanied. We were actually one of the first customers to use Zoom. I'm a big fan of my friend Eric Yuan and what they're doing there in modernizing, making it available on a mobile device. Just really fast. They've been very responsive and they reciprocated by using Workspace ONE there. We've been doing ads joined to VMware and zoom in the market for the last several years. So we're a big fan of their technology. So far be it from me to proclaim that the only thing you need here's VMware. There's a lot of other things on the stack. I think the best way, Dave, for us that we've sought to do this is again, I'm very sensitive to not ambulance-chase, which is, kind of go after this. To do it authentically, and the way that authentically is to be, I think Satya Nadella put this pretty well in an interview he did yesterday. Be a first responder to the first responder. A digital first responder, if I could. So when the, our biggest customers are hospital and school and universities and retailers and pharmacies. These are some of our biggest customers. They are looking, in some cases, actually hire more people to serve their communities and customers. And every one of them, as they , hire new people and so and so on, will I just naturally coming to us and when they come to us, serve them. And it's been really gratifying Dave. If I could read you the emails I've been getting the last few days. I got one from a very prominent City, the United States, the mayor's office, the CTO, just thanking us and our people. For being available who are being careful not to, we're being very sensitive to the pricing. To making sure customers don't feel like, in any way, that we're looking at the economics of it will always come just serve your customer. I got an email yesterday from a very large pharmacy. Routinely we were talking to folks in the, in the healthcare industry. University, a president of a school. In fact, Southern New Hampshire University, who I mentioned Jim Cramer. Sent me a note saying, "hey, we're really grateful you even mentioned our name." and I'm not doing this because, Southern New Hampshire University is doing an incredible job of moving a lot of their platform to online to help tens of thousands. And they were one of the early customers to adopt virtual desktops, and the cloud desktops, and the services. So, as we call. So in any of these use cases, I just tell our employees, "Be authentic. "First off take care of your families. "It's really important to take care of your own health and safety. But once you've done that, be authentic in serving our customers." That's what VR has always done. From the days of dying green, to bombers, to Pat, and all of us here now. Take care of our customers and we'll be fine. >> Yeah, and I perfectly understand your sensitivity to that notion of ambulance-chasing and I'm by no means trying to bait you into doing that. But I would stress, the industry needs you and the tech it-- many in the tech industry, like VMware, have very strong balance sheets. They're extremely viable companies and we as a community, as an industry, need companies like VMware to step up, be flexible on pricing, and terms, and payment, and things like that nature. Which it sounds like you're doing. Because the heroes that are on the front lines, they're fighting a battle every day, every hour, every minute and they need infrastructure to be able to work remotely with the stay-at-home mandates. >> I think that's right. And listen, let me talk a little bit of one of the things you talked about. Which is financing and we moved a lot of our business to increasingly, to the cloud. And SaaS and subscription services are a lot more radical than offer license and maintenance. We make that choice available to customers, in many cases we lead with cloud-first solutions. And then we also have financing services from our partners like Dell financial services that really allow a more gradual, radibal payment. Do people want financing? And , I think if there are other scenarios. Jim asked me on his show, "What will you do if one of your companies go bankrupt?" I don't know, that's an unprecedented, we didn't have, we had obviously, the financial crisis. I wasn't here at VMware during the dot-com blow up where companies just went bankrupt in 2000. I was at Informatica at the time. So, I'm sure we will see some unprecedented-- but I will tell you, we have a very fortunate to be profitable, have a good balance sheet. Whatever scenario, if we take care of our customers, I mean, we have been very fortunate to be one of the highest NPS, Net promoter scorer, companies in the industry. And , I've been reaching out to many of our top customers. Just a courtesy, without any agenda other than, we're just checking in. A friend in need is a friend indeed. It's a line that I remembered. And just reach out your customers. Hey listen. Checking in. No, other than can we help you, if there's anything and thank you, especially for ones who are retailers, pharmacies, hospitals, first responders. Thank them for what they're doing to serve many of their people. Especially people in retail. Think about the people who have to go into warehouses to service us, to deliver the stuff that comes to our home. I mean, these people are potentially at risk, but they do it. Put on masks. Braving health situations. That often need the paycheck. We're very grateful for that, and our hope is that this world situation, listen, I mentioned it on on TV as a kind of a little bit of a traffic jam. I love to ski and when I go off and to Tahoe, I tell my family, "I don't know how long it's going to take." with check up on Waze or Google Maps and usually takes four hours, no traffic. Every now and then it'll take five, six, seven. Worst case eight. I had some situation, never happen to me but some of my friends would just got stuck there and had to sleep in their car. But it's pretty much the case, you will eventually get there. I was talking to my dad, who is 80, and he's doing well. And he said, this feels a little bit like World War Two because you're kind of, in many places there. They had a bunker, shelter. Not just shelter in place, but bunker shelter in that time. But that lasted, whatever five, six years. I don't think this is going to last five, six years. It may be five, six months. It might be a whole year. I don't know. I can guarantee it's not going to be six years. So it won't be as bad as World War two. It certainly won't be as bad as the Spanish Flu. Which took 39 people and two percent of the world. Including five percent of my country, India in the 1918 to 1920 period, a hundred years ago. So we will get through this. I like, we shall overcome. I'm not going to sing it for you. It's one of my favorite Louis Armstrong songs, but find ways by which you encourage, uplift people. Making sure, it is tough, it is very tough times and we have to make sure that we get through this. That jobs are preserved as best as we can because that's the part I'm really, really concerned about. The loss of jobs and how we're going to recover as US economy, but we will make it through this. >> Yeah, and I want to sort of second what you're saying. That look, I know there are a lot of people at home that going a little bit stir crazy and this, the maybe a little bit of depression setting in. But to your point, we have to be empathic for those that are suffering. The elderly, who are in intensive care and also those frontline workers. And then I love your optimism. We will get through this. This is not the Spanish Flu. We have, it's a different world, a different technology world. Our focus, like many other small businesses is, we obviously want to survive. We want to maintain our full employment. We want to serve our customers and we, as you, believe that that is the recipe for getting through this. And so, I love the optimism. >> And listen, and we can help be a part of my the moment you texted me and said, "Hey, can I be in your show?" If it helps you drive, whatever you need, sponsorship revenue, advertising. I'm here and the same thing for all of our friends who have to adjust the way in which the wo-- we want to be there to help them. And I've chosen as best as I can, in terms of how I can support my family, the sort of five, five of us at home now. All fighting over bandwidth, the three kids, and my wife, and I. To be positive with them, to be in my social media presence, as best as possible. Every day to be positive in what I tweet out to the world And point people to a hope of what's going to come. I don't know how long this is going to last. But I can tell you. I mean, just the fact that you and I are talking over video interview. High fidelity, reasonably high fidelity, high bandwidth. The ability to connect. I mean it is a whole lot better than a lot of what happened in World War 2 or the Spanish flu. And I hope at the end of it, some of us, some of this will forever change our life. I hope for for example in a lot of our profession. We have to travel to visit customers. And now that I'm building some of these relationships virtually. I hope that maybe my travel percentage will drop. It's actually good for the environment, good for my family life. But if we can lower that percentage, still get things done through Zoom calls, and Workspace ONE, and things of those kinds, that would be awesome. So that's how I think about the way in which I'm adapting my life. And then I set certain personal goals. This year, for example, we're expanding a lot of our focus in security. We have a billion dollar security business and we're looking to grow that NSX, Common Black, Workspace ONE, and accompanying tools and I made it a goal to try and meet at all my sales teams. A thousand C-ISOs. I mean off I know a lot of CIO's in the 25 years, I've had, maybe five, six thousand of them in the world. And blessed to build that relationship over the years of my SAP and VMware experience, but I don't know. I mean, I knew probably 50 or 100. Maybe a few hundred CISO's. And now that we have a portfolio it's relevant to grant them and I think very compelling across network security and End Point security. We own the companies with such a strong portfolio in both those areas. I'm reaching out to them and I'm happy to tell you, I connected, I've got the names of 1,000 of the top CISO's in the Fortune 1000, Global 2000, and connecting with many of them through LinkedIn and other mixers. I hope I talked to many of them through the course of the year. And many of them will be virtual conversations. Again, just to talk to them about being a trusted advisor to us. Seeing if we can help them. And then of course, there will be a product pitch for NSX and Carbon Black and how we're different from whoever it is, Palo Alto and F5 and Netscaler and the SD line players or semantic McAfee Crowdstrike. We're differentiated so I want to certainly earn some of the business. But these are ways in which you adjust to a virtual kind of economy. Where I'm not having to physically go and meet them. >> Yeah, and we share your optimism and those CISO's are, they're heroes, superheroes on the front line. I'll tell ya a quick aside. So John Furrier and I, we're in Barcelona. When really, the coronavirus came to our heightened awareness and John looked at me and said, "Dave we've been doing digital for 10 years. "We have to take all of the software that we've developed, "all these assets and help our customers pivot." So we share that optimism and we're actually lucky to be able to have the studios and be able to have these conversations with you guys. So again, we share that, that optimism. I want to ask you, just on guidance. A lot of companies have come out and said we're not giving guidance anymore. I didn't see anything relative to VMware. Have you guys announced anything on guidance in terms of how you're going to communicate? Where are you at with that? >> No, I think we're just, I mean listen, we take this very carefully because of reg FD and the regulations of public company. So we just allow the normal quarterly ins. And of outside of that, if our CFO decides they may. But right now we're just continuing business as usual. We're in the middle of our, kind of, whatever, middle of our quarter. Quarter ends April. So work hard do the best we can in all the regions, be available for all of our teams. Pat, myself, and others we're, to the extent that we're healthy and we're doing well, but thank God, is reach out to CISO's and CIO's and CTO's and CEOs and help them. And I believe people will spend money. The questions we have to go over. And I think the stronger will survive. The companies with better balance sheet and unfortunately, some of the weaker companies won't. And I think quite frankly, if you do your job well. I don't mean this in any negative sense. The stronger companies will take share in these environments. I was watching a segment for John Chambers. He has been through a number of different, when I know him, so an I have, I've talked to him about some of the stuff. He will tell you that he, advises is a lot of his companies now. From the experiences he saw in 2008, 2001, in many of the crisis and supply chain issues. This is a time where leadership counts. The strong get stronger. Never waste a good crisis, as Winston Churchill said. And as you do that, the strong will come strong because you figure out ways by which, if you're going to make changes that were planned for one or two years from now. Maybe a good time to make them is now. And as you do that you communicate a vision for where you're going. Very clearly to your employees. Again incessantly over and over again. They, hopefully, are able to repeat it in their own words in a simple fashion, and then you get all of your employees in our case 30,000 plus employees of VMware lined up. So one of the things that we've been doing a lot of these days is communicate, communicate, communicate, internally. I've talked a lot about our communication with customer. But inside, our employees, we do calls with our top leaders over Zoom. Calls, intimate calls, and many, often we're adjusting to where I'll say a few words. I have a mandatory every two week goal with all of my senior most leaders. I'll speak for about five minutes and then for the next 25 minutes, the top 12, 15 of them I listen. To things, I want all of them to speak up. There's nobody who should stay silent, because I want to hear what's going on in that corner of the world. >> But fantastic Sanjay. Well, I mean, Boeing, I heard this morning's going to get some support from the government. And strategically that's very important for our country. Congress finally passed, looks like they're passing that bill, and support which is awesome. It's been, especially for all these small businesses that are struggling and want to maintain full employment. I heard Steve Mnuchin the other day saying, "Look, we're talking about two months of payroll "for people if they agree to keep people employed. "or hire them back." I mean the Fed. people say, oh the FED is out of arrows. The Feds, not out of arrows. I mean, I'm not an economist either. But the Fed. has a lot of bullets in their gun, as they say. So Sanjay, thanks so much. You're an awesome leader and really an inspirational executive and a good friend so thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, always a pleasure. Please say hi to all of my friends, your co-anchors, and the staff at CUBE. Thank them for all their hard work. It's a pleasure to talk to you this morning. I wish you, your family, and your friends and all of our community, stay safe and be well. >> Thank you Sanjay and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the cube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also in the house. We're doing about three and a half days, wall-to-wall coverage. The surface area that we are covering here is rather broad and I use that term, my guest is laughing, Vikas Butaney, who is the Vice President of IoT, of course. Extending the network to the edge, to the devices, and beyond with Cisco. Thank you so much for joining us. >> It's great to be here. >> All right, the IoT thing. I've worked with Cisco my entire career, I've watched through the fog computing era for a couple of years. Edge of course, one of the hottest conversations, something that I bought up in many of the conversations, the across the portfolio but Liz Centoni was up on the main stage for the day one keynote talking a lot about IoT and IT and OT and your customers of the like. So let's start there, what's new, and how does IoT fit into the overall Cisco Story? >> Absolutely. So as Liz was on the main stage and David talked about the cross domain and multi-domain architecture; Now, IoT and our operational environment is one of the key domains within that environment. And what Liz announce yesterday are two pieces of news that we are releasing at Cisco Live. First of them is an IoT security architecture which ties together the capabilities with cyber vision and then integrates it within the rest of our IT security portfolio and the second part that I'm also excited to talk about is Edge Intelligence. It's about how we are helping our customers extract the data at the edge, then deploy and move it to wherever the applications are in the multicloud environment. >> You know, we definitely want to dig into those pieces, but IoT is such a diverse solution set so it's often helpful to talk about specific industries, any customer examples so what can you share with us there to help illuminate where Cisco's helping the customers love the security angles and edge? >> That's right. Just a level set, when we think about industrial IoT we're really talking about the heavier industries, plant environments for a manufacturing company. We're thinking about roadways for a public sector customer. We're thinking the grid for utility environments. We're thinking refineries and oil extraction upstream environments, right. So this is the kind of spectrum in which we are working in, where customers have real businesses, real assets where the operations is the heart of the enterprise that they are running. And the technology can really be a revolutionary change for them to help them connect and then extract the data and then make sense of the data to improve their business practice so industrial IoT, whether you're a roadway in Austria like Asfinag, you're a utility in Germany like NRG, or EDF in France as an example. Enel in turn in Italy, all of these industries and all of these customers are using industrial IoT technologies in running their businesses better today. >> Where are we in terms of that critical infrastructure being both connected and instrumented? Where are we on the adoption curve? >> Sure, look and many of these industries we have talked about SCADA systems, right, that have been here for thirty plus years for our customers and most of those is really a one-way flow of information, right. And typically customers stood up separate side load networks which weren't really connected to the rest of the enterprise so, Rockwell has a saying from the shop floor to the top floor, right like how the digital enterprise where all of these environments are coming together is where customers are. Critical infrastructure, as you said, in this day and age with security and other kind of threats, customers are a little hesitant about how they connect it all together. But Cisco is working with these customers and helping them think through the benefits they can get but also make sure, from a cyber security point of view, that you're helping protect assets, manage these environments because you can't just arbitrarily connect them because IT tool sets just are not ready to manage these environments. >> I love that all the examples you gave were European, of course, being here in Europe. I'm curious, there's some technologies where North America might take the lead or Asia might take the lead. Is IoT relatively distributed? Is Europe kind of on-par or with the rest of the world when it comes to general adoption? >> What we have found in Europe, because of many countries like Germany leading in the renewable energy effort, and the climate is a big focus here. Data privacy and concerns around data sharing are much more top-of-mind in Europe, so we find those kind of use cases getting adopted much much faster. In Germany, as an example, NRG which is one of our customers, and they were here with us last year at Cisco live and we launched a capability with them. They are trying to manage the real time flow of energy in their grid environment, such that make sure there are no outages, no brownouts in these environments. So utilities and customers like that across Europe are adopting technology faster. Manufacturing, as always, is a leading use case. There we see some of the automotives in US are leading a little bit more in getting environments connected to their environment but overall, IoT is a global market. We work, we have over 70,000 enterprise IoT customers today at Cisco so we are fortunate to be able to serve these customers on a global basis across the range of industries I talked about earlier. >> In a lot of respects too, I would say the US is behind, right, when you look at public policy from a federal standpoint, the US doesn't really have a digital strategy from an overall perspective whereas certainly India does and countries in Europe. You look at the railway systems in Europe. >> Vikas: Much more advanced, yeah. >> Beautiful and shiny and advanced. So I would say the US has a little bit of work to do here, in my perspective. >> That's right, in India Prime Minister Modi started the effort around One Hundred Smart Cities, right, and Cisco is working with many of those smart cities with our Cisco Kinetic for Cities to kind of create, connect all of the sensor networks. Video surveillance, safety, environmental sensors, managing the flow of that data and digitizing those environments, right, and in Europe we've been working in France, Germany, Italy, UK. I think we are seeing much more adoption in these specific industries but it's a global market and again, like I said, 70,000 customers, we get to see quite a bit of the landscape around the globe. >> What should we know about the architecture? Can you give us kind of a high-level summary? What are the basics? >> Sure, so in the comprehensive IoT security architecture we released this week, it really starts with, you have to be able to identify the devices, right. In IT environments, you know, to your laptop and to your PC, they have been managed by MDM technologies for years but in the industrial environment I might have a programmable logic controller that I deployed 15 years ago. It's not ready for modern capabilities so what you really have to start with is identifying all of these assets in the communication baselines that are happening there, that's step one. Step number two is really, now that I know that this is a PLC or that's a controller, I need to come up with a policy, a security policy which says this cell in a plant environment can only talk to the other cell but doesn't need to talk to a paint zone. So I'll give you an example in automotive, if I'm welding a car, I'm building a car, the welding robots need to be communicating with each other. There's no real reason that the welding robot needs to talk to the paint shop, as an example. So you can come up with a set of policies like that to keep these environments separate because if you don't, then if there is one infection, one malware, one security, then it just traverses your whole factory. And we know customers in Europe that their networks have gone down and they've impacted 150 to 200 million dollars of downtime impact. >> Well we had a real world use case 10 years ago or so with Stuxnet with Siemens PLC and boom it went all over the world, I mean it was amazing. >> Exactly right, so again back to identification then I create the policy, then I implement the policy within our switching or a firewall network but you're never done so you have to keep monitoring on a real time basis as the landscape changes. What's happening, how do I keep up with it? And that's where things like anomaly detection are super important, right, so those are the four steps off the architecture that I want to talk about. >> So it sounds like something like cyber security is both a threat and an opportunity of bringing together IT and OT. Bring us inside a little bit those dynamics, we know it's one of the bigger challenges in the IoT space. >> Yeah, I mean I think, look, both parties whether I'm an operational person or an IT person, both of us, both audiences have their own care-abouts. If I'm a plant manager, I'm measured on number of units I'm producing, the quality, the reliability of my products. If I'm in IT I really am measured on downtime of the network or the cyber security threat. There aren't really common measurable capabilities but cyber and security, it kind of brings both the parties together. So when we use our cyber vision product, we're able to provide to that plant manager visibility to what's happening, how are their PLC's performing, did anybody change my program, is my recipe for my given product I'm making secure and safe? So you have to appeal to the operational user with what they care about. IT really cares about to manage the threat surface, don't let that threat kind of propigate. Now at the board level because the board sees both sides of it, they're asking these teams to work together because they have a complimentary skill set. >> Well I think that's critical because, rhetorical question, who's bigger control freaks? Network engineers or operation technology engineers? They both, you know, keep that operation going and are very protective of their infrastructure. So it's got to come from top down and it is a board level discussion, right? >> Yeah that's right, we have customers where, you know, the board, the CEO has mandated to say listen, whether it's for the national threat actors or other corporate espionage, I need to protect the corporate intellectual property. Because it's not just a process, it's also about safety of employees and safety of their assets that comes into play, right. So when some of the customers we're working with, where the CEO has kind of dictated that the IT teams help the operational environments, but it is a two-way street, like, there has to be value for both parties to come together to solve these challenges. >> Okay so we talked a little bit about the threat, also when we're talking IoT, there's all that data involved. What's the opportunity there for customers with data, how's Cisco involved? >> Absolutely, look, I think one of the reasons customers are doing digitization projects is because they're trying to use the data to make better business decisions. It has to improve, yield, and meet their KPI's of their industry. So far what we have seen is that all of the data is really trapped in all of these distributed environments. Gartner tells you that 75% of the data will be produced at the IoT edge. But our customers to date have not had the tool set to be able to get access to the data, cleanse the data at the edge of the network, bring the right data that they can create insights with, and improve their businesses so it's been a heterogeneous environment, lots of protocols, lots of legacy, so that's kind of what our customers are struggling with today. >> Yeah, absolutely and most of that data is going to stay at the edge so I need to be able to process the edge. Heck I even went to a conference last year, talked about satellites that are collecting all of the data, I need to be able to have the storage, the processing, the compute there because I can't send all of the data back, as fast as it is. So it's a changing architecture as to where I collect data, where I process data. We think it is very much additive to traditional cloud and data center environments today, it's just yet another challenge that enterprises need to deal with. >> That's right, so the work that Cisco is doing in the IoT edge environment is we are enabling these customers to connect their remote terminal units, their machines, and their robots and providing them the tool set with four capabilities. First, extract the data. So we have a set of protocols like Modbus, like OPC UA where they can extract the data from their machine so that's step number one. Second is to transform the data, as you said, over an LTE circuit or over a connection, I'm not going to be able to send all of the data back so how do I transform the circuit, transform the data where I maybe take an average over the last five minutes or I kind of put some functions, and we are providing, as we are in the Devnet zone, we are providing developers the capability such that they can use visual studio, they can use Javascript to write logic that can run right at the edge of the network so now you have extracted the data, you have transformed the data. Governance is a key topic, who should have access to my data, especially here in Europe where we're concerned about privacy, we're concerned about data governance. We are enabling our customers to come up with the right logic by which if there's a machine data and you are the supplier, I'm only going to give you the data, the temperature, the vibration, the pressure that you need to support the machine, but I'm not going to give you the number of units I produce. I'm not going to give you the data about my intellectual property. And then you have to integrate to where the data is going, right. So what we're doing is we are working with the public cloud providers, we are working with software ISVs, and we are giving them the integration capability and the benefit of this for the customer is we have done pre-integration on the extraction part and we have done pre-integrations on the delivery part, which allows the projects to go faster and they can deliver their IoT efforts. >> So how do you envision the compute model at the edge, I mean, probably not going to throw a zillion cores so maybe lighter weight components, and I have some follow up on that as well. >> Sure, absolutely. Look, Moore's law is a friend of ours here, right, like with every cycle, every generation of CPU technology, you get more and more compute capabilities. So the IoT gateways that we provide to our customers today have four ARM cores in them. We are using a couple, two of those ARM cores for the networking function but those cores are available for our customers. We have designed an extra memory for them to be able to process these applications and we give them SSD and some storage at that so we can provide up to sixty gigs or one hundred gigs of storage so now that gateway, that communication device, a router, a switch that's at the edge of the network can kind of do a dual purpose. It can not only process and provide you security for the communications but is now an edge processing node so we call them IoT gateways and I can tell you, we are deploying these kind of products on buses. You know, in a mass transit bus, we all ride these buses, there are over six systems that are on that bus. A video surveillance system, I'm going to monitor the tire pressure, I want to monitor if the driver is going over the speed limit. We have now connected all of these systems and we are running logic at the edge such that the riders have a safer experience and then they can get real time visibility to where the bus is as well. >> Yeah and my follow up was on persisting, so you mentioned storage, you know, flash storage at the edge and then you also referred to earlier the challenges this data today is locked in silos or maybe it's not even persisted, it's analog data sometimes. So do you envision, if you think about successful digital companies, kind of born digital, data's at the core and traditionally big manufacturing firms, large infrastructure, the manufacturing plant is the center of the universe and data sort of sits around it. Do you envision a period where that data is somehow virtualized and we have access to it, we could really build digital businesses around that data, what are your thoughts? >> Absolutely. So we have been working with a customer, it's a steel manufacturer in Austria, the heartland of Europe as an example. And they make high quality steel, right, and when they're building the high quality steel, they have two hundred different machine types and like you're saying, the data is trapped in there. This customer is trying to digitize and trying to do that but they have been struggling for the last two years or so to be able to get the data because it's a variety of machines and they want to use our IoT services but they haven't been able to pipeline the data all the way to their cloud environments so that was one of our lighthouse customers and we worked with them like, you know, roll up your sleeves and kind of designed the system with them. And we worked to get that data such that now, they're not quite a born-digital company but they are a hard manufacturing company, they can get the best of the tool sets and analytics and all of the things that contemporary tech companies use and they can bridge them into this digital environment. >> Yeah and this is how the incumbents can compete with the sort of digital natives, right I mean it's an equilibrium that occurs. >> That's right, I mean look we love the digital companies but they're not really, they don't have physical assets there or out there working. They're working in a more physical or more of the real economy whether if you are an oil company and you're getting, extracting oil from a pumpjack, right, well you need to still have the capability to do that better. So that's what we're doing, whether you're a transportation, like the bus example I gave you, an oil and gas company whose trying to extract oil from the ground or you are a manufacturer or you're a utility, if we improve use of our digital technologies and operate, improve the efficiency of the business, a 0.1%, a 1%, that has got a much much bigger implication for us as a society and the world at large. But just making them better and more efficient. >> Huge productivity gains. >> Exactly right, that's right, right. >> Massive, yeah. >> So I think that technology and IoT technologies can benefit all of these industries and you know Cisco is kind of invested and kind of helping our 70,000 customers to get better with all of these capabilities. >> Awesome, congratulations. 70,000 customers, big number, rolling out IoT solutions. Look forward to keeping track of Cisco's IoT solutions. >> Super excited to be here, thanks again. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more wall-to-wall coverage here at Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering "Welcome To The New Edge." Brought to you by Pensando Systems. >> Hey, welcome back here ready. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan, I think it's 43 floors, for a really special event. It's the Pensando launch. It's really called welcome to the new edge and we talked about technology. We had some of the founders on but, these type of opportunities are really special to talk to some really senior leaders and we're excited to have John Chambers back on, who as you know, historic CEO of Cisco for many, many years. Has left that, is doing his own ventures he's writing books, he's investing and he's, happens to be chairman of the board of Pensando. So John, thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Well, more than a few minutes, I think what we talked about today is a major industry change and so to focus on that and focus about the implications will be a lot of fun. >> So let's jump into it. So, one of the things you led with earlier today was kind of these 10 year cycles and they're not exactly 10 years, but you outlined a series of them from mainframe, mini client server everybody knows kind of the sequence. What do you think it is about the 10 year kind of cycle besides the fact that it's easy and convenient for us to remember, that, kind of paces these big disruptions? >> Well, I think it has to do with once a company takes off they tend to, dominate that segment of the industry for so long that even if a creative idea came up they were just overpowering. And then toward the end of a 10 year cycle they quit reinventing themselves. And we talked earlier about the innovator's dilemma and the implications for it. Or an architecture that was designed that suddenly can't go to the next level. So I think it's probably a combination of three or four different factors, including the original incumbent who broke the glass, disrupted others, not disrupting themselves. >> Right, but you also talked about a story where you had to shift focus based on some customer feedback and you ran Cisco for a lot longer than 10 years. So how do you as a leader kind of keep your ears open to something that's a disruptive change that's not your regular best customer and your regular best salesman asking for a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit of more the same versus the significant disruptive transformational shift? >> Well this goes back to one of my most basic views in life is I think we learn more from our setbacks or setbacks we were part of, or even the missteps or mistakes than you ever do your successes. Everybody loves to talk about successes and I'm no different there. But when you watched a great state like West Virginia that was the chemical center of the world and the coal mining center of the world, the 125,000 coal mines, six miners very well paid, 6,000 of the top engineers in the world, it was the Silicon Valley of the chemical industry and those just disappear. And because our state did not reinvent itself, because the education system didn't change, because we didn't distract attract a new set of businesses in we just kept doing the right thing too long, we got left behind. Then I went to Boston, it was the Silicon Valley of the world. And Route 128 around Boston was symbolic with the Silicon Valley and I-101 and 280 around it. And we had the top university at that time. Much like Stanford today, but MIT generating new companies. We had great companies, DEC, Wang, Data General. Probably a million jobs in the area and because we got stuck in a segment of the market, quit listening to our customers and missed the transitions, not only did we lose probably 1.2 million jobs on it, 100,000 out of DEC, 32,000 out of Wang, etc, we did not catch the next generation of technology changes. So I understand the implications if you don't disrupt yourself. But I also learned, that if you're not regularly reinventing yourself, you get left behind as a leader. And one of my toughest competitors came up to me and said, "John, I love the way you're reinventing Cisco "and how you've done that multiple times." And then I turned and I said "That's why a CEO has got to be in the job "for more than four or five years" and he said, "Now we disagree again." Which we usually did and he said, "Most people can't reinvent themselves." And he said "I'm an example." "I'm a pretty good CEO" he's actually a very good CEO, but he said, "After I've been there three or four years "I've made the changes, that I know "I've got to go somewhere else." And he could see I didn't buy-in and then he said, "How many of your top 100 people "you've been happy with once they've been "in the job for more than five years?" I hesitated and I said "Only one." And he's right, you've got to move people around, you've got to get people comfortable with disruption on it and, the hardest one to disrupt are the companies or the leaders who've been most successful and yet, that's when you got to think about disruption. >> Right, so to pivot on that a little bit in terms of kind of the government's role in jobs, specifically. >> Yes. >> We're in this really strange period of time. We have record low unemployment, right, tiny, tiny unemployment, and yet, we see automation coming in aggressively with autonomous vehicles and this and that and just to pick truck drivers as a category, everyone can clearly see that autonomous vehicles are going to knock them out in the not too distant future. That said, there's more demand for truck drivers today than there's every been and they can't fill the positions So, with this weird thing where we're going to have a bunch of new jobs that are created by technology, we're going to have a bunch of old jobs that get displaced by technology, but those people aren't necessarily the same people that can leave the one and go to the other. So as you look at that challenge, and I know you work with a lot of government leaders, how should they be thinking about taking on this challenge? >> Well, I think you've got to take it on very squarely and let's use the U.S. as an example and then I'll parallel what France is doing and what India is doing that is actually much more creative that what we are, from countries you wouldn't have anticipated. In the U.S. we know that 50% of the Fortune 500 will probably not exist in 10 years, 12 at the most. We know that the large companies will not incrementally hire people over this next decade and they've often been one of the best sources of hiring because of AI and automation will change that. So, it's not just a question of being schooled in one area and move to another, those jobs will disappear within the companies. If we don't have new jobs in startups and if we don't have the startups running at about three to four times the current volumes, we've got a real problem looking out five to 10 years. And the startups where everyone thinks we're doing a good job, the app user, third to a half of what they were two decades ago. And so if you need 25 million jobs over this next decade and your startups are at a level more like they were in the 90s, that's going to be a challenge. And so I think we've got to think from the government perspective of how we become a startup nation again, how we think about long-term job creation, how we think about job creation not taking money out of one pocket and give it to another. People want a real job, they want to have a meaningful job. We got to change our K through 12 education system which is broken, we've got to change our university system to generate the jobs for where people are going and then we've got to retrain people. That is very doable, if you got at it with a total plan and approach it from a scale perspective. That was lacking. And one of the disappointing things in the debate last night, and while I'm a republican I really want who's going to really lead us well both at the presidential level, but also within the senate, the house. Is, there was a complete lack of any vision on what the country should look like 10 years from now, and how we're going to create 25 million jobs and how we're going to create 10 million more that are going to be displaced and how we're going to re-educate people for it. It was a lot of finger pointing and transactional, but no overall plan. Modi did the reverse in India, and actually Macron, in all places, in France. Where they looked at GDP growth, job creation, startups, education changes, etc, and they executed to an overall approach. So, I'm looking for our government really to change the approach and to really say how are we going to generate jobs and how are we going to deal with the issues that are coming at us. It's a combination of all the the above. >> Yep. Let's shift gears a little bit about the education system and you're very involved and you talked about MIT. Obviously, I think Stanford and Cal are such big drivers of innovation in the Bay area because smart people go there and they don't leave. And then there's a lot of good buzz now happening in Atlanta as an investment really piggy-backing on Georgia Tech, which also creates a lot of great engineers. As you look at education, I don't want to go through K through 12, but more higher education, how do you see that evolving in today's world? It's super expensive, there's tremendous debt for the kids coming out, it doesn't necessarily train them for the new jobs. >> Where the jobs are. >> How do you see, kind of the role of higher education and that evolving into kind of this new world in which we're headed? >> Well, the good news and bad news about when I look at successful startups around the world, they're always centered around a innovative university and it isn't just about the raw horse power of the kids, It starts with the CEO of the university, the president of the university, their curriculum, their entrepreneurial approach, do they knock down the barriers across the various groups from engineering to business to law, etc? And are they thinking out of box? And if you watch, there is a huge missing piece between, Georgia Tech more of an exception, but still not running at the level they need to. And the Northeast around Boston and New York and Silicon Valley, The rest of the country's being left behind. So I'm looking for universities to completely redo their curriculum. I'm looking for it really breaking down the silos within the groups and focus on the outcomes. And much like Steve Case has done a very good job on focusing, about the Rust Belt and how do you do startups? I'm going to learn from what I saw in France at Polytechnique and the ITs in India, and what occurred in Stanford and MIT used to occur is, you've got to get the universities to be the core and that's where they kids want to stay close to, and we've got to generate a whole different curriculum, if you will, in the universities, including, continuous learning for their graduates, to be able to come back virtually and say how do I learn about re-skilling myself? >> Yeah. >> The current model is just not >> the right model >> It's broken. >> For the, for going forward. >> K through 12 is >> hopelessly broken >> Yeah. >> and the universities, while were still better than anywhere else in the world, we're still teaching, and some of the teachers and some of the books are what I could have used in college. >> Right, right >> So, we got to rethink the whole curriculum >> darn papers on the inside >> disrupt, disrupt >> So, shifting gears a little bit, you, played with lots of companies in your CEO role you guys did a ton of M&A, you're very famous for the successful M&A that you did over a number of years, but in an investor role, J2 now, you're looking at a more early stage. And you said you made a number of investments which is exciting. So, as you evaluate opportunities A. In teams that come to pitch to you >> Yeah. >> B. What are the key things you look for? >> In the sequence you've raised them, first in my prior world, I was really happy to do 180 acquisitions, in my current world, I'm reversed, I want them to go IPO. Because you add 76% of your headcount after an IPO, or after you've become a unicorn. When companies are bought, including what I bought in my prior role, their headcount growth is pretty well done. We'd add engineers after that, but would blow them through our sales channel, services, finance, etc. So, I want to see many more of these companies go public, and this goes back to national agenda about getting IPO's, not back to where they were during the 90's when it was almost two to three times, what you've seen over the last decade. But probably double, even that number the 90's, to generate the jobs we want. So, I'm very interested now about companies going public in direction. To the second part of your question, on what do I look for in startups and why, if I can bridge it, to am I so faired up about Pensando? If I look for my startups and, it's like I do acquisitions, I develop a playbook, I run that playbook faster and faster, it's how I do digitization of countries, etc. And so for a area I'm going to invest in and bet on, first thing I look at, is their market, technology transition, and business model transition occurring at the same time. That was Amazon of 15 years ago as an example. The second thing I look at, is the CEO and ideally, the whole founding team but it's usually just the CEO. The third thing I look for, is what are the customers really say about them? There's only one Steve Jobs, and it took him seven years. So, I go to the customers and say "What do you really think of this company?" Fourth thing I look for, is how close to an inflection point are they. The fifth thing I look for, is what they have in their ecosystem. Are they partnering? Things of that type. So, if I were to look at Pensando, Which is really the topic about can they bring to the market the new edge in a way that will be a market leading force for a whole decade? Through a ecosystem of partners that will change business dramatically and perhaps become the next major tech icon. It's how well you do that. Their vision in terms of market transitions, and business transitions 100% right. We've talked about it, 5G, IOT, internet of things, going from 15 billion devices to 500 billion devices in probably seven years. And, with the movement to the edge the business models will also change. And this is where, democratization, the cloud, and people able to share that power, where every technology company becomes a business becomes a, every business company becomes a technology company. >> Right. >> The other thing I look at is, the team. This is a team of six people, myself being a part of it, that thinks like one. That is so unusual, If you're lucky, you get a CEO and maybe a founder, a co-founder. This team, you've got six people who've worked together for over 20 years who think alike. The customers, you heard the discussions today. >> Right. >> And we've not talked to a single cloud player, a single enterprise company, a single insurance provider, or major technology company who doesn't say "This is very unique, let's talk about "how we work together on it." The inflection point, it's now you saw that today. >> Nobody told them it's young mans game obviously, they got the twenty-something mixed up >> No, actually were redefining (laughs) twenty-something, (laughs) but it does say, age is more perspective on how you think. >> Right, right. >> And Shimone Peres, who, passed away unfortunately, two years ago, was a very good friend. He basically said "You've got all your life "to think like a teenager, "and to really think and dream out of box." And he did it remarkably well. So, I think leaders, whether their twenty-something, or twenty-some years of experience working you've got to think that way. >> Right. So I'm curious, your take on how this has evolved, because, there was data and there was compute. And networking brought those two thing together, and you were at the heart of that. >> Mm-hmm. Now, it's getting so much more complex with edge, to get your take on edge. But, also more importantly exponential growth. You've talked about going from, how ever many millions the devices that were connected, to the billions of devices that are connected now. How do you stay? How do you help yourself think along exponential curves? Because that is not easy, and it's not human. But you have to, if you're going to try to get ahead of that next wave. >> Completely agree. And this is not just for me, how do I do it? I'm sharing it more that other people can learn and think about it perhaps the same way. The first thing is, it's always good to think of the positive, You can change the world here, the positive things, But I've also seen the negatives we talked about earlier. If you don't think that way, if you don't think that way as a leader of your company, leader of your country, or the leader of a venture group you're going to get left behind. The implications for it are really bad. The second is, you've got to say how do you catch and get a replicable playbook? The neat thing about what were talking about, whether it's by country in France, or India or the U.S., we've got replicable playbooks we know what to run. The third element is, you've got to have the courage to get outside your comfort zone. And I love change when it happens to you, I don't like it when it happens to me And I know that, So, I've got to get people around me who push me outside my comfort zone on that. And then, you've got to be able to dream and think like that teenager we talked about before. But that's what we were just with a group of customers, who were at this event. And they were asking "How do we get "this innovation into our company?" "How do we get the ability to innovate, through not just strategic partnerships with other large companies or partnerships with startups?" But "How do we build that internally?" It's comes down to the leader has to create that image and that approach. Modi's done it for 1.3 billion people in India. A vision, of the future on GDP growth. A digital country, startups, etc. If they can do it for 1.3 billion, tell me why the U.S. can not do it? (laughs) And why even small states here, can't do it. >> Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, >> All right. >> A lot of black eyes in Silicon Valley right now, a lot of negativity going on, a lot of problems with privacy and trading data for currency and, it's been a rough road. You're way into tech for good and as you said, you can use technology for good you can use technology for bad. What are some things you're doing on the tech for good side? Because I don't think it gets the spotlight that it probably should, because it doesn't sell papers. >> Well, actually the press has been pretty good we just need to do it more on scale. Going back to Cisco days, we never had any major issues with governments. Even though there was a Snowden issue, there were a lot of implications about the power of the internet. Because we work with governments and citizens to say "What are the legitimate needs so that everybody benefits from this?" And where the things that we might have considered doing that, governments felt strongly about or the citizens wouldn't prosper from we just didn't do it. And we work with democrats and republicans alike and 90% of our nation believed tech was for good. But we worked hard on that. And today, I think you got to have more companies doing this and then, what, were doing uniquely in JC2, is were literally partnering with France on tech is for good and I'm Macron's, global tech ambassador and we focus about job creation and inclusion. Not just in Paris, or around Station F but throughout all the various regions in the country. Same thing within India, across 26 different states with Modi on how do you drive it through? And then if we can do it in France or India why can't we do it in each state in the U.S.? Partnering with West Virginia, with a very creative, president of the university there West Virginia University. With the democrats and republicans in their national senate, but also within the governor and speaker of the house and the president and senate within West Virginia, and really saying were going to change it together. And getting a model that you can then cookie cut across the U.S. if you change the curriculum, to your earlier comments. If you begin to focus on outcomes, not being an expert in one area, which is liable not to have a job >> Right. >> Ten years later. So, I'm a dreamer within that, but I think you owe an obligation to giving back, and I think they're all within our grasps >> Right >> And I think you can do, the both together. I think at JC2 we can create a billion dollar company with less than 10 people. I think you can change the world and also make a very good profit. And I think technology companies have to get back to that, you got to create more jobs than you destroy. And you can't be destroying jobs, then telling other people how to live their lives and what their politics should be. >> Yeah. >> That just doesn't work in terms of the environment. >> Well John, again, thanks for your time. Give you the last word on >> Sure >> Account of what happened here today, I mean you're here, and Tony O'Neary was here or at the headquarters of Goldman. A flagship launch customer, for the people that weren't here today why should they be paying attention? >> Well, if we've got this market transition right, the technology and business model, the next transition will be everything goes to the edge. And as every company or every government, or every person has to be both good in their "Area of expertise." or their vertical their in, they've got to also be good in technology. What happened today was a leveling of the playing field as it relates to cloud. In terms of everyone should have choice, democratization there, but also in architecture that allows people to really change their business models, as everything moves to the edge where 75% of all transactions, all data will be had and it might even be higher than that. Secondly, you saw a historic first never has anybody ever emerged from stealth after only two and a half years of existing as a company, with this type of powerhouse behind them. And you saw the players where you have a customer, Goldman Sachs, in one of the most leading edge areas, of industry change which is obviously finance leading as the customer who's driven our direction from the very beginning. And a company like NetApp, that understood the implication on storage, from two and a half years ago and drove our direction from the very beginning. A company like HP Enterprise's, who understood this could go across their whole company in terms of the implications, and the unique opportunity to really change and focus on, how do they evolve their company to provide their customer experience in a very unique way? How do you really begin to think about Equinix in terms of how they changed entirely from a source matter prospective, what they have to do in terms of the direction and capabilities? And then Lightspeed, one of the most creative intra capital that really understands this transition saying "I want to be a part of this." Including being on the board and changing the world one more time. So, what happened today? If we're right, I think this was the beginning of a major inflection point as everything moves to the edge. And how ecosystem players, with Pensando at the heart of that ecosystem, can take on the giants but also really use this technology to give everybody choice, and how they really make a difference in the future. As well as, perhaps give back to society. >> Love it. Thank you John >> My pleasure, that was fun. >> Appreciate it. You're John, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back, everyone. He live in San Francisco. Here on Mosconi St for the cubes. Exclusive coverage of IBM. Think twenty nineteen. I'm Jeffrey David Long. Four days of coverage bringing on all the action talking. The top executives, entrepreneurs, ecosystem partners and everyone who can bring the signal from the noise here on the Q and excuses. Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Data and a I with an IBM Cube Alumni. Great to see you again. >> Great. There you go. >> You read a >> book yet? This year we've written ten books on a data. Your general manager. There's >> too much work. Not enough time >> for that's. Good sign. It means you're working hard. Okay. Give us give us the data here because a I anywhere in the center of the announcements we have a story up on. Slick earnings have been reported on CNBC. John Ford was here earlier talking to Ginny. This is a course centerpiece of it. Aye, aye. On any cloud. This highlights the data conversation you've been part of. Now, I think what seven years seems like more. But this is now happening. Give us your thoughts. >> Go back to basics. I've shared this with you before. There's no AI without IA, meaning you need an information architecture to support what you want to do in AI. We started looking into that. Our thesis became so clients are buying into that idea. The problem is their data is everywhere onpremise, private cloud, multiple public clouds. So our thesis became very simple. If we can bring AI to the data, it will make Watson the leading AI platform. So what we announced wtih Watson Anywhere is you could now have it wherever your data is public, private, any public cloud, build the models, run them where you want. I think it's gonna be amazing >> data everywhere and anywhere. So containers are big role in This is a little bit of a deb ops. The world you've been living in convergence of data cloud. How does that set for clients up? What are they need to know about this announcement? Was the impact of them if any >> way that we enable Multi Cloud and Watson anywhere is through IBM cloud private for data? That's our data Micro services architectural writing on Cooper Netease that gives you the portability so that it can run anywhere because, in addition Teo, I'd say, Aye, aye, ambitions. The other big client ambition is around how we modernize to cloud native architectures. Mohr compose herbal services, so the combination gets delivered. Is part of this. >> So this notion of you can't have a eye without a it's It's obviously a great tagline. You use it a lot, but it's super important because there's a gap between those who sort of have a I chops and those who don't. And if I understand what you're doing is you're closing that gap by allowing you to bring you call that a eye to the data is it's sort of a silo buster in regard. Er yeah, >> the model we use. I called the eye ladder. So they give it as all the levels of sophistication an organization needs to think about. From how you collect data, how you organize data, analyze data and then infused data with a I. That's kind of the model that we used to talk about. Talk to clients about that. What we're able to do here is same. You don't have to move your data. The biggest problem Modi projects is the first task is OK move a bunch of data that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of money. We say you don't need to do that. Leave your data wherever it is. With Cloud private for data, we can virtualized data from any source. That's kind of the ah ha moment people have when they see that. So we're making that piece really >> easy. What's the impact this year and IBM? Think to the part product portfolio. You You had data products in the past. Now you got a eye products. Any changes? How should people live in the latter schism? A kind of a rubric or a view of where they fit into it? But what's up with the products and he changes? People should know about? >> Well, we've brought together the analytics and I units and IBM into this new organization we call Dayton ay, ay, that's a reflection of us. Seen that as two sides of the same coin. I really couldn't really keep them separate. We've really simplified how we're going to market with the Watson products. It's about how you build run Manager II watching studio Watson Machine Learning Watson Open scale. That's for clients that want to build their own. Aye, aye. For clients that wants something out of the box. They want an application. We've got Watson assistant for customer service. Watson Discovery, Watson Health Outset. So we've made it really easy to consume Watson. Whether you want to build your own or you want an application designed for the line of business and then up and down the data, stack a bunch of different announcements. We're bringing out big sequel on Cloudera as part of our evolving partnership with the new Cloudera Horn Works entity. Virtual Data Pipeline is a partnership that we've built with active fio, so we're doing things at all layers of the last. >> You're simplifying the consumption from a client, your customer perspective. It's all data. It's all Watson's, the umbrella for brand for everything underneath that from a tizzy, right? >> Yeah, Watson is the Aye, aye, brand. It is a technology that's having an impact. We have amazing clients on stage with this this week talking about, Hey, Eyes No longer. I'd like to say I was not magic. It's no longer this mystical thing. We have clients that are getting real outcomes. Who they II today we've got Rollback of Scotland talking about how they've automated and augmented forty percent of their customer service with watching the system. So we've got great clients talking about other using >> I today. You seen any patterns, rob in terms of those customers you mentioned, some customers want to do their own. Aye, aye. Some customers wanted out of the box. What? The patterns that you're seeing in terms of who wants to do their own. Aye. Aye. Why do they want to do their own, eh? I do. They get some kind of competitive advantage. So they have additional skill sets that they need. >> It's a >> It's a maker's mark. It is how I would describe it. There's a lot of people that want to make their own and try their own. Ugh. I think most organizations, they're gonna end up with hundreds of different tools for building for running. This is why we introduced Watson Open Scale at the end of last year. That's How would you manage all of your A II environments? What did they come from? IBM or not? Because you got the and the organization has to have this manageable. Understandable, regardless of which tool they're using. I would say the biggest impact that we see is when we pick a customer problem. That is widespread, and the number one right now is customer service. Every organization, regardless of industry, wants to do a better job of serving clients. That's why Watson assistant is taking off >> this's. Where? Data The value of real time data. Historical data kind of horizontally. Scaleable data, not silo data. We've talked us in the past. How important is to date a quality piece of this? Because you have real time and you have a historical date and everything in between that you had to bring to bear at low ladened psi applications. Now we're gonna have data embedded in them as a feature. Right. How does this change? The workloads? The makeup of you? Major customer services? One piece, the low hanging fruit. I get that. But this is a key thing. The data architecture more than anything, isn't it? >> It is. Now remember, there's there's two rungs at the bottom of the ladder on data collection. We have to build a collect data in any form in any type. That's why you've seen us do relationships with Mongo. D B. Were they ship? Obviously with Claude Era? We've got her own data warehouse, so we integrate all of that through our sequel engine. That thing gets to your point around. Are you gonna organize the data? How are you going to curate it? We've got data catalogue. Every client will have a data catalogue for many dollar data across. Clouds were now doing automated metadata creation using a I and machine learning So the organization peace. Once you've collected it than the organization, peace become most important. Certainly, if you want to get to self service analytics, you want to make data available to data scientists around the organization. You have to have those governance pieces. >> Talk about the ecosystem. One of the things that's been impressive IBM of the years is your partnerships. You've done good partners. Partnership of relationships now in an ecosystem is a lot of building blocks. There's more complexity requires software to distract him away. We get that. What's opportunities for you to create new relationships? Where are the upper opportunities for someone a developer or accompanied to engage with you guys? Where's the white spaces? Where is someone? Take advantage of your momentum and you're you're a vision. >> I am dying for partners that air doing domain specific industry specific applications to come have them run on IBM cloud private for data, which unleashes all the data they need to be a valuable application. We've already got a few of those data mirrors. One sensing is another one that air running now as industry applications on top of IBM Club private for data. I'd like to have a thousand of these. So all comers there. We announced a partnership with Red Hat back in May. Eventually, that became more than just a partnership. But that was about enabling Cloud Private, for data on red had open shift, So we're partnered at all layers of the stack. But the greatest customer need is give me an industry solution, leveraging the best of my data. That's why I'm really looking for Eyes V. Partners to run on Ivan clubs. >> What's your pitch to those guys? Why, why I should be going. >> There is no other data platform that will connect to all your data sources, whether they're on eight of us as your Google Cloud on premise. So if you believe data is important to your application. There's simply no better place to run than IBM. Claude Private for data >> in terms of functionality, breath o r. Everything >> well, integrating with all your data. Normally they have to have the application in five different places. We integrate with all the data we build the data catalogue. So the data's organized. So the ingestion of the data becomes very easy for the Iast V. And by the way, thirdly, IBM has got a pretty good reach. Globally, one hundred seventy countries, business partners, resellers all over the world, sales people all over the world. We will help you get your product to market. That's a pretty good value >> today. We talk about this in the Cube all the time. When the cloud came, one of the best things about the cloud wasn't allowed. People to put applications go there really quickly. Stand them up. Startups did that. But now, in this domain world of of data with the clouds scale, I think you're right. I think domain X expertise is the top of the stack where you need specially special ism expertise and you don't build the bottom half out. What you're getting at is of Europe. If you know how to create innovation in the business model, you could come in and innovate quickly >> and vertical APS don't scale enough for me. So that's why focus on horizontal things like customer service. But if you go talk to a bank, sometimes customer service is not in office. I want to do something in loan origination or you're in insurance company. I want to use their own underwriting those air, the solutions that will get a lot of value out of running on an integrated data start >> a thousand flowers. Bloom is kind of ecosystem opportunity. Looking forward to checking in on that. Thoughts on on gaps. For that you guys want to make you want to do em in a on or areas that you think you want to double down on. That might need some help, either organic innovation or emanate what areas you looking at. Can you share a little bit of direction on that? >> We have, >> ah, a unique benefit. And IBM because we have IBM research. One of their big announcement this week is what we call Auto Way I, which is basically automating the process of feature engineering algorithm selection, bringing that into Watson Studio and Watson Machine learning. I am spending most of my time figure out howto I continue to bring great technology out of IBM research and put in the hand of clients through our products. You guys solve the debaters stuff yesterday. We're just getting started with that. We've got some pretty exciting organic innovation happen in IBM. >> It's awesome. Great news for startups. Final question for you. For the folks watching who aren't here in San Francisco, what's the big story here? And IBM think here in San Francisco. Big event closing down the streets here in Howard Street. It's huge. What's the big story? What's the most important things happening? >> The most important thing to me and the customer stories >> here >> are unbelievable. I think we've gotten past this point of a eyes, some idea for the future we have. Hundreds of clients were talking about how they did an A I project, and here's the outcome they got. It's really encouraging to see what I encourage. All clients, though, is so build your strategy off of one big guy. Project company should be doing hundreds of Aye, aye projects. So in twenty nineteen do one hundred projects. Half of them will probably fail. That's okay. The one's that work will more than make up for the ones that don't work. So we're really encouraging mass experimentation. And I think the clients that air here are, you know, creating an aspirational thing for things >> just anecdotally you mentioned earlier. Customer service is a low hanging fruit. Other use cases that are great low hanging fruit opportunities for a >> data discovery data curation these air really hard manual task. Today you can start to automate some of that. That has a really big impact. >> Rob Thomas, general manager of the data and a I groupie with an IBM now part of a bigger portfolio. Watson Rob. Great to see you conventionally on all your success. But following you from the beginning. Great momentum on the right way. Thanks. Gradually. More cute coverage here. Live in San Francisco from Mosconi North. I'm John for Dave A lot. They stay with us for more coverage after this short break

Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering People First Network. Brought to you by Mayfield. >> Hello, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for an exclusive conversation, CUBE conversation, part of the People First Network with theCUBE and Mayfield fund. I'm here with John Chambers at his house in Palo Alto. John Chambers is the former CEO/Chairman of Cisco Systems, now running J2C, JC2 Ventures. Great to see you, thanks for spending time! >> It's a pleasure to be together again. >> I'm here for two reasons. One, I wanted a conversation about People First and technology waves, but also, I want to talk about your new book, which is exciting, called Connecting the Dots. And it's not your standard business book, where, you know, hey, rah-rah, you know, like a media post these days on the internet; it's some personal stories weaved in with the lessons you've learned through the interactions you've had with many people over the years, so exciting book and I'm looking forward to talking about that. >> Thank you! >> Again, John Chambers, legend, Cisco, 1991 when you joined the company from Wang before that. 400 employees, one product, 70 million in revenue. And when you retired in 2015, not so much retired, 'cos you've got some--. >> I'm working on my next chapter! >> You've got your next chapter (laughs)! 180 acquisitions, 447 billion in revenue, you made 10,000 people millionaires, you created a lot of value, probably one of the biggest inflection points in computer history, the evolution of inter-networking and tying systems together, it was probably one of the biggest waves somewhat before the wave we're on now. So an amazing journey, now you're running JC2 Ventures and investing in game-changing start-ups. So you're not retired? >> No. It was only my next chapter. I made my decision almost 10 years before I left Cisco first, to make for a very smooth transition because it's my family, and out of the 75,000 people, I hired all but 23 of them! And in terms of what I wanted to do next, I really wanted to both give back, create more jobs, get our start-up engine going again in this country, and it's currently broken, and I want to do that on a global basis, in places like France and India as well. So I'm on to my next chapter, but the fun part in this chapter is that I do the things that I love. >> And you've got a great team behind you, but also, you have a great personal network. And I want to get into that, of your personal stories as well as your social network in business and in the community; but one of the things I want to get up front, because I think this is important for this conversation is, you've been very strong. I've seen you present many times over the years, going way back into the 90's. You're eloquent, you're people-oriented, but you have a knack for finding the waves, seeing transitions, you've been through many waves. >> Yes I have, good and bad. >> Good and bad. But one of the big ones, how do you spot those transitions? And what wave are we in now? I mean, talk about the wave that's happening now, it's unprecedented on many levels, but, different, but it's still a wave. >> It is, and outgoing market transitions and often combined with either economic changes or business model changes with technology. And part of the reason that I've been fortunate to be able to identify many of them is I listen to customers very carefully, but also, you're often a product of your prior experiences. Having experienced West Virginia, one of the top states in the US in terms of the chemical industry, uh, during the 40's and 50's and 60's when I was growing up there, and literally more millionaires in West Virginia than there were in the entire Great Britain. We were on top of the world in the chemical industry, and the coal industry, and yet, because we missed transitions, and we should've seen them coming, the state fell a long way, so now we're trying to correct that with some of the start-up activity we'll talk about later. As you see this, and then I went to Boston, 128, we were talking earlier, Wang Laboratories, the mini-computer era, but I was in IBM first out of the central part of the nation, so I watched IBM and Mainframes, and then I watched them miss on going to the mini-computer, and then miss in terms of the internet. So I was able to see the transitions that occurred in Boston, Route 128, where we were the Silicon Valley of the world, and we knew it, and this unusual area out in California called Silicon Valley, we paid almost no attention to, and we didn't realize we failed to make a transition from the mini-computer era to the pc and the internet era. Then I joined Cisco, and saw the internet era. So part of it is, you're a product of your experiences, and know the tremendous pain that occurs, because Boston 128 is nowhere near what it used to be, so there's no entitlement in this new world out of the thousand high-tech companies that I was associated with, including four or five giants in mini-computers, none of them are really in existence today, so it shows you, if you don't identify the transitions, number one, you're going to have an opportunity to benefit by them, but number two, you sure have an opportunity to get hurt by them. >> And you know, these waves also create a lot of wealth and value; not just personal wealth, but community wealth, and Cisco in particular had a good thing going for them, you know, TCP-IP was a defact-- not even a standard, it was a defacto standard at that time, IBM and these kinds of digital equipment corporations dominated the network protocol. Even today, people are still trying to take out Cisco competitively, and they can't because they connected the world. Now the world's connected with digital, it's connected with mobile, so we're kind of seeing this connected wave globally. How do you think about that, now that you've seen the movie at the plumbing levels at Cisco, you now have been traveling the world, we're all connected. >> We are. And it's important to understand that I'm completely arms-length with Cisco, it's their company to run now, and I'm excited about their future. But I'm focused on the next chapter in my life, and while I think about the people at Cisco everyday, I'm into the start-up world now, so how do I think about it now? I think most of the innovation over the next decade will come from start-ups. The majority of the top engineering students, for example, at a Stanford or an MIT or a Polytechnique in France, which is the top engineering school, I think, in Europe, or at the ITs in India, they are all thinking about going to start-ups, which means this is where innovations going to come from. And if you think about a digital world going from the time you and I, we almost recruited you to Cisco, and then we finally did; there's only a thousand devices connected then when Cisco was founded. Today there are about 20 billion devices connected to the internet; in the future, it's going to be 500 billion in a decade, and so this concept of digitalization combined with artificial intelligence, all of a sudden we'll get the right information at the right time to the right person or machine to make the right decision, sounds complex, and it is. And it's ability to do that, I think start-ups are well-positioned to play a key role in, especially in innovation. So while the first stage of the internet, and before that were all dominated by the very large companies, I think you're going to see, in this next phase of digitalization, you're going to see a number of start-ups really emerge, in terms of the innovation leaders, and that's what I'm trying to do with my 16 investments I've made, but also coaching probably another 50 uh, start-ups around the world on a regular basis. >> And the impact of outside Silicon Valley, globally, how do you see that ecosystem developing with the entrepreneurship models that are now globally connected in with these connection points like Silicon Valley? >> It will partially in parallel, partially, it's a new phenomenon. I sold the movie of Boston 128, as I said earlier, and on top of the world, and there is no entitlement. The same thing's true with Cisco, um, sorry, of Silicon Valley today; there's no entitlement for the future, and just because we've led up until this point in time, doesn't mean we will in 10 years, so you can't take anything for granted. What you are seeing, since almost all job creation will be from start-ups, and small companies getting bigger, the large companies in total will probably not add any head count over this next decade because of artificial intelligence and digitization, and so you're now going to see job growth coming from those smaller companies, if these small companies don't get a forum to all 50 states, if they don't get a chance to grow their head count there, and the economic benefits of that, then we're going to leave whole states behind. So I think it's very important that we look at the next wave of innovation, I think there's a very good probability that it will be more inclusive, both by geography, by gender, and all diversity measures, and I'm optimistic about the future, but there are no guarantees, and we'll see how it plays out. >> Let's talk about your next chapter. I was going to wait, but I want to jump while we're on the topic. JC2 is a global start-up, game-changing start-up focus that you have. What is the thesis? What are you looking for, and talk about your mission? >> Well, our mission is very simple. I had a chance to change the world one time with Cisco, and many people, when I said Cisco's going to change the way the world works, lives, learns, and plays by enabling the internet, everybody said nice marketing, but you're a router company. And yet, I think most people would agree, probably more than any other company, we had the leadership role in changing the internet and the direction going on, and now, a chance to do it again, because I think the next wave of innovation will come from the start-ups, and it doesn't come easy. They need coaches, they need strategic partners, they need mentors as much as they need the venture capitalists, so I would think of as this focusing on disruptive start-ups that get very excited in these new areas of technology, ranging from physical and virtual worlds coming together, to artificial intelligence and automation everywhere, to the major capabilities on cyber security across that to the internet of things, so we're trying to say, how do we help these companies grow in skill? But if I was just after financial returns, I'd stay right here in the Valley. I can channel anybody, VC's here that I trust and they trust me, and it would be a better financial return. But I'm after, how do you do this across a number of states, already in seven states, and how do you do it in France and India as role models? >> It's got a lot of purpose. It's not just a financial purpose. I mean, entrepreneurs want to make money, too, but you've made some good money over the years, but this is a mission for you, this is a purpose. >> It is, but you referred to it in your opening comments. When we were at Cisco, I've always believed that the most successful owe an obligation to give back, and we did. We won almost every corporate social responsibility award there was. We won it from the Democrats and the Republicans, from Condie Rice and George Bush and from Hillary Clinton and President Obama. We also, as you said, made 10,000 Cisco employees millionaires just in the first decade. And we tried to give back to society with training programs like Network Academies and trained seven million students. And I think it's very important for the next generation of leaders here in the Valley to be good at giving back. And it's something that I think they owe an obligation to do, and I think we're in danger now of not doing it as well as we should, and for my start-ups, I try to pick young CEOs that understand, they want to make a financial return, and they want to get a great product out of this, but they also want to be fair and giving back to society and make it a win-win, if you will. >> And I think that's key. Mission-driven companies are attracting the best talent, too, these days, because people are more cognizant of that. I want to get into some of your personal stories. You mentioned giving back. And reading your book, your parents have had a big role in your life--. >> Yes, they have. >> And being in West Virginia has had a big role in your life. You mentioned it having a prosperity environment, and then missing that transition. Talk about the story of West Virginia and the role your parents played, because, they were doctors, so they were in the medical field. The combination of those two things, the culture where you were brought up, and your family impacted your career. >> I'm very proud of being from West Virginia, and very proud of the people in West Virginia, and you see it as you travel around the world. All of us who, whether we're in West Virginia, or came out of it, care about the state a great deal. The people are just plain good people, and I think they care about treating people with respect. If I were ever run off a road at night in the middle of the night, I'd want to be in West Virginia, (both laugh) when I go up to knock on that door. And I think it carries through. And also, the image of our state is one that people tend to identify in terms of a area that you like the people. Now what I'm trying to do in West Virginia, and what we just announced since last week, was to take the same model we did on doing acquisitions, 180 of them, and say here's the playbook, the innovation playbook for doing acquisitions better than anyone else, and take the model that we did on country digitization, which we did in Israel and France and India with the very top leaders, with Netanyahu and Shimon Peres in Israel, with Macron in France and with Modi in India, and drove it through, and then do the same thing in terms of how we take the tremendous prosperity and growth that you see in Silicon Valley, and make it more uniform across the country, especially as traditional business won't be adding head count. And while I'd like to tell you the chemical industry will come back to West Virginia and mining industry will come back in terms of job creation, they probably won't, a lot of that will be automated in the future. And so it is the ability to get a generation of start-ups, and do it in a unique way! And the hub of this has to be the university. They have to set the pace. Gordon Gee, the President there, gets this. He's created a start-up mentality across the university. The Dean of the business school, Javier Reyes is going across all of the university, in terms of how you do start-ups together with business school, with engineering, with computer science, with med school, et cetera. And then how do you attract students who will want to really be a part of this, how do you bring in venture capital, how do you get the Governor and the President and the Senate and the Speaker of the House on board? How do you get our two national senators, Shelly Moore Capito and also Joe Manchin, a Democrat and a Republican working together on common goals? And then how do you say here's what's possible, write the press release, be the model for how a country, or a state, comes from behind and that at one time, then a slow faller, how do we leap frog? And before you say it can't be done, that was exactly what people said first about India, when I said India would be the strongest growing economy in the world, and it is today, probably going to grow another seven to 10%. That means you double the per capita of everyone in India, done right, every seven to 10 years. And France being the innovation engine in Europe to place your new business, you and I would have said John, no way, just five years ago, yet it has become the start-up engine for Europe. >> It's interesting, you mentioned playbook, and I always see people try to replicate Silicon Valley. I moved out here from the East Coast in 1999, and it's almost magical here, it's hard to replicate, but you can reproduce some things. One of the common threads, though, is education. The role of education in the ecosystem of these new environments seems to be a key ingredient. Your thoughts about how education's going to play a role in these ecosystems, because education and grit, and entrepreneurial zeal, are kind of the magic formula. >> Well they are in many ways. It's about leadership, it's about the education foundation, it's about getting the best and brightest into your companies, and then having the ability to dream, and role models you can learn from. We were talking about Hewlett-Packard earlier, a great role model of a company that did the original start-up and Lou Platt, who was the President of HP when I came out here, I called him up and said, you don't know me, Lou, I'm with a company you've probably never heard of, and we have 400 people, but I don't know the Valley, can you teach me? And he did, and he met with me every quarter for three years, and then when I said what can I do to repay you back, because at that time, Cisco was on a roll, he said John, do it for the next generation. And so, that's what I'm trying to do, in terms of, you've got to have role models that you can learn from and can help you through this. The education's a huge part. At the core of almost all great start-up engines is a really world-class university. Not just with really smart students, but also with an entrepreneur skill and the ability to really create start-ups. John Hennessey, Stanford did an amazing thing over the last 17 years on how to create that here at Stanford, the best in the world, probably 40% of the companies, when I was with Cisco, we bought were direct or indirect outgrowth of Stanford. Draw a parallel. Mercury just across the way, and this isn't a Stanford/CAL issue, (both laugh) equally great students, very good focus on interdisciplinary activities, but I didn't buy a single company out of there. You did not see the start-ups grow with anywhere near the speed, and that was four times the number of students. This goes back to the educational institution, it has to have a focus on start-ups, it has to say how they drive it through, this is what MIT did in Boston, and then lost it when 128 lost it's opportunity, and this is what we're trying to do at West Virginia. Make a start-up engine where you've got a President, Gordon Gee, who really wants to drive this through, bring the political leaders in the state, and bring the Mountaineers, the global Mountaineers to bare, and then bring financial resources, and then do it differently. So to your point, people try to mimic Silicon Valley, but they do it in silos. What made Silicon Valley go was an ecosystem, an education system, a environment for risk-taking, role models that you could steal people from--. >> And unwritten rules, too. They had these unwritten rules like pay it forward, your experience with Lou Platt, Steve Jobs talks about his relationship with David Packard, and this goes on and on and on. This is an important part. Because I want to just--. >> Debt for good is a big, big issue. Last comment on education, it's important for this country to know, our K through 12 system is broken. We're non-competitive. People talk about STEM, and that's important, but if I were only educating people in three things, entrepreneurship, how to use technology, and artificial intelligence; I would build that into the curriculum where we lose a lot of our diversity, especially among females in the third, fourth, fifth grade, so you haveta really, I think, get people excited about this at a much earlier age. If we can become an innovation engine again, in this country, we are not today. We're not number one in innovation, we're number 11! Imagine that for America? >> I totally agree with ya! And I don't want to rant and waste a lot of time, but my rants are all on Facebook and Twitter. (both laugh) Education's a problem. It's like linear, it's like a slow linear train wreck, in my opinion, but now you have that skills gaps, you mentioned AI. So AI and community are two hot trends right now. I'm going to stay with community for a minute. You mentioned paying it forward. Open source software, these new forms of operational scale, cloud computing, open source software, that all have this ethos of pay it forward; community. And now, community is more important than ever. Not just from the tech world, but you're talking about in West Virginia, now on a global scale. How does the tech industry, how can the tech industry, in your opinion, nurture community at local, regional, global scale? >> This is a tough one John, and I'd probably answer it more carefully if I was still involved directly with Cisco. But the fun thing is, now I represent myself. >> In your own opinion, not Cisco. There's a cultural thing. This is, Silicon Valley has magic here, and community is part of it. >> Yes, well it's more basic than that. I think, basically, we were known for two decades, not just Cisco, but all of the Valley as tech for good, and we gave back to the communities, and we paid it forward all the time, and I use the example of Cisco winning the awards, but so do many of our peers. We're going to Palestine and helping to rebuild Palestine in terms of creating jobs, et cetera. We went in with the Intels of the world, and the Oracles and the other players and HP together, even though at times we might compete. I think today, it's not a given. I think there is a tug of war going on here, in terms of what is the underlying purpose of the Valley. Is it primarily to have major economic benefits, and a little bit of arm's length from the average citizen from government, or is it do well financially, but also do very well in giving back and making it inclusive. That tug of war is not a given. When you travel throughout the US, today, or around the world, there are almost as many people that view tech for bad as they do tech for good, so I think it's going to be interesting to watch how this plays out. And I do think there are almost competing forces here in the Valley about which way should that go and why. The good news is, I think we'll eventually get it right. The bad news is, it's 50/50 right now. >> Let's talk about the skill gap. A lot of leaders in companies right now are looking at a work force that needs to be leveled up, and as new jobs are coming online that haven't been trained for, these openings they don't have skills for because they haven't been taught. AI is one example, IOT you mentioned a few of those. How do great leaders, proactively and reactively, too, get the skills gaps closed? What strategies can you do, what's the playbook there? >> Well two separate issues. How do they get it closed, in terms of their employees, and second issue, how do we train dramatically better than we've done before? Let's go to the first one. In terms of the companies, I think that your ability to track the millennials, the young people, is based upon your vision of doing more than quote just making a profit, and you want to be an exciting place to work with a great culture, and part of that culture should be giving back. Having said that, however, the majority of the young people today, and I'm talking about the tops out of the key engineering schools, et cetera, they want to go to start-ups. So what you're going to see is, how well established companies work with start-ups, in a unique partnership, is going to be one of the textbook opportunities for the future, because most companies, just like they didn't know how to acquire tech companies and most of all tech acquisitions failed, even through today. We wrote the textbook on how to do it differently. I think how these companies work with start-ups and how they create a strategic relationship with a company they know has at least a 50/50 probability of going out of business. And how do you create that working relationship so that you can tap into these young innovative ideas and partnerships, and so, what you see with the Spark Cognition, 200 people out of Texas, brilliant, brilliant CEO there in terms of what he is focused on, partnering with Boeing in that 50/50 joint venture, 50/50 joint venture to do the next FAA architecture for unmanned aircraft in this country. So you're going to see these companies relate to these start-ups in ways they haven't done before. >> Partnership and collaboration and acquisitions are still rampant on the horizon, certainly as a success for you. Recently in the tech industry we're seeing big acquisitions, Dell, EMC, IBM bought Red Hat, and there's some software ones out there. One was just going public and got bought, just recently, by SAP, how do you do the acqui-- you've done 180 of them? How do you do them successfully without losing the innovation and losing the people before they invest and leave; and this is a key dynamic, how do companies maintain innovation in an era of collaboration, partnerships, and enmity? >> I had that discussion this morning at Techonomy with David Kirkpatrick, and David said how do you do this. And then as I walked out of the room, I had a chance to talk with other people and one of them from one of the very largest technology companies said, John, we've watched you do this again and again; we assumed that when we acquired a company, we'd get them to adjust to our culture and it almost never worked, and we lost the people at a tremendously fast pace, especially after their lock-in of 18 to 24 months came up. We did the reverse. What we did was develop a replicatible innovation playbook, and I talk about it in that book, but we did this for almost everything we did at Cisco, and I would've originally called that, bureaucracy, John. (both laugh) I would've said that's what slow companies do. And actually, if done right, allows you to move with tremendous speed and agility, and so we'd outline what we'd look for in terms of strategy and vision; if our cultures weren't the same, we didn't acquire them. And if we couldn't keep the people, to generate the next generation of product, that was a bad financial decision for us, as well. So our attrition rate averaged probably about 5% or over while I was at Cisco for 20 years. Our voluntary attrition rate of our acquired companies, which normally runs 20% in these companies, we had about four. So we kept the people, we got the next generation product out, and we went in with that attitude in terms of you're acquiring to be able to keep the people and make them a part of your family and culture. And I realize that that might sound corny today, but I disagree. I think to attract people, to get them to stay at your company, it is like a family, it is like how you succeed and occasionally lose together, and how you build that family attitude under every employee, spouse, or their children that was life-threatening, and we were there for them in the ways that others were not. So you're there when your employees have a crisis, or your customer does, and that's how you form trust in relationships. >> And here's the question, what does People First mean to you? >> Well people first is our customer first. It means your action and everything you do puts your customers and your people first, that's what we did at Cisco. Any customer you would talk to, almost every customer I've ever met in my life would do business with us again, or with me again, because your currency in today's world is trust, track record, and relationships, and we built that very deep. Same thing with the employees. I still get many, many notes from people we helped 10 or 15 years ago; here's the picture of my child that you all helped make a difference in, Cisco and John, and you were there for us when we needed you most. And then in customers. It surprises you, when you help them through a crisis, they remember that more than when you helped them be successful, and they're there for you. >> Talk about failure and successes. You talk about this in the book. This is part of entrepreneurship, you can't succeed without failures. Handling failures is just as important as handling successes, your thoughts on people should think about that from a mindset standpoint? >> Well, you know, what's fun is those of you who are parents, or who will be parents in the future, when your child scores a goal in soccer or makes a good grade on a test, you're proud for them, but that isn't what worries you. What worries you is when they have their inevitable setbacks, everybody has that in life. How do you learn to deal with them? How do you understand how much were self-inflicted and how much of it was done by other causes, and how they navigate through that determines who they are. Point back to the West Virginia roots, I'm dyslexic, which means that I read backwards. Some people in early grade school thought I might not even graduate from high school much less go to college. My parents were doctors, they got it, but how I handled that was key. And while I write in the book about our successes, I spend as much time on when disaster strikes, how you handle that determines who you are in the future. Jack Welch told me in the 90's, he said John, you have a very good company, and I said Jack, you're good at teaching me something there, we're about to become the most valuable company in the world, we've won all of the leadership awards and everything else, what does it take to have a great company? He said a near-death experience. At the time I didn't understand it. At the end of 2001 after the dot com bubble, he called me up, he said, you now have a great company, I said Jack, it doesn't feel like it. Our stock price is down dramatically, people are questioning can I even run the company now, many of the people who were so positive turned very tough and--. >> How did you handle that? How did you personally handle that, 'cos--. >> It's a part of leadership. It's easy to be a leader when everything goes well, it's how you handle when things are tough, and leadership is lonely, you're by yourself. No matter how many friends you have around you, it's about leadership, and so you'd lead it through it. So 2001, took a real hard look, we made the mistake of focusing, me, on the numbers, and my numbers in the first week of December were growing at 70% year over year. We'd never had anything negative to speak of, much less below even 30% growth, and by the middle of January, we were -30%. And so you have to be realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much the market, I felt the majority of it was market-inflicted, I said at the time it's a hundred year flood. I said to the employees, here's how we're going to go forward, we need to bring our head count back in line to a new reality, and we did it in 51 days. And then you paint the picture from the very beginning of what you look like as you recover and in the future and why your employees want to stay here, your customers stay with you and your shareholders. It wiped out most of our competitors. Jack Welch said, John, this is probably your best leadership year ever, and I said Jack, you're the only one that's going to say that. He said probably, and he has been. >> And you've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I love this story. >> But you're a product of your scars. And do you learn how to deal with them? >> Yeah, and how you-- and be proud of them, it's what, who you are. >> I don't know if proud's the right word. >> Well, badge of honor. (both laugh) >> Red badge of honor, they're painful! >> Just don't do it again twice, right? >> We still make the same mistake twice, but at the same time when I teach all these start-ups, I expect you to make mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you're not taking enough risk. And while people might've, might say John, one of your criticisms is that you spread yourself a little bit too thin in the company at times, and you were too aggressive. After thinking about it, I respectfully disagree. If I had to do it over, I'd be even bolder, and more aggressive, and take more risks, and I would dream bigger dreams. With these start-ups, that's what I'm teaching them, that's what I'm doing myself. >> And you know, this is such a big point, because the risk is key. Managing risk is actually, you want to be as risky as possible, just don't cut an artery, you know, do the right things. But in your book, you mention this about how you identify transitions, but also you made the reference to your parents again. This is, I think, important to bring up, because we have an expression in our company: let's put the patient on the table and let's look at the problem. Solving the problems and not going out of business at that time, but your competitors did, you had to look at this holistically, and in the book, you mentioned that experience your parents taught you, being from West Virginia, that it changed how you do problem solving. Can you share what that, with that in conscience? >> Well, both parents were doctors, and the good news is, you got a lot of help, the bad news is, you didn't get a lot of self 'cos they'd fix you. But they always taught me to focus on the real, underlying issue, to your point. What is the real issue, not what the symptom is, the temperature, or something else. And then you want to determine how much of that was self-inflicted, and how much of it was market, and if your strategy's working before, continue, if your strategy was starting to get long in the tooth, how do you change it, and then you got to have the courage to reinvent yourself again and again. And so they taught me how to deal with that. I start off the book by talking about how I almost drowned at six years of age, and as I got pulled down through the rapids, I could still see my dad in my mind today running down the side of the river yelling hold on to the fishing pole. It was an ugly fishing pole. Might've cost $5. But he was concerned about the fishing pole, so therefore I obviously couldn't be drowning so I focused both hands on the fishing pole and as I poked my head above water, I could still see him running down. He got way down river, swam out, pulled me in, set me on the side, and taught me about how you deal when you find yourself with major setbacks. How do you not panic, how do you not try to swim against the tide or the current, how you be realistic of the situation that you're in, work your way to the side, and then you know what he did? He put me right back in the rapids and let me do it myself. And taught me how to deal with it. Dad taught me the business picture and how you deal with challenges, Mom, uh, who was internal medicine, psychiatry, taught me the emotional IQ side of the house, in terms of how you connect with people, and I believe, this whole chapter, I build relationships for life. And I really mean it. I think your currency is trust, relationships, and track record. >> And having that holistic picture to pull back and understand what to focus on, and this is a challenge for entrepreneurs. You're now dealing with a lot of entrepreneurs and coaching them; a lot of times they get caught in the forest and miss the trees, right? Or have board meetings or have, worry about the wrong metrics, or hey, I got to get financing. How should an entrepreneur, or even a business leader, let's talk about entrepreneur first and then business leader, handle their advisors, their investors, how do they manage that, how do they tap into that? A lot of people say, ah, they don't add much value, I just need money. This is important, because this could save them, this could be the pole for them. >> It could, or it could also be the pole that causes the tent to collapse (both laugh). So I think the first thing when you advise young entrepreneurs, is realize you're an advisor, not a part of management. And I only take young entrepreneurs who want to be coached. And as I advise them, I say all I'm asking is that you listen to my thoughts and then you make the decision, and I'll support you either way you go, once you've listened to the trade-offs. And I think you want to very quickly realize where they are in vision and strategy, and where they are on building the right team and evolving the team and changing the team, where they are in culture, and where they are on their communication skills because communication skills were important to me, they might not have been to Jack Welch, the generation in front of me, but they were extremely important to ours. And today, your communication mismatch on social media could cost your company a billion dollars. If you're not good at listening, if you're not good at communicating with people and painting the picture, you've got a problem. So how do you teach that to the young players? Then most importantly, regardless of whether you're in a big company or a small company, public or private sector, you know what you know and know what you don't. Many people who, especially if they're really good in one area, assume that carries over to others, and assume they'll be equally as good in the others, that's huge mistake; it's like an engineer hiring a good sales lead, very rarely does it happen. They recruit business development people who appeals to an engineer, not the customer. (both laugh) So, know what you know, know what you don't. For those things you don't know, surround yourself with those people in your leadership team and with your advisors to help you navigate through that. And I had, during my career, through three companies, I always had a number of advisors, formal and informal, that I went to and still go to today. Some of them were very notable players, like our President Clinton or President Bush, Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger, or names that were just really technical leads within companies, or people that really understood PR like Thomas Freedman out of the New York Times, or things of that. >> You always love being in the trenches. I noticed that in Cisco as an observer. But now that you're in start-ups, it's even more trenches deeper (laughs) and you've got to be seeing the playing field, so I got to ask ya a personal question. How do you look back at the tech trends that's happening right now, globally, both political, regulatory technology, what advice would you give your 23-year-old self if you were breaking into the business, you were at Wang and you were going to make your move; in this world today, what's going on, what would you be doing? >> Well the first thing on the tech trend is, don't get too short-term focused. Picture the ones that are longer term, what we refer to as digitization, artificial intelligence, et cetera. If I were 23 years old, or better yet, 19 years old, and were two years through college and thinking what did I want to do in college and then on to MBA school and perhaps beyond that, legal degree if I'd followed the prior path. I would focus on entrepreneurship and really understand it in a lot more detail. I learned it over 40 years in the business. And I learned it from my dad and my mom, but also from the companies I went into before. I would focus on entrepreneurship, I'd focus on technology that enables entrepreneurship, I would probably focus on what artificial intelligence can do for that and that's what we're doing at West Virginia, to your point earlier. And then I would think about security across that. If you want really uh, job security and creativity for the future, if you're a really good entrepreneur, with artificial intelligence capability, and security capability, you're going to be a very desired resource. >> So, we saw you, obviously networking is a big part of it. You got to be networking with other people and in the industry, would you be hosting meet ups? Young John Chambers right now, tech meet ups, would you be at conferences, would you be writing code, would you be doing a start-up? >> Well, if we were talking about me advising them? >> No, you're 23-years-old right now. >> No, I'd just be fooling around. No, I'd be in MBA school and I'd be forming my own company. (both laugh) And I would be listening to customers. I think it's important to meet with your peers, but while I developed strong relationships in the high-tech industry, I spent the majority of time with my customers and with our employees. And so, I think at that age, my advice to people is there was only one Steve Jobs. He just somehow knew what to build and how to build it. And when you think about where they were, it still took him seven years (laughs). I would say, really get close to your customers, don't get too far away; if there's one golden rule that a start-up ought to think about, it's learning and staying close to your customers. There too, understand your differentiation and your strategy. Well John, thanks so much. And the book, Connecting the Dots, great read, it's again, not a business book in the sense of boring, a lot of personal stories, a lot of great lessons and thanks so much for giving the time for our conversation. >> John, it was my pleasure. Great to see you again. >> I'm John Furrier here with the People First interview on theCUBE, co-created content with Mayfield. Thanks for watching! (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. (digital music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here on the ground. Here in New York City for Consensus 2018, sold out event. This is the premiere show for the Crypto Blockchain world. It's part of Blockchain Week, New York City, #BlockchainweekNY, for New York. A lot of events going on. Everyone's here, a lot of breaking news. I'm here with CUBE alumni, Dan Bates, ImpactPPA. He was on with us in our show in Puerto Rico, at CoinAgenda. Dan, great to see you, thanks for comin' in. >> Thanks, John. Glad to be here. >> So, you've got some hard news. Tell us a little about the conversation we had about, couple weeks ago, in Puerto Rico. You got a great mission, renewable energy. You got a token. You've been busy. You got a concrete deal. You're doing business. You're not just saying it, you're doing it. >> Yeah, shocking. >> Take a minute. What's the hard news? >> All right, so we're really proud to announce today, that we signed a deal with the Indian government, which is essentially going to lift 50 million people out of poverty. Women. How they're going to do that is they're going to help restart their textile industry. It's called Harit Khadi. It's an old craft of India, spinning cotton into really high quality fabric. What they're going to do is they're going to put an energy efficient loom in a woman's home. It's going to be powered by our technology. And the whole process, all supply chain and payment will be managed by our token. >> Take a minute real quick, to explain the technology. I know it's recycling. We've done it before. But for this first, while we're going to get context for this big news, what's, real quickly, what do you guys do? >> We install renewable energy systems on rooftops. In this case, it'll be a rooftop. In many cases, it's large microgrids. So, we use wind and solar technology to drive to batteries. And then we allow people to pay for power on an as needed or pay a you go model. It's very much like what M-PESA does in Africa. We've de-centralized electricity. De-centralized M-PESA for electricity. >> You took an economics utility, great thing. By the way, state of California, where I live, just mandating all new construction have solar panels. Not sure they're going to tokenize it. They might be getting it all wrong. But, you do an amazing mission. Great technology. But I'm amazed by the real deals you're doing. You got a PO in hand, real business. >> Yes. >> Signed. >> Yes. Sealed and delivered. >> Yes. >> What is it? How much, what's goin' on? This is big news. >> Yeah, the purchase order that we have is going to represent one quarter of 1% of this project. It's designed to put 125,000 women to work. I can tell you the number has a lot of zeros on it. >> So there's real cash in the barrel? >> This is a nine-figure-- That's right. This is nine-figure purchase order, that we have out of them. It's a big deal. 100 million plus. >> Yeah, 100 million plus. >> Just as a POC. >> Just on the POC, yeah. What we're going to be doing is we're setting this deal up now. End of June, early July, we will doing the inauguration on the first textile facility in Kahana, which is a city in India. And Prime Minister Modi is slated to cut the ribbon, to set this project in motion. His goal, and the Minister of Small and Medium Enterprises, Minister Singh, whom I met with a couple of weeks ago, they are committed to bringing 50 million people out of poverty. >> So this is really high impact, in my opinion, pun intended. You got a ImpactPPA. You got a mission-driven organization, real problem, growing middle class, by the way, is coming fast and furious. >> Exploding. >> You're connecting energy with token economics. Real money's on the table. Real impact to people's lives, with democratization. In this case, it's not, but it could apply to any other thing. This is just one example. >> That's right. This is the largest, in my opinion, from my view, from my vantage point, this deal alone, the pilot actually, that quarter of 1%, is the largest commercial blockchain project in the world. I can't see of anything else that's even close, right now. >> The claim has been made. The largest commercial blockchain deal in the world done by Dan Bates, ImpactPPA. Congratulations. Great stuff. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> We want to ask you now, shift gears to the event. You were out late last night, networking celebrating the success, doing more business. What are you doing here? Obviously, you're not done. It's the beginning of a big deal. There's only one deal. What other things you got goin' on? >> Oh, we got projects. We just signed a partnership with the Earth Day Network. They're responsible for launching Earth Day, 48 years ago. We've got a project with them, 50 by 50. We're going to be doing 50 installations around the world with our partnership by their 20th, or their 50th anniversary in 2020. We're here talking to protocols. We're here talking to strategic partners at Consensus. And it's an amazing show. The energy around here is just unbelievable. >> You know what I love about your project? And you know, we've talked before, but for the folks watching, you combine a mission-driven, high-need deal, electricity, with technology. I mean, it's.... If I'm a young person, I want to be in this business. How're you onboarding people? You guys are hiring? What kind of people are you hiring? >> Well, of course, we're looking for developers to help us with the token piece of it, the blockchain piece. We're also looking for guys who can help us get this thing to scale. That's going to be really critical. So we're talking to a whole bunch of guys around protocol to see who can bring on board, in this case, 125,000 people, like tomorrow. We're also looking for energy guys, engineering guys, because we've got projects all over the world. Don't forget, we're still doing those 42 cities in Haiti. Microgrids all up and down the West Coast of Haiti to help these people lift themselves out of darkness. We do that too. >> Dan, congratulations. You guys're doing great work. >> Thank you. >> I'm proud to know you, and I really believe in what you're doing. Thanks for doing it. >> Great. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, John. >> theCUBE coverage here in New York City. Big news. The largest commercial blockchain deal that we know of, that we've seen. If there's others out there, come challenge that and let's see it. Real offers being done. Dan Bates, ImpactPPA, CUBE coverage, here in New York at Consensus Blockchain Week. Be back with more, thanks for watching. (digital music)